In the early 2000s, Sky TV broadcast a six-part series called There’s Something about Miriam. The title might make it sound like one of those unwatchable travelogues in which Miriam Margolyes slowly invades a foreign country on her mobility scooter while shouting flatulently at innocent bystanders. But no. This was the heyday of socially irresponsible reality TV, after all. There’s Something about Miriam wouldn’t have a chance of being broadcast today.
The show put six young men in competition for a £10,000 prize, which would be awarded to whoever won the affections of a 21-year-old Mexican model, Miriam Rivera. It was only at the end of the series that Miriam revealed to the unsuspecting contestants, and the one “lucky” winner, that “she” was in fact, in the modern idiom, a transwoman. The shell-shocked lover was then invited to either reject Miriam or collect his prize money: the latter of which, to twist the knife, required the happy couple to embark on what one assumes would have been an unusually frosty romantic Mediterranean boat trip together.
After weighing up his options, our lucky winner creatively chose secret option C: joining his fellow contestants in a multi-party lawsuit against the creators of the show, whom they accused of conspiracy to commit sexual assault, defamation, breach of contract and personal injury in the form of psychological and emotional damage. Which seems about right.
Of course, some will be quick to identify There’s Something about Miriam as a disturbing cultural artefact of the morally benighted age sometimes referred to as the recent past. The most ageing thing about it, though, to my eye — admittedly only after watching the final “reveal” on YouTube a couple of times — is not that it is morally bankrupt trash. (That doesn’t really distinguish it from modern TV, after all.) Instead, it is how utterly pre-woke the sensibility underlying the show is. You cannot begin to properly grasp the central manipulation of the format, or how captivatingly unethical it is, without taking sex-realist assumptions for granted. Miriam was born a man; he, and the makers of the show, are pretending he is a woman; the hapless contestants are having their heterosexual dispositions systematically deceived by a series of deliberate tricks. The reaction of the young contestants when they find out is artlessly relatable, and equally unfamiliar to the current age: a mixture of undisguised astonishment, horror, and sniggering mutual-mockery as they attempt to collectivise the dawning embarrassment.
Still, there is rather less than progressives might like to think to distinguish There’s Something about Miriam from I Kissed a Boy, the BBC’s present-day, Love-Island style (at least nominally) gay dating show, which has been criticised recently for including a trans man among its gay male contestants. Whereas Miriam involved the calculated deception of its unwitting contestants by the programme makers, I Kissed a Boy is able instead to rely in 2025 on socially-engineered self-deception: both on the part of its contestants and one assumes some large portion of the viewing public, all of whom are prepared to engage the pretence that there is nothing odd about the fact that one of the “gay men” taking part isn’t actually a man.
To do the makers of I Kissed a Boy justice in criticising their unwise choices, it is important to hold fixed just how bad the show would be anyway, without the odd intrusion of a trans contestant. Though it is possible that the sexual majority of mankind likewise feels demeaned by what unfolds on heterosexual dating shows, somehow in the gay case, the veiled insult feels more personal. All that the show’s contestants are depicted as knowing how to do is shriek, dress up, speculate inanely about their various sexual predilections, and shout things like “slay” whenever they spot the show’s host, Dannii Minogue, herself something of a loud counterexample to the theory that no sound travels through a vacuum.
Annoyingly, because of the creators’ earnest sense of the programme’s social progressiveness, the show doesn’t fully co-operate with the viewer’s desire to dislike any of the contestants (a bit of a breach from the norm when it comes to reality TV, as I understand the genre). Instead, as if to insist that we find them sympathetic, we are offered a series of one-on-one, sometimes teary-eyed, teachable moments about the struggles of the contestants in their pursuit of true love, after which the camera carelessly cuts back to whatever lurid discussion of butt plugs or threesomes is taking place around the pool.
As one might expect, it is in the heavy-handed didactic mode that the trans-identified woman, Lars, is deployed to greatest effect. In one bizarre moment, she attempts to correct the alleged misconception that women are physiologically unable to “top” (i.e. genitally penetrate their partner). None of the fellow contestants presses her for details. Instead, they simply shout and cheer affirmingly, before moving on to more important things.
“They simply shout and cheer affirmingly, before moving on to more important things.”
As everyone knows, the contrivances of the genre make the “reality” bit of reality TV something of a misnomer. If the fantasy of cross-sex identification can be sustained anywhere in life, you might have thought, it could surely be sustained here. Yet, in a way quite contrary to its presumably inclusion-driven agenda, I Kissed a Boy unwittingly presents viewers with a vivid demonstration of the shallow confusions of its own theory of sexual reality. Most noticeable of all is the superficial quality of the other contestants’ subscription to trans-inclusive political dogma. Though they mindlessly affirm the claim that Lars is a man, none of them seems disposed to act on that expressed belief: for the most part, Lars is not perceived as an object of attraction or even a potential source of intrasexual competition by the men. They pay lip service to the mantra, but little lip service of other kinds to the person. Two episodes in, the man Lars has been forcibly paired up with nervously exits the relationship, making impressively dubious use of “it’s not you, it’s me” style reasoning. Economists often talk of “revealed preferences” as a more reliable indicator of an agent’s state than self-reported desires; in this case, the contestants’ sexual choices subvert their collective claim to take their female co-contestant to be a man.
