The Island of Lost Boys

Male survivors of the trans cult speak out

I would definitely like to have been a woman, because I feel, whether rightly or wrongly, that then everything would have fallen into place. The way I speak, the way I walk, the way I move, and the thoughts in my head would not any longer have been remarkable. They would have been acceptable. What I’m so bad at is being a man. — Quentin Crisp

When transgenderism was a budding fad, some people looked into their crystal balls and shrewdly predicted that a reckoning was coming. It wouldn’t be immediate, of course. It would take time for young people to realize they’d been screwed over. And it would take courage. Lots and lots of courage.

Over the past few years, a number of women have displayed that courage, coming forward to tell their stories and sue the medical professionals who harmed them. A few men have as well. But many more women than men.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Statistically, men are also more reluctant than women to report sexual assault, which also requires a great deal of courage for both sexes. But for men, it carries an extra weight of shame. The same is true when it comes to identifying as a victim of transgender “medicine.” Like telling one’s rape story, it’s not easy for anyone. But it will always be easier for a woman to stand up and say, “I thought I was a bro” than it is for a man to stand up and say, “I thought I was a sissy.”

The new free documentary Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood spotlights five young men who have decided to tell their stories. Alex, Brian, Njada, Ritchie, and Torren come from a variety of backgrounds. No two of their stories are exactly the same. Each is like a fingerprint, unique to the storyteller. But all five men have something in common: courage.

Their stories are interwoven with reflections from two therapists, Joe Burgo and Az Hakeem, and Irish writer-activist Graham Linehan (who lost his reputation, family, and career after publicly opposing trans ideology). Linehan doesn’t have very much screentime, but his presence is a sad reminder that we’re dealing with a top-down cultural contagion, enforced by people with enough power to completely demolish someone’s social capital.

There is also a sixth young man whom we never see. Instead, we see his father, Steven. Steven tells us how the boy “came out” transgender in his senior year of high school, walked away, and has never come back. He remains “lost.” “The last thing I think about in a day is my son,” Steven says, “and first when I wake up, before I’m even out of bed.”

Although each story is unique, there are certain recurring patterns. One running theme is that the men in these boys’ lives often seemed to be either absent, predatory, or weak. This is not a grand unifying theory. There’s Steven, after all, apparently a loving and present father who reports that he and his wife were “blindsided.” But it ties several stories together. Ritchie Herron, a young Englishman, only ever talks about his “mum” showing up to appointments with him and being pressured to make decisions. But he found plenty of men willing to enfold him into a “community” online. These men, of course, were predatory.

Meanwhile, Torren grew up in a blue-collar American subculture where the men occupied themselves with a narrow range of “manly” interests (cars, beer, hunting), while the women, in his words, “ran the show.” Similarly, Njada’s father tried to push his son towards “manly” interests and tasks, but when Njada drifted into gender confusion, he ironically failed to “man up” to his own wife. Njada recalls how she instantly took the driver’s seat and began to insist, “You better use the pronouns.” Like the women in Torren’s world, she was definitely running the show. These two stories are particularly interesting, because they complicate simplistic narratives of “toxic masculinity.” If anything, they evoke a world in which men become absorbed in “manly” pursuits while simultaneously failing to embody masculine leadership in the home. Thus lacking immediate models of how to be their own distinct selves while still being healthy men, these boys sought guidance from the broader culture. But as they discovered, that broader culture of teachers, therapists, and influencers was not going to help them become healthy men. Quite the opposite.

In the film, Joe Burgo proposes a nuanced third way for how men can properly lead and nurture misfit boys—neither by questioning their manhood if they diverge from rigid norms of masculinity, nor by “problematizing” all distinctly masculine traits, a trend which he believes has increased male depression. If boys do in fact like distinctly “boyish” things, that should be fine. If they don’t, that should also be fine.

I once discussed this in person with Burgo at a cocktail party in Washington. When I asked him what he thought of Richard Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men, which is generally sympathetic to the plight of boys, he said he still disagreed with Reeves’ idea of nudging boys towards more “feminine” trades—teaching, nursing, etc. As a disclaimer, I still need to read Reeves for myself, but I agree that particular idea isn’t going to solve the masculinity crisis. As I put it to Joe, it’s less urgent to mix up more statistically feminine trades and more urgent to re-dignify masculine trades. Here Joe looked up with a little smile, very taken with this, and said, “One thousand per cent.”

