121 Comments

Wow. Thanks for explaining this. I had no idea about this glass delusion. And holy smokes, what a delusion it was. I’m definitely going to look for Victoria’s book to learn more.

I’m the mom of an ROGD teen, and I’m often enraged, horrified and sad (as per my handle) about transgenderism and gender ideology. This gives me hope that someday people will look back on all this in utter disbelief. But what and how long will it take for that to finally happen?

Expand full comment

We will look back in utter disbelief, and then we'll do it all over again. There have been many crazes and mad delusions besides the Glass Men: witchcraft crazes; state sterilization of poor, mentally ill young women; lobotomies; the Satanic Panic. Note the fact that the truly destructive crazes targeted non-conforming, poor, and/or developmentally delayed young women.

This is a recurring theme in modern medicine: when confronted with women who don't conform or behave, the physicians' first answer is to rip out their ovaries, perform hysterectomies, or otherwise damage or destroy their fertility.

Expand full comment

You are being misled. There is actual hard science that supports a biological basis for transgender people.

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgender-brain-what-you-should-know/

It's also disingenuous for people to claim that there are only two sexes scientifically when we've known centuries that intersex/hermaphroditic people exist.

https://genetic.org/variations/

https://scienceline.org/2020/10/beyond-x-y-chromosomes-and-sex-organs/

There are also the children in the Domincan Republic who are born with female genitalia but develop male genitalia when puberty began.

Finally, please read this article that shows that this trans panic has been an orchestrated campaign:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/anti-trans-transgender-health-care-ban-legislation-bill-minors-children-lgbtq/

Expand full comment

It is with great pleasure that I accept your respect for who I am: a genetically predisposed psychopath. Indeed I was born this way and my rights, like those of any other marginalized individuals, should be considered and respected. Others have placed me in a category of the deranged and mentally ill in need of some type of intervention, but I see that you fully grasp that I am just following my nature - it's in my DNA and I have no other options. Thank you for understanding! The world is definitely in need of those like you with more profound understanding than everyone else.

Expand full comment

Pathetic. Trans people are not mentally ill and no more dangerous than the rest of humanity. People are born with or developed conditions that require medical intervention to allow them to live their fully. It's no different for trans people.

There are also still cultures in the world that condemn left-handed people as bad, etc. The rest of humanity thinks those folks are superstitious, ignorant, and cruel.

Being kind and compassionate to others is a good thing. It's also bizarre that people are obsessed with the health choices of less than 1% of humanity.

Expand full comment

As confusing and hard to understand how certain men of the 15th to 17th Century Europe could have imagined they were in part made of glass (I can't even wrap my head around it), so would it have been to these men of the Enlightenment as baffling, I suspect, to believe that some men are in actual and absolute truth women and some women are in the same truth men. Neither delusion makes any sense to this commoner except to say it is a contagious hoax employed by lost souls to give some meaning to their lives.

Expand full comment

Thanks for this. I just directed music for a high school production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella. In that version of the story, the stepmother has a few small fragments of Venetian glass, which she hopes will confer status on her daughters before the prince. Little does she know that her slave Cinderella will appear at the ball wearing shoes made entirely of Venetian glass. And yes, we had a couple girls who insisted they be referred to by plural pronouns and seemed enraptured by gender confusion.

But I have one concern: "Fear of exposure, the fear of being seen for who one really is—of course this is terrifying to those trapped in delusions, either of glass or of a transgender identity." This fear must also paralyze the history professor who wrote this piece, to the extent that he/she must hide behind the curtain of anonymity. Not, of course, due to delusions, but due to the actual dangers that revealing the truth in an academic setting can manifest. I sincerely hope that you will find either the courage to proclaim the truth to your students, or to find a way to support yourself that does not place you in such danger.

Paul D. Brassey

Expand full comment

I am also pseudonymous because I am the mother of a desister whose privacy I wish to guard. But your larger point is a good one about my reluctance to publish under my own name. This is one publication I won't be listing on my CV.

I do share the truth with my students, in person, but online spaces aren't the place for me to publish under my own name on this subject.

Expand full comment

Thank you - the truth comes first. I hope that you will consider writing again.

Expand full comment

Societal awareness and concern of course. And ultimately, life choices are ones own. But the weaponized use of "trans" as a bludgeon to demand complicity and generate enough fear to force the authors anonymity?

