By Huw Smith
While other parts of the world awaken to the dangers and lies of transgenderism, Canada careens full steam ahead with its promotion and defence. By ignoring two major recent reports condemning the lack of proper science and questionable ethics behind the gender experiment, Canada persists as a safe haven for gender narcissists and their enablers.
Alaska — A Planet Fitness member, female, photographs a man changing in the women’s locker room. She complains to management that this male is making her and a young girl uncomfortable. Planet Fitness, however, has a transgender-inclusive policy. “All members will have access to restroom and locker room facilities that correspond to their self-reported gender identity to the extent permitted by applicable law…” The male self-identifies as a woman and has complete protection. The woman has violated their policy of not allowing members to take photographs of other members and has her membership revoked. The backlash loses Planet Fitness $400 million.
Meanwhile, during this fracas, a bearded man enters the Planet Fitness women’s locker room in Gaston County, U.S.A., strips naked and asks a woman to shower with him and rub oil on him. He claims, also, to identify as a woman. He is arrested for the alleged exposure of self. Planet Fitness’ transgender-inclusive policy remains in place.
While these are well-reported American offences, the same issue exists in Canada, where disregard for women’s and girls’ safety and privacy follows on the heels of knee-jerk acceptance of ‘trans-inclusive’ policies.
Brigid Klyne-Simpson of Parksville, British Columbia, who felt “intimidated” and “uncomfortable working out at the gym with men,'' received sympathetic media attention when he was revoked access to the women’s-only section of the gym. “Once you understand trans women are women, trans men are men, non-binary people are who they say they are, it’s as simple as that,” [she] said. “If you still feel uncomfortable after that, that’s on you, it’s not on me.”
The crashing-doors tactic is just one example of the power of the transgender lobby to successfully exert pressure on culture, organizations, and society in general. The movement has come a long way, very fast, and is backed by some very wealthy people with global influence.
Yet the movement is young, and has not matured, psychologically speaking, beyond the child-infancy stage, in which the focus is constantly on self, unremittingly on the wants of the child, no matter how unreasonable, irrational or selfish they may be.
In transgender culture, we meet a strange hybrid of undeveloped child and highly politicized, radical zealot, exhibiting the narcissism of a tween expressed in the more sophisticated language of ideologues and academics.
The movement’s behaviour is no more acceptable than it is in the individual narcissist, and yet political leaders like Prime Minister Trudeau and President Biden, and celebrities like Lady Gaga and Jamie Lee Curtis have been fooled by the emotional manipulation that this narcissistic ideological narrative uses, as have corporations and bureaucracy in the gradual creep of trans ideology and its intolerance.
The other side of the coin is simply the response of capitalism, in the pharmaceutical industry, in the practice of specialist surgeons and others, who see a lucrative market in the transitioning process, (an industry projected to grow in the U.S. alone from $2.1 billion in 2022, to $5 billion by 2030, an annual growth rate of 11.25%) not caring at all about the damage that is done in this headlong rush to transition children and adolescents.
Narcissism and rampant, blinkered capitalism; what could possibly go wrong?
“The rapid proliferation of this [transgender] ideology is attributed to tremendous financial pressure and mainstream media censorship of critics, which aligns with the media’s ownership by the medical-tech industry,” writes analyst Jennifer Bilek. “The intertwining of conglomerates like Hearst, Condé Nast, and Disney with prominent pharma platforms contributes to the pervasive influence of the techno-medical complex in America.”
Mass movements tend to display similar characteristics in their infancy, when fear — of rejection and oppression — sits large in their perspective of things. But the infancy of the trans movement has been prolonged, even though trans-sexuality has been gradually, naturally accepted since the seventies, when Lou Reed sang, “shaved her legs and then he was a she.” The movement continues to insist that all transgender people are at risk, are oppressed, and in danger of being killed even while, generally speaking, transgenderism per se has few enemies.
