Looking Back from the Future
Looking Back from the Future
When what we’re doing now will be considered an atrocity
Everybody who has had some education and can read will most likely be able to name at least one “great idea” for a medical treatment that eventually went out of fashion because something else was found that worked better or it was recognized that it was causing more harm than good.
For example, bloodletting has been used as a medical treatment for over 3000 years and only relatively recently during the late 1800s was it found that this didn’t help to cure anything and in fact, probably contributed to many deaths. Which should come as no great surprise to modern minds, as the last thing a body debilitated through illness needs is iatrogenic anemia!
Humans have a rich history of causing harm to each other and a quick Google search will bring up countless examples of medical treatments and experimentation that either never should have been done in the first place (think Nazis experimenting on concentration camp inmates) or some bright spark’s great idea that well, perhaps wasn’t so wonderful after all (trying to convert same sex attracted people into embracing heterosexuality).
The Tuskegee Study
For now, I am narrowing the field to just one such example, the full name of which was the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”. It is usually referred to as the Tuskegee Study now, but the word to note in the full title is “untreated”.
Commenced in 1932 when there was no effective cure for this always ultimately fatal disease, this study was not shut down until November 1972. By 1943, the standard treatment for syphilis was penicillin (the first drug that ever worked to cure syphilis), but it was never offered to any of the study participants, presumably because then they would no longer be untreated. The fact that all the study participants were Black men who had no understanding of what the study was about was deliberate. In exchange for free medical exams, free meals and burial insurance, the 399 men with confirmed syphilis who agreed to be seen for their “bad blood” were totally ignorant about what was happening to them. Needless to say, no informed consent of any sort was in evidence; it clearly was not considered more important than the actual lives of these men.
What is syphilis?
This is a fair question now as most people will not encounter it, but in previous eras, it has killed millions of people.
Syphilis is a bacterial infection, spread primarily through sexual intercourse. Anyone undergoing an STI screen will be tested for syphilis as one component of the common Sexually Transmitted Infections alongside chlamydia and gonorrhea.
The other main route is mother to child transmission through pregnancy and birth. Untreated congenital syphilis can lead to miscarriage and stillbirth, and infants who survive may be blind or deaf, or have severe developmental delays. After being nearly eradicated in the USA, syphilis is making a comeback and in 2022, caused 231 stillbirths and 51 infant deaths in that country; nearly 90 percent of the new cases could have been prevented with timely testing and treatment.
Once infected with syphilis, the disease follows a predictable course that begins with lesions at the infection site. Unfortunately, these are painless and usually disappear after a few weeks, so may be incorrectly misinterpreted as nothing to be concerned about. The secondary phase, characterized by a painless, often faint rash that can be found anywhere on the body also goes away without treatment. It should be noted that those carrying syphilis can transmit it to others for two or more years after becoming infected and without any visible signs of the disease. Another complication is that not all of the painless sores are in obvious places, so it may be easy to ignore and overlook the early signs.
The latent phase can last for varying periods of time, up to and including decades of ill health. In the final phase of tertiary syphilis, the disease damages internal organs, causes brain damage and will result in death.
There is a long list of famous (mainly) men who have died from the effects of syphilis including the gangster Al Capone, the writer Oscar Wilde and the eccentric entrepreneur Howard Hughes.
The men who participated in the Tuskegee Study were deliberately left to suffer up to 50+ years of ill health and 128 of them died from syphilis or related complications. Additionally, 40 of their wives were infected and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis. The researchers sat and watched this happen, despite the availability of a known cure.
“Sex change”, “transitioning”, “gender affirming care” is the new Tuskegee
When bioethics is taught in the future, teachers will have a new research experiment to use as an example of a total lack of integrity in the scientific and medical communities that caused harms to people. This will be the belief that individuals can escape their biological destinies that are locked in at conception and arbitrarily change their sex.
As a binary sexed species (as all mammals are), there are only two ways of “changing” your sex: men can “become” women and women can “become” men. Well, not really of course but it is true that you can go quite a long way to change your appearance using wrong sex hormones and mutilating surgeries.
