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Transgenderism is becoming increasingly common among young people. Despite the fact that the trans youth population has doubled over five years (according to some sources), it is maintained that this is not a social contagion. Oh, no. This is simply the result of a more accepting society! People now feel more comfortable expressing who they truly are! Because no social movement has ever been wrong before!

But where did this concept of “gender identity” come from? Who popularised this? Yes, cross-dressing and transvestism have been around since ancient times — it’s even mentioned (and condemned) in the Bible! But surely, just because a man presents as more feminine, this does not make him a woman in reality. Where did this sex-gender distinction come from? And why do so many people now affirm transgenderism as an ontological reality?

The Sex-Gender Distinction

The modern concept of being transgender, and gender in general, did not develop until the mid-1900s. The use of “gender” in reference to men and women is a relatively recent invention. The ancient world had no basis of understanding gender as it has been understood for the past few decades. “Gender” had generally only been a grammatical term — about half of the world’s languages feature gender systems — and only started to refer to a malleable cultural construct in the 1950s and 1960s.

Analysis of more than 30 million academic article titles from 1945 to 2001 showed that “gender” was often used as a grammatical category early in this period, and was overall much rarer than uses of “sex.” By the end of this period, uses of “gender” outnumbered uses of “sex” in the social sciences, arts, and humanities.

The major expansion in the use of “gender”, as a distinction from sex, was triggered in the 1970s, when feminist scholars adopted the term as a way of distinguishing the “socially and culturally constructed” aspects of male-female differences (gender) from the “biologically determined” aspects (sex), as the World Health Organisation has since come to distinguish them.

In the feminist view, human nature is essentially epicene and social distinctions based on sex are arbitrarily constructed. Women don’t have to be regulated to domestic duties because they are just cultural — men and women are actually the same.

While the spread of the word “gender” in science publications can be attributed to the influence of feminism, its use as a synonym for sex is attributed to the failure to grasp the distinction made in feminist theory. David Haig stated, “Among the reasons that working scientists have given me for choosing gender rather than sex in biological contexts are desires to signal sympathy with feminist goals, to use a more academic term, or to avoid the connotation of copulation.”

In mainstream use, sex has become more exclusively associated with human sexual activity. In 1993, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) started to use gender instead of sex to avoid confusion with sexual intercourse. Later, in 2011, the FDA reversed its position and began using sex as the biological classification and gender as “a person’s self-representation as male or female.”

This term, “gender”, gained popularity rather rapidly. But where was it born? What led to this sex-gender distinction? Who contributed to its invention?

Magnus Hirschfeld

Even before the sex-gender distinction made it into language, we can find ideas about sex reassignment (the alteration of one’s sex characteristics to suit one’s gender identity). Magnus Hirschfeld started an Institute for Sexual Research in the early 1900s, Berlin, Germany. Among many other things, the museum of sexual subjects aided the institute’s popularity, housing displays of different sexual norms across different cultures internationally and some exhibits about sexual fetishism and sadomasochism. Among those who worked at his institute were Max Hodann (Marxist and eugenicist) and Ludwig Levy-Lenz (who performed some of the first sex reassignment surgeries).

Karl Giese was Hirschfeld’s life partner, and was additionally considered his “foster son” and “woman of the house.” Geise was thirty years younger than Hirschfeld and would call him “Papa.” Giese would say that they shared a “physical-mental connection.” At one stage, Hirschfeld and Giese lived in a homosexual “throuple” with medical student Li Shiu Tong.

Hirschfeld also organised the World League for Sexual Reform, which advocated for eugenic birth selection, sex education, and secularisation. He, Havelock Ellis (president of the Eugenics Society for a time), and Auguste Forel (a myrmecologist who used his work on ants to study human psychology) were elected the first presidents of the World League.

