The Transgender-Transhumanism Pipeline is Real

Andrea Long Chu’s arguments for letting trans kids change their bodies is a case study in gaslighting

Dear Readers - this essay is likely to be my last long piece for Substack. I will move my writing to my own online magazine Café Américain from April (cafeamericainmag.com, Twitter @CAmericain_mag), where it can be found along articles on politics, art, music, and critical ideas from other writers that we like and we hope to push back against the New Normal with. It was a great and intense time on Substack. But it is time to move on to something more exciting. I hope to see you in the Café soon!

But now, here is my last piece for Lawyer’s Fees, Beetroot, and Music:

It’s gaslighting time in the US left-wing scene again. Andrea Long Chu – a latte macchiato for a pen name! – has written a remarkable piece for The New York Intelligencer titled “The Freedom of Sex. The Moral Case for Letting Trans Kids Change their Bodies”. It is remarkable, because, as we will see, the author is both clearly above-average intelligent and blatantly malicious, a combination possibly passed down from the Godmother of transgender activists, Judith Butler. It is also Butler’s new book, Who is Afraid of Gender, that serves as an excuse for Chu’s long article that blends review with think piece. But I don’t want to simply condemn Chu’s argument on moral grounds, although she makes it easy. I also do not want to resort to ad homines by using Chu’s own argument directed against a well-known gender ideology critic (and also in spite of her being a porn-obsessed autogynephilic misogynist biological male but try not to let that taint your judgment. Yes, really). I much rather would like to explore her argumentative style. It is akin to those wonders of nature that lure their prey with pheromones before they devour it completely, and mercilessly. I will show that Chu does so in the realm of language. She in fact gaslights the reader into thinking that what she does is “in the best interest of children”, while she actively promotes to hurt them. This is because her arguments are of such a nature that it is not easy for the inexperienced reader, especially the inexperienced young reader, to discern their harmful intentions. Let’s explore how she does it.

Her cause is to “let” trans kids change their bodies and to not ask them why. She goes through some long-winding arguments for her case, from normalizing hormones and puberty blockers to the history of the sex division of labour, to condemning any analysis that problematizes the reasons for the surge in trans-identifying kids. Her main point, however, the one she fiercely upholds, is that in order to “get rid of oppressive gender norms”, we need to change biology itself. This is of course the direct pipeline from social to biological engineering, a pipeline often hinted at in trans-advocacy, but seldom made resolutely. Chu, though she is too clever to use the terms transhumanism or population control, clearly invites these images and makes them palatable to the “critical young thinker”, someone interested in radical social change and with vaguely “anticapitalist” inclinations. It should be obvious to anyone that “current systems of oppression” are capitalist in nature, by threat of moral condemnation if you think otherwise. But let us proceed step by step.

Chu is not stupid. She knows that listening to and reproducing the enemy’s arguments is necessary in order to appear magnanimous, generous, and kind. The enemy, in this case, are TERFs, TARLs (trans agnostic reactionary liberals, on which more later), and specifically Jesse Singal. Singal, who writes for a range of US outlets (The Atlantic, etc.) and hosts the popular Blocked and Reported podcast with Katie Herzog, has been a vocal critic of gender ideology for years, and naturally, Chu cannot let him get away unscathed. At the beginning of the piece, it is Singal’s criticism she first appears to reproduce correctly:

It would be “profoundly unfair,” [Singal] wrote last year, if a “large male” like himself were to suddenly demand that others see him as a woman.

Only to retort to:

(It did not occur to him that this is precisely why trans girls, who are well aware of their biology, are asking for puberty blockers: so that they do not grow up to look like Jesse Singal.)

Hmm, maybe not throw stones while sitting in a glass house, beauty queen.

