Sometimes you just have to write what you know and document what you’ve seen, heard, and metabolized to remind yourself that, no, you haven’t gone crazy.
Perhaps by spelling it all out and publishing it, the masses might begin to grasp the breadth and scope of a problem they’ve been led to believe is an overblown, remote issue. Tenacious journalist that I am, I’ll provide ample receipts proving that the exact opposite is true.
Allow me to show you what life in the trans trench has been like for the past decade, with a combination of personal story and indisputable, brute facts. This is the tip of the iceberg, a mere fraction of the filth.
Probably eight years ago, I remember seeing for the first time a series of images that are burned into my memory. They say a picture says a thousand words, but in the trans trench, they are the beginning of a kind of trauma — the jarring introduction to a bestial type of Hell you never knew existed. Writing in Corinth with a front-row seat to all kinds of debauchery, the Apostle Paul noted in Romans 1 how wicked people “invent new ways of doing evil” (Romans 1:30). The trans scourge is that. On steroids, literally.
The first image I saw was a blue-haired, bare-chested girl who looked like she might be all of 14 years old. Scars were where her breasts used to be. She had the most tormented, vacant eyes.
It took me aback, and I gasped repeatedly. I stood up from my desk and walked away, feeling as though I'd been violated at a deep level, like a sledgehammer to the gut. I told a friend that it felt like I had involuntarily looked at sexually violent fetish porn featuring a minor child. That friend replied, “Brandon, that is exactly what you saw.”
The second image I saw was when I heard from someone who'd undergone a radial forearm phalloplasty and regretted it. She sent me a picture of her gutted forearm, the harvested tissue from which was used to make a fake penis. Another gut-punch.
Some weeks later, I stumbled upon Miami-based Irish gender surgeon Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher’s Instagram account — some of us refer to her as the “butcher of Louth.” This surgeon was posing next to young people she'd operated on, including a girl who had previous self-harm scars. Around that same time, I remember seeing Canadian gender surgeon Giancarlo McEvenue posing with a Santa hat, holding up two medical waste buckets labeled “breast tissue.” I subsequently saw footage of him speaking at a Johnson & Johnson–sponsored discussion, boasting of his sordid profession. Calling this unmitigated depravity is the understatement of the century.
I also remember interviewing a regretful de-trans man who was castrated, and he told me how he ended up ejaculating blood. I was glad this interview was on the phone and not on a Zoom call because he would have seen me fall out of my chair.
Everyone has their own journey of falling down the gender rabbit hole, and when you find yourself in this particular trench, you soon start meeting all sorts of shocked and disoriented people, astonished that this is real life. It’s a freight train of unimaginable nightmares hurtling down the tracks at a high velocity, bulldozing people right and left.
Those of us who’ve been doing the hard work exposing the madness against an impenetrable mainstream media blockade can all tell you what it's like to learn about all the horrors, only to be gaslit with flat denials like “that’s not happening.” Then you show concrete proof, and it becomes “well, it’s only a few people,” and then maybe “why are you so obsessed with this small, strange issue?” The whole world is under a reality-denying spell, shrouded in pink and blue flags, and people are programmed with dismissive talking points if anyone suggests that something’s wrong.
We, the trans (and queer) trench dwellers, have seen pedophilic elements of this movement in silicone pediatric penis packers — vile products aimed at girls as young as 4 so that they can “pack” their underwear to give the appearance of a male bulge.
If that wasn’t ghastly enough, we found out how academics and others in internet chat forums were behind the strategic rebranding of “gender identity disorder” to “gender dysphoria” at meetings of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Thanks to the intrepid reporting of Reduxx, which spent several months investigating the Eunuch Archive, we learned that men on that site swap castration-themed written pornography involving the sexual torture of children whose puberty has been stunted. One user on that foul site described watching a trans surgery on a male as “arousing” to watch. These men say “eunuch” is a kind of “gender-diverse” person, by the way, and it's actually listed in WPATH’s official guidelines.
