A biochemistry tutor at St. Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford is getting worldwide attention for his gigantic prosthetic bosom. Matt Rattley, 42, has drawn comparisons to Kayla Lemieux, the Canadian shop teacher who stirred controversy by wearing massive mock mammaries to work in 2023.

Lemieux apparently gave up on wearing his fetish gear for children after the New York Post published photos of him walking to the store without it. He was last seen going to work at a new school wearing stubble, pants, and no fake boobs. Parents had criticized Lemieux and the Halton District School's Board of Trustees passed a unanimous motion to develop a new dress code as a result of the scandal.

Rattley looks uncanny in photographs. His beard is bad enough, but his male shoulders and hands are disproportionate for a woman. He does not seem at all embarrassed, however. No photographs of Rattley walking around outside of his costume have been published yet.

Share

However, the absence of embarrassment is more likely due to the high social costs of complaining about him. “No one in his male-dominated department has publicly criticised his sexist sartorial choices, and he has been pictured and filmed at professional events looking as though he has wandered in from a stag do”, Jo Bartosch writes at Spiked.

People have been arrested in the UK for saying that men are not women. If Rattley filed a criminal complaint against a colleague or student for objecting to his fetish costume, British police would very likely arrest that person.

Dr. Ace North, a research scientist at the Oxford University biology department, recently received pressure from his superiors to stop putting gender critical stickers on Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI, British DEI) posters.

“As an employee of the university I feel grossly insulted that this is tolerated, even celebrated, yet even mild criticism of gender identity ideology is shouted down”, North said of the new controversy on X. “I can’t imagine how young women in his classes may feel.”

Mr. Rattley’s paraphilia props have reignited a debate within ‘gender critical’ circles about the limits of personal freedom for men who put themselves on display in female form. Boundary violations are a classic form of male domination, leading many opponents of transgenderism to argue that all male cross-dressing is harmful. Most of this tranche wears the label ‘Ultra’.

Contrarily, there are many critics of ‘gender identity’ who draw a line at personal freedom, arguing that progress against the excesses of transgender ideology is much harder without acknowledging a man’s right to wear what he wants. Bartosch identifies the fault line:

This is where personal liberty rubs up against the social norms and boundaries that protect us all. It is where JK Rowling’s famous ‘dress however you please’ entreaty to both truth and tolerance begins to fray. Rattley doesn’t claim to be a woman. He is just a man who wears low-cut frocks and a huge rubber rack. The question is not about his identity, or even his motivations, but whether his choices infringe on others.

Bartosch was referring to this famous tweet, now more than six years old, in which author J.K. Rowling argued that ‘live and let live’ was possible. Rowling was responding to the travails of Maya Forstater, who eventually won her employment tribunal case against a dismissal over her statements that women are not men.

Previous management at Twitter locked this tweet down in their distaste. Innumerable app users have noted their ‘likes’ and retweets disappearing ever since. It is therefore an historic irony that gender critical discourse now divides over the statement to “Dress however you please”. A simultaneous debate over language — “Call yourself whatever you like” — is also happening.

Rowling has received criticism this week for using female pronouns in reference to a close friend who is transgender. “JK Rowling herself has stated in the past that ‘it starts with a white lie’ and ends with women being made to give away their rights”, writes one prominent critic, Lisa.

“I can still respect her”, Lisa writes. However, “I don’t think it’s unreasonable or ‘Ultra’ in the slightest to feel disappointed that Rowling herself commits to this ‘white lie’ in her private life.” Rowling is impossible to cancel, nor does Lisa want to cancel her. Still, “I don't understand why she would do this herself.”

The ‘Ultra’ argument is that by using female pronouns for any man, ever, the speaker undermines the project of getting the Kayla Lemieuxs and Matt Rattleys of the world to stop cross-dressing in public. The counter-argument is that policing private language is an ideological act which does not actually stop such men from acting out their fetish.

The one thing that does seem to shut them down is embarrassment. Mr. Lemieux only acted that way in front of children, not bothering to play dress-up for a simple walk to the store. Likewise, Rattley probably does not wear his costume full-time, but only for the unwilling audience at Oxford. If embarrassment was enough to stop Lemieux, it will likely work on Rattley — but that is only going to happen if Oxford University becomes intolerant of his behavior.

Longtime readers of The Distance will recall that this issue has come up before. In most western jurisdictions, a man in a dress is not breaking any laws, so it is very hard to justify removing him from a gender critical conference, for example. The line is much easier to draw at further boundary violations, such as using the women’s restroom at the same conference.

I have no hard evidence to supply for my sense that this debate has shifted. Time, and the continued appearance of Matt Rattleys, have eroded the tolerance-levels of many critics of genderwoo. As Lisa says, gender critics are not a church, and J.K. Rowling is not our pope. But that also means that no one, including the Ultras, gets to decide these things for the rest of us.

It was not tolerance, but intolerance of opinion that got us here. No amount of intolerance is going to unwind the problem. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we shall either hang together against the false consensus at Oxford, or be hanged separately.

Subscribe now

“I come not to bury the Middle Class Holes, but to shake my head and stare balefully at them.”

Gareth Roberts has written a compendium of 25 British personalities making everything worse for everyone. His criteria for the category are rigorous: “They must be actively dangerous, or deleterious, or hilarious, or they must exemplify something.” Gender identity ideology runs through the entire book as a glaring thread to highlight the flimsy, diminished quality of British cultural and political fabric these days.

Conservative MP Carolyn Nokes exemplifies the nonpartisan nature of the problem. In 2022, as Chair of the Parliamentary Women and Equalities Committee, Nokes championed changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would have made it simpler and easier for any man to ‘identify’ as a woman. Appalled by the populist reaction against this endeavor, Nokes wailed over the “abuse” and “vitriol” she received for simply trying to bring legislation from 2004 into the “modern day”, the poor dear.

Tories are not supposed to advance the fashionable delusions of the left, yet this was the defining issue of Nokes’s tenure. Why? To Nokes, who presents herself as an educated, middle class feminist, the ‘culture wars’ are irrelevant, a distraction from ‘real issues’ that require middle class holes like herself to exist, so they can resolve those alleged problems on our behalf.

Share

Of course, one of those issues is ‘gender equality’, or the ‘gender pay gap’, phrases that become meaningless when a middle class hole says them. “I particularly like women who are prepared to stand up for themselves and for what they believe in”, Nokes said in 2020. “Particularly, it seems, if those women are actually men”, Roberts adds with the scorn of Rumpole.

Nokes once defended the burqa from Boris Johnson, arguing that “it’s not for any man to tell any woman what she should wear”, unless of course that man is Muslim. Using Nokes, Roberts introduces us to the “dinner party problem”, a term coined by writer Tom Jones for the social pressure that makes anyone, even a Tory, adopt liberal positions so their friends do not disown them.

Nokes has been “dinner partied to maximum strength”, he writes. This phenomenon explains why gender ideology gained ascendancy under a Conservative government in the UK. It also applies to Washington, DC, where Republicans are rewarded by their dinner party friends for every move to the left, while no Democrat is ever rewarded for the smallest ideological infraction — and the punishment of activist pressure groups is always swift. It is a politics of respectability that keeps the “semi-posh” in line.

Read more

Paul Bradley lives in the UK. He is a product developer for an ammunition company, but he was also a bouncer for 23 years of his career as a security guard. In this recent video, he shares “direct, frontline experience dealing with a specific subset of individuals who presented as female but were biologically male” and created “safeguarding and security concerns” with their behavior.

Bradley is careful to emphasize that his criticism is confined to a “specific pattern of behaviour, in a specific context, that my colleagues and I encountered repeatedly” in his line of work. He is aware of autogynephilia and understands it as a fetish that makes heterosexual men “sexually aggressive towards women”.

Share

For this reason, “we had many, many situations where women would come out of the toilets, and say ‘There’s a guy in there swinging his dick around’, or ‘just walking around with his bits out, and purposefully doing it, obviously to make us uncomfortable’”. Nobody paying attention to these issues will be shocked by the disclosure.

Men would leave the stall door open and stare. They sometimes got handsy. While the bouncers would take action, “pretty much in all these cases, no one wanted to press charges” for all the usual reasons that women avoid going to the police for a sexual assault. Predictably, when Bradley made these men leave the establishment, he was accused of transphobic hate. Management worried about bad publicity for political impurity instead of customer safety.

Bradley says that the “LGBTQ+ community is one of the most divided, contentious, bitchy, unpleasant communities I’ve ever, ever worked within.” Contrary to the public image that activists and lobbyists project, gay men, lesbians, and transgender-identified men do not get along in the privacy of the club. He believes some people are genuinely transgender “from the bottom of their soul”, and asks the viewer to refrain from leaving hateful comments. However, he argues that the rest of this “community” is poorly represented by the “loudest group”.

While “everybody is bloody frightened to talk about it”, Paul Bradley insists that “taking security seriously for everyone is not an extreme viewpoint”. Indeed, safeguarding is not extreme at all. Transgender ideology frames normal safeguarding as ‘literal genocide’ because the loudest men in the bunch are the most interested in violating women’s boundaries. Bradley’s honesty is refreshing.

Subscribe now

Zero women have ever made an NFL roster, completed a training camp, or made a regular-season appearance on the professional football field with men. Every single person who has ever played a single actual snap in the history of the National Football League was male. Females have always been extremely rare at all levels of the game, but in the biggest professional league, they are nonexistent.

During the late 1960s, there was a Women’s Professional Football League, but it was a “gimmick” by talent agent Sid Friedman that ended in 1973. More to the point, those women played on all-female teams. The larger heart, lungs, bones, and muscles that boys have before adolescence, that develop during puberty, give men severe advantages against women on the gridiron.

One need only look at the men around the ball on every play to see it. Offensive linemen are chosen for their ability to sustain blocking, achieve leverage, and exert power. They average 6’5” (195 cm) in height and 310 lbs (140 kg) in weight, whereas at most, there are few dozen to a few hundred women worldwide, probably fewer than 50–100 in the United States, who are that tall and heavy.

Elite female rugby players are probably the best comparison group to offensive linemen in football, and they average just 5’7” (170 cm) and 184 lbs (83 kg). For this reason, none of the women who have ever played football on male teams has been an offensive lineman — or a defensive lineman, for that latter.

Sex difference completely explains the absence of women in tackle football. No other explanation holds up under rigorous examination. Women simply cannot compete with men for almost any position on a professional team. In fact, women have a very difficult time just competing with adolescent boys. ‘Patriarchy’ and ‘misogyny’ play no role whatsoever in this phenomenon. It is biology.

Share

Girls in football are a novelty

Tami Maida was 14 years old when her family moved from British Columbia to Oregon in 1981 so that she could try out for the boys’ junior varsity football team at Philomath High School in Oregon. Maida had a very supportive family, especially her father, but she was also at the very end of her youthful athletic competitiveness versus boys her own age.

By happenstance, there was no boy on the team with her evident leadership skills or her passing accuracy. Despite some community opposition, Maida succeeded brilliantly — for just one season of JV football.

Then Maida went home to British Columbia with her family. That was it. She played herself in the CBS movie, filling in for star Helen Hunt in many of the game sequences, but Tami Maida never played a real game of high school football again.

It is difficult to blame her, for varsity tackle football was a brutal game in the 1980s. I know because I was there. Tami Maida could not have continued her success indefinitely and she knew it. She was already taking hits on almost every play, she said, and the boys would only get bigger and stronger as juniors and seniors.

In one scene, Hunt’s character confronts her boyfriend, played by John Stockwell, for getting into a fight with an opposing player who was flagged during a game for hitting her after the referee’s whistle.

TAMI: Listen, I don’t need you sticking up for me, alright? If I can’t take my hits out there like everybody else, I shouldn’t be out there.

SCOTT: No but you’re a girl, isn’t that what you said?

TAMI: Yes, but not when I’m playing.

SCOTT: Well, what are you, then?

TAMI: What do you mean, “What am I”?

SCOTT: Maybe putting on all those pads makes you forget that you’re a girl. I know what’s underneath.

TAMI: Look when I’m playing … When I’m not playing, I, I’m a girl, yes. But when I’m playing I’m not … a male, exactly, but I’m not … not a girl, either.

Maida was elected homecoming queen. Her teammates bought her dress for the event. She was definitely a girl. Today, however, Tami Maida would likely be encouraged towards a ‘nonbinary’ or transgender identity. She would be told that her interest in football makes her a boy, that she is in the wrong body and needs to be fixed.

In fact, girls simply do have the wrong bodies to compete with boys at football during adolescence, the very moment when all players are developing the skills that might take them to the college or professional game. No amount of family or community support can change the hard decisions that evolution, or God, made long ago about human biology.

Female football players are rare enough, but Tami Maida was unique for playing quarterback. Despite rules to protect them, quarterbacks are subject to hard knockdowns and tackles throughout the game. Maida was lucky that no boy in Philomath, Oregon had intact knees and better throwing skills — and she still had to admit that her quarterbacking days were done after one season.

It is not actually surprising that Maida chose quarterback, however. Females tend to fill ‘skills positions’ in football when they do play with males. Antoinette ‘Toni’ Harris played wide receiver and cornerback on the boys’ varsity team at Redford Union High School in Michigan. Harris was the second woman to ever receive a scholarship to play football in college. She said the NFL was her goal, but she never got close.

During 2018 and 2019, Harris played free safety at East Los Angeles College. It is a junior college, not a Division I, II, or III team. Harris got very little time on the field and recorded exactly three tackles and one tackle for loss during two seasons. Central Methodist University, an NAIA school in Missouri, then gave Harris a full-ride scholarship as a safety.

During the 2020 and 2021 seasons, however, Harris saw no game time and recorded zero tackles, interceptions, or other stats, despite remaining eligible and on scholarship the whole time. No woman has ever had a genuinely successful career in the men’s game.

Why placekicker is the most common position for women

ONE: At 5’5” and 120 pounds, Liz Heaston was never going to fill any position on the field except placekicker. A soccer star, she joined the Willamette University Bearcats in 1997 as their backup placekicker. Heaston made history on 18 October 1997 when she filled in for the injured first-string kicker against Linfield College, converting two extra points in a 27-0 victory, becoming the very first woman to ever score in a collegiate football game.

Her football career was extremely brief, appearing in just two games, missing her other two extra point attempts and never attempting a single field goal. This is the pattern for female placekickers, the most common position women have tried to fill on men’s teams. In every case, soccer was the woman’s first sport.

TWO: Becca Longo made 35 out of 38 point-after-touchdown (‘extra point’) attempts and converted her one field goal attempt at 30 yards as a senior on the Basha High School team in Chandler, Arizona during 2016. Longo signed a national letter of intent with Adams State University in Colorado, becoming the first woman to earn a college football scholarship at an NCAA Division I or II school.

