The Transfolk Who Really Do Need Our Support

The experience of 'The Bearded Lesbian' reminds us some folks really do need to transition; and how LGBTQ can fail them

I began following Aaron Kimberly, ‘The Bearded Lesbian’, because she struck me as a genuine transgender person—someone who chose to become a man rather than stay in in her biological body, not for messed-up ‘woke’ reasons, not because she wasn’t properly raised to understand the answer to misogyny and male objectification is to fight back, rather than become a man; not because she had psychological morbidities that predisposed her to fix them with psychological snake oil; but because she seemed pretty genuinely masculine and dysphoric from an early age and didn’t outgrow it. She identified as a butch lesbian, but the It as she describes it—her inherent ‘manliness’—has always been there.

Kimberly transitioned in her thirties and came to regret it. Typical of the ‘trans’ medical profession, no one warned her about the health and surgical problems that reside permanently with transitioners. Or that pro-trans websites delete unwelcome pictures of trans surgery gone horribly wrong and that surgical complication rates are woefully under-reported. She de-transitioned.

Recently, Kimberly decided to de-detransition and go back to being a male. He believes his inherent maleness—which has been with him for as long as he can remember—is due to the discovery that his ‘unrecognizable’ ovary was a mass of both ovarian and testicular tissue.

Kimberly has a congenital disorder called Ovotesticular Disorder of Sex Development. As a fetus, he was exposed to testosterone at a particular time in development and which continued into early adulthood. As a result, Kimberly has always demonstrated a distinct maleness and manliness that has created much confusion and disorder throughout his life.

Kimberly identifies as a butch lesbian but can’t backtrack on the changes. He looks, talks, and can only pass for a man. No one will hassle him in the men’s room, and he would for sure create chaos in the ladies’. Fortunately, he’s not the transactivist type, not that that matters much since transmen are markedly less activist and much quieter than transwomen. The only way you know Kimberly isn’t originally a male is in the way he expresses himself in his distinctly masculine voice. Kimberly is still, to a certain extent, a socialized woman between his ears. And he has no desire to harm, threaten, or intimidate women by pushing himself where he knows he will create fear.

Which is how you can tell the bio boys from the bio girls. The way they think.

Biology matters, and it’s real

I’ve always kept in the back of my mind, as I harshly criticize the misogynist, morally bankrupt trans movement, that there may be real, biological reasons why at least some people might want to change sex. That maybe there were physical/medical reasons why they genuinely felt ‘born in the wrong body’. We know there’s a tiny fraction with various chromosomal ‘intersex’ disorders which make them more bi-sexual (as opposed to bisexual) than others. Some already 'identify’ with what appears to be their conception-determined sex and are surprised to find they’re a little less cut-and-dried as they thought. Like Caster Semenya, the South African Olympics runner who had no idea she possessed far more testosterone than a typical woman.

Aaron Kimberly appears also to be someone who didn’t know he possessed a little of the other sex’s physiology. He simply lived as he was—a very boyish girl—as authentically as he could in the 1970s and 80s when ‘trans kids’ were unheard of, and he was so super-tomboy he once accidentally, but happily, was included on a boys’ baseball team.

Transition in Hindsight: Aaron Kimberly’s Story - Genspect, 07/26/21

So biology matters. Differences in sex development, or DSDs, are, according to USA Today, “a set of rare conditions involving genes, hormones and reproductive organs that can cause the sexual development of a person to be different than others.” Two ‘female’ boxers were at the heart of an Olympics controversy this summer for allegedly testing as male rather than female, though neither identified as transgender. It points to a diversity of physiology that won’t be easily solved with a gender certificate or ‘feeling’ and raises the need for more finely differentiating how male an athlete is before that person can be permitted or barred from competing on female sports teams.

Kimberly cites research by the author of a book on testosterone and its impact on girls with DSDs. Carole Hooven notes that over a hundred studies since the late 1960s of girls with a DSD called CAH (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia), another condition which exposes female fetuses to testosterone, shows that female CAHs’ toy preferences digress from ‘typical’ girls’ preferences; they prefer to play with trucks, blocks, and prefer rougher ‘boys’ games. They don’t outgrow it; it continues into adulthood with an attraction for more traditional male roles involving things rather than the human relational professions women gravitate toward—teaching, nursing, child care, etc.

It’s not all ‘socialization’ that makes us, to one degree or another, ‘gender stereotypical’, but the way our brains and physiology develop as well. Especially by still-poorly-understood DSDs.

Many find it noteworthy that female-identified men, i.e., ‘transwomen’, are the most public and vocal and aggressive in their demands to be ‘accommodated’ in places previously reserved for biological women. They’re driving the trend to allow men claiming to be women to compete on women’s sports teams, where to the surprise of no one except the denialists in the woke left, they’re stealing prizes and awards from real women who simply can’t compete against biological males.

Transmen? They sit quietly on the sidelines, just like, well—women.

