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In 1979, Playboy published a 15 page feature/interview with musician Wendy Carlos. Carlos had been a minor celebrity for a few years around 1970, known for being a pioneer of musical sound synthesis (she and collaborator Rachel Elkind recorded the "Switched-On Bach" series of albums and much of the soundtrack for Kubrick's film adaptation of "A Clockwork Orange" and Carlos had performed with the St. Louis Symphony, as well as doing a handful of televised demonstrations of sound synthesis), before becoming a recluse. The motivation for Carlos to sacrifice her privacy and Playboy to devote 15 pages to a relatively obscure musician was sharing Carlos's experience of gender dysphoria sexual transition, something few had previously done. (A transwoman named Christine Jorgensen had shared her experience with a magazine in 1953 and published an autobiography in 1967, but she did so after being involuntarily outed by the New York Daily News and having difficulty supporting herself. Playboy assumed their readers to be so unfamiliar with the topic that two of the introductory questions are "Let's start with a basic question: What is a transsexual?" and its followup question, "So transsexuals aren't necessarily former homosexuals?") I recommend reading it as a now-historical primary source.
Carlos is an interesting case, because she has traits that would trigger incredulity among critics of transgender medicine, if she were transitioning today (exemplifying many elements of the male nerd archetype), but she was born in 1939 and had transgender feelings as a child (page 4, though I strongly recommend reading the full interview). Historical cases aren't dispositive of present-day sociogenic gender dysphoria, but how do skeptics of "endogenous" transgender feelings explain historical cases? A "critical mass" of cases sufficient for self-sustaining sociogenesis may be possible, but how could it come to exist, absent any "genuine" cases?
(Here's a pdf of the book Carlos mentions on page 5, in case anyone is curious about it.)
Do you have someone in mind, here? Like, I vaguely recall an essay by Alex Byrne suggesting that the notion of "feeling" a certain gender seems incoherent, under the rubric of socially constructed gender. But that kind of thinking, with gender distinct from sex, is very mid-20th century (Simone de Beauvoir) on. Historical cases don't really deal in gender differences without also addressing sex and sexuality; individual cases differ, but the text confirms my expectation that a 1979 Playboy reader would naturally assume transsexuals to also be homosexuals. Why imitate the dress and behavior of a sexually available woman if you were not trying to attract sexual attention from men (or, perhaps homosexual women)? The endogenous feeling there would be homosexuality, of which transsexuality would be a symptom. Autogynephilia would also qualify as endogenous without being a gender feeling. Historical examples aren't hard to explain with just-so stories either way. Noticing, say, the boom in rapid onset gender dysphoria in adolescent girls is not the same thing as committing oneself to the position that transsexuality is strictly a social contagion. So it seems like you need to be more specific about which argument you think you're undermining, here.
I have never heard anyone make a claim like this in a way that seemed really believable to me--much like my expectation that people who claim to have seen miracles are more likely to be either foolish or lying, than to have actually seen miracles, no matter how honest they seem to be. I find it far easier to believe that "I had trans feelings as a kid" is a retrospective gloss, or even deliberate self deception, than that a child has specifically "transgender" feelings. Children often reject the gender roles imposed upon them, but part of the problem here is--how do you know you "feel like a girl" if you've never been one? Wanting to fill a cultural role assigned to the opposite sex is something many, maybe most people experience on occasion. Cranking that all the way to "no, I just am fe/male" simply elevates such feelings to the level of an insistent delusion. The addition of social "support" for that kind of thinking probably makes it easier to sell the obvious lie to oneself, or to sort of emotionally sanitize homosexual or autogynephilic drives.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but sexual psychology is really screwy. Humans have sex with animals. Humans have sex with trees. Jeff Bezos, a human billionaire, left his attractive and long-suffering wife for sex with a second-rate journalist made mostly of plastic. Why wouldn't there be people out there who get off on cross-dressing or whatever; that may be one of the least weird things humans have done, sexually. The trans advocacy community works really hard to insist that gender isn't a sex thing, but I think that is ultimately just empirically false. Your brain does not contain separate wiring for sex and gender. It's all one big, thoroughly interconnected mess. That is how "trans" cases can come to exist even in the absence of social contagion: the same way every other psychosexual phenomenon comes to exist! Through the interaction of reproductive drives (normal, pathological, or otherwise), personal circumstances, and cultural norms.