Longo did not play her first season in 2017, being kept in reserve (‘redshirted’). The next year, she suffered an ankle injury and left Adams State without ever attempting a single kick of any kind. Her on-field NCAA record is zero games played and zero kicks attempted. Longo then joined the Gila River Hawks, a junior college team in the newly formed Hohokam Junior College Athletic Conference, but she recorded no stats there.

THREE: Leilani Armenta set five Ventura County football records during her junior and senior high school seasons in 2021 and 2022. Attending Jackson State University, a historically black campus, on a soccer scholarship, Armenta debuted on the Division I football field with a kickoff against Bethune-Cookman on 23 September, 2023. Five weeks later, she converted three extra points in a 40-14 victory, again after the first string kicker had been injured.

Armenta added one more extra point in 2024. She had converted all four of her extra point attempts in college, but attempted no field goals, when she graduated. During 2025, she signed a contract with the Mississippi Panthers of the Women’s National Football Conference (WNFC), a professional minor league that started up in 2019, when the NFL was in its 99th year of operations.

FOUR: In November 2020, amid a COVID-19-related kicker shortage at Vanderbilt, 6’2” (188 cm) tall Sarah Fuller joined the football team as a placekicker. On 28 November that year, she became the first woman to play in a ‘Power Five’ game in the Southeastern Conference with a second-half kickoff.

It was a squib kick, a kind of trick play in which the kicker deliberately makes the ball bounce along the ground instead of fly through the air. Fuller was able to try and convert two extra point attempts on 12 December against the Tennessee Volunteers. However, Vanderbilt lost the game 42-17. Like all of these women, Fuller ended her brief career without a single field goal attempt.

FIVE: The most famous female placekicker of all time is Lauren Silberman. She had never played competitive football at any level, in fact she had only been kicking a football for a couple of months as a new hobby, when she tried out for the NFL in 2013 at the age of 28.

Lauren Silberman participated in an NFL regional scouting combine at the New York Jets’ practice facility, becoming the first woman to compete in any official NFL tryout event. She attempted just two kickoffs, neither of them impressive at just 19 yards and 13 yards, before a quadriceps injury ended her tryout. While her performance drew significant media attention, with nearly two dozen outlets present at the scene, Silberman’s NFL career was over before it began.

We have now covered the very brief football careers of one quarterback, one defensive back, and five placekickers who were female. This position is one of the most protected on the field, with special rules that punish even incidental contact by defending players under normal circumstances. Kickers do the least running, blocking, and tackling of any position in football, indeed they only ever come on the field a few times per game. Yet even here, we find that women have never been competitive with men on the gridiron. Men’s football is a man’s world.

These days, women’s football has also become a man’s world, unfortunately.

Read more

During his sojourn as a detransitioned man, James Clifford “Elisa Rae” Shupe sought an attorney to help him “put gender identity on trial.” Sadly, no one would help a self-described mentally ill person sue the federal government just because he had changed his mind for the moment.

Their caution was justified. Shupe, who first made headlines by becoming the world’s first ‘nonbinary’ person, assumed another, new identity in 2023, and turned on another set of allies with the help of an indicted hacker and a liberal online outlet, Mother Jones.

Returning to transition did not help Mr. Shupe. Weeks after his ‘gender-affirming’ orchiectomy, the removal of his testicles, Shupe took his own life by hanging at the parking garage next to the Veterans Affairs medical center in Syracuse, New York in January 2025. He was 61.

This essay was originally published in two parts in 2023 that were subject to false reports under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by Mr. Shupe. The Distance chose to forego the drain on resources that would have been required to fight this legal battle. More than a year has passed since Shupe ended his life, so we are publishing this piece at last.

Share

“Please help me take these mother effers to court”

Shupe made headlines when he became the first legally “nonbinary” person in the United States at the age of 52.

Detransitioning three years later to new, far more subdued headlines, Shupe wanted to sue the Department of Veterans Affairs for aiding in the medicalization of his self-delusions.

In emails shared with The Distance by recipients, Shupe explains that “I have a 100% mental health rating from two federal government agencies, saying I’m batshit crazy since 2005.”

The story is consistent with Shupe’s writing elsewhere in 2021 and Twitter direct messages Shupe sent to our editor during the period in question.

In his emails, Shupe explains what that rating means in some detail:

100% Rating: The veteran has total occupational and social impairment due to symptoms such as gross impairment in thought process or communication, persistent delusions or hallucinations, grossly inappropriate behavior, persistent danger of hurting yourself or others, intermittent inability to perform day to day activities, disorientation of time and place, and memory loss of names of close relatives, own occupation, or name.

“My diagnosis at the VA has since been changed to a transvestic disorder with autogynephilia [AGP] and a paraphilia,” Shupe wrote. However, he later resumed denying that AGP even exists.

In these correspondences, Shupe drew parallels between his experience and episodes of “false memory syndrome” during the 1980s which led to false accusations of sexual abuse. His own story about himself kept changing.

“I did the same thing with my childhood with my sex change to female,” Shupe says, promising he can prove it. “I went back and constructed femininity that didn't exist that led me into the sex change.”

Shupe wanted to sue the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, a university hospital, “and the doctor who wrote the sex change letter claiming I'm non-binary.”

“I'll also be suing for emotional distress and pain and suffering because I had to get on National TV just like David Reimer and tell everyone what they did with me was a fraud.”

Shupe was referring to the most famous victim of pedophile sexologist John Money, who invented the concept of a ‘gender identity’ separate from the body. “And I can show just like Reimer that they're still using me even though I've reclaimed my male birth sex.”

Shupe said that he was never hospitalized for mental health before his “sex change” and complained of three “psych ward stays” during his “nonbinary” phase.

Claiming to be a victim of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), a term coined by Dr. Lisa Littman to describe and study female teenagers, Shupe was eagerly attaching his story to every buzzword in gender critical spaces, once again retroactively constructing a new memory of the past.

In 2023, Shupe was doing it all over again. His delusions had returned full force.

“My VA medical records are full of nothing but bad sexual behavior.”

Army barracks have always been rife with pornography. There are sex shops on the highway and a sex trade in the trailer parks. Hypermasculine military culture is not new, but Fort Hood has always been a soul-sucking environment.

Shupe got there in the late 1980s, at a time when “Jody calls,” marching cadences with misogynist lyrics, had only just disappeared from Army posts. Fort Hood could be a moral cesspit, and it all rubbed off on him like sex lube.

Soon after emerging as an openly AGP man, Shupe turned critical of “gender critical” women. Radical feminists who were disgusted by his paraphilias disgusted Shupe. Nor did he appreciate the broader “gender critical” discussion of AGP.

After a notorious appearance on Benjamin Boyce’s podcast, which the host took down for nearly a year at Shupe’s demand — he was mad at all the mean comments calling him a wife abuser — Shupe dropped off the radar in 2021, and no longer responded to our editor’s DMs on X. He had abandoned the account.

“My sexual behaviors were problematic because they frequently escalated,” Shupe wrote in a now-deleted confessional Substack post. “It was as if the paraphilias were breeding.” Emphasis is added:

I went from transvestitism to autogynephilia to masochism to eventually wanting to incorporate all of it into cuckolding. In 2019, I began to invite men over to our family home under the pretense that they would be having sex with me, something my wife reluctantly agreed to. But that wasn’t the truth behind what was going on. The reality was, I secretly wanted a man to seduce her and then use both of us as he desired during sexual activities in any ensuing relationship. Fortunately, as the men began to visit, my wife caught onto the sick game and put the brakes on it without allowing herself to become involved. After she did, I realized I needed help instead of psychologists further affirming my fictitious female gender identity.

During the period when Shupe was a man named Jamie, in between his “nonbinary” phase and his present full-blown AGP phase, his marriage was deeply damaged by his misbehavior. To be clear, that marriage seems intact when Shupe returned to being a “woman” and his wife was once again a “lesbian”.

In a now-deleted Medium post discussing his experiences at Fort Hood, Shupe explicitly linked his AGP to his wife’s gender nonconformity. Because she was not feminine, wore pants, cut her hair short, and did not enjoy playing dress-up, Shupe became the woman of his own imagination, leashed and ball-gagged for the BDSM pleasure of a man.

Per his Substack post, Shupe says that his wife was too afraid of divorce to say no at first. “I began to demand that my wife play the role of a straight man during marital sex, coercing her to satisfy my need to pretend that I was female,” he wrote.

“Should I relapse,” Shupe told The Daily Signal in 2020, “the correct response for others would be to promptly get me help.”

“Civilly commit me if necessary, if the relapse has progressed to self-harm. But do not, under any circumstances, indulge my past delusions or new ones.”

Sage advice that Mother Jones reporter Madison Pauly ought to have heeded. Instead, they published a story based on emails Shupe had provided from an email list organizing to support legislation against pediatric transition in Oregon. Participation in the democratic process was framed as a sinister conspiracy. Withholding sterilizing drugs and surgeries from children and denying certain mediocre male athletes the right to cheat at sports became actual violence, even genocide.

Then the nasty emails began to arrive from outraged trans rights activists, or maybe just one outraged trans rights activist named Jamie Shupe.

There is no gender critical conspiracy funded by the right

His new return to AGP and “trans identity” did not bring Shupe the level of attention he craved. Shupe never explicitly looked for a big money payoff, but he certainly seems to have imagined that someone would take up his crusade and make him famous, at the very least.

It is not hard to see how this aggrievement worked out. The recipients of his sick fetish porn emails include conservative activists with influence at the Idaho state house, as well as liberals and feminists, who have law degrees.

According to the story that apologists for the pediatric transition cult tell themselves, and the world, all of these people are motivated by fear and hate of transgender people, and funded by the well-heeled religious right.

But as Shupe found out, this is a nonsensical rationalization. No “gender critical” foundation or organization exists on the scale of, say, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Everything people do in this scene is a bake sale of monthly subscriptions, donations, and merch to gather funds for action. The conservative Alliance Defending Freedom does not take contingent cases like Shupe. Individual attorneys are smart enough to stay away from the wife-abusing madman.

There was never any “there” there. Shupe found that out. Then he got mad, and began his spiral.

The ball gag in the mouth of madness

Shupe’s now-deleted, but archived, essay on autogynephilia discusses his fetishism in great detail—with pictures. Passages from Shupe’s essay, as he wrote them, include the following, with emphasis added.

Physiologic autogynephilia comes from the work of Magnus Hirschfeld. He noted that some transvestites masturbated while fantasizing about themselves pregnant, lactating, or menstruating. Because my primary care doctors and psychologist’s mentors failed to teach them about Blanchard’s research on autogynephilia, it went unnoticed when I unknowingly confided that I was using a breast pump in an attempt to make my nipples larger. Me asking for the drug domperidone to induce lactation should have been a huge red flag to those who have treated me at Department of Veterans Affairs clinics and hospitals.

Behavioral autogynephilia encompasses activities such as when I have coerced my wife to forcefully feminize me, something I shamefully began to regret after coming to understand why I was doing it. Early on, I would don a wig, clothing that I imagined a woman wearing during housekeeping, and heels. Then I would engage in some half-hearted housework. Afterward, I would expect my wife to give me a sexual reward. Later down the road, after also developing another paraphilia, sexual masochism disorder, I demanded gratification get withheld as punishment. However, some of my worst behavior occurred when I began to demand that my wife play the role of a straight man during marital sex, coercing her to satisfy my need to pretend that I was a female.

In a now-deleted Wordpress essay titled “The Journey Back from Darkness,” written as “Elisa,” Shupe later apologized for “shamelessly exaggerating my sexual behaviors and using the work of Dr. Ray Blanchard, the hole-riddled theory of autogynephilia, to harm transgender women.”

Shupe getting prescribed domperidone to stimulate lactation and having a breast pump beside his desk had everything to do with autogynephilia. Each “prostate milking session” for reaching every “sissygasm” was autogynephilia.

Shupe enjoyed cross-dressing and teasing other men while fantasizing about being a cuckold in what seems like an especially sad threesome. He was the usual “trans woman” coping with “gender dysphoria”, which just so happened to look a lot like a man engaging in quite extreme fetishism.

Contemporary research on patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria indicates a high prevalence of borderline personality disorder. Despite the persistence of this finding across peer-reviewed literature, transgender activists deny any comorbidity exists at all.

In the 2003 Mother Jones article, Pauly and Shupe promoted Lupron, used to castrate sex offenders, for children suffering dysphoria. Shupe published his “Journey Back from Darkness” essay on March 8, 2023 — the same day as the Mother Jones hit piece.

In the Wordpress post, Shupe admitted having leaked others’ emails and their addresses (doxxing) while presenting himself as the endangered party. “I was offered anonymonity [sic], but turned it down because I deserve to get held accountable to [sic]”, he wrote. He wanted, nay demanded the attention.

Among Shupe’s factoids, we find him alleging that radical feminists were the ones who told John Money that “children were a blank slate who get molded into males or females with no consequences” — adding that radical feminists killed police officers and bombed federal buildings.

Shupe was featured in three pieces for The Daily Signal. Cross-posted from MercatorNet in 2017, Shupe complained that “taking too much estrogen” resulted in “swollen legs and feet” that led to necessary testing for blood clots, despite Shupe doing regular exercise.

“I should have been stopped, but out-of-control, transgender activism had made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no”, Shupe told Daily Signal in 2019. He blamed the government. “I’d learned how to become a female [sic] from online medical documents at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital website.”

Talking to Daily Signal again in 2020, Shupe seemed wistful as he described the sudden overwhelming attention he received for his nonbinary identification just a few years before.

When I officially ‘broke’ the gender binary, the media circus was spectacular. Media outlets from as far away as Germany cheered me on, celebrating my victory and embracing me as their latest LGBT hero. Before long, states were debating whether to recognize up to 73 gender identities, and gender activists testified about how those false-identities rooted in mere feelings were valid and real. For me, the celebration went on for months as I entertained reporters with tales of how I was the third gender: a special combination of male biology and a female gender identity. Of course, it was all a complete delusion, but journalists ate it up. Not once did they question me. And above all, I believed it. Having an official ‘X’ marker on my driver’s license served as validation from the government that I was, indeed, nonbinary.

The experience ruined Shupe by setting his expectations too high. Becoming ‘gender critical’ simply never received the same level of positive attention that he got for adopting his first political identity.

The sad conclusion

Shupe posted a note to Substack on or about Christmas Eve 2024 announcing his orchiectomy, the removal of his testicles. Shupe also intended to undergo penectomy and vaginoplasty in the new year, deeming them “life-saving” interventions. It is worth noting that half of men who regret this procedure do so instantly.

Shupe seems to have deleted his entire “Elisa Rae Shupe” Substack in early to mid-January. This deletion occurred at about the same time Shupe was transferred to the inpatient psychiatry unit.

