“Transgenderism is effectively over. We destroyed it,” declared Conservative commentator Matt Walsh in October, in response to newly released data purporting to show transgender identification sharply declining among university students in the US. While that verdict may be premature, it does highlight a growing divide: as the US begins to reckon with the damage done by modern trans activism, Canada is marching in the opposite direction, somehow still oblivious to the harm.

With the exception of the province of Alberta, there is no indication that the stranglehold of gender identity ideology is weakening here. Our gender clinics continue to follow WPATH; our medical associations continue to endorse the puberty suppression experiment; our mainstream media continues to ignore the most appalling medical scandal in history, and our federal government is gearing up to release census data on transgender toddlers.

A Year of Legal Chaos

2025 began on a positive note, with one Canadian province set to protect its youth from a medical world that has catastrophically lost its way. However, thanks to legal challenges brought by trans activist groups and, astonishingly, the Canadian Medical Association, Alberta’s puberty blocker ban, that received royal assent in December 2024, didn’t actually come into effect until earlier this month.

Those who have followed the legal battles surrounding puberty blocker bans worldwide will recognize familiar themes in this story—though Canada, seemingly determined to outdo the rest of the world in gender madness, has pushed the reality inversion and linguistic contortions to an absurd extreme.

No sooner had Alberta’s Health Statutes Amendment Act (Bill 26) received royal assent than trans advocacy groups Egale and Skipping Stone launched a constitutional challenge, arguing that the law would deny “medically necessary” care to “gender diverse youth” in the province. Their litigation claimed that Bill 26 violated three rights guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: the right to security of the person; the right to be free from cruel and unusual treatment; and the right to equality.

Yet, with everything now known about the scandal of “gender-affirming care,” all of those rights violations could just as easily, even far more plausibly, be applied to the interventions being dished out in paediatric gender clinics.

After all, doesn’t performing an unregulated experiment on healthy adolescents threaten their right to security of the person?

Isn’t it cruel and unusual treatment to disrupt normal development, induce endocrine disorders and remove healthy organs in the absence of a diagnosis and without scientific justification?

Don’t trans-identified youth have the equal right to safe evidence-based healthcare that the rest of the Canadian population enjoys?

Next to enter the legal fray was the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), which launched a creatively framed constitutional challenge claiming that the puberty blocker ban violated physicians’ Charter right to freedom of conscience by forcing doctors to follow government directives rather than clinical guidelines, patient needs, and professional judgment—an argument that lays bare the CMA’s apparent ignorance of the methodological bankruptcy of WPATH’s Standards of Care and all the guidelines built upon them, its disregard for child and adolescent developmental theory, and its failure to recognize that ideology, not science, guides the judgment of professionals in the field of “gender-affirming” medicine.

What followed was a cascade of legal chaos: first, a judge issued a temporary injunction declaring that allowing children to progress through normal puberty potentially constitutes “irreparable harm,” while chemically disrupting that natural process with powerful unproven drugs apparently does not.

Then Smith’s government, facing years of litigation during which children would continue to be subjected to this experiment, invoked the Charter’s notwithstanding clause—a constitutional provision allowing provincial governments to temporarily override certain Charter rights—to shield the ban from rights-based challenges for five years.

In response, Egale performed a tactical pivot: since health care is provincially regulated, the group reframed Smith’s ban, which is backed by penalties like fines or imprisonment, as a disguised criminal law with “a moral purpose aimed at prohibiting a practice the province deems socially undesirable” rather than legitimate medical regulation. This framing argues provincial overreach into federal criminal jurisdiction, meaning the legal challenge is no longer about the violation of Charter rights and thus enabling the complaint to bypass the notwithstanding clause entirely.

Clever as this reframing may be, it seems unlikely to succeed given the significant body of evidence that these interventions are experimental, unsupported by high-quality science, and fundamentally at odds with child and adolescent developmental theory.

Every twist in this saga unfolded against a backdrop of escalating fury and catastrophising from Canadian trans activists. Smith was accused of launching “hateful attacks on trans kids,” crafting policy out of “ignorance and misinformation,” and—according to a member of Canada’s Senate—advancing legislation that was “unscientific and immoral.” The final act in this circus of outrage is a newly launched petition urging the federal government to revive an obsolete constitutional mechanism: the power of disallowance, as a means to override Alberta’s use of the notwithstanding clause. Popular in the 19th century, this relic of the turbulent decades following Confederation fell into disuse long ago and has not been invoked once since 1943. At the time of writing, the petition had already amassed over 18,000 signatures.

These frantic reactions stem from a foundational error in reasoning. Opponents to Smith’s legislation start from the place that trans kids exist, and that the treatments euphemistically packaged as “gender affirming care” are evidence-based, medically necessary, and life saving—despite the lack of scientific grounding for these claims. This fundamental misunderstanding then permits the application of malicious motives to anyone who holds a different view. Senator Kristopher Wells provided the textbook example of this when he asserted that Smith’s legislation “does nothing to protect children” and exists solely to “hurt them by denying doctor supported, life saving care.”

Canadian trans activists remain so detached from reality because Canada still exists inside a protective bubble: a nationwide echo chamber where countervailing evidence is considered bigotry and alternative viewpoints are forbidden. Only in a nation where the mainstream media refuses to expose the scandal of paediatric gender medicine—and where not a single federal political party is willing to challenge it—could this degree of mass delusion be sustained.

McMaster Fans the Flames

Another embarrassing chapter in the 2025 gender medicine fiasco was provided by McMaster University, one of Canada’s most prestigious institutions. The long, messy backstory is documented elsewhere, but the short version is this: researchers at the birthplace of evidence-based medicine conducted a series of systematic reviews of paediatric “gender-affirming” interventions, and found—like every review before them—that the evidence was low quality. Publication was met with a predictably feral backlash, with local trans activists harassing researchers at their workplace and proudly documenting the behaviour on an alarmingly obsessive Instagram account.

Then, in a masterclass of institutional cowardice, instead of standing up to the bullies and defending scientific integrity, McMaster folded. It denounced the group that had commissioned the reviews—the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine—issued a statement declaring these unproven interventions “medically necessary,” condemned Smith’s puberty blocker ban as “unconscionable,” and, in what felt like the final act of a struggle session, publicly declared that each member of the team had made personal donations to Egale’s legal fund supporting the litigation described in the section above.

That the birthplace of evidence-based medicine would side with extremist trans activists who have no respect for evidence or the scientific process, while throwing an organization devoted solely to demanding high-quality evidence in gender medicine under the bus, was Canada’s peak irony moment of 2025. Even Dr. Gordon Guyatt’s excruciating appearance on Beyond Gender, where he admitted he hadn’t read the statement he’d signed and openly said he doesn’t believe paediatric gender medicine is medically necessary, wasn’t enough for McMaster to retract its shameful declaration. Genspect Canada has since published an open letter demanding precisely that, yet at the time of writing the university has taken no action. This whole disappointing saga proved, once again, that no force is more effective at torching the credibility of once-respected institutions than trans activism.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, Nova Scotia announced the expansion of its paediatric gender clinics in 2025, Statistics Canada sought advice from subject-matter experts on how to disseminate the data it had collected on transgender and nonbinary toddlers, the Liberal government raised the Pride flag on Parliament Hill and proudly celebrated International Pronouns Day, and a Vancouver park, in response to backlash from trans activists for showcasing a hugely popular Harry Potter Forbidden Forest Experience, publicly disavowed JK Rowling’s political activity, accusing her of harming the global transgender community. Rowling was thoroughly untroubled by the disavowal.

The Beginning of the End

In truth, Matt Walsh’s declaration that “transgenderism is effectively over” was premature even in the United States. While identification rates among young people certainly do appear to be falling, the ideology that drove the contagion remains deeply embedded across medicine, education, media, and law, and it’s not going to disappear any time soon.

Events in the US in the final days of 2025 provide convincing evidence of this. On December 23, 19 Democrat states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over a recent declaration threatening to withhold federal funding from hospitals offering unproven, life-altering interventions to healthy youth in gender clinics.

Thus, one thing is certain: 2026 will be another year of chaotic legal battles, in the US and beyond, between those who believe in the existence of “trans kids” and those who do not; those who believe medicalising children’s identities is ethical and those who believe it is a scandal. And the chasm separating the two sides is vast with no possibility of finding middle ground.

And all of this could be further complicated in Canada, where, to add to the nation’s woes, a proposed amendment to our hate speech law (Bill C-9) threatens to chill the gender debate just as it’s starting to get warmed up.

But still, there are reasons for Canadians to be hopeful: Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has finally begun to take a firmer public stand on the gender issue, the CBC has—remarkably—addressed the puberty blocker controversy with something approaching balance, and for the first time in years a Canadian university hosted a debate on gender identity. And there has been a perceptible shift in the mood of the nation too. Once content to politely look the other way while innocent young people sacrificed their futures in our gender clinics, more and more ordinary Canadians now have the courage to face the magnitude of this medical scandal and demand that children be protected. So while the fight ahead will undoubtedly be long and ugly, at least the first battle has now truly begun.

Mia Hughes is Director of Genspect Canada and author of the WPATH Files

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In April of 2024, in our article, “New Zealand Has a New Government. What Does this Mean for Sex and Gender?”, we laid out our analysis of the state of sex and gender under the newly elected coalition government made up of the National Party, ACT NZ Party, a libertarian party, and the nationalist New Zealand First Party. Now here we are at the end of 2025…

Background – or How We Got Here

To set the scene, it is worth highlighting again the damage the Labour Party under Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern did to the rights of women and girls and the safeguarding of children in New Zealand. Under the Labour Government, unelected representatives behind the scenes in the civil service quietly made changes and effectively removed women’s language. The word ‘woman’ was quietly dropped out of a range of government ministries, NGO policy documents, and women’s health, including maternity services. The most damaging changes to law were Sex Self-ID, in the form of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Bill (BDMRR), and the bill to ban ‘conversion therapy’, the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill.

Public concerns about these Bills were arrogantly dismissed by the Parliamentary Select Committees, who mocked submitters and accused some of transphobia, with the most vociferous hostility reserved for concerned sex-realist women submitters, with women Labour MPs and one prominent Māori woman Green MP actually mocking their verbal presentations. The Sex Self-ID law was passed unanimously, with no opposition from any party. The only hope came from the vote on the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill, in which eight National MPs voted against it, and 23 of National’s MPs exercised their conscience votes and abstained. At the time, it seemed that most National MPs were not enthusiastic supporters of this Bill, which gave some hope that a National Government would reverse some of the damage once it came into power.