The trench dwellers also know about the 2016 Dutch medical report that was part of the linchpin study underlying gender surgeries on youth. An 18-year-old in that study had been on puberty blockers, so his genitals hadn’t matured, and surgeons used part of his bowel tissue to fashion a simulacrum of a female sex organ — a laparoscopic intestinal vaginoplasty. Complications followed: E. coli bacteria from his intestine spread through his body, and he died of sepsis. When this came to light, more people started paying attention, especially since Elon Musk had purchased Twitter by then, and photos of the man’s maimed genital area were able to circulate freely online.
We’ve seen pink-haired queer surgeon Blair Peters speak in a podcast interview about using the peritoneum in similarly grotesque surgeries he does on minor boys. We’ve watched Democrat politicians walk out of the room when U.S. Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Florida) tried to show footage of that Peters interview during a House hearing.
We’ve seen Jazz Jennings’ face contorted in excruciating pain after “bottom surgery,” and we later learned how his postoperative wound split open. We've seen a young woman with cerebral palsy bearing chest scars from “top surgery,” while croaking out sounds and flailing about in a wheelchair.
Just when we think it can’t get worse — it always does — we stumble upon the story of Scarlet Blake, a transgender-identifying man who livestreamed himself killing a cat by skinning it and putting the animal in a blender. Blake murdered a human being a few months later, but the mass media broadly reported that he, the perpetrator, is a “woman.”
We’ve seen all the boundary-breaking madness of garish drag queens reading to children in libraries. We can’t seem to forget this particular pervert that some of us call “rainbow monkey dildo man.”
We’ve seen the 11-year-old “drag kid” performer “Desmond Is Amazing” dance in a gay nightclub while patrons threw dollar bills at him. Elle magazine platformed another young drag performer, an 8-year-old boy from Canada whose stage name is “Lactatia.”
Speaking of lactation, we’ve watched the disturbing capture of groups like La Leche League and the Centers for Disease Control endorse the feculent phenomenon of “chestfeeding” — trans-identifying males pretending to breastfeed babies. The NHS Trust in the UK even claimed that the drug-induced, hormone-addled discharge that such men secrete was as good as mother’s milk. In 2017, one such man who “chestfed” his daughter wrote in the Seattle alt newspaper The Stranger that the experience was sexually charged and that he “got off” on it, insisting readers not judge him. Yes, it’s as revolting as it sounds; they are using infants like prostitutes to satisfy their sick, twisted fetish.
We’ve seen the FOIA’d progress report document showing how Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy altered a research protocol, lowering the age from 13 to 8 for the cross-sex hormone cohort inclusion criteria in an NIH-funded grant.
We’ve watched in horror as a psychopathic man who savagely murdered a lesbian couple and their teen son was transferred into a women’s prison, made easy by a state law that California Governor Gavin Newsom signed in 2020. We’ve heard bone-chilling stories of violent male offenders being housed with women elsewhere, too. We’ve seen a judge who nearly received a lifetime federal appointment — thank you, Senator Ossoff, for voting no — who had urged, against the recommendation of the Bureau of Prisons, that a man who had sexually abused a nine-year-old boy and distributed child sexual abuse material be incarcerated with women. All because of the magic word “trans.”
We’ve seen the data, from insurance record analyses and medical journal documentation, showing girls as young as 12 and 13 undergoing mastectomies, and boys as young as 15 undergoing genital surgery. We’ve seen the Do No Harm database showing that between 2019 and 2023, nearly 14,000 minors received puberty blockers or hormones, and over 5,700 minors underwent gender surgeries. These are lowball figures, I should note, since some insurance systems are closed to researchers.
We’ve watched the federal government pursue whistleblowers, like Dr. Eithan Haim, who exposed the entrenched medical harm. We’ve fielded dozens of desperate calls from parents describing how their children are permanently sterile and surgically disfigured in pursuit of a lie. We’ve heard the piercing anguish and exhaustion in their voices, and their stories of being jolted awake at night with heart palpitations. Some have had their children taken and kept away from them by state social services agencies and their ideological machinery, and many moms and dads have no legal recourse to get them back. One such teenager, Yaeli Martinez, who was taken from her mother, died by suicide, stepping in front of an oncoming train in Los Angeles. Her mother had to learn how the pieces of her shattered body were being retrieved from the railroad tracks.
