Ted Kaczynski and Sexuality

Introduction

According to his own autobiography, Ted Kaczynski had sexual fantasies of himself as disabled, then as a woman, and later of being a god to 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 for this archive. 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.

How to Use This List

Below is a quickly sketched map of texts that matter across the many fields and communities that write about sex: sex researchers, historians, feminists, kink communities, therapists, religious writers, sex workers, cultural critics, and researchers of the far right. It is not a map of sexuality itself, which exists in people’s lives with or without any of these books.

The point of the list is to give a general reader a quick way into who is arguing about what. Some entries are friendly intros, some are dense academic work, and some are here because they are influential or widely cited, not because they are correct. If you’re new to the subject, start with Easy Entry Points.

Where a field is heavily disputed I’ve flagged it. Some of the clinical and psychological research below is contested by other researchers and by the communities it studies, and I’ve tried to put critics near the work they critique. Inclusion is not endorsement.

Plenty of what’s here is explicit, and some of it covers abuse, violence and fascist sexual imagery. Nothing here is medical or therapeutic advice.

Many topics don’t have a classic book per se, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten things. It’s a simple Wikipedia-style web page, so if you like you’re very welcome to help improve it by clicking the little writer’s pen at the top, or by adding ‘/edit’ to the end of the URL.

Ted Kaczynski on Sex, Love and Gender

Writing by and about Ted Kaczynski’s own sexuality, romantic attachments and gender fantasies. Some of this is disturbing to read.

In His Own Words

Press and Analysis

General Reading

Easy Entry Points

Readable overviews and popular science. Good places to start if you just want to know what researchers actually say about desire, fantasy and relationships. Sex at Dawn is a popular and controversial evolutionary argument; its critique, Sex at Dusk, is listed under Anthropology of Sexuality.

Textbooks

Heavier general overviews, written for university courses.

Social Skills and Relationships

Self-help and popular psychology on talking to people, dating and long-term relationships. Of very mixed quality, but a lot of people start here.

Desire, Psychology and Science

The Founders of Sexology

The nineteenth and twentieth century works that most later sexology is arguing with.

Sexology and Psychology

Sexology, psychiatry and psychology, from the early case studies to modern surveys. Clinical categories like “paraphilia” are themselves argued over, and the more critical and philosophical pieces are listed under Philosophy and Critique of Sexual Norms. Bader’s The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies is listed under Fantasy and Desire.

Fantasy and Desire

Books about what people fantasize about and what fantasies might mean, from survey science to psychoanalysis to Christian self-help. They disagree a lot about whether fantasies are harmless, symptoms, or something else. Lehmiller and Friday, listed under Easy Entry Points, are also relevant here.

Female Embodiment Fantasies

Researchers who study cross-gender and other “erotic target identity inversion” fantasies (where someone is aroused by being the object of desire, for example a man aroused by the idea of being a woman, rather than by being with them), and the long fight over whether those frameworks are valid. This is hotly contested science, and many trans people and many researchers reject the typologies. Serano’s Whipping Girl is the best-known critical response.

Kink and Unusual Interests

Communities, researchers and therapists writing about kink and less common sexual interests, from how-to books to academic studies. Research on rarer interests, like adult baby and diaper lover communities, tends to be small online surveys, so treat the findings as exploratory.

Philosophy and Critique of Sexual Norms

Philosophical and critical writing on what counts as “perverse”, how sexual morality gets argued, and what sex even is. These sit alongside the clinical books above and often argue against them.

Anthropology of Sexuality

Evolutionary and anthropological arguments about pair bonds, monogamy and the origins of human sexuality. The entries disagree sharply with each other, and Sex at Dusk is a direct critique of Sex at Dawn.

Disability and Embodiment

Writing on disability, desire and bodies that don’t fit the usual categories, including the contested literature on people who want a limb removed.

Romance

Love, attachment and long-term relationships, from the psychology of falling in love to the history of the idea itself, plus some critical and anarchist takes on marriage and monogamy.

Love, Attachment and Limerence

Psychology and popular science on falling in love, attachment and why long-term desire is hard to sustain. Fromm is the classic starting point. Tennov’s idea of “limerence” (obsessive, involuntary infatuation) links directly to the fantasy material above.