Where We Are in December 2025: An Overview

Puberty blockers

On November 21st, 2024, after a very long wait, the Ministry of Health finally published its evidence brief on puberty blockers. They opened a consultation on the use of puberty blockers after the release, which closed in January 2025, which resulted in 7103 online submission form responses and 2768 email submissions. A “sensitive” document was then released outlining four policy options ranging from the status quo to new primary legislation. The evidence brief confirmed serious limitations in the quality of evidence for both the benefits and risks (or lack thereof) of using puberty blockers. Unsurprisingly, it was attacked by transactivist groups such as Gender Minorities and the Professional Association for Transgender Health (PATHA). A position statement was released at the same time as the evidence brief, but this was superseded in December 2025 by the Medicines (Restriction on Prescribing Gonadotropin-releasing Hormone Analogues) Amendment Regulations 2025, which were set to take effect on Friday, 19^th December.

Amongst the organisations protesting these new regulatory protections for children were the Human Rights Commission, which stated this was a “serious infringement on human rights and medical autonomy”. PATHA appealed for an urgent injunction against the Minister of Health, arguing that the process used to implement the ban was potentially unlawful. Justice Wilkinson-Smith accepted this argument for interim relief, and there will now be a full judicial review “heard with all possible urgency” sometime in 2026. Judge Wilkinson Smith made a declaration that the Crown should take no steps to enforce the puberty blocker regulations pending the outcome of the judicial review.

Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) in schools

National MP Erica Stanford, who promised she would address the RSE before the 2023 election, announced the removal and replacement of the ideological gender, sexuality, and relationship-based education guidelines as Minister of Education. The new RSE draft framework was open for consultation until April 2025, and the group Resist Gender Education (RGE), formed in 2021 to advocate for scientifically accurate and age-appropriate relationships and sexuality education in NZ schools, gave the new curriculum, which has had all gender ideology removed, an A-grade.

The new curriculum is out for consultation until January 14^th, 2026. In their submission, RGE is suggesting a national, standard workbook for RSE be produced and distributed to all schools. Hence, there is uniformity in lesson content across the country, and parents must retain the right to withdraw their child from the lessons. This is important because, without it, activist teachers would still have the opportunity to pressure a school into reinstating gender ideology. Meanwhile, the Minister instructed schools to revert to the older guidelines, free of gender ideology, while this consultation is in process.

Genspect NZ is aware of schools that are ignoring this directive from the Minister of Education and continuing to teach the Navigating the Journey curriculum, written by Sexual Wellbeing Aotearoa, which includes gender ideology and misinformation, including telling children that girls are not the only ones who have menstrual periods.

Protection for women and girls

1.Safe single sex spaces

Within the Government Coalition, NZ First appears to be the only political party committed to protecting the safety of women and girls. Proposed legislation, the “Definitions of Woman (and Man) Amendment Bill, was introduced as a Member’s Bill in April 2025, and aims to provide clarity and consistency in NZ law by defining “woman” as “an adult human biological female” and “man” as “an adult human biological male” in the Legislation Act 2019. NZ First also introduced a Members’ Bill in May 2024, the ‘Fair Access to Bathrooms Bill’, which would require all new non-domestic publicly accessible buildings to provide separate, clearly demarcated, unisex, and single sex bathrooms. Meanwhile, in the Capital City of Wellington, the newly elected Mayor and ex-MP Andrew Little (who, as Minister of Health under the Labour Government, tried to radically reform the whole NZ health system during the peak COVID-19 pandemic) is pushing for a Rainbow Action Plan. This plan proposes that all toilets and changing rooms in new facilities become ‘all gender spaces’ and the phasing out of single sex options.

2. Lesbian Action for Visibility in Aotearoa (LAVA) versus Wellington Pride

Members of LAVA, Hilary Oxley and Margaret Curnow, brought a claim to the New Zealand Human Rights Review Tribunal after a booking for a stall at the annual Out in the City (OITC) fair in Wellington was cancelled after being accepted. The claim is that Pride was offering a service in providing stalls at the fair and that they unlawfully discriminated against LAVA because of LAVA’s political opinions about trans issues and women’s rights. This is because of LAVA’s views that sex and sexual orientation exclude trans women from being women and lesbians.

The NZ Human Rights Act protects lesbians as same sex attracted women from discrimination, and protects their political beliefs. The case hearing started in July 2025, and because Wellington Pride called 25 fact and expert witnesses, it was scheduled to be heard over three months, with hearings every four weeks. It should be noted that Pride was represented pro bono, with six lawyers attending. LAVA, which had to crowdfund for costs, had one lawyer and was seriously disadvantaged in multiple ways. Witnesses called for LAVA included Dr Emma Hilton and Professor Dianna Kenny. After a LAVA supporter’s harmless comment on social media, the Human Rights Tribunal issued a strict order prohibiting LAVA from posting anything about the case until final submissions were made in November. Each day in court, the LAVA women had to listen to themselves being described as hateful and abusive and listen to witnesses for Pride make statements such as ‘biological sex as a term is redundant’, ‘the sex binary masquerades as a scientific legitimacy’, and ‘eggs and sperm are not the only gametes that exist’. When the suppression order was issued at Pride’s request, it banned any member of the public from publishing anything about the case. It further prohibited anyone other than an accredited journalist from taking notes or recording the proceedings.

Despite this being the most significant discrimination case for NZ, only one journalist attended on one day of the hearings. The Human Rights Review Tribunal also refused permission for two well-established journalists, Jenny Ruth and Helen Joyce (who was touring NZ at the time), to be counted as accredited journalists. On the 4^th and 5^th of November, closing submissions were made, and now we await the case outcome.

3. Men in women’s prisons

New Zealand has a problem with trans-identified men being housed in the women’s estate. In July 2024, the women’s rights advocacy group Speak Up for Women (SUFW) submitted a request to the Department of Corrections under the Official Information Act 1982 to enquire about the number of trans identifying males in custody, and how many were housed in a female corrections facility. SUFW also requested the numbers of those who were sentenced or on remand for crimes involving sexual assault.

The response from Corrections NZ stated that an average of 86 trans-identifying males had served a custodial sentence or had been remanded in custody each year for the past five years, and approximately 14% of the sentenced offenders were charged with (on remand) or convicted for sexual assault. As described in the SUFW media release, the data showed that male individuals, regardless of how they identify, had offending patterns similar to those of other males. No updated data on trans identified men in women’s prisons is available. Corrections NZ has a support plan for trans prisoners that states they must be provided with access to all items required to maintain the appearance of their gender identity, and these items may include padded bras, tape for tucking, and specialty underwear.

4. Language

As previously mentioned, under the Labour Government, women’s language was stealthily removed from policy documents across government departments, including health, without consultation or impact assessment. When the first-ever NZ Women’s Health Strategy was released, it was initially designed to address the continuing health inequities for women, but it ended up using confusing ‘inclusive’ language that included men who identify as women. The Government Ministries adopted the Public Service Commission’s Rainbow Inclusive Language Guide. Now, in 2025, despite clear direction from the Associate Minister of Health to Health New Zealand to restore women’s language, very little has changed in the Ministry of Health and Health NZ’s public health messaging, policies, and documents – the Ministry is ignoring the Minister’s direction.

Health New Zealand websites and documents continue to confuse public health messaging. ‘Pregnant people’, ‘people giving birth’, ‘breastfeeding parents’, ‘chest feeding’, ‘those who have a cervix’, ‘most people who have a miscarriage’, free abortion services to any ‘pregnant person’, are the terms being used instead of ‘pregnant women’ across a range of public information websites. On one Health NZ public health webpage designed to inform families about how to support a pregnant woman in the family (the Māori word for family is whānau), the word woman is not used at all, and to manage this omission, the document refers to your “pregnant whānau member” all the way through.

After a few years of protest from midwives, women and their supporters, a petition, and complaints to the Parliamentary Regulations Committee, the NZ Midwifery Council Scope of Practice (SOP) for Midwives – a regulatory document for public safety – has finally and reluctantly in 2025 added the word ‘woman’ back into the SOP but added ‘and gender diverse people’ – effectively and confusingly adding the needs of men to a midwife’s responsibilities of care and expertise in a legal regulatory document that comes into effect in February 2026. Protest continues.

Stats NZ and the capture of the NZ census

After seemingly ignoring the debacle of a census in the UK in 2023, Stats NZ decided to continue the misleading theme of conflating sex and gender in the census, legitimising ‘gender identity’ in data, and telling the NZ population that sex can change over a lifetime. As described in an excellent Substack article that covers the Stats NZ 2023 census story, the “flaws of the UK’s sex and gender data collection, as beautifully illustrated by the England and Wales census, have been met by Stats NZ and raised some concerns”.

In late 2025, Stats NZ undertook a consultation on a proposed data collection approach and content for the census. They plan to ‘modernise’ the next census, and propose collecting and producing information about sexual identity, variations of sex characteristics, and the rainbow/LGBTIQ+ population. Unfortunately, ideological language, including ‘cisgender,’ is used throughout the consultation, and the terms sex and gender continue to be confusingly conflated.

The Law Commission – la Tangata: A review of the protections in the Human Rights Act 1993 for people who are transgender, people who are non-binary and people with innate variations of sex characteristics

In June 2024, the NZ Law Commission undertook a consultation on protections under the Human Rights Act through an Issues Paper. In 2025, a 200-page report riddled with ideological language like ‘sex assigned at birth,’ ‘cisgender,’ and ‘gender affirmation’ was released. It recommended changes to most of the existing exceptions that currently allow people to be treated differently based on their sex, such as in sports, changing facilities and toilets, or shared accommodation, prisons, and women’s refuges.

There are 13 prohibited grounds for discrimination in section 21 of the Human Rights Act: sex, marital status, religious belief, ethical belief, colour, race, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, political opinion, employment status, family status, and sexual orientation. The Law Commission’s recommendations, if accepted, would amend the current Human Rights Act by removing sex-based protections for women and including gender identity and expression.