"Trans", the pay me minions of toxic femininity, the D.E.I. commissariat, race hustlers and cancel culture jackals demand submission not acceptance. The well paid poseur Marxist's, who actually serve totalitarian finance, are exploiting and pathologizing adolescence. They are the fist inside the velvet glove pounding American culture to pieces, destroying free speech and opening the door to a dystopian "meta future" of cyber feudalism. Globalism is dying. A great world economic realignment is coming and the new monarchy is ascending.

Two recent TikTok's. In the first a young woman was proudly exhibiting her uterus in a glass jar complete with a little display light. Look she said, "..there's my cervix.."!! In the second a young woman, who was literally holding a hand basket full of pills, was pleading that other young women not make the "trans" surgery mistake. "I hate this.." she lamented, I'm tied to surgeons and medication the rest of my life.

Monsters capable of butchering a child won't stop there. They are the sterile progeny of Mengele and Stalin. This is war.

Expand full comment

"Race hustlers"? The most successful people to use race to earn money are the conservative pundits who've spread hatred for years to divide and conquer the public. How is it that the neo Nazi replacement theory became accepted into the mainstream GOP? Why are school libraries banning books about Rosa Parks, Roberto Clemente, the internment of Japanese Americans, and other books that cover the factual history of Americans of color?

Scaring white people with scary black and brown people has been an effective and profitable tool for the GOP and its backers for decades.

The uterus in a jar TikTock video is of a woman who suffered from endometriosis, an extremely painful condition and had nothing to do with transgender people.

https://www.tiktok.com/@seen_health/video/7197355457076399365

Google "Southern Strategy."

Expand full comment

Different video.

If we want change we cannot continue to allow extremist manipulator's of every stripe and polarity to shout over and control the reasonable healthy dialogue these new time's demand.

Expand full comment

The greatest extremist threat in the USA are white nationalists/supremacists and Christian nationalist who are focused on rolling back the rights that American citizens fought, sacrificed, and died to achieve over the course of the last 80 years. The left are not demanding censorship laws that would criminalize teaching the actual history of the US and the world. First, we were told such laws were needed to protect public school children but then we saw expansion of censorship laws to public libraries. How long before you all demand that booksellers refuse selling books that displease you lot or face criminal prosecution?

The left are not interested in separating American families because their families have LGBT+ members who might need medically prescribed treatment. Trans people comprise less than 1% of humanity. But to believe the right, there is some massive campaign to brainwash and "mutilate" tens of millions of kids when that clearly is not the case. Nor does science make any difference when study after study show that trans people's identification is based in the biology of their brain structure and function.

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgender-brain-what-you-should-know/

Be honest. Not only are conservatives focused on denying treatment to children but also to adults. Laws around the country are being proposed to attack trans adults from receiving medical care. Such care has been available since the early 20th Century!

Instead, superstition, bigotry, and the warmth of pleasurable ignorance motivate and excuse persecution of people who're different. It's not the first time in history this has happened: Mutations happen all the time. People with Down's Syndrome have an extra chromosome from a random mutation. Should we persecute them? Should they lose their right to exist in happiness because their differences make you feel comfortable?

What's next, should we go back to persecuting left-handed people as witches or cursed freaks? Should we torture them into using their right hand to soothe fears?

Apostrophe s ('s) is used for contractions (can't or don't) or the possessive tense (Jack's dog or the girl's socks) and not for plurals. To create a plural in English for most words, add an s, es, or ies: (dogs, cats, buses, splotches, or pennies).

Expand full comment

Thanks for the writing tips.

Expand full comment

"How long before you all demand that booksellers refuse selling books that displease you lot or face criminal prosecution?" Books are already being re-written to placate those offended by specific pronouns that are deemed to disrespect trans culture. Many books are being removed from shelves because they are said to be racist and the like. As for your contentions about medical care, perhaps my identity as a chimera requires some medical care, and I am appalled that no such care is made available! Everything is just so unfair:( BTW, looks like you are still dividing folks into categories yourself - conservatives vs liberals, etc. "You all"? Who all?

Expand full comment

"You all is meant to describe the intolerant people who ban books and are cruelly dismissive of trans people.

Whataboutism 1:

Book banning in 2023 is mainly and aggressively done by those who want to hide the history of racial abuse and genocide.

