Modern-day gender cultists are continually telling us that “trans people have always been with us”, by which they mean spurious ahistorical caprices about cross-dressing Egyptian mummies, effeminate Vikings, or Joan of Arcreally being genderqueer. Perhaps in a certain sense, this assertion is actually true: just not in the positive way these true believers mean it.

It has plausibly been suggested that the current trans cult is merely a modern-day pseudo-medical recrudescence of the ancient spiritual creed of Gnosticism, a heretical offshoot of early Christianity with a real propensity to shapeshift into novel new forms as the centuries have passed.

Nonetheless, a few key tenets have remained broadly consistent: that the fallen physical world of solid matter around us is an illusion, perhaps created by an evil rival deity to the true God known as the Demiurge, and that adherents of the cult are the only ones “Illuminated” enough to be able to see through this deception down into the true reality of things.

The core component of the Gnostic state of mind is the seemingly limitless capacity to ignore and deny the blatant physical reality which exists before your very eyes. If matter itself is in some sense evil to you, then why not magically try and reconfigure it into a shape much more of your liking by sheer force of internal supernatural will?

Once upon a time, a Gnostic-minded alchemist may have used this method to transmute base lead into gold; today, a Gnostic-minded transgenderist may pursue similar tactics to transmute their penis into a vagina.

Not that the average 21st century gender-wizard would ever have heard of Gnostic sages of old like Marcion of Sinope or Basilides of Alexandria, of course: you don’t actually need to be a Gnostic to be a Gnostic at all any more. Transgenderism is Gnosticism for the ignorant and self-obsessed, almost a parody of the original faith, an ideal new creed for our solipsistic social media age.

Reinventing the wheel

Being unconscious Gnostics, these people, ever eager to see themselves as playing a gloriously prominent role in some imaginary transgender past, have an unerring ability to mistake metaphor for reality. Take one of the alleged first representations of transgenderism in world literature, that of Plato’s Symposium, a philosophical work written in narrative-based form c.385-370BC. Here, in a discussion of the origins of the two human sexes, Plato has his imaginary version of the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes explain how, back at the dawn of time, there was actually a third human sex known as “the androgyne”, a combination of male and female together.

The specific form of this original “third sex”, though, was rather odd, Aristophanes tells us – as it was the form of the circular wheel:

“The shape of each human being was completely round, with back and sides in a circle; they had four hands each, as many legs as hands, and two faces, exactly alike, on a rounded neck. Between the two faces, which were on opposite sides, was one head with four ears. There were two sets of sexual organs, and everything else was the way you’d imagine it from what I’ve told you. They walked upright, as we do now, whatever direction they wanted. And whenever they set out to run fast, they thrust out all their eight limbs, the ones they had then, and spun rapidly, the way gymnasts do cartwheels, by bringing their legs around straight.”

Eventually, these human wheels rebelled against the reigning Greek gods, whereupon Zeus punished them by splitting them into two separate halves, male and female, thereby robbing them of their Olympus-threatening strength by making them long piningly for one another’s reintegration in the act of sexual union: hence our two separate human sexes today.

It seems likely Plato intended all this as some form of parody, perhaps deriding the exceedingly unlikely nature of certain Greek origin-myths. Aristophanes, it should be noted, was a noted parodist himself, whose comic play The Birds is where we get the mocking phrase “Cloud Cuckoo Land” from.

Evidently many bird-brained gender cultists today are living very firmly within this same head-in-clouds place: surf towards the contemporary trans chat-forum transgenderpulse.com, and marvel at how one student tells the others how he has been reading The Symposium’s origin-myth in class, with “the entire piece seem[ing] like a great gender and sexuality critique”. Other posters agree: “This just shows there has [sic] been others just like us since the human race began,” one Gnostic Gnow-Gnothing replied.

“Just like us” how? They’re giant living wheels!

