Sex Changes and the CIA, the Weird Unabomber Backstory

The Unabomber is dead. After that news broke over the weekend, I saw a very interesting tweet from influential conservative commentator Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.

He said that the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, had struggled with gender dysphoria and wanted to get a sex change to try and live life as a woman. He added that the Unabomber had also been subject to CIA mind control experiments while a student at Harvard University. Sounds crazy, right? It all checks out.

Here's the tweet:

Charlie Kirk: Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, died today at 81. He was one of America’s most brilliant young mathematicians ever, but went mad after being a subject in abusive MK ULTRA experiments while at Harvard. A lot of people know about that…but did you know that before becoming a hermit who mailed bombs to people, Kaczynski also developed gender dysphoria and wanted to become a woman?

As I said earlier, it all checks out.

Here's a story from The Washington Post back in 1998 where they report on Ted Kaczynski's struggles with gender dysphoria and his desire to get a sex change operation to try and live life as a woman.

Convicted Unabomber Theodore J. Kaczynski considered having a sex change operation when he was in his twenties and his confusion over his gender identity filled him with a rage that contributed to his bombing spree, according to documents released today.

The new details about the mental health of Kaczynski, who pleaded guilty in January to a string of terrorist bombings that killed three people and injured 23 others, were part of 47-page forensic evaluation ordered by U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell Jr. during Kaczynski's January trial.

And he struggled with gender dysphoria BEFORE the radical experiments that were conducted on him while at Harvard. Here is the official obit news story by The New York Times after the Unabomber died showing how he was used as a part of MK Ultra:

As a sophomore, he was recruited for an experiment conducted on 22 undergraduates by an eminent Harvard psychology professor, Henry A. Murray. It turned out to be a brutal experience: Three years of deliberately abusive and humiliating mock interrogations, aimed at studying how people react under stress.

The experiment resembled screening processes for secret agents that Professor Murray had helped develop during World War II. In 2018, the Central Intelligence Agency described Professor Murray’s experiment as part of MK-Ultra, a project that studied mind control, and it cited characterizations of Professor Murray’s work as “disturbing” and “ethically indefensible.”

We shared this news on the radio Monday morning and had some interesting phone calls from listeners who said they remember spotting him riding his bicycle in Lincoln, Montana back in the day.