The Lost Boys: searching for manhood
The Lost Boys: searching for manhood
A powerful new film on the dangers of gender ideology should be watched by everyone. In a guest post, the film's co-writer, Gary Powell, explains why it needs to be seen.
I was recently asked to watch a film to see if I might endorse it. I had no particular expectations when I started The Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood, but I was blown away at how it tackled a difficult topic, and the voices it platformed. The film offers so much food for thought on everything from the impact on young men of pathologising traditional masculinity as toxic to how a search for identity, especially amongst the young struggling with self-loathing and depression, can result in life-changing therapy and drastic surgical transformation. And regret. And much more.
My endorsement is from the heart:
Wow, The Lost Boys is essential viewing and I want everyone to watch it now. It shines a light on why young boys may feel as though they are born in the wrong body – from mental-health issues such as OCD and extreme social anxiety through to the impact of the social fad for problematising masculinity, leading to shame about being male. Rather than confronting such challenges, too many rush to affirm a gender ideology solution. The full horrors of surgical and hormonal transition are laid bare by brave young detransitioners. Their stories will stay with me. The sense of regret is visceral. Their new-found confidence in speaking out now they accept who they are in the context of their biological sex, is inspiring; as is the courage of those professionals interviewed who help navigate us through their harrowing experiences.
The film has indeed stayed with me, and I hope all of you will watch it, and it will also stay with you. No need to agree with all of those it features; no need to endorse the premise of the film. But do watch with an open mind and use it to start conversations. In that context, it is with great pleasure that today, on the film’s release date, you can watch it here free of charge. And we are delighted that one of the films co-writers, Gary Powell has written a guest column for our Substack to coincide with the film’s launch.
Claire
‘If you spend years and years telling a boy that men are bad, they’re going to be depressed. Basically, it’s a shame-based depression. They’re going to have really low self-esteem issues. Which leads to all other sorts of issues.’
Dr Joe Burgo, a psychotherapist specialising in gender dysphoria, pulled no punches during his interview for our new film, The Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood. This documentary explores why young men get drawn into transgender identification with irreversible endocrinological and surgical interventions, and how they can salvage their lives after realising they have made this mistake.
The documentary allows its contributors – five formerly transgender-identified young men, two specialist mental-health clinicians, an accomplished but now cancelled comedy writer, and the father of a transgender-identified young male – to give their accounts in their own words.
The experiences and thoughts shared are arrestingly honest, sometimes shockingly and devastatingly so, with account after account bearing witness to the betrayal of trust at the hands of professionals who had been turned to for help with psychological suffering. At other times, specialist accounts offer unique insights to explain what is drawing young males into transgender identification and what needs to happen in order for this to stop.
This is the eleventh film by Californian filmmaker Jennifer Lahl, and the third film where she and fellow filmmaker Kallie Fell have covered the harms being caused by the gender ideology that has embedded itself into the medical, educational, media and other establishments. Their last film, The Detransition Diaries: Saving Our Sisters explored the experiences of three young women who had mistakenly hoped that their gender dysphoria and mental-health struggles would be fixed by transgender-identification, hormones and surgeries, and it described their journey back towards recovery. As was the case with the young men, these women were offered ‘help’ based on a false political ideology, which was a far cry from what they actually needed. Jennifer and Kallie’s first film on gender ideology, Trans Mission: What’s the Rush to Reassign Gender?, specifically explored the harm being caused to children at the hands of ideologically-captured adults in the transgender industry.
Young men, young women and children: all are victims of this appalling new colonising industry, and the unique experiences and vulnerabilities of all three groups have been covered in these three separate films. Directed and produced by Jennifer Lahl and Kallie Fell, and co-written by Jennifer, Kallie, and me, The Lost Boys explores the factors that are encouraging young males to gravitate towards a transgender identification and to pursue irreversible cross-sex hormones and surgeries in the vain hope of living life free from the blight of their psychological torment and struggles.
In addition to examining what happens when young males are made to feel shame about their stigmatised maleness and the overwhelming male sexuality that begins to assail them at puberty, the film explores the role of clinical gender dysphoria, high-functioning autism, homophobic bullying, the mocking and bullying of gender-non-conforming boys, puberty-onset identity crises, trauma, depression, anxiety, OCD, peer contagion, adolescent anti-parental rebellion, extreme online pornography, and internet grooming by political actors and by sexually predatory men.
Too many boys and young men are finding themselves told from the one side that they need to abandon their male identity and instead become asexual, non-masculine males; and from the other that they are not true, masculine males and need to ‘transition to’ their ‘true’ female identity. They can end up in a no-win situation, driven into serious irreversible mistakes by an unremitting sense of shame, including socially-induced sexual shame – a powerful psychological toxin.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that young men may seek relief from the tormenting shame and trauma of their strong sex drives via the emasculation of oestrogen interventions and the amputation of their genitals. Gay males are perhaps particularly vulnerable to pursuing these avenues as an escape from the shame of their strong sexual attraction towards other males – especially if they have grown up in schools, cultures or families where homosexuality is stigmatised. Indeed, the ‘transgender’ label even gives them an LGBTQ+ pass to declare themselves to really be females who are attracted to males, which would convert them into pretend-heterosexuals in an instant. What a dangerously seductive prospect for isolated young males who struggle with guilt and shame about being gay and who long for psychological respite from their torment and self-hatred and for a heterosexual public identity.
Transgender identification, with its cross-sex hormones and violent, demasculinising surgeries, results from a betrayal of vulnerable young people by shockingly irresponsible medics and counsellors, whose members include the callous, the idiotic, the ghoulish, the conformist, the mercenary and the cowardly; by a self-serving, degenerate political establishment that is indifferent to safeguarding; and by dangerous internet proselytisers who try to convince young people that their loving, wise, terrified and heartbroken parents are really the enemy.
Desperate young people in distress can all too easily be persuaded that the potion they are being offered will cure all their ills. Yet some words by Kafka – albeit originally crafted to describe something else – so accurately represent the dangerous allure of transgender ideology in our age: it is, “An abyss full of light. One must close one’s eyes in order not to fall.”
The transgender “panacea” is precisely such an abyss full of light offered to the desperate, suffering young. Infantile, reckless adults encourage them to jump, yet it is crucial that they close their eyes and resist. We hope our film, about young men, will encourage more vulnerable young men to close their eyes and turn away from the transgender abyss, and that it will stimulate some thought and discussion about what happens when we communicate to boys and young men that being male is bad; or that, if they are not sufficiently ‘masculine’, then they may well be female instead.
Gary Powell is the European special consultant at the Center for Bioethics and Culture, California, and the research fellow for sexual orientation and gender identity at the Bow Group.