Andrea Long Chu, a pretty lady

Naturally, Chu hasn’t merely chosen poor Jesse as a target. It is the Trans Agnostic Reactionary Liberal or TARL (admittedly not as catchy as ‘TERF’) that draws her ire, people who understand that there are two sexes, and two sexes, only. Simple truths are the worst to our radical disruptors, and the most obvious a truth, the more mercilessly they will be fought. She begins softly, again, describing what “reactionary liberals” believe:

[The TARL] is neither radical nor a feminist; he is not so much trans-exclusionary as he is broadly skeptical of all social-justice movements. He is a trans-agnostic reactionary liberal — a TARL. The TARL’s primary concern, to hear him tell it, lies in protecting free speech and civil society from the illiberal forces of the woke left, which, by forcing the orthodoxy of gender down the public’s throat and viciously attacking anyone who dares to ask questions, is trafficking in censorship, intimidation, and quasi-religious fanaticism. On trans people themselves, the TARL claims to take no position other than to voice his general empathy for anyone suffering from psychological distress or civil-rights violations.

Voicing one’s worry about free speech and civil rights is “reactionary” now in the socialist nomenklatura, this we are already used to. But her real problem is that “reactionary liberal” outlets such as The Times question the right of trans kids to access health care anytime, anywhere. She thus makes the point we have been blackmailed with for years now: gender-affirming care is a human right, and resistance is heartless and cruel.

Last year, the Times ran a story on a small Missouri gender clinic that had been overwhelmed by an “unrelenting surge in demand.” But the paper did not present this as an issue of access, as it has done with the national shortage in affordable home care or the inundation of abortion clinics with out-of-state patients post-Dobbs.

Access to puberty blockers, hormones, and genital surgery should be treated equally as affordable home care (or abortion, which is not a human right – this is more complicated). Chu here confounds the questionable implications of trans kids wanting a change of their sex identity with the human right of care for the ill or elderly. This is presumptuous, because everyone gets ill or elderly if they live long enough – this is the human condition. The human condition of getting old if one lives long enough cannot be put on par with the complicated implications of why millions of children, almost exclusively in the West, now suddenly want to change their sex and have not in the 750 millennia they have existed before. But to speak of social contagion and a mental illness-normalizing political mission – and the problem of nihilism is real - i.e., to see that this fad is a social, not a biological need, is interestingly out of the question for Chu who otherwise insists, with Butler, that “gender is a social construct”. Political interests and an analysis of power are far off the mark for Chu, though she, as we will see, pretends otherwise.

Let’s stay with the hormones. Chu makes the case, which is central, that hormone therapy for menopausal women has been applied for decades without further ado to make women feel more like women. She embeds the discussion in the case of an intersex person given oestrogens to be able to fully develop her primary and secondary sexual identity characteristics. The gynaecologist in charge, a Robert Wilson who wrote the book Feminine Forever in 1966, is quoted as saying:

“Women, after all, have the right to remain women…They should not have to live as sexual neuters for half their lives.” Robert Wilson has treated both intersex persons and women with menopausal problems with hormones and “claimed his patients were part of a new sexual revolution: They had supple breasts, smooth skin, and legs that looked good in a tennis skirt.” 

But a pre-menopausal or menopausal hormone therapy is not prescribed in order to enhance sexual identity markers, or attractivity, but to treat physical and sometimes even psychological ailments in middle-aged or older women. It may help in preserving feminine attractivity, but “enhancing physical attractivity” is not the indication. The same is the case for contraceptives. They have no such function – a woman does not take the pill to be “more like a woman”, but to simply not become pregnant, and sometimes it is used to treat inflammatory acne. The hormone argument cannot be generalised, but this is precisely what Chu wants us to believe:

So what we today call gender-affirming care is part of a larger history of sex-affirming care governed by strong normative ideas of health, productivity, and moral worth.

Chu is strawmanning herself through the argument. Your go-to prescription of hormones is presented as “sex-affirming care” (which it isn’t) because a side effect of such hormones could be enhanced sexual self-confidence. For Chu, this is on par with gender-affirming care through which kids – and her article is mainly about children – want to change their sex.

And suddenly it makes so much more sense that, as Chu continues, the “sex division of labour” serves as the basis for gender norms, which she attacks. From this follows, for Chu, that, if gender is social construct, biological sex is also merely constructed. But on Chu’s radical constructivism, her main intervention into the trans debate, later. Let us follow her step by step into how she develops her main argument that biological sex can be simply deconstructed, how biology itself can be engineered, by first reviewing her political critique of sex divisions in society:

It is difficult to explain why the above gender norm would exist in the first place if it were not for the actual fact of reproduction, which at this point in the descent of man still requires very specific biological conditions in order to occur… This is sex as biological capacity; in this sense, it is no less of a material resource than water or wheat. Every human society invested in perpetuating itself — which is to say, every society — has regulated the production, distribution, and use of biological sex. This is more than the sex-based division of labor (hunter-gatherers and all that). It is the actual division of sex.

