Like I am sure that many of you have, I have been observing the – entirely predictable – shitfit from the troon commune in regards to superstraight with a great deal of amusement. Trollings of this kind never go out of style. And while a great deal could be said about the left’s reactions to superstraight and how beautifully its hypocrisies are laid bare through trolling, my concern today is more general. While the left may certainly seem deranged, nearly everything it does follows a certain political logic, a logic which the dissident does well to understand. It is my intention to illuminate this logic, specifically in regards to the trans phenomenon. Before we begin, I wish to clarify that the purpose of this essay is not to engender animosity towards the transgendered as such, but rather to show the cynical way in which the left uses them to maintain and accumulate power.
The defining strategy of the left is the politicization of resentment. Resentment is a politically valuable sentiment for two reasons. The first reason we will call bioleninistic. Resentment is mainly harbored by the losers of a social order - the “marginalized”, to use leftist terminology, those who are on the margin and occupy the undesirable positions in the social order. The allegiance and loyalty of these individuals can be bought by providing them with positions of influence and status that are only available to them under a leftist regime. The second reason we can call inquisitorial. The resentful are seldom receptive to advice on how to improve their situation – they are, however, very interested in who is to blame for it. The resentful are easily motivated by promises of revenge – the resentful man relishes any opportunity to turn the tables. Therefore, resentment can be used by directing it towards political opponents, who are made to take the blame. These the resentful will help repress with sustained devotion and glee.
The left succeeds in politicizing resentment through the use of narratives of oppression. Such a narrative, in its most basic form, contains two interconnected parts – these we will call victimization and galvanization. The first part paints the resentful as victims of some kind of oppression and the second part assigns the blame for this oppression to a designated group of oppressors, whom the resentful are encouraged to organize against. Narratives of oppression can be quite elaborate, and contain any number of theoretical constructs, but at their heart they always contain these two components from which everything else in the narrative flows.
While the left depends on resentment to maintain power, not all resentment is created equal and not every kind of malcontent is equally useful. The left originally sought to weaponize groups based on material conditions – the proles, the poor, the working classes. However, as these groups were only motivated by material concerns, they would lose their political potential once the material conditions improved. We see this most clearly with soft-socialistic projects such as worker’s rights, labor unions and the welfare state. As these projects came to fruition, more and more of the working class could rise and join the middle class, and the political potential of this group for the left was wiped out. The working class quite simply does not contain the political potential that orthodox Marxism assigns to it.
Two groups that the left has had greater success in weaponizing through narratives of oppression have been women and racial minorities. The success of the left here has been due to these groups being defined, not by economic conditions, but by their inherent qualities. As any society must by necessity value and reward some qualities over others, any society that is sufficiently heterogeneous in terms of inherent qualities will see certain groups occupy the marginal positions. For racial groups this can be clearly seen in a country like the US, where racial stratification maps closely to economic stratification. In the case of sex it is entirely trivial to find examples through history of the differing societal roles of men and women, as these are almost ubiquitous. The political potential of race and sex are greater than that of class due to their resentments arising as a result of inherent characteristics – characteristics which are not only persistent, but which are far more emotionally charged. A man takes greater offense at being called effeminate than being called poor, and he will take an attack on his race more seriously than an attack on his profession.
A fourth group that likewise possesses a great deal of political potential is the sexual deviants – yet another group that the left has successfully weaponized. While sexual deviancy may not be inherent, it is nonetheless persistent, and as in the case of race and sex there is a strong emotional charge inherent in this group identity. However, the political potential of the sexual deviant is further increased due to them possessing certain desires the satisfaction of which a leftist regime can seek to control. The best example of this in action can be seen in the Epstein affair. The continued loyalty of the sexual deviant can be maintained through awareness, acceptance and accommodation of the deviant’s desires.
This brings us back to transgenderism. As we have seen so far, the left depends for its central strategy on politicizing resentment, and we’ve looked at several groups that the left has successfully managed to weaponize. We’ve also seen how the resentment of different groups differs in terms of its political value depending on how strong the resentment is and how well it can be maintained and controlled. What distinguishes transgenderism from other sources of resentment is that it is transformative. There is a well-developed process – running from self-identification to full-on surgical modification – through which one is initiated into transgenderism, a lifestyle that one cannot leave once the process has been completed (the dick cannot be un-chopped, so to speak). It should be clear at this point that transgenderism possesses this political benefit in addition to all the political benefits already mentioned for previous groups.
It is well-established that transgenderism is tightly correlated with mental illness and suffering – the transgendered suffer from greater dissatisfaction with life, higher risk of being bullied and increased rates of depression, anxiety and suicide. The leftist narrative – the narrative of oppression – is that the suffering of transgendered individuals is a result of oppression perpetrated by the cisgendered. According to this narrative, the transgendered are forced into suppressing their innermost feelings in order to conform to the standards of cisheteronormativity, causing them to suffer as a result. In this paradigm, transgenderism precedes suffering.
