Clownfish and the transgender medical matrix

This was a thread I posted on Twitter to coincide with the release of the song Clownfish, republished here with added footnotes and commentary

Over the past 10 years, thousands of kids have been plugged into a medical matrix, wherein they're administered chemical castration agents, cross-sex hormones, and plastic surgery.

In Britain, a clinic was established in 1989 to treat children with "gender identity disorder."¹ The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at Tavistock received 2 referrals in its first year. In 2009 it had 97 cases. By 2015 this increased to 1419, and by 2020, more than 2500.

In its first 2 decades, most referrals were male. But by 2016, the scales had tipped dramatically and three-quarters of referrals were girls. About half of those referred were shepherded into drug use. This pattern was replicated across the West.

In the US, referral data is scarce. But the rise in the amount of clinics providing “comprehensive transgender healthcare” is striking. Norman Spack opened a gender clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2007. It was the first paediatric clinic of its kind in America.²

Spack championed a treatment protocol called – “gender affirmation.” This framework had been inaugurated in Holland. Under it, clinicians were to ‘affirm’ a child’s self-declared identity outright. It was devised primarily for those with life-long cross-sex presentation.

It soon became the medical modus operandi in America, rolled out to any and all. Then as now, it was asserted that kids would commit suicide if their identities were not validated. “To give them time to think things over” – puberty would be suppressed.³

The drugs selected to perform this task were developed to treat breast or prostate cancer. Such cancers need estrogen or testosterone to grow. These drugs – GnRH agonists – repress sex hormones, effectively chemically castrating the sufferer, but cutting off tumour growth.

They are used to treat perversion, paedophilia, and to diminish the sex drive in delinquents. They had also been deployed to delay precocious puberty in children who, for often unknown reasons, enter rapid sexual development at an extremely young age. 

From here, it was thought they might help relieve the anguish of kids who were anxious about entering the “wrong” puberty. This program was peddled as a panacea. The UK adopted it in 2011, and other countries followed suit. The puberty suppression circus began.

“Puberty is optional!” – went the slogan. “Blockers are reversible!” – they howled. Did they have data to back this up? No. But there was data on possible side-effects: penile or vaginal atrophy, sex hormone deficiency, skeletal disfiguration, infertility, stunted growth.⁴

Fast forward. From that first clinic in 2007, there are now 300+ gender clinics that cater to children in America alone. The Gender Mapper project aimed to pinpoint where these clinics had sprung up. I was sceptical of the numbers at first. Then I trawled through the websites of hundreds of them.

Surgery is performed on minors. Take one: the clinic operated by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy in Los Angeles. It provides double mastectomies, the slicing off of the breasts, to girls as young as 13. Here's their own report on it.⁵

Whilst the UK saw mass female referrals, there was an accompanying rise in the number of girls and young women seeking gender surgery in America. Here's data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.⁶

Girls and young women were set on a pathway towards hysterectomies (womb removal), oophorectomies (ovary removal), and phalloplasty (the extraction of skin from the forearm to be sculpted into a makeshift neo-penis) – all for an average cost of $150,000. To facilitate this, tens of thousands took to raising funds online for the removal of their body parts under the delusion that, by doing so, they would become their ‘authentic self.’⁷

What spurred the surge in demand? Did a coterie of youngsters suddenly get in tune with who they truly were? Or did the trans-identity snowball happen to coincide with the proliferation of an online cult on Tumblr, YouTube, and Reddit?

In the early 2010s Tumblr emerged as a platform for ‘transition bloggers’ to record their drug and surgical adventures. It became the campfire around which the digital gender tribe gathered. One paper described it as “a trans technology.”⁸

They would post updates on their activities: the drugs they were injecting, their emotional travails, their sexual proclivities, erotica (described as “an integral part of transition”) and all sorts of nutty stuff that would never have existed if not for the internet.

A decade before, these types of youngsters would have been on MySpace interpreting their pubertal body woes through the prism of ‘emo’. But now all the emos had become 'trans' and gender was the explanatory device par excellence for the new social media age. 

There evolved a sort of hive-mind philosophy, which developed through collaborative storytelling and functioned as a form of group therapy. Crowdsourced ingredients were stewed together: a pinch of Butler here, a sprinkle of transsexual history there, plus much that was new.

Thousands of hours of video and blog content piled up, expounding upon how biological sex was a social construct, how gender was a fluid spectrum, but at the same time how “gender identity” was fixed and innate. Not even the term’s inventor believed this.

“It is a working term,” Robert Stoller said of his creation in 1968. “We need hardly insist on the holiness of the term “gender identity.”” Half a century later, gender identity had everywhere been pronounced holy, sanctified with legal sponsorship, draped in royal purple.