Whataboutism 1:

Human chimeras exist and are formed usually when one twin absorbs another in the womb. The surviving twin can then have two genotypes.

Also, the last time I checked, most of the major medical associations in the US recommend medical intervention for trans people. It's none of my business if someone is following the best medical for treatment than it is if someone needs an appendectomy or wants to have their kid circumcised or get a face lift. People should mind their own business and let others live their lives in peace.

It's obvious for most people that the anti-trans movement is about conformity, control, and hatred of otherness. Trans people make up less than 1% of human beings. On an average day, it's highly unlikely that most people would see a trans person. There is no massive explosion of trans people. In earlier generations, trans people had to hide themselves for fear of violent intolerance.

The main reason why the anti-trans movement blew up is because it's a tool generate outrage and get out the vote.

Expand full comment

The emerging social/political structure of the present movement - and its biological preoccupations - makes it in-fact more similar to the movement within which Mengele made "sense" - became a logical outcome or expression.

It initially bore much resemblance also to the English Puritan movement - including in its desire to rule and its types of moralisms - but it is now a mass/political movement with increasingly biological preoccupations. The movement to which Mengele belonged was such a movement - the first post-humanist regime, in-fact. This has now become the second such, with consequences hard to avoid. The American President's declarations have put the force of the American government and its institutions behind the cult - re-centered the cult as official - and the medical profession has assented and is acting accordingly.

This movement has demonstrated an inner-logic which its adherents will not easily refrain from expressing.

Expand full comment

In Europe arrest's for thought and speech crime, restricted movement, special courses on 'right think' and the recent expansion of euthanasia laws (Canada as well) to include those suffering from physical ailments and depression should be the coal mine canary for aware American's. Cricket's.

Another sanctioned insanity is our governments conflation of crime and revolution as a means of exploiting the gang culture youth born of the American heavy investment in prisons as a way of advancing the militarized surveillance state. Crime is chaos and chaos serves tyranny. I'm hoping (no surprise to any of us) the recent Twitter revelations and attempts by the new Republican house to democratize the speakership might be a little daylight.

My personal opinion is, as in most 20th Century horror's, we've crossed the line from the political and squarely entered the pathological. Leonard Cohen's line "..the chaos of the world has crossed the threshold and its overcome the order of the soul...I've seen the future baby-it is murder.." from his song THE FUTURE now seems prophecy.

I'm recommending (if you haven't and have the time) Edward F. Edinger's introduction and commentary on C.G. Jung's AION. It's a short read but demystify's and explains the dynamic in play that now surrounds us.

Expand full comment

Interesting that you should suggest Jung - I don't have it before me but my wife read to me a section of one of his books in which he describes any given mass-population as carrying much functional irrationality and pathology - something like 60%, with something like 10%-plus of the total non-functional. In times of acute social stress, the larger group descends into outbursts of irrationality.

I read this four years ago, and doubted the extent of his conclusions. But that was four years ago... I agree with you that "we have arrived."

Expand full comment

Jung wrote AION at the end of his life. One conclusion was that the transcendent/ imago Dei has collapsed and fallen directly into the human psyche. He proposes that we are no longer fish swimming in the waters of the conscious universe but are being asked to become direct carriers of it. That the insanity we're witnessing is the result of the ongoing split in the human psyche .between empirical scientific reason and whatever that thing we call God is. That split has to be healed by the birth of a third reality. If it doesn't happen the prospects are grim.---Or so says Carl.

I liked your comments today. My humble view--we're definitely dealing with pathology and healing is in order.

Expand full comment

"Specialized mystical knowledge was a component of this diagnosis..."

This diagnosis is even clearer of transgenderism - which is nearly textbook gnostic mysticism, with divine or beautiful souls trapped in an evil material reality from which they must be liberated. The "ancient" versions are more complete and accomplished, and are usually purported transcendent "completions" of revealed religion (Christianity, Judaism) or, in the "modern" cases, "completions" of philosophy via "History" (Marxism, etc.) or, in the case of transgenderism, a combination of of both religion implicitly) to be resolved by transhumanism (i.e. technology).

Neither philosophy (Love of Wisdom) nor revealed religion (Faith) offer certainty relating to the human questions - the philosopher does not attain more than partial wisdom, and the believer must accept his own uncertainty. Yearning for truth about the first things, both must accept that the whole of reality is not accessible.

