There is no polite way to say this – transactivism has used psychological manipulation through methods such as emotional blackmail, false suicide statistics and gaslighting, to achieve many of its goals. 

For example, the transactivists campaign for self-declared gender identity to replace biological sex in all institutional policies, including prisons. As they believe in “trans women are women” and “acceptance without exception”, they see nothing wrong with allowing male rapists who “self-identify as women” to be housed in female prisons.

When feminists present evidence that some of these men attack and rape women inmates, transactivists gaslight them. They Deny that this happens and Accuse female inmates of lying and the feminists of being “transphobic bigots”, who want to deny “trans women” their human rights. By doing this, they Reverse the Victim and Offender (DARVO).

DARVO has been so successful at convincing institutions that the trans-identifying men are more real, more suffering and more deserving victims than women, that allowing such men into women-only spaces – including rape crisis shelters, prisons and hospital wards – has become commonplace. What’s more, these men have been elevated to a blameless, almost sacred caste that must never be challenged, their every whim and demand catered to by institutions and businesses, while women who object have been persecuted, maligned and ignored. 

I’m not suggesting that everyone who promotes gender self-identification – or profits from it – is an abuser. However, many proponents of this ideology have learned to use DARVO to force society to comply with their unreasonable demands. The outcome of this is a horrible climate of “no debate” in which ongoing harm to women and children can neither be acknowledged nor discussed in good faith.   

I believe that one way out of this predicament is to educate as many people as possible about DARVO – what it looks like and what it can achieve. To this end, I would like to present a case I encountered in my clinical practice, followed by a discussion of how this behavioural pattern has become a political strategy. I hope this rather extreme example will help others to recognise this particular behaviour when they encounter it.

Case study

One evening, I was called to the Accident and Emergency Department to assess a middle-aged senior manager following an insulin overdose. The insulin belonged to his 13 year old niece, who he was accused of molesting.

The patient was a tall, well-groomed man who looked like he had recently lost a lot of weight. He had dark circles under his eyes, a tormented expression on his face and he appeared too upset to talk.

Due to fluctuating blood glucose levels, he was initially admitted to a medical ward. A couple of days later when his condition stabilised, he was transferred to psychiatry. 

The handover from the medical team indicated that this “poor man” had most likely been falsely accused. He confided in several staff members about being worried his niece had been abused by another man and appeared devastated that she had “mistakenly” accused him instead. 

He proceeded to settle well on 1:1 suicide watch, and he received a lot of care and attention from the nurses. Then the police came to inform him that he had been charged with sexually abusing his niece.

Over the next few days, it transpired that the stories he told us were false. His niece, an insulin-dependent diabetic, had been spending after-school afternoons at her uncle’s house. The family thought they were close until she admitted to her mother that her uncle was molesting her. The police were in receipt of physical and photo evidence that corroborated her testimony.  

When our patient realised that the game was up, his demeanour changed. We watched his meek, grieving face morph into an angry scowl. The previously gentle, measured words became spitting hisses. The story about his niece changed too. You see, she was in fact a “whore and a liar”. She had “come on to him” and “got angry when he rejected her”.

What followed was a three-month long nightmare on the ward. This upstanding, wealthy pillar of the community became a furious and vindictive paedophile. He accused multiple nurses of molesting him, and while the filth that was coming out of his mouth is unrepeatable, suffice it to say that his misogyny, hatred and projection were extraordinary. 

Whenever he became stable enough to be discharged back home to await trial, he would take another overdose, timing the call to the ambulance perfectly, so that he was always rescued in time.

He continued to blame his niece for falsely accusing him. However, he delighted in showing some staff that he was lying. He would sob as he repeated his sad tale to anyone who would listen and then turn around and smirk at us. As his lies and overdoses escalated, he was diagnosed with Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder, and due to a high suicide risk, he was committed under the Mental Health Act.

I will never forget his first Mental Health Review Board meeting, where he had the opportunity to contest his involuntary admission. My male boss went with me to back me up, knowing it would be hard for me to cope with this patient’s misogynistic abuse on my own. The patient was physically imposing, and he would scowl, spit and unleash a torrent of lies and abuse at any opportunity. He was articulate, convincing, and very intimidating.

In a ten minute rant that felt more like two hours, he accused all of us of being paedophiles and child molesters. He fabricated numerous incidents including medication errors, incompetence on the doctors‘ part and stories of nurses injecting themselves with drugs and having sex with other patients – something that I knew for a fact was not true because I visited the ward often, and unpredictably, at all hours of day and night. The intensity of his anger and the ease and elaborate nature of his lies was so shocking, that by the end of his allotted time the review board were speechless. 

This was the first time I had witnessed full-blown DARVO, and I just kept thanking my lucky stars that I was seeing it in a controlled environment. Imagine how this would have played out without security close by and if everyone wasn’t fully aware of the iron-clad evidence against him.