So far, so hard to argue with. But then she puts forward an example that simply bears no relation to her point:

As Hortense Spillers has written, the genteel system of southern patrimony was bluntly waived when it came to the rape of enslaved Black women by white slave owners, who could effectively produce new assets — that is, new enslaved people — in the form of their own disavowed children. Gender alone cannot explain such an arrangement; it cannot speak to how sex functions as a kind of material base, as the Marxist feminists might put it: a source of labor, wealth, and power from which the elaborate superstructure of gender continually emerges, breaks off, and reforms in unintended ways.

It is true that antebellum South some slave owners were rapists, but then it is the rape – a relation of domination -, and not the “sex” that serves as “material basis” for anything. The offspring would not be a further asset if the social relations of slavery hadn’t already determined this relation. This has nothing to do with the act of sex itself. Again, strawmen abound in Chu’s reasoning. By reducing rape in the slavery South, a social relation based on domination, to the general term of “sex”, and then making the bolder claim that “sex is material base for X”, she not only distorts the political analysis she purports to have, she is also blind to the specificities of power and domination. In this way, she also badly overgeneralizes: sex is always something to do with “material interests”, even when it doesn’t. But the rub is in her pseudo-Marxist “materialist” analysis:

No wonder “gender identity,” understood by well-meaning LGBTQ+ advocates as an abstract feeling, has done such a poor job of justifying sex change. If biological sex is part of a material structure of value, then society has a concrete interest in any potential gains or losses that may result, feelings be damned… This is the larger historical reason why the anti-trans movement does not want transgender people to receive sex-altering care. It is not clear how, if at all, such people will fit into the division of sex in America. 

We are getting closer to Chu’s main argument. The anti-trans movement is essentially capitalist, extractivist, exploitative, perhaps settler-colonial - all words we have heard before, but which she carefully avoids not to be confounded with the blue haired screaming activist outside a council house. Her point is this: if “sex is the material base” to capitalist relations of production – a point that no single so-called Marxist-feminist has been able to prove, as I’ve shown elsewhere – then we should have want to get rid of sex identity altogether. Trans-identifying young people are, in Chu’s vision, the managers, or the spearheads, of this anti-capitalist revolution – so much for the instrumentalization of humans, and children in this case, which betray the transgender advocates’ transhumanist sympathies: “Sex-altering care can indeed affect one’s fertility but not always irreversibly, and the trans population is still far too small to bring about that sort of demographic apocalypse.» - ah, ok, I almost thought this could be about population control. My bad.

It's here that, for Chu, Butler’s demands – “that the struggle for trans rights cannot be merely cultural but instead must be connected to the fight for “the basic rights to housing, food, non-toxic environments, unpayable debt, and health care” – does not go far enough:

We need a stronger demand. Butler argues that it would be “counterproductive and wrong” to chalk up the existence of oppressive systems to biology. But why? I am of the opinion that any comprehensive movement for trans rights must be able to make political demands at the level of biology itself. 

Chu is very careful to not present such a possibly as originating from her own mind and invokes Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 classic The Dialectic of Sex:

Suppose women’s oppression really is a product of their biology, Firestone wrote. What follows? Only that feminists must work to change biological reality… For her, this meant a “revolutionary ecological programme” of fertility control, artificial reproduction, and the full automation of labor. That may sound unrealistic. But this is the point: Justice is always an attempt to change reality.

