Gender Madness: One Man's Devastating Struggle with Woke Ideology and His Battle to Protect Children

PART 1

Chapter 1

Hospital of Horrors

It was a cold spring day in April 2018. My eyes were fixed on the clouds surrounding me as I stared endlessly out of the plane window, en route to Yerevan, Armenia. My mind was filled with conflict, darkness, and anxiety, yet I was dead set on the mission I was about to embark on. Nothing could have convinced me to turn back now, even if there was a chance I may never return, and this would be my final journey. My mind was consumed with graphic images, imagining myself lying on a cold table in a dark room hearing the sound of sharp chisels being bashed into my bones and saws cutting up my flesh. It sent shivers down my spine, but I knew deep down that I had no other choice; I was compelled to do this if I ever wanted to have an ounce of happiness return to my life. I had to prove the bullies wrong, I had to remove parts of me that for years had been the target of their cruel taunts—only after removing them could I finally find solace and start to move on with my life.

After the seemingly endless hours passed by, the plane began its descent, passing through the clouds and the mist and unveiling an ancient stone city below that had stood the test of time since its founding in the eighth century BC by King Argishti I or Uratu in 782 BC.

Reflecting on the historic significance of the city as I glanced out the window, I realized just how short life was. I imagined the millions of people throughout Yerevan’s near three-thousand-year history that called this place their home and the millions whose spirits had passed on into the afterlife, into another realm of eternal peace. I wondered whether I would be joining them soon and if Yerevan would be my final resting place if what I was about to embark on did not go according to plan. Suddenly, my mind was jolted by the loud thud of the wheels landing on the tarmac and screeching down along the runway until finally the plane that had been traveling as fast as the countless thoughts running through my mind came to an abrupt stop. I stood up and collected my bag from the overhead locker. I had finally made it to the city that would either be the answer to all my problems and give me everlasting happiness or be the city where I risked having my life cut short. It wasn’t like UK or US hospitals and medical facilities that had the highest standards and a scrupulous duty of care. Hospitals in Yerevan did not have the same strict rules and guidelines and didn’t even have the latest up-to-date equipment and technology. But I had been told by countless doctors in London that they would not operate on me, so I knew I had no other choice but to go far away to a place where doctors would say yes to my every demand and would not even question my motives or my dire state of mental health. I needed somewhere without the prying questions from psychologists, who were employed by plastic surgery clinics in London to assess whether a patient was suitable for surgery. I needed a yes man who would cut off my chest and nose without questioning me. I knew this was one of the few countries where I could mutilate myself without anyone trying to stop me. I was away from family and away from friends, in a country that was cut off from anyone who knew me, so I finally felt I could be free of the self-loathing that had been weighing me down since my teenage years.

I checked into my apartment, four kilometers away from the clinic, and prepared myself for my first meeting with the plastic surgeon I had found while searching through Instagram. Two months prior to arriving in Armenia, I had grown desperate in my search for a doctor who would perform multiple procedures on me in one day: gynecomastia surgery (male breast reduction), areola (nipple) correction, and a revision rhinoplasty with septoplasty (nose). I had stumbled across this Armenian doctor’s account on Instagram, though it had just a few thousand followers and there was extremely limited information about the doctor on Google search. I liked what I saw in the before-and-after photos on his page, and, hoping that he would be the one to solve all my problems, I took a deep, hopeful breath and reached out to him. He immediately got back to me, all too eager to have a customer from a foreign land, and within an hour I had booked my surgery with him, no questions asked. I could not find any accreditation for the doctor or the clinic during my searches across the Internet and barely found any reviews from former patients. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care if he was qualified or not, I didn’t care who he was so long as he would perform the surgeries on me to make me happy. I could not even find information of the existence of the hospital itself where I would undergo the drastic procedures. I searched all over the Internet but failed to find any photos, videos, websites, or news articles about the hospital. For all I knew the doctor, if he even was an accredited real doctor, could have been performing surgeries in a back alley, but I would have still gone along with it—that’s how desperate and hopeless I felt about the way I looked. I was willing to risk anything, including my life, to change the way I looked and remove parts of me that reminded me of traumas from severe bullying inflicted on me during my school years. I knew I was about to undergo the most painful procedures of my life, but little could I imagine just how severe and unbearable that pain would turn out to be.