Then Shupe was discharged 21 January, the day after Inauguration Day. He reportedly hanged himself six days later, about one month after his “life-saving” orchiectomy. However, Shupe was not identified in the scant local and national press coverage.

Instead, news website Syracuse.com referred to a “transgender veteran” who had “hanged themselves” while “wrapped in a body-length transgender pride flag.” Shupe’s body was reported to police “at about 11:15 a.m.”

While authorities refused to identify the deceased, a “queer veteran” posted Shupe’s alleged suicide note on Substack. (Credit to Exulansic for spotting it and sharing it with us.) It is a spasmodic, radicalized disavowal of America, the military, God, and Elon Musk, opening with: “Fuck You America!”

“The white man decimated and massacred the indigenous populations of the third gender on the lands now called America,” Shupe declared of a newly-reelected Donald Trump. “It was only fitting that a white person restored it.”

Borrowed from radical queer revisionism, this racist pseudo-history of Native Americans supposedly being clueless about who the women were, or how to make babies, was supposed to be Shupe’s answer to Trump’s executive order barring VA from doing any more “gender affirming” orchiectomies.

For as Shupe’s tragic spiral demonstrates, transgender psychosurgeries do not in fact save lives. Indeed, medicalization clearly played an important role in Shupe’s drastic mental decline, and he once again blamed the Department of Veterans Affairs for his problems.

“I don’t want your health care to treat the mental illnesses you caused,” Shupe wrote. “I don’t want more psychiatric ward commitments to keep me alive in a nation that I despise.” Demanding that his ashes be spread in international waters without an American flag in sight, Shupe’s suicide note refused “any military honors or ceremonies to mark my death.”

My death is not a surrender.

My death as a member of the third gender and transgender population does not mean you won.

It solely marks the end of our association.

“You cannot erase non-binary and transgender people because you give birth to more of us each day,” Shupe concluded before erasing himself. He wanted his death to count as a noble sacrifice of self rather than a deranged act of passive-aggressive violence.

The alternative, after all, was to admit that the magic was not real, that the spell of gender identity does not work, and the medicalized Skoptsy cult of self-castration does not belong in taxpayer-provided services to American veterans. It would mean that Trump was right, which would have been a moral catastrophe for James Shupe.

We agree with the late Mr. Shupe that VA should not perform elective sterilizing surgeries on patients with 100% mental health ratings and documented paraphilias. We consider his life, his family’s trauma, and his death as Exhibit A for why this prohibition should be made law, not just administrative policy.

Subscribe now

New experimental evidence strongly suggests that mammals cannot sustain reproduction without the genetic shuffling provided by the sex binary.

Rather than promote evolution, denial of the human sex binary advances the cause of human extinction. For some leftist academics, this was probably always the real point of pushing such nonsense in the first place.

Fifty-eight generations into a 20-year experiment that cloned more than 1,200 female mice, the newborn animals died within a day of birth due to massive genetic errors that had built up in their DNA.

Japanese scientists watched the X chromosomes of male mice break up and disappear. Rather than evolve, the cloned mice eventually all died.

As part of the experiment, researchers pulled mice from the 20th, 50th, and 55th generations, then gave them normal reproductive lives. While the first resulting generation still had abnormalities and smaller litters, these problems were absent by the second generation.

This suggests “that mammals rely on sexual rather than asexual reproduction to eliminate genetic anomalies caused by clonal reproduction.”

Put simply, binary sexual reproduction increases genetic diversity, which is probably essential for human evolutionary success. Too little genetic diversity might even explain why our evolutionary cousins, such as Neanderthalensis, died out.

Share

These results align very well with Muller’s ratchet theory, an evolutionary hypothesis that asexual populations irreversibly accumulate harmful mutations over time. Each generation increases the genetic drift (the ‘ratchet’ effect). Researchers began to see it happening after the 25th generation of cloning mice.

“Across more than 30,000 nuclear transfer attempts spanning 58 generations, our study provides the first empirical demonstration that mutational meltdown, as predicted by Muller’s ratchet, can indeed occur in mammals”, they write.

Moreover, the results of the experiment “reaffirm the evolutionary inevitability that sexual reproduction is indispensable for the long-term survival of mammalian species.” To give up the sex binary is to give up on human survival.

Here is Anton Petrov explaining the study. His channel is worth subscribing to if you enjoy space and science news delivered in a neutral tone with a soothing voice. He is very good at explaining complex cosmological topics.

This experiment refutes the alleged findings of philosopher-biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling that the human sex binary does not exist. Without the X and Y chromosomal binary in sexual reproduction, humans would not exist as a species.

The new evidence also upends the work of Agustín Fuentes, who argues that “there is need to move past the sex and gender binary” and calls on readers to “do everything we can to make that happen”. He is effectively calling for extinction.

So-called ‘scientists’ who call for “inclusive” understandings of anatomy on the basis of a “spectrum” are not scientists at all, they are just activists writing in scientific journals.

Any politician, such as the daft Maggie Chapman of the Scottish Greens, who claims that “sex is not binary and immutable” is telling on themselves as a big fan of human extinction.

Attempts to socially, politically, or medically blur the sex binary must inevitably return to the very binary they deny when it is time to reproduce. Technological substitutes will not work, long-term. They will instead produce disasters.

Technology has real limitations to its promises for utopia. A genderless world cannot sustain the human race. It is posthumanism, a siren call to species extinction, though what it actually does is select which humans will be allowed to found the next generation.

Denial of the sex binary only works on those who believe it, and leaves the world to those who ignore it. By default, the future belongs to the humans who understand that the sex binary is real.

Subscribe now

During a hearing in Sacramento, detransitioner Jonni Skinner spoke against Wiener’s bill, SB 934, which would ostensibly ban therapeutic professionals from having exactly the exploration that Skinner needed, and never got.

Wiener became visibly uncomfortable as Skinner explained that gender affirmation left him anorgasmic at the age of 23.

“They poisoned my body puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, arresting my puberty and arresting my development. The result: I’m a 23-year-old gay man who has never had an orgasm, and may never experience one.”

Berns captured Wiener’s unsettled reaction.

Wiener has listened without visible reaction, displaying boredom and even contempt, on the many occasions when women begged him not to lock up women with violent men.

Wiener has expressed contempt for women who campaign to keep women’s sports for women only. He has never listened to them.

Female detransitioners have told him horrific stories similar to Skinner’s, but they say he will stare at his phone in hearings, or simply avoid looking at them.

The one ex-trans story that has ever gotten to Scott Wiener, a gay man, is the plea from a young gay man who cannot have sex as an adult because genderwoo frauds started his ‘sex change’ when he was a child, before he had ever had sex.

Share

Did it not occur to Wiener that this was happening? Did he simply never expect to be confronted with it? We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter.

This story clearly got to him. Wiener does not want to think about young gay men who never get to have an orgasm in their lives because of something he supported.

Here is a close-up of the moment when Scott Wiener had to deal with his discomfort. What is he doing with his fingers? Why did his collar suddenly not fit right?

Now, I am no expert in body language, but this does seem like the fidgeting of a man realizing that something is very wrong, something that he dares not say aloud.

Here are frames of the video from the moment when Wiener was touching his mouth with his fingers. Beth Bourne took them. This looks like a nervous motion, it does not appear to be a natural face-scratch.

The obvious implication here is that we have found a weak spot in the man’s armor. Now, that does not mean his mind is amenable to change. It does not mean Wiener can be convinced that he is wrong, or that his policy stances do lasting damage to the Democratic Party, let alone children.

What it does mean is that if you put Scott Wiener in front of a camera and make him listen to a long line of anorgasmic gay young men harmed by ‘gender medicine’, he will probably squirm and touch his face in the throes of neurosis from the cognitive dissonance.

Fam, how do we make that happen? We have to make it happen. Political agitation is the art of getting heard. Scott Wiener heard Jonni Skinner, indeed he actually heard a detransitioner for the first time in his career.

If we now know his weakness, the trick is to be ruthless, consistent, and persistent in our exploitation. He has shown no mercy, so he deserves no peace.

Subscribe now

The Los Angeles media production job market is 30 percent smaller than it was in 2022, when credit became more expensive due to the war in Ukraine. So-called ESG (environmental, social, and governance) capital — Vanguard and Blackrock — could no longer afford to prioritize the engineering of western societies over profitability. It was the beginning of a decline in LGBTQ+ ‘representation’ and the beginning of a process that will likely result in limited reach for future rainbow-themed content. Economics, not ‘hate’, will force these changes. The trends have been underway for years already.

Two more of the devastating impacts on the Hollywood labor market were self-inflicted wounds. The first was the double-whammy 2023 strikes by SAG-AFTRA and WGA, the latter union demanding and winning new make-work rules that predictably resulted in a reduction of the number of shows and movies being made. The second wound, also self-inflicted, was the new Hollywood machinery of intersectional stunt-casting and creative talent pools selected by DEI checkboxes. Audiences stopped wanting what the film industry was making.

Share

The slump in the Los Angeles media job market exactly correlates with the disappearance of the audience from movie theaters as the the quality of the movies plummeted. Too many dependable franchises and properties have been destroyed by woke programming, now: Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, DC, Indiana Jones, the list is long. Consumers voted with their wallets, leaving the industry financially exposed. First to go have been the underperformers.

A third economic force was at work that whole time, working both for and against Hollywood: taxpayer-provided subsidies (‘incentives’). Last week, The Wall Street Journal called attention to Democratic Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove of Los Angeles, whose district was previously represented by the city’s current mayor, Karen Bass, and a Burbank hearing focused on enacting a federal production tax incentive for the United States. Hollywood has lost production to foreign shooting locations with more generous government incentives.

In response, California has already raised its production incentive limit to $750 million annually through 2030. Qualifying productions can receive credits up to 35% of their contracted budget or or more. However, the phrase “qualifying productions” reveals a problem that red tape-addicted California creates for itself. Not only are the rules for shooting in the SoCal region onerous, requiring more use of more expensive union labor, they complicate the bookkeeping for innovative small producers.

For these reasons, the Golden State had already been losing production hours to other American states as well as overseas. Federal incentives will not fix the problems of California and Los Angeles that lost shooting business to Georgia, let alone fix the culture of Hollywood that churns out propagandistic crap audiences abhor.

Read more

Transgender people are invisible today, but only for today. They become visible again at midnight.

For the rest of the year, transgender people are the most visible people on the planet. That’s because transgender people are the most marginalized and invisible community in the world, so that every day requires a reminder of their existence.

Recognition of the existence of transgender people is so important that a liturgical calendar of trans days, months, weeks, and trans-centered LGBTQ+ celebrations has been necessary to make the world see them.

Today is the only day of the year when we are not reminded that transgender people exist. They become invisible, stop centering themselves, step out of the spotlight, and let other kinds of people exist, such as women, or homosexuals.

The founder of the Trans Day of Visibility, Rachel Crandall-Crocker, became impossible to see at midnight. Hallelujah, our eyeballs turn to heaven in thanksgiving and praise for the sweet relief of not seeing him.

Share

Yesterday, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is allegedly a Supreme Court justice, actually said that “there is no right to practice medicine which is not subordinate to the power of states” as the the lone dissent in Chiles v. Salazar, which overturned a Colorado law against so-called ‘conversion therapy’.

Colorado made it illegal for a therapist to see a patient as male or female and struggling. Instead, the legislature required every clinician to see a transgender person, thus counseling and treating the identity instead of the person. Justice Jackson approves of the state using its constitutional power to enforce this visibility.

In her dissent against the 2025 Skrmetti decision, however, Jackson opposed the right of the Tennessee legislature to ban sex changes for kids. Naturally, Jackson was upholding the visibility of ‘trans kids’, there.

She stands on either side of the United States Constitution according to whether it empowers the groomers of these children for a medicalization regimen that supposedly makes their ‘true selves’ visible to the world.

For her next trick, Jackson will stand on both sides of parental rights. She supported the ‘right’ of parents to chemically castrate and surgically alter the genitals of their children in 2025. In the Mirabelli case, however, watch as ‘Justice’ Jackson opposes the constitutional rights of parents to know about their child’s secret ‘gender identity’ at school.

She will always be on the side of the parental rights issue that makes the ‘trans kids’ visible. This is the only consistency to her views on any matter involving the political project of transgender identity as a ‘civil rights movement’.

The word ‘transgender’ overrides both Constitution and principles. To Jackson, this is what it means to be a good person. She is not unique. She is far too common.

David Mishook is a partner in a law firm that represents the Mirabelli School District. He says the Supreme Court has made it very clear how they will rule in the Mirabelli case, if it is the parental rights case they eventually hear.

Mishook also acknowledges that the SCOTUS was very clear that parents have a right to know about their child’s identity at school and direct their religious upbringing, which is to say that parents are allowed to keep their kids out of the LGBTQMOUSE cult that thrives at school.

But Mishook also expresses “concerns” and “confusion” with the result. “It does not mandate that staff disclose a child’s gender identity”, he says, emphasizing the supposed nuance that children might not want their parents to know something that they have an absolute right to know, and that this should matter most.

School staff are now prohibited from lying to parents, Mishook says, but that does not mean they must tell the parents. They can keep the secret until the parents ask.

This is the one neat trick for families. California parents must “directly ask” their child’s teachers and counselors and administrators whether secret pronouns and a change closet are part of their school day.

Otherwise, they won’t be in on the secret fun.

For now, all the secrecy practices are still in place, Mishook says. “What this case is narrowly about” is parents, whereas “we may not discriminate against a child’s gender identity”.

Only the political identity of the child is allowed to be visible to California school personnel, who will still keep the mystery in their hearts unless put to the question by parents with religious views.

Here, we find that every day at school is meant to be a Transgender Day of Visibility for everyone inside the building, but also every day is meant to be Transgender Day of Invisibility at home, where parents might have objections to their child joining a medicalized cult of self-harm.

The ‘transgender community’ stands on both sides of the visibility issue. For 364 days of the year, they are “invisible”, requiring constant society-wide efforts to make them feel seen.

Inconvenient truths are consistently buried, rendered invisible, so that they do not ‘harm the transgender community’.

‘Trans kids’ are so important that they must become the most visible members of their classroom society, then also kept hidden from their own parents, then also celebrated loudly and visibly by our social and political elites for the special courage required to be their special selves.

Visibility might as well mean focus, in this context. Transgender activism wants the murder of any transgender person to have visibility. Transgender activism wants the transgender murderer to have minimal visibility.

We are meant to focus on the positives and miss the negatives.

‘Trans men’ — women who call themselves men — are visible when they get pregnant, but seldom for any other reason. Indeed, many young women who transition are trying to escape male attention in some way, sometimes for the most saddening of reasons. Ellen Page the actress became a very visible ‘trans man’ and a nearly invisible actor.