Originally a term to denote how a person constructs an alternate version of themselves counter to their biological sex, gender identity now became an entity awash in almost mystical, soul-like significance. Online, this soul-superstition took many comical detours.⁹

By the mid-2010s, it escaped its microblogging cocoon and began to run rampant on the net. It rapidly spilled out into the wider world, onto university campuses and in the press, where it attracted all sorts of chancers and opportunists.

The first to clock this were the feminists. For decades, many had foreseen what it might mean to women if men were free to identify into the category of “woman.” Now they were starting to find out for real. Here’s Jane Clare Jones’s telling of it, in the form of a mock play.

Activist outfits capitalised on this fallout and marched forth on the basis that ‘trans’ was the new Civil Rights Struggle™. But basic rights had been granted long ago. So in order for the trans campaign to maintain momentum, new 'rights' had to be invented.

Enter: “Self-ID” – the right for someone to declare themselves the opposite sex and have the state immediately recognise them on this basis. No one would take advantage of this absurdity, they said, it would literally never happen. Yet it did – repeatedly.¹⁰ 

Massive amounts of funding came. Charities such as Stonewall in the UK pivoted entirely towards all things trans and found coffers flush with new money. Private foundations such as Arcus ploughed millions into trans activism. Celebrities lined up with their wallets open.

Tens of thousands of youngsters sought medical intervention. In the UK, 35 clinicians at Tavistock resigned over a 3 year period. The service was embroiled in a row over the affirmation protocol. A young woman, Kiera Bell, later took a case to the High Court.

In America, the demolition of sex organs and the assault on the endocrine system was profitably rebranded as “healthcare.” Gender medicine was a blossoming enterprise; a nifty side-hustle for the pharma giants who supplied the narcotics necessary to sustain the gender simulation.

Forbes foresaw ‘trans-tech’ as an industry potentially worth “in excess of $200B.” Global Market Insights predicted that the transgender drugs and surgery market alone would be worth $1.5B by 2026. Identity became a commodity.

A string of start-ups began peddling their wares to depressed teens. Companies like Plume and Folx delivered hormones-on-demand, through smartphone apps. They charged $150 to forge medical letters for youngsters to access "life-saving surgery."

A trans activist junta, seeking to supplant the concept of sex in law and install gender identity in its place, had emerged on all fronts: in politics, online, in sports, bathrooms, and in schools. A tangled network of inputs had spawned a ‘lollapalooza effect.’

The most visible symbol of this was the Pronoun – suddenly now an emblem of Cross-like worship – an armband worn to signal allegiance to the gender identity doctrine. Gender became a core facet of the new “Woke” civil religion, and many were sucked into its vortex.

It found itself backed by the most powerful corporate behemoths. Governments began attempting to pass gender identity legislation. Certain figures who stood against this on free speech grounds, such as Jordan Peterson, were catapulted to fame off the back of it.

Pronouns were tattooed into work email signatures, adorned on professional profiles on LinkedIn, used as moral decoration on social media – all to indicate that the adoptee was an 'affirmer.' Thus did they all support the administration of gender drugs and surgery to kids.

Most had no clue what they were supporting. They did it on the basis that they thought the trans movement was comparable to the struggle for gay rights. Eager not to find themselves on “the wrong side of history”, they feebly bent over to accommodate it.

Gay Rights history was rewritten to assert that "transwomen of colour" had been its leaders. Any historical figure that exhibited even a whisper of cross-sex behaviour – from Joan of Arc to the Roman emperor Heliogabalus – now retroactively became “trans.”

Some spoke out. When Maya Forstater was sacked from her job at a think tank for daring to air a basic fact, J. K. Rowling leapt to her defence, raising concerns also about detransitioners. She was besmirched as a “TERF” but here the mob at last met someone they couldn’t cancel.¹¹

“Anti-trans zealots, know this: history will judge you!” – squealed the Savonarolas to their million-strong congregations. These “good people” had aligned themselves with a drive to deconstruct the bodies of children on the basis they were becoming their 'true self.’

There was nary an MRI scan in sight to prove they were ‘trans’, next-to-no psychiatric assessment, little exploration of separate contributing factors, and no analysis of comorbidities such as trauma, loneliness, depression, anxiety, mood disorders, or body dysmorphia.

Those who sought to explore comorbidities were denounced as ‘conversion therapists,’ booted out of their clinics (like Kenneth Zucker), excoriated online and bombarded with abuse. Any who sought to dig deeper to a "root cause" were to be castigated.

For many who’d hopped on the transwagon in their youth, it was inevitable that regret would ensue. A wave of detransitioners that had managed to unplug themselves from the matrix gradually emerged, only to be lambasted as traitors and execrated as apostates.

The rise of transgenderism coincided with a mass media revolution and the global roll out of digital interconnectedness. Radical disquiet on the social and economic savannah had led to a breakdown of the symbols and meaning structures that once cemented peoples' identities.

