After 10 years of covering the trans madness, here’s what I learned

Sometimes you just have to write what you know and document what you’ve seen, heard, and metabolized to remind yourself that, no, you haven’t gone crazy. 

Perhaps by spelling it all out and publishing it, the masses might begin to grasp the breadth and scope of a problem they’ve been led to believe is an overblown, remote issue. Tenacious journalist that I am, I’ll provide ample receipts proving that the exact opposite is true.

Allow me to show you what life in the trans trench has been like for the past decade, with a combination of personal story and indisputable, brute facts. This is the tip of the iceberg, a mere fraction of the filth.

Probably eight years ago, I remember seeing for the first time a series of images that are burned into my memory. They say a picture says a thousand words, but in the trans trench, they are the beginning of a kind of trauma — the jarring introduction to a bestial type of Hell you never knew existed. Writing in Corinth with a front-row seat to all kinds of debauchery, the Apostle Paul noted in Romans 1 how wicked people “invent new ways of doing evil” (Romans 1:30). The trans scourge is that. On steroids, literally.

The first image I saw was a blue-haired, bare-chested girl who looked like she might be all of 14 years old. Scars were where her breasts used to be. She had the most tormented, vacant eyes.

It took me aback, and I gasped repeatedly. I stood up from my desk and walked away, feeling as though I’d been violated at a deep level, like a sledgehammer to the gut. I told a friend that it felt like I had involuntarily looked at sexually violent fetish porn featuring a minor child. That friend replied, “Brandon, that is exactly what you saw.”

The second image I saw was when I heard from someone who’d undergone a radial forearm phalloplasty and regretted it. She sent me a picture of her gutted forearm, the harvested tissue from which was used to make a fake penis. Another gut-punch.

Some weeks later, I stumbled upon Miami-based Irish gender surgeon Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher’s Instagram account — some of us refer to her as the “butcher of Louth.” This surgeon was posing next to young people she’d operated on, including a girl who had previous self-harm scars. Around that same time, I remember seeing Canadian gender surgeon Giancarlo McEvenue posing with a Santa hat, holding up two medical waste buckets labeled “breast tissue.” I subsequently saw footage of him speaking at a Johnson & Johnson–sponsored discussion, boasting of his sordid profession. Calling this unmitigated depravity is the understatement of the century.

I also remember interviewing a regretful de-trans man who was castrated, and he told me how he ended up ejaculating blood. I was glad this interview was on the phone and not on a Zoom call because he would have seen me fall out of my chair.

Everyone has their own journey of falling down the gender rabbit hole, and when you find yourself in this particular trench, you soon start meeting all sorts of shocked and disoriented people, astonished that this is real life. It’s a freight train of unimaginable nightmares hurtling down the tracks at a high velocity, bulldozing people right and left.

Those of us who’ve been doing the hard work exposing the madness against an impenetrable mainstream media blockade can all tell you what it’s like to learn about all the horrors, only to be gaslit with flat denials like “that’s not happening.” Then you show concrete proof, and it becomes “well, it’s only a few people,” and then maybe “why are you so obsessed with this small, strange issue?” The whole world is under a reality-denying spell, shrouded in pink and blue flags, and people are programmed with dismissive talking points if anyone suggests that something’s wrong. 

We, the trans (and queer) trench dwellers, have seen pedophilic elements of this movement in silicone pediatric penis packers — vile products aimed at girls as young as 4 so that they can “pack” their underwear to give the appearance of a male bulge. 

If that wasn’t ghastly enough, we found out how academics and others in internet chat forums were behind the strategic rebranding of “gender identity disorder” to “gender dysphoria” at meetings of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Thanks to the intrepid reporting of Reduxx, which spent several months investigating the Eunuch Archive, we learned that men on that site swap castration-themed written pornography involving the sexual torture of children whose puberty has been stunted. One user on that foul site described watching a trans surgery on a male as “arousing” to watch. These men say “eunuch” is a kind of “gender-diverse” person, by the way, and it’s actually listed in WPATH’s official guidelines. 

The trench dwellers also know about the 2016 Dutch medical report that was part of the linchpin study underlying gender surgeries on youth. An 18-year-old in that study had been on puberty blockers, so his genitals hadn’t matured, and surgeons used part of his bowel tissue to fashion a simulacrum of a female sex organ — a laparoscopic intestinal vaginoplasty. Complications followed: E. coli bacteria from his intestine spread through his body, and he died of sepsis. When this came to light, more people started paying attention, especially since Elon Musk had purchased Twitter by then, and photos of the man’s maimed genital area were able to circulate freely online.

We’ve seen pink-haired queer surgeon Blair Peters speak in a podcast interview about using the peritoneum in similarly grotesque surgeries he does on minor boys. We’ve watched Democrat politicians walk out of the room when U.S. Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Florida) tried to show footage of that Peters interview during a House hearing. 

We’ve seen Jazz Jennings’ face contorted in excruciating pain after “bottom surgery,” and we later learned how his postoperative wound split open. We’ve seen a young woman with cerebral palsy bearing chest scars from “top surgery,” while croaking out sounds and flailing about in a wheelchair. 

