edit: looked into it a bit and it seems genuine ngl

    • HornyOnMain [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      1 year ago
      the main sauce i can find is a washington post from the trial, here's the quote:

      In the psychiatric evaluation, Johnson reveals that Kaczynski had persistent and intense sexual fantasies about being a woman. While he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan in 1967, he went to a psychiatrist to discuss his wishes for a sex change operation. But in the waiting room, he decided he could not go forward. Instead, he told the psychiatrist he was depressed about the possibility of being drafted.

      His near confession of his feelings so filled him with rage, in this case directed at psychiatrists, that he went through a major transformation.

      “As I walked away from the building afterwards,” Kaczynski wrote in documents released today, “I felt disgusted about what my uncontrolled sexual cravings had almost led me to do. And I felt humiliated, and I violently hated the psychiatrist. Just then there came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope.”

      so idk, maybe there’s more about it in the unabomber manifesto or something idk

      • Huldra [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Most of the manifesto is just a rabid reactionary screed, I cant recall any mention of this stuff specifically but he certainly thought that modern sociology and psychiatry is leftist and bad.

        I would personally interpret that episode as part of his general identity crisis and process of radicalization more than it being emblematic of his core identity and person. Sure trans people can repress pretty hard but I feel like I gotta go with his perspective here in him denying there was anything to it and apparently never pursuing it again or even writing particularly about it afterwards.

        Ted K is the authority on Ted K.