Talking to ... Eliza Mondegreen

If identities in the Digital Utopia can be defined with the click
of a mouse, it isn’t surprising when people want to make their
lives as colorful as possible. After all: Who wants to be »a
boring Normie?« as Eliza Mondegreen puts it in the simplest
possible terms; consequently, those who wish to overcome their
deep sense of emptiness proceed like computer gamers eager to
endow their Avatars with superpowers. With this in mind, it’s
easy to understand how the Trans debate (a marginal phenomenon
only two decades ago) has seductively seized the public’s
consciousness and taken on such political explosiveness. However,
this raises the question of if the need for transcendence and the
dissolution of selfhood boundaries can be met by administering
hormone blockers to pubescent adolescents and promising them that
a physical gender swap – or more precisely, a surgical
modification of the body – can make all their problems disappear
into thin air.


And, as someone intensively involved with gender issues for
several years, this is precisely where the question Eliza
Mondegreen poses begins. While initially studying the fundamental
reality of Gender and Identity Dysphoria, she suspected there was
a question of psychical countra-banding here that was strikingly
similar to that found in cult-like phenomena. Just like the
cultist, who feels newly reborn after a divine encounter, so do
those adolescents embarking on a gender-changing journey. They
adopt a new name, become active in their new fellowship of
believers, oppose apostates while proselytizing, and proudly do
everything they can to distinguish themselves from the rest of an
unbelieving world.


Eliza Mondegreen is a researcher and freelance writer (for
Unherd, Freethinker, among others) and photographer. She runs the
widely read substack blog gender:hacked. She is currently working
on a book about gender medicine, which will be published by
Polity.


Link to gender:hacked


Eliza Mondegreen’s articles in Unherd


Freethinker


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