For men, the inherent male sexuality of their interest in transgenderism is almost always something to keep invisible. Julia Serano has described his autogynephilia in excruciating detail as a self-discovery narrative, making it visible through a rosy filter, even while objecting to the very concept of autogynephilia. It is not only invisible, it does not even exist, Serano says.

Transgender bathroom access is a highly-visible issue. The paraphilic purposes of men being in female restrooms, such as fishing used tampons out of the trash to achieve sexual arousal by mimicking menstruation, are kept invisible.

Men who rape and abuse women in women’s prisons are invisible, while the women locked up with them are even more invisible.

While this travesty was enacted by soft-minded judges, the public was simultaneously subjected to Orange Is The New Black, a show about women in prison that used a transgender character to make such ‘acceptance’ seem acceptable and normal.

Naturally, the show was hailed for making a marginalized community visible.

None of this was accidental. To date, all policy achievements obtained by the transgender lobby have been won through pressure rather than popular politics. This was a conscious choice by the genderwoo lobby.

A case in point is the November 2019 ‘Dentons Document’, so called because it was put together with the advice of the global law firm of the same name, one of the world’s biggest, and therefore most visible.

Dentons specifically advised the IGLYO organization to attach ‘trans rights’ to more popular causes, starting with gay rights, and keep unpopular policy demands out of the public discussion.

Visible causes would obscure the horrific policy programs to make them invisible to the masses.

Yesterday, on the International Day of Transgender Visibility, Vincent Lundgren and Colin Wright published an exposé of the moral panic that the Human Rights Campaign has created for a decade about supposedly high rates of murder among transgender-identified men.

Literally nothing HRC says about this topic is true. “Transgender people are less likely to be murdered than the rest of the population, most transgender people are murdered by members of their own race, and intimate partner violence — not hate — is the leading identified motive for most such murders”, they write.

White supremacy is not involved in the cases HRC has cited as examples of hate. Cross-dressing was never a major concern of actual white supremacist movements; that is, transgenderism was never that visible to the KKK.

The actual rate of homicide victimization among the ‘transgender community’ is lower than average. Other than violent black men who murder their intimate partners, no one is actually killing transgender people at a noticeable rate.

Even then, “black ‘transgender women’ are about a third as likely as their non-transgender, same-sex peers to be murdered.” This very visible cause, the trans person of color being the special target of hate, is entirely fabricated.

Transgender people are one of the safest demographics ever studied.

Meanwhile, HRC has become reticent about actual, real, not-imaginary human rights causes. At times, this can seem like schizophrenia, for example when HRC supports single-sex restrooms in the Third World but opposes them in the First World.

The only consistency is that the transes get whatever they want, whenever they want it. As soon as toilet trips to Africa become popular among the world’s most visible paraphiliacs, HRC will flip on that issue, too.

It is the first day of April. Transgender people are invisible today, but only for today. They become visible again at midnight. Don’t feed them.

Subscribe now

Arianna Laureano is a Seattle area man who allegedly turns 35 next month. While he describes himself as a homosexual transsexual (HSTS) in some forums, on various platforms like GroobyGirls, Shemalez, and TrannyDemonTV, Mr. Laureano identifies as bisexual and transgender instead.

He says that he underwent vaginoplasty as a young man, but we assess that he was about 28 years old when he was first altered. Ari also claims that he was groomed into the procedure by an older man (his “pimp”), but we have reason to doubt the veracity of this origin-story. It sounds to us like a fetish fantasy talking.

As far as we can ascertain factually, the man who “trafficked” him was convicted of possessing pornographic images of minors in 2015, one year after Mr. Laureano says he “fled” his “pimp”. Furthermore, before he was convicted, Mr. Laureano signed paperwork to assist his former “trafficker” with the movement of his goods.

Our doubts about people have proven valid before. We doubt all of this man’s stories about himself. We assess that Mr. Laureano is an autogynephile, or AGP. An autogynephile is a man in love with his self-image as a woman. Mr. Laureano has claimed for the last two years that he was detransitioning, but he is still listed as female in official documents. He has also claimed to be married to a man, but he now admits this was also false. It is, again, his fetish fantasy.

The Distance has reviewed Ari Laureano’s career since 2021 after his violent communications regarding a Jewish ex-trans woman came to light. We have found abundant evidence that Mr. Laureano was never acting in good faith as he approached the detransition community. His story about himself has changed too many times to trust that any part of it is true.

We are not the first group to draw the same conclusion. In that light, we consider these messages to be revealing of the true, unstable character of Mr. Laureano.

Mr. Laureano has systematically attacked and undermined desistance and detransition organizing since 2024 using false accusations and smears. It is rich to watch someone who lies about his own detransition accuse anyone else of being a fake ex-trans person.

Mr. Laureano has leveraged the aid and assistance of at least one other prominent antagonist of detransitioners, as well as prominent detransitioners who had their own personal scores to settle. Everything is explained below. It is rich watching this clique of Cluster B chaos agents claim that anyone else is a “fake” when their friend and circus ringmaster Ari is a perfect fraud.

This campaign of defamation, which has tarnished the reputations of people and organizations for months, ends today.

Any cause which has Ari Laureano involved in any capacity should automatically be considered a cancel mob, and their cause unjust. Mr. Laureano is an inveterate liar with an agenda that makes no sense to anyone except himself: a chaos agent with bad intentions.

The people who helped him are named below. Shame on them.

Share

We begin with the newly-minted ‘Miss’ Laureano learning to bake and campaigning against rent in the covid year of 2020. “If the state doesn’t find some way to relieve that burden from me, I’m going to be homeless when the eviction moratorium goes away.” Laureano already owed $5,000 in back rent when he spoke to a local TV station. “They’re going to destroy the working class”.

One year later, Ari was still fighting the rent as a representative of the working class in cooperation with the Washington Poor People's Campaign (this is real) and Seattle Democratic Socialists of America. Over the next four years, his politics were entirely scrambled, but delivered in the same superficial tone, with new, borrowed language. Mr. Laureano is a social chameleon, imitating his environment to fit in. We assess that he never actually became ‘based’.

Cancel culture castrati

Mr. Laureano appeared in a 2022 press event (see above) to launch the Seattle City Council campaign of Matthew Mitnick, who seemed like the dream candidate for the progressive youth wing, being in college as well as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Mr. Laureano was co-founder of the campaign committee.

It did not go well. Mitnick’s erstwhile campaign manager, Bailey Medilo, a high schooler and SDSA member, complained of malfeasance after he was set aside for someone with fewer complaints from his peers. Mr. Medilo complained that Mitnick was “abusive”. He whined that the political candidate had used an “incredibly callous and threatening tone” and cut him off when he started to cry.

Mr. Mitnick was exonerated of corruption, but his candidacy did not recover from the horrific revelation that he had refused to let a crybaby run his campaign. While we have no information about what role, if any, Mr. Laureano may have played in these scurrilous events, we decided to include the episode because it is uncanny how his own defamation campaigns resemble Mitnick’s.

• Fake an accusation of wrongdoing by someone. Anyone

• Enlist other people and platforms to cancel them (in this case, The Stranger)

• Express indignity at the embarrassment when lies are inevitably exposed

Mr. Medilo felt totally justified in his false accusations because it hurt so badly to fail. This is not how an adult person thinks. It is how Ari thinks. Whereas Mr. Medilo was 17 at the time, Ari is in his thirties. He has no excuse.

For that matter, Mr. Laureano was already in his thirties when he stood next to Matthew Mitnick representing “the youth of Seattle”. What excuse was he using then? To the surprise of zero TERFs, his new identity as a woman was giving him the girlhood he had been so cruelly denied.

His “youth” was borrowed, just like his styles.

We will spare you the images and descriptions. Before Mr. Laureano had his sex organs removed, he displayed them prominently in pornographic photo shoots with men younger than himself as “Laurie James”. These images are available to anyone who wants to go find them. They are an offense to the universe. However, they also prove that he was not transitioned as a younger man.

We suggest that developmental delay and deviance explains Mr. Laureano completely. A passive-aggressive, impulsive streak has always been visible and it has always been linked to his transsexualism.

Mr. Laureano was embedded in sexology and transmedicalist activism and associated himself with figures like Brianna Wu until 2024, when he turned on his ‘community’. For a time, he claimed to be heavily influenced by Phil Illy. (Longtime readers will recall our editor’s dissection of Mr. Illy’s batshit book.) Laureano’s extensive online identity history includes accounts such as Honestly__Anna, TruthfulTS, and The Truthful Transsexual podcast.

In one X profile, Mr. Laureano also identifies as a National Socialist, that is, a Nazi, as well as a “Blanchardian”, referring to the so-called Blanchard typology of transsexualism named for Ray Blanchard, who first identified the HSTS and AGP types clinically in 1989. Dr. Blanchard is Jewish. EDIT: We have learned he is not in fact Jewish.

Mr. Laureano has claimed that he was transitioned by secret programs; that AGPs are taking over society; that Jews living in Germany are responsible for pediatric transition medicine; that gender critical organizations are tracking his every move and hiding the truth from him. He is especially obsessed with Ashkenazi Jews over the Sephardim, for some reason.

All criticism and boundaries are a conspiracy against Mr. Laureano. Ari is never accountable for anything he does. Caught fantasizing about brutalizing a Jewish woman, Ari blamed everyone but himself, indulging a fit of self-pity. He has since deleted almost all of his tweets on his main account, then resumed going after people.

Share

We suggest that there is more than a little bit of self-loathing involved in all of Mr. Laureano’s actions.

On X, he regularly abuses gay men — he tells them to “die of AIDS” — as well as lesbian women. Despite being allegedly bisexual, and demanding recognition of his LGBTQI2S+ membership, Ari gets very upset whenever anyone calls him “gay”. He sometimes uses a goat emoji to tease the word ‘faggot’. He wants to be special without being simple.

Mr. Laureano does seem to have dropped his female persona for a time. However, he does not appear to have stopped taking estrogen at any point. Indeed, Mr. Laureano was purchasing estrogen powder in bulk and storing it at home in case HRT ever became illegal for adults.

He has said explicitly that detransition would be “destructive” for him. He has written that “detrans was a trap”. Still, he has been invited to speak and attend events including detransitioners because volunteer organizers did not know better.

In one early case we know about, the organizer was being strategically diverse with their speaking invitations in order to have the event held at all. We are not going to put the organizers on blast. On the contrary, we are giving them all fair warning for the future, here.

Too many good people have extended far too much courtesy and credulity to Mr. Laureano. Ari took this generosity and openness as his cue to become an expert on who the “real detransitioners” are, so that he can denounce anyone who does not fit his own definition of something he is not.

As we shall see, this made him useful to some very self-interested people in the world of detransition advocacy, as well as the enemies of detransition advocacy.

We suggest this behavior is simply typical of Mr. Laureano, though. He did not happen as part of someone’s conspiracy. He displays recurring instability online, cycling between harassment campaigns and emotional collapses, always reframing himself as a victim after blowing up every community he enters.

Mr. Laureano always announces that he is leaving the X app, attacks everyone who is ‘forcing’ him to leave, and then refuses to leave after all, redoubling his attacks.

Arianna Laureano is a functional, yet mentally disturbed man. This eventually becomes clear to anyone who interacts with him long enough. Everyone who has sought to advance their own agenda through his smear campaigns has earned your side-eye instead of your trust.

They knew what he is.

Defamation character

Mr. Laureano has established a pattern of fixating on organizations and individuals, turning angry when they reject him. At the time this is being published, he is attempting to draw Genevieve Gluck into his orbit by mentioning her favorably. She has already taken the bait and he is already rubbishing her. It is a matter of time before she rejects him, whereupon he will attack her.

Laureano’s first foray into disrupting GC communities took place in X spaces hosted by Gays Against Groomers. Mr. Laureano even attended GAG events in person until the X space hosts finally blocked him in September 2024, when his commentary towards the organization became hostile.

Most recently, Mr. Laureano has developed a vendetta against whistleblower Jamie Reed and her LGBCC co-founder Lauren Leggieri. One accusation he has amplified regards their fundraising. Reed and Leggieri did no significant fundraising until 2025, when they began to reimburse detransitioners for travel to testify in state capitols.

We understand that Mr. Laureano’s grudge began with a rejection for this program when he was deemed too unstable. His peeve has escalated into a cancel campaign against Reed and LGBCC built on top of a smear campaign against two detransitioners. It is lies all the way down.

Mr. Laureano had help in this endeavor. We shall now examine the clique of individuals behind Mr. Laureano.

Prisha Mosley

Ms. Mosley has socially and medically detransitioned, though she remains legally male. Her story is very compelling, and her case is very solid, if it can ever get to trial. However, Ms. Mosley has attracted an unhealthy set of friends characterized by Cluster B behavior, Mr. Laureano being just one.

It is important to note that while Laureano acts as her attack dog, Ms. Mosley is very careful to avoid any direct responsibility for his actions. Nevertheless, she plays a clear public and private role in his pressure campaigns.

Ms. Mosley contacted our editor Matt Osborne on 23 August. In direct messages, Mosley referred Osborne to Simon Amaya Price, an ex-trans young man, as a source to report on a story that Laureano was pushing.

Osborne had met Amaya Price at last year’s Federal Trade Commission hearing. Mr. Amaya Price testified next to his father, who became emotional when he described the suicide extortion of clinicians proposing to neuter his son.

In August, Ms. Mosley called Mr. Amaya Price “very diplomatic and kind” when referring him to our editor. Within weeks, however, she began denouncing him as a sexual predator, offering no evidence. Our assessment is that Mr. Amaya Price juggled romantic interests as many indecisive young men do.

Ms. Mosley first pressed Reed and LGBCC in private to take action against Mr. Amaya Price on the basis of an unsubstantiated allegation that he had sexually victimized two ex-trans women.

At the time, Ms. Claire Abernathy was one of the putative victims of Mr. Amaya Price’s alleged assaults. She was also Ms. Mosley’s nanny. This friendship would soon dissolve.

Abernathy denies that she was ever a victim of Mr. Amaya Price. In fact, she tells The Distance that her friendship with Ms. Mosley soured over her own refusal to denounce Mr. Amaya Price at Mosley’s whim. Mosley began to accuse Abernathy of helping Price groom a second woman.

In December, after the friendship between Ms. Mosley and Ms. Abernathy had diminished, Ms. Mosley began to accuse Abernathy of criminal participation in a new supposed assault by Simon on a third woman.

Most of the evidence of this campaign of character assassination has disappeared. That is because so many of the people who spread lies about Mr. Amaya Price and Ms. Abernathy deleted their lies, once those lies were exposed. Ms. Mosley’s comments are left standing alone in many places.

