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A Look into Hickman, wherein a Sensitive Young Man discovers the positional utility of money
Link the relevant tweet
I've written about Hickman before because I find him to be a very interesting character. This is a man who was purposefully homeless for years, a self-described constantly drunk anarchist, who then joined the coast guard to clean up his act, become a kind of hardcore catholic that doesn't quite fit neatly into the Online RadTrad mold, got married, had a kid, and now, apparently, self-supports via writing online. He's also something of budding real estate investor.
And although he still "hates money" he just can't deny that it's got some pretty nice features; like being able to live in good neighborhoods where your kids are safe as well as being able to choose the rough outline of your socio-political environment.
Hickman's journey isn't unique overall. It's definitely got a lot of color to it, of course. I see it, however, as a pretty normal process of becoming aware of second order social effects. As kids, we're inherently self-focused. Adolescence brings some awareness of things outside of ourself. Young adulthood continues that up to family formation. For most, however, it takes the actual having of children to ignite thoughts about the beliefs, behaviors, and opinions of larger groups of strangers.
Being 25 and single or dating means I have more or less complete control (or perceived control - memetic influence is for a different thread) over the ideas I let effect me. But a parent realizes that short of keeping their children locked up in the basement, their ability to totally control the kid's ideological intake is far from complete.
It's unremarkable to point out that what happens next is people use a combination of money and social organization to choose and maintain the ideological ecosystems within which their children live. Money can get you access to the right zip codes and/or private schools and clubs / sports. Social organization can get the right (wrong?) books banned from the public libraries, and the right (wrong?) drag queen story hour performers. Enter the ongoing culture war.
The interesting thing, to my mind, that Hickman's post illustrates is the reach of these topics. Hickman, although not living on the street anymore, is certainly on the fringe of "normal" society. He's a very-online yet pseudo Amish dirtbag Catholic who lives in dying upstate NY. Yet is talking in the same direction that leads to HOAs, school boards, zoning, planned communities and all the other things that are top of mind for the most milquetoast suburbanites. Short of a true EXIT mentality, you can't not be in the culture war.
And I think there's something useful here to contemplate in terms of the very Vibes based general feeling of anxiety that generates thousands of thinkpieces across main stream and alternative media and internet outlets. If many of us feel like non-voluntary conscripts in the culture war, it follows that we're fighting the war just to survive and get back home. But then the question becomes "what the hell is home?" There's no 40 acres and a Good Wife (TM) to walk with into the sunset. The HOA has problems with our lifestock and Wifey is at therapy and thinks we need to have a conversation about emotional labor. Or, for my progressive friends, the need to return that 40 acres to the indigenous rightful owners is really getting difficult because of the tax implications of the real estate sale and my polycule keeps breaking up while I'm talking to my lawyer.
Of course I'm having a little fun here, but the point stands; the political dream of the West post World War 2 was that a mix of economic and political liberality could ultimately result in an appreciable degree of autonomy for, at least, an individual if not a family. That no longer seems the case and there's been no real alternative identified. On the left, it's a kind of utopic socialism that can't ever actually work. On the right it's a very vibes based "RETVRN" ethos with some nihilstic streaks.
An FYI re: Hickman’s claim: it doesn’t seem like income is a foolproof way of preventing transgenderism per a 2025 study. $50,000 to <$75,000 household income has about same odds as $200,000 or higher. Probably the best bet is to ban effeminate anime at home and give child a more exciting identity and “quest” to latch onto in adolescence. I looked and there doesn’t appear to be a relationship with religiosity in household either.
FtM or MtF transgenderism? These are meaningfully different things.
That study didn’t separate the two. IMO anime and similar media plays a role in causing MTF, I have no idea what causes FTM though
It's almost certainly more porn than anime, but you obviously can't bring up porn when coming out to your parents.
Unless you're Andrea Long Chu maybe.
Judging by the sheer quantity of anime avatars I see among the online trans, I rrally think it's the anime. I've personally witnessed the anime -> furry -> trans pipeline, but have never heard of porn being a major part of anyone's trans origin story.
Not that I necessarily think it's the anime itself that does it (though a genre where nearly all men look like ladyboy twinks and nearly all women look like 13 year old schoolgirls can't be particularly healthy for a developing sexuality). It's that anime as a subculture attracts a lot of mentally ill weirdos.
There has been a Dirtbag Left meme for more than a decade at this point that dissident right-wing - and, of course, 'transphobic' - online chuds and trolls usually select anime avatars, usually female ones. I think the reason given was that they see anime as counter-cultural or at least not mainstream in present-day liberal America. I don't think there's a deeper reason for any of this other than the intent to signal membership in a counterculture.
