WPATH’s Eunuch Experts Encouraged a Eunuch "Gender Identity" in a Teen Boy

The gender cult is always looking for new revenue streams.

Thomas W. Johnson and Richard J. Wassersug

When the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care Version 8 (SOC8) draft came out in December 2021, many were stunned to see that the SOC8 included an entire chapter on eunuchs and on the need for “eunuch-identified people” to have access to “gender-affirming medicine.”

Early on, I saw commentators expressing a belief (or maybe a faint hope) that this chapter would surely not make it through to the final version. However, not only did the eunuch chapter remain when the SOC8 was officially released in September of 2022, the ethics chapter was removed. Shortly after the document went public, WPATH also issued a “correction” removing all minimum age recommendations for minors to receive “gender-affirming care.”

This may all seem unbelievable but, once you know a bit about the types of people involved in the creation of these “standards of care,” it becomes hardly surprising.

As journalist Genevieve Gluck has extensively reported, two of the men responsible for the introduction of a eunuch “gender identity” into the SOC8 are Richard J. Wassersug and Thomas W. Johnson.

Wassersug was a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia until 2011, when he retired and moved to Vancouver. There, he became an honorary professor in the Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences at the University of British Columbia.

Johnson is a retired professor from the California State University in Chico, where he taught anthropology and Asian studies.

The two men have collaborated together on numerous papers discussing eunuchs and castration. One particular paper that caught my eye was “My son was castrated as a result of a medical error. Is it OK to raise him as a eunuch?” published in August 2021.

The title of the paper is a reference to an e-mail from a father “whose son had lost both testicles at age 12 due to medical error.”

In the introduction to the paper, the authors explain:

The father wanted advice on how to support his son, now 14, if the son remains comfortable with his hypogonadal state. He specifically asked for our opinion on raising his son as a eunuch. The alternative would be for his son to begin testosterone replacement therapy, which is the standard medical treatment for agonadal individuals who are not gender dysphoric.

For some reason, the father was seeking assurances that it would be “safe” to raise his son without supplemental testosterone, though he was concerned about the social and emotional impacts of the boy openly “presenting as a eunuch.”

Wassersug and Johnson did encourage the father to get his son an endocrinological consult. The endocrinologist, in turn, warned against potential health risks if the boy did not take testosterone therapy and go through puberty, as well as against the disadvantages of never experiencing physically mature sexuality.

Wassersug and Johnson contested these warnings and claimed that puberty can be “safely delayed at least until the boy is the age of majority.” They even presented the father with some potential benefits of living as a eunuch, such as a lower risk of prostate cancer.

In the section on “Social Considerations,” Wassersug and Johnson continue making their case, writing that “eunuchs have been the most common and consistent non-binary gender throughout history” but lament that they are “absent from the contemporary expansion of genders in the western world.”

Wassersug and Johnson appear to be of the opinion that the reason boys who are castrated pre-puberty choose to take supplemental testosterone and go through male puberty is that, since the 20th century, there have been no prestigious eunuch role models to serve as inspiration for them.

Instead, such boys now have the opportunity to develop along with the rest of their peers. However, the authors don’t seem to take this as a positive, asking:

The questions then are: With increasing acceptance in the western world of gender presentations that are variously called non-binary, gender queer, and androgynous, can the eunuch gender be resurrected? Can this be done in a way that does not lead to discrimination against a genetic male, who in fact lacks testes, is androgen deficient since childhood, and elects to identify as a “eunuch”?

They decide to test their theory out on the child in question:

We suggested to the father that his son could safely wait until his late teens or early 20s to make a decision as an adult about whether he wished to take supplemental testosterone or live his life as a eunuch.

Against the advice of the boy’s endocrinologists and despite noting that he could grow up to face stigma and would not develop sexually, Wassersug and Johnson present a potential eunuch identification for the boy as a desirable outcome.

This advice is quite concerning when considered on its own, but things become even darker when you take a look at the kind of research the two authors are involved in, as well as how they have carried it out.

In a months-long investigation for Reduxx in 2022, Gluck discovered that WPATH had been collaborating with a body modification fetish forum called The Eunuch Archives. Shortly after publishing her initial investigation, she also discovered that both Wassersug and Johnson have been active members of the forum for decades, Johnson under the handle “Jesus” and Wassersug as “Eunuchunique.”

Both have also been active at WPATH conferences since at least 2009 and appear to have been instrumental in the creation of the SOC8 eunuch chapter.

