Imagine you’re a depressed young man in a developed country. Maybe you work long hours for low pay, maybe you’re unemployed. When you were in school, you didn’t fit in with other boys; girls acted like you weren’t even there. You spend most of your free time playing video games and shitposting with online friends you’ve never met in real life. You rarely have sex without paying for it. You consider suicide regularly. To the left, you’re a threat: a woman-hating incel with latent violent tendencies. To the right, you’re a degenerate: a porn-addicted, weak “virgin” who struggles to impose himself on the world.

So where do you go from here? Do you ingratiate yourself with SJWs, or with the chads? Do you succumb to the temptation to commit suicide?

For some men, the solution to the despair of living as an isolated, unhappy male is straightforward: become a woman. They call themselves “transmaxxers” and they believe gender transition can be an effective tool for escaping the misery of involuntary celibacy, social isolation, and professional mediocrity. More broadly, they see transition as a potentially revolutionary response to a world where the combination of industrialization and biomedical technologies such as in vitro fertilization and sperm donation have eroded the financial and reproductive opportunities previously available to most men. Like many revolutionary movements, they operate semi-clandestinely, preferring Discord to Twitter and YouTube, and express their beliefs primarily in the form of manifestos. The latest, a 73-page document published in April 2022 includes chapters like: