The Jenner Shift And Its Consequences

UPDATE: this post now has an AI-generated audio adaptation courtesy of AskWhoCastsAI. If, like I do, you find listening to audio equivalents easier under some circumstances than reading lengthy texts, check it out.

You may, dear reader, be under the impression that the battle for trans rights is one in which the sides may have changed in their relative strength, but the battlefield, so to speak, has stayed the same. That is to say, that everyone in history has either had identical opinions to Sophie Labelle or Matt Walsh on the subject of trans people, and all that’s changed is the ratio. This is a belief people have about practically every social justice issue, and it’s practically always wrong. For most of the others, this is more understandable, as the ideological shifts in question happened outside of living memory. All of the abolitionists who wanted to send black people back to Africa because they were incapable of integrating into American society, or members of the Know Nothing Party, who were rabidly anti-immigrant but wanted to expand the rights of (WASP) women, died before anyone alive today was born. Trans issues are a different story. There was a cataclysmic seismic shift in the way liberal America viewed the concept of transgenderism just ten years ago. The youngest people with clear firsthand memories of the previous social order aren’t even out of their twenties, to say nothing of all the media from back then that still exists, and yet no one seems to be cognizant of the fact that things weren’t always like this.

Foreword: “But what about trans men?”

Throughout this essay, I will be focusing on the group of people known variously as trans women, MtFs, or trans identified males, depending on your persuasion. There are two reasons for this. The first is personal experience. The second is that trans men/FtMs/trans identified females were largely absent from the mainstream popular consciousness before the ideological realignment I am about to describe, and are still largely sidelined today. For this, there are also two reasons. The first is that society was and is sexist, and often fails to consider that women (and no, contrary to what some may tell you, transphobes do not secretly believe that trans people are the gender they say they are deep down, like the villain in a children’s Christmas movie) are people with feelings or agency. The second is that the state of medical technology and the nature of human sexual dimorphism are such that passing as one’s identified gender is far easier when that identified gender is male rather than female (provided that one is fully clothed, at least), so trans men were and are less visible to society.

The White Elephant In The Room (Get It, Because “Blanc” Is French For White)

I am not going to begin this with an explanation of who Ray Blanchard is and what his theories regarding transgenderism were, for reasons that will readily become apparent, as well as the simple fact that if you’re reading this, you probably already know. If you don’t, the Wikipedia article is a decent summary of the current progressive party line on the subject, which is good enough for our purposes, because that is precisely what I will be dissecting. As you can tell from the article, if not any prior knowledge, the left regards Blanchardism as ridiculous discredited pseudoscience on par with phrenology or the Four Humors. (Not to imply that the right are geniuses on the matter, as while they may name-drop the term “autogynephilia”, they have practically zero knowledge of the underlying theory and are merely using it as a generic pejorative.) The thing that distinguishes science from pseudoscience, however, is the ability to be independently replicated. If we were to discover an uncontacted tribe that had independently reinvented phrenology, and agreed with Western phrenological tradition on which skull bumps corresponded to which personality traits, that would be a sign that maybe they might’ve been onto something. And indeed, though no one seems to remember it, the collective consciousness prior to the mid-2010s intuitively knew about the phenomena Blanchard described, even though only a tiny number of people had ever heard his name or knew the specific terminology he coined.

If you asked a cisgender, heterosexual, moderate liberal American circa 1974-2014 to describe what the word “transgender” meant, they would’ve asked if you meant “transsexual”. But if you said yes, they would’ve said that transsexuals were essentially men that were so gay that they wanted to be women. These people were, of course, exclusively attracted to men, and were, like gay men in general, likely to have careers in the performing arts or sex work. In other words, they would’ve described exactly the type of person Blanchard assigned the label “homosexual transsexuals”. The present-day left is at least somewhat willing to acknowledge this part. TVTropes even has an article for it. (Homework assignment: look through it and see if you can find any examples that postdate 2015.)

However, if you asked, they would also been familiar with a type of man who was so straight that he was turned on by the idea of being a woman, or wearing the clothes thereof. If they had familiarity with such things, they could’ve told you that such men were overrepresented in fields such as computer programming, science fiction fandom, and tabletop roleplaying games. In other words, exactly the sort of people Blanchard assigned the label “autogynephiles”. 2008’s The Gamers: Dorkness Rising (available free of charge on YouTube) is an excellent example. Almost every joke in the film is a reference to or parody of some common trope in TTRPG culture, and while most are still present in the hobby today, the one about the male player playing a female character in a blatantly perverse manner isn’t, not because such people stopped existing, but because they started playing female characters in real life.