Hirschfeld theorised homosexuality was innate and universal and that there was a wide spectrum of human sexuality which existed in all of the world’s cultures, all of which were “natural.” Hirschfeld argued that “what is natural cannot be immoral” and, since homosexuality was in his view natural, it should be legal. In 1930, Hirschfeld, building a reputation as the “Einstein of sex,” went on a speaking tour about sex across America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Harry Benjamin

Harry Benjamin was an associate of Hirschfeld, and brought his theories to the United States. Benjamin had studied at the Institute for Sexual Research. In 1948, Alfred Kinsey asked Benjamin to see a young patient who was male but insisted he was female. Kinsey had encountered the child during his interviews for Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. This case triggered Benjamin’s interest in what he would come to call “transsexualism.” Benjamin decided to treat the child with estrogen, which had a “calming effect”, and helped arrange for the mother and child to go to Germany, where surgery could be performed.

Benjamin’s book, The Transsexual Phenomenon, was the first large work describing and explaining the affirmative treatment path. He would later start a research team called the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, or what would later be called the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). The organisation consisted of therapists and psychologists who devised a set of “Standards of Care” for the treatment of gender dysphoria, largely based on Benjamin’s cases, and studies. It must now be said that Benjamin was a friend and colleague of not only Magnus Hirchsfeld, but Alfred Kinsey and John Money also.

Alfred Kinsey

Alfred Kinsey is known for founding the Institute for Sex Research, today known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, at Indiana University. He is best known for writing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, also known as the Kinsey Reports, as well as for the Kinsey scale. His work has influenced social and cultural values in the United States, as well as internationally.

Kinsey studied biology and psychology, with a particular focus upon entomology (study of insects). He wrote his doctoral thesis on gall wasps and went on to publish several papers about them and their phylogeny. Kinsey also wrote a high-school textbook which unified botany and zoology.

After a particularly interesting discussion with a colleague, Kinsey began to turn his interests toward human sexuality. While studying the mating practices among gall wasps, he developed a scale measuring sexual orientation, now known as the “Kinsey scale”, which ranges from 0 to 6, where 0 is exclusively heterosexual and 6 is exclusively homosexual.

Kinsey would go on to claim that humans are naturally bisexual, but religious precepts and prejudices have forced people into chastity, heterosexuality and monogamy. He endorsed sodomy, saying that all forms of anal intercourse are natural and healthy.

Kinsey collected data from his student’s sexual histories. Significant portions of his samples came from prostitutes, open homosexuals, criminals, and more. There was also a heavy “volunteer bias”, which was not accounted for. In the year in which Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published, a committee of the American Statistical Association condemned the sampling procedure. Psychologist Abraham Maslow concluded that Kinsey’s sample was unrepresentative of the general population. Historian Peter Gay described Sexual Behavior in the Human Male as “methodologically far from persuasive.” The Concerned Women for America group termed Kinsey’s research on sexology as fraudulent and inaccurate, and asserted that it was biased toward his personal agenda and not towards exploring human sexology. Some have speculated that Kinsey’s sexual activity influenced his work, that he over-represented prisoners and prostitutes, classified some single people as “married”, and that he included a disproportionate number of homosexual men, which may have distorted his studies.

Despite this, the Kinsey Reports together sold three-quarters of a million copies and were translated into thirteen languages, and may be considered as some of the most successful and influential scientific books of the 20th century. It is for this reason that Kinsey is often referred to as the Father of the Sexual Revolution.

Kinsey’s research went beyond theory and interview to include observation and participation in sexual activity, sometimes involving co-workers. He encouraged his staff to do likewise, and to engage in a wide range of sexual activity, arguing that this would help his interviewers understand the participants’ responses. Kinsey observed and filmed sexual acts which included co-workers in the attic of his home as part of his research. Once, when he had set up a sado-masochistic session involving two men, the researchers had to step aside occasionally while Kinsey’s wife came in to change the blood-stained sheets. Some, such as James H. Jones and Theodore Dalrymple, have speculated that Kinsey was driven by his own sexual needs.

Kinsey collected sexual and pornographic material from around the world, which briefly brought him to the attention of the U.S. Customs Service (though he died before the matter was resolved). He wrote about pre-adolescent orgasms (tables 30-34 of the male volume), reporting observations of orgasms in over 300 children aged from two months up to fifteen years. This information was said to have come from adults’ childhood memories, or parent or teacher observation.

