A Trip Down Meme-ory Lane: Trans Tropes are Older Than You Think They Are

What is it about culture that leads people to seek an alternative gender identity?

Genspect has covered in detail how experiments on people with gender incongruity have led to today's transition industry, but why do many people seek an alternative gender identity, and how did the idea become mainstream? 

True believers give inconsistent answers: gender has always existed, yet cannot be understood by anyone over the age of 30; gender is a social construct and also innate; gender is fixed by hormonal balances in the womb, but also fluid in adults; gender is not a choice, but choosing it is a deliberate act of liberation.  

In speaking with young people experiencing difficulties with gender, it becomes apparent that few, if any of them, have much awareness of the academic or clinical theories about these identities. They have not, for instance, read Judith Butler — and who can blame them? Their explanations are third-hand interpretations of gender theorists.  

I believe gender identity is primarily a cultural movement, not a medical, psychological, or philosophical one, which is why achieving consensus on treatment options for people with gender distress has been so difficult. This is not a coherent ideology. It is a memeplex, an assortment of related, replicating ideas, upstream of any theory.  

What’s in a Meme? 

A 'meme' is a loose genetic analogy for cultural transmission, or social contagion, first popularised by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.¹ Memes are simple ideas that appeal on some basic level. They pass from one person to the next, like a virus attaching to the receptors on a cell. Memes about gender transition have been around much longer than most people realize, but before we look at these agents of cultural transmission, let us pause to consider what makes memes about gender identity so “contagious”?  

The Russian psychologist, Sabina Spielrein, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud suggested an intriguing answer. In her 1912 paper, Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being, she challenged Sigmund Freud's conception that the human ego is driven by pleasure-seeking. She wrote:  

In our depths, there is something that, as paradoxical as it may sound, wills self-injury while the ego counteracts it with pleasure. A wish for self-injury, a joy in pain, is, however, thoroughly incomprehensible if we believe merely in the existence of an ego that only desires pleasure. 

She identified a close relationship between sex and disgust. Acts that would be repellent in another context become desirable in the context of sex. Just as the drive for sex ultimately ends in death, as one generation gives way so the next can emerge, the desire for pleasure is also a desire for self-destruction. What would happen if the circle of life became broken for some people so that only the drive for self-destruction remained? Spielrein believed this instinct for destruction is expressed in the person of Thanatos, the death god of classical Greek myth. “Close to our desire to maintain our present condition,” she wrote, “there lies a desire for transformation.”²

Are there people who fit this description? In attempting to understand why gender identity was so readily accepted in the West over the last decade or so, I have looked at the cohort I am calling the 'mid-boomers'. This group, which has been noticeably open to radical ideas about gender, consisted of teenagers in the 1960s and 70s and occupied senior roles in institutions by the 2010s. It is my belief that this cohort was primed to accept gender identity through a memetic cultural transmission from their formative years. We can see this if we look at some of the key memetic cultural influences of the 60s and 70s. 

Gender Bending in the 70s 

James Fox and Anita Pallenberg in ‘Performance’, (1970) © Warner Bros.

In 1970, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones was probably the biggest rock star in the world. He was also one of the first to play with the idea of gender transition, in the surrealist movie Performance (1970), (later retitled Sadismo for the Italian market). Jagger undergoes several transformations, from man to woman and eventually into an entirely different person.  

Unlike other examples of the man-dresses-as-woman-to-hide-from-gangsters subgenre, notably Some Like it Hot (1959) or Nuns on the Run (1990), Performance is not a comedy. In one line of dialogue, Jagger's character says, “The only performance that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness”. Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble is often credited with the idea that gender is a performance, but it was published a full twenty years later, an example of an academic theory well downstream of the gender memeplex.  

Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret (1972) © 1972 Allied Artists-ABC Pictures

The film Cabaret (1972) is another example. Based on the Broadway play I am a Camera (1951) based on Christopher Isherwood's 1939 memoir/novel Goodbye to Berlin. Liza Minnelli plays an entertainer in the Weimar Republic’s club scene. Her character, Sally sings: 

I used to have this girlfriend known as Elsie  
With whom I shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea 
She wasn't what you'd call a blushing flower 
As a matter of fact, she rented by the hour 
The day she died the neighbours came to snicker: 
”Well, that's what comes from too much pills and liquor” 
But when I saw her laid out like a queen 
She was the happiest corpse I'd ever seen... 

