Fiction is becoming reality: not just any fiction, but the last genre anyone would have expected: magical fantasy fiction. And we’re in an ugly moment in the story, for the usual villains have become the heroes and the usual heroes are being driven underground. It’s happening through the transgender revolution.

I’m speaking figuratively, of course, but I believe there’s enough substance in the analogy that we ought to take serious note of it.

Let me begin by setting the stage. Magical fantasy fiction stories are generally characterized by having a villain with some unusual magical power: the ability to re-shape reality, to cloud minds, to control others’ actions through magic and mind control. The witch turns the handsome prince into a beast, or she clouds a child’s mind into thinking she is giving him a treat, when in fact she is enslaving him to herself.

There may be good wizards in a story (think Gandalf) but the villain generally possesses more power than restraint, whereas the opposite is true of the hero, who may not even have any special powers. Evil sorcerers bend the world to their will; heroes (magically gifted or not) protect, conserve and restore the world.

That’s how the good stories go.

Transgender Fantasy Fiction

Stories like these are familiar enough. Less well known is a sub-genre of transgender fantasy fiction, in which men are either transformed into women through magical or science-fiction means, or else they’re hypnotized or otherwise mind-controlled into thinking and acting like women. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of these stories crowd the LGBT internet (I encountered them doing research for other work). Authors sometimes call them “cross-dreaming,” for they are one venue through which transgender persons can express and imaginatively live out their desire to be different than they are.

Unlike other fantasy fiction, the sorcerers or scientists who can turn men into women (it’s almost always male-to-female) don’t always come across as evil in these stories. Why should they? Their authors want to be women. But there is evil in these stories; real and indisputable, in the form of a hateful, sexually-oriented urge to use and abuse women. Far more often than not, the imagined new woman in these stories is nothing but a sex object. (I am not overstating the case.)

The stories typically begin with a gender transition and end with sex, often with a strong dose of mind control and/or sexual slavery. The new woman literally has no character except as the inhabitant of a female (or female-ish) body providing and experiencing sexual pleasure — and grateful for finally achieving the fulfillment she has always wanted, even though she exists purely for sex. If their stories are indication, this is the image of womanhood in many transgender persons’ minds.

Fiction Meets Reality: Your Mind Is Not Your Own

Not all transgender fantasies are that dark, but they do have this in common: powerful forces bend reality so that a man becomes a woman and the world sees him/her that way.

In today’s world there are powerful forces seeking to bend your perceptions and mine so that we will think a man can become a woman — not just a “male-to-female transsexual” (even “post-op” or “post-transition”) but an actual, real woman. That’s how we’re supposed to think of transgender persons. The saying goes that if there’s a woman in the restroom with a male-to-female transgender person, then there are two women in the restroom, period.

There is obviously no magic involved in this, but there is certainly an imposition of will for the purpose of changing others’ experience of reality. It’s no stretch to call this an impulse toward mind control. If a male-to-female transgender person says he/she is a woman, then we are required by public opinion, by university policy, and in some places even by law to think of her as being just as completely female as any other woman. “I am a woman in my mind, therefore I am to be a woman in your mind. It is my choice, my will, and you will obey, not only in your actions but in your very thoughts.”

Just like wizards and mad scientists, cross-dreamers want to reshape your reality and mine according to their will, and they’ve been granted the social power to do so (sometimes the legal power as well). Bruce Jenner decided he was Caitlin Jenner, and simply because he decided he was she, I must not, must not, must not think of her as him.

My mind is not my own.

The Evil in Evil Wizardry

Obviously I’m not saying this is a case of fantasy fiction actually coming true; I’m pointing to an analogy instead. Yet there is truth in it. Fantasy speaks to us because it contains enough reality to show us something true, albeit from a new perspective, about the way the world really is. And in this case something a lot like the fantasy fiction stories is going on. People are changing sexes (or so they say). They’re doing it through natural, not magical means; but if you have any doubts that it’s real, then your mind is not your own; you must submit your views to “reality” that others holding great power have chosen to impose upon you.

So we can see that the old stories have thus foreshadowed what the world is in the process of becoming. But the characters have been turned upside down. We’re expected to celebrate the powerful ones who impose their mind and their will upon others, and to castigate those who seek to conserve and restore. The “hero” role has been re-cast as that of the “villain.”

It was never that way in any of the good stories. That’s because they were good stories. They knew what good and evil were. They knew who the heroic characters were. They knew that turning good and evil upside down — using power to control others’ thinking and reshape reality without restraint, and calling that abuse good and right and beautiful — makes for very bad stories. Evil. Wrong. Usually boring, too; that’s why you never hear any stories like that.

What Kind of Story?

So what kind of story are we living in today? The answer depends on where you think we are in the story. The gay rights movement wants us to believe we’re at the end; we’ve reached the final destination. If so then the story ends as the kind of bad (and boring) story I’ve just described.

But what if we’re in the middle? What if the evil is soon to be exposed for what it is? What if the heroes are about to be revealed for the good and courageous ones they were meant to be? What if we’re part of a much larger story that’s bound to come out right in the end? As a Christian I’m convinced we are.

Every good story goes through an ugly phase. We’re in one now. Speaking figuratively, there is evil magic afoot. Speaking literally, there is evil manipulation going on. It won’t just go away on its own. But it won’t stand long, either, before the persistent, prayerful efforts of good and courageous people who know good from evil and right from wrong.