Before I leave for the airport, I wanted to call people’s attention to this new, long op-ed piece by Andrew Sullivan in the NYT. Click to read, or find it archived for free here:
Sullivan’s thesis is that extreme trans-activism has not only been inimical for society in several ways, but has also eroded respect for something he fought for over many years: gay rights. I must add that neither Andrew nor I want to “erase” trans people, or take away their rights (save a few like participation of trans-identified women in women’s leagues, or their presence in women’s jails).
That said, Sullivan makes four important points (his writing is in quotes)
1.) Extreme trans activists like Chase Strangio are trying to force American society to conform to their ideology against our will and desires:
And some of the changes (prompted by the movement) are indeed welcome. The greater acceptance of trans people is a huge step forward for all of us. But then, as I told my friends (gay, trans and everyone else), I’d always believed this and always supported trans civil rights. I was glad when, five years ago, the Supreme Court gave transgender people civil rights protection in employment. I’ve also long lived in a gay world that is skewed left, and, along with my fellow gay non-lefties, I’ve long made my peace with it, or tried to.
But this new ideology, I believed, was different. Like many gays and lesbians — and a majority of everybody else — I simply didn’t buy it. I didn’t and don’t believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with biology. My sexual orientation is based on a biological distinction between men and women: I’m attracted to the former and not to the latter. And now I was supposed to believe the difference didn’t exist?
I’m more than happy to accept that there are some people — not all that many — who don’t fit in that binary, and want to be protected from discrimination and allowed full access to medical interventions in order to live lives that are true to who they are. And I’m with them all the way. After all, I, too, am a part of a minority — most people live their lives governed by heterosexual desires. Thanks to the gay and lesbian movement, I’m not being asked to.
But abolishing the sex binary for the entire society? That’s a whole other thing entirely. And madness, I believe. What if I redefined what it is to be heterosexual and imposed it on straight people? Or changed what it means to be a man or a woman, for that matter? Then it ceases to be accommodation of a minority and becomes a societywide revolution — an overreach that would soon lead to a potent and sane backlash, against not just trans people, but gay men and lesbians as well.
2.). These changes have eroded gains achieved by the gay rights movement, for “L” and “G” are lumped together in peoples’ minds with “T”:
The gay rights movement, especially in the marriage years, had long asked for simple liberal equality and mutual respect — live and let live. Reform, not revolution. No one’s straight marriage would change if gay marriage arrived, we pledged. You can bring up your children however you like. We will leave you alone. We will leave your children alone.
But in the wake of victory, L.G.B.T.Q.+ groups reneged on that pledge. They demanded the entire society change in a fundamental way so that the sex binary no longer counted. Elementary school children were taught that being a boy or a girl might not have anything to do with their bodies, and that their parents had merely guessed whether they were a boy or a girl when they were born. In fact, sex was no longer to be recognized at birth — it was now merely assigned, penciled in. We got new terms like “chest-feeding” for “breastfeeding” and “birthing parent” for “mother.”
A key leader of this movement, Chase Strangio, informed us that “a penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.” We all were suddenly expected to announce our pronouns as if everyone didn’t already know. Then neopronouns — xe/xem! — were added. The movement came up with a mantra: “TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN. TRANS MEN ARE MEN.” It was not an argument, nor a proposition to be explored or debated. It was a theological command. In all caps.
Was there any debate among gays and lesbians about this profound change, a vote taken, or even a poll of gay men and lesbians? None that I can find or recall.
3.). Some of the erosion of the equality gays received comes from trans-activists imposing their views on children, which many of us see as misguided or even unconscionable:
Debate has been all but snuffed out; total uniformity of thought is demanded.
But this illiberalism made a fateful, strategic mistake. In the gay rights movement, there had always been an unspoken golden rule: Leave children out of it. We knew very well that any overreach there could provoke the most ancient blood libel against us: that we groom and abuse kids. You can bring up your children however you like, we promised. We will leave you alone. We will leave your children alone.
So what did the gender revolutionaries go and do? They focused almost entirely on children and minors. Partly because the adult issues had been resolved or close to it, and partly because true cultural revolutions start with the young, it meant overhauling the education not only of children with gender dysphoria, but of every other kid as well.