Genspect NZ made a submission in September 2025 recommending to Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith that the report should be set aside because prioritising gender identity over biological sex would embed rights to “gender affirmative” treatment that fails to uphold the longstanding bioethical principle of ‘first, do no harm”. If the term “sex” is not defined as “biological sex” (an objective fact) but is allowed to incorporate “gender identity” (a subjective belief), neither women (nor men) can be accurately counted in statistics nor identified in health data, nor be provided with services that meet their need.

As the current protections in the NZ Human Rights Act already protect all New Zealanders, none of these proposed amendments are necessary. This process was unnecessary and driven by ideology, transactivist influence, and flawed survey data without scientific rigour, conducted by an activist lobby group.

The Cabinet of the Coalition Government will decide in 2026 whether to act on the Law Commission’s recommendations.

Here’s to a Happy New Year 2026!

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The year 2025 has been both challenging and inspiring amid the ongoing struggle for gay rights, free speech, and the protection of children in the face of the growing influence of gender ideology. At 45, as a writer and committed activist for LGB Alliance Iceland (formerly Samtökin 22), I’ve faced intense legal pressures, achieved meaningful international milestones, and uncovered deep-rooted issues within Iceland’s institutions. This year has underscored the conflicts between true progress and what I see as ideological excess, turning my homeland—known for its dramatic volcanoes—into a key arena for these vital debates.

Legal Hurdles and the Power of Community Support

The year started under the strain of a criminal investigation from 2024, motivated by my parliamentary candidacy and triggered by social media posts in which I questioned whether biologically male individuals can safely breastfeed infants. This inquiry expanded to scrutinize my broader criticisms of transgender ideology, carrying the risk of up to two years in prison. I’ve always viewed this as an infringement on free speech. I know it is driven by my commitment to upholding biological facts and safeguarding children and same-sex attracted people—it weighs heavily on me, but it only strengthens my resolve. My detractors have never found the courage to debate me on a level playing field, and we all know why. Their ideas cannot withstand any meaningful scrutiny. It’s dogma.

This was compounded by my defamation case against RÚV and journalist Bergsteinn Sigurðsson. Their 2024 election reporting wrongly claimed that I had photographed children at school and had been removed by police. These accusations have harmed my reputation and stirred unnecessary controversy. The Reykjavík District Court’s decision on November 3 went against me, acquitting the defendants and leaving me with significant costs. Ordering me to pay the legal costs of the State Broadcaster cemented my fears that I had just been through a kangaroo court.

Nevertheless, I took my case to the Court of Appeal on November 28, highlighting RÚV’s lack of impartiality and failure to allow me a fair response. These struggles have been draining, both emotionally and financially, testing my endurance.

But amid the difficulties, I’ve been deeply moved by the incredible support I have received. Backing from figures like Graham Linehan, Andrew Doyle, Josh Howie, and many more helped frame this as a broader fight against suppression. The collective generosity has not only eased the burden but also reaffirmed my sense of connection and purpose.

Gaining International Momentum and Revealing Institutional Capture

I experienced a significant boost when I presented at Genspect’s “The Bigger Picture” conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on September 27-28. In my talk, “Speaking Truth to Power in a Nation of Fire and Ice,” I outlined how gender ideology has permeated Iceland’s state systems—from education and healthcare to media and government. It’s disheartening to see the evolution of gay rights advocacy shift toward policies that I believe put children at risk, while stifling open discussion. The speech, which is available on YouTube, has resonated with many people. Sharing concerns about diminishing freedoms in a nation that was once praised for equality and human rights has been both cathartic and motivating.

A major highlight was the establishment of LGB International on September 20. This is a global network for lesbian, gay, and bisexual organizations that has broken away from LGBTQ+ structures heavily influenced by transgender ideology. In conjunction with this launch, I stepped down as chair of LGB Alliance Iceland to the new role of international liaison officer, while also serving on the LGB International board. This change has expanded my reach, allowing me to focus on core same-sex rights without compromise—it’s invigorating to build these alliances.

I’ve actively opposed puberty blocker trials, viewing them as lacking solid evidence and potentially harmful to young people. Becoming a signatory to Genspect’s Memorandum of Understanding reinforced my dedication to evidence-based gender care.

An Alarming Development: Asa Radix’s Role in Icelandic Healthcare

Late November brought a disturbing turn with the appointment of Asa Radix, WPATH president, as head of transgender medicine at Iceland’s National University Hospital. This decision concerns me greatly, as it seems to solidify approaches based on WPATH’s debated guidelines, which prioritize gender-affirming care without sufficient evidence. The media coverage that followed has sparked important discussions on institutional influence and aligns with growing international calls for reevaluation—it’s a wake-up call that fuels my advocacy.

Setting Sights on 2026: Key Goals

Looking back on 2025—a mix of setbacks and successes—I’m motivated by the progress amid the trials. My continuing legal efforts, including the RÚV appeal and resolving the criminal probe, are crucial, with the potential to establish stronger free speech safeguards. I’ll push hard for repealing self-ID laws in Iceland, which I see as eroding essential sex-based protections. Central to my work will be advocating against non-evidence-based interventions like puberty blockers for minors, leveraging partnerships with LGB International and Genspect.

This year has shown me the real costs of standing up to dominant narratives, but it has also highlighted the strength there is in perseverance. In a time of heated identity discussions, my experiences in Iceland offer a sobering reminder and an invitation to others: let’s prioritize evidence and truth over unchecked ideology.

As part of this global movement, I’ve been following the case of Jasmine Sussex in Australia with great interest and solidarity. Sussex, a breastfeeding expert, is facing a vilification complaint under Queensland’s anti-discrimination laws for criticizing the practice of breastfeeding by trans-identified males (biological males), calling it potentially dangerous and not equivalent to natural breastfeeding. Her ongoing legal battle, which pits scientific reality against ideological claims, mirrors my own struggles and underscores the international scope of these issues—it’s a poignant example of how speaking out on child safety and biology can lead to persecution, and I stand with her in this fight for truth.

As we near the close of this pivotal year, I extend my deepest thanks to everyone who has supported me through 2025—your solidarity has been my anchor in these stormy times. For those inspired to continue standing with me in the battles ahead, contributions to my ongoing legal fund on GoFundMe are always welcome and make a real difference.

Wishing you all a Happy New Year filled with clarity, courage, and renewed commitment to what truly matters.

Eldur Smári Kristinsson is a gay-rights activist in Iceland

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

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If you’re new to this series, please visit Genspect on Substack to read the earlier parts in this series about Gnostics, Jungian alchemists, castration cults, rock ‘n’ roll gender outlaws, and the deification of the transgender child.

Like many British people, I live in a crumbly old house which pre-dates electricity supply and indoor plumbing. After chipping away cement to expose original stonework, it was evident that whoever built this dwelling had included a six-foot high rhombus made of flint stones above the front door, in an elevated position visible across the valley. The dark stones had been in-filled with black mortar to make this geometric shape especially prominent, functioning as a territorial marker.

Once I understood the significance of the black rhombus, I began to notice it everywhere; even in the brick wall of a supermarket. What some may take to be a decorative feature is the signature of a male power network. It represents the black tile in the floor of a Masonic lodge, supposedly modelled after King Solomon’s Temple. In some accounts, the black and white floor tiles represent spirit and matter, while in other stories they represent good and evil.

Rather than a monolithic patriarchy, I believe that male networks, which may be highly selective in their membership, intersect to empower and serve specific interests. The Freemasons attracted notoriety among the descendants of the medieval craft guilds by developing their own quasi-religious rites, referencing a Great Architect who created their world. Like the bissu of South Sulawesi, the initiation ritual for a Freemason involves a sharp dagger and a supposedly secret, esoteric text.

The Freemasons I’ve met have been mostly concerned with business deals and charitable works in the local community, but long-held suspicions about the power of their network linger. Not all of their brethren have been so benign. In Spain from 1931, Freemasons deployed lawfare as part of the anti-clerical movement. Their allies in ‘antifa’ groups murdered over 10,000 Christians before and during the Spanish Civil War.

While there have been small, breakaway women’s and mixed-sex lodges across Europe since the mid-nineteenth century, the United Grand Lodge of England, which claims a lineage going back over three hundred years, is strictly male-only. The wives of Freemasons are expected to support the organisation, but may not participate, and certainly cannot challenge its doctrines. Freemasonry’s wackier clones include the Order of the Oriental Templars, which Aleister Crowley, whom we met earlier in this series, seized control of long ago.

If you are ever in the financial district of the City of London, built upon the original Roman colony of Londinium, I highly recommend a visit to the Temple of Mithras. Its stone foundations were relocated and rebuilt in their original position during the construction of Michael Bloomberg’s headquarters in the city. After obtaining a ticket in advance, you can enter a side door of the Bloomberg building and descend below modern street level to see the temple’s remains, and a small exhibition.

It was here that I learned that the all-male cult of Mithraism, popular among Roman colonisers before Constantine’s endorsement of Christianity, had an initiation ritual referred to as the ‘male bride’. The hazing ceremony in this windowless, underground temple, known as a mithraeum, seems to have involved a lot of alcohol and the young male initiate being dressed in women’s clothing, in a forerunner of today’s S&M dungeon. It has been speculated that the male bride ritual was derived from the feminine representation of Babylonian bad-boy Baal.

This cult practice has been preserved in the form of a headless statue now held in Madrid by the National Archaeological Museum of Spain, which could be taken as evidence that transgender people have existed for thousands of years. Or, that when sex-starved military men are hundreds of miles from home, the prettiest boy in the unit has to dress up and take one for the team.

It seems this cult was widespread across classical-era Europe and beyond, with examples of Mithraic statues and allegorical stonemasonry found in north Africa and Syria. Somewhat like ‘Monkey’ in the Japanese TV show I enjoyed each week, Mithras was supposed to have been born from a rock. One such statue from the era of the Emperor Commodus (177-192 AD) was found at the Castra Peregrina imperial barracks in central Rome, indicating that this was no fringe religion.

Furry cosplay may also have been involved, as evidenced by a statue dated to 389 AD, found in a mithraeum in the country now called Lebanon, and kept today in the Louvre in Paris. This sculpture features a man with a lion’s mask, a snake around his torso, and his genitals on display. Some historians of these fruity basement-dwellers believe that ‘Leo’ was one of the senior levels in the Mithraic cult.

