The following is a major portion for a draft for an article that I intended to submit anonymously on a prominent substack. As that never ended up happening, I may as well leave it here for feedback. It explores an important angle almost never discussed.
[... earlier sections of the article discussed genealogical concerns - I will omit them ...]
1.2 Absolute Escapism
As stated, I believe all the above theories contain a not-so easily quantifiable degree of truth. Yet none speak to feel that characterizes transition: An inner experience. A liminal moment. An intense need to change. Nor do they speak to the prodromal state: Profound brokenness, desire for salvation, and wistfulness interceded only in fits of spastic jealousy. And long before any tranny undergoes transition, they retain fantasies of its prospect - and these experiences constitute elaborate cognitive simulations. Some explore these fantasies by roleplaying, others within internal fantasy.
It is at this juncture, facing these questions, that we can most intuitively re-simulate the experience. Before hormones, before surgery, before any of it — there is that element of pure raw fantasy. Sometimes it can be sexual, tied to fantasies of having some dude fuck the living shit out of you. Sometimes it may tend towards fetishistic, oriented towards getting turned into an obedient sissy. It is the feeling of looking at the beautiful girl on the bus. Wondering what it would be like to be her. Intense longing. Overcome by unimaginable envy at the thought. And sometimes, just sometimes, it is just the wholesome fantasy of being a wife and mother. No one is the same, and all fantasies come packaged differently.
This is the fundamental point. Virtuality and fantasy are prior to EVERYTHING, and it would be a mistake to regard them as idle. To steal from Gene Wolf:
[…] they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges […] it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.
As we are not sorcerers, we need not be esoteric on these matters. This process is more mechanical than it first appears seems. And it is more cybernetic than mechanical. Recall the positive feedback loop: The cybernetic process that continually exaggerates and intensifies itself. I believe dysphoria works like that, emerging in repeated iterations of the fantastic process. An example may convey the idea:
Quote:A young boy who continually retreats into fantasies about being a woman. These fantasies bring comfort, pleasure, and an escape from the reality of his life. Yet these fantasies also intensify his desire for escape, inspiring a feeling of brokenness. The boy knows in his heart that he lacks a virility common in all socially successful men. He feels that no woman could ever a love a man who fantasies about being a woman. And faced with his brokenness, he returns to fantasy. More day-dreaming, more wistfulness, and more envy. It all accumulates, until any last sense of masculine self-identity (if there was ever much to begin with) is eroded to the core - few vestiges remain. And then he waits, until the moment comes that a divine spark of inspiration comes and tells him to simply cast it all way. Which is to say, all it takes is one bad day.
I draw from my own psychological history here, but there is nothing particularly special about me. In the thousands of posts and testimonies I’ve read over the last decade, these same basic threads are rewoven into a nigh endless multiplicity of narratives and reified into our social reality.
The internet interfaces with virtualities in four distinct ways.
First, it provides a controlled simulation space for digital explorations of alterity. You will find that many have extensive MMO backgrounds, first exploring female identification with avatars in those virtual worlds. By its nature as a kind of manifest concept space, the internet disembodies and derealizes us, allowing an abstract self to be transcribed into binary, shaped by according digital symbols possessing nigh infinite mutability. We are not our alters, and our alters are not us - but we are also not not them. There is a reason many of us are obsessed with Serial Experiments Lain - “She is just like me!”
Secondly, the presence of other trannies who have already undergone the process act as inspiration. Especially the pretty ones, who offer hope of a positive result.
Third, when he does begin transitioning, internet communities act as social support systems and provide external affirmation to his choice. See the uncountable number of “Am I trans?” threads on Reddit. There, the individual stands upon the cusp, just wanting to be told that “It is okay…”. To the extent that “””“grooming””” plays any kind of substantial role in tranny spaces, this is the real nature of it. It comes from people seeking affirmation, and others giving it. More exotic, manipulative, and darker forms do exist in the darker spaces of the internet. But they lay deep down weeb-ish and furry rabbit holes.
For the final way that transsexuality interfaces with the internet, we must concede that it is fundamentally a meme. There is nothing exceptional in this, though. It is a meme in the same way that religion, politics, and language itself are. Once one begins to have cross-gender fantasies, the social meme serves to provide context for feelings that defy simple explanations and logic. We attempt at all points to explain ourselves to ourselves in the terms and tools that are at hand. When we learn that transition is a possibility, it becomes paints the horizon with possibility. Cross-gender fantasies have always existed, but mere awareness of the potentiality of their realization changes everything.
