"Do you even know any trans people?"

…this is the question asked of those of us who are ‘gender critical’/sex realists. It’s usually said with a sneer; the idea being that if we actually befriended a trans-identified person in real life and got to know them, we would understand them and support them.

But friendship does not = agreeing on everything. Friendship doesn’t mean going along with anything your friend does. And it doesn’t mean encouraging fantasies and believing lies.

Yes, I have known for decades, people who identify as ‘trans’. One of these people may have even saved my life (that story later).

I currently work at Walt Disney World, so I certainly see ‘trans’ people all the time. (It almost seems like Disney goes out of their way to hire them.) No, I currently don’t have any ‘trans’ friends. But if I did, it would not mean that I believe these people changed their sex.

What transgender defenders don’t realize is that most of us who are fighting for the reality of sex—even the most vocal of us—were once just like them. We went along with it the same way they did, often for years. The difference is, we eventually spent time thinking more about it, reading about it, researching it, and realized…the whole thing is nonsense. In other words, we educated ourselves.

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Here is some of my history with, as the activists like to call them, ‘trans folks’:

I worked in the cosmetics & fragrance industry for a couple decades. For several years my counter was next to the MAC counter. If you are anywhere in the vicinity of a MAC counter…you will come into contact with a ‘trans’ person. My coworkers and I worked with Layla* for years, and we all used she/her pronouns (being kind, you know) even though it was very clear that ‘she’ was a ‘he’. Being a MAC representative, Layla’s hair and makeup were on point, and ‘her’ outfits were professional. But a man’s body is a man’s body, and he was not fooling anyone.

We would whisper about Layla to each other, and the general attitude was ‘aren’t we all great for being so open-minded and welcoming!’ Some people were not so welcoming, however, and there was an incident where an employee got fired for making a derogatory remark. I heard the gossip but never got the details—I believe it had something to do with the bathroom. My female coworker/friend said she didn’t mind encountering Layla in the women’s room because ‘she’ was so pretty and feminine and clearly making a real attempt at being a woman. [It took me probably a decade to realize how off this argument is—so it’s OK for a man to go into women’s spaces if he can pass as a very stereotypically femme woman? And does that mean ‘woman’ = ‘pretty’, and all women are required to present themselves that way? What about tomboys and butch lesbians? Etc.]

Working in a department store can be extremely boring, so many of the hours are spent just chatting with your coworkers. The cosmetics & fragrance department is basically comprised of straight women and gay men, so a great deal of conversation is devoted to the shared interest of men. We most definitely did check out the guys who walked past our counters, and give each other looks of approval when a good-looking fellow passed by. Layla was no different in this regard. I remember thinking, hmmmm…she likes men, so this is really a gay guy who decided to be a woman. So now he’s a straight woman? How does that work?

There was a young gay guy who worked at MAC with Layla. Bryce* was tiny, sprite-like, saucer-eyed, cute and very sweet. He wore makeup and had a delicate walk, and there was no way he could ever in a million years pass for straight. I worried about him because I would see him getting harassed by dudes in the food court, and hear his stories of close calls with thugs on the subway.

Bryce was effervescent and witty, so I enjoyed talking with him. He wanted a boyfriend very badly, and would lament about the guys he liked that were not interested in him. Bryce was a clear ‘type’ and only a certain kind of guy was into his type—creepy, lascivious old men (or at least that’s how it seemed to him). He just wanted to date a ‘regular gay guy’ but none of them looked his way. It was one of those situations where ‘be your authentic self’ was not helpful advice. Bryce was being his authentic self, but unfortunately this was not resulting in him finding a love match. What’s a boy to do?

After I moved out of Boston I saw in social media that Bryce had adopted a ‘trans’ identity and was now identifying as a woman. I couldn’t help but wonder if working with Layla had contributed to this transformation.

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During this same time period, there was a college student girl with a boy’s name working at my part time job at an ice cream shoppe. Again, the whispers between coworkers: ‘Are we pretending that she’s a guy?’ ‘Yeah, I guess so. That’s what she, I mean he, wants.’ So we went along with it out of ‘being kind’. What could it hurt?

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There was the butch lesbian I knew through mutual friends. She performed in a drag king troupe and had a very pretty femme girlfriend. I attended their wedding—one bride wore the traditional white dress, the other bride wore a tux. A few years later, the butch half started identifying as a man. Does the femme now identify as ‘straight’ or is she still allowed to call herself a lesbian? I saw on social media that they had a baby (the femme delivered), so the child now has a mom and a ‘dad’.