Some of us now carry secondary trauma from years of sifting through this diabolical wretchedness. We find ourselves sporadically and inexplicably on the verge of vomiting, our bodies seizing up in panic. Our nervous systems are fried, and our sleep is disturbed. Some of us have family members mired in the gender jungle, and it makes the torment all the more personal.
We are not in the mood to be told that we are right-wing “culture warriors” stoking a moral panic. We are done being told “Just let them pee in peace,” and “Trans kids know who they are,” as we have heard ad nauseam.
No — those of us in the trans trench have been exposed to things at a granular level that we hope you never have to see. We’ll take some of it to our graves. We’ve been harassed, threatened, sent disturbing material by email, and censored on social media for stating basic biology. We can relate to the kind of hostile bilge that Irreversible Damage author Abigail Shrier received from a trans activist. I print it in full so as not to sugarcoat what it has been like: “I’ll slit your f*cking throat and f*ck your newly made neck p*ssy.”
How any of us in the trans trench have remained sane is nothing short of a miracle. Some of us need counseling to process everything we’ve had to absorb, so we can inform the public about the atrocities happening right under our noses.
Even as some gender clinics are closing due to federal agency action, and though the U.S. Supreme Court has handed down three solid rulings curtailing gender ideology in the past year, this horrific problem continues. Oregon remains a transgender haven. Maine Democrats recently platformed a man who claims to be a woman as a possible candidate for US Senate — a man who also has claimed that he ovulates and that menstrual blood comes out of his anus.
But instead of accountability, we feel mostly ignored. In a sane world, we would be convening Nuremberg 2.0 tribunals, but we’re watching politicians and major media start to treat this chapter as something to forget and be memory-holed.
But we trans trench dwellers never will.
Men and women are different. But saying so has become taboo, according to the evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams. A vocal minority, he states, sees positing the existence of sex differences as “a moral transgression”, to which the typical response is to “cancel, punish and shun”. This is particularly pronounced in academia, where biases distort discussion, he argues. In the Western world, there’s a predisposition towards minimising sex differences. There are other biases. “Studies finding anti-female bias are shouted from the rooftops,” while “those finding no bias or bias against men are reported in a whisper or simply ignored”, Stewart-Williams writes in his new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences.
This lack of honesty matters. “If we want to make the world a better place, we need good science,” he maintains. That’s not possible “if scientists are afraid to diverge from the pre-specified conclusions of an academic political monoculture”. He argues that not only are there clear differences between the sexes, but the basis for them – in large part – is our “million-year journey of human evolutionary history”. This goes for everything from dating and toy preference to mental and physical health.
“In large part” is key. Stewart-Williams is no gender traditionalist. He rejects those who “exaggerate” differences between men and women. So too, the sex difference-minimisers who argue that if differences exist they’re “a product of discrimination and socialisation” – and that equality requires their abolition. Both views lack balance and fall foul of the science, he says.
Stewart-Williams advocates for a third way: one that acknowledges both nature and nurture, and which neither overstates nor underplays sex differences. Readers are taken through a long list of “standard-issue” differences, all of which, it’s argued, are hugely influenced by nature. These go from the obvious and uncontroversial (men are larger than women), to the uncomfortable but accepted: men, on average, are more violent and take more risks. Nature helps explain differences in both our physical and mental health – women are more prone to mental health disorders, men to substance abuse – and our desired occupations and playthings. Men tend to be more interested in “things” and things-related jobs (like engineering or computer programming); for women it’s people and people-related jobs. We’re even predisposed to like certain toys: cars, weapons and building blocks for boys; dolls, homemaking toys and fashion items for girls.
These are, Stewart-Williams acknowledges, “basically a compilation of antiquated stereotypes”. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist or have a solely cultural cause. Nor does arguing that their root lies in evolution mean that these differences are fixed forever or inherently good or bad.
While some sex differences are “genuinely large”, these are almost always physical. Most human sex differences fall into the “fuzzy or statistical” category. Imagine a standard bell curve. The horizontal axis represents scores on a given trait. The vertical axis represents the number of people with a given score. When we say men are, for instance, more aggressive than women, we are talking about two bell curves that overlap. The one representing men is slightly further to the right. As Stewart-Williams explains, men and women can be found at almost every level of aggression. On an individual basis, some women are more aggressive than some men. But the average level of aggression is somewhat higher for men.
