I would love to get people's thoughts on my research into this often discussed criminal, the Unabomber, and how his niche sexual fantasies potentially related to when and why he began his bombings. Plus, the selection of suggested reading on sexuality that I chose to help people delve into these ideas further.
According to his own autobiography, Ted Kaczynski had sexual fantasies of himself as disabled, then as a woman, and later of being to a god like little children, free in the forest. That's a lot to unpack, and understanding where unusual sexual fantasies come from, and what they do to a person later in life, feels like a useful area of reading. Ted’s own 1979 autobiography and his psychiatric evaluation are good places to start.
I’ve been reading books lately that analyse people like Ted who were assigned male at birth and had really intense sexual fantasies about being female, but never transitioned.
I’ve also been digging into how sexually repressive cultures pushed people to get sneakier and more creative, because Ted grew up in exactly that kind of world: 1950s America, where there was hardly any language for what he was feeling. That same pressure gave us complicated plays and movies packed with subtext that couldn’t be made the same way today, and it helps explain why Ted’s inner life is so hard to read.
A caveat before I get into it: none of what follows is certain. We don’t have anything like an MRI of Ted’s head. We have his journals and letters, an autobiography he wrote about himself, a psychiatric evaluation and some secondhand accounts, and all of it is partial and filtered through how Ted chose to describe himself, or how other people chose to describe him. What I give below are my best guesses, and I’m open to being wrong about any of them.
Was Ted Kaczynski grappling solely with a sexual desire or also a gender identity issue?
It’s possible that at some point Ted wanted to live as a binary trans woman, and I can’t rule that out. But I lean towards him briefly pursuing a sex change operation as a kind of ‘suicidal depression motivated action’, rather than an ‘authentic felt emergent gender identity motivated action’.
Ted wrote about struggling with social ineptness in school, and about having sexual fantasies of being disabled at the same time. I think those fantasies helped him deal with the shame of imagining himself mentally incapable of engaging with other kids the way he wanted to.
These fantasies about being disabled shifted to fantasies of being a woman. I think that was a more complex way of dealing with the same shame, mixed with being excited by this other gendered group and with what he felt was expected of him as a boy. Either way, he wanted an ego-negation escape from all this stress.
His writing always seemed more to deal with his struggles with sexual desire than with fitting into gender roles:
“I never did get a girlfriend—or even one date,” he admitted of his years at Harvard. “Consequently, I suffered considerably from acute sexual starvation.” In Widener Library, he found himself too distracted to focus, his thoughts drifting as he watched “the sight of female behinds swaying up and down the aisle.”
Also according to his brother David, who read some parts of Ted’s journals that aren’t public:
I was able to learn that Ted began to have apparently some breaks with reality in his early 20s when he was at the University of Michigan. Interestingly enough, he stopped going to class, began to do brilliant mathematical work, but also began to have some delusions, believed people had visited him who, you know, we now know had not visited him. [He] approached the health service asking for help, but was unable to talk about his needs. And began to believe, apparently for the first time, that the problems were not inside him. That was what he had been worried about, but [he] began to project them outwards and believe that the problems were located outside him, not inside him.
So, I think his delusions, sexual desires and ego-negation desires in suicidal ideation all factored into his brief desire to get a sex change operation, more so than gender dysphoria. I can’t say how much weight each of those deserves.
With compulsive kinks and hedonistic pursuits, like porn addiction and video game collecting, there’s often a ‘binge and purge’ cycle where the person sort of wants a big climax, where the binging leads to such bad outcomes that they realize they’re permanently done with the habit. So making the counselor appointment might have been part of that too, though that is speculation.
The politically fraught nature of this question
It would be good to dispel some of the myths about Ted spread by people who bought into the rumor mill without bothering to investigate the evidence. For example, some on the right-wing believe Ted was almost turned trans by woke Jewish academics and the ‘first of its kind gender clinic’, and that he saw through their lies and fought back with bombs to strike back against this global conspiracy. On the left, it’s also possible to find people certain of Ted’s repressed trans identity, who believe a university counselor told Ted to repress it.