By contrast, intolerant, manipulative, radical narcissistic ideology has a significant number of dissenters and objectors, including Richard Dawkins, Douglas Murray, Helen Joyce and academics such as Janice Raymond, Jordan B. Peterson, and Kathleen Stock. These defenders of science object to the excessive behaviour and demands of a movement that need not, by any rationale, behave the way it does and cause so much damage.
One passive-aggressive ploy of the trans zealots is to continually manipulate us into such a dilemma of guilt and sentimental compassion that we are too busy apologizing and showing that we are not transphobic to voice any reasoned, reasonable dissent.
An overtly aggressive tactic is to change a country’s legislation so that, for example, not using someone’s preferred pronouns becomes an arrestable offence, as happened in Scotland, on April 1, 2024. Author J. K. Rowling challenged the new hate crime law by posting a list of sex offenders identifying as transgender along with well-known trans women activists. She described them as “men, every last one of them.” Scottish police did not charge her with a criminal offence, possibly because they were too busy following up on the 3,000 hate-crime complaints they had received in the two days the law had been in effect.
Narcissistic traits of the transgender movement
Lack of empathy
A dominant trait of narcissism is a lack of empathy for others, since the other person is just a thing to be manipulated towards the narcissist’s ends. In the transgender voice, it shows, first, a lack of empathy, even disdain and misogyny, toward biological women and their concerns.
“KILL TERFS, TRANS POWER” — Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter has been the target of numerous protests and complaints due to their female-only policies. https://uncommongroundmedia.com/kill-terfs-fuck-terfs-vancouver-rape-relief-attacked-again/
The trans movement’s efforts to erase the very idea of a biological woman are well known and documented. They take the form of attacks on science and biology and flat-out denial of their validity, and attempts to legislate language use, so that the words woman and female are not to be used except by trans ideology’s terms. Trans activists successfully apply pressure, linguistically and through mass dissemination of their ideology, to confuse everything relating to womanhood, in an effort to appropriate womanhood for themselves.
Thus, dissenting and concerned women are not only attacked as TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist), but called ‘front holes,’ ‘people with cervixes,’ ‘menstruators’ and even ‘non-men.’ One cannot remain a woman now (for those who ‘identify’ as biological, sexed women) but must be called a cis-woman, to suit the trans lobby. The language referring to actual women is being supplanted by trans vocabulary, ironically, in the name of inclusivity — for trans people. If any woman pushes back against this absurd subverting of womanhood, she is, of course, cancelled, attacked as transphobic and accused of hate speech. So much for reciprocal empathy. Trans culture demands that empathy be given to them but not to actual women.
From GE Healthcare - Empowered Women’s Health — Gender-Inclusive Language Guide for Gynecologists
The biological woman is not just someone who must be renamed, she is a primary enemy. Perhaps one of the most chilling expressions of this comes from transexual Angela Douglas, who underwent mutilating trans surgery, and later in life reverted to male status, but declared in 1997:
"Genetic women are becoming quite obsolete, which is obvious, and the future belongs to transsexual women. We know this, and perhaps some of you suspect it. All you have left is your ability to bear children, and in a world which will groan to feed 6 billion by the year 2000, that’s a negative asset." — pg. 1547, Women's Spaces, Women's Rights: Feminism and the Transgender Rights Movement by Christen Price
Narcissistic lack of empathy also shows itself in trans culture’s dismissal of women’s very real concerns about its demands. Women’s concerns about their privacy and safety in what used to be their changing rooms are dismissed as transphobic. Transphobic, too, is women’s objection to stronger, faster transwomen, with physiological and biological advantage, competing unfairly against them in sport, from high school level to elite.
“On April 30, the B.C. Conservatives introduced the ‘Fairness in Women's and Girls' Sports Act,’ … Despite the full support of the B.C. Conservatives and B.C. United, the bill was quashed by a 51-27 vote, led by Premier David Eby's NDP majority.” — Drea Humphrey, Rebel News.
