Kristi Noem’s husband and the dark secret of trans

What guy hasn’t wanted to wear pink spandex and a mammoth pair of prosthetic boobs? I only ask because that’s what the husband of Kristi Noem, former US secretary of homeland security, was wearing in pictures that appeared in the Daily Mail on 31 March. Had the paper delayed publication for another day, the story might have been dismissed as an April Fool’s.

Bryon Noem – a successful crop-insurance salesman – racked up, it is alleged, bills of $25,000 from paying women to talk to him online, while he was wearing huge rubber breasts and pouting with all the feminine allure he could muster (despite forgetting to shave).

It sometimes seems as if nothing can shock us about adults’ consenting sexual behaviour, but the universal bafflement that greeted the images of Mr Noem was understandable. It has echoed the stunned reaction to the revelation in HBO’s The White Lotus, that Sam Rockwell’s character likes dressing up as a woman and getting ‘railed’ by four or five men at a time. In their different ways, Noem and Rockwell have helped lift the veil on a subject the trans lobby and their insanely uncritical allies have long refused to acknowledge. Whisper it gently: the vast majority of cross-dressing men get a sexual thrill from doing so.

Trans activists have relentlessly suppressed this fact. And who can blame them? The public would never for a moment have entertained allowing men in dresses access to women’s single-sex spaces if they knew the truth – namely, that many of these men are sexually aroused by forcing other people to treat them as if they’re women.

This is not to say that autogynephilia, the technical name for men getting off on imagining themselves as female, comes in only one style, the fetish equivalent of the little black dress. There’s a whole walk-in wardrobe of different cross-dressing fashions. Each more spicy than the next.

When the trans lobby first emerged in the 1960s, its leading activists, like Virginia (aka Arnold) Prince, insisted cross-dressers should dress conservatively. All the better to appear respectable. This also appealed to men who fantasised about being treated as submissive domestic servants. This is what they assumed ‘real’ women are like – or should be like. By 2014, the year Time magazine dubbed ‘The Transgender Tipping Point’, trans activists like Laverne Cox and Munroe Bergdorf had adopted a highly sexualised parody of women inspired by pornography. Whether it’s the older ‘sissy’ fantasy or the newer pornified fantasy, one thing remains the same: cross-dressers can’t help themselves from belittling women. How could they? Belittling women is the core mission of almost all male cross-dressing.

Talking of which, Bryon Noem, it turns out, is a devotee of ‘bimbofication’. This fetish revolves around cartoonishly exaggerated women’s bodies. Think Jessica Rabbit. Some men in the bimbofication camp content themselves with fixating on women with surgically pumped-up lips, buttocks and breasts. Whereas some get sexually aroused by trying to turn themselves into a bimbo. For men like this, there is a whole subculture of sex shops that specialise in selling outsized prosthetic breasts. Some are merely bra-like. To get truly gargantuan boobs, you have to do what Noem did and wear a rubber top-suit that slips over the head and neck. Many of these come with an attachment so the breasts can be inflated. Of course they do…

If you’re getting the feeling this fetish reduces women and their bodies to a sick parody, you’re not wrong. In this world of male fantasy, bimbos are considered gorgeous, in a pornstar way, but also invariably dumb. This contempt for women is also clear when men perform the role of a bimbo.

One reason Noem’s attempt at ‘feminisation’ provoked such ridicule was that it seemed so half-hearted. Here was a big, hairy bloke who hadn’t even bothered to put on make-up or a wig and appeared to think unnaturally huge rubber boobs alone granted him bimbo status. This complacency wasn’t a failure on his part. It’s a key element of the fetish.

When a bimbofication enthusiast casually throws on rubber breasts and a pair of pink hotpants, it’s his way of expressing the same misogyny that permeates autogynephilia. Every autogynephile is, in effect, declaring that womanhood is a costume that a man can adopt at will.

Bimbofication takes this a step further. For these men, the state of being female is defined by having ridiculous, cartoonish body parts. Being men, and therefore inherently superior, they have no need to sweat and toil in order to be the ideal woman. They only have to slap on the comedy body parts that they believe represent the essence of being a woman. The more cack-handed and tokenistic their attempt to look like a bimbo, the more they emphasise how pathetic they think women are.

Will Noem’s outing as a bimbo-ette change how Americans think about cross-dressers in general? Probably not. Most coverage in the US, like that about Sam Rockwell’s White Lotus monologue, has assiduously sought to maintain the lie that there is no connection between men with fake boobs and those nice, well-meaning cross-dressers who permanently try to pass as women.

The New York Times surpassed itself by implying we should get over our discomfort about men cosplaying with rubber breasts in an article with the headline, ‘In South Dakota, neighbours feel sorry for Kristi Noem’s husband’. ‘Such a nice man’, one neighbour was quoted as saying. ‘It just tears me up.’ Yeah, sure.

The New York Times’ sympathetic approach to a man caught on a sex chat while wearing colossal breasts contrasts with the same newspaper’s approach to his wife. When Kristi was South Dakota governor and then secretary for homeland security, it ran multiple sneering articles about her physical appearance. Everything from her hair extensions and her make-up to her alleged cosmetic surgery was dissected, supposedly in an attempt to decipher their political significance, although the snobbery was thinly veiled. This obsession is perhaps best captured in the headline, ‘The South Dakota governor’s new teeth are just the latest step in a very MAGA makeover’. The hypocrisy is unbearable.

Above all, the tawdry case of Bryon Noem reveals the dark truth about transgender ‘women’. These men dress like women, not because it is their true ‘gender’, but because they get off on it.

Malcolm Clark was LGB Alliance’s head of research from 2019 to 2022. Visit his Substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.