Episode Details

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 hi