Non-Binary Niece syndrome

Proximity to 'harmless' quirk chungi is nuking the judgement of otherwise reasonable women

If your first real encounter with an inhabitant of Planet Trans was anything like mine, you’d probably be raging TERF, too.

I moved to Brussels in 2008, just as the arse was falling out of the Irish economy. I had come for a short visit, but the worldwide financial system sank beneath the waves while I was here, and Ireland got fully submerged. I realised that there was no job market to go back to. And while Belgium hadn’t escaped unscathed from the collapse, it’s built on old money — so there was still a scrapin’ of industry left. Helas, I never got round to leaving.

I had no mates, though, so I had to do some weird things to try and make some. One of the things I did was sign up for a feminist zine workshop (I know) taking place out in the dockyards of Antwerp.

I took a short train and a long walk, and I found myself out on the outskirts of the city. As I approached the venue on the dockside, I could see a circle of young women sitting out on rusty chairs, squinting in the downing sun. They were chatting animatedly, each with a pile of magazines and papers on their laps. But as I got nearer, something seemed off. One of the “girls” looked funny.

It was a man.

He was wearing some kind of blue and purple skirt ensemble. He had a lanky frame, long hair, and a beast of an Adam’s Apple.

And it quickly became clear that this was a very, very popular guy, judging by the way the women were interacting with him. Their body movements and gestures were all pointed in his direction. They laughed and nodded deeply, sincerely at his every word. They leaned in to him, their eyes sparkled at him. It was fucking weird.

I was desperately curious to know what this man had said or done to be showered with so much affection by these fawning fangirls (I wouldn’t really figure it out for many years, unfortunately).

I was so naive!

I was obsessed with knowing what his deal was. Like, were we in the presence of some sort of avant-garde arty gay from Antwerp’s cool design university? He didn’t give off that vibe at all. He just looked like a normal XBox-type. Your older brother’s mate in a skirt.

Did he…. did he…. think he was a woman?

This was back before the Great Entrooning, and the normies hadn’t received any instructions on how to behave around a man in the grip of a hallucination that he is the sexy whore of his dreams. Entirely unbeknownst to me at the time, you were supposed to encourage them.

However, failing to do so had not yet been criminalised. So how was I supposed to know?

The actual women encircling the transvestite on the dock that day — self-proclaimed feminist, queer, anarchist, all sorts of -ists — had clearly been reading up on the rules. They lapped and clapped and marveled at his stunning, but also brave, wit and charm. As the event went on, it became clear that they wanted to assure him they certainly saw him as a female just like them — albeit a very extra-special super-duper, if not better, type of female.

The question kept nagging me: what is this guy’s story? I was powerless to suppress my curiosity, and eventually, out popped the words that would ruin my evening.

I don’t remember very much about how the entire conversation went exactly, except that I asked him: “so, like, do you think you are actually a woman?” I wasn’t trying to be mean, and if you read that in your head with a mean-girl intonation, that would be inaccurate. I lilted all my words upwards, almost like I was affirming the answer to my own question. But despite injecting my inquiry with as much lightness and air as I could — like I was turning egg whites and sugar into meringue — he took it as a beating.

And that’s how I learned that there is no nice way to inquire about the motivations of a transvestite. But especially one who is in mid-roleplay.

Older, wiser, and TERFier, I know now why the sky over Antwerp blackened in that instant, why the seagulls suddenly fell silent and dropped dead, one by one, into the sea. Why the arthritic knees of the grizzly old Flemish dockers suddenly twinged in pain, and why the electric signaling equipment of nearby tankers blinked, flickered, and died.

The women scraped their chairs away from me. Their backs and faces swiveled in the other direction. The conversation, and the reverie, abandoned me. The mood crashed. The man in the skirt screwed up his face in frustration. The women scowled and side-eyed me on his behalf.

Well I guess that answers that question, then!

Suddenly frozen out, I was mortified. All I had wanted to know was: what was expected from me, what were the rules? What was he hoping to convince me of? I might even have Been Kind and submitted. I was 25! My brain was prime real estate for the most ridiculous nice nonsense.

But most of all I thought: why couldn’t I just shut the fuck up? I was so embarrassed. Devastated.