After falling asleep that evening in my Yerevan apartment and dreaming of a better tomorrow, I woke up feeling ready to meet the man who would either restore my happiness or potentially kill me through a botched back-alley procedure. It was a risk I was all too willing to take. When I arrived at the hospital—if it could even have been classified as one—I instantly felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. It didn’t look like a hospital at all; instead it seemed more like an old Soviet-era mental asylum or an abandoned warehouse. Even the nurses’ and doctors’ uniforms looked like they had been taken out of a 1960s Soviet museum, dusted off and repurposed in this so-called hospital. I was ushered in to meet the doctor for a ten-minute consultation where he examined my chest and nose and told me he could easily fix me. I didn’t ask any questions about the procedure other than asking how soon he could do it. I had been patient enough waiting for this moment my entire life and wanted it over and done with at the earliest available opportunity. He scheduled me for the operation three days down the line and sent me to a nurse for an ECG (electrocardiogram) test to check my heart rate and a blood test to check my blood pressure. The room was poorly lit and almost unfurnished except for a few cupboards, a chair, and a table. There was no flooring, just a cold stone floor like I had visualized in my thoughts and vivid dreams prior to arriving in Armenia. I was starting to have a dangerous sense of foreboding that everything I had imagined about this hospital was true. My heart filled with dread and questions swirled around inside my head, What if my dreams are actually a vision of my future? What if I actually die on the operating table? Maybe it will all come true. In that moment I was filled with so much fear and a sheer sense of desperation, yet I still told myself I had no other alternative but to risk my life for that chance I would get through it and come out on the other side a different person. I had convinced myself over years of self-loathing, identity struggles, and traumas that doing this was the only way I would ever have a true chance at feeling good about myself. I had spent hours each day staring in the mirror, being critical of my own reflection and longing for the day when I could finally remove all my imperfections and sculpt myself into a redesigned and reimagined version of Oli. I wanted to erase any trace of my father and his features so that I could finally forget what he put me through. This was a terrifying experience, but I felt like I deserved to suffer, that I was worthless, and putting myself through agony was something I felt I deserved due to years of torment. I deserved to be mutilated, and I deserved to be in pain.

The doctor warned me during the short consultation that I would not be able to walk for days due to the gynecomastia surgery, which would remove all of the excess fatty tissue from my chest, and he informed me that this was a very intense and risky procedure. At the same time as having this painful procedure, I was also getting nose surgery to try and fix the mistakes of previous rhinoplasties that had gone terribly wrong. It was a lot to put my body through, but I felt I had no other option. I remembered those long hours throughout my teenage years of staring in the mirror, hating what I saw after being told every single day at school I had breasts, being teased for being like a girl, and being mercilessly mocked during swimming class for my chest that looked more like a woman’s than a man’s. But now I finally had a chance to change that reflection and alter my own mirror image.

• • •

I was wheeled into the operating theater through the seemingly endless, dimly lit corridors of this old, worn-down circa 1960s building, with a bright light shining above the uninviting stone floor in a room that looked like a concrete prison cell. The medical equipment and operating tools looked old and worn, the table where I would lie for the next four hours looked cold and grim. An outside observer would be forgiven for thinking this room was a scene from the horror movie Hostel, where kidnapped hostages are operated on and tortured with an array of sharp penetrating tools by masked men. I closed my eyes and kept telling myself everything would be okay, and that if I did die, it was worth the risk to try to improve the way I looked. I was scared, this time more than any other time I feared I would never wake up again. This could be the end for me, but I had to do it. I had to take that risk or I would never be happy and never be able to achieve anything with my life. I closed my eyes, and a nurse placed the anesthesia mask over my mouth. I started to count to ten. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . . and suddenly lost consciousness.

