‘Puppygirls’ and the Collapse of Academia

A new paper treats men role-playing as female dogs as a new form of transgender identity that demands affirmation.

Reality’s Last Stand is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a one-time or recurring donation to show your support.

About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, Queer Majority, and other major news outlets and peer-reviewed journals.

---

Academic publishing is supposed to be where serious ideas go to be tested. It’s meant to filter out nonsense and keep only what’s rigorous or potentially true and useful. Increasingly, that filter is broken. Instead of weeding out nonsense, many journals now publish almost anything—no matter how bizarre, absurd, or even blatantly perverse—so long as it’s dressed in the right academic jargon.

On my podcast Citation Needed, I (along with Brad Polumbo) regularly drag these absurdities into the light. I do this because while they can be funny, they also expose a deeper rot in academia. Few examples capture this better than a recent paper published in Australian Feminist Studies, a Taylor & Francis journal, titled “What Puppygirls Know? The (in)Human Pedagogy of a Trans Feminine Style.”

---

🎧 Prefer to listen?

Watch or listen to evolutionary biologist Dr. Colin Wright and nurse Amy Hamm discuss this paper on the Citation Needed podcast.

---

What exactly is a “puppygirl”? According to the author, puppygirls are “trans lesbians that are also dogs. Not literally, of course – but also not entirely figuratively.” That line should you almost everything you need to know. The paper is essentially a defense of a sexual fetish subculture where some trans-identified males—described here as “trans feminine lesbians”—role-play as submissive dogs, specifically puppies. The paper attempts to treat this as a profound contribution to feminist scholarship, arguing that puppygirls represent a way of being trans that doesn’t rely on the “ciscentric understanding of ‘the human’ as their point of reference.” In other words, the paper suggests expanding the idea of “trans” beyond crossing sex boundaries to include crossing species boundaries. You aren’t only the sex you weren’t “assigned at birth”—you might also be the species you weren’t assigned.