The last post questioned the theory of “ROGD boys”, suggesting the theory has more explanatory value for the attitudes of parents and counsellors towards autogynephilia, than of the boys themselves.
There does however appear to be a new factor in why males would disassociate from their sex: misandry directed at boys by the primarily online feminist social justice movement movement, who cast males, including boys, as an oppressor group.
This appears to work as a push-factor, to autogynephilia becoming an autogynephilic disorder, as being cast as an oppressor leaves boys with autogynephilia with fewer reasons why they would want to remain as male.
It also appears to be capable of inducing a gender identity disorder in boys who would have otherwise had no propensity to want to identify as the opposite sex. In this case, there arguably is a new type of socially-induced gender identity disorder amongst males.
The social media network that often features in the account of Zoomer boys who were sucked into “gender identity” ideology is Tumblr, a media-sharing and blogging platform that was popular around the 2010s. Tumblr was one of the main platforms on which young people disseminated and became radicalised by social justice ideologies.
In the 2010s the feminist social justice ideology, of women versus the “patriarchy”, had reached fever pitch. On Tumblr, this created a push-pull dynamic, where boys were pushed away from the apparent “toxicity” of their own sex, and pulled towards “gender identity” ideology, which offered an alternative to growing up as men:
This background made me vulnerable to the ideology of transgenderism. I had no friends in high school and spent a lot of time online, and I was exposed to the burgeoning social justice/woke movement before it entered the mainstream. When I connected to the internet, I was inundated with messages about the violence of maleness. This wasn't just “toxic masculinity”—I saw feminists saying all masculinity was toxic, that all men were rapists, all men were oppressors, all men should be killed
[…]
As a white man, I was directly responsible for all of the oppression experienced by women and people of color. I was fourteen years old and had never been in a fight in my life or said a racist or misogynistic word to anyone, but I believed that the circumstances of my birth made me a monster. I wasn't mentally mature enough to think critically about these ideas, or to take them as anything but literal fact. (Literal thinking is common among autistic people, and I would be diagnosed with autism a few years later.) I believed, all the way down to my core, that all men were evil and all women were unimpeachably virtuous. This was black-and-white thinking; it’s one of the reasons why so many autistic people are transitioning. I believed that my very existence was sinful.
[…]
I didn't have any particular reason to want to be female except that women were better than men–in my mind women were smarter, kinder, more empathetic, more beautiful, more moral. I was attracted to women, and felt guilty about that attraction–straight male sexuality, I was told, was repulsive and rapey and objectifying. If I were a woman, I could be attracted to other women in a virtuous way. Maybe I was fetishizing lesbians, but there was nothing leering about it–I simply believed the things that women online were saying about themselves.
[...]
I wanted to transition because my body was my enemy, and my body was the enemy of the world. I hated myself and wanted to punish myself. It was the same feeling that motivates cutting, binge-eating, anorexia, and lashing oneself. My very nature meant I deserved pain. I couldn’t remove my whiteness from myself, but maybe I could remove my maleness. The first step was to get rid of the poison coursing through my body: testosterone, the hormone turning me into an animal and a brute. I needed to purify myself.1
And in another account:
All the evils of being a cisgender heterosexual white man suddenly melted away, since it was now telegraphed to everyone with whom I interacted that I was really just a sweet trans girl.2
The author of this account has written about autogynephilia,3 but I think has since become ambivalent about the concept. It is perhaps possible that there are boys who might end up experiencing a phenomenon similar to autogynephilia, if they are left attracted to the result of their transformation, by virtue of being heterosexual.
These boys, who are now young men, have a difficult job in speaking up against the feminist social justice ideology that drove them to transition as boys.
Feminists in the anti-“gender identity” movement say their concern is the safeguarding of children, but are hostile to the males who must necessarily criticise feminism and the role it played into pushing them away from their sex and into “gender identity” ideology as children.
There appears to be again, a generational factor behind the inability of feminist in the anti-“gender identity” movement to hear what the Zoomer-generation of males are saying. The Boomer-generation of feminists who see the anti-“gender identity” movement as a rerun of women’s suffrage, are largely unaware of what it is like to grow up as a Zoomer online, exposed to the misandry of the feminist social justice movement.
At its worst, this inability to hear, becomes active hostility to what these boys, who are now men, are saying, as it conflicts with their understanding of the “gender identity” movement, which presents the feminist social justice movement as the solution, rather than a contributing cause of “gender identity” ideology and unhappiness in children.
Ironically, at the same time as feminists in the anti-“gender identity” movement complain, quite legitimately, about being labelled as the “cis, white, hetero, patriarchal, oppressor” e.g. as “TERFs”, they themselves label these boys, now, men, who by necessity must criticism feminism, as “misogynists” or as “incels”, “involuntary celibates”, with seemingly little awareness that they are behaving in the same way as the group they disagree with.
The point is not that such labels are true, or offer any particular analytic value, but instead they are slurs used to mark that person as the oppressor. The term “incel” or “misogynist” is even directed towards men who are in relationships, or married with children, in the same way that “TERF” is directed towards those who are in no way radical feminists.
The “gender identity” ideologues and feminists within the anti-“gender identity” both claim that they are nothing like the other, yet share the same traits: each divides people into oppressors versus the oppressed — of victims versus a supposed oppressive patriarchy. When attempting to talk about their experiences on social media about their childhood, with their necessary criticism of the influence the feminist social justice, these young men have often therefore been mobbed, and cast as part of the oppressor group. Worst still, is the reaction to any attempt to talk about the concept of autogynephilia. The fact that these young men are labelled as the oppressor, has resulted in victim-blaming, that somehow they were culpable creating the “gender identity” movement and responsible for their own descent into “gender identity” ideology as minors.
Part 9 of this series considers gender dysphoria and Zoomer girls.
“Purification Rites”, Richards, S. 26 April 2022
“Tumbling into Trans Activism”, 10 March 2022 “Limpidă”. 10 March 2022.