1.3 Causes (local)
Let us roll the concepts of the last section into a shitty acronym. Call it the Virtual Dysphoria Machine - the VDM. An extremely tranny name for an extremely tranny concept. If we allow ourselves to grant that the VDM works in the way prescribed above, then we have gained (some) insight into the process - but not yet the nature of the cause. As a positive feedback loop, we believe the VDM eventually generates intense overwhelming dysphoria. A hatred of the body. But it does not exist in isolation. Instead, it constantly interfaces with the social and is subject to other external and internal forces
Quote:A. “I can be a socially successful male”
This is a belief, but I would prefer to think of it as a force. A belief influencing behavior. Call it a ‘belief-force’. you’re a handsome and good-looking guy who has had success within the dating market, you’re straight out less likely to transition early. And if you’re Caitlyn fucking Jenner, the concept might be so paralyzing to you that it might dampen the VDM-autorecursion for four fucking decades. High status/sexual market value has a strong repressing effect.
Quote:B. “I am not desirable as a male.”
Another belief-force and the negation of the preceding. If you think this way, you’re suddenly far more likely to consider the transition. Not only is your assigned sex undesirable to others, but you yourself are also hostile to it (you believe that it prevents you from having the best life you can). Perhaps you would be more desirable as a woman, and you would certainly be more sexually satisfied by it. So say you are a 17-year-old 5’6 anime autist with abysmal social skills. You masturbate to the DANKEST /d/ futanari five times a day. Women look at you like you have HIV. Or as a potential rapist. Probably both. You’re probably already begging your mom for estrogen daily. The thought consumes you. If you’re not obsessing, you’re LARPING and sad-posting on 4chan’s /tttt/.
Quote:C. “I would be an ugly woman.”
Non-passing trannies tend towards a certain look. Sometimes they inspire disgust, sometimes comedy. No one wants to be a disgusting joke. And except for 4chan adjacent spaces, trannies do not talk about this directly - the conversation is (culturally regarded as) a cruelty inflicted on those who simply waited too long, or had the wrong genetics for it. Yet all trannies are aware of it, in some deep way. And for most, the sum of all fears is thus: People would see me as a disgusting clown. If you believe this, you will probably repress. If someone still transitions well retaining this thought, then they have ascended to a low-grade sociopathy and simply ceased to care about the beliefs of others. Nietzschean? Degenerate? Depends on your tastes. Alternatively, they may come to recognize the belief-force as erroneous — either in truth or in delusion.
Quote:D. “I would probably pass.”
Again, the negation. If you can perceive yourself as passing, you are not only highly motivated to transition, but time has become a albatross. Every moment, every second postponed is a moment of further masculinization. This belief, more than any other, allows the VDM to spiral into overdrive in the case of teenagers. The fear of what they might lose is overwhelming. Opportunity cost is everything here.
Quote:E. “My parents/peer group/partner would disown/leave me.”
Weakly negating, but not as much as others. Unless you have extremely tight bonds, this serves to repress the VDM only insofar as it inspires resentment of those people who inhibit you. Once the resentment hits a certain threshold, it ceases to be negating. At such a point, it radically switches towards amplification: transition as an act of vengeance against those who held you back. There are a lot of trannies who take a certain naked pleasure in the thought of obtaining surgery, as a means of vengeance to inflict upon their parents. A most grotesque, if understandable, pleasure.
Quote:F. “I will go to hell.”
Strongly negating. But the mechanism works exactly the same as (E). Inhibition inspires resentment, which will in turn lead to one questioning their faith. Strongly atheist ex-Christian trannies are a dime a dozen.
Quote:G. “I would be accepted by all those I care about.”
…requires no discussion. Absolutely untethers the VDM. If you believe that you can realize your fantasy and not lose anyone you hold dear. The only inhibitions that will remain are concerns about aesthetics (C, D) or concerns about faith (E). If neither presents a challenge, you’ve probably already scheduled an appointment with an informed consent clinic or googling DIY HRT.