In hindsight, what did I expect. This was a fetishist at a feminist zine workshop, for fuck’s sake, and he had a harem of angels fluffing him up. The drinks were flowing, his polyester panties were chaffing in all the right places, the air was warm. So was the tip of his penis. His fantasy was in full-tilt, and here I came to throw a bucket of cold water on him like he was a randy stray bothering the neighborhood bitches.

I spent the rest of the event trying to make it up to them all by being super saccharine friendly. I tried the I am but a poor country fishwife from Hibernia. I know not what I do! But it was too late. There was no way back. I even bought a bunch of poxy zines from them, but they made it clear that the priority going forward was not excusing my faux pas, but building back up this guy’s shattered lady delusion, which had been dropped from a great height.

I wouldn’t even hear the word “TERF” for at least another decade. But that’s the night she was conceived.

Encounters in Troonland

A lot of people are trying to figure out why so many otherwise normal, reasonable, intelligent people have succumbed to the “trans women are women” cognitive epidemic. Conformism, luxury beliefs, protection-seeking from clearly unstable men, a desire to be seen as progressive….

So many ideas have been floated, and I think all of them have merit. The only one that doesn’t have merit is the one that posits that some people actually think there are women trapped inside the bodies of men. Nobody actually thinks that.

The reverse question is just as interesting: why do some of us reject the trans premise entirely? Do we have a superior intellect? Are we noble-minded pursuers of truth? Are TERFs just extremely smart, cool and hot?

I think the answer to these questions is much more likely to be very pathetically human.

I often wonder: what if my first encounter with a gender urchin had been less hostile? How would I feel about these men now? Imagine a different outcome to the scene above: one where the entitled little shithead still needed the good graces of people like me to build up his fangirl posse. Imagine he had swallowed his rage at my question and instead gently led me by his massive hand through the mind maze of gender identity theory.

I was literally friendless, alone, and far from home. He had an open goal in me. What if he had asked if we could stay in touch? If he had offered to show me round the city? What if, instead of being a total douchebag, he had invited me to an after party, bought me shots, offered me a line of coke while we were in the ladies loo together?

Before I had met the dockyard dickhead, my only other experience with a transvestite was a man who used to sometimes hang around a bar I frequented. He would drop in “dressed”, after dark, and sit alone nursing some womanly drink like vodka and Slimline Tonic. I would watch him and his party shop wig sympathetically as I slugged pints. I felt very, very sad for him. He looked like such a sad sack. Maybe I was ripe for being his fawning fan girl, had I bumped into him in the ladies.

Who knows?

Some feminists who later became celebrated for their gender-critical positions got completely one-shotted by this exact scenario. Transvestite males seek out women and women’s groups in order to get the OK for their behaviour. They join our clubs, associations, teams and get-togethers, and dare anyone to object.

Those women who were in the trenches early on were not yet wise to this, and ended up developing relationships with some of the more affable transvestites, used their pronouns, and then found it extremely difficult to walk it back once the TERF movement established the “no pet troons” unofficial policy.

I could very easily have gone home from Antwerp that night thinking, well, you’re not a woman, but I will do everything to help make sure you can pretend you are. Because you were very nice to me, and because I am a nice person. And anyway (get ready for it): what’s the harm? How does it affect me? Why can’t I just be kind?

Tomboy envoys

This thought totally freaks me out. But it helps me understand the behaviour of some people who have been ideologically captured by the trans cult. I think it’s particularly helpful in decoding the thinking of people whose first encounter in Troonland was via the softest landing of them all: the harmless, squishy, quirky chungus girls who claim the labels “trans masc” or “non-binary”.

These girls hover on the periphery of every middle-class woman’s entourage, whether it be via family, colleagues, or friend group. Women be chatting, bonding, sharing everything about our lives. What do you do when Julie from badminton tells you, in a falsetto, not quite meeting your eye: “yeah so my youngest, Madeline-Grace, is going by Max now. They feel much better presenting as non-binary.”

To pronoun, or not to pronoun? New badminton partners are hard to find.

Besides, you’re a progressive. You love cycle lanes and bottle-return schemes and all that shite. Accepting Max as not-a-girl goes with your class territory. But more importantly than all that: Max’s people matter to you.

That breastless barista, she’s always been lovely to you, you think. Who are you to deny who she is?