Philosophy, History and Criticism of Love

How the idea of romantic love was invented, theorised and criticised, from antiquity to modern sociology.

Marriage, Monogamy and Alternatives

The sociology and politics of marriage, divorce, monogamy and non-monogamy. Evolutionary arguments about pair bonds are under Anthropology of Sexuality.

Consent and Sexual Ethics

Writing on how people negotiate, give, withhold and pressure each other over sex, from practical zines to critiques of the way consent itself gets talked about. Kink-specific writing is under Kink and Unusual Interests, and books for therapists are under For Partners and Clinicians.

Learning Consent

Practical and community-based starting points.

Sex-Positivity and Its Critics

First-hand and critical accounts from inside queer and sex-positive scenes about pressure, dysfunction and the expectation to enjoy sex, plus a critique of the politics around sex on the right.

Gender and Identity

Feminism and Gender

Feminist and queer writing on sex, desire and gender, from the sex wars to trans feminism. These authors argue with each other as much as with anyone else. Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women is listed under Fascism and Sexuality, and writing on where gender came from is under Origins of Gender.

Origins of Gender

Anthropological and anarcho-primitivist arguments about where gender and patriarchy came from, and whether early human societies were egalitarian.

History, Culture and Power

Histories of Sexuality

How ideas about normal and deviant sex were built, and how they changed. Foucault is the usual starting point, with plenty of people arguing with him since.

Repression, Indirection and Subtext

How sexual and gender repression, especially in mid-century America, pushed writers, lyricists, songwriters and filmmakers into indirection, and how that indirection produced real craft. Think of the structure of Some Like It Hot, the double entendre of the blues, and the wit of Broadway. These books also cover the audiences who understood the subtext, and the performers whose actual sexuality had to stay unspoken for reasons of professional survival, not personal confusion. The same silence left people like Ted with little accessible vocabulary for cross-gender fantasy, same-sex desire or shame.

Stage, Screen and Song

How popular entertainment (the blues, Broadway, Hollywood) carried sexual meaning under censorship, and how queer audiences and artists read and used it.

Panic, Law and the Closet

Sex panics, the policing of homosexuality and the Cold War politics of sexual deviance.

Religion, Law and Morality

Religious and moral traditions that shape what counts as acceptable sex, plus writing by queer Muslims and others who push back.

Race and Colonialism

How race and empire have shaped sexual stereotypes and sexual politics.

Sex Work, Porn and Media

Sex work, pornography and how sex is sold, written first-hand and studied from outside.

Sex and Politics

Fascism and Sexuality

Historians and critics of how fascist movements, and the media made about them, handle masculinity, sex and violence. Several entries cover the sexualization of Nazism in pulp and film, and they are not endorsements of it.

Sexual Frustration, Incels and Male Violence

Writing on involuntary celibacy, male supremacist online communities and the link, or lack of one, between sexual frustration and violence. Several pieces here connect to Ted Kaczynski’s own writing about sexual frustration.

Anarchism and Sexuality

Anarchists have written about sex, marriage and love for well over a century. This is a short selection, from nineteenth-century free-love essays to queer anarchism and relationship anarchy; there is much more on the Anarchist Library. General anarchist theory with no focus on sex has been left out. Related anarchist writing is listed under Consent and Sexual Ethics, Feminism and Gender, and Sex Work, Porn and Media.

Overviews

Free Love and the Sexual Revolution

Classic writing on marriage, jealousy and sexual freedom, mostly from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, plus a history of the Reichian sexual revolution.

Queer Anarchism and Relationship Anarchy

Queer politics inside and against anarchism, and critiques of the couple form. Spade’s Love in a F*cked-Up World is under Marriage, Monogamy and Alternatives.

For Partners and Clinicians

Books written for therapists, counselors and partners, mostly sex-positive and kink-aware in approach.

Memoirs

First-hand accounts from sex workers, dominants and submissives.

Domination and Submission

Sex Work and Escorting

Reference Works

Dictionaries and encyclopedias for looking up terms.