I think I understand the young men who desperately want to be beautiful women.

Society threw away true feminine beauty. So a bunch of confused young men picked it up.

If you have been paying attention to the transgender mania that is seemingly sweeping the globe in the last few years, you have probably come across social media posts of men who pretend to be women, expressing their longing, anger, frustration, at not passing as women or not being accepted as women by strangers. Or you may have seen videos of men, pathetically attired in dresses, heels and make-up, swinging a handbag, trying to convince themselves and the world that they are so pretty and feminine, while being nothing of the kind. 

As a TERF, transphobe, bigot — or whatever slurs they are using these days to describe people who have a grasp on reality —  what I’m about to say is going to sound weird, but here goes. I watch these young men, and I totally get it. I understand what is driving their mimicry. The truth is, these deeply misguided young men get something extremely profound that society, at least the liberal-left-progressive portion of it, has completely lost sight of: the quasi-magic power of being female, and especially of young women.

I would go so far as to say that acknowledgement of that quasi-magic power has been suppressed and deformed by a society dominated by liberal, supposedly equalitarian, feminist-influenced society.

Despite my alarm over how gender ideology has been embraced by all facets of power and influence, I always feel a weird sense of recognition watching those videos. It is unsettling, actually, given how creepy the men making them are.

But then I remembered my own self, as a girl, and my own feelings of fascination, trepidation, and longing for the mysterious process that would transform me into an adult woman. That transformation has now become a hideous and deeply fraught experience for so many teen girls, especially recently with the pornification of teen social life. But even before that, in educated, progressive circles being a woman was considered to be, by many women, an obstacle that had to be overcome. Beauty and body were oppositional to strength and smarts. Not only is this not true, it is dishonest in a profoundly damaging way. Female beauty has immense power, but at least one generation of girls have been given only the most glib and commercialised and bastardised understanding of it. 

In the English speaking world, middle and upper middle class society has been thoroughly captured by a discourse that pins women to victimhood centred around our bodies. There has been, in recent years, such an uptick in female expression about our bodies and bodily functions that it borders on obsession. And it’s overwhelmingly negative. Tracking alongside this reality, is the new (at least in our modern, rationalist society) and bizarre phenomenon of young men seemingly desperate to be women — to the point of mutilating their genitals and gauging holes in between their legs. Is it possible that living in a culture hyper fixed on the female body is feeding the fetishisation that they are indulging in? That these men are are appropriating womanhood in twisted homage? They definitely think we women don’t appreciate the majesty we have, that we are just born with, and we complain about all the time to boot! These men, on the other hand, have to work for it and constantly face rejection from the straight men whose attention they crave because they are not the real thing. On the hand I find this immensely creepy, because appropriation is a violation. But it’s also incredibly sad, and in a very weird way — true. 

The thrill and the solemnity of growing into being a woman, after watching grown women with awe from the sidelines of girlhood,  is not something that is talked about or acknowledged anymore. The onset of menstruation is a kind of ritual, after which you are transformed into a new person with a new burden, a new responsibility you carry with you for the next three or four decades of your life. Young people need and crave responsibility. Without it, they are deprived of so much. So for us women, that responsibility is handed to us by our own bodies.

Boys no longer have any ritual to welcome them to manhood, to introduce them to their newly acquired physical power and its attendant responsibilities. Boys in the comfortable middle classes are now mostly shielded from physical pain and discomfort. Are they doing better as a result? No, they are not. 

Recently, I saw a Reddit post written by a man pretending desperately to be a woman. His post was absolutely dripping with rage that he was not convincing anyone, especially the lesbian he had hoped to “date,” but who cancelled upon finding out he was, in fact, a dude. As he sits in a restaurant “throwing back Bombay gin” and nursing his epic grudge, he describes of a table of young women sitting near him.

“3 girls, all early 20’s, slim, bubbly, sundresses, talking about nails and boyfriends and sex all just basking in the femininity that I’ve spent my life and my savings just trying to get a taste of. It’s just salt in the wound after being stood up by one of their kind. I fucking hate them so much and they don’t even know, it’s not fair, they’ll never ever know the struggle women like us have to go through to just to feel like that.”

If this comment doesn’t perfectly sum up the miasma of lies that these young men are marinating in, I don’t know what does. Their rage is misogynistic, to be sure, but it’s also the rage of a generation of lost boys who have absolutely been emotionally abused, manipulated, and deprived of all understanding of what it means to be a man.

 These boys are picking up on the power of the female that is ignored by leftists and progressives. They are also desperate for some meaning and some challenge, addled by porn and pharmaceuticals, and lied to by their elders who tell them that there is no such thing as biological reality. In this toxic swirl of frustration, confusion and longing they try to steal womanhood. 

A word about longing: this is a feeling that goes mostly unremarked upon these days. Almost as if it’s associated solely with fictional Victorian governesses and the aloof patriarchs they worked for. But it’s such a powerful emotion, it’s a driver of so much interpersonal chaos. It’s the feeling that tricks us into lying to ourselves. If you will indulge me sharing a rather flimsy comparison from my own life, of a moment in which I lied to myself in order to fulfil a longing that could not be met in reality. For most of my life, I longed to look like one of those lithe and slender girls that I had met in private school, with a ballerina’s bearing and bone structure. Alas, I have always been of more stout composition, thanks to my peasant ancestry and fondness for comfort eating. There were always certain things that, in my imagination, really highlighted the beauty of the willowy girl, and one of those things were welly boots — the kind you would see Kate Middleton wearing at some country fair. So I bought a pair, even though they cost more money than I could afford and — and this is hard to admit — they did not fit over my robust calves. Nonetheless, one day I wore them to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, pretending I looked like a Pilates instructor going out to feed her chickens in her organic garden. In reality, I was stomping around with thick rubber folds around my ankles, making it difficult to walk. I looked ridiculous. I had paid good money to look ridiculous. I did it anyway, because that’s how much I wanted to look like something I was not. By the way, when this happened I was in my mid thirties and a mother — I was not some dumb teenager. I’m mortified at the thought of it.

I know that story is trite compared to young men who are taking far more drastic action to ape female beauty, at far greater cost to them and the women around them. I know also that those men are not harmless victims, many are autogynophile predators and the ideology they espouse is absolutely a threat to women. They are all fuelled by a deranged resentment that I would not want to experience firsthand. All I’m saying, really, is that I can hear the pain and the longing in their voices, I can see it on their garishly made up faces, and I feel rather sorry for them. They will never come close to female beauty, and they have destroyed their maleness in that impossible quest. This is a tragedy.