All manner of language and scientific distortion are utilized to obfuscate against these objections and dismiss them outright, so successfully that governments, corporations and schools are falling in line with their ideology without question. Those who do question must do so in secret, to shelter themselves from attack, and often, to keep their jobs. We see cases of people losing their jobs or being demoted, simply because they object to the new policy of announcing their preferred pronouns in emails, which they do not have, and have never had.
Inclusivity in trans-ideology must work only one way. A preoccupation with victimization can do that to you, and victim status seems to be something that trans-ideology has not grown beyond. The other side of the coin is that victimhood is utilized very effectively to manipulate others into a compassion that trumps reason and debate. Empathy, in trans ideology, is a one-way street, and its usurping of womanhood comes without apology.
However, as Janice Raymond succinctly puts it, in her book Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism, “Men can’t self-identify their way out of their own bodies, history and life experiences into any meaningful definition of womanhood.” This is precisely because, among other things, women also experience their unique bodies, history and life experiences, which a biological male cannot know in any but the most superficial manner.
Nurse Amy Hamm was dragged through three-plus years of disciplinary hearings by the BC College of Nurses and Midwives for insisting there is a biological difference between men and women. The decision of the Discipline Committee is pending.
Grandiosity
We see a general sense of grandiosity in the movement in its vastly magnified claims of the numbers of those needing to transition. Transgender culture would have us believe that the number is legion, with at least one child in every classroom in desperate need of affirmation and intervention.
As for those who simply ‘identify’ as the opposite sex, there are no real numbers, because data gathering is sparse and unmethodical. Given that social contagion is a major factor in the current upward trend in declarations of transgender identity (especially among young girls waking up to find that they now desire to be boys), as is the rush to affirmation and social/medical support, it is no surprise that girls and boys are now demanding a change in their pronouns, and generally basking in the attention that comes their way after transgender affirmation.
Existing scientific studies already show that most cases of gender dysphoria (80% or more) resolve with an acceptance by the affected that they are gay or lesbian. The numbers of transgender children, teens and adults is vastly magnified by the transgender movement, to convince us of the dire need for transitioning amid a mass of sufferers, and of the normalcy of transgenderism – which in one respect runs counter to their claim to be as unique and special as the rare Ghost Orchid. However, when you are in a rush toward total affirmation and power, any tool or narrative will do.
Egale, Canada’s “leading organization for 2SLGBTQI people and issues," states that the 2021 census data shows that 0.33% of Canada’s population report themselves as transgender or non-binary. But with just 100,815 people reporting special gender status in a country of 38 million people, this represents just .002 percent of the population.
A prime example of particular grandiosity that transgender culture celebrates is American trans celebrity Dylan Mulvaney. Once a gay man, he stage-managed his way to celebrity (undoubtedly with a calculating agent and management team) by claiming, at age 27, to be not a woman but a girl. Presenting as a hollow girlie creature, all rapid eye blinking, fluttering hands and breathy talk, Mulvaney has reduced young womanhood into a vapid, sexual stereotype. For Mulvaney, as his song videos show us, girls are lazy, brainless and live to go shopping. They also love pink, do not have hips, but do have penises.
Screen capture from “Days of Girlhood” music video.
To go down this road, and to make a fortune off it is cynical and opportunistic. Mulvaney, social media star and television celebrity, is now making up to $150,000 for a single social media post and is a millionaire. Making millions from a caricature girlie persona that is not even satire while insulting legions of women reveals troubling things about our society.
Virtually all media, including Canada’s national newspapers, reference Mulvaney as female. A Wikipedia writer obediently states that “she began to document her gender transition in a daily series of videos published on TikTok titled "Days of Girlhood" in March 2022, which began to gain in popularity.” Mulvaney takes hormones to create a more girly appearance but has had no surgery on his parts. He defends the girl-with-penis thing with sing-song statements like “Normalize the bulge!” and, in the sycophantic rush to adore and fall in line with trans fictions, the media happily pushes this idea; after all, they are quite happy to have Mulvaney star in advertising for women’s athletic bras, even though he has no breasts.