Ms. Mosley maintains that Jamie Reed ignored her complaints about Mr. Amaya Price. This is false. Reed and Leggeiri have no staff, but they still investigated the allegations against Amaya Price very thoroughly and spoke to everyone involved over three days.

Being a nonprofit organization, they have acted professionally by not releasing any statements. Ms. Mosley could learn something about professionalism, here.

Mr. Amaya Price has never had any leadership role with LGBCC and was never authorized to speak for them as a volunteer. He was one of the young detransitioners whose travel the organization reimbursed. He has not said or done anything related to LGBCC since October.

We also note that during the months of November and December, at the very same time Ms. Mosley was agitating for Jamie Reed to be canceled over Mr. Amaya Price, he was also featured in a documentary by the International Women’s Forum.

IWF gave the documentary heavy promotion on X, but Ms. Mosley never mentioned the organization even once in public. In fact, Mr. Laureano also never put public pressure on IWF. None of these people have. We have confirmed that that Ms. Mosley complained to the organization in private.

We have also confirmed that Ms. Mosley is a paid ambassador of IWF. She knows better than to risk her income with public attacks against the organization that supports her.

We know of one other organization that was contacted by this campaign of personal destruction that stopped working with Mr. Amaya Price out of an abundance of caution. We note that this organization has not been defamed the way LGBCC has, and we suggest an explanation below.

While she has given no sign of personal animus against LGBCC, Ms. Mosley hangs out in private direct message chats with people who clearly do hold a grudge, starting with Mr. Laureano. We suggest that her best interests have not been foremost in the minds of this peer group.

Leta Boylan

Leta Boylan aka Leta LaStrange aka TerfNurse spoke during the Federal Trade Commission panel on gender medicine last year. Her testimony is at the 6:03:08 mark in this video of the panel.

Boylan claimed that while she worked as a nurse in Wausau, Wisconsin, a female patient “nearly bled out” when her ovaries “virtually exploded”. She claimed that on some days in the youth mental health ward, “every single female was trans identified”. She claimed that Medicaid fraud was “openly discussed” in reference to gender-affirming ‘care.’

These claims may have varying degrees of truth to them, though we are quite sure that ovaries do not actually explode. Sadly, The Distance has confirmed that Boylan’s story was not vetted before the panel. Her invitation was an accident in a volunteer movement and should not be repeated.

The stridency of Boylan’s FTC testimony gives us pause because of the setting and the later circumstances. She appeared alongside Jamie Reed and Tamara Pietzke, who both had highly-engaging stories about the consequences of whistleblowing, whereas Boylan said nothing about the consequences of her own whistleblowing.

That is because she had nothing to say about something that never happened.

Ms. Boylan was not fired from her job for blowing a whistle. The Distance has confirmed that Ms. Boylan lost her nursing job for administering medication without an order from a prescribing authority.

In an email dated Monday, 9 December 2024, Boylan admits to a coworker she was actually fired after administering medicine. Ms. Boylan writes that the nursing manager at North Central Health Care in Wausau explained to her that “I was being fired for giving a medication without an order”.

Ms. Boylan is a fake whistleblower.

The Distance has obtained information that suggests Ms. Boylan’s life turned upside-down around the time of her firing. She appears to have had an acrimonious divorce in which her ex-husband has won everything, while a court has also removed her guardianship over an adult man.

Sources speaking off the record tell The Distance that Ms. Boylan has developed a jealous streak towards Ms. Reed. She has for example accused LGBCC of hiding their IRS 990 forms — a shrill and specious charge that Mr. Laureano and others have amplified.

LGBCC first filed an IRS 990 in 2024, reporting very little income. As we mentioned above, reimbursing the travel of detransitioners in 2025 was the first significant fundraising effort the organization had ever undertaken.

The IRS document will be made available on the government website in 2026 in accordance with federal law. Ms. Boylan will see it the same time everyone else does.

As if attempting to unseat a rival, Ms. Boylan pressured Reed to denounce Mr. Amaya Price. Boylan has confessed her intense dislike for Mr. Amaya Price ever since the FTC panel to other people.

It has never been clear why Ms. Boylan expected LGBCC to do anything about the putative assault of a detransitioned young woman in a state where neither she nor Ms. Reed lived.

Boylan texted a parent volunteer with LGBCC in early December claiming “we have a rape victim” whose “vagina was bleeding after sex with Simon” and that “Jamie is not going to survive this” scandal.

Based on all the information and evidence we have seen, we assess these claims were quite simply false.

Not simply a mischaracterization: they were completely fabricated.

Leading a public cancel mob on X, Boylan called Ms. Reed on 8 December in an attempt to force her into a public denunciation of Mr. Amaya Price, which Ms. Reed declined to do.

As a professional organization, LGBCC was not about to launder baseless allegations on behalf of Ms. Boylan.

Sources close to the organization, who have heard the recording Ms. Reed made of the conversation, describe Boylan’s phone call behavior as “absolutely insane”.

Share

To underline the point: We assess that the story that the Cluster B Clique tells — the story in which Mr. Amaya Price and Ms. Abernathy forced themselves on a detransitioned woman we shall call K.T. — is frankly and purely false.

We have reviewed too many communications in this absurd ‘scene’, looked at every screenshot, and talked to principal witnesses. We conclude that no rape or assault occurred at all on or about 30 November. We will stand by this conclusion in any courtroom.

It would likely be impossible to prove that such an assault took place, even if any evidence for it existed, because the public behavior of the Cluster B Clique has likely abrogated any rights to victim relief that K.T. might have had, once. They have not served her interests at all. They are not legitimate victim advocates.

We find that adult detransitioned people are allowed to have sex if they want to, and that it is nobody else’s business. It is particularly evil that moral scolds with such peccable credentials would burn detransitioned young people at the proverbial stake for having sex like adults. Shame on these Puritans.

By putting the private business of young adults on blast, Leta Boylan has violated the ethics of her nursing profession — and likely set herself up on the wrong end of any defamation litigation that might come out of this affair. Again: we are happy to testify, if needed.

Among the topics we asked her about is a rumored romance with yet another fake detransitioner who has a clearly destructive agenda.

Erica Moise

Michigan-based attorney Erica “Hendrix” Moise, who tweets as Pissed Off Lawyer, announced last September 11th that she was “going to destroy” the gender critical movement.

Ms. Moise had spent months preparing for the day by pretending to detransition. We see no evidence that Moise actually changed anything about herself. Few observers bought into her act by the end. Moise became a joke for a few days in September, and then people moved on.

We note that Ms. Moise has also accused the attorney general for the state of Michigan of conspiring to have her killed and claims that the Democratic Party stole her car. We suggest that all of her allegations and accusations are equally deranged and false as the ones against Mr. Amaya Price and Ms. Abernathy.

Ms. Moise’s favorite hobby involves abusing gay men on gay dating apps, forcing them to express their “acceptance” of trans men or else risk suspension. We suggest that misandry explains a great deal of her behavior.

Ms. Moise claims that she traveled to Boston with K.T., the putative victim, on 30 December 2025 to report Mr. Amaya Price and Ms. Abernathy to the police.

After they announced this reporting trip, Mr. Amaya Price released communications from the supposed victim the day after the supposed assault in which K.T. specifically thanks Mr. Amaya Price for making her feel safe during the encounter.

We assess this was was a non-penetrative make-out session between three young adults.

We assess that K.T. is subject to an online peer group that has entrapped her in a scheme to disrupt detransitioner organizing for a variety of motives.

If Ms. Moise did in fact convince K.T. to fly to Boston and submit a false report, Moise may have committed solicitation and conspiracy to this potentially criminal act.

Ms. Moise has declined to offer contact information for the Boston police officials who took this supposed report.

As Ms. Moise is yet another fake detransitioner, it is hilarious to us that she feigns expertise at discerning who the fake detransitioners are, and that anybody buys anything this fraud ever says.

Anyone who has escaped the cult of gender ideation without surgery is now “fake.”

Anyone who failed to get enough of the ‘correct’ injections is also “fake.”

Anyone who was treated according to WPATH ‘standards’ below a line that no one can actually ever draw is deemed “fake.”

This projected fakeness plays on a hierarchy that emerges out of the differential experiences of desisters — people who never medicalized — compared to those who had hormonal interventions, and then again with those who have had surgeries. These are three different, increasing levels of harm, depending on how deep into the medicalization protocols a victim traveled on their ‘gender journey’.

With increasing frequency, detransition support groups are separated into these three harm levels because the different levels of harm simply do not share the same experiences. Sometimes this can lead to resentments and disagreements.

For her own reasons, Ms. Moise seeks to expand this fracture in a nascent community. By brute force and luck — for she is no strategic genius — Ms. Moise has found and exploited an organizing vulnerability that no one has fully addressed, yet.

It is especially acute with a population that has widely acknowledged personality deficits.

Someone like Prisha Mosley, who had a double mastectomy, can become deeply jealous and resentful of someone like Maia the Peace Poet, who ‘only’ used a binder and ‘only’ socially transitioned in the special conditions of Israeli society.

That is especially true when Maia the Peace Poet maximizes her X revenue. We are stunned and gratified to see Maia’s success on Substack as well. Mosley is not the first ‘gender critical’ person to burn in jealousy over her success at just about everything she tries to do.

Exulansic, whose interventions were “transmasculine/nonbinary” and WPATH-approved, is also frequently attacked for being “fake” even though she has needed major corrective surgery due to her non-surgical transition that ‘only’ used alternative hormone treatments. Her success has also inspired jealousy.

Additionally, the act of desistance or detransition comes after some level of wrong-sex identification. In young people, this condition is most often comorbid with homosexuality, and/or autism, and/or trauma, and/or other psychosocial factors in their lives. Cluster B disorders are particularly prevalent in the population. Such disorders do not resolve on their own with transition, of course. However, desistance and detransition also do not resolve these conditions magically, either.

To be sure, such changes can accompany the effective treatment of mental illness; even Cluster B disorders can improve with effort and cognitive behavioral therapy. But the Cluster B problem often persists after the transgender identity is abandoned.

Prisha Mosley has made no secret of her struggles with Cluster B. We are not mental health professionals, but we suspect that Mr. Laureano and Ms. Boylan could also tick off the boxes necessary for a diagnosis. Ms. Moise is very clearly Cluster B material, too. In fact, all of these people strike us as unwell.

Cynthia Breheny

The troubles began for Simon Amaya Price several weeks after the FTC panel when he needed a place to stay and a friend in the detransition community took him in.

Upon taking up temporary residence in Cynthia Breheny’s home, however, Amaya Price says he began to sense something was off. In fact, Ms. Breheny was already beginning her campaign against his reputation, affecting the way that others, including Ms. Mosley, regarded Mr. Amaya Price.

The Distance has verified that while these events took place during 2025, Ms. Breheny (PTelephant) was living with her current partner and their child while she was still legally married to her previous husband.

Thanks to the unique laws of South Carolina passed in reaction to Obergefell, common law marriages no longer exist after 2019, and therefore do not violate § 16-15-10, the state bigamy law. However, this living arrangement still seems dubious for a moral scold, which Ms. Breheny has been.

Ms. Breheny contacted Jamie Reed in September to complain about Amaya Price. Despite the fact that he was not employed by LGBCC, and had no role with the organization, Breheney seemed to be under the impression that Reed was Amaya Price’s direct work supervisor.

We assess that this strong belief in an absolute fiction began with Ms. Breheny and that she impressed this false belief upon the rest of the Cluster B Clique.

At the time, Mr. Amaya Price was juggling two girlfriends, one of them Ms. Abernathy. The other lived in a different state than Mr. Amaya Price. Nevertheless, Ms. Breheny expressed concerns to both organizers about Amaya Price, a grown man, having adult relationships with adult detransitioned women.

She also accused Mr. Amaya Price of frightening the neighbors by walking past his bedroom window naked. The Distance has toured the rural neighborhood where Ms. Breheny lives by way of Google street view. We found that the nearest neighbor’s house is approximately 200 feet away. We suggest this accusation is frankly impossible.

Let us be clear: We assess that Ms. Breheny is almost certainly LYING when she says the neighbors saw Mr. Amaya Price through his bedroom window. At best, it is a malicious embellishment. It seems to us a pure fabulation.

Ms. Breheny was in the direct message group with Moise, Boylan, Mosley, and Laureano that the collaborators used to conspire against their targets. Corey Cohn, aka Heterodorx, identified the group as “the Cluster B Clique”. Cohn recently stopped using X for unrelated reasons.

To show Mr. Cohn how angry they were, the Cluster B Clique called their secret direct message chat group “The Cluster B Clique”, and then did not tell him, so that he would not be in on the joke.

Thus empowered by vengeance masquerading as justice, they fancied themselves to be the witch hunters teasing out secret Cluster B actors. They made a mistake, however, when they invited Exulansic into their scheme. According to our sources, she is most likely Cluster C, and therefore a bad fit among Cluster Bs.

We assess that their attempt to launder the false accusation against two detransitioners through Exulansic, herself a controversial detransitioner, was an overly-ambitious project to discredit and defame Exulansic on behalf of Ms. Breheny. The two ex-trans women have a longstanding dispute.

The attempt to rope Exulansic into a compromising position through another private chat with the putative victim backfired because she asked probative questions like any good reporter would.

Shocked when Exulansic turned the tables and exposed their fabrications, the Cluster B Clique immediately began denouncing her as a “fake detransitioner” again.

Least surprised of all by this sudden, yet inevitable betrayal was Exulansic, who had predicted it would happen the day before. “People who are bad expect me to be bad”, Exulansic tells The Distance.

Believe people when they show you what they are

The #MeToo era demonstrated the inherent dangers of believing claims against the accused without evidence. The cancel mob always ignores exculpatory information that is widely known and well understood about the accusers. We have not looked away from it.

We have reached out to everyone involved in this story for comment except Mr. Laureano. We assess that anything he would say to us is equally unreliable as anything he has said before, and we do not print lies.

Prisha Mosely responded to our editor by blocking him on X.

Erica Moise appeared in an X space on Tuesday evening to complain about our coverage in advance.

We will update if we hear back from Ms. Breheny or Ms. Boylan, who has suspended her X account.

In summation, we assess that chaos actors are taking advantage of petty personal rivalries and mental health issues in the detransition ‘community’. We call for an end to these pallid imitations of cancel culture.

We assess that some actors in this ‘scene’ very stupidly seek to advance themselves and their petty personal rivalries with the help of these chaos agents.

An unhealthy cult of personality has accumulated around Prisha Mosley. We believe these influences have led her to make bad decisions. Ms. Mosley is still an adult who made her own decisions. Other people have influenced her against Simon, but the smearing of Ms. Abernathy is her own project.

We expect Ms. Mosley to repudiate the falsehoods she has broadcast on social media. If she chooses to continue standing by her false allegations, she must also expect to be held responsible for any future harassment directed at Simon Amaya Price or Claire Abernathy over these false claims.