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I think you have the causation backwards. Trans are men who want to become women. It makes sense for them to have female avatars online. It makes extra sense that these avatars are not real 3d women. That leaves anime girl avatars. In a cartoon world, maybe they could be a cartoon girl. As for me, I use it for a different reason, which is that it is pleasing to look at, and also somewhat funny. Did watching anime cause me to feel that way, or is it innate and anime is downstream of my instincts?
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If you spend a lot of time home alone on the internet, odds are you get into anime.
A lot of transgender people are introverts and tend to stay inside. Naturally you get an overlap.
I would imagine that there could be a correlation between heavy use of certain social media and transness. The more time you spend online, the greater the odds that you notice a trans subreddit or trans discord or trans-positive streamer. If you become part of such a community, I can only imagine the chance of transitioning goes up.
So spending a lot of time online leads to more time on social media AND more time watching anime and playing vidya. But only one of these lead to transitioning.
They are also usually reluctant to socialize with normies, this feeling also being mutual, I think.
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You may be right. I have no way of knowing which way the causality moves (if any). I just notice that there seems to be a pretty linear relationship between the sexual weirdness of a given online community and the proportion of anime characters in people's avatars/bios. Most of the people I've met in real life who are either trans or some flavor of nonbinary are unusually into anime.
It's possible I'm letting my biases get the best of me and I'm just carelessly lumping trans people and otaku into an overly broad "sex weirdos" bucket. But as someone who is not a fan of anime, I can't help but notice how much overlap there seems to be between the two communities. Then again, you could make the same argument for dungeons and dragons, for example (thanks Dimension 20!), and maybe I just notice it less because I actually like DnD.
Are you perhaps actually noticing that the many trans people are autistic? That would explain those specific hobbies at least.
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I'm inclined to think that there's some further underlying factor that explains the trans + anime connection, rather than a specifically anime -> trans pipeline (and maybe that underlying factor is just "autism").
I unfortunately can't serve as a perfectly controlled experiment, because I was exposed to anime from an extremely young age. But I was having persistent thoughts about wanting to be a woman by the time I was around 10 years old, and prior to that time, I had only been exposed to what I would consider to be very "normal" mainstream children's anime with pretty normal male role models, like Pokemon and Yugioh and DBZ (Cardcaptor Sakura got shuffled in there too, but, I would be shocked if one show with a female protagonist had such a profound lifelong impact on my psychology).
Regarding furries I'm guessing the pipeline is not anime -> furry but maybe anime cosplayer -> furry specifically maybe?
I’m not a furry at all and have basically never interacted with that community, so you’d have to ask them.
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All three of these media franchises contain, as a central part of the protagonist’s path toward their desired social rewards, a magical identity transformation:
Yugi learns that his true identity is an extraordinary Pharaoh, and that this real identity was lurking within his body and waiting to appear after some puzzling around
Pokémon have their identities changed in a powerful and stunning way; Charmeleon, Butterfree, from egg to eggmazing
Goku shifts into a Saiyan which changes his fundamental identity into something cosmically-important
What is unconsciously grafted into the adolescent’s understanding of the world is that such magical identity transformations are normal and extremely desirable. They are sensed as “reinforcing” in that they occur at key junctions where a character obtains something highly desirable, and where he is otherwise in a stressed or confused state. We can imagine an idea being unconsciously smuggled into the mind: “what if I have my own shocking identity transformation which results in the social rewards I have been pining for? Doesn’t everyone have one of these?”
Where effeminate anime comes in, is that across many anime franchises the female characters are the most “privileged” and anxiolytic within the cast, and usually the most beautiful to boot. Imagine you’re a youth who, as @Botond173 and @4bpp suggest, has a lot of stress related to their gender and social identity. Your favorite activity to reduce stress is to vicariously live another life (essentially inhabiting the body of a new person), and the person you are vicariously experiencing often has a magical identity transformation that drastically improves his life. What’s more, the most comforting / anxiolytic / socially-desired objects in the animeverse are women. Often these women, or girls, are overly-feminine. You’ve essentially been primed to vicariously inhabit another life as relaxation, you’ve been conditioned to associate the highly-feminine with the most comfort, and you’ve been conditioned to expect an identity change to fundamentally flip your life for the better. Now, maybe still, for a lot of people this doesn’t do anything. But let’s say you are wired a little differently, autism or etc. And then on top of this, there are communities that are now ready to shower you in superabundant social praise and validation for your identity transformation, and even the media seems to be on your side, and there are psychological tricks that this community employs purposefully or inadvertently (look at how colorful you will be now; so much novelty; you’re part of a tribe and get a flag and grievances and purpose and . . . ).
Re: the porn element mentioned by @Tanista, one of the ferishes that seem to be far more common among MtFs is “puppygirl” et al. This is essentially the fantasy that you are so socially-desirable that someone wants to command you around all day as a pet, while at the same time providing a comforting identity through the outsourcing of control over your life. I think this is similar to the anime etiology in that there is an identity change which comes with a huge shift in social esteem.
