Incredulous? Keep it up!

Writer Lionel Shriver on maintaining the right attitude in improbable times

Hold fast to your utter disbelief in the face of the fashionable idea that our sex can be changed by hormone injections and surgical removal of body parts.

That’s the advice of the writer Lionel Shriver who, despite her husband’s concern for her safety, came to talk at the September 27-28 Genspect conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where security screening was judged necessary.

“I want to urge all of us never to relinquish our incredulity,” Ms Shriver said in conversation with Genspect founder Stella O’Malley.

“I find I have to refresh mine from time to time. I step back and I think, oh, my fucking god, who could believe that we have a contagion of people lopping parts of their bodies off and making themselves ill—because taking the wrong hormones is actually making you ill.

“We have people trying to change sex all the time, and that’s what everyone in education is obsessed with. How did we get here? This is unbelievable. It is literally unbelievable. And twenty years ago, if someone had predicted this phenomenon, you would have told them they were daft.

“So, never let go of how moronic this is, what an incredible regression it is, even in terms of sexual politics, because when I was growing up during the so-called women’s liberation movement, we were working to be regarded not as women, but as people—we wanted to dissolve the extreme distinction between sexes.

“This [transgender] movement is all about going backwards on all of that. [It says] the most important thing about you is your sex … that you have a deep, gendered soul.”

“Genspect strongly urges the recognition of transgender identification as a pathological condition characterized by an ‘extreme overvalued belief’.

“An extreme overvalued belief is a rigid, non-delusional conviction, shared and reinforced within a culture or subculture, defended with passion and experienced by the individual as entirely rational. Over time it strengthens, resists challenge and can drive powerful—even harmful—actions in its service.

“The 2010 declaration by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to ‘de-psychopathologize’ gender variance was not based on scientific discovery but on political advocacy. This campaign has caused catastrophic harm by removing essential psychiatric guardrails, fueling a social contagion and exposing vulnerable people to experimental medicalization.

“Re-psychopathologization is not a call to re-stigmatize or marginalize individuals who identify as transgender. It is a call to restore compassion and clarity: to understand that this condition is pathological, not innate; to treat it as an all-consuming fixation requiring careful, appropriate, ethical psychological intervention, and to prevent the unchecked spread of this harmful belief.”—statement, Genspect, 27 September 2025

Nominal dysphoria

Ms Shriver dates the start of the “trans craze” to 2012, when she felt moved to ask herself, “Where did this come from? And why are we suddenly watching a documentary a week about little boys in dresses?”

As a tomboy, she had her own history of unease about sex roles, having changed her name to Lionel when she was 15 years old; “nominal dysphoria”, she calls it.

“I was a little alienated from my sex, just because I grew up between two brothers. They got to do more things than I did, and my father was the boss. So, who wouldn’t envy the boys—and therefore, I don’t think that my choosing a male name was arbitrary.”

She reproaches herself for not tackling transgenderism as a topic until 2016; she was afraid of an activist movement that torches careers, punishes dissent and makes lurid threats of violence online. Ms Shriver has made up for those four years of reticence.

Mania is the title of her latest novel, a satire in which the cognitive equality of all is an article of faith and “the last great civil rights fight is for dumb people”.

“I will concede that I modeled this [satire] most closely on the trans craze because it defies physical reality in the same way, and it defies what any little child knows by the time he or she can speak,” she said.

“It is delusional to believe that you can change sex; you are stuck with it. I am one of the many former girls who, if they were given a button to press, would press it if it made them into a boy. I found being female highly inconvenient.”

---

Video: Lionel Shriver on humanity’s talent for collective madness

Status quo, OK

“We have enough men and women, and we don’t need to swap them around,” Ms Shriver said.

“It is a ludicrous waste of resources, in many senses, to keep trying to have people change places. And it’s not just medically. I feel strongly that we should not be making insurance companies cover this. I don’t think that [the US government program] Medicaid should cover this. I certainly don’t think Medicare should cover this. If you have insurance, if you pay taxes, we are funding this stuff, unwillingly.

“It’s also a waste on the cultural front. We are putting huge cultural energy into this conflict. We’re putting political energy into this conflict. We probably elected Trump because of this conflict. So, if you’re a Democrat, you’re really paying for it. And I hate to say it, but everyone here [at Genspect’s meeting] is also ultimately having their resources wasted.”

Trans, in her opinion, has been a distraction from interesting and worthwhile pursuits, setting instead “a very low bar as to what it means to achieve something”.

“We are cultivating a subculture that believes that play acting as the other sex—and that’s all you can do—is their life goal. That is what they want to accomplish in life—to walk into a room and everyone thinks that they’re female,” she said.

“This is dismal. I mean, to successfully pass as the other sex is about as important as getting a bit part in your high school musical.

“We’re expecting very little of ourselves, and it makes us look bad … and I extend that to the larger geopolitical sphere.”

On the West’s embrace of trans, she says, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is correct. “He’s right. We are decadent. This is decadent, and this is a waste of social and political energies”.

She says the image of Admiral Rachel Levine, Joe Biden’s trans-identified assistant secretary for health, made America look “ridiculous”, and transgenderism has national security implications “because we just don’t look very scary anymore”.

Ms Shriver and Ms O’Malley disagreed on how—and how easily—the trans phenomenon would unravel.

Ms Shriver cites the precedent of the 1990s recovered memory scandal where, after family devastation and lawsuits, people “just moved rapidly on” and it was all but forgotten.

But Ms O’Malley feels that gender ideology has a far greater hold on society and its institutions.

“It’s embedded in medicine, it’s embedded in legislation, it’s embedded in law, it’s embedded in politics, it’s embedded in education,” she said.

“It’s so much bigger in the policies that, to pull back from it, I think, is going to be significantly longer, harder, more complicated and more tortured.”

Ms Shriver said: “We actually have to put a little more stigma on [transgenderism]. Now, you know, there’s nothing wrong with stigma. Stigma attaches to things for a reason. It’s a very useful social tool. At the very least, we can say [that trans is] so yesterday, so old hat, it’s so boring.

“It has to elicit an eye roll on the peer level. And I think that’s when it’s going to change.

“We’re admiring the wrong people and for the wrong reasons. I can see how it’s attractive to go trans, given the rhetoric we throw at it—it’s always such a brave decision. It means that you’re worthy of special treatment and admiration. We do present it as some kind of great achievement. We present the embrace of fraudulence as authenticity.

“We should never let the activists get away with describing this as about ‘trans rights’ because nobody is telling them to sit at the back of the bus, or that they can’t vote. The rights that they’re talking about are the rights of men to go into women’s prisons and rape crisis counseling and to enter women’s sports.”

Ms Shriver argues that true courage lies in detransition, not trans allyship.

“Because we’ve got this false [pro-trans] social consensus going, and it’s been going now for 13-14 years, it doesn’t take any bravery to support so-called ‘trans rights’.

“But it does take bravery to resist the movement, and it takes a lot of bravery to realize that you have been caught up in something that is doing you harm, and a lot of other people harm, and you have been fooled.

“That’s hard enough to do when it’s just an opinion. But if you put your literal body on the line to back up a perception that turns out to be fool’s gold, it takes enormous integrity, bravery and steeliness to pull back and publicly announce that you were wrong, you were misguided, you were taken in.

“And it’s even worse because the detransitioners are spurned.

“There’s a huge identity wrapped up with throwing your body in with the trans crowd, and it comes with a lot of support, especially online. And you don’t get that when you become a traitor to the cause.”