With the Roman Empire so vast by ancient standards, the followers of Mithras weren’t its only cross-dressing cultists. In his podcast episode ‘A critical history of gender theory’,

Forrest Smith detailed how the Galli, self-castrating transfeminine priests from Anatolia who worshipped the goddess Cybele, have been appropriated for modern times by the abuse of historical process. As UK government quango-turned-charity English Heritage puts it, the Galli “occupied an ambiguous space in Roman notions of gender that many modern transgender and nonbinary people have identified with.” This amounts to official celebration of deliberate, masochistic and dangerous self-harm.

In 1897, English poet George Cecil Ives founded secret society ‘The Order of Chaeronea’, also known as the ‘Army of Lovers’. This quasi-military cult was inspired by the Sacred Band of Thebes, a unit of three hundred homosexual warriors who had been defeated at the Battle of Chaeronea in Ancient Greece during 338 BC. A reference to the Army of Lovers re-surfaced in the 1990 pamphlet ‘Queers Read This’, which James Lindsay has reviewed recently. The anarchist ‘Bash Back’ movement of militant-deviant activism appears to have inspired today’s ‘trantifa’.

Andy Ngo reported that a group calling itself ‘Bash Back’ carried out a vandalism attack on the Equality and Human Rights Commission building in London during November 2025. This was in retaliation for the Commission recognising the authority of the UK Supreme Court ruling on the definition of ‘woman’ in the Equality Act 2010.

The ritual of the ‘male bride’ does not appear to have ceased over the centuries, with the evidence in Martin Dammann’s photographic book “Soldier Studies: Cross-Dressing in the Wehrmacht” suggesting those men who accuse feminists of being ‘Nazis’ may be doing what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called ‘projection’: attributing problematic thoughts and desires to others.

The National Socialist Workers Party of Germany was of course a formidable male power network, going from a rag-tag of revolutionaries, Berlin night-clubbers and rough-trade street brawlers to dominate the country within little over a decade. The party’s mantras about domestic roles for females elided the fact that as early as 1933, the Third Reich had opened a concentration camp at Moringen for women who wouldn’t wheesht.

In today’s cancel culture, we see evidence of a male power network in operation. Feminists asking awkward questions about gender ideology, and women simply objecting to the presence of a naked man in their changing room or prison cell, have been subject to censure out of all proportion to the offence supposedly caused. Queer theory appears to have escaped the academic seminar to engender a male power network, which certain women appear to support, perhaps in the hope of obtaining power by becoming non-women.

Male power networks with esoteric beliefs are routinely accused of corruption precisely because history has proved them extremely effective at manipulating whole societies and nations. The bond of brothers under pain of death, sworn to make all others secondary, is a supremely powerful organising force, because loyalty is of vital importance to functioning clans. These powerful associations do not sit well with liberal notions of equality.

To what extent is the online community of socially isolated basement-dwellers a male power network used for sadistic hazing? Members of the so-called ‘764’ cult have been convicted in both the USA and UK of encouraging self-harm and suicide by young women.

What if the harmful medical interventions and bizarre surgeries carried out on young, terminally online people with gender identity crises are the result of trolling by devious manipulators and wannabe Satanic edgelords? Is anyone checking the motivation of transgender forum members who encourage vulnerable teenagers to seek the interventions of gender clinics? And are the anonymous posters who encourage institutionalised self-harm in the guise of ‘life-saving healthcare’ even transgender themselves?

In this respect, transgender people could be considered victims of organised psychological manipulation by social network. The gender industry of doctors, clinic staff, plastic surgeons, drug companies and pharmacists has been only too happy to oblige this new legion of self-harmers, only at war with their own bodies.

If we are to challenge the harms being actively pursued for gender non-conforming people by an ideological-industrial complex, I believe we need to recognise the influence of networks of power attached to magical belief systems, and in particular male power with dark intent.

The gender non-conforming Bissu of Indonesia were believed by the Bugis people to have descended from the heavens via rainbow with the ‘white-bloods’, aristocratic rulers of the region. Their esoteric status is therefore tied into power politics. Until the 1940’s, the Bissu priests led the ritual which crowned new kings and queens for their people. As historian Leonard Y. Andaya put it, the origin story of the Bissu “is not simply an entertaining legend but a form of oral magic which reactivates the beginning of time in order to endow the favored ruler with powers of that primeval period.”

The followers of Mithras in Britain may have been drunken, horny soldier-colonisers who liked playing dress-up with the boys in darkened basements, but they also founded one of the most powerful cities the world has ever known. The square mile around Londinium’s Temple of Mithras remains a key centre of international financial empire almost two thousand years later. Those of us who have been inspired by Margaret Mead’s famous quote on small groups of people changing the world might note that it also applies to ruthless bands of ambitious and highly motivated fetishists who organise in cults.

Being surrounded by hostile natives who do not share your novel beliefs and rituals appears to cement the bond between men, making them a powerful adversary, like the British soldiers who killed hundreds of Zulu warriors after facing an overwhelming siege at Rourke’s Drift, Natal in 1879. Due to its technological advantages, the male power network of the colonial British army ultimately won that war. It would take another 115 years before majority rule emerged in South Africa.

In our time, a very small number of cross-dressing men appear to have dominated nations of millions of women. And so, the very act of colonising territory can reify countercultural belief systems into policies to be imposed on a reluctant local population; siege mentality begets an authoritarian form of governance if the coloniser can achieve and maintain power. How many years will it take for majority rule to be restored in the case of gender?

The network’s belief system must contain a categorical imperative for the seizure and maintenance of power in order for that network to endure. For the coloniser, this could be based on the vulnerability inherent in numerical disadvantage; for the usurper or crusader, divine right. Sometimes both imperatives combine, forming a Molotov cocktail of murderous, insurrectional zealotry.

Late American sociologist Alvin Gouldner attacked the tendency of critical theories to espouse ‘underdog metaphysics’, noting the irony that progressive academics were drawn from the wealthier classes. Today, ‘allies’ support the right of violent sex offenders, invariably male, to be housed in prisons for women while simultaneously arguing for prison abolition. Deviant underdogs are supposed to form the new proletariat, with maximal revolutionary potential. That the contemporary spree of sex crimes harms the actual proletariat most is of no consequence to the postmodern theorist.

The contemporary transgender rights movement in the West appears to operate as a quasi-Masonic male power network; queermasonry, if you will. Instead of the dagger of the bissu, the sharp initiation implement is a syringe of cross-sex hormones, and the sacred, esoteric text is Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Trouble’, or ‘Julia’ Serano’s ‘Whipping Girl’. And so, the male power network takes on a quasi-religious quality, as its fundamentals, essential to power-seeking, become codified into initiation rituals, creeds and mantras, like the slogan, heard so many times, “Repeat after me: Trans women are women!”

From the Yogyakarta Principles of 2006 to the notorious ‘Denton’s Document’ of 2019, it is more than obvious that the trans brigade is on a mission to change the world. How else might we explain the rapid adoption of policies directly contrary to established medical, scientific and ethical principles, except via a powerful network acting in the interests of a self-selected affinity group? The arrest of comedian Graham Linehan by armed police on arrival in Britain, treatment usually reserved for international criminals and terrorists, was evidence of queermasonry in the justice system.

Women may outnumber men with transgender ideation by the ratio of Zulus to British soldier-colonisers, but there is no ‘trans genocide’ underway in the West. If your identity depends on the mental and physical submission of the majority, it was always unstable and precarious, with a tenuous connection to reality. The existential need for the power-seeking imperative of the ‘trans rights movement’ simply does not exist, suggesting that queermasonry will not endure in the long term as a network of male power.

Like in Freemasonry, women do not lead the genderist movement, but some play an important supporting role in sustaining it. As Queen Jezebel found out in around 843 BC, proselytising for Baal may result in being defenestrated by eunuchs and then being eaten by wild underdogs.

It seems allyship is seldom rewarded.

Image: Altar and mosaic floor at the Moonta Masonic Temple, South Australia. Photo by Denisbn, CC BY-ND 2.0

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

The post Is Genderism an Esoteric Male Power Network? appeared first on Genspect.

Luke O’Reilly Kane reflects on the impact of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on her already delayed development, her experiences with medical transition and detransition, and the challenges of a very late sexual and emotional awakening.

I was developmentally delayed by about four years, but physically I was the opposite: bras at seven, first period at nine. Trans groups always say blockers are for “precocious puberty.” If my parents had known about them back then, would someone have put me on the same drugs? Thank God they didn’t.

Crushed

From about age seventeen, I had these crushes on girls, but it was never sexual: “She looks pretty, I like hanging out with her, she has nice hair, she’s cool to talk to.” Zero interest in sex or dating. Actually, I was doing everything I could to avoid it.

At twenty-one, after years on testosterone, I still had zero libido, which everyone says is the one thing T always does. I asked the doctor,

“Could this just be my delayed development?”

He said no, there might be “some estrogen sneaking in,” so we’d just raise the T dose.

Six months later, same problem: dose up again.

Another six months, age twenty-two, and finally, the gender clinic endocrinologist hands me puberty blockers.

I asked, “Won’t this mess with my already delayed development?”

“No,” he says. “Testosterone is your dominant hormone now. The blocker stops any leftover estrogen from getting through.”

I took them for nine months. They did nothing literally. I quit them myself, then, three months later, quit testosterone altogether after I tested genetically positive for hemochromatosis (a condition where your body stores too much iron and it builds up in organs and joints). I’d read that regular blood loss through periods is one of the main ways women naturally keep their iron levels safe, so I thought having my cycle back would be the simplest way to manage it. If the dysphoria got too much, I could always restart T. My broken voice and facial hair already gave me some confidence that there was nothing to worry about coming off testosterone. I could manage the fat redistribution with clothes as I did before T.

Three weeks after my natural estrogen returned, I finally knew what a libido was.

Awakening into Adulthood

Everyone says twenty-five is when adolescence ends. For me, twenty-six was when it finally started. Puberty at twenty-seven or twenty-eight is terrifying. The self-consciousness is brutal. At work, I’m constantly thinking I’m going to make a mistake so that someone trips, sues the company, and it will be my fault. In school, you just got told off or lost marks. Now the stakes feel life-ruining. Other twenty-seven-year-olds have been proper adults for years.