Male and female brains are more dude-y and chick-y than many want to acknowledge, and even trans people who successfully ‘pass’ as the sex they’re not, out themselves eventually. It’s the way they move, their relational communications style. Biological females simply are more sensitive to others’ moods and feelings when they communicate; I say that observationally, not critically. Males are more assertive, more aggressive, and sometimes more manipulative. It’s kind of like when a woman meets a man who seems fairly dude-ish and masculine, but after a few minutes of talking to him she gets the sense he’s gay. It’s something different about him, a slightly different way he relates to women he has no romantic or sexual interest in. Straight guys, on the other hand, who aren’t attracted to a particular woman don’t usually come across as gay.

The hidden caveats of ‘acceptance’

For all the lofty speeches Team Rainbow gives gender and sex, and how no one is really one thing or another and we’re all fluid and should just accept each other for our various identities, they’re remarkably uncomfortable and even a little intolerant of The Bearded Lesbian. Kimberly writes of the initially cordial online relationship he had with Holly Lawford-Smith, a New Zealand university professor and gender critical feminist. Lawford-Smith, it seems, is annoyed that Kimberly acts very much like a man sometimes and should stop. He writes of how he was asked at a women’s festival if he couldn’t girl himself up somehow (with a ‘pink bow’? So much for smashing stereotypes!) as he warned young lesbians about the regret levels in transitioning. His ‘manliness’ seems to discomfort those who need a small symbolic pacifier to remind them that Kimberly is, in fact, a biological woman.

Reading of Kimberly’s struggles makes me wonder how the world could be more accommodating of people like him in the future. Could he have lived happily dude-ily female or however he felt without medical intervention in a world that truly accepts each one of us as the truly unique individuals we are? Isn’t that what LGBTQ preaches? Humans naturally gravitate toward ‘tribes’, people who are like them in one capacity or another, but what if we stopped assigning so much value to our various labels? It’s one of the greatest failings of today’s LGBTQ movement: The horrific authenticityphobia that encapsulates the very worst of our modern hyper-competitive world. You are born not good enough. You need to be better. You can’t be you, because ‘you’ are fundamentally imperfect.

The last time I went to Toronto Pride, I felt like a quiet enemy walking among them. I used to feel quite at home with LGBTQs, despite being relentlessly heterosexual. People are what they are and as long as they’re not hurting anyone, what do I care?

That changed several years ago when T and Q began harming people, especially women and children, and now they’re marginalizing gayfolk. I no longer feel comfortable around anything LGBTQ. I see pink hair, pierced eyebrows, rainbow backpacks and I’m immediately on my guard thinking, Avoid, avoid! They look like a giant pain in the ass!

I can’t even know whether the cis-gay person in front of me is a ‘normie’ or someone who’s drunk the explosive woke Kool-Aid.

LGBTQ has become the very face of ‘wokeness’ which is why Donald Trump chose to exemplify his opponent’s allegiance to it with, love it or hate it, one of the most highly effective and spot-on political campaign ads we’ve ever seen. Betcha a lot of those new female Trump voters noticed how vicious, angry, hateful, misogynist transactivists vilify and abuse biological women with impunity, demonstrating what you have to do to get away with that in our so-called ‘feminist’ world. Don’t think many men aren’t donning dresses and overdone makeup for the ‘privilege’ of beating up women.

If Team Rainbow could ‘do the work’ and move beyond its near-psychopathic narcissism and just chill out, we’d all be able to live and work together more harmoniously. Meeting someone like Aaron Kimberly or a non-binary wouldn’t induce stress at first sight because you know what you need to know and if you don’t, all will be revealed shortly: Kimberly is a man. And the normie non-binary, if such a person can exist, and I believe it’s possible, would be, well, non-binary. When you speak to them your pronouns are I, me and you. No drama.

I’m drawn to Aaron Kimberly’s Substack because he’s just so real, and his perspective reflects both sex experiences. He’s a dude born in a bi-sexual body who’s trying to navigate life as best he can, just like the rest of us. Most importantly, he’s sensitive to the impact he has on women, recognizing that strange men can be perceived as a threat by many women. He has no desire to make someone’s wiz more stressful by occupying the stall next to them with his convincing manliness.

Kimberly makes me think about sex and gender in more productive ways than hateful transactivists ever will and illuminates what I love about transgenderism, even though I spend more time criticizing than praising it: Genuine sex-changers have much to teach us about what it truly means to be male and female, when they’ve literally lived on both sides of the divide.

I also hope women and others can come to accept Kimberly for what he is without needing to ‘girl it up’ for them. He’s a biological woman (mostly) who truly feels and believes he needs to be a man. These are the genderfluids who truly ‘slip through the cracks’, the ones who need our support and help.

I’m good with that. I don’t need his pink bow. Hell, I’ll even share a bathroom with him without dragging the U.S. Supreme Court into it!

‘Coz I’d feel comfortable with him.

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