When I woke from the procedure, I panicked. I was confused, I didn’t know where I was, and I couldn’t speak. I was wheeled down the corridor into a recovery room, where I was placed for several hours while the anesthetic wore off, then wheeled into another room where I would recover over the next few days. I was nauseated and threw up multiple times and my whole body felt like I had been possessed by a demonic spirit. I was starting to regret and question my decision to do this to myself, to mutilate my body and my face and put myself through such trauma and unbearable feelings. I was in agony and unable to move even an inch for three endless days in the hospital bed. Those three days were, without a doubt, the hardest of my life; the amount of physical pain and discomfort I was in was staggering, I couldn’t even move an inch in my bed or even reach for a glass of water. The nurses barely checked on me over those three long, never-ending days. Each passing hour seemed like twenty-four hours. When I peeked under the tight bandages wrapped around my chest, thinking I look like an ancient Egyptian mummy, I saw plastic tubes with a bag filled with blood hanging off me. What was this tube connected to? I dreaded to know the answer. But then my heart filled with fear realizing to my horror that the plastic tubes were inside my nipples draining the blood from my internal bleeding. The thought of this was too much to comprehend, and my heart started racing in panic, my breathing became heavier, and my mind became overwhelmed with emotion. I felt like a modern-day Frankenstein. I could have died, all for the sake of vanity and trying to feel more confident. Yet in a peculiar way I felt like I deserved to be in pain, I deserved to suffer, I was worthless, ugly, and after all I wasn’t a real man if I had man boobs.

After my three days of extreme discomfort, pain, and being practically paralyzed, the doctor called me into his office and removed my chest binder. He inspected my nipples; I glanced down quickly and saw dried blood and those dreaded plastic tubes inside my body. Without any warning, the doctor ripped them out. I screamed in pain, and tears flooded down my eyes. Why didn’t he warn me? Was it because it would have made my heart race and I may have resisted him doing it so aggressively? I shook uncontrollably, and my whole body reacted in shock. He then picked up what looked like a cattle branding iron and put the hot metal rod on each nipple, burning my skin and fusing it back together. It was like being in a horror movie and I was the victim of Victor Frankenstein, like I was his science experiment. I was traumatized, shaken, and begging for morphine. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. Then he removed the dried cotton from inside my nose and cut the stitches; more pain, and by this point I didn’t think I could take any more, but I had no choice. I was traumatized after sitting for an hour to recover from the shock.

During the two weeks I was staying in Yerevan, major anti-government protests erupted involving the roads being blocked each day by thousands of cars and people that took over the streets. The protests were completely peaceful; however, it meant that after I was discharged from the hospital I could not get a taxi to get back to my apartment. Instead, I had to walk four kilometers (2.5 miles) from the clinic after having the tubes ripped out of my nipples, while covered in bandages and in significant pain and discomfort. It felt like running a marathon; every step was painful and agonizing. But I kept telling myself I chose to be in this situation after all, the pain was my burden and my burden alone. I should embrace it; I should suffer. After all, I was used to suffering.

• • •

Several days later, I had to make the long arduous journey back to the clinic. Meandering through the protesters, trundling past the roadblocks in severe pain, and worrying with each step I took whether I was damaging my nose and chest, as I was supposed to be keeping big movements to a minimum. After several hours of walking, I made it back to the clinic for a checkup. I was frightened about what would happen at this visit, given how excruciatingly painful the last one was. I was relieved when it was over after the doctor examined the bruising and told me I was good to go. I then had to walk the four kilometers back to my apartment for the final time.

I lay in bed that night unable to sleep, reliving the traumas of the past few days over and over again, asking myself why I put myself through that. But I rationalized and told myself at least no one could tease and taunt me again saying I had women’s breasts. Those bullies from my school years would never again be able to use that insult. I could finally go to the beach, finally go for a swim without the paranoia of people laughing at me, a man, for having female breasts. I never thought that one day I would seriously consider getting female breasts during the period I was living as a trans woman and that I would have wished that I never removed my man boobs back in 2018 in Yerevan, Armenia. On that day, I promised myself as I lay in bed that night pondering my existence that I would never have surgery again and I would never put myself through a near-death experience again. My promise, however, was to be short-lived.

