You have two options: become a "real man" or a trans prostitute.

This is basically what the world tells sex-role nonconforming boys.

Eight years ago, when I was in college and still experimenting with being woke, I wrote an essay called How to Be Cisgender. The essay was about my childhood sex-role nonconformity—how I loved My Little Ponies, spinning around in skirts, and hanging out with girls—and about how I meticulously conformed to sex-role norms in adolescence to satisfy the bullies, who were relentless.

What inspired me to write the essay was a news article I had read about a “nonbinary” mother who was refusing to register her newborn as male or female. Her reason, she said, was because she wanted the child “to have all of the space to be the most whole and complete person that they can be.”

When I wrote the essay, I was just becoming familiar with gender ideology (I was actually interning for GLAAD at the time), so I couldn’t yet articulate, even to myself, how ridiculous the mother was being: how, even if she wanted her child to have the freedom to transgress rigid gender norms (a fine aspiration), she couldn’t just pretend sex doesn’t exist. And besides, if innately¹ sex-role nonconforming people identify out of their sex categories, doesn’t that just end up reinforcing the stereotypes associated with the sexes? “I’m a male, but I can’t be a man because I’m not a chauvinist” seems pretty counterproductive, if you ask me. And here I thought the goal was to expand what was possible for men and women, not to give up on the project entirely.

I continued the essay by describing how my self-suppression atrophied my personality and concluded it by speculating about what I might be like today if I had had the fortitude to resist conforming. What type of clothes would I like to wear? Would I still be highlighting my hair? What kind of life would I be leading?

Eight years later, I still wonder about this, especially when I see so many femme-presenting gay men identifying as transwomen or as nonbinary. And it’s not just about a new name and pronouns. A lot of these men are medicalizing with hormones and undergoing high-risk surgeries (including castration). These interventions do not “free them from the bonds of heteronormativity.” They rob them of their futures.

A lot of these guys are ending up in prostitution. And no, “sex work” is not a safe and rewarding profession, no matter what modern progressives try to tell you. It’s the on-ramp to drug addiction, homelessness, and violence. Much like “third gender” males in non-Western cultures (Thailand’s ladyboys and India’s hijras, for instance), some transitioned gay men see it as the only viable option. And deep-pocketed gynandromorphophilic men (GAMPs)—aka “tranny chasers”—are aplenty.

Róisín Michaux recently wrote about this topic in a brilliant essay she titled The Ground Zero of trans propaganda. Trans-identified gays in the West and “third gender” males in non-Western cultures becoming prostitutes is “so common”, she wrote, “that travesti is synonymous with prostitute in much of Latin America. The same goes for a lot of the culture-specific names for ‘third-gender’ men.”

Michaux’s reason for writing about this was to make a point I often try to make. She wrote:

Aesthetically-feminised homosexual men represent only a tiny fraction of the population of people who identify as transgender in the Western world. But they are the keystone of trans propaganda. They are the chunky bits in the slop you get spooned by the mainstream media every time you need to be reminded not to voice any incorrect opinions on the erasure of sex in law and policy. They help obfuscate the reality of the far ghastlier types: the heterosexual cross-dressing dads, and the middle-class girls who self-mutilate out of angst and/or narcissism.

That is, when people hear the word “transwoman”, they think of a surgically and medically feminized version of the character Ricky in the short-lived ’90s TV show My So-Called Life. The docile, faggy, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly friend who likes wearing eyeliner and also getting butt-fucked. In that television show, Ricky would join his high school girlfriends Angela and RayAnn in the lady’s room. And while, no, it is not OK for even docile gay guys to invade women’s private spaces simply because they don’t want to be left out of the juicy girl talk or because they’re afraid of getting beaten up in the men’s room, the ’90s television audience’s inclination was to say, “Oh, just let him go to the lady’s, the poor fag; he’d probably be happier as a girl anyway”—not realizing, one, how regressive that viewpoint is, and two, that this lenient attitude would eventually lead to 6-foot-2 linebackers in pigtails swinging around their dicks in the girl’s room.

For far, far too long, people have been misled to believe that all trans people identify as trans for the same reason. “They were born in the wrong body” or “their body is male but their spirit is female.” It’s hogwash and, quite frankly, insane. As Michaux wrote in her essay, the Ricky-types are a tiny fraction of the trans-identified male population. The linebacker types who get off by stuffing maxi-pads under their balls represent the overwhelming majority.

Anyway, back to me. If I hadn’t done everything I could as a young person to de-feminize myself in order to stave off the bullies and instead just naturally evolved into an adult androgyne, would I too have started identifying as a transwoman and gotten sucked into prostitution? Or would I have been able to lead a normal, healthy life?

It would probably be easier to answer these questions if there were a lot of truly femme-presenting gay men in the West who still identify as men and who lead normal, healthy lives. At the moment, Pear Joseph is the only one I can think of.²

When I spoke with Pear last week, he told me he identified as a girl when he was five or six, but thankfully neither his parents nor his therapist affirmed him as one. Thus, he was able to grow up with a healthy endocrine system and his body intact. He has normal romantic relationships and a normal job. He now testifies in support of state restrictions on “gender-affirming care” for minors because he believes (as I do) that it’s a brutal new form of gay conversion therapy.

When Pear was in his early twenties, he grew his hair long and got lip fillers. After that, he was regularly (and aggressively) hit on by GAMPs, who often mistook him for a prostitute. While Pear still had no desire to transition, these experiences helped him to understand why others choose that path. Not only is it a relief to no longer be the object of society’s scorn, but when a femme gay guy starts presenting as a woman, it’s often the first time in his life that he gets to experience being complimented for his looks and pursued by men. Even his female friends, who before he transitioned were always kind but at the same time treated him like a lesser version of a man, are now telling him how “fierce” and “gorgeous” he is.

Maybe I’m crazy, and maybe this will always be nothing more than a pipe dream, but good god would I love humans to finally get it through their thick skulls that there will always be a minority of sex-role nonconforming males and females, and that we should probably figure out how to make space for them to live healthy and happy lives instead of demanding they either conform to normative sex roles or undergo surgical mutilation.

Ah, but I dream.

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1. I say “innately” because I’m referring to gender-incongruent people who have been that way their entire lives, not to those who cosplay as such by getting weird haircuts (or, God forbid, mastectomies) and calling themselves nonbinary.

2. Of course there are many boldly feminine gay men out there. But I’m not talking about them. And I’m not talking about drag queens, either, or anyone else who cross-dresses as some kind of performance art. I’m talking about the Western equivalent of the non-Western world’s “third gender” males (that is, if “third gender” males could live the American dream).