In this deep-dive episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins examine the provocative claim that gender dysphoria—the intense, modern experience driving today’s trans movement—has no precedent in recorded human history before the 1920s.

They contrast historical examples of cross-dressing, third-gender roles, or gender-nonconforming behavior (two-spirit, hijra, sworn virgins, Elagabalus, etc.) with the core modern trans experience: profound discomfort with one’s birth sex that often leads to demands for medical transition, pronoun changes, and access to single-sex spaces.

Malcolm and Simone argue that gender dysphoria resembles culture-bound syndromes like anorexia—intensely felt but socially influenced, disproportionately affecting autistic individuals, emerging around puberty, and exploding via social contagion and media stories.

They respond to critics like Short Fat Otaku (Dev), discuss the shift from 1990s liberal “live and let live” assumptions, the role of bad actors, sports/prisons/restrooms, detransition, and why new evidence (Cass Review, WPATH files, UK data) demands updating views. Simone shares her personal experience with anorexia to illustrate how real these feelings feel even when culturally shaped.

A data-driven, empathetic, and unflinching conversation on human flourishing, consent, and ideological capture.

If you’re interested in history, psychology, culture-bound illnesses, or the trans debate, this episode is essential.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be going deeper down a rabbit hole that I have pulled on in the past, but I was called back to it by an episode I watched of the rapidly declining in viewers short fat Orta. I, I think we now do better than him in terms of, of view count by probably like 20%.

That’s insane. Which is pretty exciting because I used to really like him in his videos and he sort of got, he, he actually represents a, a wider phenomenon that I wanted to grab onto on this topic because he, in its recent video, he was critical of leaflets debate performance, whereas almost everyone else says that she won dramatically.

I even had this moment where he’s like, I think she lost the trans debate she was having. And I was like, to go to an AI and be like, is it general? What’s the general consensus on who won this debate? And it’s like overwhelmingly leaflet. And it, and then it went through all of the reasons. It was overwhelmingly Lisa.

So I was like, okay, just checking on that crazy.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. Just so yeah. To, to even override your, your bias still.

Malcolm Collins: But [00:01:00] he said one thing that really got under my skin at the beginning because a trans person was saying to somebody who was in this debate that was happening on X you know, we were here before you and we will be here after you.

And then his response to went viral was like, this is true. And, and he then says, trans people have been reported in human history since, you know, across cultures since the beginning of time. And this is. Factually not true. And I actually don’t even really blame short fat Otaku for not knowing this because this is just, he’s not a historian.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. Well, it’s something that’s not widely known and yet is claimed with a lot of confidence by the trans community. And if you don’t double check, because you, you’ll be broadly aware, like if you’re aware of history, you will be aware that throughout human history and a lot of different cultural context where people will take on alternate gender roles where sometimes people cross dress in [00:02:00] history yeah.

Where people would act like a man or a female at different points in history.

Speaker 2: The Fall of Rome.

Joe Rogan had this to say on his podcast

Speaker 3: fascinating that the end of empires, they get really concerned with gender and hermaphrodites

Speaker 2: the Roman fem boy. Fully grown and willing to take on the role of a common Roman woman. Even the emperor himself donned girly outfits, mascara, and held many chamber parties . The Roman Senate began having debates to determine if quote, being with a fem boy was a totally gay thing. After all,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so you take that and you then just are like, yeah, of course. I’ve heard like three or four instances of that happening in history that I can just think of off the top of my. But that’s not what the modern trans movement is.

The modern and even the core complaint of the modern trans movement is gender dysphoria. This really, really intense discomfort with your birth, gender [00:03:00] to the extent that you may want to unlive yourself, right? Like, you, you cannot live a mentally healthy life as your birth gender. It is something that is constantly eating at you if you, if you don’t transition this phenomenon literally.

Nowhere in history before the year 1920.

Speaker: And you may wanna say, well, Malcolm, that’s pretty nitpicky. So you’re saying that there have been alternate gender presentation throughout history, but there’s never been dysphoria recorded in history. , Why does that matter? Right. And it’s like, well,, if it turns out that dysphoria is a modern cultural phenomenon, if dysphoria is not actually part of the human condition, then most trans arguments immediately fall apart.

The idea of I can’t be mentally healthy without doing this because of what? Because of the distress I feel when I’m. Displaying my birth gender. If you say, well, that distress is a cultural artifact and would probably better off removing the cultural artifact than,, a, a attempting [00:04:00] to address it through major surgery,

that falls apart And if you can say, well, if the people in Historia, , you know, lived as other genders but didn’t feel dysphoria, then why they do it?

And it’s like, well, we actually have a very good record. , Most of the time it was either like a woman wanted to live as a. Father in like a church and like a, this is sort of lifestyle. , Or did she wanted to fight in a war and women weren’t allowed to fight in wars during that period. , Or, , she wanted to pursue a gay relationship and women weren’t allowed to pursue gay relationships in that period.

, Or. With guys. , It’s often they were cross-dressers. Cross-dressing is something we see recorded throughout history. Even today. To conflate somebody who is a cross-dresser with a trans person is extremely offensive to both the trans community and the community of Crossdressers. They are not the same thing.

Wanting to dress up and talk like a woman sometimes is not the same thing as. Being trans. So, , if you say, oh, well in history we have [00:05:00] cross dressers, but no trans people, that’s a significantly different thing That removes most of the motivation for like why we need to gender someone correctly. Gender dysphoria.

Why do I need to use that restroom? Gender dysphoria? Why do I need to be on the sports team? Gender dysphoria.

But if we’re looking to history and all we have is sometimes I like cross-dressing, then it’s why do I have to play on this girl’s sports team? Because I like cross-dressing. It’s like, oh no, that’s stupid. No, we can’t let you on the sports team just because you like cross-dressing. If gender dysphoria is a cultural artifact, that is the center stone that the entire trans community relies on

To demand they, one, be seen as their preferred gender. And two, gain access to safe spaces that would otherwise be referred for people who were born, that gender. , And

also just to head this off at the beginning of this. , We do not think that they are faking feeling gender dysphoria or the [00:06:00] severity of the gender dysphoria. They are. They feel, , we suspect with a lot of evidence that we’ve gone over in other episodes that gender dysphoria. Is very similar to other forms of body dysphoria, which are associated with culture bound illnesses.

These are psychological conditions that only happen within certain cultures, within certain periods of history, and people are unable to catch unless they are aware of them with the most famous being anorexia. And again, you can see a lot of similarities. Age of onset around puberty, gender distribution.

More girls than guys, , key characteristics hits autists more than the general population, , associated with intense body dysmorphia. , And Simone, as somebody who. Went through that, and we’re gonna see this throughout this episode, can really empathize with how real this feels. But if it is a culture bound illness, the way that we need to address it is [00:07:00] entirely different than the way our society is addressing it right now.

If we actually care about the people who are suffering from it.

Malcolm Collins: and there are two maybe cases but both of them are really bad. We’ll go into them in a bit. Just to briefly touch on them, one is a Jewish rabbi from 600 years ago who wrote a poem poem, wrote poem about like, wouldn’t it have been better to be born a woman?

And we’ll go through the poem and everything like this. And just to sort of give, give away the thing there, it’s, that poem is considered within Jewish thought for 600 years up until the year 2000. Not a single scholar. It’s a very famous poem. Thought that it wasn’t satirical. In fact, it was considered almost prototypical or a, an excellent example, often used of Jewish humor from that period.

So not a single scholar or rabbi for 600 years th...