Note, I am not touching on the identity that is increasingly beloved by those who can’t decide who they are. I regard a “nonbinary” ID as so ridiculous that ignoring this is the only stance worth taking. If you are wedded to this identity, please use appropriate contraception if you are sexually active in the knowledge that female bodied nonbinary people can get pregnant and male nonbinary people can get others pregnant. Even in the nonbinary community, your natal sex makes a difference that is ignored at your peril.
M(ale) to F(emale) or men wearing womanface
Not really talking about you guys in this post, not because I don’t care about you, (see other posts including here and here for a male focused perspective), but because my purpose here is to concentrate on what happens to the bodies and minds of girls and young women when they take steps to appear to the world as men.
So even though men can also wreck their bodies in pursuit of the unattainable quest of becoming women, I am not examining that here. I would like to note though, that most trans “women” retain their masculinity in the form of their penis, the loss of which is clearly a bridge too far for most natal males to sacrifice. In fact, the retention of a penis is a major factor in the complaints of women who are expected to cede our private spaces (in for example, public changing rooms) where they can be discomforted by the presence of this reproductive organ on display, especially when it is in a state of obvious arousal.
F(emale) to M(ale) - the great escape?
When I was a small girl, we lived next door to neighbors who had four boys and one girl, and my siblings and I played together with these children all the time. During the long, hot summers, the boys would start out dressed as we were, in shorts and tee shirts and as the weather warmed and the day progressed, the shirts would come off. Except for us girls, who were required to sweat under our shirts unless we were inside our bedrooms. I never could figure out the logic in this as we all looked the same. It would be fair to say that if we had stood in a line with our shorts on and our heads covered, no adult could have picked who was a girl and who was a boy.
I remember asking my mother why this rule was in place, but she had no answer other than that old mothering standby: “because I said so”. My mother was not one to do the ‘sex talk’ with her eight-year-old daughter.
I have the same reaction today when I see three-year-olds at the swimming pool or the beach and the girls are wearing bikini tops to cover their nipples, while the nipples of the boys are proudly on display, despite the fact that they all look exactly the same. This is the start of how girls are conditioned to hate their female bodies and boys are taught that the bodies of girls are on display for them to enjoy.
One way this is accomplished is by using the bodies of women to sell products, many of which have nothing to do with anyone’s bodies or sex of any kind. This works differently for women and men. Women see other women and feel a need to achieve this level of ‘body beautiful’ as well and then feel bad about themselves for not reaching unattainable goals. Men see the bodies of attractive women and hopefully from the advertiser’s perspective, want to buy the product, as if in some way they also get that woman.
Why is this important? Because “Advertisements can set the gauge for what a culture considers normal.” Exploiting the bodies of girls and women for any reason is wrong and sends a powerful message to both sexes about their places in society. Objectifying women and girls promotes and contributes to gender stereotypes that cause harm and trivializes violence against girls and women.
Hypersexualized societies have plenty to offer today’s women and girls, including, but not limited to chronic anxiety about their appearance, feeling ashamed of their female bodies, and eating disorders along with a generous serving of depression and low self-esteem.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that in today’s climate, girls are wanting to escape their fate as women and of course now, that is not only possible, but if your parents are against this, there is no shortage of compliant adults who will defy their wishes to give you “gender affirming” treatments.
The first step: cementing in delusional beliefs
The first step for any girl or boy, man or woman on the road to changing their sex (sic), is referred to as “social transition”, which is fairly self explanatory. It used to be standard practice for “transexual” men to have to live “as a woman” for a set time period before a doctor would authorize anything else, such as hormone treatment or surgery. They had to show commitment and determination to “prove” their belief they’d been “born in the wrong body” was real and permanent.
Of course, to live as a woman then relied on the sort of gender stereotypes that we are supposed to object to now. So, these men grew their hair long, shaved their facial hair more often, stuffed bras with socks, wore dresses and jewelry and painted their nails. Which now that I think about it, is preferable to fully unaltered men sitting in women’s changing rooms in an obvious state of arousal as they watch girls and women in various states of undress, while claiming a right to be there because of a self-chosen identity.
Condoning the social transition of children sets them on a path where it becomes nearly impossible for them to deviate back to where they belong as a member of their natal sex. Children are an easy target for trans lobbyists because they lack many critical thinking skills, tend to believe what trusted adults tell them and are loved by parents who want only the best for them, so may feel pressured to permit doctors to give harmful “care”. And of course, some parents see this as a way of elevating their own status in society by supporting their oh, so “special” child.
