If there’s one thing that defines gay men, it’s a fondness for willies. One might say it’s a defining characteristic. So when the BBC aired I Kissed a Boy — touted as the UK’s first gay dating show — and slipped in a woman who calls herself a man, the backlash was both completely predictable and absolutely justified.
Lars, 23, is a heterosexual woman who has identified as male for less time than I’ve had the bra I’m wearing. She’s had her breasts cut off and takes testosterone. She told the BBC:
I didn’t have an attraction to girls, I always liked guys. I felt like a gay guy trapped in a woman’s body.
The harm in this isn’t just to Lars. The danger is that viewers — many of whom will be young gay men — are being told that they have a problem if they reject women. This is not representation; it is propaganda from our state broadcaster. As LGB Alliance CEO Kate Barker explained in a letter to BBC director Tim Davie:
The pressure on those young men to agree that this woman might be someone they would date will be immense. Any rejection of her — a rejection that would be entirely in line with their natural homosexuality — will be seized upon by activists as evidence of their bigotry and transphobia. It is unconscionable to coerce young gay men in this way.
Naturally, when asked about Lars’s being on the show, presenter Dannii Minogue dribbled out platitudes about love and inclusivity. The BBC claimed, “All applicants are asked their dating preference, and they are matched accordingly.” But what of Lars herself? Well, she is a symptom of a wider social sickness.
There’s no denying that some straight women treat gay men like lifestyle accessories — tokens to display their progressive values. They want proximity to what they perceive as an edgy, glamorous, and exotic subculture, while neutering it in the process. Gay men become HBO caricatures: the sassy best friend who’ll tell you if your bum looks fat in jeggings.
This is the mindset behind straight librarians who call themselves queer and invite drag queens to read to children. It grants moral status to rainbow-lanyard-wearing busybodies who find meaning in lecturing others about pronouns. And ultimately, this is the performance women like Lars are cosplaying. Of course, being “a gay man” also adds a frisson of oppression to life for the perennially unfashionable straight woman.
Stereotypes have blotted out reality
Today, such stereotypes have blotted out reality. The result is that even state institutions now facilitate sex by deception. NHS-funded sexual health service CliniQ produced guidance advising women who identify as men on how to conceal their genitals in male-only saunas. Public money was used to help straight women trick gay men into situations they did not and could not consent to. The guidance was only withdrawn after a furious public backlash.
All of this — the delusion, the appropriation, the institutional complicity — is a product of the online world. The fantasy that a straight woman can become a gay man begins in the same place that tells teenage girls that violent, degrading sex is “empowerment”. The entire ideology is soaked in the logic of porn: identity as costume; desire as performance; boundaries existing merely to be torn down.
Over the past decade, a global subculture of women identifying as gay men has taken root. These are the fans of Yaoi and Boys’ Love — genres of erotic fiction written by and for straight women, built on romanticised, soft-focus gay male relationships that have little grounding in reality. What began as niche fanfiction has metastasised into identity. And some, steeped in the fantasy long enough, now call themselves “gay men” — despite being female and attracted to men.
Bizarre though it is, there is some logic. Perhaps inhabiting a fictional male body offers the illusion of sexual freedom without the risk of pregnancy or rape. But these are still fantasies, no less reductive or porn-sick than straight men fetishising lesbians.
It is disgraceful that women like Lars are encouraged to deny their sex — and even more so that they are celebrated for it. But here’s the rub: while neither women who claim to be gay men nor men who claim to be lesbians should be indulged, the threat they pose is not the same. Women like Lars cannot rape men.
That does not excuse them. Infiltrating gay male spaces under false pretences should never be normalised. But it’s not the same threat as men demanding access to women’s changing rooms, rape shelters, and hospital wards.
And let’s not pretend Lars got here unaided. She says she was prescribed testosterone by Dr Helen Webberley, the disgraced GP behind the controversial GenderGP clinic. Lars may be a self-absorbed opportunist, but she’s also a casualty — misled by people who should have protected her when she was younger, manipulated by the porn-pushing algorithms that are now an inescapable part of adolescence, and then exploited by a national broadcaster to boost its falling ratings.
Lars is not a gay man. She is a woman. A woman who has been broken, built back up in the image of ideology, and paraded on national television as proof of progress. In truth, she is the most visible sign of a deep social sickness — one that punishes truth-tellers and rewards liars, all in the name of “love.”
