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Lorelei 🌕🧙🏻‍♀️🕸🍄

@hatpinwoman

May 11

I stumbled across a HIGHLY REVEALING document from 2002.

It’s a Canadian document “funded in part by the British Columbia Human Rights Commission”

And its goal was to eviscerate women’s single sex resources

Including resources for female sexual assault victims 🧵🪡

The purpose of the document was to “assist” women’s organisations to include men

The authors called women “non-trans women”

& told us that trans identified men were already working for local women’s organisations but “Some have simply not identified themselves as being trans”

They claimed that women’s organisations had a duty to “educate” their members & “make alliances with trans and queer communities” while resisting backlash from people who tried to maintain the “status quo”

Women who objected were framed as a regressive hurdle to be overcome

Read 22 tweets

Lorelei 🌕🧙🏻‍♀️🕸🍄

@hatpinwoman

May 6

This book will haunt me.

Dee A Levy describes “bewildering” decades married to a crossdresser. She felt “emotionally battered” & “broken”

A description similar to transwidow’s stories today.

Here, she collates many women’s words about being married to these men.

🧵🪡

The book is divided into short quotes by anonymous women, and longer stories by 5 women.

The short quotes talk about issues such as escalation:

“…I thought it was kind of fun at first but over time his fetish escalated…”

The misery of not knowing where any of this ends:

“Last night mine tells me he wants to shave his legs too. Where does it end? Or does it? I married a man because I wanted to marry a man, but now he wants to wear panties and nighties and shave his legs. I don’t know who I married anymore…”

Self-doubt:

“Is it usual to not want to see my H dressed in my lingerie? Am I being unreasonable? Is there something wrong with me?”

And dealing with the humiliation and worry of him wanting to take his crossdressing out in public while wearing HER clothes:

“I try not to worry- until he wanted to go out into the community. On top of the usual family stresses, I really didn’t need him prancing down to the local pub for some brews and a beating wearing my best frock.”

One wife suggests taking it “even one minute at a time if needed” which I think highlights just how traumatic this experience is

Another warns that this paraphilia is all-consuming:

“Clothes, not you, consume his thoughts. Thoughts the most experienced cross dresser’s wife can never understand.”

One says she feels guilty by how much it is affecting her then adds that he treats her like a mannequin:

“I feel betrayed and lied to, nothing more than a mannequin to him. Trusting him now is so difficult.”

While another is miserable that she has lost her husband to his bizarre fantasies

“It frustrates me to think that he is on the computer right now imagining his “other self” instead of in bed with me-a real woman that he could have if he would just prefer it to the other.”

Read 16 tweets

Lorelei 🌕🧙🏻‍♀️🕸🍄

@hatpinwoman

Feb 8

I have a LOT to say about this book. I want to particularly cover the downplaying of paraphilia, arguments that would effectively compromise women’s rights, and how the book promotes ‘transition’ 🧵

One of my first thoughts was that the title proclaims a journey back to reality and yet, several paragraphs into the prologue the word “neoclitoris” is used.

The author does describe the harms, and risks, of genital surgery. You might think that’s great, but let’s put a pin in that, for now.

He claims that by the age of three he was ashamed of thinking about girls tights. For those of us rightly dismissive of the concept of the trans child, the concept of the AGP child is similarly unacceptable.

In this case because it projects a paraphilia onto a child.

Yet this is where he is going.

The author says he stole his mother's tights from the rubbish bin. He claims it was exciting, made his heart race and his body “would become aroused”

At just 5 years old.

He talks about dressing up as a ladybird for the village fete, being full of adrenaline, and wishing he could keep the tights to wear privately. At 6 years old.

Why is any adult suggesting that 6 year olds are being driven by a paraphilia? It's insane. But then the word paraphilia is never mentioned in the main text of this book. He doesn’t want people to consider it that.

The AGP child, like the trans child, then, is cover.

He says of his childhood experiences that “my internal struggles might have been sexual- they clearly related to my sex- but they were not erotic” 🫥

He then describes autogynephilia as a psychological condition.

Once he was a teenager, and beyond, he says it became explicitly sexual & he started buying women’s clothes for the purpose “although my immediate physical needs were satisfied with my bag of clothing-always strictly alone- human beings are social animals. We need relationships…”

When he meets his wife, his paraphilia seems to recede temporarily

“I no longer wanted to be a girl… I had a girl”

A few pages later he says

“It wasn't women’s clothes that captivated me, I wanted a female body”

Those two statements considered, side by side, upset me.

