A new report from Sanjana Friedman at Pirate Wires documents a phenomenon that’s been a source of discussion among the extremely online for a little while, and has now made it into the open. “Transmaxxing” is a subculture of young men who embrace trans identities not because they believe they were ‘born in the wrong body’ but simply because they can, and because they think it’ll make their lives better.
It’s a phenomenon that reveals more nakedly than ever before the true face of the cyborg era: a culture caught between increasingly powerful technology, and the collapse of any coherent narrative about how best to use it for the good into a general sense that all narratives are interchangeable.
As Friedman tells it, the transmaxxers are strikingly post-ideological about their self-remodelling, at least compared to the official trans narrative, which draws heavily from 20th-century civil rights discourse. In this view, ‘gender identity’ is immutable and trans people are just ‘born that way’.
Many transmaxxers, though, modify themselves just because they want to (examples are shown on this 73-page ‘transmaxxing’ manifesto). Some report making up stories of gender dysphoria for medical professionals, while others then self-induce gender dysphoria by watching ‘sissy hypno’ — a type of video in which hypnotic (and sometimes also pornographic) stimuli are combined with messages encouraging the male viewer to embrace feminine looks or behaviour. The post-ideological feel of the phenomenon is underlined further by how often such individuals shift from embracing the ‘incel’ ideologies associated with the Right, to ‘trans’ identities associated with the Left.
For the most part, the contest between trans activists and their feminist opponents has been conducted on the field of ‘gender’: what it is, whether it has discrete categories, how (or whether) it relates to physiology and so on. A smaller handful of writers have drawn attention to the transhumanist implications of claiming a right to remodel one’s physical body based on an unfalsifiable inner feeling.
This vision sees medicine not as a restorative practice intended to return us to a shared understanding of ‘normal’, but as a potentially limitless method of upgrading ‘normal’ according to personal desire and preference. This has been openly advocated for some time as well by some trans activists, such as pharma entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt. But the debate has so far stayed largely within the pre-cyborg moral frame of equality, justice and rights.
Yet as Friedman notes, what’s striking in the transmaxxers is the way they’re cheerfully abandoning the civil-rights narrative, in favour of an open, wholesale embrace of the transhumanist outlook. Many transmaxxers report that the interventions have significantly improved their lives; why, such individuals might ask, does anyone need a ‘born in the wrong body’ story to justify something that works on its own terms?
And it’s here that we catch a glimpse of the real face of the cyborg era: an emerging cultural paradigm in which technology is the ideology. The opinions someone endorses while down an internet rabbit hole matter less than the cumulative psychological impact of spending all day every day in that rabbit hole: a condition of radical body dissociation and (increasingly measurably) real-world social isolation.
Once self is thus dissociated from body, there’s no obvious reason not to treat that ‘meat suit’ as an instrument to be optimised, whether via hormones, surgery or other interventions, in pursuit of greater happiness — and again the story matters less than the fact you’re simply doing it because you can.
https://unherd.com/thepost/why-are-incels-turning-themselves-into-girls/ (Archive)
Transmaxxing: the Incel-To-Transwoman Pipeline
why a community of depressed young men with nothing to lose is convinced the only way out of their misery is gender transition
That a large and growing subset of men are literally incapable of getting laid is a seemingly-benign issue that actually impacts our entire country, intersecting every controversial topic from technology addiction and “toxic masculinity” to the population crash. But more recently, as the involuntarily celibate (incel) subculture works its way through the funhouse mirror world of our Twenty-first Century internet, it has strangely — and perhaps inevitably — intersected with the trans community. Long story short, what if you hated women so much you decided to become one?
Today, in a whirlwind of incel men becoming girls and dating each other, androgen treatments as a defense against a man’s own sex drive and “the power of women,” and the use of sissy hypno porn to “force” men into womanhood, Sanjana Friedman guests for Pirate Wires with a wild foray into America’s strangest and most wondrous new creature: the incel transmaxxer.
Buckle up.
-Solana
Imagine you’re a depressed young man in a developed country. Maybe you work long hours for low pay, maybe you’re unemployed. When you were in school, you didn’t fit in with other boys; girls acted like you weren’t even there. You spend most of your free time playing video games and shitposting with online friends you’ve never met in real life. You rarely have sex without paying for it. You consider suicide regularly. To the left, you’re a threat: a woman-hating incel with latent violent tendencies. To the right, you’re a degenerate: a porn-addicted, weak “virgin” who struggles to impose himself on the world.
