The Wrong Body Self Destructs
The strangest notion the trans lobby ever came up with was that people could be born in the wrong body. It's time to bury this absurd notion once and for all.
Once upon a time when people said they were trapped inside someone else’s body an exorcist was called. If they were lucky. In Scotland you were more likely to be thrown into a pond with a weight attached.
In the 1950s, the notion you could inhabit the wrong body had something of a revival. Robert Stoller argued people had an inner sense of their sex which he called ‘gender identity’ and that sometimes this could be different from their actual sex, leading them to feel they were born in the wrong body. John Money would popularise this but it was Stoller who set the ball rolling.
I always like to remind people that Stoller, who for some reason is not dismissed as a complete charlatan, also believed he could communicate telepathically using dreams. Indeed he wrote a paper in 1973 recording some of those dreams in which he described how he saw events happen like say a motorcyle accident and then days later a patient would come in for a session…whose relative had died in a motorcycle accident. I assume his wife suggested he try -just for once- to dream the numbers of the lottery.
I digress.
The trans lobby is a little embarrassed by the ‘wrong body’ narrative now. Or claims to be. One reason is activists realised, late in the day, that ‘born in the wrong body’ assumes there is a male male body and a female body. Isn’t that kinda binary?
As recently as 2014, Frank Maloney hadn’t got the memo.
In 2020 Mermaids publicly renounced such language. Critics pointed out this new approach just happened to be announced 24 hours before the UK government issued a new policy that any organisation using such language would be excluded from schools. Maybe Susie Green had a telepathic dream?
Unfortunately for Mermaids their pivot promptly caused a backlash from many trans supporters who insisted the old language DID describe their own experiences.
The fact is the notion of being born in the wrong body has been central to selling the wider trans narrative to the public. No one was more influential in doing that in the UK than the travel writer Jan Morris. In the opening words of ‘her’ 1974 autobiography, ‘Conundrum’ Morris describes how he realised at “the age of three or perhaps four” that “I had been born in the wrong body and should really be a girl”.
He also describes this “as the earliest memory in my life”. One of my earliest memories around the age of 4 was of dressing up as a Dalek. Maybe I was meant to be an angry, extra-terrestrial mutant. My ex would say I was.
Sometimes I dream (not telepathically) that some prominent trans ally like Layla Moran MP will announce to the world she was meant to be a penguin. Every time she enters the debating chamber at the House of Commons the speaker will pull out some anchovies from a bucket and throw them at her. She’ll waddle to place her vote. It all makes as much sense as boys who are girls, but instead of laughing out loud, politicians nod sagely.
One of the results of the scandal over sex offenders in Scottish women’s prisons is likely to be a renewed skepticism about ‘born in the wrong body’. I wrote recently about the exposure -so to speak- of the female penis but the reality of sex offenders makes the entire ‘wrong body’ story collapse from within.
We know males offend -especially when it comes to sex offences - at extraordinarily higher rates than females. These crimes are committed not by Stoller’s telepathic disembodied souls across time and space but by actual people who inhabit bodies in the here and now. Indeed when it comes to sex offences like rape it’s the physical body doing the offending.
Dividing the mind from the body of an offender is the first step in reducing culpability. How long before a male offender, who says he is trans or ‘non binary’, tries to use the defence it wasn’t the ‘real’ them doing the offending, the inner authentic them…but the nasty, awful residue of that old male body? It makes as much sense as a female penis, or a woman’s mind trapped in a man’s body. What about the gender fluid …who claim from day to day to be male or female, and then back again …and yet again. Should laws be designed to fit gender yo-yos?
It will take time though to rid ourselves of the wrong body story. The public have grown used to it and politicians adore it.
Here’s Caroline Nokes, the Women and Equalities Committee Chair saying (0.50’ in) that we have to “recognise the reality there are people born in the wrong body”. Do we?
The reason for the enduring power of the ‘born in the wrong body’ myth is that it’s so useful to politicians. For one thing male sex offenders become female sex offenders instead. Or they did until last week when Sturgeon couldn’t work out whatever her policy was that she’s been championing for almost a decade. It also enables politicians to ignore the mental health crisis of thousands of girls wanting to mutilate their bodies. They’re merely adjusting their wrong bodies.
So entrenched is the myth that for a few vocal trans supporters it’s heretical to even question it. Ahead of an anticipated judgment in the case of Mermaids v LGB Alliance the transcripts of witness testimonies have been published. The SNP MP, John Nicolson, delivered this legend:
“I think it’s one of the most offensive things in the LGB Alliance’s submission that they say they do not believe that you can be born in the wrong body”