Shon Faye - 'well, it's over' - a brief eulogy for the "trans rights" movement.

I'm sorry, but he is supremely untalented as a writer.

Thanks Shon, that’s really cheered me up. No really, it has, more than I can say.

But never mind eh chuck, you have managed to come out of it OK, shame about all those anxious kids in their bedrooms who have been brainwashed by you and your ilk and are now quivering wrecks of pronoun insecurity, also a pity about the confused young women who thought taking testosterone would help them to find their niche place in the world only to discover too late that its effects are permanent, the health risks are real and the outcome not very satisfactory. Maybe you could manage to send a bunch of flowers from your comfortably enhanced bank account to the women who have been hounded out of THEIR careers and financial security by impressionable people who believed the lies you spread in order to secure your own future.

But hey, here’s a little something for you.🍓Sorry it’s a strawberry, I couldn’t find a raspberry. But it’s identified as one so that’s OK.

This warms my big cis heart. I hope his predictions come true.

I wonder what it will say in history books about this phenomenon in a hundred years. Whatever it says, I hope it will include a lot of examples and pictures of masculine angry men in wigs protesting to get into the girls showers etc., and big transwomen at the podium in sports. And surely something about the great wave of lawsuits against the gender clinics/pharma and its culpable enablers.

I expect I’ve said this before on one of my many other usernames but I actually quite like the writing style of Andrea Long Chu (it’s just a shame he uses it to write misogynistic travel stories that invariably terminate at Malaga Airport).

One of my first WTF moments in Transland (circa 2003) was when I asked a university tutor to recommend Feminist writers and every one of the recommendations given turned out to be a Queer Theorist (eg Judith/Jack Halberstam).

Currently having a little chuckle over the inevitable outcome of ‘normalising’ formerly fringe/marginalised human behaviours (such as cross dressing, kink and transsexualism) in an early 2020s fast-paced, internet trend environment is Faye and Friends rapidly going from ‘stunning & brave’ to ‘tedious old hat’.

the personal disappointment about the fact we are no longer fashionable or marketable

Genuinely hilarious.

The Guardian does have a good trans writer, but then they were writing on football pre transition. There was one self absorbed column and then they just continued writing their comprehensive and interesting column on italian football just as before but with a new name and byeline photo. No more mention of it.

I'm glad to see that most trans people are more level headed, and aren't buying Faye's ridiculous fantasies about forced electroconvulsion.

Even for a drama llama, Faye's piece is ridiculous.

I dont know much about him, but I'd guess he comes from money and simply has no understanding of how life is for most people. I find it very unlikely he's made money being a 'successful author', whatever he says.

Just another inadequate male who enjoyed the chance to punch down while he could.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, Shon.

I think the Guardian runs a system of perverse incentives.

I remember meeting the late Rachel Pollack, who was such an interesting person with such a wide variety of experiences and knowledge and enthusiasms that after a minute or two you'd forgotten Rachel was trans.

You can see some of that with Roz Kaveney, who again is from the older generation and really does have intellectual depth.

But these days, if you're a young writer with a trans identity, publishers will snap you up, and the Guardian will give you a column... but they just want you to write about being trans. I find it hard to imagine the Guardian running a column on, let's say, films or football or town planning by a bright young writer who happens to be trans identified.

It turns the young writers into terrible navel gazers, even if they weren't already, and I'm sure it must be boring for them, and they never get a chance to stretch themselves. And the Guardian don't even know they're running a trans ghetto.

I suppose there was a moment where they could aspire to be screenwriters on Doctor Who, but RTD torched that to the ground.

TheUnusuallyQuerulentMxLauraBrown

Bloody brilliant! Have you considered writing for Private Eye?

Yes. No.

🤣 👏

I’m imagining a whiney whatsapp group chat exclusively made up of people who were once feted as Mainstream Media’s Trendiest Transsexuals but who are now consigned to the Scrapheap of Fleeting Fashions…

(disclaimer: the following is fiction but based-on-a-true-story, names have been changed to protect the identities of the real-life participants)

Editor’s note: a previous version of this article misnamed Gloria Gaynor (she/her dis/co).

The group chat members are:

Shun Naye

Shun’s been quite weepy of late, shares YouTube shorts of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive at least fortnightly. Hopes to stay in the ‘Sugababy’ dating category for at least another decade, willing to steal injectable plasma from biological females to achieve this. Chat participants are too busy filtering selfies to adequately risk assess whether Shun is sharing a fantasy or planning a crime.

