This Bizarre Story Refutes Gender Ideology's Central Dogma

If gender identity is innate and fixed from toddlerhood, how did cancer meds turn this 67-year-old man into a nonbinary grandmother named Leela?

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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.

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We are constantly told that gender identity is innate, immutable, and knowable in toddlerhood. Activists insist that when a three-year-old boy plays with dolls or says he’s a girl, he is revealing a profound inner truth that must be affirmed with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries. This claim—that identity is fixed from the earliest age and should guide permanent medical interventions—is the central justification for “gender-affirming care.”

But then along comes a story that so thoroughly undercuts this narrative that it forces us to confront just how incoherent the ideology really is. Such is the case with an article recently published by LGBTQ Nation bearing the headline: “Cancer medication turned me nonbinary.”

As part of his treatment, his doctor prescribed radiation and testosterone blockers. In this case, blockers were used as intended—they stop the cancer from feeding on testosterone. But almost immediately, Morris said he “hated every minute of it.” The side effects were brutal: “My genitals shrunk. I lost virtually all hair, except for the hair on my head, eyebrows, and lashes. I gained weight in all the places that women gain weight… I was a wreck for most of the time.” He felt miserable, irritable, and emotionally wrecked.

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After eighteen months of this, Morris pushed his doctor to stop the blockers and give him testosterone injections instead. The doctor’s colleagues thought it was reckless, but Morris showed up with studies from Harvard and Yale in hand, and the doctor eventually relented. Sure enough, testosterone brought the male traits back—weight loss, hair growth, and what Morris described as being “absolutely obsessed with sex… like a teenage kid again.” But he didn’t like that either. “Ah god, I remember this, but this is not what I want,” he said.

Then his cancer metastasized to his spine. His doctor warned him that unless he resumed blockers immediately, “in six months, you will have hundreds of tumors, and you will be really, really sick and in pain.” Morris went back on blockers, but this time something shifted. Instead of resisting the feminization, he leaned into it. Maybe a little too hard. “My heart had opened,” he said. “I was a lot more calm and loving and kind.” Therapy sessions then turned this into a full blown “gender journey.”

And then came the psychedelics.