My manager says I’m a good worker, and perhaps in a few months I could become a supervisor. Part of me wants to climb higher and earn more, but I would also be responsible for ensuring that others don’t get into trouble. I’ve been working for over 7 years now. Have I done anything wrong?

Weirdly, this late sexual awakening is the first thing that’s ever made me want actually to live as my sex. I suddenly need to be attractive to the people I’m attracted to: women who like women. No amount of therapy, no counsellor, no TRA, no TERF ever gave me that. Both sides mostly gave me reasons to stay transitioned. Now I have a sense that’s bigger than ideology: I want a girlfriend.

Sex-ed in School and Youth Groups: Where Joy Goes to Die

Between eleven and nineteen, I heard way too much sex talk from adults: pregnancy, BDSM, kink, sex work, “different types of pleasure,” bodily fluids, all of it. It felt gross and wrong. There’s something seriously off about adults discussing that stuff in detail with kids and young teens. Basic biology would have been fine. The rest I wish I’d only ever talked about with my mum, at home, when I was actually ready. I wrote before: “You who gave me purpose to transition are the same ones who finally gave me purpose to leave it.”

Now I’m twenty-eight going on nineteen and terrified of hurting someone or doing life wrong. The feminists who scared me years ago—men and women both—they’re still in my head. All their talk of assault and abuse froze me in transition for years. After this massive late awakening, part of me wants to check out of the whole conversation forever.

Learn more about Luke’s story here.

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

Image: Trapped on the outside: photo by Eric Goverde

Protecting Puberty

To learn more about the importance of natural puberty, visit the Protecting Puberty website and sign Genspect’s Memorandum of Understanding on the Role of Puberty.

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The following is a transcript of a keynote speech given by Mia Hughes at the EU Parliament in November 2025.

In the first decade of this century, the Western world lost its grip on reality when a brand-new type of human being was conjured into existence by the collision of political activism and medicine.

That new type of human was the transgender child.

Despite this idea defying everything we know about childhood development, large swathes of society—seemingly overnight—began believing the unbelievable: that children could be born in the wrong body.

Today I’m going to explain how that came to be, and how the widespread acceptance of this dangerous falsehood led to the worst medical scandal in the history of modern medicine.

The seedlings of the idea were sown in psychiatry in the 1980s, with the diagnosis of “gender identity disorder of childhood”—but it needed political activism and the cooperation of endocrinology to bring the idea to life.

Because once there was an official diagnosis, along came the medical “solution”: puberty suppression, developed in the Netherlands in the 1990s.

This idea to halt the puberty of gender distressed youth was actually born out of a failed experiment.

When the Dutch realised the first wave of men in their sex-change experiment were unhappy with the results because they didn’t look like women, those doctors didn’t hang up their lab coats and accept that their mad endeavour had been a failure.

Instead, they turned their attention to children, reasoning that intervening earlier would produce more pleasing cosmetic results in adulthood.

It was this unfathomable idea that brought the concept of the transgender child to life because, before puberty blockers, it was impossible to lie to a gender-nonconforming little boy and raise him as a girl, or vice versa, with puberty looming on the horizon.

But when the Dutch made puberty optional, they handed deeply misguided adults the means to sever children who don’t conform to gender stereotypes from the reality of their sexed bodies.

At the same time, a critical shift—central to the theme of today’s event—was unfolding in trans activism.

In the 1990s, while the Dutch were launching their experiment on adolescents, early trans activists decided to redefine transgender identities as innate and healthy, rather than rooted in mental disorder or paraphilic desire.

This wasn’t grounded in new science. It was strategic rebranding. The old labels, while accurate, didn’t suit the movement’s political goals.

The concept of the transgender child, freshly minted by medicine, fit perfectly into this new narrative.

If trans identities are innate, then transgender children must exist. And if transgender children exist, then trans identities must be natural—not pathological or deviant.

It was a self-justifying loop—circular, compelling, but entirely false. Rooted not in evidence, but ideology.

In the decade that followed, so-called “trans kids” were thrust to the forefront of what was framed as a civil-rights struggle.

This devastating convergence of medical, political, and cultural forces ensured that countless innocent children—rather than being given the freedom to grow, mature, and explore different identities—were locked into a lifetime of medicalization, embodying an identity imposed on them before they were old enough to understand what was at stake.

If you pay close attention, you’ll notice that every story of a “trans child” consists of nothing more than stereotypes—little boys who like Barbies and princess gowns, and tomboys with short hair and a dislike of dresses.

What separates a gender-nonconforming child from a “trans child” is not biology, but belief: specifically, the child’s belief that they are the opposite sex—usually shaped by the beliefs of the adults around them.

And in our upside-down world, the child leads and the adults follow.

Yet only a society in the grip of collective madness could treat children as wise oracles capable of divining their authentic gender soul while they still believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

Confusion Goes Viral

Then, in the mid-2010s, disaster struck.

Starting around 2014, paediatric gender clinics across the Western world began to fill with an entirely new patient cohort: adolescent girls claiming to be boys.

The surge was so sudden, and the inflection point so obvious, that in a sane era clinicians would have immediately scrambled to identify the trigger of what was clearly a social contagion. Instead, in the age of trans rights, no one even bothered to look.

And it wouldn’t have taken much effort to find the answer.

Just a glance at the cultural messaging of the time.

Because 2014 was the year Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the headline: The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s next civil rights frontier.

And with that, the modern trans rights movement launched its global assault on reality.

Trans-identified celebrities were everywhere, trans characters appeared in children’s books and television shows, trans influencers proliferated with astonishing speed online, and schools began teaching gender identity ideology as if it were scientific fact.

And in a perfect-storm scenario, smartphones and social media exploded in popularity at exactly the right moment—creating the ideal superspreading environment for this seductive idea to go viral.

The message adolescents received was simple: If you hate your body, that could mean you’re trans.

And right on cue, legions of confused adolescents who hated their developing bodies showed up at gender clinics believing they were trans.

Simple cause and effect.

And what has happened to all those confused kids who’ve had the misfortune of being funnelled into gender clinics during this era?

An Unfathomable Scandal

Many were placed on a medical pathway that simply defies belief.

One where doctors induce endocrine disorders into healthy children—using puberty blockers that weaken bones and disrupt normal development, and massive doses of cross-sex hormones that can sterilize and carry severe long-term risks.

Where surgeons amputate the healthy breasts of teenage girls; invert the penises of young men—often before their first sexual encounter; remove functioning reproductive organs; and even sew appendages made out of forearm flesh onto women’s groins.

It sounds like a horror film. But they call it medicine. “Gender-affirming care.”

The victims of this medical crime aren’t cancer patients or people suffering from life-threatening illnesses. They are healthy young people swept up in this powerful cultural storm—because society didn’t have the courage to say no to the outrageous demands of trans activists.

And of note, every systematic review conducted thus far has concluded that there is no good-quality evidence supporting this drastic medical pathway for youth—no proof that it is safe, beneficial, or leads to positive long-term outcomes.

Meanwhile, the harms are clear and indisputable.

So this raises an important question:

Do the experts in so-called gender-affirming care genuinely believe adolescents can consent to treatments that may permanently impair their ability to have children?

Publicly, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health—WPATH—says yes.

Privately, the story is very different.

In the leaked WPATH Files—internal communications from WPATH’s messaging forum that Michael Shellenberger and I released last year—a leading paediatric endocrinologist admitted that discussing fertility preservation with 14-year-olds is like, and I quote, “talking to a blank wall.”

I know this to be true because at 14, I, like so many other women, was that blank wall.

And today, at 47, I am the proud mother of three children who have brought more joy into my life than my teenage self could ever have imagined.

These doctors also know full well the consequences of the interventions they prescribe. In the WPATH Files, members discuss how puberty blockers and estrogen can leave young males never able to experience orgasm, and how testosterone causes vaginal and uterine atrophy in teenage girls so severe that it leads to debilitating pain and bleeding.

But at no point in the WPATH Files does anyone question whether it is ethical to destroy healthy young bodies with these powerful drugs.

No one expresses concern about allowing young people to sacrifice their fertility and sexual function before they are old enough to understand what that means.

Because first, do no harm has no place in their ideological quest.

It is the darkest irony of our time that to be a good person—or a good, progressive nation—you must support and celebrate this atrocious medical crime.

At the behest of a political movement with no grounding in truth, you must be willing to fill innocent children’s heads with absurd, dangerous lies.

And anyone who tries to protect children is demonized.

From Chaos to Clarity

Now, in 2025, the scandal of gender medicine has reached a moment of chaotic, polarized action.

In the United States, red states have banned youth gender medicine, while blue states double down and declare themselves sanctuary states.

In Canada, it’s full steam ahead—except in Alberta, where Premier Danielle Smith is doing her utmost to protect children, and is facing legal action by trans activist groups for her efforts.

The UK has banned puberty blockers, yet simultaneously has a clinical trial in the works that will expose more healthy children to these harmful drugs.

And here in Europe, Sweden and Finland have reversed course after finding insufficient evidence to support transing kids; a Belgian family has launched a lawsuit alleging medical negligence after the suicide of their trans-identified teenage daughter; and numerous other nations have moved to restrict access to these experimental drugs for minors.

Yet at the same time, the EU has unveiled an Equality Strategy that recommends gender self-ID for children and seeks to embed the fictional concept of gender identity into every major EU policy framework—while punishing member states that attempt to shield children from this danger.

And for those over 18, the medical scandal continues unabated.

In short: no one can agree on what to do.

But the answer is actually very simple.

Restore reality.

Restoring the Reality of Childhood

Defend the right of children to a childhood grounded in truth and the right of all young people to grow up healthy and whole.

Stop bombarding young people with an incoherent, anti-reality political ideology, and start protecting them from it instead.

Reject prioritizing the desires of extremist activists over the safeguarding of children.

And face the reality that trans kids do not exist.

What exists are gender-nonconforming children and confused adolescents trying to make sense of themselves in a world that has abandoned reason in favour of ideology—young people being lied to at a crucial stage of identity development, who face consequences that will haunt them for a lifetime.

Children don’t need to learn about fictional “gender identities” in school; they don’t need their heads filled with the poisonous lie that they can choose whether they are boys or girls. And they no more need “trans role models” than they do anorexic or bulimic role models.

