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At the moment, I work at a supermarket. Early today, a customer got pissed off about something at checkout - I don't know what - and started manically shouting a vulgar schizo quasipolitical rant, pacing around, targeting and physically intimidating my customers and coworkers, trying to start a fight, before he wandered back into the store. I'm not sure, in the end, if he left the store of his own accord or because security forced him to; I didn't care to ask around. He was a large, fit, middle-aged white man; exactly the kind of guy you'd stereotypically expect to see in the profile picture of a really deranged MAGA boomer Twitter account. We probably get several problem customers a day, but this was definitely the worst one I've seen in quite a while. It was mortifying to watch a walking hateful strawman of the Red Tribe, especially as I hail from the Red Tribe myself and used to be extremely invested in its success in the culture war.
(As of 2020 or so, I'm trending more centrist, because of exactly this kind of thing. I voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but I do not intend to vote this year; I have become disillusioned with democracy, politics, and the culture war. I feel that the mentally ill and generally unpleasant have become too dominant among the right wing. Of course, I always saw the mentally ill and generally unpleasant as dominant among the left wing; I feel that that's inherent to what the left wing is and represents, from its origins around the French Revolution to the ideology of Marx and on to the present progressive-stack day. But anyway, tangent over.)
The main content of the man's rant was that life in the modern US is shitty because [God presumably cursed the country because] President Obama was secretly "a faggot" and his wife was secretly male.
Now, I tend to have a pretty conspiratorial worldview myself. It's pretty obvious that the world does in fact run on conspiracies, and that much of the conventional wisdom suggesting otherwise is desperate copium, often pushed by the people in power. But, of course, we don't know all that much about what the conspiracies in charge are actually doing - that's the whole point of a conspiracy - and most of the "conspiracy theories" you see going around are deeply stupid, and you would need to be stupid to believe them. (The man at my workplace this morning threatened a woman in line for "calling [him] stupid"; she actually said no such thing, but I'm saying it now. I'm not a mind-reader, but I'm pretty sure that that man was stupid.)
Among these stupid conspiracy theories, the so-called "transvestigations" have always been the most striking to me personally, for many reasons. I'm sure ugly rumors about famous men secretly being women and famous women secretly being men have gone around for a long time, as ordinary bottom-feeding gossipy trash talk. But they seem to have emerged as a distinct, legible "type" of conspiracy theory relatively recently, starting in my adolescence, around the late 2000s and early 2010s. Noteworthy early individual targets included Lady Gaga (this was a "Marilyn-Manson-had-his-ribs-removed-so-he-could-do-autofellatio" tier schoolyard rumor for my generation) and, of course, Michelle Obama. However, over the course of the 2010s and on into the 2020s, as transgender people became central to the culture war, transvestigation metastasized into a more omnidirectional tendency to delusionally believe that any arbitrary public figure is secretly trans.
There are several key points here, in a natural order. The first is that the transvestigation phenomenon is nakedly psychological, in a way that feels like an exaggeration of the pattern of other stupid conspiracy theories. Transvestigators are obsessive in searching for rationalizations for their beliefs. They start with a single point that they want to believe - it would be convenient for their worldview if some specific person they hate, like Michelle Obama, were secretly transgender - and they start collecting and glomming onto "evidence" to reinforce the idea, ignoring any counterevidence. Confirmation bias. They strain to develop a suspicion, and that implausible suspicion quickly becomes ludicrous certainty. And that broken thinking winds up leaking out into and contaminating the entire rest of their worldview as they obsessively think back to it over and over again, fixating on their imagined secrets about their enemies' genitals, until eventually they wind up completely convinced that the entire ruling class is secretly transgender, and/or they wind up screaming to a crowded supermarket that the most popular First Lady of my lifetime is actually a man in a dress.
The next point is that the pathology of transvestigation very directly parallels and acts as a foil to various pathologies associated with the transgender movement itself. People can go crazy over both sides of the "we can always tell" coin. Transgender people often try to build confidence through denial of it; they convince themselves that it's much easier to pass than it actually is. From there, they can convince themselves that any given person around them could plausibly be of either sex, and that transgender people are arbitrarily common. Transvestigation has the opposite general motive, but follows a similar path to a similar endpoint. They want to convince themselves that they're always able to identify transgender people, and so any note of ambiguity in their minds, however disingenuous, starts throwing up panic signals and fostering conspiracy thought, which feeds itself in a vicious cycle until they've ironically destroyed their own ability to reasonably perceive/intuit people's sexes.
The more nuanced truth about passing, which both sides of the coin are missing, is that it's fundamentally a modern problem. Back in the olden days, it was much easier for men to pass themselves off as women and vice versa, because people weren't thinking about that possibility in the back of their minds at all times. The more relevant that transgender issues become to the zeitgeist, the harder it is for transgender people to pass, as normies start to consider the sex of those around them with more skepticism; a predator/prey-population-style cycle leading towards equilibrium. But, as transvestigators demonstrate, we might be hitting the limits of that process now; the appearances of the sexes are in many ways distributions with overlapping tails. Plenty of ugly people look remarkably like ugly people of the opposite sex, and you don't even really need that kind of natural androgynous ambiguity to get confused, if you're flooding your brain's training algorithm with images of attractive transgender models while contemptfully scoffing and trying to convince yourself that you can Still Definitely Tell.
We are a confused and spiraling people.
Finally, I think transvestigation is plausibly a baptists-and-bootleggers situation. For transvestigators themselves and their close extremist-right allies, it's a simple and effective way to stoke hatred and fanaticism; they perversely make themselves more and more paranoid while comforting themselves that they're able to see through the great veil. They develop the assuredness and the sense of grievance necessary to shout threats at strangers in a supermarket. For the left, transvestigation-adjacent rhetoric lowers the sanity waterline and encourages their enemies to beclown themselves.