But what if this isn’t the case? What if individuals are drawn to the transgender narrative of oppression in order to make sense of their suffering? I am hardly the first to suggest this – Steve Sailer published an article recently where he made this exact point. For instance, take the case of transgenderism and autism. Transgenderism is associated with increased rates of autism. But autism, being a neurological developmental disorder, is present in individuals from birth. Transgenderism, by contrast, can manifest itself at any point in life, and most cases that manifest before puberty resolve themselves during puberty. We can therefore conclude that, while it is possible for transgenderism to coincide with autism, it certainly cannot precede it. Thus, if we suppose a causal relationship between the two, there must be some process by which autism leads to transgenderism.
Though it is rarely acknowledged, a common way in which autism presents itself is as an unstable sense of identity. I theorize that this is due to the inherent social difficulties of the autist, hindering adequate socialization which is a prerequisite for the development of a stable identity. I believe that this accounts at least in part for the tendency of some autists to hold very firmly to certain aspects of themselves which they see as making up their core identity – this is often their special interest. This serves as an anchoring point and a defense against identity dissolution. It is not difficult to see how such an unstable sense of identity - together with the social difficulties of autism – would make an autistic individual vulnerable to adopting transgender ideology. After all, one of the main selling points of transgenderism is that it offers an identity, something which adolescents in particular are also desperate to develop.
So we see a way in which autism could lead to transgenderism. We can make similar arguments for other conditions. The psychological pain and distress of depression and anxiety can be re-framed as gender dysphoria, gender transitioning can be offered as a cure for dissatisfaction with oneself and one’s life, bullying can be explained as transphobia, teen angst as being “born in the wrong body”. Furthermore, it would be trivial to show how autogynephilia – itself a perversion of male heterosexuality and not a form of transsexuality – could be re-framed as transgenderism. There is also a case to be made for how certain more sensitive boys or tomboyish girls, especially ones which are isolated or alienated from their same-sex peers, could likewise have their personalities re-framed as a form of transgenderism . All the cases of transgenderism that I know of in my own private life fit into this last category, at any rate. This is not to suggest that there are no cases of “true transgenderism”, only that the transformative aspect of transgenderism allows for the creation of transgendered individuals.
Once an individual accepts the transgender identity – regardless of their motivations for doing so – it becomes an almost trivial task for the left to get them to accept the transgender oppression narrative, and to begin to see the cisgendered as oppressors. And so we arrive to the key point that I wish to make in this article, namely what the political logic of transgenderism really is. I will formulate it as succinctly as I can.
Transgenderism is used by the left as a method of turning pathology and alienation into politically viable resentment.
Having established this we can now begin to make sense of much of the insanity surrounding transgenderism in the modern political landscape. We understand that the aggression and hostility of the trans community is used by the left to police their opposition. We understand that pushing transgender ideology on children is a way of recruiting and grooming them to become political inquisitors. We also understand that “Rapid onset gender dysphoria” is a way of fast-tracking the process of initiation. We can see why the left takes the side of trans against TERF:s, women and lesbians – it is a way of policing dissent within their own ranks by using politically more useful groups to control the politically less useful. The insistence on “pronouns” becomes a way of sniffing out dissent and forcing people to openly declare their fealty to the left through what amounts to humiliation rituals. Pushing for “inclusion” of the transgendered in all spheres of public life becomes a way for the left to install their inquisitors where they can monitor dissent. Even rudimentary things like bathrooms or children’s clothing become an opportunity for the left to force declarations of political fealty.
And through it all we have the trans community itself, which gets a free pass to gorge itself on all the petty revenge fantasies it wants.
The true nefariousness of the left’s designs with regards to transgenderism can be seen in their obsession over transitioning children. Should the left be successful here, they will be able to essentially create political inquisitors who have never known anything other than transgender ideology, who will have a lifetime of resentment for the left to use and who, due to the poisoning and mutilation of their bodies, can never leave or create a normal life for themselves outside the leftist political-ideological machine. Inquisitors whom the left, nota bene, intend to place in every institution, company, media franchise, etc.
BAP was wrong when he said that the future gulags will be staffed by lesbians with Martin Sheen haircuts. They will be staffed by men in wigs.
Further reading
Central to the thesis of this essay is Spandrell’s theory of bioleninism. Highly recommended.
https://spandrell.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism/
Steve Sailer’s article Poison, Mutilate and Sterilize.
https://www.takimag.com/article/poison-mutilate-and-sterilize/
Trans and its correlates.
Life satisfaction and mental health among transgender students in Norway
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32000747/
Transgender Identity Is Associated With Bullying Involvement Among Finnish Adolescents
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.612424/full
Elevated rates of autism, other neurodevelopmental and psychiatric diagnoses, and autistic traits in transgender and gender-diverse individuals
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17794-1
The Inquisition Wears a Wig
Tldr
Thank you for this nuanced, and thought-provoking take.