And just like that, you’ve been gently shepherded into make-believe land.

So many otherwise-normals have non-binary or trans-masc nieces, kids-of-friends, second cousins, interns, and goddaughters, or even favourite TV characters who now identify as “part of the trans umbrella”. It’s easy to look upon these bizarre faddish identities and do a big massive whatharmisit shrug-n-gulp.

But it means they’ve accepted the premise of genderwang without even noticing they’ve signed up to a cult. Maxing the Madelines requires closing off all avenues of critical thought, lest reason jeopardise your relationship with the person (invariably, the mother) to whom the quirkster is attached.

These chungi are, in a way, the most dangerous trans identities of all because on the surface, they present the least onerous demands of all the characters in the troupe. And yet accepting their claims to have no sex — however fleeting this identity might eventually be for them — is just as insidious as pretending the dockyard transvestite has an inner female soul. It’s all the same derangement.

I have talked endlessly about the femme presenting gays who work in prostitution and their role as the window dressing of the trans ideology movement. They can mobilise sympathy like no other, because they are so often victims of mistreatment (and besides, everyone knows that discrimination against those guys is actually just homophobia). They also look kind of better than the rest. That’s why they are so often asked to be Pride grand marshals and dance show judges and TV (but not radio) panelists on “trans rights” issues. They provide cover for the hulking gooners and apple-shaped pooners.

But while people are unlikely to have personal relationships with gay transvestite prostitutes, most people in the professional class are likely to have in their direct or adjacent entourage at least one teenage girl of thus-far indeterminate sexual-preference who is escaping the bodyhorror of impending womanhood by claiming not to be female.

To the untrained eye, these girls — with their oversized clothes, their Revlon box dye in the shade of Toxic Exotic Tree Slug, their uneagerness to aesthetically please — might even look like a bold rejection of sexist stereotypes to their naive GirlPower-era moms, aunts and godmothers. Haven’t we spent at least 5 decades encouraging just such a rejection of the overbearing male gaze? Hooray for the girls who refuse to succumb to Insta trout-pout selfie mania, I guess?

When someone has been captured by delerium enbicus neptis, as this disorder is known in the scientific literature, they don’t exhibit many early outward symptoms beyond a glassy stare and selective mutism. However, if the disease has advanced, sufferers will also exhibit severe nystagmus, an affliction in which the eyes dart from place to place, looking for somewhere — anywhere — to look so that they can avoid your accusatory gobsmack (watch out for the differential diagnosis: the condition can be confused with fucking cowardly wankeritis generalis, with which it is often comorbid).

All of these symptoms can be relieved by cutting off contact with the TERF hags in the patient’s lives, the ones who won’t stop going on about Barbie Kardashian threatening to rape the women on whose prison ward he was housed.

The sufferers of this syndrome are unlikely to dress all in black and scream at women’s rights campaigners. They won’t even struggle their colleagues to attend work’s annual Coming Out Day party. But they’ll certainly show up and eat crisps out of a rainbow bowl themselves. They’ll act like it’s all totally normal to have a sexual identity reveal in your workplace, and then go back to their desks pretending to think that wrapping concealing bandages around a disassociating teenage girl’s breasts is some kind of human rights triumph.

Joanna!

I went home to visit an old friend not long ago, and I sat at her table and chatted as she cleaned up the kitchen around me. A couple of years of catchup was spilling out of us both. We are both busy with our disconnected lives, but we always found time to hang out whenever we could and exchange long nutrient-rich strings of information about our wins and woes in short but intensive bursts.

When I got to my work on “trans issues”, which she vaguely knew about, she got very quiet. Very, very quiet. I realised she wouldn’t look at me.

FUCK.

The cleaning intensified to a frenzy, and the chatting slowed to a drip. A schism had cut right through the kitchen. Male rapists in women’s prisons, I tried. Puberty blockers? Women losing their jobs? The Rio Olympics!!! I reeled off the whole filthy, rotten list. But I was now Joanna, suddenly transported to a Stepford kitchen, begging for some sign of intelligence from a woman who had been replaced by a cliche-repeating robot.

(This is the part in the horror movie where the discordant violin sounds that you had barely noticed begin to get uncomfortably loud).