All of these belief forces exist outside the VDM. They speak to one’s social relationships and status within society. For the sake of clarity, they should be contrasted with the dominant belief-forces existing internal to the VDM. Let us distill one such example.
Quote:“I desire to be a woman, and no one would ever desire a man who fantasizes about being a woman.”
I believe that the VDM is driven by self-referential beliefs such as this. An auto-reference generates an infinite recursion, manifesting in thought-loops, depression, and choice paralysis. By contrast, the belief-forces described above are not self-referential - they have tied directly to individuals' perceptions of their social reality. These things may or may not be interconnected in other ways, but I have not speculated past this point.
4. Causes (Global)
One of the driving features of VDM is the potentiality of transition itself. Call it the primordial infohazard. The moment we become aware that it is done, that someone somewhere in the world a man has made himself pass as a woman, is the moment that we feel most intensely the desire it.
In the early 2000s, pornography was the first infohazard. At the very least, it was from porn that a lot of people learned that transition was both possible (and that some people got good results from it). By the late naughts, Tumblr served to widely disseminate the concept into the collective unconscious. As of $CURRENT_YEAR, the online trans-community is sprawling - hundreds if not thousands of influencers and microcelebrities. Knowledge of specific surgeries, and hormone replacement theory, is no longer constrained to a small group of trannies and the associated medical professionals — but is fairly widely disseminated in the Wired.
Fundamentally, it was the internet that created the conditions for this, allowing geographically divergent communities to assemble into convergent digital ones, creating the proper pre-conditions for large-scale meme dissemination from small sources. Every child who is growing up now and for as long as the internet exists in its current form will know about us. About who & what we are. And if they have the appropriate preconditions and predisposition, they will begin to speculate on the possibility of transitioning themselves. From there, the psychological process described above will be enacted with brutal efficacy.
Yet the internet contributed in a second indirect way. The proliferation of dating apps has led to an absolute boom in the average woman’s self-esteem, and an absolute bust for men. Parts of incel culture, the ‘dating pareto principle’, ’female hypergamy’, etc… have also become common-knowledge. Those with a feminist inclination may dispute them, but their truth is a red-herring. If males believe they are true, then they might as well be. As a consequence, the average male comes to feel substantially less sexually desirable than he once may have. This feeds back into a local cause: belief-force (B).
Finally, we should credit to Bronze Age Pervert for conceptually isolating yet another ‘global’ cause. This is the concept of ‘owned space’, which is challenging to express in a mere few sentences. Eschewing the concepts of spiritual connotations that naturally underlie it, it asserts that modern society stifles the ability of young boys to explore the world around them. This is very intuitive, but hard to convey concretely. Consider the following sentence:
“If you work really hard in school, and go to the right college, you can probably get a job at Amazon or Google someday.”
Only those with the right attunement can sense the sinister nature at work here. As children, we dream of many great and lofty things. We do not, however, dream of working a 9-5 in FAANG cubicle. Of spending our disposable income on mediocre video games and trashy streaming services. Or of being divorced, alone, and paying child support. Yet we are aware that this is our probable future - if we are lucky enough to even make it. The world is smaller now than it once was, and our dreams are smaller still. To be born a few hundred years ago was to know a world that was still a mystery, to hold tight to the dream that one day you could claim part of that world for yourself. Few and fewer hold such dreams now. We are taught to be conservative with our desires. We should want a small apartment, eco-friendly electric car, and enough disposable income for weekly visits to the local Wine & Cheese bar. This is a good life. This is what the New York Times sells me, and it is what it sells all of us.
Like homosexuality, BAP implicitly suggests transsexuality emerges as a reaction to this, at least in the presence of a child with high sensitivity. As BAP largely restricts his discussion to homosexuality, I will attempt an extrapolation for trannies: If the ‘male conception’ of power is perceived as debased and undesirable to the sensitive child, then the ‘female conception’ is ascendant - the power of being desired, the power OnlyFans stars exert on legions of adoring simps. In our terms, this generates the entire predisposition for the VDM. Fantasies of being a woman become the escape from bland masculinity. As these become internalized, and eventually sexualized, femininity and submission are elevated to power fantasies. As much as this might seem a contradiction in terms, it is manifest in the intense jealousy that some prodromal trannies feel towards attractive women. We did, if nothing else, come of age in a world of dominant #GirlBosses.