Gnostic ideas ("Gnosis," or knowledge) purports to provide occult access which surpasses philosophy and faith. It is a degraded form of human knowledge, seeking false certainty (and other benefits, as the author discusses) to its adherents. It is related to the ideas of beauty and fragility, and indicates cultural or civilizational crisis - it is irrational.

Expand full comment

Tell it like it is!! (Proud of you.)

Expand full comment

Wow. THIS is excellent!

Sometimes I wonder how much of my life is delusion. NOW is immediate, coming, here, and gone faster than a blink of an eye. The rest, my past, my future, is dreams. And I know I'm not made of glass.

Expand full comment

Very insightful… And thought-provoking

Expand full comment

"Sometimes I wonder how much of my life is delusion."

Yeah. Insightful.

According to some religions, for You and me and almost everybody in existence, the answer is *all* of it. (But at least we know we're not made of glass. ;-)

Expand full comment

"Cogito ergo sum". Yeah, but when?

Expand full comment

Mmmm. Deep question, and I'm in the deep pool at the end of my day.

Raising my head above the water for a moment, I'd say the moment is gone before the thought is finished. What do You think?

TY for reply... (Mebbe tomorrow. Mebbe not. ;-)

Expand full comment

I'm getting so deep, I need a snorkel. Maybe reflection comes with age :-)

Our cognitive thoughts are of things past, our actions in the present, and nothing and anything is in the future. That is both blessing and curse.

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

― Omar Khayyám

Expand full comment

A round of applause for di Maria.

Expand full comment

That's pretty deep. lol...

I think You're on to something, M EZTejas123. So is M Khayyám. TY for both.

Expand full comment
Jan 7, 2023·edited Jan 7, 2023

More than just transgenderism, the glass delusion also parallels the currently fashionable "snowflake" mentality. The symptoms are the same. The cure is lack of money to indulge it.

Expand full comment

If people are interested in a list of social contagions, mostly involving females ages 12-25, several are listed on our LGB medical watchdog org. regarding pediatric medical transition. It includes things like bulimia and the "needle girls." Thanks for covering this issue. It is truly appreciated.

https://www.genderhq.org/increase-trans-females-nonbinary-dysphoria/#anchor-page11-section-b-research

Expand full comment
author

No the number in GFM is 42000

Expand full comment

Maybe nobody really believes “trans” women (that is to say men who want us to believe they are women) are women, but we agreed to lie. We kind of agree to lie about Santa and the tooth fairy in certain situations. We kind of agree to lie and say certain men are women, under certain circumstances. I personally enjoy situations where I have agreed to lie about Santa et al, but I don’t like situations where I am supposed to lie about certain men.

I consider the whole trans activism movement an attack against feminist accomplishments like Title 9. And the situations in prison are a huge unfair mistake. Some so-called women prisoners use their very feminine penises to impregnate women prisoners. Big mistake.

Is a désister someone who once believed men could change into women and got hurt?

Expand full comment

This one was incredibly thoughtful. There are a lot of interesting models from history for what we're experiencing now, but this one seems particularly relevant.

Expand full comment

Fantastic article. Humans are so complicated and goofy. Makes you wonder, once the transgender craze passes by, what next?

Expand full comment

One of many fascinating historical parallels, thanks

Expand full comment

What an excellent connection you've made here. (Wild applause from the gallery)

Expand full comment

One problem that is clear from our recently allowing men to be considered women (and women to be considered men) is that data are now muddled. We know that certain diseases are spread by men’s sexual activity with men, for example. Academic studies of that disease vector must be muddled if we count a biological woman who calls herself a man and has sex with a man (or another woman who calls herself a man)--- if we count this as male-male sex, we are mistaken. Our attempts to gain knowledge are confounded. Biological sex must be used in science. There is no such thing as “trans”, in that sex cannot be changed to suit a person’s wishes. The lies our society agrees to tell harm medical advances. Can’t we just accept these people without drugs and surgeries and tell the truth about them?

Expand full comment

Thanks for this interesting and thought-provoking article - yes life is hard, then we die - how to accept the human condition without dangerous delusions/cop outs?

Expand full comment

EXCELLENT !!!

Expand full comment