Kinsey also said he interviewed nine men who had sexual experiences with children and who told him about the children’s responses and reactions, however it was later revealed that Kinsey used data from a single paedophile and presented it as being from various sources. Despite being aware of the acts of paedophilia, he never reported anything to law enforcement authorities.

Kinsey declared that one of his goals was simply to show that “nearly all the so-called sexual perversions fall within the range of biological normality.” Be believed that all consensual sexual behaviours were healthy, and stated, “There are only three kinds of sexual abnormalities: abstinence, celibacy and delayed marriage.”

Kinsey hypothesised that infants were orgasmic from birth and suggested that incest relationships and paedophilia benefit children as a “sexual outlet.” Kinsey asserted that there was no proven medical or other reason to forbid incest or adult-child sex. He believed that social conditioning made it taboo, despite it actually being a “normal” sexual behaviour that should be practised as well as pursued.

Kinsey wished to argue that children have a sexuality which is not harmed by being used for adult gratification, and thus he saw adults ‘manipulating’ children to orgasm as synonymous with children’s own authentic and autonomous sexuality.

Unsurprisingly, pro-pedophile advocate Tim O’Carroll has said that Kinsey’s work was “unassailable” in support of the paedophile cause.

It may also be worth mentioning the names of some of the researchers who worked alongside Kinsey, particularly Wardell Pomeroy and Mary Calderone. The hole goes deeper still.

John Money

In his lifetime, sexologist John Money received 60+ awards and published over 2000 pieces of writing. He is regarded as the first to introduce a distinction between biological sex and gender as a role, and may well be considered the godfather of the transgender movement.

In a 1955 paper, he defined gender as “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman.” Money believed that gender was learned rather than innate (that we are born a “blank slate”), and was a prominent proponent of the “theory of gender neutrality.” He promoted the idea that gender wasn’t only distinct from sex, but was completely divorced from it.

Money presented his theories in a college textbook titled Man and Woman, Boy and Girl (1972), and this book would be embraced by feminist theory. As an example of gender reassignment, this book featured a man named David Reimer – we would be amiss to not recount this case.

Originally named Bruce, Reimer was the eldest of identical twin boys (his brother named Brian). At six months old, Reimer suffered a botched medical circumcision. Concerned about his future happiness and sexual prospects, his parents took him to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to see Dr John Money.

Money believed that gender identity developed primarily as a result of social learning and that it could be changed with the appropriate behavioural interventions. At the time, surgical construction of the vagina was more advanced than the construction of the penis. Money and the Hopkins team believed that Reimer would be happiest in adulthood living as a woman with functioning genitalia and persuaded Reimer’s parents that sex reassignment surgery would be in Reimer’s best interest. At 22 months old, Reimer underwent a bilateral orchiectomy and was reassigned to female, given the new name Brenda.

Reimer was raised under the “optimum gender rearing model,” which attempted to define a binary for intersex children and stop gender incongruence (i.e., gender dysphoria, transgenderism). He was never told he was born a male, and was subjected to hormone therapy early on in order to lead him through a female puberty.

This case of identical twin boys, where one could be raised as a girl, provided a perfect test of Money’s theories. Brian made an ideal control because the brothers shared genes, family environments, and the intrauterine environment. Additionally, this was reputed to be the first reassignment and reconstruction of a male infant who had no abnormality of prenatal or early postnatal sexual differentiation.

Money supervised and reported on the twins’ gender development as the “John/Joan case” until the twins were 13 years old. During check-ups, Money included “childhood sexual rehearsal play,” which he argued was important for a “healthy adult gender identity.”

Money theorised that reproductive behaviour formed the foundation of gender, and that “play at thrusting movements and copulation” was a key aspect of gender development. Starting at age six, the twins were forced to replicate sexual intercourse with each other, touch and inspect each other’s genitals, and watch pornography. He would then prod them about their sexual arousal, and question their attractions. On at least one occasion, Money took photos of the two children doing these things.

Both Reimer and Brian recall that Money was mild-mannered around their parents, but ill-tempered when alone with them. When either child resisted doing any activity, Money would get very aggressive. Both Reimer and Brian were traumatised by the therapy.  Estrogen was given to Reimer during adolescence. For several years, Money reported on Reimer’s progress, saying, “The child’s behaviour is so clearly that of an active little girl and so different from the boyish ways of her twin brother, that it offers nothing to stimulate one’s conjectures.”