Adolescence: a time of natural upheaval has been kidnapped by unicorns!
Most of the young boys who have had a lot of publicity around their social transitioning were gender non-conforming. They played in the doll’s corner at preschool and wanted to be Elsa (from the movie Frozen) for Halloween. The two obvious examples are Jazz Jennings and Susie Green’s son Jack. Both of these now young men are sterile and will never be able to have a pleasurable sex life due to the bodily mutilations they underwent as minor children. Jazz is on public record as now having major mental health problems that have interfered with his further education plans to attend Harvard.
Girls on the other hand, seem to mostly escape these sorts of “wrong” gender behaviors in childhood, but when they hit adolescence, it can be like lighting fireworks in a confined space.
Our bodies change shape throughout puberty (because that’s how mammals move from a child to an adult who can then reproduce). And although it’s true that both boys and girls gain secondary sex characteristics by going through puberty, this seems to be much harder for girls than it is for boys. Part of this is because men automatically have a higher status and women become objectified, as discussed a few paragraphs ago. Any past equality between the sexes vanishes faster than ice cream in the desert.
Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) is a phenomenon first described in 2018. Girls who have no prior history of gender distress, who were perfectly happy to know they were girls suddenly and unexpectedly tell their parents that they are trans and so are no longer daughters, but now are sons.
There is a large social contagion aspect to this, as well as often complex histories that can involve autism, family trauma, and prior sexual abuse, but in today’s world, these are often not explored adequately, if at all, once a self-diagnosis of “trans” is declared. This is despite all the research that demonstrates that if young women are supported through puberty, between 70 and 90% will come to terms with their female bodies. Many of these girls discover that they are lesbian and none of them are “really” boys, despite their self-declarations.
As a society, we have forgotten that adolescence is a time of great change for humans. Every bodily system is affected, some in ways that we don’t know enough about. But from what we do know, the evidence is in that altering a normal life course causes permanent harms. And young women are paying the price for believing in gender unicorns.
Who can blame young women desperate to escape what seems to be an inevitable fate? Many female readers here will remember puberty as a tumultuous period of their life as their body changed in mysterious ways that they had no control over. Boys who used to be friends are now making derogatory comments about “tits”, “boobs” and “look at her bazongas”. Many teenage girls feel as though they are nothing more than breasts on legs when they are in the company of teen boys and much older men. Joining them as fellow males is a way around the distress these bodily changes are causing.
What happened to celebrating the coming of age that is menarche (commencing menstruation)? Why are boys lauded for reaching manhood (at some arbitrary age), but girls are shamed at the point when they start to bleed?
Women’s bodies are powerful. They are the only sex that can grow, birth and nourish a brand-new human being. But for those girls at the start of womanhood, they can’t see their own power yet and what they can see is really frightening. It’s so much easier to believe in the unicorns and glitter promised to them by the trans crowd than it is to accept their changing bodies.
What follows after he/him is accepted? The physical damage compounds the mental distress
OK, so our typical newly trans “boy” has made her big announcement (or perhaps not; her school may be complicit in hiding this important health information from her parents). Those in support of her self-diagnosis are calling her by her newly chosen male name and are careful to use he/him as her new pronouns. A new short haircut soon follows and if she has started breast development over-large and baggy shirts will cover this physical burden until she can organize something better.
I have written about the harms and dangers of chest binding here. Breast/chest binders are an intermediary step on the way to “top surgery” (an unlovely euphemism for the elective amputation of healthy breasts) and can be hugely dangerous, even when used “correctly”. Permanent damage can be done to breasts that are bound too often or too long and ribs can be skewed out of alignment permanently.
If a girl wants to bind her breasts and her parents do not give permission for her to get a binder, many groups in different countries will send her one for free without parental consent. In the UK, the children’s charity Mermaids not only sends these harmful products to girls who have told them their parents have forbidden their use, they have gone a step further by advising girls how to find another address to use to circumvent parental disapproval.
Puberty blockers: how to prevent children from ever growing up
Puberty blockers are advertised as no more than a “pause” in human development that “gives children time to decide what gender they are”.
In the same way that smoking cigarettes didn’t help our ancestors’ asthma, puberty blockers do not help children deal with the inevitable changes of puberty. Preventing normal puberty is not the same as treating the true medical condition of precocious puberty, which is defined as the development of early sexual characteristics; in girls this means before age 8, and in boys, this means before age 9.