We stress that while she is very popular on X, and enjoys the amplification of many prominent critics of gender medicalization, Prisha Mosley does not frighten us with her social power to propagate lies about events where she was not present to witness anything.

We expect that a great many people will read this far and still conclude, wrongly, that we are out to get her.

Only the real world consequences of Ms. Mosley’s clique concern us. She does not.

We could not cancel her if we wanted to, and we do not want to.

Her future is her own to cancel.

No one who encouraged Ms. Mosley to make false criminal accusations and whip up cancel mobs on X belongs at any gathering or event where she might still appear. They should not even be in X spaces where she is speaking out. They have damaged her credibility and may have potentially exposed her to civil liability.

This will complicate affairs most of all for Ms. Breheny. We suggest she should apologize to Mr. Simon Amaya Price as well as Ms. Claire Abernathy and move on.

We are not lawyers. But before Ms. Mosley continues dividing a community by denouncing other people, we should note that her legal interests differ from many other ex-trans people.

In the recent first-ever $2 million detransition verdict, for example, the plaintiffs successfully argued that the defendants had failed to meet WPATH standards. As a matter of law, it did not matter that WPATH ‘standards’ are a joke. They are the only standards. Ex-trans people are winning lawsuits because even the existing, risible “standards” were not met.

Ms. Mosley’s case is different. Her complaint charges multiple providers of fraud, deception, lack of informed consent, systematic failure to address her underlying mental health conditions, and the experimental and unproven nature of the interventions themselves.

We would all like to see her win, but not at the expense of other potential litigants.

Arianna Laureano frequently changes his profile. For a short time, he took on the persona of Admiral Invalidator, aka Mark Doyle, the Pennsylvania man who made terroristic threats against Maia the Peace Poet, Exulansic, our editor Matt Osborne, and a detransition organizing conference. He is currently The Transphobic Historian. Who knows what he will be next.

We will update this story as needed.

Subscribe now

Share

The Our Duty USA website is here.

You can watch Erin Friday’s new podcast here.

Her X account is here.

Subscribe now

According to the United States Department of Education, Jefferson County, Colorado public schools have allowed boys to take up 60 different places on girls sports teams. One “nonbinary” player is listed on a team for girls as well, though it is unclear whether this student is male or female.

Of course, mathematically, there may be as few as 21 boys taking up all these team spots by cheating at more than one sport. Some number of boys between 21 and 61, say about 40 boys, has received this privilege in one small area. However, it is the number of girls displaced that count as Title IX violations, not the number of boys allowed to displace them.

Share

How many schools had to compete with these teams? How many of them added boys to their own teams just to keep up with the arms race? Genderwoo ruins sport. The intrinsic dishonesty destroys ethical sportsmanship before the whistle ever blows.

According to Lindsay Datko, founder of Jeffco Kids First, the Department of Education has given Jefferson County a Monday deadline to follow the sex-based rules of Title IX or else lose federal funding.

For years, ever since males descended on female sports with a vengeance under the rubric of gender identity, we were assured that this hardly ever happens. Entire websites now exist to document how often this thing that hardly ever happens actually happens.

As of last year, we knew that more than 1,000 females had been cheated out of titles, medals, and trophies by men wearing lipstick and cheating at sports. Now we know it has happened at least 60 times in one blue Colorado county with a school system that got high on their own social justice supply.

We are reaching the end of the usefulness of denial in the form of “it hardly ever happens”. The Supreme Court is supposed to hear its first case on women’s sports this year, and we can already see that the old denial must give way, and a new denial take its place, out of sheer necessity.

Now “it is fine that this happens”. We can already hear it from the mouths of Democrats. The integrity of female sports and spaces is a “moral panic”, they say. If not for the sinister machinations of right wing oligarchs, the public would never care about this issue at all and Riley Gaines would be nobody.

This is a cope. I can prove it with math. The supermajority of Americans opposed to males in female sports enlarged by eight points after Lia Thomas stole his trophy and got his glazing on the cover of Sports Illustrated. The same polling shows that more Americans than ever also knew a transgender person, yet this disapproval number still grew.

The problem that Democrats have on this issue, which they are unable to admit, is that human beings have eyeballs. Worse, we have evolved heuristics, cognitive shortcuts that are many times faster than thought. Put simply, when people saw Thomas on that trophy stand, they disliked what they saw immediately. No one had to tell them not to like it. They did not have to think about it at all.

In fact, the glowing coverage — his face was filtered in the television transmission to appear more feminine — repulsed viewers who understood they were being demoralized. No right wing oligarchs had to tell people what to make of what they saw and felt.

This is why Democrats lose on the ‘trans sports issue’. Eyeballs.

For their final argument, Democrats dismiss all this as irrelevant, because the evil Nazi orange man is working on behalf of the xenocisheterophobic oligarchs, who are STEALING from you.

Who cares about your daughter’s bearded volleyball teammate sharing her motel room on the road? What matters is that someone, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or whomever, is rich, and you are not.

Fair and safe sports for girls is not important to them. They say so because it is true. Then they cannot imagine why it would be important to someone who is not them, who does not think the way they do. They can only explain it as a conspiracy of perfidious influence. It never occurs to them that this is how they are seen.

Subscribe now

Aeta, a young knight errant, undertakes a “brutal journey through Italy” to rescue her true love, Bianca (see above): this is the plot of 1348 Ex Voto, a new video game that centers the ‘representation’ of lesbians right in its marketing.

Now, I am not a butch lesbian, but I am quite sure the butch lesbians I know are not about to fall in love with Bianca, just like the very-male video game audience being asked to buy the game has not fallen in love with the game at all.

The term ‘ex voto’ refers to holy offerings displayed in fulfilment of religious vows. Thus the most remarkable thing about the game is the provocative title paired to the premise. Even Kotaku, among the most ‘woke’ of gaming websites, calls the game itself “unremarkable”.

Reviews on Steam, the biggest English-language video game download and discussion platform, are decidedly mixed. A consensus finds it unfinished, unpolished, and incomplete as a work. Buggy, middling, could have been better: the commentaries do not encourage purchase.

Subscribe now

Here is a short conversation from one of the most popular cultural commentariats of YouTube about the underwhelming performance of the game-makers. Note that none of them are criticizing homosexuality, or gay marriage, or lesbianism. All of them say the game simply stinks, that its ‘representation’ is the only part which stands out. And that is a problem for the ‘community’ that such content purports to represent.

It does not appear that any butch lesbian, indeed any sort of lesbian, was involved in this project. The studio has not highlighted LGBTQMOUSE+ representation among its development team or the motion capture actresses in promotional materials, behind-the-scenes content, or responses to the controversy.

This ‘representation’ is not even coming from actual representatives of the ‘marginalized community’ being portrayed by the game and inhabited by the player. The result is a “highly sapphic” game, according to GO Magazine, which promotes itself as “the cultural roadmap for city girls everywhere”. A highly sapphic game that somehow fails to excite boys? Amazing.

Lesbian in theme, it is nevertheless not interesting to lesbians, either. Turns out the ‘modern audience’ that supposedly demanded this video game does not actually exist in the real world. No great hidden mass of queer folx was waiting for this thing to come along so they could feel seen.

The game was developed by Sedleo, an independent Italian studio consisting of an international team (red: virtual office), and published by Dear Villagers, a French company. Sedleo received approximately €656,131 (about $752,000) in funding for the game’s development through Italian government tax credits and grants from 2021 to 2024.

A “Ministry of Culture Video Games Tax Relief” program sounds like communism for bad creators because that’s what it is. The program provides “incentives” to studios based in Italy — even virtual ones, published in foreign countries — to “foster job creation” with “cultural projects”. 1348 Ex Voto is what heterosexual European communists think lesbian representation in video games should look like.

They are not proles, either, these creators. They are the pampered kids with a view from nowhere. Unable to portray real human beings — for they have never lived among normal people — they create terrible video games on intersectional premises, doing actual harm to the actual representation of the intersectional categories they wanted to promote.

At the end of their shambolic development process, those ideological purposes are left as the only remarkable trait in any given game. To communists, profitability is beside the point. “Ah, but we have defeated the male gaze in gaming! Worth it” is how they actually see the world. The cost of the virtue is the signal.

Subscribe now

As shown by these two graphs, the rising number of published references to “detransitioner” has closely tracked the rise in published references to “puberty blockers”. The graph looks very different when both terms are compared together because detransitioners get far less attention than ‘trans kids’. We have to see them independently to discern the pattern.

This is mathematical evidence that transgender medicine creates detransitioners. The sudden arrival of transgender medicine and lifestyles for kids after 2011, when Jazz Jennings received his implant, produced the current population of desisting, detransitioning, or ex-trans people. They are not a right-wing plot against the innocent transes. They are the discarded byproduct of transgender ideology.

During 2010, Ångrarna, or “Regretters,” a 2010 film by Marcus Lindeen, presented the world with its first documentary about surgical transition regret. The film won awards, including the Prix Europa for best documentary, receiving praise from the wokeratti for its exploration of the ‘gender journey’ both men had traveled.

Mikael Johansson was an autogynephile. Orlando Fagin was a homosexual transsexual. Like Ritchie Herron, a British detransitioner who has appeared in more recent documentaries, Johansson regretted his surgery instantly upon awakening. Fagin lied about his sex to marry a man, with predictable drama when the truth became impossible to hide anymore.

Both men were convinced that “sex change” was real. Both were still grappling with the complications that surgical transition created in their lives because “sex change” is a lie. Every ex-trans person has a different story, but every story shares this one lie that people believed about themselves, that they no longer believe.

Fagin and Johansson lived in a country with single-payer health insurance, and more importantly, centralized bureaucratic record-keeping. In fact, when they appeared onscreen, Sweden was about to become the place where real transition regret rates first gained medical attention and a proactive response from health authorities.

Published during 2014, a study of “sex reassignment surgery” found historical regret rates of approximately 2 percent in the Swedish cohort who had legally changed their sex markers from 1960–2010. In other words, only people who asked for their sex markers to be restored to their birth sex were counted as “regretting” transition. This leaves out, for example, people who regret transition, but choose to remain in their new identity because they have destroyed their sexual function anyway. Regret is not the same thing as detransition.

More importantly, this small figure is already double the constantly-repeated figure of one percent regret that always appears at the first mention of detransition. In a separate, and more famous, 2011 study, Sweden also found that medical transition is absolutely not ‘life-saving’. If anything, suicidality greatly increases and long-term mental health suffers.

By now, I have interviewed or gotten to know dozens of people who regret their medicalization, and few ever gave the clinicians who harmed them any feedback. Loss to follow-up is notorious at gender clinics. For a variety of reasons, it was always clear that the actual rate of actual regret was never being measured by any study.

Moreover, the literature on detransition so far has consistently found 7-10 or 8-11 years as the range of long-term regret, that is, the end of the euphoria, aka the hormone hangover. For all of these reasons, the detransitioner Ngram curve will continue rising even as transgender identification goes out of style, which seems to be happening.

The future of “detransitioners” as a topic will likely have the same social contagion qualities that transgenderism had in the last decade, namely a gender flip, from a 3 to 1 male to female ratio to the opposite. “Detransitioners” will achieve public awareness the same way and probably exhibit a similar boom in population.

Share

History will also record with some irony, given the amount of policy capture involved in the trans phenomenon, that the detransitioner wave began with parents complaining, and mainstream journalists actually doing their job, followed by action from responsive public health professionals — all in a socialist country.

During 2018, the late Avi Ring started GENID (Gender Identity Project Scandinavia), an association of parents and former patients who worried that children were receiving risky interventions with irreversible effects. For reasons that remain unclear, activists failed to cancel GENID before it got enough attention to the issue that responsible people looked into it.

The following year, the Swedish Public Television program Mission: Investigate produced “The Trans Train and the Teenage Girls” (Tranståget och tonårsflickorna), the first of four episodes focused on the issue. As the series ended in 2023, Sweden was pulling the plug on puberty blocker experiments.

Dr. Sven Roman, a Swedish child and adolescent psychologist, says that no one should undergo medical transition until the age of 25. Psychosocial treatment — therapy aimed at helping kids to cope with adolescence — should be the first treatment for gender dysphoria in youth. Roman submitted a brief to the United States Supreme Court in the Skrmetti case that upheld state bans on pediatric transition ‘medicine’.

The identity of the first person to detransition has yet to be established. Isolated cases appear in medical literature from the 1950s, though they are rarely publicized. Earlier publicized or semi-public examples of clinicians acknowledging rare regret do exist, but no one has definitively been singled out as the first person in the world to detransition. This is hardly surprising. Why would such a person volunteer to be first?

The universal experience of the detransitioner is total rejection by the former community that ‘affirmed’ them. They lose all their friends, and they have almost always hurt their families. If every parent affected by the transgender craze was able to file a million-dollar lawsuit today, the pediatric clinics would all shutter tomorrow. The path back is emotionally and psychically fraught. Some do not make it.

Surgical transition is irreversible, but chemical transition also has irreversible effects. Nonmedical interventions are not harmless, either: binders can harm ribcages and tucking can harm testicles. Even social transition has severe mental health impacts. The a la carte nature of gender medicine, with its focus on ‘embodiment goals’, produces this descending order of harms.

As a result, the detransitioned population requires complex care, such as a differentiation of therapy groups — social desisters in one, chemical and surgical detransitioners in others. Anyone who leaves transition behind now will find resources and organizations, such as Genspect, that did not exist just a few years ago because demand has already grown so much in so little time.

I will be in Washington, DC tomorrow to report from Detrans Awareness Day 2026. Last year brought all sorts of good policy news on this front. Studies of insurance claims have found that tens of thousands of children had various interventions, thousands of them surgical ones. Recently, the first detransitioned litigant won $2 million from a blue New York jury. While detransition is a new historical phenomenon, it has quite a future.

Subscribe now

Share

The Gays Against Groomers website is at this link.

Michael’s X account is at this link.

Subscribe now

A discursive, or inhabited, construction. A state of mind in the person. A feeling. A spirit. A state of belief in one’s own narrative of being. In a word: Bullshit. Gender identity is whatever bullshit story a grown-up tells themselves about who they are, or tells about what kids say they are.

Michael Hobbes is a ‘debunker’. He says that children really are born with magical, mystical, invisible senses of self — souls, body thetans, or gremlins, basically — that are objectively more real than their sexed human bodies. This assumption underlies all of his ‘debunking’ when it comes to the child-sterilizing woo cult of ‘gender’.

As Hobbes ought to know, being the super-expert on this topic, all but two of the original Dutch protocol ‘patients’ were same-sex attracted, a supermajority of the Tavistock cohort were same-sex attracted youth, and Ken Zuckerberg was destroyed and his clinic shuttered in 2015 for the crime of reproducing decades of results that show most ‘trans kids’ are gay when they grow up.