I soon found out why she was acting this way: her neighbours, the ones who gave all their kids ridiculous Gwyneth Paltrow-style names, had a daughter who had recently begun to say she was non-binary. My friend thought it was “very refreshing” that her own children had adapted so quickly to using they/them pronouns. (The skin goes cold. Total internal panic ensues.) The enby was in and out of the house all the time, she said, and everyone, apparently, was doing the pronoun thing.

“Who am I to say to them, No you’re not who you say you are?” she asked me.

I know well why she found it “refreshing”. We both grew up in the impoverished underclass, surrounded by violence, alcoholism, male brutality, sexism, and homophobia. It was the air we breathed. She was happy that she now moved in better circles, the kind of circles made up of people who are intolerant to all forms of intolerance.

But I made her do the checklist on the enby neighbour: is she autistic? Seems like it. Is she quirky, does she have a hard time making friends? Yup. Is she from a posh family? Hoooo-yeah. If you had to guess, would you say she might grow up to be a lesbian? Quite possibly, yes.

Anyway, what’s the harm?

Perhaps as a consolation, after seeing the look of terror on my face, she offered: “…but when I see trans women dressed up in slutty clothes? I don’t like that.” This brief interjection to tell me that she’s not fond of the fishnet gooners felt like talking to someone with Alzheimer’s who has a fleeting lucid moment: she was back for a second. But just as quicky she disappeared once again.

Gone.

Her admission about fetishistic perverts was a weak balm for the looming rough patch in our relationship. Fighting this harmful bullshit has practically become my full-time job, and she’s on the dark side of the moon right now, and possibly forever.

But I understand, in a way. We’ve been friends far longer than little Neopronoun next door has even been alive. But the fact is that we only see each other about once a year. Noah, or Max or whatever, and her mom, are right there, 24/7. Also, Noah’s mom simply got there first. Undoing whatever conclusions we have previously, confidently settled on — that’s hard. Our heels, they tend to dig in.

As I’ve said on these pages before: the deprogramming will be intense. The guys who talk would-be jihadi bombers out of their promised virgins will struggle with these women. Their social lives in the temporal world hinge on the apparently tiny concession to agree to say “they” instead of “she” once or twice a week. What’s the harm?

But that’s just how it starts. The conceptual hole gets too deep to climb out of. The little lie eventually consumes everything in its path.

As if to demonstrate this trajectory, she told me that, inspired by her young LGBTIQ+ acquaintance, she had taken her children to Dublin Pride. When her little daughter invited me to check out her bedroom, I found pride bunting and stickers and badges strewn all around her bunk bed. Her favourite flag is the pansexual one (she’s 11 years old). There was a photo of Lizzo with a love-and-hugs LGBTIQ quote on her bedroom wall. She was reading a book about a lesbian couple that looked extremely horny, judging by a quick flick-through. Her school, I was told later, in another proud pitch, was an alternative pedagogy type of establishment for people who are specialer than you. It was fully queered. Everything had been queered.

It felt like a scene of ideological carnage.

The most disturbing psychological manifestation of non-binary niece syndrome is the cognitive dissonance that manifests when you accept the “harmless” trans-masc identity escapade of the daughter of the woman who drives you to yoga, while recoiling in horror at Fishnet Fred who is having the same kind of gender adventure in your changing room. But the only way to shoo away this dissonance is by learning to accept Fred into your ideological fold, lest your psychological security (and social circle) dissolve into a puddle all around you.

It all comes as a conceptual package.

If someone like Barbie Kardashian was your first foray into the land of gender, consider yourself lucky, because it’s clear which way your truth-seeking compass will point. But a lot of people are stumbling upon trans via tomboys in their milieu who are escaping womanhood like a flat on fire. At first glance, it looks like something to celebrate.

The entertainment industry is fueling the blaze: companies like Netflix are producing propaganda cartoons for children about fictional loveable noble Noahs, adorable trans boys who desire nothing more than to be left alone to be their authentic selves. Oh how they tug on the normies’ kindstrings! The producers don’t include the factoid that Noah hates her body so much that the only way her parents can get her to take a shower is at nighttime with the lights off.

But trying to relay all this to someone who has already been bitten by a marauding gender zombie is useless. Arguing your case has no power. Only social relationships do.

We’re all incredibly human like that.