However, by the time Reimer reached puberty at 13, he felt suicidal. His mother recalled,

“She was very rebellious. She was very masculine, and I could not persuade her to do anything feminine. Brenda had almost no friends growing up. Everybody ridiculed her, called her cavewoman. … She was a very lonely, lonely girl.”

Seeing his sadness, Reimer’s parents finally told him the truth. Within weeks, Brenda became David. He had reconstructive surgery and eventually married, being a stepfather to his wife’s three children. Tragically, in his thirties, Reimer became depressed. He lost his job, he lost his wife, and he lost his brother to a drug overdose. Reimer shot himself in a local grocery store parking lot.

Before his death, Reimer went public with his story. However, by the time it was discovered that Money had made fraudulent and deceptive claims about the malleability of Reimer’s gender, the idea of a purely socially constructed gender identity and infant intersex medical interventions had become the accepted medical and sociological standard. Money publicly dismissed criticism toward the Reimer case as anti-feminist and anti-trans bias, though, according to his colleagues, was personally ashamed of the failure.

It should come as no surprise that Money believed childhood sexual play was a necessary aspect of development, claimed that pedophilia was not always harmful to children, and urged that adolescents should receive explicit instruction about masturbation. Money described pedophilia as “a love affair between an age-discrepant couple.” He also wrote: “For a child to have a sexual experience with a relative [was/is] not necessarily a problem.” He identified as bisexual and had several discreet affairs with both men and women. Money also championed open marriage and nudism.

Volkmar Sigusch

Volkmar Sigusch was a German sexologist, physician, and sexologist and was the founder and director (1973-2006) of the Institute for Sexual Science at the clinic of Goethe University Frankfurt. In his publication Transsexuals and our nosomorphic view, Sigusch coined the term “cissexual” as an antonym to “transsexual,” referring to a person whose gender identity matches their sex. “I have allowed myself to introduce the terms cissexualism, cissexuals, cisgender etc.,” Sigusch wrote.

In 2011, Sigusch stated that the problem with “pedosexuals” is not their desire to abuse children, but acting on that impulse. He proposed that the best outcome for treating paedophiles is not the loss of their desire, but instead preventing them from having “contact” with children. As should be pretty clear from the characters we’ve already covered, the late ’60s and early ’70s saw German sexologists beginning to view sexual relations with children as progressive rather than abusive.

Helmut Ketler (another disturbing figure worth mentioning) was a key figure in facilitating the cultural acceptance of paedophilia. Thankfully, many feminists were vocal and forceful opponents of Germany’s attempts to legalise the abuse of children.

In a paper titled Teenage Boys and Girls in West Germany, Sigusch published research on the sexuality of teens (ages 16-17) that involved highly specific interview questions about masturbation, orgasms, and their sexuality in childhood. Sigusch and co-author Gunter Schmidt appear to have misled the teen participants about the nature of their research, asking to interview them about leisure time, marriage, and family. They were instead asked about the age of first masturbation, frequency, whether or not they would have preferred intercourse, drug use, whether drugs enhanced their sexual arousal, and whether they would prefer to live in a commune.

Unsurprisingly, Sigusch and Schmidt also argued that exposing children to pornography was harmless. In the 70s, Sigusch promoted “pedosexuality,” and would later turn his focus toward “gender identity.” In his essay, titled The Neosexual Revolution, Sigusch identifies the trend in sexology to normalise behaviours that have long been associated with predation, deviance, and abuse. He further writes,

“Pedosexuality itself is now undergoing pluralization… If embryos and virgins can be offered in the market, if everything is saleable, then why not children as well?”

Sigusch writes,

“There is nothing wrong with pedophilia in the sense of the word… The sensuality that spontaneously unfolds between a child and an adult is something wonderful… Childish eroticism is not only full of delights, it is also necessary.”