Soon afterwards, he was transferred to a high security psychiatric unit and I never saw him again. Despite the passage of time, however, I am still somewhat traumatised for witnessing it. On the positive side, I have found this experience very instructive and I have never lost the ability to recognise this type of behaviour.

Discussion

I think that DARVO works so well for three reasons. Firstly, it obscures and confuses the issues in abusive situations. No sooner does a rape victim identify her abuser than she is labeled a liar or accused of seducing the alleged rapist and trying to ruin his life. This instantly puts the onus on the victim to prove that she is not, in fact, the actual abuser. By doing this, the abuser diverts attention from his wrongdoing which helps him to escape the consequences of his actions.

Secondly, abusers are experienced liars, and they rarely put the brakes on their behaviour. The more threatened they are, the bigger their lies become, and they tell them with such conviction that an ordinary, honest person has no way of beating them at their own game.

Thirdly, most of us are afraid to challenge abusers. When we witness someone being abused, we instinctively avert our eyes and tell ourselves that the victim must have done something to deserve it. We do this so that we can avoid confrontation with the abuser, who may be dangerous to us, as well. In turn, anyone who feels compelled to stand up for the victim knows that they will probably be the only ones doing it, as the onlookers avoid getting involved or even side with the abuser to protect themselves. 

Abusers are aware of this dynamic and take full advantage of it by turning any challenge to their behaviour into a “you are either with me or against me” game. This serves to isolate the victim. The victim is now the odd one out, an inconvenience at best and a threat at worst, while the abuser has all the support.

Evidence and calm discussion are powerless against DARVO – at least for a while. Eventually, abusers lose control, the mask slips, and they get exposed. By then, it’s often too late. The extended period of gaslighting and the reversing of victim and offender has bought time for systems to be put in place to benefit the abuser. 

In criminal proceedings, abusers use DARVO to generate enough reasonable doubt to convince the judge and jury they should acquit them. Or they wage extended DARVO campaigns in family courts, which can leave their spouses destitute and their children traumatised. The mere threat of this is often enough to intimidate victims into shrinking away from seeking justice or holding their abusers to account.

Ultimately, DARVO is a tactic that carries enormous potential gains for the abuser while having few risks. If DARVO doesn’t work out the way it was intended – for example, the irrefutable proof is provided, and authorities act to stop the abuser – the society will shrug their shoulders and say, “well, he is an abuser, what did you expect?”. If it does work, the abuser wins, and the lives of his victim – and anyone who attempted to help her – are ruined.

Transactivist DARVO

The transactivist utilisation of DARVO becomes obvious when they respond to concerns that sexual predators would use gender self-identification laws to gain access to victims. They have no compunction in comparing women who fight for sex-based rights and child safeguarding, such as JK Rowling, to prolific child molesters, such as Jimmy Saville. They claim that she, and women like her, are abusers because only a paedophile could see the potential for abuse in a situation where safeguarding has been compromised. 

This doesn’t make any sense when you calmly reflect on it. However, in the febrile context of social media, hundreds of transactivist accounts are promoting this narrative together, using highly emotive language to feign victimhood. Meanwhile, the mainstream press repeats these false accusations as if they have merit. The result is damage to the reputation of women and a vast amount of emotional labour being spent on appeasing highly distressed transactivists. Before you know it, everyone would rather the whole issue goes away, and for this, women need to shut up and stop provoking abuse.

It is not accidental that feminists are transactivists’ biggest opponents. The bulk of feminist activism involves protecting women and children from male abusers, which usually consists of resisting some form of DARVO. Many feminists have also experienced DARVO in their private lives, if not from abusive partners, then from Men’s Rights Activists who have been trying to roll back women’s rights since their inception. 

When feminists see a man campaigning to force girls to toilet, shower, and sleep next to genitally intact adult males, and he refers to women and girls who object to this as “bigots” and “child molesters,” we recognise the pattern. We know that many people in our institutions recognise this pattern also, or they should do if they understand how safeguarding works and why it exists in the first place – not because all men are abusers but because abusers are so effective in manipulating others. Firm boundaries must always be in place to protect the vulnerable and help expose those who escalate when they come across a boundary they cannot easily transgress. 

By using DARVO to engineer a climate of “no debate”, transactivists have successfully sidelined women’s groups and presented themselves as the sole stakeholders in decisions that concern women’s and children’s rights. The outcome is the effective dismantling of child safeguarding, institutional policies that force women into dangerous situations in order to appease abusive men, and institutional paralysis around this issue.

However, as long as our institutions continue to justify their inaction, they will be enabling the abusers. The mask has well and truly slipped now. It is time for those in charge to find the courage to act.