The other featured therapist, Az Hakeem, is also very concerned about the masculinity crisis, and he makes a further connection to the cofactor of autism. He’s consistently observed that young male patients on the spectrum followed a certain rigid chain of logical reasoning, based on their tendency to create rigid categories: “To be male, you have to be like this, this, and this. I’m not like this, therefore I’m non-male. Therefore I must be female.” Burgo adds the observation that autistic young people will struggle more than average with the changes their body undergoes in puberty, more likely to feel disgust or a desire to disassociate from who they’re physically becoming.

Several of the young men in this film are themselves either on the autism spectrum or, relatedly, on the OCD spectrum. Depression and anxiety are also recurring themes, as is pornography addiction. Yet the “professionals” who should have cared for them bypassed all these cofactors and glibly promised that everything would be “solved” not by treating their mental health, not by quitting porn, but by female hormones. All of them took estrogen, though Brian, Njada, and Torren seem to have reversed their process before pursuing surgery. Njada recalls how the therapist he sought out in college informed him that “transition is the typical treatment that makes people feel satisfied with their life.” And for a while, he did experience a euphoric “high” as the drug reduced his sex drive. But the high wore off. Brian was initially encouraged to pursue the “treatment” when he reached out to a YouTube influencer who presented herself as a licensed social worker. According to her, only “a transgender person” would like the particular twisted kind of porn he had tumbled into. Although he was troubled, he says he wasn’t suicidal…until he took estrogen.

Alex, from Norway, also wasn’t suicidal when he sought out a therapist, but he had to claim suicidal ideation, because apparently the Norwegian mental health system is so broken that you can’t get an appointment otherwise. He also suffered from autism and OCD. But because, like all these young men, he was unlucky enough to mention his gender dysphoria, his therapist prescribed (what else?) estrogen—within five days. In England, Ritchie wanted help overcoming his OCD, but he was instead referred to a “gender therapist” who put him on estrogen, then bullied him and his reluctant mother towards surgery. Both Ritchie and Alex recall that by the time they were wavering on the edge of surgery, they were suffering so much brain fog from their estrogen pills that it was difficult to formulate a clear counter-argument.

Alex also recalls that the more estrogen he took, the more dysphoric he became, and the more convinced he became that surgery was the next step. “I was like, well, am I woman enough? At what point am I? There’s just this one thing that separates me from other women…” This highlights how hormone therapy can be iatrogenic—that is, reinforcing the condition it’s supposed to “treat.” All of these stories demonstrate that the same is true for social transition. The more these young men were encouraged, the more eager they were to keep going. Njada remembers being surrounded by girls in his college Pride group who sounded just like his mother: “You better use the pronouns…”

For Ritchie, hormone therapy suggested surgery for the very grim reason that it made his genitals feel too painful to keep around. At a certain point, worn down by his therapist’s continual badgering, feeling as if the estrogen was “crushing my testicles,” he eventually decided he might as well get on with it. (Worth noting here that women’s genitalia can also be damaged by testosterone, as Prisha Mosley has described in her testimony.) It’s immensely difficult to hear Ritchie and Alex calmly describe the details and aftermath of their surgeries, but I encourage the viewer to persevere. Alex had to pursue his surgery in Thailand, and already on the plane he remembers thinking “What am I doing?” He was sent to the operating room after just three appointments, where he began having a panic attack on the gurney. Ritchie has shared something similar in a different interview. At the last minute, both young men desperately wanted to get away, desperately wished someone would help them. Then everything went black.

The irony hasn’t gone unnoted that while trans activists position themselves in the same stream as gay and lesbian activists, this gruesome “treatment” functions as the most extreme form of “conversion therapy,” more nightmarish by far than the silliest South Park caricature of a “pray the gay away” evangelical. But there’s very little discussion of homosexuality in the documentary, perhaps because the creators wanted to pitch it to as wide an audience as possible. Yet it bubbles just under the surface throughout. Ritchie, the most public figure among the young men, is openly gay, and he reveals here that the idea of gender transition was first planted in his mind when a gay work friend underwent the treatment. Joe Burgo and Az Hakeem don’t mention here that they themselves are gay, and don’t need to, but this has clearly informed the particular shape of their anger.

Brian’s story is also a sad reminder that garden-variety bullying can still plague boys who are unfortunate enough to be randomly deemed “gay” by their crueler peers. At age 13, he remembers that he excelled at running, which inspired some boys to call him “the other f-word” and throw him down a ravine. Like Ritchie, he doesn’t discuss his experience of same-sex attraction here, but even apart from that, this story painfully underscores how boys like him can be caught between a rock and a hard place.