Soon after returning from honeymoon he wants to take this further by ‘transitioning’ & it’s clear over multiple pages that this sexual behaviour is a huge focus for him & is already threatening to take over his whole life.

He tells a member of the pastoral team about his crossdressing and they agree, together, that neither transsexualism, or tranvestism, are things men should be doing, then the author asked if there was an option for

“conversion therapy?”

Thereby conflating cruel measures designed to stop someone from being gay, with interventions that might stop a man compulsively devoting his life to his paraphilia.

Given the GC position is that including ‘trans’ people in conversion therapy bills would be dangerous because it limits exploratory options, and conflates wildly different things, this is notable.

He talks about his “cravings to change sex”

I think cravings is SUCH an interesting word.

Some men have all sorts of harmful sexual cravings, don't they?

He calls it a compulsion, too. As though it is something near impossible to resist.

Calling harmful behaviours a compulsion seems like an attempt to minimise responsibility for the sexual damage a man is inflicting, whether on himself, or others. The subtext, in the word, is that he cannot help it.

It’s also true that if we really believe a man is so compelled to sexual destruction that he cannot resist it, he is not a rational actor and we should not treat him as such.

The author is soon hiding clothes in his house and spends time on the internet looking at forums for other men like him

He paints a very clear picture of a man who is letting himself be consumed by these desires & further reinforcing them by linking them to his sexual gratification

He suggests the internet brainwashed him into believing he really was a type of woman

He talks about the pseudoscience behind gender identity, clearly, which of course does matter for readers.

Then he, finally, tells his wife about his feelings. He describes this as “terrifying but liberating” and “much to Stephanie's distress I also told others”

Then, he admits she was right to urge more caution, and he was wrong, but adds “I wanted to be whole, and that meant bringing together the internal and external worlds”

I personally do not see a lot of real empathy for his wife in this book. She is, in a sense, always peripheral (although she writes the epilogue).

He talks about how online forums fuelled his obsession and escalated the situation. The “transition or die” narrative and the unquestioning affirmation fed it all. I can believe it.

He states “I enjoyed a rush of euphoria everytime I came out to anyone”

Don't we always say that gender euphoria is code for sexual thrill?

Remind me, didn’t he have to ‘come out’ to his children and to other people’s children? Yet he uses such a term about the ‘coming out’ process.

The escalation continues as each stage of transition does not feel like enough, for him, and he feels irritated, or angry, at having to wait for each next step.

After genital surgery he feels he gets more clarity, and it was a few months later that he says he started to think more rationally about being a woman etc. Realising it was a false idea.

Julia Long, Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, Magdalen Berns and Miranda Yardley are all mentioned, here, as voices who helped challenge him.

I agree their insights have been (and are) vital but read on…

He defends terfs a bit and just as I’m thinking “I will make sure to note in my review that he wants to stand up for women’s sex based rights” that optimism begins to fall apart. He says

“Take away the official gatekeepers…and women may well introduce informal gatekeepers of their own that may be far less welcoming of transsexuals”

So, maintain the status quo because otherwise men like himself may lose out?

This same kind of language crops up a few sentences later “it seemed remarkable…that anyone would want to throw a spanner in the works”

In fact this motive keeps cropping up

“Vulnerable women in prisons would suffer dreadfully– they don't get to choose who they share their spaces with- and the inevitable fallout would damage the trust and confidence that transsexuals like me relied on”

Self-interest is far less noble than a commitment to do right by women and girls.

As he does not define autogynephilia as a paraphilia or get into a discussion about paraphilias; how they cluster, for example, he has to offer an alternate explanation.

So, instead, he talks about sex signalling and the theory that we are constantly sexually signalling to each other and responding to signals from other people

This is simply not true. Most people, day to day, are just living their lives. They are not, relentlessly sexually signalling every member of the opposite sex while they buy chips and beans at the shops, play bingo, or go bowling with their friends.

And he continues that perhaps a wire is crossed in his brain causing those sexual signals to go inside.

This is a very neat sidestep. Just like the concept of gender identity, this sexual signalling theory takes autogynephilia out of the realm of paraphilia, and the concerns associated with that. It puts it, instead, into the realm of inborn neurology, makes it intrinsic, and in that sense makes it inevitable.

Yet as I've already noted paraphilias cluster. If men like him didn’t have a paraphilia, we wouldn’t see paraphilias clustering in AGP, like we do, all the time, would we?

