HBO drama series The White Lotus has unexpectedly dragged a dark secret of the trans movement kicking and screaming into the light. In the episode, ‘Full Moon Party’, which premiered last week, Rick meets up with his old buddy, Frank, in a bar in Bangkok. Their conversation quickly takes a very weird turn.
Frank, who is played brilliantly by Sam Rockwell, starts with an account of how his sex addiction spiralled out of control. Then comes the segue no one is expecting, as he describes how he decided to start dressing up as a woman during sex. Before he knew it, he was inviting three or four men a night to come over and ‘rail’ him, as he puts it.
The scene is memorable for more than just the shock factor or the quality of acting. It also represents the first explicit treatment on mainstream television of autogynephilia – the powerful sexual fetish in which men get aroused by imagining themselves as women. Or as Frank puts it:
‘I’d hire an Asian girl who’d just sit there and watch the whole thing. I’d look in her eyes while some guy is fucking me, and I’d think: “I am her and I’m fucking me”.’
Many viewers were understandably taken aback by Frank’s confession. The vast majority will never have heard of autogynephilia. To anyone familiar with the trans movement, though, this will have come as far less of a shock. Many men who identify as women are not only sexually attracted to women, but are also excited (literally) by crossdressing and otherwise caricaturing women. One prime example of this is an interest in so-called sissy porn, which shows a man being humiliated by being forcibly feminised against his will.
Just as remarkable as the White Lotus scene itself has been the reaction from mainstream media outlets, which regularly hold themselves up as experts on and advocates for the trans movement. CNN said Frank’s monologue was ‘absolutely bonkers’. The New York Times said it ‘is too raunchy to repeat in fine detail’. The Standard said it was ‘queasy’. As for Forbes magazine, its headline asked plaintively, ‘What did Sam Rockwell’s The White Lotus monologue mean?’.
In the Los Angeles Times, two of the paper’s entertainment correspondents, Greg Braxton and Mary McNamara, competed to sound the more dumbfounded. The sexual behaviour being described was everything, they wrote, from ‘an off-the-chain exploration of privilege’ to something ‘so abruptly dark and extreme’ that it might have been included merely for shock value.
It is almost as if these outlets, which never normally miss an opportunity to push for ‘trans rights’, have no idea about the radioactively erotic core of the trans identity. This is hugely significant. If you don’t realise that dressing like a woman gets some men sexually aroused, you will fail to appreciate the importance of policing single-sex spaces.
Take the now infamous Wi Spa scandal. In 2021, trans activist Darren Merager was charged with exposing himself in the women’s changing room at a spa in Los Angeles. He had campaigned for gender self-ID and, when the legislation enabling this was passed in California in 2019, he used it to change his legal gender. He has also been a registered sex offender since 2006, receiving convictions for indecent exposure in 2002 and 2003.
At the time Merager was charged with the Wi Spa incident, he was also awaiting trial on seven counts of indecent exposure dating back to 2019. Yet when he was first accused by female customers at Wi Spa for exposing his erect penis to them, plenty of papers – including the Los Angeles Times – scandalously took his word over the women’s. It was apparently completely unthinkable to them that a man might identify as trans in search of sexual gratification.
You’d have thought writers at the Los Angeles Times might have learnt a lesson from that debacle – especially Mary McNamara. The year before Merager was charged with exhibitionism in Wi Spa, she laid into JK Rowling for warning about the growing willingness to admit males into female spaces.
In response to Rowling citing her personal experience with male violence as a reason to be cautious, McNamara wrote: ‘People talking about the sanctity of gender-segregated bathrooms should stop using the word “safety” when they mean “my own problematic emotional comfort”.’ For good measure, McNamara called Rowling ‘crazy’ and ‘verifiably wrong’ for suggesting that some men might want to gain access to women’s toilets or changing rooms for nefarious reasons.
What is bizarre about this kind of performative idiocy from journalists is that it’s not hard to find out the truth about crossdressing kinksters. Prominent trans writer Andrea Long Chu has said explicitly that sissy porn inspired him to transition. The trans movement’s misogynistic, pornified view of women is reflected in Chu’s belief that ‘getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is’.
It is because heterosexual autogynephiles believe women are inferior that they are sexually aroused by being viewed as one, just as Frank in The White Lotus is. Of course, few trans-identified men would ever publicly admit that crossdressing is part of a sexual fantasy for them. The vast majority are careful to present their demands as a necessary means to alleviate the psychic pain of ‘gender dysphoria’. They know full well that if legislators or the public realised this movement was driven in no small part by sexual compulsion, they would never agree to a policy as mad as gender self-identification.
Thanks to that White Lotus monologue, a dark truth about trans has been dragged out of the closet. We cannot allow it to disappear back into it.
Malcolm Clark is a TV producer. Visit his Substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.