Where the pre-2015 folk understanding differs from the theories of Blanchard, however, is that the word “transsexual” was generally understood to only refer to the first group. And while it may be a factor, this isn’t solely due to the notion that attraction to women renders one’s trans identity illegitimate. Gynephilic transsexuals were genuinely much less common, and much more likely to successfully remain hidden, relative to androphilic transsexuals at the time. Again, heteronormative gatekeeping was certainly a factor to some degree, but doesn’t tell the whole story. I am not going to beat around the bush here: the larger reason for this phenomenon is that men will fuck anything with a hole, and women have standards. If you’re a gay man and you transition, many straight men will start wanting to have sex with you, and some gay men won’t even stop, whereas if you’re a straight man and you transition, in the vast majority of cases, straight women will stop being attracted to you, but lesbians won’t start. Thus, all but a tiny minority of the most passing-capable gynephilic males declined to transition for fear of being permanently involuntarily celibate, and the ones that did kept their trans status a secret, such that they remained invisible to all but dedicated experts like Blanchard.

Some of you may be thinking that this theory is obviously false, as trans lesbians have no need for the sexual attention of cis women, as they're perfectly happy dating each other. First of all, I would politely ask you not to make hasty generalizations, and second of all, even for those that are, even if they had consciously considered it as an option, which before 2015 most of the people now called trans lesbians hadn't, this presented a classic example of a coordination problem. If a million autogynephiles transitioned, they could form a community which would enable them (or at least, most of them) to live happy lives. But in order for that to happen, they needed someone to transition first, and that someone would be risking permanent social ostracism if the other 999,999 didn't follow behind them. That is, unless that someone were totally impervious to any negative social consequences of their actions for some reason, such as, for example, being a Kardashian.

It's Not So Much That There's An Elephant In The Room As That We’re Living In An Elephant Preserve

Nothing is monocausal, however. Despite the name, there were multiple factors which led into the great rewriting of the popular consciousness’s ideas of trans people which I have chosen to call the Jenner Shift. One is that autogynephiles were a part of the larger category of men who for one reason or another were unable to perform attractive masculinity well enough to get laid, who had been becoming more and more of a problem over the past several decades, as in the past, such men were deterred by the prospect of being beaten up by the woman's male family members or existing partner, but as this mechanism often also deterred men who the women actually wanted to fuck, it began to be phased out as women were granted more agency, and unwanted male attention became a greater and greater nuisance until the problem came to a head in 2014 with Gamergate and the Elliot Rodger shooting. The stakes were clear. Something needed to be done.

Another is gay marriage. After the intentionally mismanaged AIDS epidemic killed all the countercultural, revolutionary gay men, leaving only the bland, assimilationist Pete Buttigieg types, and the countercultural, revolutionary lesbians were forced to kowtow to the Ellen DeGeneres types in order to maintain the male support they needed to survive in a sexist society, same-sex marriage was set as the final frontier of gay activism. In 2015, the Supreme Court granted them their objective nationwide. This raised the question: What now? Life wasn't a video game, where once you achieve the objective, your enemies spontaneously cease to exist. If you want to keep the old objective, you have to set and pursue a new one, so they'll be too busy defending it to attack the one you already captured. In another timeline, perhaps polyamory came next. Perhaps the argument that one man marrying one man would lead to one man marrying ten women would've been proven right. Perhaps in that world, transsexualism is still thought of by normies as an extreme variant of homosexuality today, in the same way as polygamy is thought of as a practice peculiar to Muslim monarchs and Mormons in ours. Perhaps the rationalist community in this timeline is exactly the same, save which practice people treat as Their Weird Thing, having been early adopters of both already. However, we do not live in that timeline.

People often say “Caitlyn Jenner invented trans people in 2015” sarcastically, as a comical exaggeration of how conservatives falsely believe trans identity to be a new phenomenon. But while this statement is obviously not entirely true, it’s not entirely false either. It’s true to the same degree, and in the same ways, as the statement “Benjamin Franklin invented electricity in 1752.” Obviously, electricity has existed since the dawn of time, and was documented by the ancient Greeks and Egyptians in the form of static electricity and electric fish. But Benjamin Franklin did make a significant change in the way we understood electricity, which in turn made a significant change in the role it played in our society, and the same is true for Caitlyn Jenner and trans people. Caitlyn Jenner was not the American public’s idea of a transsexual. Caitlyn Jenner was an Olympic athlete. Caitlyn Jenner had appeared on the cover of Gentlemen’s Quarterly Magazine. Caitlyn Jenner had been married to three different women and fathered two children with each. And yet, here she was, on the cover of Vanity Fair, wearing a dress, emblazoned with the words “Call me Caitlyn.”, because she was far too rich and famous to be beholden to the same unspoken social rules as the rest of us. This sent a message loud and clear to autogynephiles everywhere: A precedent has been set. The floodgates are open. If Caitlyn Jenner can be a transgender (as we are now calling them), anyone can be a transgender. All around the world, people who had previously unconsciously assumed “of course I can’t be a transsexual, I’m straight and like programming and Warhammer” began to reconsider. And when they reconsidered, the rest of the world was forced to reconsider some notions of its own.