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The last time I went to a drag show was probably eight years ago, but there was a time back in the day when I was an audience member pretty frequently. There is a drag bar in Boston called Jacque’s, and there were many performers who I knew on- and offstage. There were a few drag queens who segued into dressing in drag full time. We were to believe that they had ‘realized’ they were really the opposite sex, or should have been born the opposite sex, or were more comfortable being the opposite sex. And some of them had surgeries to ‘correct’ this. OK, fine, I thought. But what confused me was this: Why are they still performing? They would continue to dance and lip synch on stage, collecting dollar tips. A line-up would have a couple of drag queens plus a (now) ‘trans’ girl, and to me that was just weird. I went to the shows because it was understood that these were gay men performing as Cher, Madonna, or a made-up female character. If I’m watching a person who is NOW ‘officially’ a woman…it’s no longer a performance as a lark; it’s me validating you as a woman. These performances were more sexualized, because the performer was pulling out all the stops to show how feminine ‘she’ was. So, for me as a gay man…yuck. It’s one thing to stick a dollar into the bra strap of a gay guy clowning around in a dress and wig, but I had no interest in my hand coming into contact with a surgically enhanced breast.

Some men were into that, though. So much so that Jacque’s had a weekly night called ‘Tranny Shack’ with an all-trans line-up. Let me tell you, it was a VERY different crowd that filled that audience.

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Story time: Spring, 2011. There was one drag queen that I had never met ‘offstage’, but Boston is a very small town and I knew he traveled in the same circle as my ex-boyfriend. Through social media I saw his profile and photos as his real self. He was (in my opinion) more handsome as a man than he was pretty in drag. I was working in Copley Square at the time and found out he worked at a store in the mall, so I would peer in to get a look at him as my friend Penny and I passed by on our way to the food court for lunch. He had sexy, sleepy eyes and a kind of suave demeanor, and was actually quite masculine. Every time we passed, I would say, ‘Let’s see if Max* is working today!’ and then sigh to Penny about how dreamy I thought he was.

One day, I arrived to work and Penny said, “Don’t get mad, but…” and proceeded to tell me that she had gone into Max’s store and told him that I had a crush on him. I beat my head against the counter. “NO, NO, NO, PENNY!!! WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!?” She was trying to help in finding me a boyfriend, but I explained that to me it was just a kind of game, and admiring him was just a nice pick-me-up to help me get through my dreary work days. I never expected to actually MEET him. But the cat was out of the bag, so now I had to suck it up and go talk to him.

I sheepishly went to his shoppe, introduced myself and apologized for the situation. I was mortified but tried as best I could to be charming. He seemed like the serious type (which made him even more sexy) and said ‘no worries’ or something to that effect. We chatted for a bit and I mentioned that I had tickets to a Simian Mobile Disco show and would he like to go? He said yes, and we had a date.

I got to the Paradise Rock Club early and ordered a drink from a friendly lady bartender. I wandered around a bit, nervously waiting for Max to arrive. He showed up and greeted me with a hug, and I asked if he wanted a drink. I went back to the bartender, who was not so friendly anymore. I realized in my nervousness that I had forgotten to tip her the first time, and apologized profusely, doubling my tip to make up for it. I explained the situation and her smile reappeared.

Max and I listened to the music, talked, danced a little, drank a lot more, and eventually started making out. After a while, we had heard enough music and it was getting stuffy, so we went outside. On the sidewalk, we continued making out in our intoxicated state, and then he started asking me questions about sexual roles and my relationship with my ex. “A relationship would never work out between us,” he said, despairingly. I recognized that he was drunk, so I laughed and said, ‘Woah! This is our only our first date…we don’t have to get so serious!” He kept rambling, and I was trying to follow along but he was talking in circles. We both agreed that the night had maybe reached its end and we parted ways in separate taxis.

Nothing really happened after that. It was an awkward night and I guess we just left at that. Neither one of us contacted the other.

Some months went by and I went to Pride with a couple of friends, a gay buddy and his lesbian aunt. We got some STRONG drinks at the makeshift bar at the block party and danced. I was feeling very good. At some point I lost track of my two companions, but I bumped into an acquaintance. While chatting, I pointed out a guy in the distance that caught my eye and my acquaintance said, “I know him. Come on, I’ll introduce you.” He brought me over and I flirted with the guy, making him smile and laugh. He said he had to go, but before he left I asked for his phone number. Now I was really feeling good, but I was alone. I thought maybe I should go look for my two friends that I had arrived with. That’s the last thing I remember.

