Money argued that the need to amputate healthy limbs was driven by similar pathological forces to those that led people to want sex-change surgery. Both, he suggested, were masochistic sexual fantasies in which people ‘performed’ their suffering for the world and for themselves. Both were, in effect, a form of humiliation enacted upon the patient at their own bidding.

The trans lobby has spent years since trying to bury any comparison between limb and genital removal. They realise that if the public was to notice the eerie parallels between the two then it would likely conclude that ‘gender-affirmation surgery’ is just fetish-driven self-harm. And they wouldn’t be far wrong.

It’s a fetish