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…

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.

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

🧵 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

🧵 Where someone is not facing criminal consequences for an alleged behaviour he is already being treated as “innocent until proven guilty” by the law.

He is being granted that specific benefit of the justice system by not being locked up or convicted on the say so of others &such a man has recourse to other protective laws if he wants to dispute claims made about him

The law still functions to protect his liberty

It is unreasonable to suggest it also means no one can talk about serious harms he may have done

🧵 Many women have pointed out, today, that most rape and sexual assault is done to women and girls by men they know.

Stranger rape is less common.

That’s true, & it is appalling that those close at hand & those we may love are often more dangerous to us Women in the gender debate know that allowing more men unfettered access to women & girls facilitates more sexual assaults and rape against us too

It is precisely because men we know have greater access to us that they are the highest risk in the first place.

I HAVE to tell you about Elizabeth Heyrick.

She was born in 1769 &so talented at painting that her father had “half a mind” to make her an artist

She was against bull-baiting. Once, buying the bull and stashing it in the parlour of a cottage until the angry crowd dispersed 😄 As a child she was apparently “singular” because she gave pennies to beggars and chose a plain kitten over a pretty one.

Heyrick was her married name & after her husband’s death she became a Quaker

She was a prison visitor &wrote 18 political pamphlets on a variety of subjects

After the Tavistock scandal,how are young children& adolescents presenting with a trans identity or “gender incongruence” going to be treated by the NHS? 🧵

I just read this 25 page publication by NHS England

There’s a lot to think about

Some key points below: 🗝 Providers of The Service must be “an established& specialist tertiary paediatric unit with a strong partnership with mental health services; be an established academic centre with strong record of research in children/young people; have robust safeguarding frameworks in place”

It’s unforgivable for any adult to agree with a child, or teenager, when they say their body is wrong.

Of course it isn’t, &they haven’t even finished growing into it yet

It doesn’t stop being unforgivable to agree just because they say what’s wrong with them is their whole sex I’ve never been a boy, but I remember being a girl.

I think society has forgotten, if it ever knew, what it is like to be female and to grow up.

For a time, you cannot help but focus on your body and all the things it’s determined to do

I rang Oxfam’s complaints number 🧵

I said “Good morning, I know it’s early in the day to have to field a complaint but I’d like to make one. Your company tweeted a video for pride month which had a still of a woman being branded a “terf” in it. I want to remind your company that sex is a legally protected characteristic, that the Equality Act provides provision for single sex spaces, &that demonising women who know this is discrimination against women &girls”

He said he’d been made aware of the video as soon as he got into work & offered “context”

People really want to blame feminism for gender identity ideology.

Yes, branches of feminism succumbed to it but it didn’t originate with them.

This is first & foremost a medical scandal. The mad ideas came out of medicine & from trans activists themselves 🧵 In the early 1900s some eugenicists thought changing sex in humans would be a wonderful endeavour. They sought to make intersex patients perfect “ideals” of a given sex as well. Some already thought human beings were degrees of their sex based on characteristics and behaviours.

There’s an important case study, in Frontiers, about a detransitioned woman called Elizabeth

Doctors removed her breasts before she had accepted her sex and rejected the label “trans”.

She was later unable to breastfeed her child and found that distressing 🧵 The paper notes that future inability to breastfeed is not being discussed with patients and that some doctors even claim a reversal of mastectomy (breast removal) is possible when it is NOT.

No one discusssed this properly with Elizabeth

We’ve long said that if you replace the word “terf” with the word “woman” you see what trans activism really is

When you replace the word “transwomen” with the word “men” the same revelation applies

Here’s a quick thread of examples: Men want to be allowed inside women’s rape shelters where the women are trying to heal from male violence.

Men who have committed crimes, including serious sex offences against women and children, want to be in women’s prisons

I’m now reading a really excellent, slightly creepy book called Fashion Victims about the various harms over the centuries to the wearers and makers of the dazzling objects that people have worn for the sake of fashion🧵 A famous John Tenniel drawing features. As a fine lady admires her reflection,the mirror shows the seamstress dead from her endeavours. Tenniel was inspired by the real case of Mary Ann Walkley who sewed 26 and a half hrs straight to make a ballgown, and died.

I found an entire page of Jane Austen memes on Facebook yesterday and some of them are great.

So here are a few Pride and Prejudice memes, for your Sunday, in case you might enjoy them, too: 😂

Women are demonised because they hold the common sense position that they don’t want any woman or girl to find herself on the wrong side of the door with a male predator in what should have been a safe space: We don’t want the prison cell door,or rape shelter door, or domestic violence shelter door,or changing room door,or the toilet door,or the hospital ward curtains to close on any woman with her rapist or her killer on the inside beside her

We want him shut out, not welcomed in

I’ve read this cautionary tale that will make you hardened terves repent! 👀

Gather round please 😂

Glenda, an elderly woman who is “built like a horse” &has facial hair, decides to pop into town on the bus (to Iceland,no less) in a “flouncy” velvet dress&high heels,as one does She puts on some rare make-up for this endeavour but doesn’t pluck her chin hairs because she “forgot”.

So there she is dressed like she’s about to attend a Ball while, presumably, carrying her bag for life and her “crocheted coin purse”.

If medicine chooses to call all the reasons people try to escape their sex “gender identity” it can give them an easy prescription instead of helping them. No one has to deal with a patient’s eating disorder,borderline personality disorder,paraphilia or their struggles to fit in, No one has to try to address a patient’s reaction to their own same sex attraction (or the reaction of a homophobic society). No one has to consider what it’s like to be female in this world or how it impacts female patients, especially if theyve been raped,abused or traumatised

So, according to the current consensus among trans activists here are just some of the things that are unspeakably bad 🧵:

Disabled women wanting intimate care to be performed by female carers

Female domestic abuse&rape victims wanting single sex groups to heal from trauma Women rejecting labels like “cis”, “bodies with vaginas”, “birthing person”

Women & girls having single sex changing rooms, hospital wards & toilets

Women saying we’re not a gender identity but a material class of human beings

Any exclusive same-sex attraction

On the 10th March, a man called Ben Miller cited his personal expertise in a tweet that claimed “Nazi persecution of trans people is documented history”

He provided a source

As it’s one of the few times I’ve seen someone offer evidence when saying this let’s see what it says 🧵 “Trans Liminality & the Nazi State” offers a “close reading” of the life of Gerda R; a man who was considered a transvestite at the time. As we know from Hirschfeld,who coined the term,it was never meant to refer only to clothes. Male transvestites also wished to be women.

I saw a remarkable video yesterday.

In 1.5 hrs of sometimes barely suppressed rage, which begins with the destruction of a laptop with a hammer, Abigail Thorne laments the state of trans healthcare 🧵🪡 It was an interesting watch because it laid out, to the viewer, how the NHS is being pressured to give these patients what they want, over and above what is evidence based. Not just by organisations but by individuals themselves.

This is partly how capture continues.