The capricious dynamic of the show parallels the broader reception trans-affirming politics has received among homosexual men, where the response has often been an unstable mixture of apathy and dogmatism. A good number of gay men seem to have mistakenly judged that what is principally on the line in the terf-wars is a general right to sexual libertinism and various permissive norms of sexual self-expression, the critique of trans rights being merely the thin end of a threatening political wedge. Many have been willing to join the debate with gusto on the basis of that inadequate understanding. That they themselves wouldn’t dream of actually having sex with a female, trans or otherwise, registers with them not as a possible source of tension in their beliefs, but a mere good use of the very general right to untrammelled sexual autonomy that they see as under contestation in the first place. It often doesn’t occur to these self-described allies of the trans movement that the view (implicit in much of what they say) that gay rights can only be bought at the price of a complete sexual free-for-all is a very pessimistic view of the justificatory standing of homosexual rights.
Of course many other people, including gay men, have noticed how regressive I Kissed a Boy is. Though it may be an excessively polemical gloss on the show, there is an uncomfortable degree of truth in the provocative claim here that the show places its contestants in a situation akin to that of conversion therapy: an environment in which they are invited to feel sexual attraction towards someone who is female. Though they wouldn’t put it in these terms, the makers of the show are in a very literal sense committed to the old bromide that some of its gay male contestants may just not have met the right woman yet. In response to such claims, the programme’s defenders have pointed out that all of I Kissed a Boy’s contestants appear to have consented to the set-up, woman and all — ignoring, in doing so, the awkward truth that those seeking conversion therapy often consent to the process too, a fact in spite of which many still see clear reason to proscribe it.
What leads well-meaning BBC executives to insert a trans contestant into a gay male dating show, all the while presumably thinking they are doing something laudable? Perhaps they operate with a faulty, but oddly widespread, heuristic to the effect that gay men, in virtue of their androphilia, must in some obscure way be non-standard women. Another subliminal temptation on the part of self described progressives is often to simply chunk all non-standard sexual identities into a category that could be labelled “sexual miscellaneous”: no doubt because they view any internal differences among these people as less important than their shared deviation from the norm.
But whatever the more eccentric features of the programme makers’ mistakes, the more damning underlying error is their failure to understand one of their show’s central concerns: the romantic and sexual dispositions of the gay men on it. These sexual dispositions track biological features, not social ones. Sex, not gender identity.
Though there remain interesting evolutionary questions about the origins of homosexual desire in humans, there is little evidence to think it less stable or fundamentally different in kind to the standing sexual dispositions of, for example, heterosexuals. There is no reason to think a gay man might be successfully “turned” by a woman, whether she thinks of herself as a man or not. Despite what the creators of I Kissed a Boy seem to think, a gay man’s sexual disposition is a robust psychological fact about him.
Why is that simple and informative account of sexual orientation, arguably the default view, so widely rejected? One obstacle to its acceptance is that it can often appear to clash with people’s introspective reports about their own inner sexual lives, a subject about which they are often tacitly assumed to be infallible informants.
But that incautious way of handling the evidence of psychological testimony is a serious error. Unlike sexual orientation itself, one thing that is often not robust (as many cognitive scientists and philosophers working today recognise) is an individual’s access to their own fleeting mental states, about which they can often be mistaken. However counter-intuitive it may seem, that includes reflective access to their own sexual desires and beliefs. Indeed, that people can often be painfully or comically confused about what they want, who they are attracted to, or what they really think of other people, is one of the basic leitmotifs of reality TV.
“Despite what the creators of I Kissed a Boy seem to think, a gay man’s sexual disposition is a robust psychological fact about him.”
In spite of the obvious truth that people are capable of gross failures of self-understanding, what might be termed the “Cartesian myth” that each individual enjoys transparent access to his or her own mental life remains ubiquitous and seductive. It has certainly been of great rhetorical help to trans activists in recent debates over the nature of sex and gender, where it has invested individuals’ claims to self-knowledge of their innately sexed identities with an unearned epistemic authority. Because those reports are often so muddled, the Cartesian paradigm also has the further downstream effect of making the underlying nature of sex seem messy, “fluid”, and complicated. People’s psychological self-assessments are often a highly faulty source of data.
Less often noticed is that once the robust, simple account of sex has been obscured by so much Cartesian graffiti, the same quickly happens to sexuality. Because sexuality must ultimately be understood in terms of sex, it too must be fluid, complicated and messy. One terminally frustrating feature of the way this dialectic plays out is that many boomerish heterosexuals, perhaps flattered by the unfamiliar attribution of sexual adventurism, often collude in the confused thought that sexual dispositions are inherently unprincipled and mysterious. The rich, tumultuous and sometimes surprising character of one’s sexual experiences can help to lend credibility to that picture. But psychologically, the “messy” theory of sexuality gets things completely backwards: modelling shaky access to a relatively robust phenomenon as robust access to a relatively shaky one. It is the conclusions we draw about our own sexual natures that can be confused or inconsistent, not the underlying natures themselves.
Were a gay man to kid himself that he fancied a woman, the default explanations should be that it is just that: a flight of fancy. Even if the show’s contestants, bullied by the format of the show and strongly internalised social expectations, are able to work themselves into that regressive frame of mind, it would establish nothing of importance. For a TV show to nudge a bunch of men into misperceiving their own sexual desires is no great political accomplishment, nor a particularly clever psychological trick either, as There’s Something about Miriam testified to many years ago.
Though the creators of I Kissed a Boy think of themselves as moved by considerations of political kindness, kind motivations, a bit like sexual desires, are the sort of thing one can be mistaken about possessing. If There’s Something about Miriam now looks eccentric to modern eyes, I Kissed a Boy may to future eyes look significantly weirder: a remnant of an age in which large swathes of society engaged the complicated pretence that they had forgotten the differences between men and women. It is silly enough to claim that the differences between men and women are of no social, legal or political importance; to insist, further, that they are of no sexual importance is barely coherent.