There is some relevant data for this theory, eg the HomeStuck fandom is 50% transgender (100x prevalence?) and the media franchise is essentially (1) I had a fundamental life-altering identity transformation through logging into a digital social ecosystem [sburb]; (2) the coolest and most beautiful and less stressful characters are all women.
This is pareidolia. Any story where a character gets more powerful could be described this way, the only difference being that in animation it's also done visually.
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There is nothing trans here, in fact pokemon is gender-essentialist with its in-game breeding system and sexual dimorphism in many species. Evolution tends to track growing up, for example Charmander is a baby lizard and turns into a powerful masculine dragon lizard. Kind of like how the 8 year old boys the show is aimed at might turn into strong, powerful men. Charmander does not put on a dress and decide he wants to be Misty.
Goku was so ripped and cool that he made me want to lift weights when I was 12, the opposite of a sex change. I am not sure what this has to do with becoming trans.
again, they are not magical but rather innate and predictable based on baby traits. Goku fell out of a space ship and had a tail. He obviously was not a normal human from day 1. He only found out he comes from powerful racial heritage. If anything this will produce fascists or elitists and not transsexuals.
This is western stuff made for LGBTQ folks, not anime.
The only cool female character I can think of is Frieren, which is literally her name ... but she's not the coolest in the series. In male oriented romance series, which have tons of girls on screen, the girls are goofy and the guy is the coolest, usually. In female oriented romances, the guy is super cool because he's supposed to be really attractive to the main girl. In Frieren, Sein and Himmel are far cooler. Women generally are not cool. Maybe if I were naturally trans I would think otherwise, and it's all in the eye of the beholder, though.
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Sure. But
Themes of transformation and metamorphosis are incredibly common throughout fiction (not to mention throughout biological reality), in both sexual and non-sexual contexts. So it’s not particularly surprising that three randomly selected stories touch on those themes.
Undoubtedly, fantasies of transformation are very common among both boys and girls. And those fantasies might be inspired by fiction media. But isn’t the average little boy more likely to fantasize about transforming into something, y’know, male? A stronger man? Or maybe at least just self-inserting as the male hero in the show? What could explain the fact that a very small minority of boys go off in a completely random and unexpected direction and fantasize about transforming into women instead? Nothing in the show itself (given the examples we’re talking about). Which is why I hypothesize that some of them simply have a latent disposition to think this way, due to biological factors.
I’m honestly not sure what you’re getting at with this whole section. Pick any randomly selected battle shounen written for a young male audience (especially one made before 2010) and the female characters will clearly be less important and less capable than the male characters who actually drive the plot forward.
To the extent that you’re picking up on a real pattern, it’s just art imitating life. Yes, an attractive woman is socially desirable and she can convince others to actively work towards soothing her anxieties, by virtue of the fact that she is an attractive woman. That’s not anime propaganda, that’s just reality.
You mean… the exact same sorts of sexual fantasies that cis women have?
I don’t know how familiar you are with erotic fiction written by-cis-women-for-cis-women, but the exact same themes of subservience, of being “owned”, of courting favor and protection from those stronger than you, are extraordinarily common. This is just how feminine sexuality works. Usually not presented in such an overtly fetishistic way, of course. Although they sometimes are. I’ve certainly come across puppygirl stories for cis women too.
Some people naturally gravitate towards a supporting role. Many of those people are either women, or would prefer to be women. All of this is wholly unsurprising to me.
To be honest, I think your incredulity at the idea that some people could be born gay or trans (or at least be born with underlying factors that predispose them to that sort of developmental pathway) is just the rightist version of the leftist incredulity at the idea that some people are born stupid and violent. People love biology when it supports their ideology, and then they reach for “social construction” when it doesn’t. I simply consistently remain on the side of biology in all cases.
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I think this is brilliant.
What I would add is that your phrase "magical identity transformation" is fundamentally normal for teenagers. It is both the biological reality of puberty and the narrative logic of progressing from child to adult. "Young adult" media inherently concerns the realization of conflict in the world and the boy's need to become a man. (The Pokemon anime is fundamentally for children because the world is basically good and the conflict is all in good fun, with occasional exceptions. The games are closer to puberty media.)
A lot of trans experience starts with anxiety over puberty, so it makes a lot of sense to me to connect this to soothing soft media.
Is it really that high now?
I thought it had more to do with Homestuck's fascination with alternative sexualities. If I remember correctly by the end of the original story there were maybe two main characters left who were not at least ambiguously gay.
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A bit reductive, no? The pharaoh is an entirely different person, that Yugi needs to let go of in order to realize his own growth. And Goku changes to become more masculine. Stronger, faster, angrier yet simultaneously in control of himself. He doesn't become something else. He enchances what he already has. In Pokemon, the main characters do not evolve because that is clearly impossible. That kind of transformation is limited to a different species than us.
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