This is not a troll, this is not an ironic comment, this is not a criticism of anyone in particular&

This is not a troll, this is not an ironic comment, this is not a criticism of anyone in particular—and so I’m not going to attribute the above quotation; you can find it on your own—but an earnest question that I myself have been thinking about seriously, except from the other direction, as it were: 

In the third decade of the 21st century, do you either have to come out as trans or come out as a conservative? 

I wrote a novel in 2013 immediately after earning my Ph.D. I wrote it in five months in a visionary trance or frenzy, an almost unwilled outpouring of all that I had been made not say of what I had seen in academe. To the extent that its magical realist element—a drugged-out self-mutilating genderless ascetic avantist communist death-cult menacing the lives of artists—was meant allegorically or parabolically, I wanted to show the noble and ignoble, sympathetic and antipathetic, roots of the avant-garde and the radical left in a longer tradition of spirituality, of world-hating and world-annihilating iconoclasm, to which I wished to counterpose a richer alternative of individual particularity and agency, of aesthetic splendor and surplus. 2013 was the year before “the transgender tipping point.” 

I had no conscious thought in my head of transgender identity as topic when I wrote the novel, though I had been aware of the subject since my teens in the 1990s. If you’d asked me then, I suppose I’d have said that my satirical target, to the extent that I aimed to satirize anything, was closer to the second-wave/radical feminists later popularly branded as TERFs, an iconoclastic movement par excellence, and not transgender people, whom I would have then associated, perhaps naively but also as a result of living and working within a largely queer milieu, with individualism and anarchism. (Strangely, I control-F’d the pdf, and the word “gender” does not occur even once in the almost 100,000-word book.) 

So why is it that now, when I read the testimony of the detransitioners, do I hear such uncanny echoes of my own characters, of my own imaginary world? Why does it now appear that, nine years ago, narrating a journey—a journey I myself took—into and out of the iconoclast-gnostic avant-garde, I inadvertently wrote a novel of transition and detransition? 

And if you hate me for saying so, all I tell you is that I wouldn’t have written it if I hadn’t gone through it, except that “it” has changed enough now that a man about 15 years my junior, in the same position I was in 15 years ago, wonders as I did not quite if he isn’t ethically obligated to become a “woman,” where “woman” signifies gap, lack, wound, and sameness, rather than the bitter masculinity of whatever is so hideously present to experience and consciousness, whatever is irredeemably itself, universally beheld as distinct, there, erect on this sinful earth.

The few escapees who were interviewed by the media tended to converge around the following theory of what motivated the Its: consciousness and individuality were a disease, a disease both causing and worsening the differences between us. Eliminate the differences of language and sex and appearance and skin color and clothing, eliminate even the vanity of existing as a body apart from other bodies, and you will have eliminated our loneliness, a condition not known to the so-called lower lifeforms, though zoologists report that some of the higher primates were already showing symptoms, adopting moldy logs as their own babies, for instance, and so might one day need to form It cults of their own.

—Portraits and Ashes