Kids all over the country were impacted. Your children were taught in elementary school that being a boy or a girl was something they could choose and change at will. Your daughter found herself running against a trans girl (i.e. a biological male) in athletics. Children in elementary school got to pick pronouns, and some children socially transitioned at school without their parents’ knowledge or permission. I suppose there are other ways you can resurrect the ghost of Anita Bryant, and all the homophobic paranoia that followed her, but this will probably do the trick.
And then most radical of all: gender-affirming care for minors, which can lead to irreversible sex changes for children. The “care” included off-label “blockers” to arrest puberty, almost always followed with cross-sex hormones. To begin with, gays and lesbians, including me, empathized with kids with gender dysphoria, and trusted the medical profession with the rest. If this helped kids or even saved their lives, as was often emphasized, what business was it of mine? If transitioning this young in life would helped some pass better as adults, good for them.
Sullivan adds this, and it’s something we all should realize:
. . . there are many more [gender-dysphoric children] who will grow up to be gay and lesbian than who will grow up to be trans. When adolescents referred to a British gender clinic were asked about their sexuality in 2012, some 90 percent of females and 80 percent of males said they were same-sex attracted or bisexual.
Ergo, parents, psychologists, and doctors should not, under the guise of “gender-affirming care”, be so eager to inject kids with hormones or cut off parts of their bodies.
4.) The extreme political polarization of America, and widespread hatred of Trump, have blinded liberals to the view that, in putting brakes on gender-affirming care, the Trump administration might be doing the right thing:
If Mr. Trump is against childhood sex reassignment, then we must be for it. If Mr. Trump says there are two sexes, we must insist that there is a spectrum. It will be very hard to break this dynamic in such a tribal atmosphere, especially when there is genuine transphobia among some on the right. But it would be incredibly healthy if we were to allow an actual debate in the community about the direction we are headed in, and treat dissenters less like bigots and traitors. Representative Sarah McBride, the first openly trans member of Congress, echoed this sentiment on Ezra Klein’s podcast last week. But she was condemned on social media as a traitor to trans people.
This intransigence matters because, left on its current trajectory, the L.G.B.T.Q.+ gender movement carries significant risks for gay, lesbian and trans equality. Gallup found that satisfaction with the acceptance of gay and lesbian people peaked at 62 percent in 2022 but dropped to 51 percent by January of this year. The center and right — whom some of us spent a lifetime engaging — are being lost. Gallup showed Republican support for gay marriage dropping from 55 to 46 percent between 2022 and 2025.
In my view, this kind of intransigence works against true liberalism and against the Democratic Party. It is a maladaptive manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is a real thing. We cannot simply oppose everything the Republican administration does simply because it’s Republican. And some of the things we need more inter-party comity about are issues of gender and sex.
h/t Luana for calling my attention to this article.
Read it first thing this morning. So grateful for Andrew Sullivan and for the NYT (finally) letting the adults back into the conversation.
I agree – this is a very good article by Sullivan. The radical trans movement is very different from the LGB stuff with its live and let live philosophy.
So the NYT seems to have finally gotten the message. When will the Democratic party get it?
+!!!
Democratic party won’t get it because several of its big donors, such as Pritzkers, have personal and financial interests.
And especially because trans activists have a strangle hold on Dem politicians.
Will the Democratic Party get it? Not if my current reading is any guide.
Everyone seems to be ecstatic about the far left NYC candidate for mayor Mandani (“globalize the intifada!”).
My understanding is that research showed that around 80% of kids with gender dysphoria end up happy with themselves after puberty. Unless you can reliably sort the 20% who presumably are not happy from the 80% who are I don’t see how you can justify blockers/hormones for anyone before puberty. Has anyone advocating blockers/hormones addressed this? Was the earlier research flawed?
What is the difference between “gender dysphoria” and learning what life is like with the operating system that bequeathed at conception?
Yes, it was flawed. The “Dutch protocol” was simply an anecdotal reporting of what they did to these kids and here’s how they turned out. No control group because it would be “unethical” not to give people what they said they wanted, and the clinic doctors believed in what they were doing. One died from an attempt to make a vagina out of a piece of peritoneum. But otherwise they were fine and happy.
That’s it. There was no “research.” It was all activism. The suicide scare was never based on research either and has been debunked.