Turns out, the three of us had been roofied from those strong drinks at the makeshift bar. The next day, I called my friends to see what had happened to them. The gay guy said he came to at a stranger’s house party many miles away from Boston. The lesbian woke up in the passenger seat of her truck with a bruise on her forehead. Here’s what happened to me:

Everything was black. I wasn’t sleeping, but it felt like I was waking up. I slowly became aware of my consciousness. I was kissing someone. Not just kissing, I was naked and someone was on top of me… and we were having sex. My eyes opened and I saw that it was Max. I didn’t know where I was or how I got there, but I didn’t panic because the face was familiar. I stopped everything and asked where I was and what had happened. Apparently, he had seen me wandering around by myself on Columbus Avenue in front of the Castle in the South End of Boston.

The Castle in Boston. It’s now a steakhouse or something.

I’m sure when he found me, he had thought I was just very drunk and ‘Pride happy’, but I had no memory of our interaction. He was pretty mortified when I told him I had blacked out. But I didn’t feel taken advantage of; rather, I was aware that I had been in a potentially very dangerous situation—literally out of my mind, wandering alone on a busy street in Boston, during Pride—and I was grateful that someone I knew was the person who had found me and (unbeknownst to him) come to my rescue.

After this second even more awkward interaction, we again parted ways without contacting each other. [I did call the handsome guy I met at the block party before I blacked out; we went out, and we were together for almost a year.]

I saw Max again a few years later, in another city when I was on vacation. He was now ‘Maxine’, a full-time ‘she’, and working as a performer at one of those ‘drag brunch’ venues. Lip syncing to CeCe Peniston, collecting dollar tips from mostly drunk straight women, and being ‘her authentic self’, I guess.

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Yes, I know ‘trans people’. I see some here and there that I’m pretty sure are heterosexual men with a sexual kink who are—because of the #BeKind crew—now allowed to perform their fetish in public, at work, and around kids. But I don’t want to talk about them. I want to talk about the ones I just wrote about. The gay people with discomfort in their bodies and self-hatred for their same-sex attraction. The people desperately looking for a way out, and seduced by a ‘fix’ to make them fit in to the world. The ones who have been lied to, and encouraged to alter their bodies with destructive drugs and barbaric surgeries.

Years ago, like a lot of people, I thought ‘trans’ was brave. As someone who tried to work out my frustrations with being gay through humor (via my comic strip), I remember thinking how in order to survive as a trans person, you must have to have a great sense of humor. Because wouldn’t it be the ultimate practical joke to realize you were born in the wrong body? Rather than question the science, logic, or rationality of the concept, that was how I worked it out in my brain at the time. So I gave the trans people I knew a lot of credit. You’d have to have a sense of humor to live with that ‘realization’, right? It almost seemed heroic.

Going along with it seemed harmless; a polite fiction. But it was this polite fiction that enabled it to be turned into a legal fiction, and now we are at the bottom of that ‘slippery slope’ that you always hear about.

Here’s my message to the trans activists and allies: I used to be sympathetic but I’m not anymore. What you don't realize about all of us TERFs and 'anti-trans' monsters is that we were once just like you. We supported ‘trans’ because--like you--we didn't think about it deeply or rationally. We were told it was part of the LGBT, LGBTQ+ (or whatever) Community and accepted it. We were sympathetic and welcoming because it was just a few people here and there, and they needed a place to go, so why not join us?! We were ‘being kind’. We let our guard down.

Today, I am occasionally assured by True Believers that 'there are some trans people who just want to quietly live their lives as the other sex', but to be frank: I don't care. This whole thing has gone way too far, and too many lives have been damaged and too many families have been destroyed. There is no such thing as 'living as the opposite sex'. A lie is a lie, even if you are doing it 'quietly'.

Here is my message to trans-identified people: The reason I’m not sympathetic and welcoming anymore? Because now you’ve made your problem MY problem. Not content to be ‘affirmed’ in your new ‘identity’, you are actively trying to persuade others that they are trans too. In order to validate your own fantasy, you’re now going after children. You’ve preyed upon vulnerable young gay people and encouraged them to transition. You’ve destroyed gay spaces and obliterated gay rights by convincing a generation that a man can identify as a lesbian and a woman can identify as a gay man. You’ve stolen gay history and claimed it as your own. You’ve ruined the goodwill and acceptance that gay people took decades to achieve. You’re responsible for making gay people go back into the closet—for holding the belief that sex is real. You are not part of my community. I don’t want any part of this.

#LGB✂️T