Normal puberty commences at around 8 to 13 years old for girls and around 9 to 14 years old for boys.
Puberty blockers are now being prescribed to children at the very first signs of puberty to arrest any further development. How is this done? It’s easy! Just give boys regular doses of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) analogs and testosterone production that drives penis development and deepens boys’ voices will prevent this from happening. GnRH analogs are easily available as they are the same drugs given to chemically castrate men (who are being punished for sex crimes) and to men with prostate cancer. This is how we know they work.
Ditto for girls; stop the production of estrogen by constant administration of GnRH analogs and further breast development doesn’t happen. Job done!
Somehow, I don’t put young children undergoing unnecessary medical treatment in the same category as mature men being treated for real conditions, but hey, I’ve been called fussy before.
Puberty blockers do not help children change their sex; actually, nothing can accomplish this desire. What they do accomplish is to put a child’s body into a state of suspended animation, thereby keeping them from maturing into the adults they were meant to be. The price paid by children is not insignificant.
Far from a treatment for childhood depression due to gender dysphoria, puberty blockers can be a cause of emotional disturbances, including depression. The package insert of Lupron (the number one prescribed puberty blocker in the USA) warns about the importance of monitoring for development of or worsening of psychiatric symptoms during treatment. There is also evidence that finds that for a girl, a year on puberty blockers can exacerbate her gender dysphoria, leaving her worse off than before.
Unfortunately, puberty blockers don’t just stop the development of secondary sex characteristics, they stop everything from developing.
Puberty is an important phase in a natal girl’s life as this is a time of heavy bone mineralization. Not only is this the peak time for a girl to reach her full height, but this is also the time where her body is preparing to lose calcium to a future baby (who is relying on this for the formation of the skeleton). Low bone density creates permanent negative changes in the skeleton that cannot be reversed or fixed. Want your kid to have the same bone density as her great grandmother? Puberty blockers can do this. This article from Sweden outlines the problems.
For me, the most frightening loss to a puberty blocked child is the lack of brain maturation. We have all been teenagers and most of us probably know a teenager or two and as adults, we can be truly astounded and horrified at some the ideas they come up with as they move through these years.
Those of us with non-puberty blocked children know that “this too shall pass” as they eventually move out of adolescence and take up their adult lives because a fundamental reorganization of the brain takes place in adolescence.
Some parts of the adolescent brain do a partial shutdown while “renovations” are in progress and other parts go into overdrive, which accounts for the heightened emotional state of teenagers. The major developmental tasks of adolescence include the establishment and nurturing of intimate relationships and the development of identity, future perspectives, independence, self-confidence, self-control, and social skills.
Puberty blockers prevent this from occurring. So rather than being a pause button that gives children time to think, it locks them into a phase of childhood where there are few, if any executive functioning skills available for them to use. Once you understand this, you can also appreciate why 98-100% of children who are on puberty blockers proceed to taking cross sex hormones. They are not using recently enhanced brain development to guide their choice; they are still using their prepubertal brains.
They are also observing their peers getting taller, coming to terms with their changed bodies and engaging in relationship building activities. And leaving them behind.
It is impossible for children to give informed consent to taking puberty blockers. Children lack the maturity and thus any capacity to participate in medical experimentation or to make decisions that have lifelong and permanent deleterious effects on their bodies. It is my personal belief that parents do not have the right to give consent on behalf of their children either. Medical experimentation on children may be acceptable in the context of clinical trials if there is no other treatment; it is never acceptable for a parent to consent to the harm of their healthy child.
And note to the gender woo crowd: children are not like a TV streaming service. If you “press pause” on a child’s natural and normal development, it is not true that if you press “play” (by stopping the medication) that adolescence will just pick up where it left off and children will catch up to their peers. Human development is a bit more complicated than your ideological beliefs.