The Dutch study has repeatedly failed to replicate, with studies all having too low confidence to say much of anything in terms of benefit beyond the obvious finding that people are generally happier when you give them what they want. If they believe passionately enough, they don’t even mind suffering the known side effects of the drugs and complications of surgery. This was, in a nutshell, the main finding of the Cass review.
Hi Mr. Different,
Go to minute 29 or 30 of this youtube with Dr. Robert Garofalo and listen for about 5 or 6 minutes:
That 80% is likely same sex attracted kids who will grow up, if left alone, to be gay or lesbian. I am one of them.
I think that’s the point he was making …
Bravo
“LGBTQ+” is the synthetic dialectical identity of a Gnostic religion, whose object is to sublate the Revolutionarily empty “husk” (or “hulls”/”kernels”, Hegel) of same-sex marriage law with marginalized sexual practice and experience. Examples are in Gayle Rubin’s Thinking Sex (free online).
One way to see this is to ask what “B” means – not what the letter stands for. Or when same-sex marriage law is brought up, e.g. in Drag Queen Story Hour.
I note as well the “L” always comes first. That is amusing to ponder the reasons for as well.
Yeah, “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is a real thing, and it’s a psychological malady that refers to Trump’s SUPPORTERS, not to his detractors. I would attach a couple of photos/political cartoons to demonstrate this point, but I can at least describe one photo: a woman at a Trump rally holding an “Apprentice”-era Trump doll in its still-sealed box while looking up lovingly at Trump. Most Trump supporters are deranged to one degree or another, and clearly this woman fits the bill.
It’s just right wing BS to claim that being hyper-critical of Trump is somehow a “mental disorder” or whatever phrase these nimrods are trolling out.
Okay, I got it wrong, but you know what i mean: people who think that Trump is not only Hitler, but cannot even evaluate whether what he does is good or bad. It’s all bad say these people. I did not say it was a mental disorder and I am not a nimrod.
I think you are right. Many of President Trump’s supporters do seem deranged, no argument, just as supporters of radical leftists do, but the provenance of the term is just as you used it it: his opponents are so wound up in their opposition to him that they seem to normies to be a little off their rockers. (Canadian comment pages have been full of what I sure would call TDS were I so inclined.) We’re kind of used to supporters of anything being a little kooky these days. It’s Mr. Trump’s detractors who seem uniquely so nuts to be unable to recognize when he does something sensible that it spawned what everyone who uses the term realizes is a tongue-and-cheek mental-health diagnosis and only a stand-in for a rebuttal. It’s a joke, son.
Granted the term is so right-coded that anyone who labels an opinion as TDS suffers vicious backlash a la Barry Lyons incensed that his carefully constructed argument that Trump is worse than Hitler was dismissed so casually out of hand. And yes, anyone who does refer to TDS should follow up with his own argument, which you did.
Professor CC: As a heteronormative hunter who often babbles, I am offended by your pejorative use of the word “Nimrod”. Nimrod was a mighty hunter unafraid of Wog. You, as a seeker of knowledge, are also a hunter, so you should use that appellation with pride!
I am sure that TDS is, in practice, described as opposing everything about Trump. I’ve looked it up to be sure, and I find no version where it is the opposite thing that you describe.
But one should be agreeable that there are two very different forms of TDS that appear in the far left and the far right.
Exactly. So, the expression has evolved. No need to split hairs. It’s context dependent. We all get it. Jerry’s meaning was clear.
Thank you for reprinting this opinion piece, as I’m in complete agreement with it, especially points 2 and 4. I also believe that this (over) emphasis on trans-female rights negatively impacts women’s rights.
I would go so far as to say it negatively impacts everyone’s rights. It’s a damn imposition. Ultimately, transgenders themselves are suffering due to this nonsense. I’ve spoken before about the transgenders of the past who quietly went about their lives, asking for and needing nothing special from anyone other than to be left undisturbed. The industry that’s grown around it needs to be mentioned, as well. There is profiteering going on. Just as with the DEI business as a whole.
+1
I am gay and almost 70 years old and have been reading extensively about “gender affirming care” for several years.