When The Girlcum Hit The Fan

The impact this had on social justice activism cannot be overstated. Nowadays, progressive-aligned people spend a lot of time denouncing “trans-exclusionary radical feminism”. Now, I’m not going to say that pre-Jenner Shift, all feminism was trans-exclusionary, nor even most feminism, because that wouldn’t quite be true. If you asked the sort of feminist activist that read The Mary Sue or Kotaku or what have you in the early 2010s, they would’ve been happy to affirm their support for transgender people. But as previously discussed, society back then had different boundaries for the concept of “transgender”. If you clarified that you were including men who crossdressed at anime conventions in your definition of “transgender”, they would’ve looked at you like you had two heads. Obviously those people weren’t transgender, they were nerdy straight men expressing typical nerdy straight male sexuality, which as any good feminist could tell you meant they were the spawn of Satan and deserved to be launched into the sun! Sure, they were doing something related to gender and/or sexuality that mainstream society disapproved of, but so were pedophiles, or the aforementioned Muslim monarch and Mormon¹ polygamists, and they sure as hell weren’t part of the queer umbrella. If you complained about this being an awfully gender essentialist sentiment, they would’ve gone “Look at this whiny MRA complaining about misandry! What’s next, are you gonna get mad about ‘reverse racism’ because some black person on Twitter called you a cracker?”

You see, pre-Caitlyn Jenner feminism was working on an entirely different paradigm from modern feminist activism, or rather, it was actually acting on the same paradigm, just applied more consistently. “Gender essentialism” was like any other form of identitarian thinking: it was only bad if you were “punching down” (i.e. claiming that the male Essential Nature was better in some way than the female), and actively encouraged if you were “punching up” (i.e. claiming that men were a bunch of stupid, violent, horny neanderthals who were a dead weight on the human species now that there are no mammoths to hunt and women don’t need to spend their entire fertility window pregnant because most of the kids won’t make it to puberty). Believe it or not, there was a time when “women don’t like most video games because they’re all about violence, which of course women are by nature averse to, but women love video games when they’re not about violence, like Journey² and Portal” was considered a feminist statement! If you said such a thing in feminist spaces today, people would go “what are you talking about, women love violent video games, just look at all these trans women with thousands of hours in Fallout: New Vegas and various Paradox map painting simulators!” Similarly, current trans activists will often point out that cis people experience gender euphoria too, but while pre-Jenner feminists wouldn’t have had the same terminology, they were entirely familiar with the phenomenon, they just thought it was another reason men were bad. Men wanting their masculinity affirmed was stupid and pathetic, and women, being the morally and intellectually superior sex, never actually wanted their femininity affirmed, but the patriarchy didn’t care about their feelings and forced it on them anyway. You mainly saw this with toiletries, but people did it about basically every product with gendered marketing. Soap having a flannel-print box and a grizzly bear logo was a sign of masculinity being a cardboard fortress, soap having a pink box and a butterfly logo was a sign of femininity being an inescapable prison. In the ideal feminist world, all women would dress and act like lesbians, even if they were straight, and all men would simultaneously perform masculinity perfectly and effortlessly and be completely emasculated in that way that the Green Brothers or Wil Wheaton are. Trans people may have objected to this, but they were an insignificant, marginal enough presence that their objections could be safely ignored. That is, until they weren’t.

As you might expect, the Jenner Shift was a bit of a code red, all hands on deck situation. It was essentially that thing that happens in Team Fortress 2 (among other online team-based competitive games) where players log off mid-game, causing one team to have more players than the other, so the server spontaneously switches people to the other team until they’re balanced again, only with infinitely more sociopolitical fallout, because this is real life, and not a video game, where “reality” can be rewritten in an instant and all consequences are confined to a match that’ll be over in a matter of minutes anyway. They were all just going about their lives, when one day, sociopolitical factors beyond their control effectively forced them to integrate people who were their bitter enemies five minutes ago as first-class members of their coalition. Obviously, these people were still gross perverts who needed to leave women cis women the hell alone, but we couldn’t just acknowledge that there was any difference between them and cis women anymore, that would be an act of open betrayal and we needed them in the coalition, and of course we couldn’t portray lesbian sexuality as inherently gross, pathetic, and predatory, that was what The Enemy did, so what were we, the SJW³s of the world supposed to do? Just let them go around making women uncomfortable without any recourse, and also even worse because they’re doing it in dresses?

