'Conclave' Isn't The Pro-Trans Film People Think It Is

Rather, it illustrates the insanity of the trans/queer movement.

©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection

This post contains spoilers.

Now that Emilia Pérez looks like it’s out of the running to win the Best Picture Oscar after its trans star and Best (*wink wink*) Actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón has been canceled for disparaging Islam on Twitter, it looks like a PG-rated movie about the pope actually has a shot at taking home tonight’s main award.

I saw Conclave in November with a friend, and it’s great. The film is about a gathering of cardinals in Vatican City to elect a new pope after the previous one dies of a heart attack. Over the course of a very scandalous few days, damning revelations end the campaigns of the frontrunners, an Islamist blows himself up outside the Sistine Chapel, and the cardinals elect to the papacy a pacifist archbishop who runs a church in Kabul.

But the drama doesn’t end there. After he’s elected, the new pope, Vincent Benitez (Carlos Diehz), confides to the dean of the conclave, Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), that he has a disorder of sexual development that resulted in a(“intersex”). He—or she, rather—explains that, during a routine appendectomy, doctors discovered she had been born with a uterus and ovaries.¹ What’s more, the former pope was aware of Benitez’s condition and had even paid for her plane ticket to Geneva to undergo a hysterectomy, which, the pope seemed to believe, would make Benitez a male and therefore eligible to serve as an archbishop.

You know that friend I mentioned earlier, the one I saw Conclave with? Well, he happens to be a gay man who was “affirmed” as trans at 15 and subsequently underwent vaginoplasty. He suffered severe health complications from both the surgery and the cross-sex hormones, and a few years ago he decided to detransition.

Right after the film’s big reveal, my friend and I couldn’t help but laugh. Of course this PG-rated movie about the pope is also about gender. These days, what isn’t?

But we also knew what the movie is not about: trans. And yet we could be sure that the “LGBTQIA+” crowd would try to paint it as such. Trans/queer activists conflate intersex conditions with trans identities (hence the “I” in that ridiculous acronym) because they want people to believe that trans, like intersex, describes a physical condition rather than a psychological one. And if people believe that it’s a physical condition, no different from a DSD, then they’re more likely to agree that pediatric sex-trait modification (aka “gender-affirming care”) is a human right, instead of what it actually is: child abuse.

But trans and intersex are completely different. Trans-identified (and increasingly, queer-identified) people take hormones and undergo surgeries to modify their secondary sex traits in an attempt to live and pass as the opposite sex (or as androgynous). They are not born with physical variations in sex characteristics. For various reasons—be it autogynephilia, radical politics, social contagion, or an attempt to thwart homophobia—they just don’t want to appear as the sex that they are.

People with DSDs, on the other hand, are born with variations in sex characteristics that compromise their ability to reproduce in adulthood. They make up about 0.018% of the human population (1 in 5000 people). Historically, many people with DSDs have undergone medical treatments to “correct” their DSDs in order to appear more like one sex or the other. In some cases, they were forced to undergo these “corrections” as children, long before they could consent to such procedures.

This is not to say that people with DSDs can’t “identify” as trans or queer. But having a physical condition and “identifying” as something based on a paraphilia or politics or whatever else are obviously not the same thing.

Sure enough, just as my movie-going friend and I had predicted, the gender cultists have co-opted Conclave’s plot and turned it into agitprop (as any good narcissists would do).

In a Them article about the film, trans writer James Factora stated, “People rarely talk about the ways that intersex people are affected by anti-trans legislation, and frankly, by anti-trans rhetoric.” Factora’s quote links to a separate Them article, which is about state legislatures that ban sex-trait modification for trans-identified kids while continuing to allow doctors to perform “corrective” surgeries on children with DSDs.

That article is, of course, rife with all the typical misinformation. Surgeries “are commonly used to police the bodies of intersex youth but are virtually never performed on trans minors,” its author, Abby Monteil, wrote.

Well, not exactly, Abby.

Between 2016 and 2020, at least 3,678 people between the ages of 12 and 18 underwent “gender-affirming” surgeries, according to a Stat News report. Over 3,200 of them were breast or chest surgeries, and 405 were genital surgeries. In 2022, Komodo insurance data compiled for Reuters found that 776 mastectomies were performed on patients ages 13 to 17 between 2019 and 2021, while 56 genital surgeries were performed on this age group. The Reuters analysis does not include surgeries that were paid for out of pocket.

For her Them article, Monteil interviewed Alicia Roth Weigel, an advocate for the intersex advocacy organization interACT, who testifies against the state bans. Weigel repeated the same misinformation as Monteil, stating that surgeries are “not happening on trans children.” She also told Monteil, “It should be such a basic fundamental understanding that a trans kid should be able to ask for something that will improve their health and an intersex kid should not have something forced upon them that will be detrimental to their health.”