“Gender affirming care” is the lesbian and gay conversion therapy from hell:
The industry has absolutely no way of distinguishing when a sissy boy (me) or a tomboy will be homosexual…a great word, btw, and what may be the minority of cases when they are trans.
So now all the “gender non-conforming” are in danger of being transed.
BTW, I think the NYTimes is definitely doing a climb-down from its largely trans court stenographer phase. This from Andrew plus the Nick Confessore article are huge inflection points. Trans advocate world is having conniption fits.
“Gender affirming care” is the lesbian and gay conversion therapy from hell
Absolutely! As some of the staff at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in London bleakly joked, “Soon there won’t be any gay kids left”.
Great to see the NYT finally finding the cojones to publish pieces like this.
The “Climb down” that Mr. DD and JezGrove – and Sullivan – talk about here is apparent. Well put.
Right out there like a dog turd on the patio at a party that nobody is talking about but everyone is being careful not to step in.
These days I have contempt for the paper I used to read for decades because they won’t just say: We were WRONG. We ‘effed it up.
No…. just a gentle change of course.
But people invested in this won’t forget their dishonesty: publishing psychopath Andrea Long Chu, Andrea Calibrero of Harvard, that maniac Strangio and all their ilk at activist WPATH. Nor ALL (except Pamela Paul) op-eds, the retarded two Mellissas and idiot Masha Gessen etc. pumping for “suicide trans kids blockers” nonsense. (Sorry for the ire but I have a dog in this fight and lost a family).
And tens of thousands of children, families and parents had their lives and lifetime health deranged and damaged.
“Moving right along…” change of course won’t cut it for me. After this, Fwee Pawestine! BLM etc. are all discredited but there’s no accountability or even any type of mea culpa. Shameful.
D.A.
NYC
+1
The German politician Valerie Wilms—a transsexual man (aka “transwoman”), ex-member of the German parliament, and ex-member of the German Green Party—writes in her book:
“Society in the USA is on the way to vanquishing the woke, i.e. “awoken”, movement. This will happen here in Germany as well. The woke movement, originating with the American gender theorist Judith Butler, and the trans lobbyists following her have overstepped the mark. …This will have bitter negative consequences for those who have not lived and still do not live completely within the norm. The overemphasis on postfactual positions will lead, sometimes with a significant delay, to a momentous regression. Because if all biological criteria are sacrificed to a gender ideology, the acceptance of all trans people in society will quickly be at stake.” [Google Translation from German]
(Wilms, Valerie. Meine zwei Leben: Als Junge geboren – als Frau im Bundestag. München: LMV, 2025. pp. 137-8)
Thank you for mentioning Valerie Wilms. She is a voice of reason.
Incidentally, she was the first transsexual member of the German Bundestag (2009-2017) and not Nyke Slawik or the scandalous Tessa Ganserer, as many activists, the media and even Wikipedia (*) claimed. Tessa Ganserer was only elected to the Bundestag in 2021 and then decided not to stand for election in 2025. Allegedly because, as a trans woman, she was met with “inhuman hatred”.
(*) The article in the German Wikipedia has since been corrected. However, it skirts around the truth and writes euphemistically: “Ganserer and Nyke Slawik are the first openly trans women in the Bundestag.[2] Valerie Wilms, who was already a member of the Bundestag from 2009 to 2017, only came out in 2025.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/04/18/german-mp-trans-secret-gender-identity-bundestag/
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessa_Ganserer
I am hopeful to find that Valerie Wilms is shown to be correct about the trajectory of trans-activism. And what will happen to the activists who harmed children thru medical interventions that cannot be reversed and that they did not need? Maybe nothing. Or the bloggers and influencers who sold sold sold this fantasy? What will they do when the caravan moves on to a different cause du jour? They will have a case of amnesia.
Thank you Oliver – you’ve kept us informed of earlier issues in Germany and it is appreciated.
I’m unsure of how deep woke nonsense goes there. I’d assumed it was mainly a Berlin thing, but a foreigner would be wrong if a they thought it was just a NYC thing here. Poison spreads.
Danke schon!
D.A.
NYC
And hopefully they will be respondents in many civil legal cases. And maybe even defendants in some criminal ones.
That’s accountability.
“Postfactual”…not sure if this is a translation issue, but we used to refer to “postfactual” things as….”wrong”.
