Mick Hartley

One of the points that's emerged from the Tavistock debacle is the way that the clinic worked to "transe away the gay": that many of the children put on puberty blockers and hormone treatment on the route to transitioning were in fact same-sex attracted. Some parents, it seems, were glad that their children were "really" the other sex "born in the wrong body" rather than gay. Former Mermaids CEO Susie Green famously put her son on puberty blockers, and then took him off to Thailand on his sixteenth birthday for the sex change operation, because her husband disapproved of the boy's feminine ways.

And this gay shame, as Brendan O'Neill discovers, is the central theme in trans star Munroe Bergdorf's new Transitional memoir:

The book is riddled with talk of gay shame. Bergdorf seems to have spent much of his early life consumed by shame: ‘I felt ashamed of my identity, my heritage, my skin.’ Shame of his homosexuality – which is how he understood his identity in his teen years – was a particular problem. ‘[Even] though I knew I was gay and even though I understood that being gay was not a thing to be shamed for, I was still ashamed.’ When he was called homophobic names on account of his being ‘effeminate… camp’, he says ‘a part of me believed in their slurs’. He says he dreaded becoming a ‘monster’ if he ‘pursued’ his homosexual urges. He so often heard the idea that ‘being a gay man and being a sexual predator were synonymous’ that he became ‘absolutely terrified that I’d become a monster [too]’. What’s more, his parents didn’t handle his coming out well at all. ‘It’s just a phase’, his mum said. He was forbidden from doing ballet, because boys don’t do that. It was all ‘guilt and fear and negative feelings’, he writes of his gay years.

Then, one day, he discovers that he might not be gay after all. He might be female. The language he uses to describe his journey away from gay might be flawlessly politically correct, but it’s no less alarming for that. Maybe, he says, society had conditioned him to think of himself as gay. ‘I assumed that I must have been male and I assumed that I must have been gay because I was assigned male at birth, because I’m in this body that everybody refers to as male and because I find men’s bodies sexually attractive’, he writes. ‘But’ – but! – perhaps he was being hemmed in by those nasty old sexual binaries that say we’re all either male or female, gay or straight. ‘I didn’t know there was anything else other than straight or gay’, he writes. ‘I didn’t have the reach or understanding or language beyond being gay.’ (My emphasis.) He finally went beyond gay, though, when he started to transition into ‘womanhood’. Finally he found ‘a version of myself that I could be proud of’. Coming out as trans was ‘the beginning of transitioning out of shame’, he says. He was ‘transitioning out of shame and into pride’….

We need to start being honest about what a regressive idea this is – this idea that an individual’s feelings of shame and self-disgust might be fixed by gender transition. This is an idea feverishly cleaved to not only by woke ideologues like Bergdorf, but also by ruthlessly homophobic regimes like the one in Iran. A 2014 report published by Justice for Iran – Diagnosing Identities, Wounding Bodies – captured well the Iranian regime’s belief that shameful homosexuals can only become proud citizens by being surgically corrected. The theocratic rulers of Iran believe, it said, that if people display ‘a marked aversion to the normative mannerisms of the gender they have been assigned at birth’, then they should ‘undergo sex-reassignment surgeries in order to successfully uncover the truth about their sex and make it agree with their “true gender”’. Going back even further, to the pathologisation of homosexuality in the 19th century, we find the insulting belief pushed by psychologists that homosexuality was a case of a ‘female soul inhabit[ing] a male body’. Anyone else feel uncomfortable that the old homophobic view that male gayness is trapped femaleness seems to be making a comeback?

It seems increasingly clear that homophobia – whether of the old-fashioned, the woke or the ‘internalised’ variety – is a key component of trans thinking. Whistleblowers at gender clinics for children have described trans interventions as ‘conversion therapy for kids’. For her new book on the rise and fall of the Tavistock Clinic – Time To Think – Hannah Barnes spoke to gender clinicians who became concerned that some kids were transitioning after experiencing homophobic bullying and shame. A couple of years ago, a former gender clinician said of the kids being treated: ‘We heard a lot of homophobia… A lot of the girls would come in and say, “I’m not a lesbian. I fell in love with my best girl friend but then I went online and realised I’m not a lesbian, I’m a boy. Phew.”’ And now we have a memoir by one of the best-known transgender figures in the UK talking about his gender transition as a ‘transitioning out of shame and into pride’. What’s going on here?

What's going on is that the homophobia built in to trans ideology is becoming harder and harder to ignore.

Bergdorf’s rather arrogant adoption of ‘womanhood’ confirms just how many social groups lose out as a consequence of the trans hysteria. Gays, who are implicitly told that greater pride might lie in the surgical correction of their physical constitutions, and women, whose experiences are co-opted by born males. It seems to me that Bergdorf is using the language of ‘liberation’ to describe what other people more honestly refer to as ‘conversion’. Show me the difference between his ‘liberation’ from his feelings of gay shame and someone else’s ‘conversion’ from their shameful homosexuality. Indeed, if anything the trans ideology’s enticement of young gay men and lesbians into the shady sphere of surgical correction is worse than religious-style conversion therapy. There is always a way back for the young homosexual who believes that he has been converted to heterosexuality. There’s no way back for Munroe Bergdorf. He’s gone too far. He will never be a gay man again. That is tragic, in my view; a testament to how the ideal of gay liberation has been so thoroughly warped that it now means its opposite.