Dylan Mulvaney, some might say, was a gay man who saw that the market for transvestites was already saturated, and so planned out the ride to celebrity as a trans girl. For all intents and purposes, this grandiose campaign has worked marvellously.
Mulvaney and Co. have carved out a lucrative niche, thanks in great part to trans ideology’s pushing the idea that any transitioning fiction at all is bona fide and must not be questioned. But for those of us who still believe in science and biology, the Empress has no clothes.
For those of us who still believe science and biology, the Empress has no clothes.
But there is no child to point out this obvious fact. They are busy online, being groomed to believe that they, too, are not their biological sex, and are probably destined to become some alternative gender fantasy.
The United States, and some celebrities in the UK, have swallowed his delusional narrative whole, and fete and celebrate Mulvaney for showing great courage; in the face of what, is unknown. President Biden sat down with him for a tête-à-tête, and Lady Gaga gushed over him and crusaded against a backlash when Mulvaney and herself posed for an image celebrating National Women’s Day. When numbers of women rightly commented that Mulvaney was not a woman and not an appropriate figurehead to represent them, Gaga went, well, gaga, stating that the backlash could not be called such, because “Backlash would imply that people who love or respect Dylan and me didn’t like something we did.” Gaga schooled the world and let us know that having a gay man, now a pretend girl, with a penis, represent the nation’s biological women, was actually fine, while any opposition was “vitriol, hatred and violence.”
Lady Gaga's Instagram post
Looming just as large, for equally baffling reasons, is the UK star Jessica Alvez − a ridiculous, nightmarish caricature of womanhood. If Alvez is to be respected for his difficult journey into and through transitioning, he is not due any respect for the pornographic caricature of womanhood he has created. A Wikipedia article tells us that, as of 2018, Alvez had spent over $800,000 on plastic surgery, because of a mental disorder known as body dysmorphia, and thanks to a sizable fortune inherited from wealthy parents.
After some celebrity, due in part to his documenting the surgeries, and appearing on Big Brother and other shows, Alvez finally claimed to be a transwoman, that is, an actual woman. He is now a totally remade creature, sporting breasts the size of an adult’s head, huge pouting lips, and a nose that has had so many cosmetic surgeries that he can barely breathe, a nose on which surgeons refuse to perform further. He resembles not a woman, but a horrific sex doll.
‘Human Barbie’ Jessica Alves flaunts figure in sheer catsuit — New York Post
Of course, almost every step of this mental disorder, followed by transition (such a harmless sounding word) has been celebrated on social media and television. Alvez has a net worth of around $30 million, from inheritance and appearances on the likes of the U.S. show Botched, and the U.K’s Celebrity Big Brother. Body obsession can be very lucrative. For the likes of Mulvaney and Alvez, their narcissistic desire for admiration and attention is being met.
Hypersensitive to slights and enraged when criticized
For the trans zealots there can be no debate and no discussion of anything that the culture presents to society. A necessary ploy, perhaps, when your demands are excessive, verifiably untrue, and bordering on delusional. Narcissistic, also, is the tendency to shift all blame to others. For transgender culture, none of their problems are due to their own excesses and demands, but are the fault of transphobes and fascists, that is, anyone who speaks against or questions their ideology and attacks on science.
Fae Johnstone, Executive Director, Momentum Canada, leading the March for Trans Rights, Ottawa, August 25, 2023, demonstrating how he advocates for gender ideology. His tell-tale T-shirt has also been sported by the Minister of Children and Family Development of British Columbia Grace Lore (NDP).
