The Dark Psychology Behind the Trans Movement

What is driving the fervent and violent push for gender self-ID?

Not to Be Reproduced, René Magritte (1937)

Over the past several years, trans activists have put on a showcase of the dark psychology that is driving the movement. From violent attacks on women’s rights demonstrators to continued advocacy for transferring sexually violent men into women’s prisons, the mask is gone and the motivations are clear for anyone to see if they care to take a look.

One of the most useful constructs for understanding what is going on is a psychological theory of personality called the dark tetrad. Many people may be more familiar with the dark triad personality traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. The dark tetrad is an expanded theory that also includes sadism, painting a broader picture of the psychology at play behind this movement.

What does a dark tetrad personality look like? Narcissism is characterized by entitlement, resentment, and hypersensitivity to perceived slights. Machiavellianism combines manipulation and deceit for exploitative purposes. Psychopathy is associated with callousness, lack of remorse, and impulsivity, while sadism involves taking joy in the suffering of others.

Not every trans activist has this personality typology. The vast majority certainly do not. However, many of the advocates of gender identity and gender self-identification do display a combination of these traits in pursuit of their ends. These traits are also prevalent, encouraged, and all too often rewarded in the movement at large.

If a social movement as a whole can be said to have a personality dynamic, then trans activism itself is the dark tetrad. The traits are obvious in the entitlement to women’s spaces, the complete disregard for women’s safety, privacy, dignity, and opportunities, the extreme emotional overreactions to women who won’t comply, and the outright physical violence that sometimes results.

Nowhere is the dark tetrad personality dynamic more obvious than when it comes to the battleground of women’s prisons. Where self-ID is the law of the land, male inmates are being transferred to women’s prisons—with absolutely zero concern for the women locked up with them.

These men, many of them convicted sex offenders, display entitlement, sadistic cruelty, and psychopathic disregard toward the women who live in fear of their presence. The majority of incarcerated women have a history of abuse, yet they are forced to be housed with these violent men, even to shower with them.

Devastatingly but unsurprisingly, trans-identified male inmates are committing sexual assaults against female inmates, which have, in some instances, even resulted in pregnancies. Women are fearful to raise their concerns with prison authorities, and for good reason—when they do, they are often punished.

Trans activists have ensured that these women have little recourse and nowhere to turn by completely capturing organizations that might help them. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union is in full support of transferring male sex offenders to women’s prisons, as is the Elizabeth Fry Society in Canada, an organization that purports to advocate for women in contact with the legal system.

Politicians are worse than useless—in fact, they are very proud of the laws and policies that have led us here.

When women’s rights advocates raise concerns about these human rights abuses, they are often called hateful and bigoted. They are sometimes even assaulted. When a group of women protested against the placement of convicted male murderer Dana Rivers into a women’s prison in December of 2022, they were attacked by trans rights activists. The black-clad assailants ambushed the women, threw pies and eggs at them, tried to knock them to the ground, and forcefully took their signs.

By attacking these women, the trans activists were defending a man who exemplifies the dark tetrad personality type. Rivers, who was convicted of murdering a lesbian couple and their teenage son, is sadism and entitled rage personified. He bludgeoned, stabbed, and shot his victims before setting their house on fire. And yet, during the trial, the court ordered that this murderous man be referred to by female pronouns.

Rivers may be an extreme example of the dark tetrad psychology that is running rampant in trans activism, but he is by far not the only example. Just like the activists that defended him, trans activists often attack women at many other events, like the Let Women Speak events regularly held by Kellie-Jay Keen across the United Kingdom and now around the world.

One only needs to watch Keen’s documentary, Kellie-Jay in the USA, to witness the often-frightening anger of trans activists at women who want to speak about how they are affected by gender ideology. In New York City, the women who came out of the Let Women Speak event were surrounded by hundreds of protestors who attempted to breach a police barricade. Some were also filmed hurling threats and even spitting at the demonstrators.

These overemotional and sometimes violent outbursts happen in everyday situations as well, often when trans-identified men are “misgendered” in public. Who can forget the GameStop Ma’am, a man who yelled and swore at a cashier before proceeding to kick over a display after being called “sir.”

This is an example of narcissistic rage, almost certainly coupled with sexual frustration. When the man was reminded that he was not in fact a woman, his sexual fantasy was shattered and he experienced what felt like a real and malicious insult. He lacked the impulse control and empathy to calm himself down and went on a rampage instead.

