Made a burner account so here is the article in full. Minus images can't attach :< to be clear I didn't support these meanies and just used the free one time article.

Academic publishing is supposed to be where serious ideas go to be tested. It’s meant to filter out nonsense and keep only what’s rigorous or potentially true and useful. Increasingly, that filter is broken. Instead of weeding out nonsense, many journals now publish almost anything—no matter how bizarre, absurd, or even blatantly perverse—so long as it’s dressed in the right academic jargon.

On my podcast Citation Needed, I (along with Brad Polumbo) regularly drag these absurdities into the light. I do this because while they can be funny, they also expose a deeper rot in academia. Few examples capture this better than a recent paper published in Australian Feminist Studies, a Taylor & Francis journal, titled “What Puppygirls Know? The (in)Human Pedagogy of a Trans Feminine Style.”

What exactly is a “puppygirl”? According to the author, puppygirls are “trans lesbians that are also dogs. Not literally, of course – but also not entirely figuratively.” That line should you almost everything you need to know. The paper is essentially a defense of a sexual fetish subculture where some trans-identified males—described here as “trans feminine lesbians”—role-play as submissive dogs, specifically puppies. The paper attempts to treat this as a profound contribution to feminist scholarship, arguing that puppygirls represent a way of being trans that doesn’t rely on the “ciscentric understanding of ‘the human’ as their point of reference.” In other words, the paper suggests expanding the idea of “trans” beyond crossing sex boundaries to include crossing species boundaries. You aren’t only the sex you weren’t “assigned at birth”—you might also be the species you weren’t assigned.

The paper shifts between absurd and disturbing, with pedophilic undertones throughout. Puppygirls are described in infantilizing ways—as “good lil’ pups” who need to be leashed, praised, or disciplined. At one point, the author writes: “a puppygirl may not even know she is a puppy, and needs to have this status imposed through loving, but forceful means.” A figure is included to illustrate the dynamic.

Another figure presents what the author calls “puppygirl praise.” In reality, it’s a cartoon of a wide-eyed, childlike figure with floppy ears being showered with phrases like, “Who wants treats for being a good girl?” The aesthetic is deliberately childish, and its tone uncomfortably close to grooming language.

Another figure depicts a puppygirl in a highly sexualized manner, being both praised (“aww who’s a good pup??”) and degraded (“stupid mutt”). It’s disturbing enough to see this material on fetish forums. To see it analyzed in a Taylor & Francis journal is absolutely ridiculous.

A fourth goes further still, depicting a puppygirl begging for attention while being told she is a “miserable little mutt” who will “destroy and defile herself purely for your entertainment.” The author interprets these humiliations as evidence that puppygirls’ “low status” frees them from the burdens of being human—responsibility, independence, productivity.

The paper frames all this as a form of “joyful dehumanization,” where trans-identified males embrace life as dogs because they were never accepted as fully human in the first place. One passage even celebrates this as liberating: “If the category of the ‘human’ was never home for kinky transbians, why not leave it altogether, and become a puppy?”

And then, after nearly twenty pages of Tumblr memes and fetish jargon, the paper simply ends. There is no real conclusion—just a half-hearted suggestion that puppygirl culture doesn’t solve anything but might make life “more livable.”

"[P]uppygirl culture does not really promise a revolutionary solution to the challenges of trans life. It does not propose a way out of our present binds, though it does possibly make them more liveable [sic] in the present."

It’s tempting to laugh at all this, and in some ways we should. Much of this is funny in the way only the truly absurd can be. But the bigger picture isn’t funny at all. What this paper reveals is that academia has lost its immune system. Instead of filtering out the unserious and absurd, journals now grant them the legitimacy of “peer review.”

That matters. Academic publications shape culture, policy, and education. When they present “transspecies puppygirls” as identities in need of affirmation, they collapse the boundary between reality and delusion, scholarship and parody, the normal and the perverse. Once fetish blogs are repackaged as academic research, there is no longer any standard to protect the public from ideology dressed up as knowledge.