The second volley used to silence us, is to state that we misunderstand trans culture and trans people, and, as outsiders, have nothing to say. We are dinosaurs of another age —some fictional version of the 1950s — in which males and females all lived as rigid stereotypes. We are this stereotype, in the second decade of the 21st century, as if all the decades in between simply did not happen to us, and we have neither learned anything nor evolved. Of course, this logic reverses itself as regards trans people, who have lived every second of the intervening decades, in a state of mortal fear, oppressed and hated.
The trans movement’s magnification of their importance, their suffering, the danger they are in, are used as justification for their rage against criticism and dissent. It is the tried-and-true narcissistic ploy, that your criticism is not only invalid but grievously hurtful to them.
The narcissist turns the tables, making criticism a poisoned weapon that you must feel guilty to even think of using; your only correct response is to humbly acquiesce and fall in line with the narcissist’s continuing narrative of self-importance.
We find immediate evidence of this in trans ideology’s strategy, used to convert psychiatrists to their side, that if you do not immediately begin transitioning a child claiming to be the opposite sex, that child will likely commit suicide.
This is part of trans-ideology’s strangely binary thinking that shifts from one condition – that of the gender-questioning child – to the extreme response, that this child must, therefore, be the opposite sex, in the wrong body and must be transitioned.
“...the transition-or-suicide narrative is, as Finland’s leading expert on pediatric gender medicine has put it, ‘purposeful disinformation,’ the spreading of which is ‘irresponsible.’ Using suicide threats to influence parents in their decisions over healthcare for their children is a violation of medical ethics and amounts to malpractice.” – Mia Hughes, The WPATH Files
The WPATH Files Report, released by Environmental Progress and authored by British/Canadian Mia Hughes, exposes and condemns the use of the suicide threat used on parents of gender-confused kids.
There is no nuance in this thinking, and no room for the rational and reasonable response of simply supporting the child in their expression of self, as it changes through childhood, puberty, and the fraught teenage years, a natural response that almost any parent would readily adopt. What we get, thanks to the success of trans-ideology’s pressure in this issue, is psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists telling confused, deeply loving parents that their child is likely going to commit suicide if they don’t immediately get radical support, and radical intervention (with puberty blockers and hormone treatment, for example) toward making that child the opposite gender.
Transgender’s childish, irrational anger against a society they see as the enemy, is hidden beneath manipulation of a parent’s sentiment, emotion and fear − a ploy that nullifies any criticism and questioning of a radical intervention the transgender movement insists is essential. It is a hyper-narrative, from a hypersensitive, angry culture that intends to win, at all costs, whatever that winning ultimately looks like. The many de-transitioners, damaged for life, are already beginning to tell us the shape of that win.
Entitlement
We see transgender's sense of entitlement, first, in their claim to such a profound thing as womanhood, simply by way of ‘identifying’ as woman. I will not detail the narcissistic sexual fetishizing that drives some trans women’s eroticized version of womanhood, and the male gaze that is inherent here. This erotic-masturbatory element is well known, discussed at length in various articles, and evidenced in contemporary news stories of men identifying as women to gain access to women’s changing rooms for sexual gratification. No certificate of proof is asked for, as regards gender dysphoria, because none exists, or for psychological support of this claim to female identity, because none exists.
One might think that if biological males’ claim to be women is sufficient for them to have access to women-only safe spaces, then a good compromise would be to give written proof of gender dysphoria that a person could give to fitness clubs and the like, or some identification, as convenient as a driver’s license, for trans-identifying persons. But the transgender lobby has never asked for this, even if it might support their cause, because they do not wish to be recognized as transmen and transwomen, but as actual men and women.
So we live with a radical non-compromise, where we pretend that transwomen are actual women who can share private spaces with real, biological women. Even making a distinction between biological women and trans women is verging on criminal and will soon be so if the movement gets its way. The distinction between the two must vanish, as must the science it is based on, so that, with the lines sufficiently blurred, trans women can become women without a shred of evidence. For now, biological women who object are hysterical transphobes without cause. This is the face of inclusivity.