For each trait, Stewart-Williams argues that the sex difference observed has a part-evolutionary explanation. Many appear “remarkably early in life”, long before children are even properly aware of their own sex, or during puberty. That’s not proof of an innate contribution, he writes, but it certainly increases the plausibility of evolutionary factors. These differences have persisted over time: if they were solely down to culture “why would so many [traits] be so uniquely resistant to efforts to reform them?” These sex differences have been observed across different cultures, and many are found in animals.
The ultimate explanation is what Stewart-Williams calls “reproductive variability”. Male animals – including humans – can have more children than females. For both sexes, any trait that helps an individual edge towards the maximum possible number of children for their sex has a good chance of being selected, and subsequently passed on. Depending on the animal, this might be traits that enhance males’ ability to attract females, or beat up rival males, or even coerce unwilling females into sex.
But, importantly, human sex differences are far smaller than they are for other species. Why so? It’s because of how complicated we are. We fall in love and form long-lasting relationships. With humans, both sexes are choosy about their mates and care for their children. This has lowered the maximum number of children men can produce, bringing it closer to the number for women. “As that happened, it ushered in a corresponding reduction in the magnitude of sex differences in our species,” writes Stewart-Williams.
These arguments are – in large part – persuasive. Stewart-Williams’s casual, Ted-talk-esque style succeeds in making complex science understandable. He’s often witty, too. But after a few chapters, what initially seemed charming and enjoyable starts to grate. The same points are made over and over again, and the prose begins to feel formulaic. And while the arguments for an evolutionary influence are persuasive for many traits where sex differences observed, some fail to convince.
“Men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators, and women overwhelmingly the victims” of sexual assault and rape, Stewart-Williams claims. But with intimate partner abuse, he continues, there is only a difference when it comes to “extreme” physical aggression. (“Less extreme” aggression is not defined.) “In the modern West, men and women engage in similar levels of physical aggression against partners, and women, if anything, engage in more verbal aggression,” he says. The 2006 paper cited for the claim argues firmly that the basis of this is strongly cultural (going against Stewart-Williams’s argument). “The relative difference between men’s and women’s partner aggression, and the level of men’s physical aggression against their partners, appears to be strongly influenced by the predominant beliefs of each society,” it concludes.
For the rest of the chapter, it’s claimed – not all that convincingly – that both sexual violence and intimate abuse are best explained by evolution. Rape is not primarily about power or misogyny. “The main contributors are men’s greater interest in casual sex and sexual variety, coupled with women’s greater sexual choosiness.” When combined with “men’s greater size, strength, and willingness to use aggression… you’ve got a recipe for occasional disaster”. Occasional? According to the most recent figures for England and Wales, one in 250 women aged 16 or over were the victim of either rape or assault by penetration in the year ending March 2025. Close to one in 33 female (739,000) experienced a form of sexual assault.
The discussion on sexual misconduct aside, this is an important book. In A Billion Years of Sex Differences, Stewart-Williams is making a more profound argument: magnifying or minimising sex differences doesn’t just ignore science, it leads to harm. By failing to treat us as individuals, we end up discriminating against men and women. In medicine, both exaggerating and denying sex differences can be dangerous: doctors overlook gender atypical problems or presentations, for example missing eating disorders in men and heart attacks in women.
Gender-role individualism is Stewart-Williams’s proffered solution. We should “establish a fair and level playing field”, and let people make informed choices. We can work towards eliminating sex differences “created or amplified by unjust bias or barriers”. But we must acknowledge that “the sexes do differ on average, and we can’t just lie about that”, he says. Instead, we should “tell the truth carefully”.
This is the book’s ultimate message. Truth matters. If we deny differences that “everyone can see with their own two eyes”, the public simply won’t trust scientists on “politically charged topics”. Perhaps that ship has already sailed. Trust in “experts” has been in freefall for years. But an environment in which scientists, politicians, academics and others feel able to tell the truth – however uncomfortable – and not to be punished for doing so, is worth fighting for.