This is wrong. Justice is not an “attempt to change reality”, but to bring about conditions that are just, as the name says. “Changing reality” is a deliberately vague term, one that is supposed to cause feelings of rightful anger for the struggling younger individual who sees bad things happening everywhere, the latter which is confounded with “reality”. Wouldn’t it be great to change reality? is then nothing but “wouldn’t it be great if bad things no longer happened?”. This is every socialist’s and social engineer’s mantra, no matter the cost:

… the belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism. What trans kids are saying is this: The right to change sex that has been enjoyed for decades by their parents, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, and representatives, especially if those people are white and affluent — this right belongs to them, too. We should understand this right as flowing not from a revanchist allegiance to an existing social order on the perpetual verge of collapse but from a broader ideal of biological justice, from which there also flows the right to abortion, the right to nutritious food and clean water, and, crucially, the right to health care.

The gaslighting has come full circle: appeals to more general human rights (“rights” sounds good) is linked to the “rights” of trans kids to change their sex, which is directly linked to the “care for vulnerable people”-paradigm (we don’t want to be cruel) which is then short-circuited with appeals to “let them” change their sex for the sake of “biological justice” – and become mutilated, incapable of reproduction, often psychologically devastated, and in life-long therapeutic need – which of course we hear nothing about. We don’t want to deny kids their rights, do we? We have seen, with Chu, that hormone prescriptions are a common thing, and we have seen that the social sex division is based on a value-extracting system of oppression, and we have seen that biology/reality can be changed only if we want it, so who could possibly be against teenage sex change?

The cruelty consists in the evocation of terms like “justice”, “rights”, and “freedom” terms that no one could object to, while simultaneously undermining young people’s rights and freedoms in the endeavor of the transhumanist (messing with one’s DNA) and population control (sterilizing) effects of gender transition – under the pretense of “biological justice” or the “freedom of sex”:

This does not mean shooting testosterone into every toddler who looks at a football. But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right. 

Biological engineering should be accessible to all, because:

Americans tend to imagine children both as a font of pure, unadulterated humanity and as ignorant dependents incapable of rational thought or political agency. This has allowed the movement to infantilize not just kids but all trans people whom it only wishes to shepherd through the ravages of mental illness and the recklessness of youth.

Most of all, and this is new in the “child focused” world we live in, where child prophets like Greta Thunberg accelerate the acceptance of reduced standards of living for all, where a reduced age of consent facilitates the accessibility to children for pedophiles, where drag shows for children normalize sexual perversions, etc. we – the grown-ups - should not ask the reason why children want to change their sex. This is because the kids, once being TikToked into accepting irreversible damages to their body, will have made the right decision no matter what.

We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex. It does not matter where this desire comes from. 

The Believe the children mantra, however, is pure malice. At this point, conscious manipulation on the side of the aforementioned “parents, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, and representatives”, never mind media figures, becomes presented as the child’s own decision. But children are malleable. They are gullible. They are vulnerable. This is the whole point of children. This is why they are specifically protected by the law. This is why, as a society, we look out for them. This is also why we don’t trust them to do our tax returns, drive a car, or camp in the woods alone. But we should “trust them” with making irreversible changes to their body that affects their reproductive capabilities?

With this article, Andrea Long Chu is striving for a broader social acceptance of hurting children. I have no idea why. I am not even sure she does so consciously. Maybe it is true what Elon Musk said: that Chu is a psychopath. I only believe, firmly, that the mental depravation of the left has nowhere left its mark as strongly as in the transgender movement.

And because the trans cause shares its nihilist and irrational aims with it, Andrea Long Chu is also a pro-Palestine activist. Antisemitism, as Claire Fox correctly sees, is often a symptom of a broader decline of civilizational standards. This is what it shares with the transgender movement.

Make no mistake: at no point is the activism an activism for the people it purports to support. It is much more than that: it is a cynical reaction to the enemy. Pro-Palestine activists do not care about Palestinians, or Hamas would be their main target. They care about living out their anti-Jewish resentment without excuse or consideration, and even with the absolution of their “just cause”. Trans activism is no different: It is a rebellion against the adult world, against civilized politeness, detachment, respect, and the implicit understanding that not everyone wants to be bothered with the most intimate secrets of others. Children serve as pawns to this end, as much as Palestinians serve as pawns to the antisemite’s resentment against the civilized world.

Both kinds of activism are a cruel reckoning with the state of the world that seeks to annihilate and destroy, but which cloaks its destructive aims in the language of “care” and “human rights”. This is the real nihilism.

Do not let predators like Andrea Long Chu get away with it.