Every day I wake up and thank God that I was able to transition in my twenties.
I say that because of Bryon Noem, and because of a person called John.
On March 31, 2026, the Daily Mail published hundreds of messages between Bryon Noem — husband of former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — and three women in the online bimbofication community. A 56-year-old insurance executive from South Dakota had been paying upwards of $25,000 to OnlyFans creators who specialize in extreme breast augmentation and doll-like transformation. He used the alias “Jason Jackson.” He sent photos of himself wearing fake breasts made from balloons. He told one model he wanted to marry her.
“I will at some point. Today is not the day. I appreciate your heart,” Bryon Noem told the New York Times — when asked if he had anything to say.
Kristi Noem’s spokesperson said the family had been “blindsided” and asked for “privacy and prayers.”
Trans people have a name for this: John 50.
In 2001, a psychologist named Anne Vitale published a paper called “Implications of Being Gender Dysphoric: A Developmental Review.” Vitale is a trans woman herself — she transitioned in 1980 and spent the next twenty-five years counseling over 500 gender-variant clients in private practice in California. She’s been a member of WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, since 1979. She is not speculating about this from the outside.
The paper identified three groups of people experiencing what she called gender dysphoria.
Group One was people who present as their true gender early and transition with relatively little difficulty. Group Two was the equivalent pattern in trans men. Group Three was the one that mattered to me.
Group Three is the closeted ones — the ones who pass. Vitale described them as people who look and act exactly as society expects them to — who build conventional lives, hold advanced degrees, climb corporate ladders, marry, have children — while living with their dysphoria in secret. She traced what happens to them across a lifetime. In childhood, they know something is wrong but learn fast that saying so is dangerous. In adolescence, they double down: they date the right people, play the right sports, perform the gender that keeps them safe. In young adulthood, they build the structure — career, marriage, family — and wrap it around the secret like a cast around a broken bone. It works. For a while.
Then it stops working. Vitale documented what the middle-age crisis looks like for Group Three: panic attacks, insomnia, inability to concentrate, episodes of weeping. The dysphoria doesn’t fade with age. It worsens in direct proportion to how deeply entrenched the person becomes in the life they’ve built around it. The further they get from believing they can ever live as themselves, the more acute it gets. Some become suicidal.
Vitale described a patient she called John. John was 50, a research scientist, married 23 years, three kids. John showed up in her office after a panic attack at an airport so bad they called paramedics, disclosing having “episodes” at work — curling into the fetal position and sobbing at a desk. John had known since childhood.
John wasn’t faking a career or being a father. John was faking one thing, and the effort of faking that one thing colonized everything else until there was nothing left.
John transitioned. Three years of therapy and hormone treatment, and then came out and lived as a woman full-time. She returned to her career. The structure keeping her from being herself didn’t just fail — it was replaced by something real. But she lost decades.
In trans communities, “John 50” has become shorthand for or a pattern. Most of us know someone like this. Some of us almost became someone like this. Like a splinter in your mind, the feeling doesn’t die. It curdles, comes out sideways, spilling out in ways the person themselves might not fully recognize, decades later, in a DM to a stranger.
And now it’s time for all the disclaimers: Bryon Noem may not be trans at all though that’s certainly up for debate. There are cis men, cis women, trans men, trans women, and people who don’t map onto either category who enjoy bimbofication as a fantasy or a way of being. Cross-dressing is not the same thing as transitioning. A kink is not a gender identity. What Bryon Noem experiences internally is not mine to diagnose from a newspaper article. Et cetera, et cetera.
But I know what John 50 looks like — the secrecy, the outside life so solid that nobody suspected anything. The insurance business, the ranch, the marriage to one of the most powerful women in Republican politics. And then one day, the dam bursts.
I read Vitale’s paper in my mid-twenties. I remember the feeling of going through her life stages and checking them off. Childhood: knew something was wrong, learned not to say it. Check. Adolescence: performed harder, dated the right people, built the mask. Check. Young adulthood: started constructing the life — the career, the relationships, the structure designed to make the feeling irrelevant. Check. I was in stage three. I was building the cast.
And then I read stages four and five — the panic attacks, the insomnia, the crying at your desk, the decades of compounding distance between who you are and who you’ve built yourself to be, until one day you’re a 56-year-old insurance executive from South Dakota making balloon breasts in your bathroom.
I did not want stages four and five.
Repression does not resolve gender dysphoria. It defers it. And every system that tells a person the thing they know about themselves is unacceptable — their family, their community, their government — is not preventing transition. It is building more John and Jane and Zane 50s.
In 2022, Kristi Noem became the first governor in the United States to sign a ban on transgender girls playing school sports. In 2023, she signed a ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. As Secretary of Homeland Security, she removed LGBTQ+ protections from the department’s intelligence-gathering guidelines and oversaw a policy barring transgender TSA officers from performing pat-downs.
She signed the laws. She wrote the executive orders. She went on Fox News and made the case. And then Trump fired her.
I am not making fun of Bryon Noem.
The internet is having a great time with this, and I get it. The hypocrisy is a neon sign. But what I see when I look at those messages is a person who has been at war with himself for so long that his own desires have become unrecognizable to him. The secret payments, the alias, the fetish — these are not the behaviors of someone who is at peace. These are the behaviors of someone whose interior life has been sealed in a pressure cooker for decades, and what’s leaking out is not clarity.
Half a century of refusing to admit even to yourself who you even are will scramble your mind and your relationship to your own desires until they’re twisted into a funhouse mirror. Until your only knowledge of your own spark of life is of desperation.
I transitioned at 27. I had a therapist who didn’t make me prove I was suffering enough to deserve care. I had a doctor who prescribed hormones after an informed consent conversation, not a years-long diagnostic gauntlet. I had people in my life who told me the truth: this doesn’t go away, and trying to make it go away will cost you everything. So I stopped trying to make it go away.
It wasn’t willpower that kept me from becoming a John 50, and it wasn’t self-knowledge. It was access.
A 17-year-old in South Dakota can’t get that access today, because Kristi Noem signed it away. A teenager who knows exactly what I knew — who feels the same thing I felt, who would benefit from the same early intervention that let me have a life — is now required by state law to wait, to suppress, to build the structure and hope it holds.
Decades are not reversible. You can’t give someone back the years they spent at war with themselves. You can’t undo what thirty years of suppression does to a person’s relationship with their own desire. You can let someone transition with a doctor and a therapist and a supportive family. Or you can watch them detonate at 56 on the front page of the Daily Mail. Those are the options. Kristi Noem chose for her state. Her husband is simply collateral damage.
A superb, sensitive essay -- beautifully penned, it shows real empathy for Byron Noem. Initially (like so many people) I laughed at the absurdity of someone like the awful Ms. Noem (one of our worst foes) having a husband with so Big and Ironic a secret; but I regret that now, for he deserves real empathy and emotional support. Thank you for showing that to him.
Beautifully written. When I saw him I felt sad for him. I’m sure his relationship with his wife is awful. His neighbors and other folks around town said they liked him a lot. Collateral damage, indeed.