This is also the kind of behavior that women fear and often end up facing when we attempt to set boundaries around spaces like single-sex washrooms, changing rooms, and even rape shelters. When women say “no,” these men understand that we don’t recognize them as women, and our boundary is seen as an affront and attack on a sexual fantasy.

When not directly threatening women in real life, trans activists flaunt their sadistic cruelty online, sending death threats and rape threats to women who don’t agree with them. One only needs to look at the horrific reaction to J. K. Rowling for an example of this. Trans activists also like to catastrophize and will often claim that women’s words and concerns are causing them real harm and may even lead them to suicide. This is all emotional manipulation designed to exploit the empathy of others.

The absence of regard and downright hatred for women so prevalent throughout trans activism is often directed specifically at lesbians. Since most trans-identified males are heterosexual, they want to be validated by lesbian sexual partners. Nowadays, you’ll even find lesbian sex guides that advise the reader on how to stimulate a penis.

These men often feel entitled to infiltrate lesbian dating apps and online lesbian spaces. They then advocate for the banning of women who won’t validate them or simply lobby to shut down entire online communities where they don't feel centered and capitulated to.

Trans-identified men seek to infiltrate and co-opt lesbian spaces in real life, as well. Take, for example, the fact that the long-running Michigan Womyn's Music Festival was eventually forced to shut down after years of harassment and boycotts for its "womyn-born womyn" policy.

Similarly, there are scant few lesbian bars left and attempts to open any are often met with accusations of transphobia even when these bars are specifically welcoming of trans-identified males. If these men are anything but centered and celebrated in lesbian’s spaces and even lesbian’s beds, then they want lesbians to suffer, and they enjoy seeing it, too.

These tourists of identity display a complete and total lack of empathy for the feelings of the women they hurt, viewing them as objects to be used for their own validation. Such levels of entitlement and callousness are a marker of both narcissism and psychopathy.

This dynamic also plays out in the realm of sports, another hot-button topic in the trans debate. Here, women are relegated to supporting characters in the dark psychodrama that places trans-identified men at the center of the universe. Full of grandiose entitlement, these men show no compunction about cheating and stealing sporting opportunities, podiums, medals, scholarships, and prize money from female competitors.

Consider the case of swimmer Will Thomas, who did not care that he could beat every single female competitor in the pool with minimal effort, making his female competitors feel hopeless and dejected before they even got into the water. Nor did he care that young women were uncomfortable with his naked presence in the changing room. In his interviews, Thomas said that doing all this made him happy, and that was that. To men like him, no one else in the world even exists.

People with dark tetrad personality traits have always and will always exist—the problem today is that the world is catering to men like this as long as they claim to have a female “gender identity.” Their belief that they deserve special treatment and that the rules we all play by should be bent for them is validated everywhere by captured institutions in a stunning display of Machiavellian manipulation.

Consider what happened in Port Townsend when 80-year-old Julie Jaman was shocked to see a young man watching little girls take off their bathing suits in the women’s changing room. She asked him to leave and, in return, she was banned from the pool.

Similar stories of men in women’s changing rooms are cropping up all over North America and, every time, the response from facilities and cities is that it is a human right for a man to get his penis out in spaces where women get naked.

Perhaps the most shocking example of society bending over backward to accommodate these men is the Canadian high school shop teacher who went viral for wearing a massive pair of prosthetic breasts to school. Both the school and the school board have staunchly defended the teacher, pointing to the Ontario Human Rights Code and its protections for “gender identity and gender expression” as the reason why this man had to be allowed to do whatever he wants, even something so absurd.

We used to know—and we still do know, we just aren’t allowed to say it—that men who push boundaries like this, especially sexual boundaries, are dangerous.

So much of the modern trans rights movement boils down to a man’s right to act out his fetish wherever and whenever he pleases. A movement with such aims is, by nature, going to be manipulative, entitled, abusive, sadistic, and psychopathic.

“Gender identity” provides the perfect cover for a dark tetrad individual. Invoking it allows a man to assert the primacy of his own feelings and desires over women’s actual physical safety, to make egregious demands of institutions, and even to hurt the women that try to stand in the way with minimal, if any, repercussions.

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