‘Anorexic’ is trending on social media after a bizarre TikTok from Dylan Mulvaney went viral showing the trans influencer looking thinner than usual. It would be unfair to speculate on their health, as that is their business.
The video is interesting for other reasons.
Dylan, with freshly bleached hair and wearing a skin-tight black mini dress, can be seen shouting, ‘I live for the gays! The gays make me happy! Gay! Gay! Gay!’ This goes on for some time.
It is an odd mantra for a trans pin-up star. Does it suggest the lines of gender ideology are blurring, even among advocates? Is a transwoman a ‘real’ straight woman attracted to men and thus not gay? Or is a transwoman actually a gay biological man? Are transwomen who like women straight men or lesbians? These are becoming both legal and philosophical questions.
As an advocate of the trans community, wouldn’t it make more sense for Dylan to walk the ‘straight’ ‘cis’ ‘hetro’ line?
For those watching on, there’s a habit forming among gender activists who declare their new gender to be ‘real’ while they also wish to remain part of a minority group that affords them a special social status unattainable to biological women.
Social history tells us that if an ideology is internally inconsistent, it is probably deeply flawed.
When it comes to our species, the biology of gender is a primary human drive imperative to our survival. Misunderstanding gender as a concept results in extinction, so it is unlikely that the narrative ‘gender is a social construct’ will continue. Keep in mind, there has not been a single recorded civilisation that got itself in a knot regarding gender theory until the progressive Western liberals came along.
Most individuals reject the re-writing of gender, but expressing a truthful personal opinion has become difficult in a situation where activism is lucrative and anything that invalidates that activism threatens the profit margins of the richest organisations on the planet. The more converts, the more customers. That’s the theory, although it isn’t going so well for a certain beer company on account of customers having a measure of free will.
This practice is being turned into a system of social ranking via the ESG framework where companies that engage in ‘diversity hiring’ are busy turning employees into commodities. Our grandparents would find this sinister, but the younger generation is thrilled they can monetise their identity in the absence of talent.
The reality of radical gender theory hits the road when it comes to dating. Women and men do not need the word ‘real’ in front of their gender to convince a prospective mate. Changing a pronoun and demanding access to sex-segregated apps has not granted the trans community broad access to straight partners. Critics can complain that sexual preference for biology is ‘transphobic’, but we have a line in the sand that says no one can compel someone else to sleep with them – certainly not through ideological and social blackmail.
Returning to today’s social media trend. There is an interesting lesson to take from the mention of anorexia in relation to gender dysphoria.
Regardless of how careful society is, there will always be a number of people predisposed to developing an eating disorder. It is a recurring feature of humanity that is no one’s fault. Some people can be successfully treated, others cannot.
The one thing we know about anorexia is that it is a condition that can be brought on among healthy people by triggers in their environment. Eating disorders are often artificially induced by external stimuli such as surrounding young girls with stick-thin role models, clothes that only come in tiny sizes, a market saturation of unattainable beauty, diet culture, and extreme fat-shaming from peer groups.
When society realised this cause-and-effect relationship between culture and eating disorders, changes were made to protect children. Anorexia is still around, but no one is celebrating or encouraging children to engage in that world while adults are severely criticised if they promote dangerous eating behaviours.
Gender dysphoria is developing a similar pattern. Rates of dysphoria remained constant for many generations. Neither rising nor falling. However, in the last decade – exclusively in Western nations – gender dysphoria has accelerated in a spike that cannot be explained by anything other than environmental onset.
It has become clear that by exposing young children to gender ideology and rewarding children with social status if they adopt an atypical gender, society is giving children gender dysphoria. The vast majority of these children, had they lived in any other time in human history, would grow up without questioning their gender.
This artificial conversion of children into what was once considered a serious condition is shocking.
There are no good outcomes for children who have adopted dysphoria. The bulk of these kids will be fast-tracked onto hormones and even surgery, leaving them sterile and disfigured. Those who escape this fate are likely to suffer severe social consequences and mental trauma from the life and relationships they attempted while in a state of fabricated confusion. Detransitioners are already raising the alarm about the subsequent conditions they suffered as a result, including depression.
The people these kids were born to be has been lost to them forever. Their true identities were usurped by activism and we are going to spend the next hundred years picking through the trauma.
Just as society sees the manipulation of young girls into dangerous eating behaviours as abuse, the adults of this world should be casting a critical eye over what radical gender theory is doing to healthy children.
Why are we celebrating an ‘explosion’ in gender dysphoria when it has one of the highest levels of suicide of any condition?
Why do we celebrate the sterilisation of children, the removal of breasts, and disfigurement of sexual organs as ‘affirmation’?
If schools across the nation suddenly had an outbreak of exceptionally thin girls, you wouldn’t send in a modelling agency to recruit them as poster girls for sports companies or turn them into brand ambassadors for diet pills. That would be considered negligence.
At some point we have to ignore the feelings of adults and start thinking about the welfare of children.
Flat White is written and edited by Alexandra Marshall.
