Twenty-six-year-old Miles Yardley — formerly known in downtown New York City as a musician, influencer, and model named Salomé — publicly renounced his trans identity this year, sold his women’s clothing online, and began posting grim details to his 20,000 or so followers on X about how his medical transition as a teenager has affected his body over the past decade. Yardley is a microcelebrity — as Salomé, he modeled for fashion brands Elena Velez and Batsheva, and he’s currently auditioning for a show on HBO. His detransition was, in part, spurred by another micro-celebrity, the alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, with whom Yardley is sharing a house in Los Angeles. Yiannopoulos now claims to be “ex-gay” and has launched Tarantula, a talent agency for scandal-plagued celebrities; Yardley is a Tarantula client. Yardley also says he’s ex-gay and is undergoing a form of conversion therapy — a branch of therapy as debunked as possible in a changing world — and has made a public embrace of Roman Catholicism.
Given the politics and personalities involved, it’s tempting to accuse both men of being as deliberately offensive as possible — even to Roman Catholics, who won’t love the performative and irreligious tone of their materials. And as one straight man I know said, Yiannopoulos’s and Yardley’s new trad-bromance “looks pretty gay”. Yet Yardley seems to represent an incipient trend. He is one of a handful of detransitioners I personally know of who have turned toward Catholicism’s restrictive sexual dogmas (still no blowjobs, folks) and teachings on biological sex in order to change their lives.
While not all insights gained from the experience of being trans and back again are reliable — especially when staged for an online public — their voices are worth hearing for what they reveal about the so-called vibe shift, a younger generation’s turn away from sexual-liberationist paradigms, and the role of Christianity in it. This, even as the attention-seeking quality of their discourse recalls nothing so much as the gender trend just a few years ago — only now in the opposite direction.
Yardley is of the first generation of young people to launch their medical transition during puberty as part of the Tumblr-fueled gender revolution, and believes he will face permanent fertility consequences as a result. He says that he was a feminine-looking boy, who liked female things and had mostly female friends, and who was often misgendered. He didn’t know why he was different, but “other people informed me of it”. Around the time Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” came out, in 2011, he wondered if being transgender might be the answer. He went to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and says he was goaded into transgender care. The therapist recommended by the clinic “immediately bought into it that I was really a girl”.
Today, he is graceful, tall, and girlish in photos, and easily passes as a biological woman. But he has grown to regret his transition for a host of what are becoming the usual reasons: concerns about how cross-sex hormones were affecting his health; physical pain; fatigue with what other detransitioners have called “trans OCD”, an obsessional focus on one’s body; and a dawning realisation that the desire for transgenderism spawned from an original mental-health issue that being transgender wasn’t fixing. “I was never comfortable with it,” Yardley tells me.
Like some male-to-female transitioners, he says that at least part of his attempt to become a woman was in order to cope with same-sex feelings of attraction without having to declare himself as gay. He now objects to the characterisation of sexual orientation as a fixed and immutable identity. He also rejects the idea that being a feminine boy meant he was actually a girl. “Gay and trans are the same thing”, he tells me. “Both result from an original trauma to your gender that can be healed”.
It’s fairly easy to diagnose a swing from one utopian extreme to another, which comments like that exemplify. But it’s less easy to dismiss the critique of categories of sexual identity and sexual orientation, acknowledged by scholars on both the Left and the Right to be a fairly recent invention. For most of human history, as Michel Foucault pointed out, heterosexuality or homosexuality did not exist as identities; both were invented in the late 19th century as a means of normalising heterosexual behavior, while treating same-sex-attracted people as “abnormal”. That the invention turned on its makers and ended up providing the grounds for gay liberation is one of history’s delicious ironies. Today’s proliferation of increasingly niche identities and orientations, and the practice of changing them as a person evolves, supports the argument that these identities aren’t as hard-and-fast as they appear.
“The attention-seeking quality of their discourse recalls nothing so much as the gender trend.”
Some of the excesses of Yardley’s and Yiannopoulos’s publicly performed hard-Right Catholicism seem like they could be trolling. But Yardley’s explanation over the telephone sounds heartfelt. He was raised nominally Catholic, he says, and as early as 2020, when it became clear to him that being trans wasn’t making him happier or more socially comfortable, he began to research dissenting opinions. A Catholic priest was the first person ever, he says, to tell him something most human beings have believed throughout history — “No, you’re a man, and you can’t get out of it.”
Another outspoken detransitioner, Ray Alex Williams, has run a YouTube channel on the subject since 2023, and published an essay on Substack on 24 February headlined, “How Catholicism Solved My Autogynephilia Problem.” Williams’s essay begins with the acknowledgement that people will think he has “gone off the deep end” and has gone “from one extreme cult to another”. During a follow-up phone conversation, he reveals that he isn’t officially Catholic yet; his religious-conversion experience is fewer than two weeks old; and his girlfriend broke up with him over it. The headline, in this case, seems like a deliberate distortion in a bid for clicks. However, as he tells it, his “desperate search for moral clarity” has been years in the making, and he believes he needs such clarity to help him combat the destructive role his sexual desires have played in his life.
Autogynephilia, or AGP, is contested cultural territory. Defined by the eminent Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard as “a man’s paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman”, it generally involves not just the erotic desire to be a woman, but accompanying fantasies of being used and abused for being female, often these days following the tropes of the “sissy” subgenre of pornography.
When they don’t deny autogynephilia altogether, transgender activists object to the term because it pathologises the set of sexual desires it describes, and opens the door to the claim that trans people with these desires are not women, but just men with an obsessive paraphilia. (Yardley explicitly disavows AGP as having had any role in his experience.) One thing is certain, though: the set of desires itself is fairly common.
