“No happy person transitions because they are happy,” Ritchie Herron says at the top of the new documentary The Lost Boys. “It’s self hatred, not self love that drives you there.”
For each man interviewed in the documentary, the trouble that led to transition began in childhood. As boys, they were bullied, or they liked clothes and toys that were more aligned with stereotypes for girls. They heard messages that manhood, that men were bad, were not something anyone should want to be.
Herron spoke to the issue of the hatred of men, the continuous efforts to blame men. “You’re part of the sex that has damaged society for so long,” he said. “So you’ve got a lot of guilt, a burden, and you take that very literal mind: and it just goes ‘being a man is a bad, I don’t want to be a man, therefore I’m a woman, or a trans woman, or something.”
Cancelled comic Graham Linehan has been outspoken about the problem with the trans trend to the point of destroying his career and losing his family due to the pushback. He spoke about the problem of what has become hatred of men in contemporary culture.
“Young men are probably in a place where they feel they’re being monitored, they have to watch everything they say,” Linehan said, “and they can’t really be themselves.” In his view, social media and the very online culture young men exist in is a big part of the problem.
And so, each of these men determined that they were not men, that deep down they were women. They undertook to live as women, to present themselves as women, and most importantly, to be perceived of as women by strangers, friends, and family alike.
The men who undertook transition spoke about hitting puberty late, developing later than their peers, being interested in poetry, or simply not fitting into the stereotypes or archetypes of the men and women in their lives. These men felt like they didn’t belong and so they began to trying to come up with some way to fit in.