A permanent harm is perpetrated through surgery
Body dysmorphia is considered to be a mental health problem where a person becomes fixated on some bit of their body that they perceive to be flawed or defective, even if no one else sees it. This is not the same as gender dysphoria; you can read more about the difference between the two in a previous post. The important difference to note is that body dysmorphia is classed as a mental illness and is treated by working with a person to overcome their illogical thinking, whereas when someone presents claiming to suffer from gender dysphoria, they are immediately affirmed in their belief and harmful “treatments” are commenced. “Gender identity disorder” was removed from the DSM (which is the handbook on mental health disorders) in 2012, so is no longer considered to be a mental health disorder. So, women who hate their breasts know what to say when they walk into a clinician’s office if they want them removed.
What is the most visible sign of a female human’s sexual maturity? Yup, it’s those pesky breasts sticking out the front and attracting all the male attention. Binders will only take you so far. They are an aid to help alleviate the problem of body dysmorphia.
The first surgical intervention on the way to “manhood” is usually referred to as top surgery.
Also referred to as “chest masculinization” surgery, the elective removal of healthy breasts is self-harming mutilation. As with all surgeries there are risks that may be lifelong and irreversible. The specific risks for this surgery include, but are not limited to bleeding, infection, poor healing of incisions, hematoma, loss of nipple and chest sensation, loss of the nipple and areola, and anesthesia risks. The internet is awash with botched top surgery stories and some doctors even advertise for “re-dos” for those who feel as though their operations didn’t go as planned, the results are not what they expected, or a really terrible job was done.
As nipples and breasts are a major erogenous zone for women, the loss of sensation (which can affect the entire chest region) is another factor in the loss of pleasure during sexual intercourse for those that have this surgery. Even if the nipples are retained, the severing of nerves means that both the feeling and the function of nipples are lost forever.
Which brings me to my main objection to performing this surgery, especially on minors and young women. If you have had top surgery, you will not be able to breastfeed any babies. How many 12-year-olds (yes, they are doing these surgeries on girls who are that young) can say with complete certainty that they are never going have a baby, so this doesn’t matter. Quite a few actually, but how many of these girls if allowed to go through puberty to enjoy normal brain and body maturation to become women may keep this resolve? A small minority.
This site and others that obfuscate and downplay the disadvantages of losing all your glandular tissue (that is the bit designed to make milk) are not being honest about breastfeeding potential. Babies need something to latch onto (as those trying to breastfeed with flat or inverted nipples know all too well), but it is not recommended to apply that much pressure to grafted on nipples and some would-be men are choosing the ‘no nipple’ look. Severed nerves, lack of vascular connections and the major anatomical changes from this surgery prevent any milk that might be made from exiting.
These women are left with babies frantically searching for nonexistent breasts and so much regret. This excellent case study outlines one mother’s intense grief at her inability to breastfeed her baby. It also has accurate information about how and why breastfeeding after top surgery does not work, which counters some of the optimistic twaddle found on other websites where facts are fudged, ignored and fuzzy language is found.
Yes, you can get new silicone breasts. But they won’t be the same as the ones you amputated, they won’t have any feeling to the touch or sensation, and you won’t be feeding your baby with these falsies either.
Boobs, gone. Next on the list permanent infertility?
Once you’ve halted puberty in its tracks, the next step on your gender journey is the commencement of cross sex hormones (which should more accurately be called wrong sex hormones as this is what they are). These are not a temporary intervention; for as long as a woman is committed to a male identity, she will have to maintain this regimen because if stopped, her body will revert back to its true state although some changes (voice deepening, facial hair, male pattern baldness, etc.) can’t be reversed.
For girls who have been on puberty blockers and go on to take male hormones, an absolutely sure result is permanent infertility. Those “trans dads” hitting the headlines were late starters in the gender change game so have retained the ability to conceive and gestate a baby.
It is known even by trans advocates that boys who have the puberty blocker/cross sex hormone treatment are unable to orgasm but the results for women are unclear. Considering all the other anatomical changes that ensue from consistently having way too much testosterone in a female body, it should come as no surprise that sexual intercourse and the pleasure derived from this is affected.
Bodies know if they are male or female
Homeostasis is defined as a self-regulating process by which a living organism can maintain internal stability while adjusting to changing external conditions. Homeostasis explains why when we have a bacterial infection, this is often accompanied by a fever. Body temperature regulation is just one way that our bodies work to keep us alive. “Gender affirming care” is a deliberate assault on homeostasis.
Your sex is so much more than how you appear to others or how you self-identify; it is encoded in every single cell of our bodies. Every bodily system is affected by altering female physiology through high dose (for women) testosterone.