For Alex, insight has gradually dawned that his more sensitive interests in poetry and music simply made him “a romantic type.” They didn’t make him “effeminate” per se. Nor, he adds, did they make him “gay.”

Here, I want to be absolutely fair to Burgo and Hakeem and say that if young Alex had shown up in their offices, I don’t believe they would have leaped to tell him he was gay either. I do, however, want to note what can go underdiscussed beneath the loud splintering sounds of the LGB vs. T fracture: All of the things that Burgo and Hakeem quite rightly draw out in this documentary — the way boys can “get lost” during puberty (particularly if they have other mental health issues or lack healthy masculine guidance), the element of social contagion, the thrill of finding a “community” that accepts them “as they are” — have longstanding parallels in stories of boys who enter the gay subculture. And just as some gay men strongly resist the idea of pressing boys into a trans “identity,” so people to their right have long resisted the idea of pressing them into a gay “identity.” Again, I’m not saying Burgo or Hakeem would ever do this coercively. But it’s safe to say that many gay therapists have, as well as gay teachers, mentors, and influencers who, like trans activists today, were ideologically possessed.

This isn’t to say that I have some perfectly worked-out “theory of gayness” to sell anyone. Am I a Christian, with normal little “o” orthodox Christian ideas about gay sex? Yes. Does this mean that I could say with confidence precisely how much of same-sex attraction is “hardware” and how much is “software,” or that I think sex orientation change efforts are some kind of silver bullet, even though I also don’t think they should be demonized? No. I understand why LGBs feel as if biology is in their corner, but not in the “T” corner. To say that a boy “is” gay doesn’t bother them in the same way it bothers them to say that a boy “is” a girl, because the latter exists in the realm of pure postmodernist fantasy, whereas one can at least pinpoint a real physiological experience of same-sex attraction. That doesn’t mean they would leap to Conclusions just because a boy likes ballet, or likes to crochet, or requested an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas at age six (you laugh, but I swear I have read an autobiographical memoir in which a grown man tries to Make Something out of the latter).

Still, all of them regard homosexuality as something that could be fully integrated, encouraged, and celebrated, unlike gender dysphoria. And this is where we must inevitably part ways, for all the other common ground we might be able to find.

But in the spirit of friendly dialogue, knowing some of them will probably read this review, I’ll end it by circling back to a point where we agree. I began with a rather wrenching quote from Quentin Crisp, an iconic showman immortalized in Sting’s “Englishman in New York.” Crisp floats through the music video on a cloud of mystery, white-haired and fragile and not quite this-worldly. But his impish smile masked a great deal of pain, which he spent his career channeling into savage Confucian aphorisms about life, the universe, and everything. My opening quote comes from a 1970 television special where he waxes philosophical about sexuality and gender in his usual faux-offhanded, frank fashion.

In the last year of his life, Crisp wrote that it had finally been “explained” to him that he was “actually” not homosexual, but transgender. He accepted this, saying he no longer thought of himself as a man, although “of course, I know I’m not physically a woman.” Had he been a young man when sex change procedures were conveniently available, he believes he would have pursued them. For decades, he’d joked that his life would have been much easier had he been born a woman. Indeed, it’s quite uncanny to compare his words to some words from the young men in this documentary. Alex, very much like Quentin, shares vulnerably about how he believed he was “a failure as a man.” And if he was so bad at being a man, what else was there for him to do but be a woman?

These sad last words of Crisp have naturally been seized on with great glee by the trans lobby, writing breathlessly about how “she” finally realized that “she” was “actually” transgender. In a sense, I suppose one could say Crisp was simply living out the logical conclusion of the song written in his honor: “Be yourself, no matter what they say.” And yet, tragically and paradoxically, he couldn’t see how he was undermining it as a song about masculinity. He couldn’t see how he was in essence giving up on the very idea that “it takes more than combat gear to make a man/takes more than a license to own a gun.”

In a tribute written after Crisp’s death, close friend Guy Kettelhack said that on hearing another gay friend dismiss Quentin as “a flaming old queen,” it suddenly struck him that “I had never found Quentin effeminate. I mean never.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, he still feels he must add, but that it simply wasn’t Quentin. Joe Burgo put it well to me when I made this connection and passed it on: “He was masculine in ways he didn’t understand.”

Ritchie Herron closes his testimony in the documentary with a thought that will stay with me for a long time. Together with a few friends, he’s put together a recovery group, but he says they prefer not to call themselves detransitioners. Because, really, “there was no transition. I never went to female, and I’m not going back to male, right? I never left.”

Indeed.