The germs of an idea

Rather more alarming is that the first significant modern-day gender-theorist of the Age of Science, the German so-called “sexologist” (re: pervert with a medical degree) K.H. Ulrichs (1825-95), was also directly inspired by Aristophanes’ allegory. He made it the basis for his amazing new idea of “the third sex” of “Uranians”, today better known as “homosexuals”. According to the ever reliable Wikipedia, this fact made Ulrichs “the first gay man in world history”, an honour I had previously assumed belonged to Liberace.

Rather than once having been giant living wheels, Ulrichs hypothesised human beings were actually androgynous during the early stages of gestation inside the womb, with residual “germs” of both potential separate sexes remaining still a part of each later embryo once they had finally split apart into distinct separate sexes, as baby boys and girls.

Yet sometimes excessive amounts of the opposite sex’s androgynous “germs” remained stuck in the subsequent, non-androgynous baby, leading to severe gender-confusion, as in Monty Python’s famous Lumberjack Song. Sometimes, an astonished midwife was even presented with a full-blown hermaphrodite, with both male and female external genitalia, Aristophanes’ (non-circular) androgyne made flesh.

As there were an infinitude of different male and female “germs” present within the original androgynous womb-being, governing various different aspects of the later adult human personality, a bit like an early idea of genes, Ulrichs theorised there may be as many as “a thousand degrees” in existence between man and woman – he had just invented the dreaded “gender-spectrum”.  

If a man turned out to be a “Uranian” homosexual, Ulrichs guessed, he had just inherited too much of that particular aspect of the female “germ” which governed sexual desire – in other words, he had been born with a female “soul” trapped cruelly inside a male body. In old-time traditional Gnosticism, remember, the soul is infinitely more real than the physical fleshly prison within which it had been born trapped by the wiles of the Demiurge – just as, to today’s classic transgenderist, their inner identity is infinitely more real than that of their boring old physical genitals, which can easily just be wished away by sheer force of concentrated inner will, or so they say.

With such logic, K.H. Ulrichs was inadvertently setting the ground for a later, 21st mass re-emergence of Gnosticism, but transformed anew into an only ostensibly non-mystical secular and pseudo-medical form. Or, then again, maybe we should say he was actually only laying the ground for an unexpected re-emergence of alchemy within a pseudo-medical setting?

Romancing the Stone

Alchemy too taught spirit or soul were stronger and more real than mere base, fallen matter, just as Gnosticism did. That was how and why the alchemist was famously able to transmute lead into gold: by sheer power of what was called imaginatio, a word whose meaning you can probably guess.

Some more literal-minded alchemists really did seek to transmute lead into gold in a physical sense, as a quack get-rich-quick scheme.

It was genuinely possible for a Gnostic alchemist to induce visions of androgynes within his lab. It was not possible for him literally to physically transmute lead into gold – alchemists of the former class often looked down on those of the latter as ignorant, simple-minded morons.

We can see this dichotomy reborn anew today, with some more realistic transsexuals realising perfectly well they cannot literally magically shift gender, merely begin acting and dressing as if they can, whilst some more literal-minded rivals believe that, somehow, it really is possible for them to physically become their own biological gender-opposite – just think of Dylan Mulvaney, a self-proclaimed aspirant pregnant male (another classic alchemical image, by the way).  

One typical such individual runs their own Gender Alchemy blog, which features reams of truly laughable Gnostic prose-poetry like the following:

“Trans wizards are blood sorcerers. We brew Truth in serums and whorl it into creams to rub ourselves and inject ourselves with the Truth until it emanates, glowing from our bodies, humming at full volume, I am living proof that magic is real … We take what is and transmutate it into what should be yet has always been, forming more complete and spiritually whole versions of ourselves with the power of magic. We infuse our bodies with feminine and masculine energies using forbidden magic, with techniques passed down from our forewitches and forewarlocks, the brilliant gender luminaries of previous generations that usher us into the future.”

What a load of old warlocks.