This reminded me of something, and no, I don’t mean a time when the A.V. Club used to be a fun and interesting site to read rather than another woke embarrassment. Actually, I remembered something from last summer, when I read Lis Wiehl’s Hunting the Unabomber.

[I]n the summer of 1966, Ted experienced what he described as a gender-identity crisis that prompted him to consider a sex-change operation. He claimed that beginning that summer, he was plagued by “intense and persistent sexual excitement involving fantasies of being a female” and became convinced he should undergo a sex-change operation.

He made an appointment to see a psychiatrist in order to gain authorization, but lost his nerve and chose not to reveal the original motive for the meeting.

“As I walked away from the building afterwards I felt disgusted about what my uncontrolled sexual cravings had almost led me to do and I felt—humiliated, and I violently hated the psychiatrist,” he wrote in one of his journals. “Just then came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope. I thought I wanted to kill that psychiatrist because the future looked utterly empty to me. I felt I wouldn’t care if I died. And so, I said to myself, why not really kill the psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate? What is important is not the words that ran through my mind but the way I felt about them. What was entirely new was the fact that I really felt I could kill someone. My very hopelessness had liberated me because I no longer cared about death. I no longer cared about consequences and I said to myself that I really could break out of my rut in life and do things that were daring irresponsible, criminal.”

I’m genuinely surprised that in this age of diminishing clickbait returns, when tons of hack writers are looking for a formula to produce viral articles, no one has seized on this yet to argue that we should see Kaczynski as a victim of internalized anti-trans bigotry. If any of you want to pitch the idea to Vice, Salon, Slate, or whichever other garbage outlet you prefer, take it with my blessings.