The reason why present-day gay adults have credibility when they say ‘That would be me’ is because we have tons of data that ‘trans kids’ are actually mostly just gay kids, if you leave them alone. Hobbes waves all this away with the assertion that “Child psychologists know the difference between gay kids and trans kids”, which is simply false. And we can prove that it is false.

Share

First, because detransitioners exist. The Distance will be in Washington, DC this week to cover Detrans Awareness Day 2026 because of their existence.

Second, because no one has ever demonstrated competency at choosing the ‘trans kids’ from the gay kids. The science simply does not exist. All ‘gender identity’ pronouncements are solipsistic psychological constructs. Gender dysphoria resolves in the vast majority of children who are not medicalized. This is the actual science.

No one has ever demonstrated that ‘trans kids’ exist in a laboratory setting. We offer Mr. Hobbes this opportunity to make scientific history.

The Distance will award $10 MILLION to Michael Hobbes if he can demonstrate a mechanical, chemical, or electromagnetic sensor apparatus that detects and measures ‘gender identities’ in double-blind laboratory conditions with high reliability.

Submissions must already comply with US medical device and testing standards. All submissions are subject to evaluation for reliability and must be accompanied by the body of peer-reviewed medical scientific literature underlying the technology. A winning submission must also exceed the accuracy of an eyeball test at childbirth, which can detect the objective biological sex of a newborn with 99.982 percent accuracy.

Mr. Hobbes will probably object that The Distance does not have ten million dollars to give away. THIS IS FAKE NEWS. We identify as bazillionaires, pronouns ka/ching. By the Rainbow Rules of order (cit. “acceptance without exception” and “people are who they say they are”), Mr. Hobbes is obliged to extend us the same courtesy of mandatory belief that he gives to Lia Thomas.

Questions about our bazillionaire identities are actual violence.

However, in a courageous act of self-disclosure, we will now reveal that our bazillions of dollars are co-located with our gender identities. Build the gender identity detector first, and then you can find our missing gender identities, and the money will be right there, waiting for you. See how that works, Michael Hobbes?

The Distance will be covering Detrans Awareness Day 2026 in Washington, DC this week! If you are a free subscriber, please consider upgrading to support this work.

Have you noticed the dogs that are not barking, right now? Actors. Big A-name celebrities, B-listers, even the C-listers have all suddenly re-learned the lost art of shutting up about divisive political topics. Pedro Pascal and Rachel Zegler and Emma Thompson and Mark Ruffalo are all shutting up, all of a sudden. In the middle of a war with Iran.

By historical happenstance, the inevitable merger of Paramount Skydance with Warner Brothers has finally become official after months of resistance by Netflix, who could not quite explain their plan for profitability to their own stockholders. The streaming service lost a third of its stock value during the bidding war, recovering most of that value after Netflix quit. David Zaslov, Warner Brothers CEO, is the biggest financial winner in the whole mess.

Hollywood endured a relentless, years-long box office bombing campaign of its own making, styling itself as the resistance leadership in a time of national political crisis involving actual fascism, only to surrender at the first business merger. Strangely, Donald Trump did nothing, said nothing to make this happen. He calls himself a friend of Larry and David Ellison, the media empire-builders at Paramount Skydance, but he too was uncharacteristically quiet about the matter. Zaslov, who still enjoys immense powers to control the character of future content, is likewise seen as a friend of Trump and anti-woke.

After the November 2024 election result, the commentariat wrote of a ‘vibe shift’ in the corporate world, a great ideological ditching of DEI and ESG and ‘wokeness’. Hollywood remained a bastion of cultural resistance as long as the casting agents who really run the show could get away with it. They cannot get away with it anymore because all the work is coming from friends of Trump.

Subscribe now

Which is not to say that the Ellisons are ‘right wing’. If anything, they are sensible centrists who want to make as much money as possible by drawing the largest possible audience. They are unlikely to make CNN into Fox News. Rather, the Ellisons just want CNN to do better in the ratings, which means featuring more voices like Scott Jennings, their most popular personality. Editorial control might change, indeed Bari Weiss might take over to restore both trust and ratings as she is doing at CBS. If that happens, it will be interesting to see how much resistance she encounters.

Back in December, when the merger fight was just beginning, the social justice activists of legacy media faced a stark choice. Netflix was woke, with unisex restrooms in their corporate headquarters and transgender kids’ content on their platform. But Netflix would also be a disruptive buyer, further damaging an entertainment industry that is already reeling from job losses and AI. At the time, however, Netflix still seemed preferable to the friends of the evil orange man in the eyes of Hollywood, so confident stories of imminent victory in their merger war with Paramount Skydance abounded.

Many YouTubers had a different view, the one that turned out to be correct. WDW Pro, which is focused on Disney and the broader entertainment industry, confidently stood by their assessment that Paramount Skydance would win. Now they are vindicated. WDW Pro has also reported on Disney submerging their DEI practices, and by happenstance, Bob Iger just lost his job as the CEO of Disney. Now the DEI nonsense is being torn out, root and branch.

Clownfish TV is a production of Thom ‘Kneon’ Pratt and Kambrea ‘Geeky Sparkles’ Pratt, who have the cutest family business in the world. They have made, sold, and re-built entire pop culture collections over the years, and now they chronicle the downfall of the brands they once advised along the way. Disney is just one of the companies they have worked with, contested with, and competed against during their careers.

Having listened to their channel for three years now, I am also impressed by the parallel story they tell about cancelation mobs coming for their content on social media over opinions that ran contrary to progressive orthodoxy. Thom and Kambrea in fact go out of their way to avoid expressing divisive partisan political opinions. What they acknowledge, that makes them anathema, is how the imposition of progressive orthodoxy has ruined brands and even entire industries. They said the Hollywood strikes were a mistake, that the demands of the unions would result in fewer entertainment industry jobs, and they were right.

They were hated for being right. If that sounds familiar, they also predicted that the boycott campaign against the Hogwarts Legacy video game would backfire, and they were right. Now they are saying that John Oliver, one of the most notorious and odious advocates of genderwoo in the entertainment world, is on his way out of the job. I believe them because they have an established track record of being right.

And this is what has actually happened to Hollywood, if we are honest, and give up the impulse to formulate conspiracies of influence. Streaming has trained everyone to wait at home for content that will likely not be worth the ticket price and opportunity costs of a trip to a theater. Meanwhile, on their very same screen, the most dominant ‘smart TV’ app is actually YouTube and not any of these big, legacy studios. Netflix is a dominant streaming service competing with YouTube.

On YouTube, the algorithm determines what ‘movie posters’ you see. John Oliver is put on a level playing field with The Panic Button, a YouTube channel featuring “two lesbians giving their takes on hot button topics”, including gender critical views. Bereft of his current platform, John Oliver will likely become yet another podcaster from the old media world. Few of them do very well in this algorithmic meritocracy. Megyn Kelly regularly gets more views than CNN and MSNOW combined, on YouTube. Imagine John Oliver embarrassed by lesbians with hot takes, because that is what the future looks like.

Share

Audience share is everything in this environment. That is why you see Candace Owens stringing her audience along with fresh insane accusations every week. In yet another happenstance coincidence, during September 2025, the same month in which Charlie Kirk was assassinated, sudden algorithmic changes favored TikTok style ‘shorts’ on the platform to the detriment of the content creators. Several channels, including all of these, called out the changes immediately. They were losing audience share to a hypnotic highlight reel of AI slop.

The Midnight’s Edge channel belongs to Norwegian culture critic Andre Einherjar and is managed by an American named Tom Conners. In this video, Einherjar argues that the Ellisons are not about to make Hollywood right wing. David Ellison’s dinner party invitations would stop, and that can never happen. Instead, a “corporate Hollywood caution” will bring surprises for everyone. Einherjar warns us all that Davis is “the devil you don’t know”.

Democrats like California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Sen. Elizabeth Warren want you to believe the Ellisons are the oligarchy, that they are preparing to monopolize an economic sector and silence all the progressive voices. In fact this is the very last chance for everyone to adapt to the new technological and social realities of the entertainment economy. If prominent activist-actors on the left go silent, remember that the rule against political outspokenness has always applied to conservatives in Hollywood. Just ask Gina Carano or Rob Schneider. The first step in dominating audience share is: stop dividing the audience.

We have already seen content shifts that reduce the number of LGBTQMOUSE identities inserted into new shows. Audiences have consistently tuned out this form of ‘representation’ along with multicultural color-blind casting. It may be hard to believe while Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is dressing gay vegan Klingons in skirts, but the changes are coming now, and the content that comes out of those long production pipelines will have to change. Audiences want great entertainment. Save the altar calls for the gospel films, boys.

Subscribe now

In any camps in which women prisoners of war, as well as men, are accommodated, separate dormitories shall be provided for them. […]

Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault. […]

[In confinement,] Account shall be taken of the internee's age, sex and state of health.

Geneva Convention (III) on Prisoners of War 1949 - 14, 25, 27, 119

Hugo Grotius, the father of international law, coined the word “civilian” in the early 17th Century during his work for the East India Company. An ardent advocate of Dutch empire, he created a legal framework with two sets of rules, one for Europeans at war with other Europeans and another for Europeans at war against non-Europeans.

Nor was the distinction intended to protect or defend innocent people. Only in the 20th Century, following the horrors of two World Wars, did the idea of non-combatants as a class worth protecting evolve into the international legal language of war.

Fraught as the 1947-1949 Geneva Convention III process was, and as complicated as the question “what is a civilian?” can be, the assembled nations ultimately agreed to a set of rules for how civilians should be treated.

They did the same for the word “woman,” which had not been problematized into meaninglessness yet. “Gender,” the nebulous term that has been swapped in public discourse for the harder, more material “sex,” did not appear in the text. The Third Convention diplomats were not only able to reach a consensus on difficult questions that two previous conventions could not touch, they were also able to answer the greatest of 21st Century mysteries, “what is a woman?", with surprising ease.

Polemology Positions

The 1949 Geneva Conventions Were A Real Battle

Preparing for War: The Making of the 1949 Geneva Conventions by Boyd van Dijk. Oxford University Press, 2022. 376 pages. Dispelling what he calls the “foundation myth” that the atrocities of the Second World War motivated the postwar powers to a rare show of unity in 1949, Boyd van Dijk argues that the Third Geneva Convention was in fact a fraught proce…

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

To be sure, women did much of the work. Modern historiography on the 1949 Convention is unanimous on this point. Because history has mostly been written by men, about men, women making important forgotten contributions — “hidden figures” — have been common.

Given all these ‘problematic’ roots, it is hardly surprising that the 1949 Convention remains controversial, usually for not going far enough to protect civilians. As Boyd van Dijk writes in Preparing for War: The Making of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, Common Article 3 has been called “a major breakthrough, a disappointment — or even both” for its inconsistencies on a variety of questions.

Consider Helen Kinsella, an avowed feminist. In The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian, Kinsella introduces the postmodernist lens of Michel Foucault during her introduction, then proceeds to question the acknowledgement of human sex difference in the Geneva Conventions, calling it “the logic of the Middle Ages.”

Problematically, all four of the 1949 Conventions say that “women shall be treated with all consideration due to their sex.” The problem with this, Kinsella says, is that “the III Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War gives us a definition of women that is, simultaneously, our only definition of sex.”

What a problem to have, eh:

The sex of women is defined on the basis of weakness, honor, and modesty, whereby pregnancy and childbirth are akin to weakness, and honor and modesty are articulated only in terms of sexual vulnerability to “rape, forced prostitution, and any form of indecent assault.” Women are both desired for and made vulnerable by their sex. [..] Only the suffering, distress, and weakness of women, derived from reproductive capability and sexual vulnerability, are the constant and natural markers of their very sex and, thus, of sex difference.

Concern for the welfare of the young, and the women who are traditionally assigned caring roles for children, especially their own, in every human culture, because of immutable biology, pervades the III Convention and its official Red Cross commentaries.

“Children under fifteen shall in all circumstances enjoy preferential treatment, particularly as regards food, medical care and protection against the effects of war,” they say. “Expectant mothers and mothers of children under seven shall also enjoy preferential treatment.”

Having pried apart the onion, we learn that the “problem” here is how the definition of civilian is itself a product of “gender,” by which Kinsella means sex difference. For “even though children, women, and the elderly are consistently invoked as the paradigmatic civilian, only the category of women is accepted as always already civilian.”

Individuals in the other two categories, children and the elderly, are civilians momentarily, bounded by their chronological age; but women are civilians always, bounded by their sex. Thus it is sex and sex difference, as constructed through discourses of gender, that enable a distinction to be made between combatant and civilian.

The biology of human reproduction mattered too much. Official commentaries to the 1949 Conventions “hold that it was the matter of women’s sex itself — defined as reproductive capability and sexual vulnerability — that places women outside the fighting,” Kinsella says.

As a result, it is only the category women, not the other distinct categories (children and old people), that both materializes and stabilizes the distinction between combatant and civilian as a matter of sex … Consequently, the relations of protection and the corresponding (inequitable) relations of power that they require are consolidated through recourse to the seeming immutability of (fundamentally heterosexual) sexual difference.

And there you have it: the 1949 Conventions are not woke enough because the meaning of the word “civilian” is too feminized. This principle of distinction is fundamental and fragile, Kinsella complains, so it “does not so much rest on a categorical difference between combatant and civilian as produce it.”

If only we stopped discussing sex differences in war zones, they would go away. Like magic, see?

Kinsella does not use the word ‘transphobia.’ When she published her work almost two decades ago, that term did not have the power or currency it has today. Nevertheless, she anticipates the fanatical rejection of binary human sex differences, banishing all “terfs” from the discourse of civilization.

Examining the wars of the American West, Latin America, and decolonization, Kinsella appreciates the role of international law in limiting civilian suffering. She also isn’t arguing that women should be subject to greater suspicion of being combatants, or that war crimes are somehow okay.

Rather, Kinsella wants a definition of civilian that is not so “gendered” as this one. For the white European heterosexual capitalist men who invented the current body of law were too white, European, heteronormative, ritzy, and male to know what they were doing. This is her actual argument.

By Kinsella’s telling, white dudes created the whole international-law thingy to legitimize what they were doing to non-European peoples. This criticism is not without foundation. “Consistently, discourses of civilization were employed to legitimate the refusal of protection to those designated as outside its boundaries,” Kinsella argues. The people outside the boundaries are fair game.

Which, okay. Sure. But which civilization are we discussing? In his book, van Dijk demolishes the “foundation myth” that the atrocities of the Second World War motivated the postwar powers to a rare show of unity in 1949. In fact, the Third Geneva Convention was a fraught process of disagreement and furious debate between potential enemy civilizations. Whereas Kinsella would relitigate the past, they were shaping the laws of future wars to their own liking.