Just when we think it can’t get worse — it always does — we stumble upon the story of Scarlet Blake, a transgender-identifying man who livestreamed himself killing a cat by skinning it and putting the animal in a blender. Blake murdered a human being a few months later, but the mass media broadly reported that he, the perpetrator, is a “woman.”   

We’ve seen all the boundary-breaking madness of garish drag queens reading to children in libraries. We can’t seem to forget this particular pervert that some of us call “rainbow monkey dildo man.”

We’ve seen the 11-year-old “drag kid” performer “Desmond Is Amazing” dance in a gay nightclub while patrons threw dollar bills at him. Elle Magazine platformed another young drag performer, an 8-year-old boy from Canada whose stage name is “Lactatia.”

Speaking of lactation, we’ve watched the disturbing capture of groups like La Leche League and the Centers for Disease Control endorse the feculent phenomenon of “chestfeeding” — trans-identifying males pretending to breastfeed babies. The NHS Trust in the UK even claimed that the drug-induced, hormone-addled discharge that such men secrete was as good as mother’s milk. In 2017, one such man who “chestfed” his daughter wrote in the Seattle alt newspaper The Stranger that the experience was sexually charged and that he “got off” on it, insisting readers not judge him. Yes, it’s as revolting as it sounds; they are using infants like prostitutes to satisfy their sick, twisted fetish. 

We’ve seen the FOIA’d progress report document showing how Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy altered a research protocol, lowering the age from 13 to 8 for the cross-sex hormone cohort inclusion criteria in an NIH-funded grant. 

We’ve watched in horror as a psychopathic man who savagely murdered a lesbian couple and their teen son was transferred into a women’s prison, made easy by a state law that California Governor Gavin Newsom signed in 2020. We’ve heard bone-chilling stories of violent male offenders being housed with women elsewhere, too. We’ve seen a judge who nearly received a lifetime federal appointment — thank you, Senator Ossoff, for voting no — who had urged, against the recommendation of the Bureau of Prisons, that a man who had sexually abused a nine-year-old boy and distributed child sexual abuse material be incarcerated with women. All because of the magic word “trans.”

We’ve seen the data, from insurance record analyses and medical journal documentation, showing girls as young as 12 and 13 undergoing mastectomies, and boys as young as 15 undergoing genital surgery. We’ve seen the Do No Harm database showing that between 2019 and 2023, nearly 14,000 minors received puberty blockers or hormones, and over 5,700 minors underwent gender surgeries. These are lowball figures, I should note, since some insurance systems are closed to researchers.

We’ve watched the federal government pursue whistleblowers, like Dr. Eithan Haim, who exposed the entrenched medical harm. We’ve fielded dozens of desperate calls from parents describing how their children are permanently sterile and surgically disfigured in pursuit of a lie. We’ve heard the piercing anguish and exhaustion in their voices, and their stories of being jolted awake at night with heart palpitations. Some have had their children taken and kept away from them by state social services agencies and their ideological machinery, and many moms and dads have no legal recourse to get them back. One such teenager, Yaeli Martinez, who was taken from her mother, died by suicide, stepping in front of an oncoming train in Los Angeles. Her mother had to learn how the pieces of her shattered body were being retrieved from the railroad tracks.

Some of us now carry secondary trauma from years of sifting through this diabolical wretchedness. We find ourselves sporadically and inexplicably on the verge of vomiting, our bodies seizing up in panic. Our nervous systems are fried, and our sleep is disturbed. Some of us have family members mired in the gender jungle, and it makes the torment all the more personal. 

We are not in the mood to be told that we are right-wing “culture warriors” stoking a moral panic. We are done being told “Just let them pee in peace,” and “Trans kids know who they are,” as we have heard ad nauseam.

No — those of us in the trans trench have been exposed to things at a granular level that we hope you never have to see. We’ll take some of it to our graves. We’ve been harassed, threatened, sent disturbing material by email, and censored on social media for stating basic biology. We can relate to the kind of hostile bilge that Irreversible Damage author Abigail Shrier received from a trans activist. I print it in full so as not to sugarcoat what it has been like: “I’ll slit your f*cking throat and f*ck your newly made neck p*ssy.”

How any of us in the trans trench have remained sane is nothing short of a miracle. Some of us need counseling to process everything we’ve had to absorb, so we can inform the public about the atrocities happening right under our noses.

Even as some gender clinics are closing due to federal agency action, and though the U.S. Supreme Court has handed down three solid rulings curtailing gender ideology in the past year, this horrific problem continues. Oregon remains a transgender haven. Maine Democrats recently platformed a man who claims to be a woman as a possible candidate for US Senate — a man who also has claimed that he ovulates and that menstrual blood comes out of his anus. 

But instead of accountability, we feel mostly ignored. In a sane world, we would be convening Nuremberg 2.0 tribunals, but we’re watching politicians and major media start to treat this chapter as something to forget and be memory-holed.

But we trans trench dwellers never will.