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“We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” —Ayn Rand
Matt Walsh crowed last week that "Transgenderism is effectively over."
"We destroyed it," he went on, calling it the "clearest and most decisive cultural win that conservatives have ever achieved."
Sorry, no — if Matt were any more wrong, he'd put on a dress and insist we call him Mathilda. But before you can understand where Walsh went wrong, you have to understand what's really going on.
I put "trans" in scare quotes up above in the headline because the word has been conflated beyond all meaning. So before you can understand why the crisis is far from over, we have to restore meaning to that word.
The confusion stems — and this is no accident, by the way — from taking the word transexual (which is the less scientific term for gender dysphoria) and expanding it to cover three other types of people who are not in any way gender dysphoric.
The short version is that the catch-all term "trans" now includes four distinct groups: the genuinely gender dysphoric, predators, victims, and trendies. Before we get to the fakers and the harmed, let’s take a quick look at the real deal.
True dysphoria isn't a TikTok trend or a phase trendy kids go through — it's a real and painful disconnect between mind and body that makes the simple act of being feel out of tune. At best. It means waking up every day and believing the mirror lies to you about the most fundamental aspect of your biology. The gender dysphoric aren’t confused about who they are; they’re exhausted by how hard it is to live in the body they have.
The real tragedy is that we still don't have a handle, medically or psychologically, on how (or necessarily whether) to treat gender dysphoria. The reported attempted suicide rate for the gender dysphoric is higher than any other group of people you could name, at nearly 40%. That's an astonishing figure, and although the research is spotty on self-reported suicide attempts, the figure remains about the same regardless of whether a dysphoric person has medically transitioned.
And Another Thing: For brevity's sake, I use "transitioning" for the series of hormonal and surgical procedures that we used to call "getting a sex change." But please know that I know that basic biology and common sense dictate that there's no actual transition or sex change taking place. Any changes are purely cosmetic. For some who are gender dysphoric, that's enough. For others, not so much.
A 2019 study found that "Despite professional recommendations to consider gender-affirming hormone and surgical interventions for transgender individuals experiencing gender incongruence, the long-term effect of such interventions on mental health is largely unknown." That's true even after six-plus decades of procedures performed on tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone.
Some are happier after transition surgery and hormone treatments. Some are worse off, but have made changes to their bodies that can never be fully reversed. The medical profession is unable to tell in advance which person will fall into which group.
There are as yet no easy answers. Hell, there don't seem to be any difficult answers, either. People caught in the dysphoria dichotomy deserve our sympathy and our help, although the former is at risk from the "trans" movement, and the latter, we still don't really know how to provide.
The gender dysphoric do not seek to draw attention to themselves; they just want to pass.
You know who does draw attention to themselves? Autogynephilic male predators who coopted the trans label.
The middle-aged straight man with the stringy "girl" hair, the beard, and the dress trying to barge into the girls' locker room so he can ogle and wave his penis around isn't "trans" anything. His kink, as sexologist Ray Blanchard described it, is sexual arousal at the idea of having a female body, and flaunting it in front of others.
In better times, he paraded around in front of his wife or whatever — in private. Today, he uses the law to force the rest of society to accept that he's just a girl, free to invade women's space and compete in women's sporting events.
On second thought, the predators are probably best divided into two subsets: Autogynephilics and losers.
Here's an autogynephilic:
OMG
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 10, 2025
The transgender s*x offender Richard Cox, who used the girl’s locker room at Arlington County Public Schools in Virginia in front of kids, was communicating with a school board member about the school’s policy allowing males in girl’s bathrooms. The school board member… pic.twitter.com/aGewenwHbw
And here's a loser:
Lia Thomas spent 21 years of his life as a man.
— American Principles Project (@approject) March 18, 2022
He started competing against women in swimming this year and became a national champion.
Our daughter’s sports are not a plan B for failed male athletes.
pic.twitter.com/Lbtos3Ut6g
But make no mistake: Both prey on women.
Autogynephilic men have shown all kinds of violent tendencies, over and over — though I still don’t fully understand why. Maybe someday I'll do enough research to write an essay on them, assuming I can stomach it.
The Left loves promoting these male predators as having the same rights as women, because promoting predation, kink, and mental illness to individual rights obliterates the entire concept of individual rights. As I wrote above, the conflation between gender dysphoria and "trans" is no accident.
Yet there is real change going on, something visible enough that it got Matt Walsh crowing about it.
Take a look:
1/ NEW: trans identification is in free fall among the young
— Eric Kaufmann (@epkaufm) October 14, 2025
(h/t @FIRE data in particular) pic.twitter.com/i0Z1BNcWG8
In just two years, the number of teens and young adults who self-ID as trans/queer/genderfluid/etc. has dropped nearly in half.
Those are the trendies, and they were never genuinely transexual any more than nine out of 10 members of your local Rocky Horror Picture Show live cast.
About 25 years ago, at the height of what I called "Lesbian Chic," it was super-trendy for young women (and a few older ones, too) say, "I'm not gay, but I'd totally do it with Angelina Jolie." I can't quite recall when or how the whole Lesbian Chic thing came about, but it was brilliantly skewered in a 2004 episode of Will & Grace (back when that show was funny because it made fun of literally everybody — gay, straight, or "other") with a gay power couple played by Edie Falco and Chloë Sevigny. One of the many jokes in that episode is that Sevigny's orientation might have had as much to do with career advancement as anything else.
