Thread by @hatpinwoman

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…

In chapter 5 “perception and reality” the author makes the argument that if transition wasn't offered in the U.K. then people would probably just get it elsewhere, anyway.

I’ve seen trans activists make this argument about kids, and blockers, given that the black market exists.

Then he adds “Could it ever be feasible–certainly in liberal societies–to force those people to conform to sexist stereotypes to ensure that they are always taken for their biological sex?”

But it doesn’t follow that refusing people “transition”, by prioritising evidence-based medicine, would mean they had to conform to sexist stereotypes at all.

He says that the birth certificates and passports of ‘ transsexuals’ “were quietly changed to reflect the impression they made on those around them. They might not really be the sex they appeared to be but…it was easier to create a legal fiction that they were the opposite sex.”

He continues to argue that perception is somehow key, and that it perhaps should be legally key. Of course he hedges a little but plausible deniability is important, no?

“Had those drafting the bill (the GRA) talked about ‘being routinely perceived to be the other sex’, then some of the subsequent problems might have been averted. That wording would likely have been unpopular with both sides of the debate. Firstly, it would have introduced a ‘passing test’. While we can all distinguish between men and women, we use instinct rather than a set of rules. Transgender activists would also no doubt protest that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman. On the other hand, feminist campaigners would hold that only biological females can be women. But–and this is crucial–the law would have merely codified those instincts on which we rely every time we meet someone new.”

No, this is not crucial. Even very pretty men are not women, and should not be seen as women in law. You can’t establish women in law, as just a class of people who look like something.

We are a class of people who *are*.

Honestly, if anyone needs a reason not to call men she, it might be this one: it fuels a delusion that is encouraging them to try and stake a claim to our rights in law. It is because the author thinks he passes, that he can write this.

On the basis of the courtesy others offer him he believes that if a woman was someone “perceived as a woman”, he would make the grade.

He thinks it is only the concept of gender identity that ruined this by opening the door to bad actors yet men trying to shoehorn their way into women’s spaces, and the category of woman, against our will, are all bad actors.

He says “Hard-wiring the words ‘men’ and ‘women’ to ‘male’ and ‘female’ is also unhelpful…”

In line with all trans activists, everywhere, he then invokes intersex people as part of his argument that sex perception is the line.

So, because we recognise those with CAIS as women, he is essentially arguing we might recognise him as a lady, too.

“We also have a dilemma when medical transition is possible, because the sense of man and woman can indeed change – or at least become ambiguous – in transgender people. In short, a meaningful transition can alter the way our sex is perceived. Are transwomen women after all, then? Clearly, we are the opposite sex to women. My reproductive system was, as far as I am aware, typically male, and it certainly worked as expected. But we could say that someone perceived to be an adult human female can be usefully referred to as a woman”.

In advocating for the idea that physical interventions are the true measure of trans, and can lead a man to being accepted as a woman, he is actually arguing against his stated position against child transition, too.

If society accepts that men who are sufficiently perceived as female might as well be women, then activists and doctors will surely have a vested interest in creating passing adults. And will continue to do so by medicalising gender nonconforming children.

“The first group to apply for GRCs were those who had already completed the process of gender reassignment. As the saying goes, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck – and we might as well call it a duck.”

We might as call some men women says the gender critical ally 👀.

I rather wish the ducks were being left out of this

The author is actively against self ID (and articulates its harms) but, then again, it is clear he doesn’t think he needs self ID and sees it as actively compromising his own interests.

He defends terfs against accusations that we are transphobic, and the whole of the U.K from allegations that it is a hive of anti-trans villainy. And I won’t deny that him doing so may help more people speak up but these are crumbs.

The greatest strength of this book, surely from all perspectives, is that it is often so honest about the author's position. Though it muddies the waters at other times.

Another strength is its strong denouncement of gender identity ideology being foisted on children in schools.

It is just that other beliefs, here, make this position totally inconsistent, and substituting gender identity ideology for a narrower form of nonsense isn’t a sufficient answer to all of this. Especially if we really want to protect women and children.

It was Vulvamort, wasn’t it, who said we must go back to the beginning, and back to the root, if we are to really stop the harms?

We have to be totally honest, and men like the author have to accept that fixing this will affect them, in some ways, but only because they laid claim to so much that was never theirs in the first place.

For those of us who think the category of woman is a single sex category, that passing is no standard of anything, that medicine should not be offering the poorly evidenced and destructive intervention of ‘sex change’, that language matters, that the term conversion therapy should only refer to harmful measures to change sexual orientation, and that paraphilias should not be sanitised, this book should give us pause.

The political position articulated, here, is not the same as ours. In fact, it often stands in direct opposition to our most fundamental efforts.

Sure, in the final chapter the author concedes it’s probably too late to turn the clock back, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a concerted attempt. Perhaps this book is part of that?

He also suggests men like him shouldn’t have to use men’s facilities (or women’s) and that the GRA could maybe go entirely if EVERYONE’S sex was officially obscured except in situations where it matters.

For women and girls, sex matters full stop. And no legal efforts should be made to help any men obscure their sex given that we live in a world where that is the case.

It is bunkum that one of the most fundamental facts about humanity should be considered a secret matter when men don’t like those facts.

On the other hand, he also thinks the GRAcould stay and just be “strengthened”. #NoThankYou to that, as well.

Making one group of men into “not really men” by pushing them out of men’s spaces, or calling them transwomen, or giving them female certificates, is still ideological. It is exactly how we got here.

We just need to stop romanticising all of this.

Men who have surgeries, and take oestrogen pills, are still men and society doesn’t need to completely reorder itself around them.

I sincerely don’t think it should.

Just reread this and his exact quote about conversion therapy was “was that conversion therapy?

Same conflation of terms but he wasn’t hoping to get it.

I edit as I go and I meant to alter that.

For some reason Elon doesn’t let you edit tweets in threads so putting it here.