From this maelstrom of confusion, cult formation was simply the easiest route out of nihilism. The kids of this decade rode its chaotic rapids, seeking refuge in the shelter of self-creation. They changed their names, adopted new pronouns, had their bodies regulated by drugs.

The "trans" experiment will be remembered as the great medical error of our era. When its history is written, it will not be seen as a liberation movement that threw off the shackles of sex, but as a quack derangement of the sort that surfaces every now and then in history.

It will rank alongside leucotomy, lobotomy, Lysenkoism, mercury peddling, thalidomide prescription, and eugenics. A movement that medicalised kids and young adults, enslaved their bodies to drugs, and lopped their sex organs off in the pursuit of profit.

Strike me dead, the track has vanished,
Well, what now? We’ve lost the way
Demons have bewitched our horses
Led us in the wilds astray.

– Pushkin

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1. The term ‘gender identity disorder’ along with the more accurate ‘sexual identity disorder’ was used from the 70s onwards. It was later replaced with ‘gender dysphoria’, from Greek dusphoria, meaning something ‘hard to bear.’ This switch arrived only relatively recently, being gradually introduced at the behest of activists to eliminate the ‘stigma’ surrounding the word ‘disorder’. By 2013, with the publication of the American Psychiatric Association’s fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), ‘gender dysphoria’ usurped all previous terms. Activists are now seeking its complete removal from the DSM-5 under the pretext that it is not a ‘mental disorder’ whatsoever. From 2018-2022, referring to it as ‘a mental disorder’ on social media had countless people suspended.

2. The Center for Gender Surgery operating out of Boston Children’s Hospital was recently in the press again when it appeared that they were advertising gender surgeries, such as ‘gender-affirming’ hysterectomies (removal of the uterus, cervix, and fallopian tubes), for minors. The advert was deleted from the hospital’s website, but not before sparking much controversy. Although their website states that one has to be 18 before they can have certain body parts ripped out, it still makes clear that girls can have their breasts sliced off by the age of 15. Owing to this, the Center received bomb threats. No bombs were found.

3. This article was a Q&A published with Dr. Norman Spack in The Boston Globe back in 2008. Even then, the same fallacious arguments were used as to why it would be a good idea to pump children with GnRH agonists, that is to say chemical castration agents. ‘They will commit suicide if we don’t’, he basically argues. Perhaps it might be a good idea to provide some sort of psychological support to these kids before you start pumping them with drugs? No, this approach was henceforth labelled ‘conversion therapy’ by transgender activist cretins. They regard any form of mental health counselling or psychological support as a way of questioning, and thus negating, the self-declared ‘transgender identity’. For these duplicitous orcs, the mere mention of therapy is anathema. The only therapy is ‘transition’ (which is the real conversion therapy, since it literally seeks to convert the body into something it isn’t). It is now a punishable offence to ask a young girl why she believes herself to be a boy, why she wants to pump her body with testosterone. One must merely respond with: “Oh, you’re a boy! That’s great. Here let me give you some pamphlets about the best way to inject T, and here’s one about double mastectomy, you might want to consider slicing your breasts off soon.” The ‘identity’ is basically a coping mechanism in these children. Many of them have experience of abuse, have found themselves in precarious circumstances, and have joined an online cult on Tumblr, YouTube, and Reddit and elsewhere, which pumps nuclear levels of dross and propaganda at them.

4. NICE Evidence review for GnRH agonists here, which later informed the Cass Report. Similar reviews had been undertaken in Sweden and Finland, two of Europe’s most ‘progressive’ countries, and they likewise found the ‘evidence’ for the use of these chemical castration agent drugs on confused kids to be abysmal. SEGM has compiled a list of studies related to bone health, cardiovascular, endocrine, fertility, and other biomedical risks and complications in the use of ‘gender-affirming’ drugs and surgery.

5. It became a common occurrence online to state the fact that minors were now receiving ‘gender’ surgeries, and to receive in response a horde of sixth-wits asserting that this wasn’t happening whatsoever, as there were ‘safeguards’ and ‘restrictions’ in place and all the rest of it. Upon sending the papers written by the clinicians themselves to these ignorant interlocutors, which were demonstrative proof that the surgeries were happening by their own admission, the same people who mere minutes ago had asserted that these surgeries ‘weren’t’ happening now suddenly changed tack and reasoned that, well, if it is happening then it must be good. It was these sorts of instances that really gave me an insight into how previous scandals, previous regimes built on duplicity and obfuscation, previous discourses corrupted by power and propaganda, came to inflict the damage they did. A not inconsiderable part of it was thanks to the acquiescence of herds of utter numpties, captive minds, useful idiots whose idiocy had been wielded as a weapon in the service of dogma.

6. The data came from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ website. The numbers are from their annual reports up to 2020. The huge spike in the numbers of young women undergoing surgeries under the delusion they will be able to ‘live as men’ shows similar rates across most Western, especially Anglophone, countries, and in each of them it really rockets up around 2016.