But I digress.
Needless to say, none of those "I'd do it with Angelina Jolie" women ever did it with Angelina Jolie, and their actual fantasies probably centered on her then-husband, Brad Pitt. All of which is just a long-winded way of explaining that even when it comes to sex, sometimes people pretend to be what they aren't, usually briefly, and going back at least to the Glam Rock era of the early '70s.
For all I know, Oscar Wilde started a short-lived Gay Chic movement in the 1890s. And everyone in Victorian London would have pretended not to notice.
And Another Thing: Try not to judge, or at least not too harshly. Musically, the Glam era gave us everything from Ziggy Stardust to Roxy Music to Kiss. For those and many other acts, I'll be forever grateful.
The point of all this is that today's trendy trans kids are about as gender dysphoric as Wilt Chamberlain, and about as likely to attempt to transition as Sofía Vergara. Just as soon as the air got let out of the "trans" balloon, they went back to being fashionable in some other way. With any luck, they'll look back and laugh at their purple hair phase like my generation does our attempted Flock of Seagulls hairstyles.
No harm, no foul, I suppose.
But the fourth and final group of "trans" people suffered grievous harm.
These are those poor kids trapped between the Scylla of having transitioned in whole or in part, and the Charybdis of never being able to fully detransition. For the most part, these were ordinary gay teens, tomboys, or just going through a particularly awkward adolescence, and in no way "trans." Others were autistic.
Daily Wire reported in July on Kayla Lovdahl, who had undiagnosed autism and some unnamed and unaddressed sexual trauma. She was "put on hormones at just TWELVE and had a mastectomy only a month after turning thirteen."
At an FTC workshop on the dangers so called "gender-affirming care" for young people, she said, "Never along the way did anyone question why I suddenly wanted to become a boy. They didn't comprehensively screen me for mental health disorders, or ask me about any prior trauma."
Her doctors just jammed her full of male hormones and sliced her breasts off.
In 2023, X user "Jess" wrote about the "sad transformation" of her brother, who "came out as trans when he was 16 and now at 22 he has 'detransitioned,' realizing he was really just a gay dude on the spectrum." Her family described his pre-transition traits — like avoiding touch and screaming — as signs of neurodivergence, not dysphoria, and lamented the unnecessary interventions that left permanent effects.
Then there are cases like Nikita Teran's, a 16-year-old tomboy who, after "years of insecurity fell into place when she when she came across a female-to-male transitioning story on YouTube." She soon began transitioning, but "at around 22 years old, those doubts surrounding gender identity began to creep back in. She started to question herself and wonder if the decision to transition to a male was the right decision."
Nikita eventually began detransitioning and "was put on a waiting list to have laser hair removal. She is going to change her name back to Nikita and start using female pronouns once more."
"Most individuals are able to return to a similar physical status they had prior to HRT initiation," Dr. Marcus Tellez told Newsweek in the story linked above, "but mental implications for detransitioning are likely related to discrimination from others. For most individuals, transitioning in a safe space improves mental health outcomes."
And Another Thing: Many years ago, I made a happy acquaintance with a freshly divorced — and quite attractive — young mother of two. She adored her kids but had zero interest in having more. All she wanted was to get her tubes tied and not worry about it. But this was the 1990s, and no doctor would agree to the procedure — she wasn’t yet 25. Yet today, we let confused teenagers make far bigger, permanent decisions.
"Similar physical status" is about as good as it gets for young people wrongly encouraged or even manipulated into transitioning, when what they really needed was just a little guidance getting through a trying time.
There are many more such cases, and I'd rather not take you on a deep dive through them.
Let's call these kids what they are: victims of woke faddishness, Munchausen-by-proxy mothers, and some seriously creepy segments of the medical establishment.
These people deserve justice.
What's happening in California and a few other Democrat-run states is a doubling down on this lunacy, instead.
Signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier this month, California's Family Preparedness Plan Act of 2025 does to parenthood what "trans" did to sexuality — broaden it into meaninglessness. Under the new law, a “nonrelative extended family member” may sign and have the same rights to authorize medical and dental care for minors that are given to legal guardians. The law defines “nonrelative extended family member” as an adult “who has an established familial relationship with a relative of the child, or a familial or mentoring relationship with the child.”
So that could mean teachers, clergy, neighbors, family friends — or groomers.
While other states are finally moving to protect vulnerable kids from medical mutilation, in California, they're more vulnerable than ever. In California, it's the sick moms, twisted doctors, and male groomers who enjoy legal protection.
Originally called AB 495, I like to think of it as the Get Your Kids the Hell Out of California Act (GYKHOCA).
And Another Thing: GYKHOCA doesn't have much of a ring to it, does it?
Conservatives continue to score legal wins against male predators demanding to "compete" in women's sports and barge into little girls' bathrooms, but the madness continues without respite in trans-sanctuary states from Virginia to Minnesota to California.
So the good news is that young people who were never really trans to begin with have stopped telling themselves — and everyone on TikTok — that they're trans. But male predators continue to prey on women and girls. Doctors still butcher the autistic and confused young gays, lesbians, and tomboys.
We will always have the truly gender-dysphoric, caught in a tragic — and for now, unsolvable — tension between brain and body. And, worst of all, whose condition remains hijacked by a few vile men and their enablers on the Left.
Last Thursday: From Anathema to Applause — What Changed for Trump?