Final Thoughts

Despite all of their efforts, the fact of the matter is that children who identify as transgender almost always grow out of it. Studies of transgender kids have shown that a substantial majority — anywhere from 65 to 94 per cent — will cease to identify as transgender. Gender dysphoria does not persist in most children past puberty. Most are simply going through a phase. Perhaps it is not sex-based gender roles which are the social contagion, but the concept of gender identity.

Dr Sherer argues that kids will modify their gender expression to seek rewards from their parents and society, but this will not affect their internal sense of self. However, even beyond hormone therapy and surgical procedures, it is worth knowing the damage transitions can do. The UK’s National Health Service warned that “social transition” (i.e., wearing the clothes of the opposite sex and taking on a new name) “should not be viewed as a neutral act,” as it could have “significant effects” on the child’s “psychological functioning.” This gender ideology is damaging a generation.

What we have seen throughout this article is a collection of sexually depraved and pedophilic men whose ideas gained popularity through faulty and fraudulent science. Personally, I refuse to honour the disgusting and failed research of paedophiles, and pedo-sympathisers, by using the language they developed.

There is a horrifying amount of pedophilia in this history, and a disturbing amount of pseudoscience. We already know that there are real empirical differences between the sexes which are not purely sociocultural. I simply cannot get on board with recognising transgenderism as a real ontological category.

Timeline

• 1906 – Treated by Hirschfeld, Karl Baer becomes the first transgender person to undergo sex reassignment surgery (female-to-male).
• 1910 – Hirschfeld coins the term “transvestite” to describe modern “transgender” people.
• 1919 – Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research opens.
• 1919 – Kinsey is awarded a Doctorate of Science by Harvard University.
• 1921 – Hirschfeld organises the World League for Sexual Reform.
• 1922 – Dora (Rudolph) Richter, the first known person to undergo complete male-to-female gender reassignment surgery, is castrated at Hirschfeld’s institute.
• 1923 – Hirschfeld invents the term “transexual.”
• 1930-32 – Hirschfeld goes on a lecture tour around the world.
• 1931 – A patient of the institute, Einar Wegener, dies from infection after his immune system rejects the transplanted uterus.
• 1945 – Madison Bentley defines gender as the “socialised obverse of sex.”
• 1947 – Kinsey establishes the Institute for Sex Research.
• 1948 – Benjamin was asked by Kinsey to see a male patient who claimed to be female.
• 1948 – Kinsey publishes Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male.
• 1949 – Simone de Beauvoir publishes her book The Second Sex, in which she applies existentialism to womanhood, writing that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
• 1953 – Kinsey publishes Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female.
• 1955 – Money redefines gender and introduces a distinction between biological sex and gender as a role.
• 1960s – Helmut Kentler begins rehoming neglected youth with paedophiles.
• 1965 – Money co-founds the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, which performed the first sex reassignment surgeries in the United States.
• 1966 – Benjamin publishes The Transsexual Phenomenon.
• 1967 – Reimer is taken to see Money for the first time as an infant.
• 1972 – Money releases his theories in a college textbook titled Man and Woman, Boy and Girl.
• 1970s – Feminists adopt the term “gender.”
• 1972 – Sigusch establishes the Institute for Sexology at the University Hospital in Frankfurt.
• 1972 – Dr Fits Bernard writes a paper concluding that “pedophilic contacts do not damage the psychic development of a child.”
• 1973 – Sigusch releases Teenage Boys and Girls in West Germany.
• 1979 – WPATH is founded by Harry Benjamin.
• 1980 – Reimer is told the truth.
• 1985 – Money testifies before Attorney General Edwin Meese’s commission that pornography is not detrimental to minors.
• 1987 – Homosexuality is removed from the DSM.
• 1991 – Sigusch coins the term “cissexual.”
• 1992 – WHO removes Homosexuality from its ICD.
• 1997 – Reimer goes public with his story.
• 1998 – Sigusch publishes The Neosexual Revolution.
• 2004 – Reimer takes his own life.
• 2013 – Gender Identity Disorder is removed from the DSM (replaced with Gender Dysphoria).
• 2018 – WHO removes Fetishism, Transvestic Fetishism, and Sadomasochism from its ICD.

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Image courtesy of Alexander Grey.