Of course not. Despite what TERFs will tell you, the progressive coalition would not tolerate such a thing. There was, of course, no secret summit where Felicia Day and Caitlyn Jenner met in a smoke-filled room and signed a contract in their own blood, but somehow, through an aggregate of numerous people independently acting in their own self-interest, women and autogynephiles arrived at an agreement. All parties would outwardly shout “trans women are women” at the top of their lungs every hour on the hour, but in practice, gynephilic trans women would be recognized as their own third gender role, with its own distinct set of rules. These rules would be simple: by donning the dress or the she/her pronoun pin, heterosexual men were freed from all accusations of male privilege, male chauvinism, male entitlement, and the like, and from treatment of their sexuality as inherently crass, disgusting, and predatory, so long as it remained directed at others of their ilk and/or safely unattainable targets like fictional characters and celebrities, and in return, they promised to 1. Provide undying loyalty to the progressive coalition in explicit matters of politics, and more importantly, 2. to permanently and totally cease any and all pursuit of sexual activity with “cis” women.

A Charade Unmasked

But, you may ask, how would such an obligation be enforced without betraying the alliance by acknowledging that there’s a difference between cis women and trans women? Simple. Amongst itself, the trans community would evangelize T4T⁴ and treat relationships with cis women as unthinkable with exactly the same level of force as the wider progressive cultural sphere evangelized the idea that any difference between trans women and cis women is totally infinitesimal and irrelevant in any context save a visit to the doctor or Planned Parenthood. Thus, with both memetic signals being broadcast at the same strength, all autogynephiles’s brains would either be penetrated by both, in which case they would exclusively pursue supposedly superior T4T relationships, or they would be penetrated by neither, in which case we would never be convinced that we’re women in the first place and thus be under no illusions that lesbians are interested.⁵

And the best part is, most cisgender lesbians aren’t even consciously aware this is the case! If you ask them “why haven’t you dated any trans women”, most of them will say something along the lines of “I don’t know, why haven’t I dated any Oklahomans, or anyone born in February, or any Brendas? It’s not that I have any particular reason not to date any of those groups of people, simply that I haven’t dated most lesbians, and most lesbians are not any of those things, so probability works out such that the two groups lack any overlap.”, and most of the time, they’ll actually believe themselves. It’s actually very easy to sincerely hold incorrect belief’s about one’s own preferences, just so long as you’re never in a situation where you have to actually make a conscious choice based on those preferences, and since autogynephiles have all either been trained out of sexually pursuing cis lesbians, or were never trained into it in the first place, cis lesbians never do!

Of course, if you accuse any individual cis lesbian of lying about their own preferences in such a manner, you’re probably being pretty unreasonable unless you have some kind of damning evidence which you’d likely need to flagrantly violate their privacy to obtain, and if you accuse them of being genuinely mistaken about their preferences, you’re definitely being unreasonable unless you’ve literally scanned their brain with magic or Sufficiently Advanced Technology. But anyone who’s ever played a social deduction game knows that there are scenarios where you can’t prove if any individual is lying, but you’re certain that someone in the group is, and this is one of those scenarios. Of course, it makes perfect sense for very few cis lesbians to be dating trans women, given how much fewer of the latter group there are. But if you flip it around, and look at how many trans lesbians are dating cis women, you’ll find that the answer is still “barely any”, despite the fact that viewed from this angle, the numbers should work out in favor of trans/cis lesbian couplings. What gives?

If you approach the question from the other way around and ask trans lesbians why they aren’t dating cis women, some will give essentially the same answer as the cis lesbians did about why they aren’t dating trans women. Others will claim transphobia, an obvious contradiction, given they also claim that TERFs are liars for claiming to represent cis lesbians and in reality they’re a vocal minority and the majority are on the side of trans acceptance. Others, however, will give more reasonable answers. Transness comes with a lot of cultural and personal baggage that they don’t want to have to explain to a partner and worry about them not understanding, and consequently, trans people have their own social circles separate from cis queers where many meet their partners. Perhaps as well they simply find themselves more attracted to trans people than cis people, and given that they’re an Oppressed Group, rather than an Oppressor Group, they’re allowed to. On the surface, this sounds reasonable. However, the same phenomena also exist to varying degrees in all ethnic minorities, disabilities, and even hobbies, if we’re counting groups that aren’t Oppressed Minorities, and yet people in all of those groups date outside of them at a far higher rate than trans lesbians seem to. It just doesn’t add up. The hypothesis that the primary cause of the lack of C4T lesbian relationships is the preferences of cis lesbians is simply the one that best passes Occam’s Razor.