I’m putting “postfactual” as a nomination for euphemism of the year.
No, it’s not a translation issue, because the German word used by Wilms is “postfaktisch”, the exact English translation of which ist “postfactual” (“post-factual”). The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “relating to a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts.”
I think it’s a useful specific term for describing people and institutions that are uncaring or even hostile to truth in general. It’s less inflammatory than “irrational”, “deceitful”, “delusional”, “moronic”, etc. And it has a nice parallel with the irrationality (etc.) of postmodernism.
The marriage of LGB and T and Q makes little sense. LGB is primarily around sexual orientation. T is about “gender”, which isn’t indicative of sexual orientation by itself. Q, as James Lindsay has shown, is actually a political theory. T also appears to have a large political element as part of the neo-Marxian attempt to destroy the family unit as a bastion of bourgeois values. T & Q have clearly tried to glom on to LGB to leverage the growing sympathy for that movement, and, perhaps, to camouflage its own, well, deviancy.
Yup, it’s no surprise that so many LGB people on X include a pair of scissors in their usernames, for example: https://x.com/TheKingofKatz
Yes! That’s very good news.
“The marriage of LGB and T and Q makes little sense.”
It is coherent in its ritual, esoteric function – see my statement above.
That is “does not make sense” exoterically is precisely how epistemic magic spells work, concealing the core esoteric/religious nature.
A recent survey in the WaPo suggests that a majority of Democrats agree with Sullivan on trans matters. I am once again left with the impression that Trump and conservatives have exaggerated the extent to which “Democrats” are the issue here.
Here is an alternative: elected officials from the Democratic Party are captured by activists and the sentiment within elite social circles, so they largely ignore some views held by the majority of Democratic voters. Why? Because those voters will largely vote for the officials anyway. At least most of the highly-credentialed ones will. The working class has increasingly had enough.
I agree. We should always elect our representatives and presidents on the basis of roughly 9 trans athletes in the NCAA. How else can poorly educated people decide complex issues of political economy, global power, or science?
Good piece by Sullivan, and published where it will be read widely. That’s how to fix this mess. Bad arguments need to be countered with the good.
How did the western world come around to widely accepting gay rights? First off, I absolutely agree that the activists were incredibly on point to leave the kids out of it. Another thing that struck me, living thru that time, was that prime time television had a huge influence on advancing the issue thru the positive presence and depiction of gay people on variety shows, sit-coms and on other shows. The same depictions on television was also very important for the earlier civil rights movements that were happening during the ’50s’ and ’60s. Ellen Degeneres coming out on her show, and other gay notables coming out, were Huge Events and contributory to how we got here in regards to gay rights and widespread acceptance.
Television producers will not (or better not!) try to be activists and proselytize to their audience before they are ready to be proselytized to. But when the moments were right, they put on these new kinds of characters, and it had a very positive and consolidating effect on social movements that were already under way.
But now the well has been poisoned, and it is very tricky to have trans characters on television without there being a huge backlash. And it isn’t the staunch conservatives who are responsible for this situation.
The reason having nice, friendly, relatable gay characters had such an impact on the public was because homosexuality was seen as perverse, immoral, and strange. Finding out that same-sex attracted people were actually pretty much like you was critical to the acceptance of gay people.
Trans activists therefore tried the same strategy with trans characters. Put them on the shows! Initially, it helped the public accept them, mostly because being “trans” was being sold as similar to being gay. It’s LGBT.
But the real problem is that transgenderism isn’t considered perverse, immoral, and strange — critics considered it false. Women are female; they don’t include males who really really want to be female. Same with men being male. The entire storyline about being born with a “gender identity” which doesn’t match the “sex assigned at birth” is either wrong or incoherent, take your pick.
And now the forced-teaming is pulling down acceptance of homosexuality.
That, plus, at least in Canada, many of the prominent advocates for inflicting trans obeisance on the rest of society, manipulating the language of group-based rights trumping the individual as we roll here, (from social transition through bathrooms to mutilation) are publicly out, comfortably successful homosexual men, not ”transwomen” themselves at all. They proudly list their advocacy for all manner of homosexual causes as proof of their bona fides. And now they are lending their expertise and moral certainty to the trans crusade. To protect the homosexual brand during the backlash they may have to cut the trans guys loose but it will be hard because so many are in fact homosexual men, part of the tribe, just more flamboyantly effeminate. Most normal people aren’t mentally equipped to resolve whether a drag queen is a homosexual man camping, a “transwoman” expressing her fashion sense, or a professional performer doing a woman-face minstrel show to pay the rent.