And that brings me to why I am here today, in the Parliament of the European Union. The EU lost its way when it allowed itself to fall under the spell of trans activism—and it is long past time to correct that course.

Because EU values are supposed to protect the vulnerable, and if those values do not protect children first and foremost, then they have no value at all.

Mia Hughes is the author of The WPATH Files, and director of Genspect Canada.

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Imagine that, at the age of 11, you walk in on your father applying an oestrogen patch to his thigh. He tells you that he wants to be a girl.

This is how self-described “transgender activist” Amethyst Herrick introduces his son’s story in a recent Metro article, “I told my son I was trans – nothing prepared me for the response” (30 November 2025). It is presented as a heart-warming tale of acceptance. However, for those of us who grew up as the children of trans-identified fathers, it raises questions about boundaries, perceptions, and the emotional burden that children are expected to carry.

Increasingly, late-transitioning fathers narrate their lives in public – not only in print, but in videos and talks about surgery, sexual sensation, and intimate bodily changes. Any curious teenager can find this material in a few clicks. The children of these men are not just asked to accept a new identity at home; they may also discover that extremely personal details about their father’s body are available for strangers – and for them – to consume. It can feel as if nothing is off-limits. Your parent’s inner life and sex life are pushed into the spotlight, while your own reactions are meant to be invisible.

Being the child of a trans father – which was my own experience in the 1980s – can pull you into a world of far too much information about things you should never have to know. In my teens, I learned about sissy porn, transsexuals and transvestites, about surgeries and post-surgical complications, electrolysis, and breast growth. I was drawn into a transgressive adult world where my dad cast us as the cool ones.

We hung out in gay bars. Strangers congratulated me on how accepting and amazing my “mother” was. Who would dare to seem so uncool as to say, “Actually, I’m not comfortable”? And who could I possibly have told that all of this was too much, far too soon? I emerged from that period with a severe eating disorder, low self-esteem, and identity problems. And I am not the only one left with shrapnel from a father’s gender conflict.

When I set up Children of Transitioners in 2019 and began writing about my experiences, the thing I most needed to name – what I had been bottling up for forty years – was “The Pressure to Pretend That It’s All OK”. The responsibility for my father’s fragile emotional state had been pushed onto me when I was still a child. It took years to see that this should never have happened.

Red flags abound. Herrick writes that when his wife was pregnant, he longed for a girl and planned to “…channel my roiling femininity through our daughter”. When he discovered they were having a boy, he describes plunging into a “dark depression” lasting a decade, until he was “broken and hollow”. “Living as a man was killing me,” he says, “but I feared transition would harm my son’s chances at growing into a man.” What impact does this have on a son?

My own father told me he had had a “nervous breakdown” and that transitioning was his only hope of staying alive. Imagine holding the weight of that in your early teens. Imagine a father who has been depressed, angry, and short-tempered with you for years suddenly saying that the only thing that will make him happy is transitioning, and your wholehearted acceptance of it. How many of us have heard some version of: “I’ll kill myself,” “I’ll never be happy,” “do what I want, or I’ll never love you again”?

Even when it isn’t said explicitly, once a child’s cooperation and approval are initially perceived, where is their freedom later to express doubt or ambivalence?

We are constantly told two things at once. First, that transition is the most important, authentic thing a human being can do: a revelation of who they “really are” deep inside, in contrast to the false self they inhabited before. Second, that transition has virtually zero impact on family and friends: it’s “just a change of clothes and pronouns”; the person is “exactly the same” as before. But transition is not a neutral, private act. It alters the emotional landscape of everyone in the family.

Herrick works with people who have gender dysphoria and is a firm supporter of WPATH. It is no surprise that the media selects families like his to profile. Reporters do not randomly find these; they are carefully sourced to fit a particular narrative that portrays late-transitioning fathers as brave pioneers. This propaganda is intended to normalise autogynephilia.

Recent revelations about institutional bias at organisations such as the BBC have shown how the voices of trans widows and children of trans-identified people have been sidelined in favour of the one narrative of happy and successful transition. This isn’t accidental; it’s in response to activist pressure and does not help anyone affected by this issue. Many marriages break down after a transition is announced, for example, and although we have no official figures, it is unlikely that Herrick’s experience is the norm.

When only one narrative is allowed, it is usually the one controlled by the person with a vested interest in appearing as a successful partner and parent. That is why groups like Trans Widows Voices and Children of Transitioners have carved out online spaces where we write, make films, and podcasts about the bigger picture.

When the children of trans-identified people tell their own stories, a different pattern emerges. We learn that it is normal to feel grief at the ambiguous loss of your beloved parent; to feel hurt when he says that the time he was your “Dad” wasn’t real, that he was pretending and secretly in pain. Alongside the good memories may be feelings of abandonment, of broken boundaries, and shattered trust. Where does your love for your parent fit inside that?

These stories don’t fit neatly into the upbeat transition narrative, but they are there if you look. We are told, for example, that Herrick’s son is “non-binary”. We are not invited to ask what that actually means, or how it might relate to having your father announce he wants to be the opposite sex at a key stage in your own identity development. In “positive” pieces like this, those questions are never raised, yet it is possible to read between the lines.

Herrick ends his article by saying: “I’m vibrant and happy, I see a future ahead of me. I want to live … I am out; I am proud … I am Amethysta, and I am here.” That closing paragraph contains six “I” statements and not one “we”. For many of us who grew up as the children of transitioning parents, that rings horribly true. Their transition becomes the central focus of their life, leaving very little space for you.

Emma Thomas is the founder of Children of Transitioners.

Watch her presentation from the Bigger Picture Conference 2024 here.

If a parent, partner, sibling, or other loved one in your own family has transitioned, you don’t have to deal with the impact on your own. Genspect’s Beyond Trans service is launching a new, free online support group in January, offering a compassionate space to talk honestly, share experiences, and be heard by others who understand. Children of Transitioners is pleased to be involved in this new group.

The post It’s Time The Media Told the Whole Story About Adult Transition appeared first on Genspect.

Backyard Politics: A Psychological Understanding of Today’s Political and Social Divide
by Craig Wiener. Torchflame Books, 2024

Dr. Craig Wiener is a clinical psychologist with 45 years of experience working with children, adolescents, and families. He is best known for criticising the trend of medicalising behavioral problems, such as ADHD. In this book, he focuses on the American nation as a metaphorical family.

Mentioning Republicans and Democrats only once each in this entire book, Wiener describes our politics as a tension between two conflicting American political minds. One sort of American – the Protector – believes that “problems originate from external factors, not from personal limitations, adaptations, or decisions”, and that the solution to every problem is therefore a change to the system. The other sort of American – the Promoter – holds that “people struggle because life is difficult, and it is each individual’s responsibility to acclimate”.

Both minds want to advance the interests of the individual, but they take different approaches: the Protector starts from outside the individual, promoting an unhealthy external locus of control, while the Promoter mind aims to develop an internal locus of control in every person, regardless of circumstances.

America exists in the tension of these two minds, Wiener writes, and our politics inhabit the dynamic liminal space between them. The tension must continue for America to continue. Should either mind achieve complete hegemony over the other, and the debate end, it will become impossible for America to remain a project advancing individual freedom. Such a world would impose the tyranny of one political mind over another and be abusive by design.

Wiener’s final section explains these two American minds in terms of the inner workings of a family, with each reflecting the average values of mother and father. A new generation needs both the Protector and the Promoter to thrive. No wonder the rising generation has so much difficulty, he suggests. America is threatened by dissolution because we are increasingly atomized, disenchanted, and disembodied individuals. Dr. Wiener says he wrote the book, now in its second edition, because the increasing polarization of our times revealed patterns of interaction similar to those he observed with his clients, particularly couples, during his years of clinical practice.

The subject of gender dysphoria takes up only nine pages of Backyard Politics. However, gender dsyphoria is the topic of Dr. Wiener’s penultimate point, which is that the new identitarian politics are an attempt by the Protector mind to achieve hegemony. Wiener suggests that the Protector mind explains poverty and racism as systems of inequality maintained by a brutal society, and ‘gender identities’ are the purest expression of this mind. Every triumphant announcement of scientific breakthroughs in transgender ‘identity’ has been walked back, but not before an instantaneous, reflexive wave of sensationalist internet headlines has confirmed the biases of the Protector ideology.

Some Promoters – Wiener cites James Lindsay – see “the enhanced tribalism of group identity politics as an endeavor to destroy a liberal society, which has always valued the primacy of the individual, the necessity for universal ethical principles, and the importance of free speech.” These values stand in the way of more radical visions for protection. Wiener uses the term ‘classical liberalism’ to describe this idealized American system, which is threatened by the Protector’s intensified ideology.

Dr. Wiener is not the first writer to make these connections. He cites Thomas Sowell throughout, embracing the equivalence between his own framework of ‘Protectors and Promoters’ and Sowell’s concept of ‘constrained and unconstrained’ political visions. Whereas the “unconstrained vision understands human suffering as incident to societal harms and disparities of treatment” (Protector), the constrained view relies on human self-interest to guide individual actions and “does not anticipate that any person, or group of people, can derive a utopia” (Promoter).

Conspicuous in its absence of mention, perhaps, is the 2004 volume Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate – The Essential Guide for Progressives by Berkeley professor George Lakoff. Per the title, Lakoff’s book is a partisan promotion of the same conceptual framing. In place of Wiener’s Promoter mind, Lakoff has a “strict father” model of the family, which he contrasts with the “nurturant parent” view that Wiener calls the Protector. Whereas Lakoff seeks to win the war of two minds, Wiener tells us to deplore final victory by either side. The debate must continue for America to exist.

“Both ways of understanding problems and patterns of interventions have merit in some contexts and situations,” Wiener writes. “Neither is intrinsically better or worse all the time.” Context matters. “Clearly, there are occasions when people are powerless victims, and certainly people can benefit from learning and skill development. Often, the problem is discerning the point at which the expectation of personal contribution is reasonable.” It is a matter subject to debate, in other words. “This seems equivalent to asking, Is the harm from without greater than the resources within?”