New York magazine books critic Andrea Long Chu has been open that such impulses fueled her transition, and discussed how sissy porn shaped her identity in remarks at the New York Public Library in 2018. Chu said that she started watching “a lot” of pornography as a middle-school boy, and described a progression in her tastes from “run-of-the-mill, mainstream pornography” to “JOI” (jerk-off instruction) videos, in which a female performer demeans the male viewer. From there, Chu “went down a humiliation track … until I hit sissy porn…. My porn addiction had all along been waiting for something like sissy porn … because now if I’m reading in retrospect, the whole thing was about trying to access a kind of sexuality that wasn’t about being a man”. Trans actress and Euphoria star Hunter Schaefer wrote along similar lines in a now-deleted Instagram post the same year: “My sexual orientation was not gay. It was not straight. Nor pan. It was an attraction, is an attraction, always, to misogyny. My gender was SO influenced by a need to be used by men.”
Detransitioner Williams chronicles a lifelong struggle with a similar set of feelings and desires, which led him to transition to female in 2015, at the age of 28. He says he didn’t have “an underlying predisposition to hate my male body”, though that started after he became trans. Williams lived as a woman for eight years, which he says decreased the sexually fetishistic aspects of his behavior (and his libido), but had other negative consequences, such as extreme social anxiety. He also, in 2020, developed a pulmonary embolism and almost died, he says, which he attributes to taking cross-sex hormones. Attempts to detransition and manage his resurgent AGP in a healthy way, along lines suggested by Phil Illy’s book Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex, were a failure, despite finding a bisexual, kink-positive partner who accepted his sexuality.
The activist stance on these desires is that they are neutral in themselves and can be considered a sexual orientation, and that any negative consequences come from social stigmatisation. Williams’s experience could bear that out. Despite finding willing partners and accepting circles, he continued to feel shame, confusion, and social discomfort from his gender urges and sexual practices. However, he also found that indulging his desires oriented him towards masturbation and away from his partner, and that his desires followed patterns of other addictions in his life, requiring ever-greater stimulus for diminishing rewards, and ultimately bringing unhappiness instead of pleasure.
One day, high on cannabis — another persistent addiction struggle, he writes — and ready to engage in his fetish, Williams had the revelation that both his marijuana smoking and his sexual behavior were self-destructive and pathological in the same way, and had to stop. “Immediately”, he writes, he had the desire to get back into religion, which he had experimented with before on his detransition journey, but this time, he was drawn to Catholicism, specifically for its intensity of pageantry and ritual and its strict sexual doctrine. He understands that his new convictions might seem suspect or “mentally unstable”, he says, but he now believes that the inner voice of shame and disgust that he hasn’t been able to silence has a transcendental cause, and is distinguishing a fundamental right from wrong.
“It’s the scare tactics of the original trans movement: if we don’t all believe this right now, people will die.”
Not all of the new detransitioners are drawn by Christianity’s oldest branch. Sierra Weir, 37, who goes by the name Exulansic on X and Substack, has since 2021 devoted herself since to exposing the ugly side of the gender trend, for simpler but similar reasons of mental and physical health. Weir did a double-major in gender studies and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and says she was once “really into” transgenderism. She transitioned medically to male when she was 23 but began to have ideological disagreements with the trans orthodoxies and experienced harmful and dangerous health outcomes from hormone therapy. She says she now has osteopenia (low bone density, a precursor to osteoporosis) which is a known risk factor with Depo Provera, which she took to suppress menstruation, and she has been recently diagnosed with lumbar degeneration, which she believes is related. She is vituperative against her former doctors, whom she believes misdiagnosed her and exacerbated her problems. “It just ruined my life”, she says.
Weir’s social media channels circulate lurid news items about crimes by transgender women, and frequently discuss suicides by distressed transgender people all genders and ages — material that can legitimately be read as stigmatising for transgender people seeking public acceptance. She also writes and films disturbing stories on mostly biological female victims of terrible mental and physical health outcomes and botched surgeries. However, she says, “I’m not against individual people who are trans, and I have a great deal of compassion and empathy. I’m speaking out because I don’t want harm to come to them.” (She may or may not now be on the right side of history, but once again, it’s the scare tactics of the original trans movement: if we don’t all believe this right now, people will die.)
In addition to believing that hormones and surgeries are physically risky and damaging in ways people aren’t told about, she believes that cross-sex hormones can cloud a person’s thinking — making them more likely to opt for risky procedures — and exacerbate previous mental health issues. “The hormones were affecting my ability to think and my ability to remember”, she says. Having detransitioned, she feels like “I don’t have brain fog anymore.” She believes that people suffering from gender dysphoria from any of these conditions “deserve to have optimal health and to understand their predicament”, and that medical providers are “abdicating that responsibility.”
Prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, Weir was “being banned from all platforms of note”, she says. Now she’s free to critique the movement she was once a part of, and with the same zeal. Yardley, for his part, attributes the wave of detransitioners not to the vibe shift or a trend, but merely to the passage of time. It’s been several years since the transgender tipping point, he says, and people have “passed that first sense of euphoria that people get from accomplishing any goal” and begun to have doubts. “So many people are detransitioning because so many people transitioned”, he says. That conclusion, as least, sounds reasonable, and like something we should be open to learning from.
But let’s hope the pendulum doesn’t merely swing from one brand of too-certain conviction to another. The Roman church, in addition to its prohibition of most sexual acts, asks adherents to cultivate lives of silence, contemplation, and prayer. Those who have embraced the Church as a refuge from online ideologies might want to take up these practices — instead of plunging head-long into the next performative mania.