The movie's depiction of the Weimar Republic is something like the way today's radical trans rights movement envisions its situation. It is the story of the Fall: on one side there is an Eden peopled by genderqueer performers. On the other side of the stage curtain there’s a hostile world — peopled by National Socialists. In this febrile, imagined history, gendercide is imminent; the evidence of transgender people's existence has been looted from Magnus Hirschfeld's library and burned in the streets. Of course, this origin story has nothing to do with the historical facts of the period, as Malcolm Richard Clark has documented, but the memeification of the Weimar period through films like Cabaret might help to explain why men who punch women at feminist rallies now justify their violence on the basis of a supposed 'anti-fascism'. 

Divine in Pink Flamingos (1972)

Gender also plays a part in John Water’s Pink Flamingos (1972). It is hard to describe what goes on in the film, starring drag artist Divine without a content warning. The film was so transgressive that Variety called it “one of the most vile, stupid, and repulsive films ever made” — which was exactly what Waters was aiming for. “I wouldn’t call us a happy-go-lucky bunch,” Waters recalled at the film’s 50th anniversary. “We were all influenced by radical politics and rioting, so we were driven, but we were also looking for trouble." Balenciaga, a fashion house which might also be described as looking for trouble, (their 2023 ad campaign featuring photos of children holding teddy bears in bondage gear) ended their 2022 show with an homage to the Water’s film featuring a man wearing a copy of Divine's red dress as the film’s theme played. 

Andy Warhol was another artist and filmmaker interested in gender. He collected 'interesting' gender-incongruent people around him, including actor Candy Darling and psychopathic androphobe Valerie Solanas (the latter would repay Warhol’s attention by shooting him). Candy Darling had a central role in the film Warhol produced. Women in Revolt ( 1971) is a satire of women's liberation. In a foreshadowing of the current enmity between drag queens and feminists, the female characters are portrayed by men in drag. A review of the film by Jeanne Miller stated “The acting is embarrassing, the dialogue absurd and the photography atrocious. Mercifully, the soundtrack is so poor that a great deal of the conversation is totally inaudible.” 

Rock-n-Roll  

Rock legend, Lou Reed, another member of Warhol's circle, deserves special attention. Reed formed The Velvet Underground, in 1965 naming the band after journalist, Michael Leigh’s 1963 expose of sexual deviance in the USA. Reed, always up for the risqué, had already written Venus in Furs, taking its name from an 1870 erotic novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (where we get the word ‘masochism’ from). One of the Velvet Underground’s more infamous gigs and their first with androgynous singer Christa Päffgen a.k.a ‘Nico’, was at the annual dinner of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry in 1966, where Warhol and his acolytes asked the unsuspecting psychiatrists lewd questions then chided them for their embarrassment.  

The band's songs about the delights of bondage and scoring heroin were not considered radio-friendly, and their record sales were low, but they gained a following among musicians. One such performer was a British musician and mime artist named David Bowie. Bowie wrote a song in 1971 about Warhol and his associates: "Dress my friends up just for show, see them as they really are".  

Bowie and Lou Reed - ES Magazine

The following year, Bowie invited Lou Reed to record a solo album in London. The songs on Transformer were about Warhol’s circle in New York. The best-known song, and Reed’s most iconic hit was Walk on the Wild Side a song about drugs, cross-dressing, (“shaved her legs and he was a she”), prostitution and oral sex. The album’s artwork featured drag poses, with some fans speculating that these images showed Reed himself. In fact, they show Gala Mitchell and Ernst Thormahlen, and yes, that is an enormous banana in his pocket. Ernst died of a heroin overdose some years later. 

Photo used on the back of Lou Reed’s Transformer album. © Karl Stoecker

David Bowie’s own album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was also released in 1972. Ziggy is a gender-diverse character, with big hair, make-up and heels. Arguably, David and Angie Bowie were the original queer straight couple. The opening lines in Bowie’s hit Rebel Rebel from 1974, “You've got your mother in a whirl. She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl” could be the Genspect theme song were it not for copyright.  