I realize that women, correctly, see more danger from the autogynephilic woman-attracted men who have nefarious motives for invading women’s spaces and suborning children. Unfortunately for you, even though these men have little justification to enlist the support of male homosexual activists, they get it anyway because Big Gay is all in on Big-Tent Trans. They just don’t care that trans is bad for women and children.
Off topic, but The Washington Post also had a good article relating to transgenderism: https://archive.is/sIkHB
And another piece about overreach, written by Jesse Singal: https://archive.is/hYXMu
Hi Jerry, Thank you very much for linking to the archived versions of stories like this, I really appreciate it! I don’t have a NYT subscription (you can only do so many subscriptions!) and enjoy reading them. And thanks for bringing them to our attention.
If you copy and paste the NYT links into an archive site, such as https://archive.is , it will show you the archived version if someone else has already saved it and if they haven’t it’s really easy to archive it yourself. (Works with many, although not all, paywalled articles from other websites, too.)
I’ve never seen the scissors thing. That’s interesting.
The Andrew Sullivan article is great at highlighting some of the fundamental issues of the rights.
Once the premise of trans women are women is accepted as gospel then women no longer have any rights as our protected status is null and void as our class is no longer a distinct and unique category. This is a catastrophe for a functional society.
Medicalising children was never safe or reversible. The suicide trope was an abhorrent manipulation for compliance.
The best thing has been to publicise the trans activists comments and behaviours. Everybody can now see how they are not marginalised and vulnerable people who just wish to quietly live their lives but violent aggressive men who issue rape and death threats regularly with occasional real physical violence.
America is deeply polarized on this based on political views but globally this holds less true.
What Andrew Sullivan failed to address is the incoming tsunami of medical complications of this ideology. It’s a very grim prospect. Colin Wright has discussed this in a recent paper.
https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/1937958168031559942
The objective of “gender affirming care”, starting as it does from the assumption that every child who expresses any kind of uncertainty about their sexuality should transition, is the erasure and elimination of all gays and lesbians, just as certainly as it was the Nazis’ objective in the 1930s and 40s, and as Andrew Sullivan says this is the unabashed rationale for it being pushed by the theocracy in Iran.
This point needs to be rammed home again and again. Take control of how the narrative is framed, create some clear water between the LGs and the Ts, and make it unavoidably clear that these two groups’ interests are not only not aligned, but fundamentally opposed to each other.
Glad to see this conversation. Thanks for posting it and the comments above,
I hope the Dems can move away from this nonsense, but I’m not encouraged, given ZM’s proposal for $65 M for “gender affirming care”.
In the meantime, some of my “trans” neighbors are presenting as in the two links below. I don’t think it will lead to greater acceptance of transgender issues. Of course, it’s performative as all-get-out.
I sent something like this to our host & I hope it’s close enough to topic to be suitable.
I learn from the stalwarts in Great Britain (e.g. Helen Joyce, JKR & others) that there is a theme of male pattern narcissistic entitlement & behavior.
I find this stuff disturbing. The Eugene Weekly Front page graphic is worse than in the link. Delusional dudes in dresses armed to the teeth…
https://eugeneweekly.com/2025/06/19/armed-and-fabulous/
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1140713659/oregons-lgbtq-community-worries-that-a-new-law-will-keep-them-from-obtaining-gun
The A. Sullivan essay is very good, as expected. As for Chase Strangio, where have we heard that name before? He/She/It said “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on”. A rather odd view for an ACLU lawyer. Did the ACLU fire him/her/it? Of course, not. The tweet was later deleted. He/She/It also argued the United States v. Skrmetti case. He/She/It lost. His/her/it’s views are ‘odd’ to say the least. A quote from Wikipedia ‘Strangio has described himself as “a constitutional lawyer who fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He has called civil marriage “a fundamentally violent institution.” Strangio disagrees with the idea that transgender women could be born with a male body, saying there is no such thing as a “male body” and that “A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”’.