Chapter 2

Childhood Traumas

I was born on January 14, 1990, in the English countryside, in the small town of Sawbridgeworth in Hertfordshire, ninety minutes north of London. It’s an idyllic, peaceful little town steeped in history, old stone cottages, streams trickling through meadows filled with buttercups, and a history dating back to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The town is filled with old Tudor, Elizabethan, Stuart, and Georgian townhouses, built through various reigns of some of England’s most notable royal families. Throughout history, the town was populated by English nobles and aristocrats including Anne Boleyn, the famed wife of King Henry VIII who later met a gruesome fate at the hands of her tyrannical husband. The town features various medieval churches including a thirteenth-century church, Great St Mary’s Church, which, although built in the 1200s, actually sat on the top of an Anglo-Saxon church dating back to the eleventh century, prior to the French Norman conquest of England. Surrounding the town, endless fields stretch as far as the eye can see with rich soil that had been cultivated for millennia by local farmers. Sitting on these lands are marvelous manor houses, built for noble families centuries ago who ruled the lands and the people who farmed them. It was an idyllic place to be brought into the world, surrounded by beauty, clean air, nature, and a rich history. It was the perfect place for a child to grow up and have a perfect childhood, until it wasn’t.

It was a cold winter’s evening when my mother was taken to the hospital to give birth to me. My father, who had acted cold and withdrawn with my mother during pregnancy, reluctantly came with her to the hospital. Prior to my conception nine months earlier, he had insisted he was ready to have a child and had assured my mother he was excited about the prospect. After giving birth that cold winter’s night, my mother was abandoned almost immediately after my father had held me in his arms for a brief moment for the very first time. He clutched me in his arms, displaying an abnormal lack of any kind of emotional response. After holding me for a moment, he handed me back to my mother and left the hospital, abandoning her in a moment that should have been a joyous and momentous occasion. Days went by and there was still no sign of him, and even though my mother tried desperately to get hold of him, she was unable to reach him or gain any kind of contact with him. This was a time before cell phones, computers, and emails. If someone went off-grid back then, it was extremely hard to locate them. She had no success finding him that week. After seven long days had passed, he finally turned up. He claimed to have run off after struggling to come to terms with the fact he had now become a father and now had a responsibility and duty to care for a child he had brought into the world. It was childish behavior on his part and heartless, to say the very least, to leave my mother in the hospital clutching me in her arms while he went to rediscover himself. After a so-called period of soul searching, he came back, much to my mother’s relief—although she felt terribly betrayed. This perhaps was one of the single most hurtful things my father had ever done to my mother and indeed to me. I only found out about it as an eleven-year-old boy, when my mother bravely told me about my father’s abusive and hurtful behavior after I questioned her on his behavior and how it made her feel. It was a terrible act of treachery that I know put a heavy weight on her heart all those years while she nurtured me and watched me grow up.

I was less than a day old, and already I had been abandoned by my father. What chance would I have in life if this was the regard my father had for me? I was worthless, unimportant, and unwanted, and as I grew up I was reminded each day of his coldness and always felt a need to try and prove myself to him, to try to win his praise and respect. I tried to do everything he asked, but the more I saw his cruelty and disregard for his family, the closer I grew to my mother and wanting to become like her. This angered my father, as he was always trying to teach me to pursue the same interests as his, the manly pursuits. I tried my best to appease him time and time again, but I was never good enough and never lived up to his expectations. I was too feminine, too weak, and too timid to be a real man, and he resented this. I felt like I had been set up for failure, and my mind was always filled with anxiety and self-doubt.

Children are like sponges, absorbing everything around them and soaking up every single thing they are taught by an adult. I was trying to absorb everything he tried to teach me; each time he would shout at me to do better and be more of a man, I would try to absorb it. But it felt like the sponge was being squeezed so hard because I didn’t want to be like him, and eventually I would reject everything he taught me, squeezing all the water out of the sponge, trying to form my own identity and pursue my own interests, rebelling against everything he had been trying so hard to push on me.

• • •

My earliest memory was sitting by a fireplace with my mother watching the crackling flames of the wood burning and feeling an intense warmth in my heart. I was five years old and I was innocent, naïve, and seemingly happy. I was a tabula rasa, as the Latin term aptly describes a blank slate—my mind and thoughts on the world were pure and innocent. When any child is brought into the world, they too are blank slates, and how they grow as a person depends on a variety of factors from social interactions and their surrounding environment to parents and nurturing factors. Many psychological studies on children’s cognitive development have been done over the years, exploring the various factors that can lead a child to develop in different ways and shape the person they become. Nature vs Nurture studies examine whether genetics can have an impact on a person’s identity and shape their personality, or whether it is the way they are nurtured, the home environments they are raised in, that has the ultimate effect on who they become. Studies of twins separated from their birth parents and raised in completely different environments show that while genetics play a part in a person’s psychology and identity, being raised in an environment that encourages certain behaviors can completely and sometimes detrimentally impact a child’s cognitive development.