A Repugnant Conclusion

Thus, we come to the present day, where formerly bitter enemies are united hand in hand under a supposedly noble lie where everyone is simultaneously the liar and the lied-to. This seems to work out perfectly fine for most people. It’s great if you like T4T. It seems to work out surprisingly well for cis women. Straight, non-autogynephilic men are pretty much unaffected, as the number of straight trans women hasn’t gone up nearly as much, on top of them tending to pass better, and men, as previously mentioned, tending to be less picky. I have absolutely no idea how the gay male community has reacted to the commensurate rise in the population of autoandrophilic transitioners⁶ and would love to hear accounts from gay men on how that worked out. But it certainly hasn’t been universally positive. There are some autogynephiles among us who are not content with living out our lives in the T4T ghetto. Who long to know the touch of a real, actual woman, as in the kind that that word referred to before 2015, with wide hips and proper boobs and a vagina and everything, and whose shared interest in our autistic, male-dominated hobbies feels special and unique and not common and stereotypical, but who know we will never have such, because we’re disgusted by the idea of being attractive in a masculine manner, and incapable of being attractive in a feminine manner. Who wish we could at least lament our circumstances without being told at best that we’re sick with the disease of internalized transmisogyny and need to be shown the healing light of T4T, and at worst that we’re vile misogynist incels, somehow, despite supposedly being women. Who, quite bluntly, don’t like being lied to. What, pray tell, are we supposed to do in your glorious trans utopia? Going around demanding that random trans-affirming cis lesbians fuck us or be proven hypocrites would be neither ethical nor productive. It seems, at present, that our options are the noose, the bullet, or writing essays about it. I’m choosing the latter for now, but I’ve still got the rope in my closet in case this fails to do any good.⁷

Acknowledgements

Zack Davis and Eneasz Brodski, for making “hybrid diary entry about being an AGP repressor and political manifesto on the subject of transgenderism” into a whole subgenre of rationalist blog post, such that I felt like I should do my own spin on it with a more sociological bent.

Ozymandias Brennan, Whose rebuttals to such posts contained so much blatantly false and misleading information that my soul could not be at rest until I wrote a double rebuttal. (Loved the one about how autogynephilia isn’t real because people don’t make major permanent modifications to their bodies which carry both massive social stigma and potential negative physical side effects for any other kinks, given certain other facts about myself that one really cracked me up.)

Kelsey Piper, whose wonderful blog post “Pure Queers” and outlier status as a cis lesbian happily married to a trans woman make me feel a little less wracked with guilt for being what I am. (Damn shame she’s moved on to more important things than SJ blogging, so I’m stuck with a guy who acts like he’s some kind of queer Hunter S. Thompson but didn’t even know what feederism was in 2016 as my opposition, though.)

Readers like you, for making me feel a little less excrucitatingly alone with my thoughts.

1. The official Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints hasn’t practiced polygamy since abolishing it in order to gain Utah statehood in 1890, but various fundamentalist splinter churches still do.

2. Sidenote, does anyone remember Journey? The 2012 video game, not the band who made Don’t Stop Believing. In my experience it was like, the James Cameron’s Avatar of its medium. It sold a bajillion copies and got on a bunch of “best video games of all time” lists and got pointed out a lot by feminists as a Game Women Liked, but in the entire decade I’ve been active in gamer circles on the internet, I’ve yet to see a single person discussing it organically in casual conversation.

3. As they were called at the time, back before white people discovered the word “woke”.

4. An abbreviation of “trans for trans”, meaning romantic relationships where both (or rather, all, as many, likely even the majority, of such relationships are polyamorous, at least among trans women) partners are transgender.

5. As for the political loyalty clause, it would be enforced exactly the same as every other minority, with the branding of any member who questions progressive dogma in any way as an assimilationist Quisling traitor who’ll rat out their fellows to the Gestapo and plead that they’re one of the good ones as they’re dragged into the gas chamber next.

6. And yes, contrary to orthodox Blanchardism, autoandrophilia is real, as anyone who’s been using Tumblr or Archive Of Our Own regularly since the Shift can tell you.

7. This is not a joke. It is a cry for help.