To the Protector, society “depends on the expert wisdom of a select group of outside decision-makers” that we call ‘experts’. However, this new priesthood promotes superstitions, the most deranged of which are the gender ideologies that have emerged from academia. “Promoters think that it is preferable not to base best-treatment practice on who is most adamant” about their demands for medicalization, Wiener writes, and “they do not want the power of sophistry to shape professional intervention. They wonder if societies endorse transgender claims without inquiry or questioning, then what assertions about ‘identity’ will society not accept, and on what grounds?” It is inherently destabilizing. Although Wiener does not delve into queer theory, it is obvious that, for many Protectors, destabilizing society is the entire point.

Wiener points to social science research showing that “a small contingency of intransient activists can change an entire culture when they reach 25 percent of the population.” Conversely, it is possible to “renormalize” a social group “by progressively adjusting to the loud voices of inflexible people who clamor for accommodations.” In other words, we can learn to say ‘no’ to them. This is the free society being free. The only way to close off this debate – to have ‘no debate’, per the progressive mantra – is to stop being a free society.

The final section of Backyard Politics focuses on the American family, which is when the meaning of the title finally becomes clear. Our politics begin in the backyard, where two parents must debate what is best for their child: protect them from danger, or let them learn to fail and recover? In the ideal, our politics closely resembles the familial tension between mother and father, the ideal situation in which every new generation of Americans was born and raised, until the Great Society began to unravel that ideal. Children are now protected instead of challenged, so they never learn the skills of self-regulation and independence. Instead, young adults demand that the Protector ideology be given hegemony over their lives, so that their lives are ostensibly easier.

Like a family, the Protector is collectivist. But whereas resources can be distributed efficiently in a family, in a socialist welfare state the “detailed parsing of who needs what becomes unwieldy. Potential waste and inefficiencies are pushed to the back burner, and as many people as possible are gathered into the catchment” of identity categories. “The incentive is to magnify the numbers that qualify, and assign blame to external forces, in a quest to provide compensation to all the putative victims” of the protected class. Inquisitions over alleged microaggressions and other putative expressions of racism replace civil debate and free expression.

Rather than ‘fix’ racism, this process has unleashed it against the foundations of liberal society. Rather than relieve anxiety, it has intensified social division. Destruction of “the patriarchy” has likewise destroyed relations between the sexes rather than erase some invisible system of oppression. Wiener’s book helps explain why the gender divide has grown so wide in American politics, with women and men voting very differently today. Basically, “Protectors see females as victims within a system that favors males, while Promoters see mutual benefits and downsides for both in the arrangements between the sexes.”

Although this book was initially marketed as a parenting book, it actually serves as a warning about the consequences of national divorce. Dr. Wiener closes his book with a thought experiment. What does the world look like if the Protector ideology wins? Promoters say that in this scenario, America will forget how to promote individual thriving altogether, that collapse will become inevitable as the system runs out of disfavored groups to rob of resources, and that the new elite will become the object of envy of the new underclasses. Yet upheaval may be inevitable. “Everyone becomes a rebel when the disadvantaged and advantaged agree the system must come down,” he writes.

Autogynephilia is casually mentioned without explanation in this book. So are akrasia, impulsive acts against one’s own interests, and anagnorisis, the point in a story where a principal character realizes the shocking truth, aka ‘the plot twist’. The plot twist of this book is the threat of identitarian politics. Dr. Wiener is clearly well-informed on all the issues and expects readers to keep up by using their phones to look up words. Aside from this, the only difficult moment in the entire book was the first sentence of the introduction, and that is because the author is being so scrupulously objective. Dr. Wiener presents his ideas cogently and neutrally, showing how each of two minds sees the other at every turn and presenting arguments fairly from each side to explore the psychological dynamics of our increasingly dysfunctional American ‘family’. America is not an idea; America is a debate about ideas. If the debate ever ends, so does America.

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

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Earlier this year, I was invited to present Genspect’s concerns about the NHS puberty blocker trial to a parliamentary committee. My fellow panellists were eminent clinicians and researchers, and when I came to write my talk I decided to leave the technical critiques about trial design and methodology to them. Instead, I tried to expose the flawed premise that lies at the very heart of the trial, namely the belief in the existence of the ‘truly transgender’ child.

In essence, the ‘truly transgender’ child is a young person who adults have given up on trying to help in a way that preserves their right to an open future. The decision to proceed with a trial feels like a tacit admission that health authorities see these kids as write offs, so incapable of natural growth and reconciliation with their healthy bodies that they may as well be made sexually dysfunctional and sterile. I don’t believe that any young person, no matter how psychologically distressed, no matter how insistent, deserves to be written off in this way.

Now that the final trial protocol has been published, and nothing short of costly legal action can prevent the unnecessary medicalisation of more gender distressed children, the text of my committee presentation seem more relevant than ever.

“Thank you for inviting me to speak about the ethics of the NHS puberty blocker trial.

Puberty is the natural cure for gender related distress. Prior to the introduction of puberty blockers, 80% of gender distressed young people experienced recovery after going through puberty. The figure is as high as 87.8% in some studies. By contrast, 98% of young people who take puberty blockers proceed to sterilising cross sex hormones, with a further proportion undergoing invasive, experimental genital surgeries.

So the first thing to say about the ethics of the NHS trial is that it will prevent natural recovery for the vast majority of participants, unnecessarily placing them on a path towards infertility, sexual dysfunction, brittle bones, urinary incontinence and a lifetime of medical dependency.

At root, the NHS trial is predicated on a belief that there is such a thing as a ‘truly transgender’ child, a child who will live a life of desperation and tragedy if they cannot cosmetically ‘pass’ as the opposite sex in adulthood. No rationale for blocking puberty remains that does not depend on this belief.

The Cass Review showed that puberty blockers do not buy time to think, do not improve mental health and do not resolve gender dysphoria. The only indication for their use that the Review identified was in suppressing the development of secondary sex characteristics, as a prelude to the use of cross sex hormones and genital surgeries in order to help a child superficially resemble the opposite sex in adulthood.

For supporters of the trial, the ethical question is not whether it is right to treat mental distress using invasive hormonal and surgical techniques, or whether it is ever acceptable for medical professionals to collude in a child’s belief that their healthy body is wrong. Incredibly, they regard these huge ethical questions as settled. I would argue that society hasn’t even begun to grapple with their implications.

Nonetheless, public debate about the trial typically takes the existence of the ‘truly transgender’ child as a foregone conclusion and focuses ethical questions on the assessment process, on using inclusion and exclusion criteria to accurately identify ‘transgender children’. So, how do we assess which children should assume the heavy physical burden of medical transition and the equally heavy psychological burden of living at odds with the reality of their body?

The truth is that we can’t. Assessment in this area can only ever boil down to a subjective assessment of how well someone conforms to reductive sex stereotypes, of how vehemently they assert a cross sex identity, or of how intensely they vocalise distress about their sexed body. In this way, a whole range of diverse experiences are easily misinterpreted and pathologized as evidence of intense and persistent gender related distress.

To illustrate this, I would like to tell you about a detransitioner I will call Julia, a service user at Genspect’s Beyond Trans support service. When she presented to a gender clinic at 12 years old, she was considered the ideal candidate for puberty blockers. She had been “insistent, persistent and consistent” in asserting a male identity. She was highly gender non-conforming, preferred boys toys, clothes and company and she hated her developing female body with a passionate intensity. She was started on blockers and proceeded to testosterone at 16. At 18, suffering painful atrophy of her reproductive organs as a result of testosterone use, Julia had a hysterectomy, and at 20, she had phalloplasty.

Now aged 26, Julia has had no less than 16 surgeries to correct complications arising from phalloplasty. She has difficulty draining her bladder, resulting in a permanent urinary tract infection which places her at highly elevated risk of sepsis. She has lived with chronic pain since her early twenties. She has never experienced sexual pleasure, has never orgasmed and has permanent pain in her surgically altered genitals.

But far worse than the physical side effects has been the realisation that Julia was never a ‘truly transgender’ child. She was a gender non-conforming lesbian, who struggled to come to terms with her sexual orientation and tried to escape homophobic stigma by becoming ‘heterosexual’.

The pain and suffering that doctors put Julia through, starting with a prescription for puberty blockers, was completely unnecessary. There is no such thing as a ‘truly transgender’ child and there are no young people for whom a lifetime of iatrogenic harm, of physical and psychological attrition, is a good or desirable outcome. There is therefore no ethical way to conduct this trial.

The resources allocated to the trial should be diverted into completing the data linkage study and finding out what has happened to the 9,000 children already treated with puberty blockers and cross sex hormones by the NHS. Funds also need to be made available to support people like Julia, who the NHS has a moral responsibility to care for.”

Carrie Clark is a member of the Killarney Group and sits on Genspect’s Advisory Board.

Puberty is Every Child’s Right.

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If you’re new to this series, please visit Genspect on Substack to read my previous articles about Gnostics, Jungian alchemists, castration cults, and the rock ‘n roll gender outlaws.

Everything I know about the proselytization of Buddhism, I learned from watching ‘Monkey’ on TV. This Japanese series, produced from 1978 to 1980, based on Wu Cheng’en’s 16th-century novel, was shown on British television with dubbed dialogue while I was in primary school. Other than the titular magical simian in somewhat human form, his water-monster sidekick Sandy, the ever-hungry, lecherous Pigsy, and their talking horse, the central character was boy-priest Tripitaka. Just like Moses, this young mystic had been found as a baby floating in a stream, and had been given the special mission of receiving, guarding and spreading the divine word.

On an epic journey to India with the imperative of retrieving the three sacred texts he was named after, Tripitaka was given anthropomorphic animal companions by the Buddha to defend him from cannibals. Because he was considered the reincarnation of a holy being, a belief had spread that consuming the flesh of this boy-priest would confer eternal life on whoever ate him. My favourite character was Sandy, who wrestled with the moral dilemma of having to defend Tripitaka despite his fondness for snacking on humans, as demonstrated by his skull necklace. You can take the water-monster out of the swamp, but can you take the swamp out of the water-monster?

Even as a child, I noticed that the holy charge of the spirit animals was not at all masculine. In fact, Tripitaka was played by actress Masako Natsume in the 1970s version of ‘Monkey’, the boy-priest being rather girly as a consequence. This was not the only reference to gender ambiguity in the series. In one memorable episode, a defiant Monkey attempted to fly beyond the end of the world on his pink cloud, only to discover that he remained within the Buddha’s hand. Giant columns, which our staff-wielding, kung-fu fighting hero imagined were pillars marking the end of the heavens, were in fact manicured fingers attached to the divine palm. The Buddha had confused Monkey that day by appearing in his/her female form.