The physical complications can include:
· Weight gain
· Acne
· Developing male-pattern baldness
· Sleep apnea
· A rise in cholesterol, which increases the risk of heart problems
· High blood pressure
· Making too many red blood cells — a condition called polycythemia
· Type 2 diabetes
· Blood clots in a deep vein or in the lungs
· Infertility
· Drying and thinning of the lining of the vagina, which makes penetrative sex uncomfortable
· Pelvic pain
· Discomfort due to an enlarged clitoris
· Osteoporosis
Taking cross sex hormones puts teenagers and young women into premature menopause, decades too early. From research done on women who have had bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (surgical removal of the ovaries) performed before the natural age of menopause it is known that this is associated with adverse long-term health consequences, including increased overall mortality, coronary heart disease, dementia, Parkinsonism, osteoporosis, mood disorders, and sexual dysfunction, among others.
Some men-identifying women choose to have a hysterectomy as part of their gender affirming care, while others may have their uterus removed to avoid the risk of cancer caused by excess testosterone.
In addition to the physical risks of excess testosterone on the female body, psychological changes are well known. These can include increased irritability, frustration, and anger. There are reports of testosterone destabilizing trans men who have preexisting conditions such as bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and schizophrenia. “Transitioning” will not cure, remove or override any other mental health issues that have been ignored or left untreated. In fact, it may make them worse.
Creating a penis is hard; creating a working penis is nearly impossible
It’s not just women’s bodies that are engineering marvels; the human penis is pretty amazing too, which means that replicating it in all its functions is, well, impossible. If you are a trans man and go to a plastic surgeon with a desire to own your own penis, you will be asked what your goals are. All phalloplasties are complicated procedures that require multiple operations, with high failure rates. As this author states:
Total phalloplasty is one of the most complex reconstructions that plastic surgeons are called upon to perform as it involves replicating a form and function that is truly unique. Add to this the fact that the materials available are sub-optimal and the emotional overlay associated with this reconstruction is very significant, the task assumes nearly Herculean dimensions. It is no wonder that it is fraught with a plethora of complications.
Some people are content with a realistic appearance, while others want to be able to urinate while standing. Various gadgets to simulate an erection can be implanted. But a true replication of a penis is even less convincing than those silicone boobs on a self-ID’d woman who is a man.
Artificially lengthening the urethra is very difficult and problems are expected to occur, including severe irritation from hair growing inside it and strictures that prevent urine from exiting.
Erectile devices are not as easy to “install” in created penises (as they are in men who have the underlying structures built in), and around a third of these fail and are removed.
The only other genital surgery as damaging as phalloplasty is Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and this is now against the law in an increasing number of countries. I struggle to understand how one of these is celebrated and the other is condemned. Both emerge out of misogynist thinking and ideologies.
“Fixing” what ain’t broken
Anorexic children are not allowed to starve themselves to death just because they identify as fat. Women with puerperal psychosis are not allowed to commit suicide just because a voice in their head is instructing them to kill themselves.
“Removing safeguards for distressed people because they invoke a gender identity is medical negligence.” writes this author. In the same way that the Tuskegee study is a case study in medical negligence and deliberate harm in the name of research, encouraging children to “decide” about their true sex and then experimenting on them when they lack the capacity to consent to being harmed in ways they cannot conceive of, is wrong.
And birth and breastfeeding organizations who celebrate a trans identity should be ashamed of their misogynistic abandonment of women and mothers.
Heartbreaking yet critically important information to disseminate. Thank you Lucy Leader.
Behind this madness is what you so well pinpoint,
“Women’s bodies are powerful. They are the only sex that can grow, birth and nourish a brand-new human being. But for those girls at the start of womanhood, they can’t see their own power yet and what they can see is really frightening. It’s so much easier to believe in the unicorns and glitter promised to them by the trans crowd than it is to accept their changing bodies.”
Societies that are comfortable undervaluing women cause girls to want to be anything but. So sad.
Excellent points! This is simply the latest in many scandals, and with this one, there will be a great reckoning as many of its most exuberant supporters are probably going to act like they had no part in it.
I also usually say that males are driven by their illogical perversions into "trans," while young women are looking to escape male perversions with "trans." It makes sense that way usually (not every single case, but usually).