Bowie enjoyed reinventing his identity from album to album, his imagination assisted by his copious drug intake. Two years later, he was wearing a black leather overcoat, being driven around Berlin in a presidential Mercedes, and praising a well-known German dictator as “one of the first rock stars.”  

‘Candy Darling on her Deathbed’ 1973 © The Peter Hujar Archive LLC

The cover for Antony and the Johnsons album I Am a Bird Now (2005) featured a photo of Candy Darling on her deathbed in 1974, a direct link to Warhol's circle and the theme of Thanatos. Lou Reed makes a guest appearance on the recording. If you don't know this album, I recommend that you seek out a copy. Like Lou Reed's Transformer, it is a personal account of gender identity but also a great album. The lead singer and pianist of the group is transgender and has gone by the name Anohni since 2016.  

I believe that cultural figures such as Lou Reed and David Bowie have had a greater influence on the public understanding of sexuality and gender than any theorist. I think we are witnessing a revival of 50-year-old conceptions of gender because the generation which has overseen the institutions regards these figures of their own time as highly culturally significant.  

Drugs 

While many of the artists of the period died due to drug misuse, others continued to struggle with the legacy of addiction, as their creative output dwindled. The Velvet Underground's singer Nico went from heroin to methadone and died in 1988. Marianne Faithfull, the singer and muse of the Rolling Stones who is related to Sacher-Masoch via her aristocratic mother, ended up living on the streets due to her drug habit. 

Poster from the Heroin Screws You Up Campaign, 1985 (From the Department of Health and Social Security, Central Office of Information, shared under the Open Government Licence)

During the 1980s, the British government responded to increasing levels of opiate addiction with its “Heroin Screws You Up” campaign, showing unhealthy-looking young people with various negative outcomes of drug misuse flagged. This campaign proceeded from the rational assumption that young people would not take heroin if they were educated about the side effects. The campaign was considered a failure, as heroin continued to be abused. Lou Reed had already informed the heroin user about what they could expect many years before, in the Velvet Underground's song I'm Waiting for the Man: "Feeling sick and dirty, more dead than alive". Thanatos has a lot to answer for.  

Perhaps we make the same mistake when warning young people about the side effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. We assume a rational standpoint which enables an even-handed balancing of risks and benefits, but people inhabiting self-destructive memetic cultures do not operate that way. The addict knows that opiates are bad for their health but continues their misuse regardless. And gender-affirming 'therapists' assume that someone figuratively killing their old self, refusing the use of their 'dead name', knows who they really are. 

Where does this leave agency, and informed consent? If people cannot be assumed to make decisions in their own best interest, because of their conscious or unconscious desire for self-destruction, is it ethical to give them choices which could result in harm? That question may be uncomfortable for people who are used to a consumer healthcare paradigm, in which the patient gets whatever they want if someone pays. 

Saving Us from Ourselves?  

We are told that social transition can only be positive, but the destruction of identity that this must entail is usually unacknowledged. Is it ethical to enable, and cheer for, the patient's symbolic self-destruction, just because they claim to be sure it is what they want? Shouldn't we first establish why the patient wants to destroy their existing identity? 

We are now living in the world Lou Reed chronicled, of junkies and drag queens. Only instead of being limited to the environs of Andy Warhol's Factory, this is the anti-normative normal that all of us are supposed to accept. The problem with cultural outlaws is they have no idea what to do next after their memeplex becomes the establishment view, endorsed by governments and corporations alike. We might need a more humane counter-counterculture which is not predicated on self-destruction. 

As Spielrein put it in her paper of 1912, we should not “thrust an imbalance of destructive images exclusively onto children or highly emotional people. In neurosis, the destructive component is predominant and, in every symptom, voices its opposition to life and genuine destiny.”  

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1. The American Humanist Association withdrew its 'humanist of the year' award from Dawkins, twenty-five years later, because of his wrongthink on gender. 

2. Freud took note and adopted Spielrein’s ideas in his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, referring to it as the 'Todestreib', or death-drive. Spielrein’s ideas about self-injury changed his mind and he acknowledged that "there might be such a thing as primary masochism — a possibility which I had contested". He expanded the idea in "The Economic Problem of Masochism"(1924) where he wrote “libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfils the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards... The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power."