7. There are plenty of gender clinics with price listings for all the various sorts of surgeries and procedures they perform. Prices vary, depending upon where the clinic is based, and in what state/country. For instance, private gender surgery outfit ‘The London Transgender Clinic’ offers vaginoplasties (penile inversion or intestinal/sigmoid) from £32,000. If you want the full shebang, it quickly all adds up. Hence why the waiting lists for GIDS, the NHS gender clinic, stacked so high in recent years, as more and more young men and especially young women sought to have their bodies rearranged and refashioned to meet the demands of their new delusional ‘identity’ – courtesy of the taxpayer. In America, these gender surgeries are much more expensive. There are countless private clinics offering all the different surgical options. To have your breasts sliced off in New York State you’re looking at, on average, $10,000. Hormonal drugs add up to about $2000 a year. To have your penis inverted and a makeshift ‘neovagina’ constructed out of the leftover tissue costs in the region of $25,000. Having your uterus, cervix, and fallopian tubes wrenched out will set you back about $10,000. Facial surgeries are the real expensive ones. To fully masculinise your face will cost about $50,000. To feminise it will set you back $70,000. A lot of money has been made in the last few years, that’s for sure. Hence why many youngsters who simply don’t have this sort of money took to sites like GoFundMe in an attempt to raise the monies. You can go to the site right now, type in ‘top surgery’ or ‘bottom surgery’ and see tens of thousands of fundraisers. There is a hilarious, but rather dark irony in how the transgender movement considers itself ‘anti-capitalist’.

8. Link to the paper about Tumblr as a ‘trans technology’

9. On Tumblr, from about 2010-2017, gender identity became its own crackpot fandom, in which young teens competed with each other to proclaim new identities. This multiplication of micro-identities was a way for certain kids to differentiate themselves from their peers, and as a result all sorts of ridiculous concoctions were spawned. To take one example, they invented genders such as ‘tetrisgender’, a gender identity which builds up over time only to disappear like Tetris blocks. You can find a whole alphabetised index of these things over at Gender Identity Wiki. Some were satirical, some were deadly serious. Much of this sort of stuff can be written off as teen nonsense, the type of stuff that proliferates in weird online fandoms. Unlike other fandoms, however, the gender identity fandom metastasised into a sort of onboarding mechanism for the transgender cult-at-large which, at the same time, was finally achieving major attention in the US press. Many of the kids that had merely sought to coddle their oddities online with likeminded others now found themselves railroaded onto the drug and surgery track via the doctrine of ‘gender affirmation.’ Huge dollopings of ‘erotica’ no doubt either aided them along the way or alienated them from their own bodies. They had hopped from tetrisgender to berrygender to demigirl, and experimented with a bunch of crackpot neopronouns. Their next step from here was often to proclaim a ‘non-binary’ identity, before finally settling on actual transgender. They now believed that the fluidity of their former ‘gender identity’ had congealed to create something ‘fixed and innate’. What followed would be mutilation of the body in the service of fantasy, as thousands of girls ‘discovered’ that they were really boys on the inside. And they conveniently found many braindead adults willing to indulge this madness for ‘kindness’ cookies. Utter insanity, all of it.

10. There are too many examples of this to enumerate here. But an example from recent weeks was the case of ‘Isla Bryson’, formerly known as Adam Graham – a man who was prosecuted in January 2023 for the rape of two women. By the time of prosecution, he had conveniently adopted a ‘transgender identity’ and the UK press, no matter their political orientation, willingly indulged this delusion by referring to him as ‘she’. Even rapists must have their holy pronouns respected, you see. The case caused a stir as it happened to coincide with the Scottish government’s attempts to bungle through their new gender self-identification legislation, meaning that any man who claimed to be a woman would be able to completely alter his official documentation concerning sex within a matter of mere months. Debate erupted in the press as to whether it was a good idea to allow a two-time male rapist to be confined to a female prison, simply on account of him now claiming to be a woman. The whole thing was fucking insanity, but we live in an extremely deluded, insane age where facts are so easily trampled upon by the juggernaut of transgender idiocy, and this idiocy finds itself backed by clubfoots of the intellect like Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish National Party leader. She then found herself having to assert that ‘Isla Bryson’ was ‘faking’ his ‘transgender identity’, duplicitously using the gender legislation so as not to be housed with the brutes in the male prison. Ironically, this is precisely what many so-called ‘TERFs’ had been warning about: self-identification legislation will lead some men into posing as women so as to gain access to women. The irony was completely lost on Nicola Sturgeon.

11. Examples of the psychopathic vitriol and the raging spite, envy, and murderous rancour that the online transgender mob and its little quislings exhibited and directed at ‘TERFs’ (women) can be found at Terfisaslur.com