Transgender advocate, Attitude columnist and author Juno Dawson is convinced that there are a lot of gay people who are actually transgender but too chicken to come out and admit it, accepting a gay lifestyle as a “consolation prize.”
Dawson says he lived as a “misdiagnosed” gay man before coming out as transgender in 2015.
“I think that there are a lot of gay men in the world who had the same personal misdiagnosis, because we didn’t have the information that we have now,” Dawson told Attitude. “I think there are a lot of gay men out there who are gay men as a consolation prize because they couldn’t be women. That was certainly true of me.”
The columnist is basing this bold claim by extrapolating from his mere personal experience coming out as transgender from a previously gay lifestyle.
“What I will say is that, and I think this is true of all trans people, once you are an out trans person, you become like a helpdesk,” said Dawson. “There are two or three gay men who have come to see me and said: ‘Oh, I think I should be trans but I don’t want to do anything about it. It’s too hard, I’m too old.'”
As you might suspect, many, especially those in the gay community, found themselves at odds with Dawson’s remarks, deeming them homophobic:
In a reactionary piece slamming Dawson, Douglas Robertson sarcastically thanked the trans advocate for letting him, a gay man, know that he’s actually a trans woman:
Imagine my surprise, then, to find out this morning that I am in fact wrong, and that I’m a trans woman. That’s right: Juno Dawson suggests in today’s Attitude magazine (a publication boasting a “global audience of affluent, fashion-conscious, brand-loyal gay men”) that in fact “a lot of gay men are gay men as a consolation prize, because they couldn’t be women.”
This statement is, of course, quite ludicrous. In fact I would say that it is beyond debate. It isn’t really something that can be considered or discussed, because it is so utterly generalising. In a simple sentence it manages to conflate gender identity and sexuality, and dismiss the identities and existences of millions of people as a “consolation prize”.
The fast-moving transgender movement has even found themselves at odds with feminists against trans bathrooms and biological men who think they are women competing against biological women, a group which is largely a silenced sect in the media. Trans advocates have labeled such feminists with the derogatory term TERF, meaning “Trans-exclusionary radical feminism.”