And here's the thing: when I was a kid circa 2009, and transvestigation was just getting started? I got sexually harassed a lot, like, a lot a lot, by the LGBT kids (and their allies) at school. It wasn't a sexually-driven thing; it was political activist shitflinging. I'll admit I was an open bigot about those issues at that age, and that painted something of a target on my back. They saw the trope of outspoken bigots turning out to be repressed queers as a strategy and a goal, and they sought to confuse their enemies' sexualities. I keep seeing people in the modern culture war say that transgender people entered the discourse after the gays had fully won, because the activist structure needed something to move onto. There might be some truth to that, but I think it largely gets the order of cause and effect completely wrong. (Many people seem to be under the impression that transgender was invented from whole cloth in the mid 2010s. Full strain copium.)
In my experience of that era, transgender people entered the discourse as a tactic for advancing gay issues; they were ubiquitous rhetorical objects long before they were an actual notable demographic. The 2009-era LGBT activist kids talked a lot about transgender people, far out of proportion to their actual prevalence in the movement at the time; hell, "LGBT" was already a common and very recognizable term and I'm not sure that any of them were actually transgender, though they would often tell me that they were, at an ambiguous irony level. It was a foot in the door for forcefully making people question their sexuality, like a more politically pointed, though equally crude, meatspace analogue to old 4chan's trap culture (back when the term "trap" was new!). Oh, so you're not gay at all, right? You're not attracted to dudes even a little bit? Just girls? No penises, just veejays? Okay, what about this girl? She's hot, right? You wanna fuck her? Well, she's got a penis. How about that? You wanna suck her cock? Or do you think she's a man? Do you think that would make you a faggot? Maybe it would, if you think so. Or maybe you'd prefer Buck Angel? Early prototransvestigation rhetoric was spread around by a mix of bigots mocking their enemies and activist perverts fantasizing. Whenever I found out at that age that a classmate professed that Lady Gaga was born male, I could not have reasonably guessed, just from that, their view of the matter, ideologically speaking.
(Out-of-touch right-wing nightmares of teachers grooming children to become queer through sterile corporate-board-room-esque gay lesson plans are largely ignorant of how children interact with their peers already.)
Anyway, bit of a swerve, but - has anything like the scenario transvestigation points at ever happened? That is to say, has anyone ever become a major celebrity presenting themselves as one gender and later turned out to have secretly been the opposite sex the whole time? The closest examples I can think of aren't very close, and/or they're much closer to microcelebrity status than someone a normie might have heard of; very niche YouTubers. Famous transgender people I can think of are usually either famous specifically for being transgender (the proverbial dancing bears; Laverne Cox; Jazz Jennings), they decide to transition after they've already become public figures for other reasons (the celebrities' public crises; Elliot Page; Maddy Thorson), or both (the Caitlyn Jenners; Caitlyn Jenner). I guess the closest thing to an example I can think of after a few minutes of thought is Brianna Wu; I never followed Gamergate all that closely, but I get the general impression that she publicly presented herself as an at-least-implicitly cisgender woman but was eventually outed by her enemies. But there's a pretty big gulf in fame level between Brianna Wu, twice-failed primary candidate for Massachusetts' eighth congressional district, and, like. Michelle Obama.
(Naively, one would assume that some devious conspiratorial plan to normalize transgenderism through an influx of secretly-transgender celebrities would involve those celebrities publicly revealing themselves eventually. You know. To normalize it. But this part never seems to actually happen, which moves the hypothetical conspiracy more to "taunting you by sneaking triangles into the media, because the devil wants there to be secret triangles there" territory.)
Arguably JK Rowling? The initials were deliberately chosen to hide her female name and appeal to the target market of young boys. She never actually lied about it, but the early books were certainly presented in that sort of boy fantasy way.
That seems like a reach. Lots of writers use pen names. JK Rowling wasn't trying to pass as a member of the opposite sex, she just chose a gender-neutral pen name mandated by her publisher for fear that young boys would refuse to read a book by a female writer. I've never heard anyone suggest that Mary Ann Evans, Charlotte Brontë, K.A. Applegate or S. E. Hinton were trans men, despite all of them having published books under male pen names (or using their initials to mask their sex, as Rowling did).
The suggestion that the act of writing a book whose primary target demographic is members of the opposite sex makes that writer transgender is quite the hot take. Surely this would imply that literally all male romance novelists are trans women, which I'm sure would come as quite a surprise to Nicholas Sparks.
It is a reach, but I disagree that she "wasn't trying to pass as a member of the opposite sex." I think that her publisher and marketers definitely tried to pass her off as a male author (at least in the minds of the 8-12 yr old boys who were the main sales demographic). It was a different time, when the only thing we knew about authors was the book jacket, not like today when we can whip out our phones and instantly look the author, their personal life, and their political views.
Not saying she was transgender, no one thought that. It was just a simpler time when boys wanted to read boys about boys written by men. Or at least, that's what publishers thought.
Counterpoint: several first edition copies of Philosopher's Stone clearly display the name "Joanne Rowling", either on the cover, in the front matter, or in the copyright declaration. At least one author bio on an American first edition refers to her with female pronouns, the honorific "Ms." and identifies her as a "struggling single mother".
If publishers were trying to pass her off as a male writer, they clearly weren't being especially diligent about it.
Who reads the copyright declaration?
My point is, if they were fully committed to the bit and determined to have everyone believe that JK Rowling was a man, the name "Joanne" would not have appeared anywhere in the book (and it wouldn't have been any more difficult for the copyright declaration to list "JK Rowling" rather than "Joanne"). The fact that the name does appear in the book indicates that it was not an elaborate gender-swapping obfuscation à la George Eliot, but a simple gender-neutral pen name.
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