What Happened to the Transsexual Rights Movement? More on Percentages and Prevalence

In my previous post, we took a look at the claim that trans people “have always been here” in the numbers at which they’re now emerging, and found it wanting.

Now, I’d like to turn our attention to the fact that the trans rights movement has clearly undergone significant changes in the last two decades.

Twenty years ago, trans people were not making the claim that they had “always been” their preferred sex. They knew biological sex existed, and the idea of a non-transitioned, non-passing trans person entering into opposite-sex spaces was absurd.

Today, things are very different. Online trans activists are brash and bold with their claims that biological sex doesn’t exist and neither should sex-based protections. They also seem to share a belief unique to transgender people that they must be recognized as their preferred sex in order to exist at all.

When women notice that this change has been swift and merciless toward women’s rights, we’re told to be silent and trust in the beneficence of the trans movement as a whole, in spite of any bad actors. One of the most common ways to chide women for anti-transgender opinions is to say that surely, there are only a few bad apples, and that most transgender people are “just trying to live their lives.”

So why does it seem like so many trans people on the internet aren’t “trying to live their lives” at all, and are instead spending hours a day disparaging feminists? What’s happened here? How did the transsexual rights movement become the transgender movement?

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I’ve sometimes heard people say “sure, there are bad trans activists out there who say awful things, but that doesn’t mean you should consider the whole lot tarnished.”

Fine.

What if I told you that today, over 90% — and possibly as many as 99% — of adult transitioners do not fall into the definition of a transsexual, and are instead sexual fetishists?

Oh, now I’ve said something awful? Something shocking?

I’d better have some evidence to back that up. How dare I imply that not only some, but a supermajority, of adult transitioners are engaging in this performance for primarily sexual reasons? How dare I make it about sexual perversion, don’t I realize I sound like a Victorian prude?!

 

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The evidence for this comes from prevalence estimates. The research I did on the prevalence of transsexuality revealed, if you recall, that no one before 2002 pinned an estimate of transsexuality 1:2,500 or so, and usually much lower. This changed only when an MTF researcher simply decided to insert fudge factors until the trans population appeared far larger than it’s ever been found to be.

Prevalence estimates exist for a number of psychological conditions.

One of those conditions is transvestitic fetishism, or attaching sexual pleasure and arousal to crossing gender norms in clothing.

The existence of transvestitic fetishism is well-known in history, all the way back to the Roman emperors (a commenter here five years ago once tried to claim Heliogabalus for the trans side, for example).

In recent decades, psychologists have tried to establish an estimate on the prevalence of transvestitic fetishism using in-depth interviews with large numbers of participants.

According to them, about 2-3 percent of men, and around 1 in 200 women, experience transvestitic fetishism. Stonewall UK now includes “crossdresser” as a full transgender identity. It’s not surprising, given its higher prevalence than transsexuality, that Stonewall would wish to do this — in fact, by including fetishistic transvestites to swell the ranks, Stonewall could achieve the huge jump in trans numbers observed in recent years.

Lynn Conway (who fudge factored the incidence of transsexualism) says that conservative estimates of crossdressing fetishism puts it at a prevalence of 2-5% of men, and notes that about 1 in 20 to 1 in 50 of these men will eventually go on to complete a full transition.

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This blog is no stranger to discussing Bayesian statistics, in which probabilities are not independent of one another but must be regarded in relation to known information. We’re going to look through that lens again, today.

 

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If three percent of men are sexually aroused by crossdressing, and only 1 in 2500 meet the qualifications for classic transsexuality, then only 1.3 percent of the overall MTF “transgender” population is actually transsexual, and 98.7 percent are fetishists.

People noticing that even many FTMs in today’s rapidly exploding FTM population seem motivated by fetishizing gay men in visual novels, anime, or other media are right to notice: if .4 percent of women are sexually aroused by crossdressing, and only about 1 in 10,000 women is transsexual (prevalence figures from last post), only 2.5% of self-identified FTMs are genuinely transsexual.

These figures, of course, assume that all fetishistic crossdressers / transvestites are holding themselves out as transgender. What if 80 percent of transvestitic fetishists were quite content to occasionally crossdress at home, with no trans identification needed, and only 20 percent considered their activities to fall under the trans umbrella?

Even then, only 6.5 percent of MTFs, 10 percent of FTMs, would be transsexual, with the rest being fetishists.

We can take it a step further and use Conway’s lower bounded estimate: that 1 in 50 fetishistic crossdressers (2 percent) will eventually take the leap and transition to a full-time cross-sex presentation. Two percent of the 3 percent of males who engage in crossdressing fetishism yields a prevalence of .06%, or about 1 in 1667. But remember, the incidence of transsexuality is only 1 in 2500.

Even if only two percent of male crossdressing fetishists decide to transition, these fetishists will constitute over 60 percent of the overall transgender population, while transsexuals become a minority in their own movement.

Once you understand this aspect of the changing transgender movement, everything becomes clear. Crossdressing fetishism is correlated with sadomasochistic fantasies, pornography consumption, and other paraphilias (the 2-3 percent link above will illustrate this nicely).

Crossdressing fetishism is now the dominant thread of the transgender movement. It is an inherently misogynistic and narcissistic activity, in which female stereotypes manifested by the self are sexualized instead of actual living, breathing sex partners –

Fetishes are, by their very nature, obsessional. Whether we’re talking about zoophilia, pedophilia, crossdressing, or rape fantasies, it’s only when you try to separate a man from his fetish that you begin to see the narcissistic injury: they will cry about how they can’t help themselves. If that doesn’t work, they’ll grow enraged and threatening. They will aver with absolute certainty that the fetish is so fundamental to the core of their being that it makes them who they are.

Men go to great lengths to hide the level of depravity their fetishes and paraphilias reach, and to convince the people around them that they are harmless.

This is what we are observing in the trans movement at large, when they are described as men or as autogynephiles by feminists: the unbounded rage of the fetishist when told his fetish is unacceptable and will not be coddled by those around him.

Today’s average adult transgender person isn’t someone who felt strong cross-sex role urges from an early age, and who feels strong body dysmorphia focused on primary and secondary sex characteristics.

Instead, the average transgender person, due to the incorporation of fetishists into the movement, has become a fetishist focused on enabling that fetish by any means necessary.

Some do this by lying about physiological differences between men and women, like “Rachel” McKinnon. Others put on sex shows for chump change and refuse to hold jobs so they can devote more time to their fetish while their wives go to work, like “Zinnia Jones.” Others spend time every day devising creative, sexually sadistic punishments to inflict on the TERFs who have the audacity to tell them to stop wanking to the idea of themselves as the subjugated sex.

It has — can you feel it too, mothers of the internet? — the feeling of a teenage boy caught red-handed in front of internet porn and told to stop jerking off and clean his room. I see the same clear hot-faced embarrassment and shame over being caught, the same reaction of anger at any woman who says to stop wanking and start being productive.

Indeed, I suspect if we told all teenage boys that their most misogynistic and narcissistic fantasies were a core part of their identity, and that anyone telling them to knock it off wanted them literally dead, we’d see this kind of behavior from absolutely all corners.

It’s not that transvestism is uniquely awful, it’s that no other fetish is elevated into a protected identity category allowing men to carry out misogynistic deeds with impunity. That’s the devil’s bargain LGBT organizations made with fetishists in order to bolster their numbers — I doubt they’ll like what they’ve gotten themselves into, when they realize how much it will cost them.