We see sex offences being committed by this group of men more often in every data set we have. This is not because they are “trans” nor because they have a sex signalling problem. It is because of paraphilia. Obscuring this is bad for everyone…

Read 7 tweets

Lorelei 🌕🧙🏻‍♀️🕸🍄

@hatpinwoman

Jan 29

A lot of attention on here, in coming weeks, is likely going to be given to AGP from a more ‘sympathetic’ perspective.

So, I thought it was about time I posted about this book. It records the experiences of some women in 1989. Now we would call those women trans widows.

The writer uses the word transvestite to refer to the men which, of course, was coined in 1910 by Hirschfeld to describe the same demographic as those we now call AGP.

In the book’s introduction, Annie Woodhouse notes that “The role of women as wives of these men has remained largely invisible, receiving somewhat cursory treatment in two American studies. In Britain their perspective has been totally ignored”

She also echoes a sentiment many of us now share, when she insists that one ultimately has to choose a side in this:

The paraphiliac men, or the women and children close to them.

“Suddenly transvestism wasn’t simply about men transgressing the rules of gender in private; it involved marriages and conflict and sometimes suffering. Interviews with wives underlined this. It’s always said that there are two sides to every argument and the intention here is to present these two sides, but total neutrality is not possible and sides have to be taken.”

The book has many insights, even before we get to the wives testimonies. For example Woodhouse points out that transvestism is a form of fractured behaviour which “compartmentalises masculinity and femininity; thus the possession of two wardrobes doesn’t make for a more complete self, any more than it makes for greater sexual equality”.

She visits a social group for transvestites (and ‘transsexuals’) to learn more about them and, while being cordial, she still realises that doing such research means “entering a fantasy world where reality sometimes becomes a poor second to wishful thinking” and where transvestites can both fantasise, and lie to her.

This behaviour has come to characterise trans activism which was begun and has been advanced, in great part, by transvestite men.

At this group, one transvestite also has to act as her minder, accompanying her to the loo, to protect her from proposition, and harassment, by the other transvestites.

While there’s a lot of stuff of interest here, the rest of this thread will focus on the trans widows words…

The first detailed account is by Eleanor, wife of Will, who discovered a girdle, at the back of their bathroom cupboard. Through that she found out about her husband’s transvestism which was distressing to her.

They ended up barely speaking for many months, and at this time she was working full time so was able to buy her own clothes. Whenever she did he’d say “I don’t like that” and make such a fuss that she started having to hide her purchases in her wardrobe, and pretend they were old.

She eventually realised that this was because her clothes were new, while he was sourcing women’s clothes from jumble sales.

Eleanor was frightened the children would discover him ‘dressed’ because he didn’t lock the doors, and when their youngest daughter, Tracy, was 16 Will said they had to tell her.

She already knew. She had found his crossdressing clothes, and mentioned it to her older sister, Sandra, who said “it’s his thing”. We don’t find out, here, how Sandra knew that.

Tracy clearly struggles with it, and with having to interact with her father while he is crossdressing.

Eleanor feels like she came to the brink of a nervous breakdown, at one point, and would have gone mad. Especially as there was only one person she could really talk to about it.

However, at the time of the book she felt like the crisis in her marriage had somehow passed, despite his continued crossdressing and her continued confusion about it.

June, the next wife of a transvestite, knew that there was something wrong with husband George and, as a result, was depressed and nervous for several months. He had withdrawn, from her, completely. Eating the food she cooked, while reading a book instead of engaging with her, for example.

She was put on tranquillisers and on anti depressants which made her feel more buoyant. At this time, George told her he “loved dresses as well”.

She agreed, at first, that he could dress up when their two children were in bed but “then something in you rebels and is repulsed and says this isn’t right”. She couldn’t stop crying which meant more pills.

And she was very angry because down from their loft came so much paraphernalia; wigs, underwear etc.

She had been scrimping, and saving, and he had been splurging “I went without” she said “and there’s all this”.

Once he got what he wanted (to dress at night) he actually helped around the house and was nicer to live with. Having never so much as washed the dishes before.

He tried to push things further, to be allowed to have sex wearing a nightie. We don’t know if she capitulated to this despite her disgust, or if he coerced her, but she ended up in the local psychiatric hospital.

The hospital gave her ECT.

So he is the problem, but she gets electric shocks to the brain.

She became dependant on anti depressants and went though hell trying to come off them. She was exhausted and weak, and one night kept hitting the wall when aiming for the door. George was asleep.

