In just two decades, transsexuals have gone from being perceived as manifestly deluded and mentally ill, to being able to force members of many Western societies to participate in their delusions. As the Irish comedy writer Graham Linenhan has set out in his memoir Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, people in the UK have lost their jobs or almost been thrown out of university for stating that you can’t change your sex.

Linehan himself has been driven out of the mainstream comedy industry in the UK due to his forthright criticism of the trans movement, teenagers have been sterilised and mutilated, women prisoners sexually assaulted by fellow female inmates with penises, toilets are increasingly unisex, biological men can participate in female sport and even use their changing rooms and anyone who dissents is subject to the wrath of the trans mob and its Woke supporters. Hardly any of his colleagues were brave enough to defend Linehan as he was attacked and many of them joined in with the mob of deluded bullies. How have we reached this level of insanity, where a deluded person can state they have changed sex and this must be accepted?

The answer, in part, is that the gender non-conforming have the precise traits which predict achieving power: They are high in Narcissism and they combine this, as my new study has found, with being highly intelligent. Narcissism is characterised by a sense of entitlement, self-importance, superiority, manipulativeness, callousness and envy. It strongly crosses over with the other “Dark Triad” of Psychopathology (low altruism, high dominance) and Machiavellianism (a desire for power).

To varying to degrees, these are reflections of Neuroticism: feeling negative feelings strongly. When people are plagued by negative feelings the world will seem out of control, so they will want power; high in hatred and anger, they will be psychopathic, and they may deal with low self-worth be creating a false self, where they tell themselves they are superior. In other words, they will create a delusion, which will be all the more convincing if others accept it. Puncture this delusion and you risk “Narcissistic Rage” as the method of containing the negative feelings unleashed by this attack on their false self; the agent of destruction is thus a threat to their ability to cope [see, Breeding the Human Herd: Eugenics, Dysgenics and the Future of the Species, By Edward Dutton, 2023].

Many studies have found that those who attain extremely high status – what we might call geniuses – tend to combine extremely high intelligence with Dark Triad traits. The high intelligence allows them to solve problems and outwit their opponents while the Dark Triad traits make them highly competitive, unscrupulous, brimming with confidence, devious and power-hungry. It is people like this who are able to rise to the very top [see Sent Before Their Time: Genius, Charisma and Being Born Prematurely, By Edward Dutton, 2022].

So what do we find with transsexuals? Transsexuals are especially elevated in Narcissistic Personality Disorder. One study found that 80 per cent of transwomen had a personality disorder, with 57 per cent of those having Narcissistic Personality Disorder [The frequency of personality disorders in patients with gender identity disorder, By A. Meybodi et al., Medical Journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 2014]. It may be that Narcissistic males, not caring about the subversion and disgust which transsexuality induces, are more prepared to go ahead with surgery and are less able to keep their paraphilia – their fetish – under control. It has been argued that many display evidence of Narcissistic Rage when others refuse to accept that they are female [Shame and Narcissistic Rage in Autogynephilic Transsexualism, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2008].

To be clear, most male transsexuals are autogynephilous transsexuals (a minority are homosexual transsexuals, see themselves as female well before adolescence and are highly feminised). They suffer from a fetish, which develops in adolescence, whereby they are sexually aroused by the idea of themselves as a female, something with which they also become obsessed. The development of this and other fetishes is associated with autism. This is because, compared to controls, autistics are highly masculinised and hyper-sexual and feel sensations very strongly, meaning they easily create sexual associations. They are also obsessive, interested in objects over people and they are low in cognitive empathy. They are high in anxiety both due to their hyper-stimulation and problems they encounter due to their lack of social skills. This elevated Neuroticism, as we have seen, can easily lead to the development of Dark Triad traits [see Gender Dysphoria and Transgender Identity Is Associated with Physiological and Psychological Masculinization: A Theoretical Integration of Findings, Supported by Systematic Reviews, By Edward Dutton and Guy Madison, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 2021]. Accordingly, we can see how this mix leads to transgenderism and they tend to be sexually interested in women even after they have “transitioned.”

But we must add to this their high intelligence. A recent study by me and Emil Kirkegaard, drawing on the large OK Cupid dataset, found that intelligence is associated with being non-binary as well as with unusual forms of sexuality, such as pansexuality [Intelligence is associated with being non-binary and unusual sexuality: Rare sexual orientation, gender non-conformism and intelligence in a large dating sample, By Edward Dutton and Emil Kirkegaard, Psychreg, 2024]. One possible explanation for this is that intelligence is associated with Openness, being open to unusual possibilities, this openness helping you to solve problems. The less intelligent may dismiss thoughts of gender non-conformity as ludicrous but the more intelligent may be more likely to entertain them.

Also, intelligence is associated with social conformity. Intelligent people are better at norm-mapping, forcing themselves, via effortful control, to adopt the dominant world view in order to attain the related social benefits. They will then attain status by competitively signalling their conformity to this world view. In our world of “grievance hierarchy,” being gender non-conforming allows you to attain a degree of status, so we can see why the relatively more intelligent would be attracted to it.

But taking all of this together, we can understand why transsexuality has managed to become so influential, even apart from the fact that Woke activists promote it. Autogynephilous transsexuals are more intelligent and higher in Dark Triad traits – more ruthless and power hungry – than normal people. The response of trans activists when you say this is to claim that the research “risks serious harm to already marginalised groups,” a point made about my own study by transwoman researcher Reubs Walsh [“Masculine” Describes Gender Expressions, Not Neurobiologies: Response to Dutton and Madison (2020),” By Reubs Walsh, Sex Research and Social Policy, 2021]. But this only proves my point. It is a fallacious appeal to consequences and is, therefore, manipulative. It also involves victim-signalling, something associated with Narcissism and especially so-called vulnerable Narcissism, in which such people manipulate others by stressing the degree to which they are victims and need help [Signaling virtuous victimhood as indicators of Dark Triad personalities, By E. Ok et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2021].

Transgender activists have a delusion which they demand others partake in, with rage being the consequence if they fail to. This is textbook Narcissistic abuse; textbook bullying. And when it is combined with high intelligence, we can begin to understand why they have been so successful in cancelling critics such as Graham Linehan.