So where do you go from here? Do you ingratiate yourself with SJWs, or with the chads? Do you succumb to the temptation to commit suicide?
For some men, the solution to the despair of living as an isolated, unhappy male is straightforward: become a woman. They call themselves “transmaxxers” and they believe gender transition can be an effective tool for escaping the misery of involuntary celibacy, social isolation, and professional mediocrity. More broadly, they see transition as a potentially revolutionary response to a world where the combination of industrialization and biomedical technologies such as in vitro fertilization and sperm donation have eroded the financial and reproductive opportunities previously available to most men. Like many revolutionary movements, they operate semi-clandestinely, preferring Discord to Twitter and YouTube, and express their beliefs primarily in the form of manifestos. The latest, a 73-page document published in April 2022 includes chapters like:
- “How society benefits from people transitioning”—“[incels] will become less likely to develop or maintain problematic political beliefs or become violent, they will instead benefit from accelerated hypergamy and gynocentrism”
- “How to transition”—a 13-step process that involves, among other things, watching anime and sissy hypno porn to induce dysphoria, banking your sperm, and beginning hormone replacement therapy
- “Transwomen have way better sex than ‘chad’”—“[on estrogen] you will experience multiple full-body orgasms”
The 1,200+ member transmaxxing Discord includes men who have transitioned, those who are merely interested, and everything between. Some men in the Discord are there simply because they have a kink for “forced feminization,” a form of fantasy roleplay in which a man is forced to assume a stereotypically feminine appearance and sexual role. But Vintologi, an admin of the Discord, and the compiler of the transmaxx manifestos, told me that “most active members seem to be on HRT [hormone replacement therapy].” And though he insists that “most of the incel community are against transmaxxing and incels do not participate in our spaces much,” the manifestos and Discord chats suggest that many transmaxxers previously identified as incels. The “Transmaxxing success stories” chapter in the manifesto attests to the existence of an incel-to-transmaxxer pipeline:
- “4 years ago I was an edgy, right-wing, anti-SJW teen who was borderline MGTOW [Men Going Their Own Way1]. Now I’m a gay catgirl dating an anarchist transgirl.”
- “I was more an incel-ish transphobe than anything. Looking back at my past kinda disgusts me, but now I’m good with myself. Honestly makes me wonder how many incels are in trans denial.”
- “I used to run in neckbeard 4chan incel circles. Now my name is Rebecca and I’m a girl. When did that happen?”
Where does the fetish end and the identity begin? It is often difficult to tell. Kat_the_Vat, a YouTuber and member of the transmaxx Discord, suspects the manifesto’s porn talk (and, particularly, fantasies about forced feminization) may serve a practical purpose for would-be transmaxxers.
“[Some] incels need to be, like, forced into [pursuing transition] because they have all of these mental constraints from people around them saying ‘you can’t be a girl, because you’re a man’ [or] ‘you can’t do this because of your penis,’” she told me. “But as [they] transition, [they’re] like, ‘I don’t need to read [the porn part of the manifesto] anymore, let me just skip to the medication section.’”
Mainstream progressive discourse around the nature of dysphoria and trans identities doesn’t take kindly to the idea that porn could convince people to transition, or that gender dysphoria could be induced. If for some men transition could be, as Kat put it, “a route to deincelization”—or, practically, a way for “two young incels [to] transition and then date each other,” as Vintologi described it—then what becomes of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s insistence that gender identity is “a person’s intrinsic sense of being male (a boy or a man), female (a girl or a woman), or an alternative gender (e.g., boygirl, girlboy, transgender, genderqueer, eunuch)?” That trans people really just are the gender they claim to be underlies many core contemporary practices related to gender, from prescribing puberty blockers to dysphoric children to declaring pronouns at the start of meetings.