If a child’s home environment is toxic, abusive, destructive, and unhappy, then the likelihood of that child growing up to become an adult who finds these behaviors normal and even replicates the behaviors in their own life is dramatically increased. If a child is shown love, acceptance, and given positive reinforcement from early on, they are more likely to become a well-rounded and empathetic individual. There are examples, however, of those whose childhood was filled with seeing their father being abusive to their mother and that behavior being the norm, yet that child grows up to become the total opposite of their father and shuns these harmful behaviors. There are also other cases where a child may have had a perfect fairytale-like childhood with all of the nurturing from their parents, with school life and environment being the perfect recipe for their cognitive development, yet they still grow up to develop completely different behaviors to what they were taught. In many cases, my childhood was a contrasting mix between elements of a fairytale; beautiful surroundings, a nice home, fond memories of elementary school and opportunities, yet at the same time it was marred by abusive behaviors from my father, watching him treat my mother with disrespect and put her down each day with insults, and with me as the daily target of his strict, cruel, and tough approach to parenting.

My mother cherished me and filled me with love and positive reinforcement, always reassuring me that I was a good kid and had a special purpose in life. Meanwhile, my father criticized me, lectured me daily, punished me if I questioned his authority, and put tremendous pressure on me to be just like him. I was his shadow and instructed to follow his every move. He wanted to mold me into his own image so I would grow up to become a miniversion of him. He trained me every day to mimic his behaviors and instilled in me the notion that being a dominant, aggressive male who looked down on women, like my mother, was normal behavior that was to be encouraged. If ever I was brave enough to challenge my father’s authority or to question his behavior or even call him out on his words, I was immediately shut down and punished, often being told to stay in my room and not come out until he said I could. I knew deep down he must have loved me, but it was a tough love approach meant to force me to grow up just like him.

My father came from a broken family, where his father, my grandfather, had a severe lack of respect for women, going through wife after wife, cheating on them, abusing them, and neglecting his son, my father, in the process. My grandfather was a very cold man devoid of any emotion and who lacked any compassion for the suffering or emotions of others. A narcissist, obsessed with himself and lacking in empathy. He had fathered children with numerous women and yet abandoned each child when his relationship with the woman would sour. Despite his considerable wealth, he would offer no financial support toward the upbringing of these children, including my father. He treated my father so badly, showing no love or attention to him throughout his childhood, and at sixteen my father was thrown out onto the streets, forced to fend for himself with no financial or emotional support. However, he was eventually taken in by one of his father’s ex-girlfriends and lived with her family until he could get back on his feet and find work. He was taught by his own father that there was no such thing as love, only cruelty, and that the only way to succeed in life was to be heartless, to develop a thick skin and be tough. This toughness helped my father work from the ground up slowly, building a career in interior design before meeting my mother when they were both 28. Two years later, I came into the world. He promised my mother that he would never be like his father and that he would be a loving husband and devoted father. But the promise would be short-lived. The damage was done, and he had developed all the same traits of the man he claimed to despise and detest. Lack of empathy, narcissistic personality disorder, aggressive behavior, outbursts, disrespecting women, and looking down on others—these were all the traits he picked up from his own father. This was a classic case of like father, like son. He was a clone, and after I was born and started to grow up he tried to pass on these same traits to me, hoping that I would be his protégé. It perplexed me that someone who hated someone so much, like he hated his own father, whom he vowed to never be like, would become an exact carbon copy of this object of his detestation and then want me, his son, to become another carbon copy of him. He didn’t even realize he was replicating these behaviors, and more and more each day he became a monster. These characteristics in my father only seemed to worsen and become more visible as I grew older and as I started to see things more clearly with my own eyes. He had left me with traumas that had ultimately contributed to my struggle for self-acceptance in later life, which led me to self-harm and self-mutilation in the hope of erasing any trace of my