Bissu Gender

I remembered this early education in Eastern mysticism while learning about the Bissu gender of indigenous priests who live among the Bugis people in South Sulawesi, part of modern Indonesia.

The Bissu have their own written ‘language of the heavens’, studied from a young age and supposedly unintelligible to other Bugis, in which the same characters can be transcribed as matelo (to die) or mattelo (to make love). This literary ambiguity emphasises the cycle of life leading to new life, which Sabina Spielrein made the core of her theory of primary masochism, or ‘Thanatos’, as the death drive.

Young Bissu must undergo a potentially dangerous initiation ritual, involving an elder member of the sect holding a dagger against their throat while readings are made from sacred, esoteric texts.

The success of Islam in the region has marginalised the indigenous religion to the point where this gender non-conforming priest caste might disappear altogether. The ‘trans genocide’ wasn’t caused by Western feminists or Baroness Cass. Under the long dictatorship of Suharto, a military general from Yogyakarta, which lasted from 1967 to 1998, Bissu were forced to renounce the religion of the Bugis. Some Bissu were tortured or murdered in the preceding Islamic rebellion led by Abdul Kahar Muzakkar.

It was, of course, a 2006 meeting of academics and human rights professionals at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta that devised a framework that codified gender identity beliefs into international law. Of the 29 signatories to the original Yogyakarta Principles, only one represented Indonesia, while the majority were Westerners.

Attempts to claim the supposedly celibate Bissu and other indigenous gender identities for the Western LGBT movement may not be helping to save them from radical Islamist oppression. Recently, Bissu had found a unique niche in a syncretic blend of traditional religion and Islam, blessing events such as Hajj pilgrimages, but they remain under threat from a new generation of anti-LGBT Muslims.

There is now academic interest in the Bugis people and their traditions because of their five traditional gender identities: oroani, makkunrai, calalai, calabai and bissu, roughly corresponding to masculine, feminine, transmasculine, transfeminine and either ‘intersex’ or ‘non-binary’ respectively. Other than the Bissu priests, transfeminine Bugis work as makeup artists, wedding planners and caterers, while some transmasculine members of their society provide physical labour.

As Leonard Andaya, former professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Hawaiʻi, relates, the Bissu have a higher status in Bugis society than cross-dressers who perform opposite-sex roles, because it is believed they have the unique ability to understand both heaven, which is coded as male, and earth, which is coded as female. The Bissu are considered divine because of their ability to manifest both masculine and feminine genders, like the Buddha who entrapped a foolish Monkey in her manicured fingertips.

Other than blessings, Bissu carry out religious duties for their communities including rituals, and in the past, the crowning of kings, but their identity does not map exactly onto Western understandings of gender or differences of sex development. While some Bissu are believed to have been marked by the gods with unusual bodies, like the sacred, feminine bayasa of central Sulawesi reported to have very small penises, other Bissu, known as mau jangkka, are feminine men who have wives and children. To complicate matters, calalai and calabai sometimes have to step in to perform Bissu rituals because the latter group is now so small in number.

Much like the Western priest class in their frocks, who at once provide their congregations with masculine discipline and a sympathetic, listening ear coded as feminine, the Bissu have a formal social role which accommodates, rather than pathologises, their distinct appearance and gendered behaviours.

The tragedy of Western transgenderism is that the modern, secular world has no reserved place for cross-dressing eccentrics with esoteric ideas and beliefs about the universe and their place in it, except in light entertainment, academia, software engineering, Olympic sports or political lobbying. And so, we medicalise and surgically alter these benighted individuals, in a misguided attempt to help them fit our godless times. A man being made ‘Woman of the Year’ neatly encapsulates this exaltation without purpose.

The idea that the transgender or gender non-conforming individual has unique access to the divine is by no means limited to Indonesia, and appears common to several societies in Asia. This makes transgenderism ultra-conservative, rather than progressive. The anti-scientific notion that the way a person has sex or dresses makes them neither male nor female, or somehow the opposite sex, appears in pre-Abrahamic traditional religions which have a very different understanding of the human body.

Andaya reports that among the Iban people of Borneo, the manangbali healer wears female clothing “in obedience to sacred commands conveyed through dreams. However, it was necessary for him to be ‘sexually disabled’ before doing so”, in a manner similar to that of the boy singer with the voice of an angel given the snip to become a castrato. The hijra, despite living on the margins of society across the Indian subcontinent, often with no other work available than prostitution, have been considered magical for centuries.

Eastern Imports

In addition to the influence of Germanic pseudoscientific ‘sexology’ on notions of gender, Westerners have witnessed the wholesale importation of Eastern religion by the counterculture from the 1960s onward, by pop stars and phony gurus alike. It is cultural appropriation to imagine ourselves part of a multi-gendered, pre-modern society like the Bugis or the Iban. And there was no facial feminisation surgery, for which the appropriate abbreviation is ‘FFS’, in Tripitaka’s time.

As Matt Osborne wrote in 2023, and I have covered in part one of this series, the more radical factions of contemporary Protestantism are waving the Progress Pride flag, their belief predicated on the Gnostic heresy of the gendered soul. This belief may have been reincarnated in our times from Buddhist missionary influence on the early Christians.

Inverting the principle of ‘lived experience’, the holy child knows more than we adults do precisely because they have a direct line to the divine. The search for a new Dalai Lama among children of the Tibetan villages, the lost boy Jesus found in the Jerusalem temple dispensing wisdom to his elders, or the ‘transgender child’ who knows their sex better than any biologist: all embody the idea of a precocious supernatural authority. “They know who they are!” shout the devouring mothers who transport their children to the gender clinic for chemical castration, and the surgical table for removal of sexed body parts.

J.R.R. Tolkien used the term ‘mythopoeia’ to describe the process of legend creation, which he had dedicated himself to by writing the epic Lord of the Rings cycle over seventeen years. Psychoanalytic alchemist Carl Gustav Jung, whom we met earlier in this series, fully leaned into the value of myth-making to humans. Robert Bly and others would later draw on the Jungian method to create the ‘mythopoetic’ men’s movement in the 1980s.

The Harry Potter universe, the Narnia stories of C.S. Lewis, or even the Star Wars franchise could be considered mythopoeic; they are not mere allegories for the eventual triumph of good over evil, but complete subcultures which attract obsessive fandoms. The young Potter himself is a magical messiah, the divine child who arrives at our time of need to save the world from evil. He receives the grimoire, a mystical text, but he is found in the cupboard under the stairs rather than in a floating basket.

Art and Life

As life imitates art, Greta Thunberg, who arrived telling the adults they are wrong and wicked, never grows up, cursed to remain all-knowing while trapped in the body of a child. Like Oskar, the protagonist of Die Blechtrommel by Günter Grass, her piercing scream is heard from afar. To ‘beat the tin drum’ is a German idiom meaning ‘to gain attention for a cause’.

Perhaps the reason why self-identified ‘transgender rights activists’ hate J.K. Rowling so thoroughly is that having created their magical world, with the story of a hidden child inheriting supernatural powers from heavenly parents, she is their Gnostic demiurge: the jealous god of Moses’ second commandment. Helen Joyce defined gender identity as “a thing that the individual in question can utter into being by stating it”.

Alchemy uses magical words in an attempt to control the material world, and so gender woo is not merely an abstract, inconsequential performance; it is semantic witchcraft. Someone who grew up believing in ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ might imagine that words of self-declaration spoken out loud could turn a man into a woman, as he grasps his wand tightly.

The extreme privation of the spiritual ascetic is no longer Harry Potter’s cupboard, or being walled into a convent cell like 15th-century syphilitic anchoress Lady Isabel German, it is being imprisoned in the family basement by depression and an addiction to Reddit, or worse still, being the subject of a reality TV show on ‘the transgender child’.

In Exulansic’s re-telling of the ‘Melody’ Dawson case, a teenage boy suffering the delusion that he is female managed to shoot out both of his eyes and part of his brain with a single bullet. This is not only a tragedy which Sigmund Freud might have considered validating of his Oedipus Rex fixation, but an act of religious extremism comparable to the eyeballs on a dish of third-century Christian martyr Saint Lucy. ‘Melody’s’ survival of this alleged self-harm could be considered miraculous, on the path to sainthood.

The deification of the transgender child is only possible within the belief system of a child abuse cult like the Skoptsy, because this holy status comes with costs attached. In Western culture, with our history of using psychiatry to control difference, cross-sex identity is not merely symbolic. Veneration requires sacrifice. As Abraham discovered in the Book of Genesis, being willing to destroy your own child is the ultimate test of faith. Nor is transgender ideation merely a performance à la Judith Butler. Instead of on the altar for burnt offerings, the knife is now wielded above the surgeon’s table, somewhere in Thailand where ladyboy transitions are routine.

The transgender child is venerated because he/she/they has achieved gnosis at a prodigious age, and is therefore the most special child of all. What takes some autogynephilic men until middle age to realise, they discover in school. Just as the young Jesus was found conversing knowledgeably with the elders in the temple, inspired by the divine power of the Gnostic goddess Wisdom, so the child is allowed to lead the adults because they are the shepherd and we are the sheep.

So-called ‘gender-affirming care’, which involves castrating and mutilating young people in a secular context of ‘informed consent’, is not progressive. It merely replicates ancient religious traditions of ritual and sacrifice. It is a regression to myth-making, which is why evidence-based medicine was always incompatible with the gender industry. Now, after multiple systematic reviews, ritual body modification has retreated to the consumer principle that the customer is always right, even if mental and physical health outcomes are not improved by these drastic interventions.

We need a new honesty that transgender medical and surgical procedures have nothing to do with ‘healthcare’ and everything to do with a reversion to pre-modern superstition, in which gender non-conforming people pay a high price for being different. On this basis, the special exceptions in legislation which allow physical harm to transgender people, forbidden for anyone else, need to be repealed immediately.

Female genital mutilation law also needs updating to address the phenomenon of male children being flown across borders for devastating surgeries, which would be illegal in their own territories. This urgently-needed political intervention would confirm that neither boys nor girls should be enabled to suffer life-limiting procedures which they cannot possibly consent to. And as those children grow into adults, they need the support to understand that self-harm is never a rational choice.

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

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