By now I would really hope that everyone reading this knows there is exactly zero quality evidence that shows these treatments improve the health of trans-identified kids. Besides guaranteeing infertility, they actually impair cognitive development and bone health, and there’s a good chance they worsen mental health symptoms. Not to mention that, just as intersex kids cannot adequately consent to these procedures, neither can trans-identified kids consent to them!

This is something that Bria Brown-King, the director of engagement at interACT, seems to understand. In her article, Monteil wrote that Brown-King finds it “hard to reconcile how lawmakers insist that they are protecting trans children from making life-altering medical decisions, even while allowing doctors to do the same to intersex children who cannot advocate for themselves.” Brown-King underwent a “life-altering” surgery at age 13, long before she was “in a position to understand the full impact of [it].”

It sounds like Brown-King would have had a lot in common with the late intersex activist, Kiira Triea, who died of cancer in 2012. As the bioethicist Alice Dreger wrote in her obituary of Triea, in the 1950s, when Triea’s mother was pregnant, a doctor prescribed a form of the synthetic hormone progestin in order to prevent miscarriage. This caused the genetically female Triea’s genitals to virilize during fetal development. As a result, at birth, Triea was erroneously observed to be male.² As she got older, she behaved like a typical female and even described herself as “boy crazy.” When Triea was 14, she was taken to see the infamous psychologist Dr. John Money at Johns Hopkins University, where Money spearheaded the nation’s first “gender identity” clinic. Money claimed that gender expression was solely the result of nurture rather than nature, and that intersex children and even males who had suffered botched circumcisions could be raised as whichever sex the parents chose to raise their children. That is, people like Triea, whose genitals appeared more male than female, could be socially conditioned and surgically and hormonally altered to appear and behave more like that sex. So that’s what he did to Triea. Money’s efforts to turn her into a “normal” heterosexual boy failed. “Eventually he gave up,” Dreger wrote, “and ‘let’ her present to the world as a girl.”

As an adult, Triea became an advocate for intersex rights. Along with adult gay people she cofounded a website, titled (ironically, in retrospect) transkids.us, to spread awareness of the research of the sexologist Ray Blanchard, in particular the difference Blanchard found between trans-identified homosexuals and trans-identified autogynephiles. Triea knew that the sex-trait modification procedures that appeared to help autogynephiles were actually harming homosexuals in a similar way that these procedures had harmed her. And while she was well aware that the vast majority of proto-gay kids aren’t intersex, she did know they are often very gender-nonconforming in childhood, just like she was. Triea hadn’t been allowed to grow into adulthood unharmed by bad medicine, and she didn’t want proto-gay kids misdiagnosed as transexual to end up suffering the same fate.

Dreger wrote, “Kiira never hated transgender women who were autogynephilic, the way certain activists would claim. But neither did she have any patience for those who would pretend to have had a childhood like hers and the other transkids, many of whom as children had been beaten senseless, literally or metaphorically, for being identified as queer so young.”

In 2007, Triea coauthored a Perspectives in Biology and Medicine article with J. Michael Bailey, who wrote 2003’s The Man Who Would Be Queen, a book about Blanchard’s transexual typology. In their article, Bailey and Triea detail the harassment campaign that trans activists—including the trans-identified male “Andrea” James—leveled against them for informing the public about autogynephilia. (Dreger wrote a book about the ordeal, 2015’s Galileo’s Middle Finger.) James posted photos of Bailey’s young daughter on the internet, labeling her—and I quote—“a cock-starved exhibitionist.” For Triea’s transgression of cofounding transkids.us, James demanded that the “transkids be exposed,” claiming “they were ‘fakes’ because they would not reveal their identities publicly.” James later sent threatening emails to Dreger and even showed up at her office at Northwestern University when Dreger wasn’t there. The university counsel, after reading James’s emails, advised Dreger to alert the police.

And yet, in 1998, James wrote to Dr. Anne Lawrence, an openly autogynephilic physician and sex researcher, that Lawrence’s work “backs up my own experiences…. I readily admit to my own autogynephilia.”

How strange.

Anyway, back to Conclave. No, the the film is not, as Out magazine claims, “a timely Oscar film on trans acceptance.” And not just because trans and intersex are two very different things, as I hope I’ve adequately explained, but also because of what comes after Benitez tells Lawrence her secret. That is, in the end, Benitez says she decided not to go through with the hysterectomy.

“I am as God made me,” she explains.

Damn right. People with DSDs—as well as gender-nonconforming homosexuals—are fine just the way they are.

Leave them kids alone.

1. After doing some research and consulting with an expert, I determined Benitez’s condition was most likely Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). In females, CAH can result in an enlarged clitoris that resembles a penis and labia that may be partly closed and therefore look like a scrotum.

2. Hey, look guys! The only type of situation in which it’s ever appropriate to use the phrase “sex assigned at birth!”