Harris Wees

Secretly detests the other chat participants because: CLASS WAR.
Smug to have achieved mainstream writing success despite attending a shit midlands comprehensive and being an ex-con but bit embarrassed over the recent TV series flop. Tweed was hoping that hate-watching terves would mask the truly awful viewing figures but even they CBA with it. Constantly ruminates over whether casting a transmantwink to play a young, pre transition transwoman (trans Inception) would’ve been better than casting a boring old bog standard cistwink but isn’t going to admit making bad decisions to his bougie buddies (unless it’s a humorously retro story about precociously clipping a john in a cottaging hotspot).

Hunho Berkdorf

A real life version of the live action Disney remake of Little Mermaid, extensively media trained by the same shadowy PR consultancy company who empowered pandemic era Snow White to describe Prince Charming as ‘Weird… Weird’. In hindsight, Hunho might’ve preferred the escorting option but dived enthusiastically down the EDI river early on and now only bobs up to the surface for the occasional life saving, fair trade lingerie shoot.
Shout out to Hunho’s favourite overseas surgeon for the extra large silicone implants that function as a handy floatation device whenever the Cancellation Canoe gets close to Crashing.

Ohno Crawson

Ohno rarely posts to social media and only occasionally replies to the group chat because Ohno is frantically busy with the ‘Day Job’ of churning out shitty Dr Whooo spin off novels.
If he can keep a low enough profile he should be able to continue to profit from the Geek Pound, he just needs to quit the side hustle of giving career advice talks in school (hand jobs for all!) and stay away from red carpet events - which isn’t hard because the only media company still issuing evening invites to celebrity transwomen in 2025 is Pink News and Ohno isn’t THAT desperate for freebie frizzante. Not yet, anyway.

(even Mussel T Gravy himself can’t squeeze a bloody email response from the stone cold staff at Vogue!)

and Teddy McNobble

Teddy is the group admin who does all the organising that everyone else ignores… in fact, Teddy wonders if the Dollz have completely forgotten about Teddy’s existence…

…Tbf the Dollz have indeed forgotten that Teddy exists because Teddy has been muted in chat for almost a decade (the only thing the other four chatters abhor more than a BabyBore is a Professional BabyBore and Freddy hasn’t published an article about anything but babies since the 2016 sperm donor catalogue dropped).

That's interesting, I got deleted, I think for suggesting that the people who deliberately target children, and organise the young into their violent and controlling illusion fantasy world resemble those who rallied the young into another violent and controlling organisation in Europe 90 years ago.

I wonder who was so scared of that comparison that they had to get the post removed rather than try to refute my point?

I was trying to be caring and nice lol. But yeah, I think the haddock might be more beneficial.

I think a metaphorical biff round the chops with the Haddock of Reality might be more useful!

So Shon Faye's Milk the System career has hit the skids?

Maybe it wasn't that great an idea to base it entirely on a "loose, shifting constellation of biological, political and cultural phenomena which varies according to context, place & time" while recommending women enjoy their erasure and telling kids to suck dick and get tits early?

I mean, I've seen a few CVs in my time, and no, that wouldn't have made the cut, Shon.

I picked up Shon's book in a library once but didn't get past the first page or two @WimbledonWhites. It failed to engage me on any level.

I wasn't surprised.

He doesn't half go on.

Has anyone read Shon’s book? I found those few paragraphs genuinely hard to read - is the book any better?

it’s either escorting or the diversity and inclusion panel

Never thought I’d say this but in this instance at least the escorting would be honest work.

Quite. I have no sympathy for him at all. I wonder if he’s starting to regret having his penis removed - it doesn’t seem to have been the magic fix he may have hoped. He sounds quite bitter.

I've tried to locate my sympathy for Shon but I seem to have mislaid my microscope.

The victimhood is genuinely nauseating.

they’ve piggy backed the EDI and trans juggernaut for years and milked as much as they can. It’s now running dry and they’re wondering if they might have to put on a lanyard and work in a call centre.

It’s the role of the true narcissist to repeatedly frame themselves, or in this case, Shonself, as a victim. It’s their whole existence, being ignored or not validated is truly the end of days. He’s just a shallow, mediocre, narcissistic man.

Yes, I think Faye does believe in 'true trans', and there are a couple of elements to that.

The first is that Faye as a gay male transsexual really doesn't feel any great affinity with straight male fetishists. So he doesn't believe that all varieties of 'trans' are the same thing.

The second is that Faye is quite politically canny, and I suspect has reached the Hayton position of "these extremists and weirdos are undermining the social acceptance I've always relied on."

The obvious thing for Faye to do - and he's not untalented as a writer - is to transition out of the TQ+ punditocracy and into writing gigs where his trans status isn't the sole selling point. Maybe he can do that, maybe not. But I think his activist phase is at an end.