She considered taking her life at this point.

She then turned to religion to cope, instead, and this led her to decides that surely, surely this will all just get better over time.

We don’t find out what happened next.

Read 7 tweets

Lorelei 🌕🧙🏻‍♀️🕸🍄

@hatpinwoman

Nov 6, 2023

This tweet is about someone I love but it’s also about young women on testosterone and the Wernicke’s area of the brain:

I watched over the course of 8 months as this person I love descended into an escalating hell and then he died. He spoke less and less and, when he did speak, would talk about impossible things that were very real to him. I remember him telling me, for example, that he had met me as an old lady, and that he had seen a strange man emerge from a cupboard in his house.

He would get trapped in nightmares that he couldn’t be woken from where he cried out in pain. He walked with an odd, shuffling gait. He had the most terrible cough. He would pluck at the blankets fretfully.

He hallucinated vividly, seeing the dead as well as the living. Sometimes he saw cars drive into the room he was in, or water flooding the whole place. He lost huge chunks of memory. And, he would invent the most astonishing stories to fill in those missing days, weeks, months or years. Often, in his stories, he would be in grave peril.

His legs became so thin that I thought he looked like those tragic men who have been photographed as starving prisoners of war.

He suffered very much, and it broke my heart to see it.

This man who was described after his death as an “Elegant gentleman” vanished as we watched him.

He had something called Wernicke’s Encephalopathy (WE) which is a serious B1 vitamin defiency that, untreated, can lead to coma and death. Also to Korsakoff Syndrome. Korsakoff’s is a terrible syndrome to have. Your loved one goes into a dark, and frightening, place from which they rarely emerge. It led him there

So why am I talking about this?

I saw NeuroSGS post that the Wernicke’s part of the brain is altered for females taking testosterone (source in second tweet). The paper that said this didn’t raise the spectre of Wernicke’s Encephalopathy but I wanted to find out more.

In the paper, females taking T had reduced grey matter. The study authors suggested other affects on the women’s white matter might mediate this reduction, but what if reduction of grey matter is another kind of red flag?

Reduction in grey matter is seen in Wernicke’s Encephalopathy too

WE is more common in men than in women and most common for men during the ages of 30-70. Is testosterone relevant at all to this or are known risk factors, like excess drinking, just more associated with men?

I found another paper (source in third tweet) where a man who had taken anabolic steroids, including testosterone analogues, developed WE. The doctors could not rule out that this was the cause of his condition.

So, greater minds than mine have considered a potential link between specifically an EXCESS of testosterone and WE, at least once before.

What would be the mechanism for testosterone affecting B1 though?

Well, in women at least, excess testosterone is already known to increase the likelihood of insulin resistance (source in fourth tweet) and insulin resistance leads to high blood sugar and diabetes which very frequently results in thiamine deficiency (sources in fifth tweet).

There may well be additional possible mechanisms.

It is the thiamine deficiency in WE that leads to a reduction of grey matter.

So, given excess T can ultimately lead to thiamine deficiency, and we are now seeing a reduction in grey matter in the Wernicke’s part of these women’s brains, alarm bells potentially ought to be ringing.

Add in, too, that additional risk factors for thiamine deficiency are alcoholism or dietary deficiency. Along with the information that many of the young girls on T have eating disorders and some may abuse substances because of serious distress.

And I think you might have a perfect potential storm for some of these young women. With this terrible condition and with others.

The fact western medicine has done less due diligence than the average woman with internet access to the medical literature continues to be extremely concerning and wrong.

https://twitter.com/neurosgs/status/1721261417045610628

https://twitter.com/neurosgs/status/1721261417045610628

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Read 5 tweets

Lorelei 🌕🧙🏻‍♀️🕸🍄

@hatpinwoman

Sep 20, 2023

🧵 The term “false accusation” can be misleading even before we get to the fact some men hear “women love to LIE about rape”

Rarely, people lie but the term “false accusation” can include cases where police misidentify a perpetrator,where witnesses do,where 3rd parties accuse,

where a victim picks the wrong stranger out of a line-up, where a victim withdraws a complaint &where there’s insufficient evidence

This is because what counts as false allegation varies by place, context &collection technique

In some places it is incredibly broad, &everywhere

it’s subject to human bias&error

There are cases, too,where ppl approach police fearing rape as they were drugged/unconscious,but investigation finds no assault occurred

Conflating any&all of this with malicious reports in official figures or the public imagination is dangerous

Read 19 tweets

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