“When I transitioned, I lost every right I had to women’s spaces, and that’s what a transexual understands,” said Buck Angel, who transitioned from female to male in the 1990s. “When you transition, you don’t get everything you want.
“Trans women are not women. I don’t care what you say. I’m not a man. I’m a transsexual man.”
In the latest episode of “We Never Had This Conversation,” a podcast from Bill Maher’s Club Random network, The Post’s Rikki Schlott interviewed Angel, who identifies as a transsexual — and not transgender — about gender issues taking over our culture war.
Angel takes special exception to transgender athletes, like former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas — who blew biologically female competitors out of the water.
“I really believe that Lia Thomas and all this ‘trans women are women’ stuff is a really misogynistic movement because the trans women I know would never do that,” Angel, 62, said. “They have respect for women’s spaces.”
Angel, who lived as a lesbian woman until age 30, was a high-ranking competitive runner in the late 1970s in Los Angeles as a female athlete — something he says makes him even more sensitive to the need to protect women’s sports.
“I have a foot in this game because I remember what it takes,” he said. “Sports is not a human right … Why are we even having this conversation [about trans athletes]?”
Angel, who is based in Los Angeles, is even more concerned with transgender women infiltrating women’s prisons.
California has particularly been a hotspot for this topic, as numerous female inmates in the state have become pregnant in jail by other prisoners. Several incarcerated women have also allegedly been raped in custody by male inmates who identified as females and were transferred into women’s prisons.
“Real trans women [in prison] don’t want to be transferred to women’s prisons because they get treated like queens in the men’s jails,” Angel said. “The ones who want to be transferred to the women’s prisons are just predators. They always have some sort of background that’s disgusting and gross, and they’re there for rape and predatory stuff.”
er gender ideology activists are less reasonable than his generation. Getty Images
Angel was inspired to speak up around 2020 when he noticed an uptick in young women detransitioning — and he realized that gender ideology was taking over the LGBT community.
“They’re just telling [girls] that you can become a boy,” he said. “The thing is, what happens when these kids grow up to be 25 and they’re not men?”
Angel says that, when he transitioned, he was required to go through years of therapy and screening. Today, he believes young people are sped through the process too quickly and, therefore, might regret their decision.
Before transitioning, Angel was also an androgynous model, long before the look was mainstream. While working as a female model, he appeared in a controversial music video for the band Porno for Pyros.
Angel, who calls himself a “tranpa” — a play on trans grandpa — says that he’s concerned with large generational divides between trans people, with younger activists getting more unreasonable.
“In this new wave, people identify as ‘trans’ and really push an agenda, but people like myself don’t want you to know [that I am biologically female]. We just want to move in the world,” he explained. “I want to look like a man.”
He also says he’s concerned that, although the term gets abused and used in a derogatory way, there is a legitimate issue with “grooming” in the trans community online. He says adult predators are obsessed with sexualizing children and even isolating them from their parents.
“There’s a thing about ‘your parents don’t understand you’ and ‘get away from your parents.’ It’s very creepy actually,” he said on the podcast. “It’s like the adults manipulating the kids … There are a lot of creeps … It’s 100% happening.”
He also takes issue with a new wave of “neo-pronouns” like they/them or xi/xir — something he says is a linguistic “trap.”
“Don’t force me to use your pronouns. I’ve never forced anyone to use my pronouns, and everyone calls me ‘he’ because I participate in the world [as a visible man],” he said.
Angel, who underwent invasive surgery and years of hormone therapy, is annoyed with young people who dabble in neo-pronouns with no real buy-in.
“If it’s a woman who’s calling herself ‘he/they,’ they just want brownie points. They just want to be part of this new thing,” Angel said. “You’re never going to transition, so why should I give you the respect of calling you ‘he’, when I put in all this effort?”
Despite living as a trans man for more than 30 years himself, he’s been pilloried by the trans “community” for having heterodox opinions about gender issues.
“I get called transphobic constantly,” Angel said. “I’m really ostracized by the trans community, which is fine with me because I have no issue about being ostracized by a community that’s being disingenuous on many levels.”