In fact, Johnson, as “Jesus,” claimed that he was specifically chosen to contribute to the section on eunuchs. He also claimed to have been involved in editing the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which renamed “gender identity disorder” to “gender dysphoria.”

Gluck’s investigation further revealed that the Eunuch Archive has a “Fiction Archive” which hosts stories that eroticize child castration. There is a section within the archive specifically titled “minors” which hosts over 3,000 stories.

Wassersug and Johnson used the stories from the forum in a series of papers specifically exploring the sexual aspect of castration.

For example, in 2015, they published a paper titled, “The sexual side of castration narratives: Fiction written by and for eunuchs and eunuch ‘wannabes’.” The abstract describes these stories as “therapeutic” despite the fact that one-third of them involved minors:

Common themes in both stories and personal histories of voluntarily castrated men were homosexuality, childhood abuse, and threats of castration. We found that 83% of stories were explicitly sexual, which was defined as containing physical or mental sexual arousal; sexual acts such as masturbation, oral sex, or penetrative sex; or attainment of orgasm. Fifty-one percent of stories described forced castrations, 34% involved minors, and 24% described orgasms related to genital ablation. Writing these stories may be therapeutic for the authors, as some members have claimed that writing them has allowed them to work through their extreme castration ideations without acting on them.

They continued exploring these stories in a 2019 paper, “Sadomasochistic erotica and the sexual response cycle: Insights from the Eunuch Archives,” where they noted that the top 100 stories on the forum are characterized by “extreme sadomasochism.”

A 2022 paper titled, “Castration for Pleasure: Exploring Extreme Castration Ideations in Fiction,” again had the authors analyzing the top 100 stories from the more than 8,800 on the site at the time. They write in the abstract that:

The most popular EA stories link sexual gratification and romantic partnership with genital abuse. They are characterized by the absence of consent for genital ablations and multiple SM-related paraphilias. Many stories feature attraction to, and ablation of, the genitals of pubescent or adolescent males.

Later in 2022, Wassersug and Johnson turned their attention to exploring why such men had a castration fetish in the first place. In October, they published a paper on male paraphilic sexual attraction to other males without genitals.

By surveying the members of The Eunuch Archive, they discovered that, in some cases, the paraphilia was associated with traumatic childhood experiences and body image issues such as “(1) witnessed animal castration (23.7%); (2) having been threatened with castration during their childhood (11.9%); (3) receiving genital injuries inflicted by others (11.0%); (4) pretending to be castrated (60.2%); (5) thinking of self-castration (54.2%); or (6) injuring their own penis (23.4%).”

One of their more recent papers is particularly hard to read knowing the advice that Wassersug and Johnson gave to the father of the 14-year-old boy. In 2023, they published a study titled, “Exposures to information about castration and emotional trauma before puberty are associated with men’s risk of seeking genital ablation as adults.”

As the title notes, they discovered that “Learning about castration before 13 years of age is associated with more adverse childhood experiences,” and “as compared with those who learned about castration after 13 years of age, those who knew about castration earlier were more likely to have self-injured their penis.”

In light of all of Wassersug and Johnson’s own research, one understandably wonders about the wisdom of encouraging a 14-year-old boy to adopt a eunuch “gender identity,” even if he was already castrated in a medical accident. Would it not seem that this could cause risks of further self-injurious behavior and of the development of paraphilias like those of the men active on The Eunuch Archives?

Men interested in castration do not appear to be well-adjusted and mentally healthy individuals. Their fetish often seems to be a result of trauma and they frequently display a sexual interest in minors. To be blunt, many of them are pedophiles. Why was this “identity” presented as not only a possible but a desirable outcome for a teenage boy?

The optics of spending decades on a forum that hosts sexualized forced child castration stories and then encouraging a minor to identify as a eunuch are not very good, either.

Aside from this single case, the rise of the “eunuch gender identity” and its inclusion into the SOC8 at least partly at the behest of Wassersug and Johnson has even broader implications. It represents a growing movement within gender ideology away from conceptions of gender identity as a fixed and innate inner essence and as simply a desire for body modification, regardless of motive.

The further we go down this path, the less those who provide “gender-affirming care” will be held to account when those who go through with these procedures experience regret. The whole process becomes a simple provision of services. Sterilization, sexual dysfunction, and irreversible body modification become nothing but buyer’s remorse.

Wassersug and Johnson attempted to steal the sexual maturation of a 14-year-old boy in favor of a manufactured “identity,” just as the trans movement is doing to an entire generation of children. Worst of all, this is being called “care,” and all of our major institutions, especially here in Canada, have bought into it.

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