These Men Were Promised Lesbians

Whose idea was it to tell heterosexual men that they could change their wardrobe and the world would see them as women? A non-exhaustive list: your local government, your national government, your federal government, your national broadcaster, the HER app, and your local arts centre.

Any time women made it known that, as one half of a sexually dimorphic species, we can spot the phenotypical traits of men before we clock literally anything else about them, we were shouted down, expelled, fired or attacked. But the threats did nothing to change our innate sexual attraction.

The grimmest places on earth

The end result is a lot of lonely, unhappy “transbians.” Promised by all of our major institutions that only raging bigots would see through their fancy dress, they gather on internet fora and post through the stages of grief. Incredibly, the first of those stages is often surprise.

Peppered among the sexy selfies in divorced-dad apartments, in Facebook groups like “Transgender Lesbians” and “How to girl” and the subreddits r/MtF, r/AskTransgender, and r/MTFSelfieTrain, they run the gauntlet from hope to shock to despair to rage. The following unedited and unlinked quotes are just a sample:

“If anyone sees my future girlfriend, tell her I'm at home waiting for her,” they might say in the early days. But check in a while later, and they often express shock: “Is anybody else here inexplicably unable to have a relationship?” They ask each other, “Why don’t I pass?” as they outline goals it’s hard to believe are sincere, publishing pouty before and after photos that - whether taken six months or six years apart - are photos of the same men.

What gives? They got their official girl-certificate, they have little nubbins of boobs, and everyone in the office is forced to call them “she”. So why does nobody want to date them? Trans "women" rarely pass. And yet society has invested heavily in convincing them that they can.

Being cruel to #BeKind

Trans women often end up dating each other, even finding real happiness in the arrangement - though for heterosexual men it rarely seems like their first choice. The relationships they have with actual women are more often than not the wives who decided to stick around, or young “queer” women living their truth that TWAW (trans women are women).

Many try out the chasers (ostensibly straight men, but with a fetish for transgender women) before swearing off them. They might try the dating scene as openly trans, before eventually, inevitably, getting creative with the truth. Sometimes they are successful, in which case they are ecstatic, which only serves to deepen the sadness of the other men in the groups.

But as they burn through their options, the sense of desperation often deepens.

“I was feeling so confident; lately though, any confidence and self-esteem I've had has been completely crushed. I've been misgendered more in the past two weeks than I have in the past three months… multiple times a day. And to be honest, outside of friends/family/online I don't think I've been gendered female to my face more than a handful of times since I started.”

And then comes the dawning realisation that everyone has been lying to them, which is when the anger begins to build: “Feeling crappy about my looks from trying to date. 3 years of hormones, FFS and still I get brushed off immediately because they can clock me....and don’t want to be with a transgender woman.”

You are real, you are beautiful, you are valid

They commiserate with each other about their lack of progress on “HRT”, and beseechingly tell each other how beautiful they look. This so-called hugboxing is constant, but as the realisation dawns that it has all been a cruel scam, they lash out:

“I'm calling BS and hugboxing. Seriously I don't pass if you look through these pics. It's all anglemaxxing + lighting. I literally want to crawl in a hole and die with these pics.” Another might respond- “It’s ok to be sad”

The start to reflect a little more deeply about things: “(I) wondering if I am the only one to experience this: I have noticed with how society is becoming more accepting, it is not as taboo for men to date/hookup with a transwoman preop/postop. However, I rarely know any transwoman who was preop to date/hookup with a cisgender woman, unless they were in a relationship before.

The penny starts to drop: “If society sees us as women, why are there not just as many women wanting to hookup/date us?” they ask, before realising: “Even accepting people act weird around us.” The sadness then consumes them: “Loneliness is tearing me apart. All the people who said they would always be there for me want nothing to do with me.”

These men didn’t get here all on their own.

The political hugboxing of AGPs

A civil rights movement is one in which you win hearts and minds. You convince people to give rights to those who didn’t have them before, as Helen Joyce puts it in her excellent book Trans:when ideology meets reality. The process, which usually takes decades or more, has been sped up in the case of “trans” people. “You might think it a good thing that such a delay is a thing of the past,” says Joyce. “But in fact it’s an indication that transactivism is not a civil rights movement at all.”

Gay rights, female enfranchisement, and desegregation took ages, and had to be built from the ground up via speeches and rallies where the favour of majorities was won. Only then did these movements take their cases to the courts. Trans activists went straight to the politicians, avoiding the painstaking process of convincing women to extend access to their spaces, identities and bodies.

“When those laws will take away other people’s rights,” says Joyce, “it is not only unnecessary to build public awareness. It is imperative to keep the public in the dark.” If only #NoDebate hadn’t been the strategy, these men might have found out earlier that there would be no women waiting for them on the other side of their divorce.

Who egged on the incels?

In a 2019 study, only 3.1% of straight (and non-trans) people were willing to date a trans person. Lesbians were more likely to be game, though it turned out that their willingness only extended to natal women. And in news that would have shocked not a single female – had any of us been consulted – it turns out almost nobody wants to date trans women.

The author of the study, Karen L Blair, was apparently keen to toe the delusional line. She blamed “explicit transprejudice,” and our alleged tendency to view trans people as “unfit, mentally ill, or subhuman.” She said those who denied attraction to trans people simply have “a lack of understanding or knowledge about what it means to be a transgender man or woman, and therefore, what it would mean to date a trans person.”

We're simply not trying hard enough, she says, because “it is one thing to make space for trans people within our workplaces, schools, washrooms, and public spaces, but it is another to see them included within our families and most intimate of spaces, our romantic relationships.”

And the chilling conclusion: “We won’t be able to say, as a society, that we are accepting of trans citizens until they are also included within our prospective dating pools.”

Incels, meaning involuntarily celibate men, have always existed. But nobody threw parades for them, and bigotry wasn't blamed for their unfulfilled desires. Women were. And now, again, it's our fault these men are all alone in their disgusting flats. Gender euphoria is temporary. Woman hatred is eternal.

Disclaimer: the quotes taken from Facebook and Reddit in this article are anonymous to avoid targeting of quoted individuals

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