A girl was reportedly assaulted in the female restroom at Arcadia High School in Rochester, New York. According to another student at the school, the attacker is a boy who identifies as a girl. He was allegedly retaliating for perceived insults. — X post from Reduxx Mag
Current legislation in Canada, is, without any real medical basis, completely on-side with transgender ideology. The Trudeau government accepts and promotes trans ideology and its narratives as gospel truth and has created a climate of insipid wokeness in Ottawa.
The group caWsbar (a Canadian group concerned with women’s sex-based rights), tells us that “in 2017, the Canadian Human Rights Act was amended to include 'gender identity or expression' as a category protected against discrimination (Bill C-16). This amendment was adopted without substantial due diligence or meaningful consultation with women's advocacy groups. The reality of such an amendment − which does not precisely define what 'gender identity or expression' means, instead relying on a vague concept of 'internal sense' of oneself − is that a male may simply declare himself to be a woman… and demand he be granted all of the hard-won rights and protections women have fought for over the decades. This includes the right to access female-only spaces, services and resources.”
This knee-jerk affirmation of gender identity has already shown its negative face in prison systems in the U.K. the U.S. and Canada where male rapists identifying as women are moved to women’s prisons. Apparently, female inmates are not of much concern, as their fears and reports of intimidation by these male women have been ignored. Assaults and rape of women inmates have already been reported. Yet, dangerous male sex offenders are still being accepted as women and shifted into female populations. The lack of empathy and reason is mind-boggling.
From How dangerous male offenders can enter women’s prisons in Canada, TNC News.
We see this entitlement also in the demand, effectively lobbied, that transgender people simply identifying as male or female be given all ‘treatments’ such as drugs and surgeries, on the public purse. Such drugs include estradiol, progesterone and domperidone, to mimic pregnancy and induce lactation in biological men who want the experience of breastfeeding.
Federal government employee Tanya King (pictured) complained to the Ottawa Citizen about the delays he experienced in accessing the new $75,000 insurance coverage for "gender-affirming care" under the Public Service Health Care Plan.
Do we have cause for optimism?
In the UK, which has a healthier, more rational approach to the transgender issue than does Canada, we see the Cass report and others critical of current transgender orthodoxy. In Cass’s own words:
“Gender medicine for children and young people is built on shaky foundations… The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.” -–Dr. Hillary Cass, The Cass Report
Cass’s review, 388 pages of it, is now driving serious National Health Service (NHS) review of affirmation and treatment of transgender people. The recognition that transgender ideology and demands are not based on science is a good start. For too long, necessary scientific research into the effects of drugs used, for example, has been shut down. Researchers have been not scientists but transphobes, and research has been refused financial support in hospitals and universities. That may change in the UK, as the NHS is finally having to develop protocols and practices around transgender treatment based not on the fear of powerful non-medical lobby groups but on actual science.
At present, the kindergarten narcissist that is the trans movement enjoys far too much enabling, unchecked by reason and dissent.
Too much has been done, far too fast, on the basis of nothing more than fictions and monied lobbying. History will shame us if we do not inform ourselves and respond through rational medical and public policy. The Dylan Mulvaneys of our world will fall by the wayside, cultural deformities unworthy of attention. Yet untold numbers of those needlessly transitioned, of those suffering damaged lives thanks to drug, surgical and radical psychological intervention as early as childhood, will not fall away. Their suffering is the main reason for this article, and for the call for a rational and science-based engagement with trans culture and its radical ideology.
Enabling has never fixed any narcissist or our relationship with them.
Huw Smith is a writer and one-time academic (MA English Language and Literature), now retired. He writes essays and articles on a variety of subjects and has written a clutch of fiction, with some works pending.
For more information
Since 2021, Joshua Slocum has hosted the Disaffected Podcast — “the show where we talk about politics, culture and relationships through a psychological lens.” Josh examines how Cluster B personality types prevail in “woke” and transgender ideology including antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorders.