Share

“The drafting process resembled less an ivory tower, in which blueprints are conceived in splendid isolation, than a political arena, in which actors contemplate and struggle over different proposals and the stakes are often impossibly high,” van Dijk writes.

“In many different ways, they tried to define the contours of future battlefields by deciding who deserved protection, what counted as a legitimate target, whose lives mattered, whose did not, and who had the right to enforce them.” The results were “hybrid constructs, shaped by different drafters with contrasting political aims.”

This process was so difficult that the final version could only be approved by secret ballot. No “global civil society” was in the offing, and there were competing, mutually hostile visions for a future global civilization.

Yet everyone involved still knew what a woman is. In fact, there was no debate at all on this point.

Museums can speak to the past. Prehistoric skeletons show a very clear sex division in evidence of violence. Capital-H History begins with accounts of men having wars over women in Herodotus. Conflict anthropology can seem like wall-to-wall male violence. Ancient massacre sites have been dug up and analyzed as scenes of butchery: the men and children and old women were slaughtered, but fewer remains of young adult females can be identified, and we can guess why.

War is a biological fact of human sex difference. This is not something that a European came up with. Or Hitler. Or ISIS. Polemology, the scientific study of war, is a dismal, depressing domain, and it is impossible for polemologists to unsee sex difference.

My survey of human conflict history shows a consistent 2:1 male to female ratio of civilian death rates throughout, almost a golden ratio of lethality. Germans did it to Russian civilians and Russian soldiers to German civilians. But less intense wars have produced similar ratios; so have genocides.

For example, the Indonesian genocide of 1965 had a similar ratio of dead males to females. A million people died in darkness, at least two-thirds of them being male. A majority of survivors were female, and their stories contain all the familiar, traumatic, sex-specific experiences the reader expects.

Polemology Positions

Headhunting Sukarno: The Cold War Murder of an Impossible Country

An academic consensus of English-language historiography now assigns responsibility for the mass killings of 1965-66 to the Indonesian army and Suharto with critical aid from western powers which then sought to replicate their success in other countries. This paper contextualizes the politicide 1965-66 of 500,000-1.5 million people within an emerging historical definition of the word “genocide” as a state or nation destroying some part of itself, with gendered performance of violence and deliberate creation of palingenetic renewal myths being a characteristic of that process. Prevalent in the Indonesian case, headhunting and decapitation neatly contain as symbol the discursive construction of a new nation, an Indonesia free of feminists and leftists…

Read more

3 years ago · 4 likes · 15 comments · Matt Osborne

In the Indonesian example, a non-European civilization put “communists” outside those “discursive boundaries of civilization” that Helen Kinsella mentions. The broad category of ‘communist’ during the killings included everyone discernibly ‘left’ in their politics. Radicals, feminists, writers, artists, academics, unionizers, and organizers were all attacked or arrested, but the outcomes — death in the dark, or sex-based exploitation — were neatly divided at sex.

Moreover, because the killing was done by death squads operating in secret, it was up close and personal. Some urban killers preferred throttling and decapitation methods. On the island of Bali, military authorities passed out traditional klewang swords to their recruits. Countless reports of headless bodies and bodyless heads await the reader who delves into this historiography.

Bear in mind that Indonesia was a post-colonial state, and furthermore a creation of Dutch imperial policy in the first place, just like the Geneva Conventions. Kinsella argues for “resituating and reassessing the principle of distinction” because straight white European men invented it. Would she apply the same principle to Indonesia, a country where nonwhites did this to one another?

Still, Kinsella’s work is a valuable corrective to gender identitarians gaslighting the existence of sex-based rights. After all, if the entire academic argument undermining (‘queering’) history is that certain sex-based rights have only existed since 1949, it is difficult to also simultaneously argue that they never existed. If the men who drafted the Geneva Conventions displayed gender bias, then the historical and practical context of human conflict history set this bias in place.

And yet we find this argument repeated by ‘feminists’ as they respond to criticisms of ‘gender identity’ in law and policy: sex-based rights don’t exist, or if they do exist, they are too new to be real rights, and anyway they are something that sexist white guys invented, so they shouldn’t count.

For example, the ACLU has successfully sued in federal courts to let intact male inmates “identify” as female and get re-housed with female inmates in both state and federal prisons, with predictable results: rape, pregnancy, abuse, fear. California’s Democratic Party supermajority legislature actually voted to allow this insanity in their state prison system. Engage in public debate on this point for only a few moments, though, and someone will flatly deny that ‘sex-based rights’ even exist at all, let alone apply to the situation. Show them they are wrong, and they will switch to claiming these rights are too new and untested.

In 1949, the International Red Cross understood damn well what a woman is, and why single-sex incarceration matters for women being interned in wartime, or any other time. It was seen at the time as a step up for humanity, now it is The Man putting his boot on a transwoman’s face.

Nor does the question of female combatants change the answer to the question. “The only time the ICRC was ‘able to invoke the provision of the 3d Geneva Convention’ was after one of its delegates visited a prisoner of war camp in Poland where both men and women were being held,” Kinsella writes.

So not only is this a sex-based right in international law, but that law has already been enforced, even if ‘only’ the one time. A legal precedent that appears to have been abandoned by the ‘human rights’ industry, which, as we have now reminded ourselves, was never really that interested in humanitarian outcomes to begin with. Is there a more insidious profession on the planet than ‘human rights lawyer’ anymore?

Whether women are incarcerated in a ‘War on Drugs’ in the US, or a war on unpaid TV licenses in the UK, they do not deserve to be housed with males who can hurt them. Whether or not the penises of those males have been inverted, those men are still male, with immutable combat advantages over women.

People who pretend not to understand why it is wrong to put men in women’s prisons like to also say that they are on the right side of history. The actual, real, not-imaginary history of female captives in war is abysmal. Things only got a little better in 1949, and the very first thing they did was give interned or imprisoned women their own spaces. We are now supposed to believe they did it because they were sexist, and not because they had a well-informed, deeply realistic view of mankind.

Subscribe now

Benjamin Ryan reports at The New York Sun that “combined CHIP and Medicaid spending on gender-transition interventions for minors increased from $17.2 million in 2019 to $34.1 million in 2023; the bulk of the spending went to puberty blockers, which are extraordinarily expensive.”

The study found 80,546 young people receiving this ‘care’ through a search of diagnostic and procedure codes that are approved for that purpose. As regular readers of The Distance will be aware, it is also very common for clinicians to use false medical billing codes for young patients, so this is still an undercount of the affected population.

That’s important to bear in mind because the new numbers are much higher than the ‘floor’ estimates produced by Stop The Harm in 2024. In preparation for Trump’s State of the Union address, Fox News highlighted those findings this week, producing a graphic that has been shared around the world. But it is already obsolete, now.

“We always knew our estimates represented the floor, not the ceiling,” Dr. Travis Morrell, a senior fellow at Do No Harm, told Benjamin Ryan. “One of the biggest questions left unanswered by this and other studies is that they do not capture the number of patients treated with inaccurate billing codes, something WPATH still recommends today on their website.”

Of course, this is all unpossible. It cannot possibly be true, for we were repeatedly assured that none of it was happening, that zero minors were being surgically altered, that no one had been harmed at all.

Now that the brutal lie is exposed, the real numbers keep growing. CBO report author Jared Lane K. Maeda finds that “gender-related surgery utilization for those aged 15 to 17 years was higher than previously reported.” Brace yourselves, it only gets worse from here.

Share

According to a Washington state database, “Stiller Aesthetics, a cosmetic surgery practice led by Dr. Geoffrey Stiller, MD, has received more than $4.3 million from the Washington State Health Care Authority since July 2019” for ‘gender-affirming’ surgeries on prison inmates.

“Records show Stiller Aesthetics was a ‘facility contact’ on an internal prison list of gender medicine providers, and post-operative transgender surgery instructions from Stiller Aesthetics were distributed to inmates”, the Daily Wire reports.

In one case, a “staff member requested an inmate be placed in a single cell for a full year after undergoing genital surgery to provide privacy for their postoperative dilation needs” after vaginoplasty.

For prisoners, this procedure comes with an extraordinary housing privilege. Under normal circumstances, privacy simply does not exist in prison. But for the world’s most marginalized community, anything is possible.

“Ms. [redacted] has her gender reassignment surgery scheduled for 11/22/24, after which time she will require a private place to dilate for 30mins 3x daily for six months to 1 year,” states the document.

“Recommending up to 1 year single cell,” the document states.

Prisons were actually the first institutions that gender insanity captured. Captive female populations were perfect guinea pigs for the normalization of men in women’s spaces. A television show about women in prison, Orange Is The New Black, introduced a transgender character designed to make men in women’s prisons seem acceptable.

This mirrored the process by which ‘trans kids’ were revealed to us through curated ‘reality television’. Jazz Jennings was a media product from the age of 11. His chemical and surgical castration process was aired to the world in order to normalize it. Jazz was a transgender character designed to make poisoning and mutilating kids seem acceptable.

Donald Trump won his second term with an ad campaign (he was “for you”, while Harris was “for they/them”) highlighting his opponent’s support of free transgender surgeries for undocumented aliens in detention.

Trump first mentioned it in their debate. Time magazine initially labeled it “false”, but had to correct themselves. PolitiFact rated the claim “mostly true”, but not entirely true, because it “lacked nuance”. The New York Times, ABC News, and PBS all clamored for context, while FactCheck.org declared it is good, actually, that incarcerated aliens get transgender surgeries.

In that case, they could not lie. The rest is history. But history has a different solution for the ‘trans kids’ phenomenon, and for all the lies that were told to sell it to America as health care.

Whereas lawsuits made it possible to put men in women’s prisons in the first place, litigation is going to break the gender doctors. We saw recently that one detransitioned young woman can incur a $2 million jury award. It took a lot of spending to get us here, and now there will be hell to pay on the way out.

Subscribe now

According to local news reports on the case, Brittany Ortiz, 38, was an assistant coach for a girls’ team at Holy Child School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania. During the game, Ortiz reportedly shouted in foul language, drawing a rebuke from the opposing coach.

“After the game, Ortiz continued arguing with the other coach and his wife near the entrance to the gym — then grabbed the other coach’s wife by her hair and slammed her to the ground, striking her head against the floor”, according to the criminal complaint.

Tiffany Kalman, the victim of this assault, reportedly suffered a concussion and had clumps of hair pulled out of her scalp. When William Radel, the opposing coach, tried to stop this brutal assault on his wife, Ortiz’s father William Stanley allegedly struck him in the head while his daughter attempted to kick him in the groin.

According to the criminal complaint, Radel suffered an inner thigh bruise. Far more distressingly, Radel was also holding his three-year-old daughter, who suffered bruising on her leg. The child became hysterical during the altercation and urinated herself in terror.

Ms. Ortiz was investigated by state CPS officials in 2024. The nature of the investigation and the outcome of the case are unknown at this time. However, Ms. Ortiz habitually uses drugs while livestreaming on YouTube — and while her four children are in the house alone with her. Her judgment is consistently poor.

Share

The Distance told you this person was bad news. Editor Matt Osborne first encountered Ms. Ortiz at a November 2022 Kellie-Jay Keen event that Ortiz helped to organize in Philadelphia.

“I heard her before I saw her. She was only just leaving the parking garage and already was having her first argument with a stranger,” Osborne tells The Distance. “She revealed later that she was ‘tripping balls’ on psilocybin mushrooms during the entire event.”

Osborne also participated in a May 2023 event in Washington, DC where Ortiz spoke, and then appeared on Ortiz’s YouTube channel afterwards to discuss his review of the first PITT Parents book. Ortiz did not seem under the influence of any substances during that conversation.

When Ortiz and her father were charged with multiple misdemeanors this week, the story was catnip for local media. An NBC affiliate picked up the story and it has spread from there. The New York Post has picked up the story along with The Independent and US Magazine. Here is the local ABC television segment:

It is unclear just when these mugshots were taken. Ms. Ortiz appears to have touched up her face and brushed her hair beforehand, while Mr. Stanley too has combed his hair since the fight. He claims to have suffered broken bones. His lawyer says that his family called 911 to the scene to help him and says that he is the real victim, here.

Mr. Stanley has a complex legal history with Ortiz. She pleaded guilty to perjury in 2022 in connection with an alleged violent threat against her former husband by her lover. Ortiz later reported the paramour had died in prison.

Mr. Stanley reportedly used his wealth to shield Ms. Ortiz from the consequences of her actions in that case. He holds the title to her home, a substantial estate in a ritzy Malvern neighborhood, but does not live there.

In 2024, after Pennsylvania Child Protective Services initiated their investigation of Ortiz, she lashed out at several women on social media, alleging they had reported her to the authorities.

One of these women, Exulansic, aka Sierra Weir, was already trying to resolve a dispute over a dog bite she had allegedly suffered in Ortiz’s home in 2023. Ortiz accused two other women of calling CPS first, but then doxxed Weir in retaliation.

Frustrated, Weir finally sued Ortiz over the dog bite a few months later. According to sources close to the case, Stanley provided for Ortiz’s lawyer, as well as the ultimate settlement, which was reached some time before the end of 2025.

Although the litigation is public record, the terms of that settlement are undisclosed. Ms. Weir declined to comment for this story, saying only that the case was “resolved”. We have reached out to Ms. Ortiz for comment on this story and will update if she responds. Here is the local Fox News segment:

So far, no media outlet has reported that Ms. Ortiz was a prominent ‘gender critical’ social media influencer prior to her problems with CPS in 2024. Indeed, none of them has dug into her past at all. This is sure to change eventually, and the story will likely end up at Pink News and perhaps NPR as well as BBC.

It is worth noting that Ortiz has frequently picked fights with other organizers and organizations, making enemies out of friends, and that The Distance first took note of Ms. Ortiz courting conspiracy theories almost two years ago. Her ‘gender critical’ career has suffered accordingly. We believe that ‘gender critical’ voices have a responsibility to take out our own trash instead of leaving it up to the opposition.

During her livestreams, Ms. Ortiz likes to affect fluency in Spanish, creating some of her most absurd and unintentionally funny moments. She will therefore be happy to learn that her story was picked up by the local NBC Universal Telemundo affiliate, too.

We will be sure to keep an eye this case, though we will not hold our breath waiting for public acts of contrition. Instead, history suggests the most likely ‘justice’ outcome of this story will be litigation by Mr. Radel and Ms. Kalman with a quiet settlement out of court.

We do hope however that the ‘gender critical community’ will recognize our reporting on problematic figures in the ‘movement’ has been vindicated. We tell you what they really are, and then they consistently show you what they really are, and what they are is exactly what we told you they are. If you won’t believe us, believe them.

Subscribe now