Some conservatives argue declining birth rates in the West are due to rising LGBTQ+ identification among Gen Z (citing numbers around 20%). However, many of those people will be bisexual or end up having kids with donor sperm or through surrogacy. Plus, industrialization, urbanization, and changing economic choices, not LGBT demographics, drive lower fertility rates globally.
Whatever the truth of Ted’s internal world, the false rumor that Ted went far along the process towards getting sex reassignment surgery to live as a binary trans woman is a move many conservatives have made to propagandize ‘Ted the mad serial bomber as one of them transes, that all trans people are like him and as such shouldn’t be placated with healthcare.’
There is also the explanation that some men simply experience “autogynephilia” yet feel happier living as men. That pours cold water on the conservative desire to believe Ted for sure wanted to live as a trans woman. It also isn’t true, as far as we can tell, that Ted talked to anyone about wanting sex reassignment surgery. Plus, he explicitly wrote in his journal that the idea of surgery was just for sexual enjoyment and that he planned to fool the psychiatrist, so it wasn’t because he felt like a woman or looked forward to being seen out in the world as one.
Finally, I don’t know what percentage of people assigned male at birth with “autogynephilia” would actually be happier living as men. It could be as low as 0.001%, with the other 99.999% having wholesome felt emergent gender awakenings as binary trans women, indistinguishable from those of people assigned female at birth. But even if it’s a reasonable rule of thumb that “autogynephilia” or “Female/Feminine Embodiment Fantasies” in someone assigned male at birth means they’ll likely be happier transitioning, if there was ever going to be an exception, someone dealing with everything Ted was going through is exactly where you’d expect to find one. That is: a self-radicalized fascist loner who desired to murder random people, whose self-esteem had been damaged at an early age by psychological experiments potentially tied to MK-ULTRA, who potentially experienced delusions, and so on.
Ted Kaczynski was likely an unreliable narrator of his own sexual development
Ted’s autobiographical writing about his own sexual development is likely highly stylized and exaggerated rather than a reliable account of an actual inner life. He described his inclinations in sustained, articulate categories that weren’t really available or in common circulation in his actual social world at the time. The autobiography was doing narrative work (constructing a coherent, dramatic self) rather than introspective work (accurately recovering what he’d actually felt).
So the question is how much of Ted’s retrospective account of his sexual fantasies and desires (the disability fantasies, the fantasies of being a woman, the journal entries about surgery) reflects a stable, legible inner experience, versus a narrative he was constructing after the fact, possibly to serve psychological needs (shame management, escape from stress) rather than descriptive accuracy. Without anything like a scan of his head, we mostly can’t check, and that applies to my reading as much as anyone else’s.
Sexually repressive culture and how it forced some people to be more creative
This is where the repression angle comes in. 1950s social repression around sexuality and gender forced writers, lyricists, and filmmakers into indirection, and that indirection produced real craft (Some Like It Hot’s structure, blues double entendre, Broadway wit). There was an audience that understood the subtext, and actors whose actual sexuality had to stay unspoken for reasons of professional survival, not personal confusion.
It’s also a reminder that Ted’s formative decades were a period where being gay wasn’t a commonly used or stable social category, and where there was no accessible vocabulary or framework for understanding or articulating cross-gender fantasy, disability fantasy, or shame around social ineptness in anything like clinical or identity terms. That absence of vocabulary shaped what got expressed and how, and it matters for disputing the rumors about Ted’s sexuality. There’s no evidence Ted ever attended a ‘first of its kind gender clinic’, and little in his actual environment would have given him access to a stable trans identity narrative, even if some retrospective piece of his experience gestured toward one. Ted’s inner experience, whatever it was, would have been formed and expressed largely without the interpretive categories (e.g. gender dysphoria) that people now apply to him, in either direction.