Nor is transmaxxing necessarily amenable to a gender critical account of transgender identities, at least if this account rests on the claim that transition is always a physical and psychological disaster for those who pursue it. The manifesto and Discord are full of personal narratives from people who claim to have radically improved their lives by taking hormones and undergoing feminizing surgeries. As one transmaxxer put it, transition “was like going from watching a movie without colors and sound to watch[ing] a 4K movie with nice audio. I love how orgasms feel now when i am a girl, i didn’t think sex would be this good [sic].”
For Tina, a 23-year-old German transmaxxer who’s been living as a woman for the past year, transition has been a “solution to inceldom.” After suffering a “particularly hard [romantic] rejection” on the heels of “a series of rejections,” she began to investigate “certain patterns in the relationships between men and women.” Tina came to two crucial conclusions: first, that men are replaceable from a reproductive standpoint, and second, “one in 20 men are doomed to become incels” because of the imbalance in the birth sex ratio (on average, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls, though this ratio varies between countries). At this point, Tina felt that she herself was an incel, and decided she needed to “remove the sexual power that women had over [her]” by reducing her sex drive. When she learned that anti-androgens, which suppress testosterone production, are often prescribed to trans women as part of hormone replacement therapy, she decided to fake gender dysphoria in order to access the drug.
“I had never concerned myself with any kind of trans stuff before,” Tina told me, referencing her mindset prior to her decision to transmaxx. But after going to several trans-specialized psychologists and telling her “completely fake” dysphoria story — “the general gist of it is, ‘I’ve had gender dysphoria since I was 14… I’m uncomfortable around women and I envy them for their femaleness and all that kind of shit’” — she received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and prescriptions for anti-androgens and estrogen.
“It was uncomfortable dressing up like a woman for the first time… but now it’s just normal,” Tina says. “I no longer consider myself an incel… the sex drive reduction worked, the dependency-on-women reduction worked, the self-worth-crisis relief worked. And I even met some nice trans people along the way.” She’s been living full-time as a woman for the past year and recently traveled to Marbella, Spain for a consultation with a facial feminization surgeon. Since she has been clinically diagnosed with dysphoria, the German government will cover all costs associated with her transition. She estimates these will total around €80,000.2
Where the progressive attitude is that gender identity is innate and has nothing to do with your sex, and the gender-critical attitude is also that gender identity is innate, but has everything to do with your sex, transmaxxing suggests a range of factors might influence a person’s decision to identify as trans and/or pursue transition: gender dysphoria (induced or otherwise); sexual fetishes (e.g. autogynephilia, which the manifesto encourages would-be transmaxxers to develop); a lack of certain highly valued male physical or social traits (having a large penis, being tall or strong, being assertive, being financially successful). It takes a transhumanist approach to transition, suggesting, in Kat’s words, that unhappy men ask themselves “is estrogen going to improve my life, are anti-androgens going to improve my life… it’s not about ‘oh am I innately a boy or a girl?’ or ‘am I stuck [in the wrong body]’… it’s like, ‘do I want to take estrogen and grow boobs?’”
Interestingly, most transmaxx discourse has little to say about women transitioning to men. Vintologi says that he would “ban FtM [female-to-male] transition completely… for the good of society,” citing five reasons why —
In some ways, transmaxxing seems like a possible, albeit extreme, response to what Mary Harrington, taking a note from N.S. Lyons—who in turn takes a note from Christopher Lasch—calls the “class and culture war between ‘Physicals and ‘Virtuals.’” That is, between those who work in the material world and those who work “at a layer of abstraction apart from the physical world” (e.g. finance, media, tech, academia). On Harrington’s reading, deindustrialization has given the Virtuals a decisive upper hand over the Physicals and, in many cases, deprived Physicals of opportunities for financial and social mobility.
Similar analysis seems to underlie the transmaxxing manifesto’s claim that “most males are already obsolete” because “their bodies are no longer needed for physical work and males as a group do not have any major mental advantages over females." But while some (like Harrington and Lyons) consider the triumph of the virtual world over the material world a problem to solve, the transmaxxers see it as inevitable. How should we adapt to a society where the immaterial takes precedence over the concrete? The transmaxx response goes something like this: embrace the abstractions, “drop down the pink vortex,” and remake yourself with the help of technology. As one Discord user put it to a lonely, depressed new member considering whether to transmaxx, “u might as well transition, nothing to lose.”
-Sanjana Friedman
https://www.piratewires.com/p/transmaxxing (Archive)