How, then, do you explain the existence of large numbers of asexual trans people? (I mean, you could argue it's still a particular configuration of a single "sex-and-gender" neural knot in the brain, rather than two unrelated phenomena. But when people say "trans isn't a sex thing" they mean "it isn't a kink pursued for sexual gratification". Brain wiring isn't really the point.)
Fucking with hormones does a number on sex drives.
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Do you mean asexual as in no sex with people, or no masturbation either?
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Yes.
I regard this as far too narrow a sense of "sexual gratification." The archetypal case for autogynephilia is something like "imagining yourself as a woman helps you achieve orgasm." But then stuff like penectomies or even HRT are known to make orgasm more difficult, or even impossible, to achieve, so you might expect autogynephiles to avoid those things, given that "achieve orgasm" was the whole point of the exercise. But there are other forms of "sexual gratification" than just orgasm; there is for example sexual gratification in simply being perceived as sexually desirable. For someone who is for whatever reason averse to sex, or indifferent to it, not being perceived as an object of sexual desire is a strictly sexual form of gratification.
All forms of sexuality, a-, trans-, homo-, hetero-, or otherwise, are by definition sexual in nature, and gratification does not refer exclusively to orgasm or even to specifically coital pleasure, but to gratification that is sexual in nature. If we accept the (questionable) move of separating them from "gender" and making that word refer only and exclusively to the sociological phenomena that supervene on sex, those phenomena still supervene on sex. Many 20th century feminists understood this, which is why they advocated for the abolition of gender distinctions, rather than merely the decoupling of gender from sex. By reifying traditional gender norms through dubious metaphysical claims about one's "real" gender, today's trans advocacy routinely operates directly against its own intellectual foundations.
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Which ones do you mean? FtM asexuals are, in my experience, mostly very average women with feminine personalities, who first mistake the normal & expected unpleasantness of puberty as gender dysphoria, and then it's easy to further mistake the normal low feminine sex drive as anomalous, both due to being consistently misinformed about the nature of sex and sexual development.
MtFs, similar to furry asexuals, posting habits and behaviour clearly seem to imply them deriving sexual pleasure from their interactions, it's merely that they don't like the act of sex itself. Which is not unusual for strong fetishes, think findom or other variants of the more elaborate sub-dom relationships. Excluding the cases that simply lie about or downplay their impulses, of course, which also isn't particularly rare.
Edit: Also, there additionally is the increasingly large number of people who treat their LGBT+ identity as a social club offering them a safe space, affirmation and simple slogans to live by in a world that only gets more complicated. From this PoV, it just means they want to belong to both these social clubs instead of only one.
What is your experience?
Short story is, me and my wife are both PhDs (me applied math, her psychology), so we have both met quite a few different varieties of nonbinary and trans individuals. Even back when studying we noticed that it's my spaces and in particular Computer Science that has several MtFs (and I've made the same observation in ultra-male online spaces such as mech-themed games or esoteric linux open source projects; they may be 10% female, but it's all G.I.R.L.s), while FtMs are mostly in her circles, particularly the social sciences. Standard gender theory would predict the opposite; And further, my wife (who is, ironically, one of the least feminine woman personality-wise I know) noticed in her interactions in her circle of friends that the majority of FtMs and nonbinaries have virtually no male hobbies, no masculine behaviour patterns, nothing.
When asked how they knew, they talk about how they disliked their growing breasts and how cumbersome they are (my wife does as well), how unpleasant the period is (duh), how scary the thought of pregnancy is (again, duh) how they don't want to be pressured into caring for kids and having to abandon their career (my wife, too), sometimes even how cismen are dirty and gross and they don't want to have sex with them (literally every women ever). It's basically a laundry list of all realisations and fears that many if not all girls get during puberty or slightly later, but instead of having to come to terms with it, they took the easy way out: Just reject it all. Their male identity, meanwhile, consists of superficialities, such as literally wearing lumberjack shirts, or even doing female-coded hobbies but with a male twist, such as really liking to cook, but they cook steaks. They're basically what women think men should be like, not what real men are actually like. Not rarely, they downright detest almost everything about real men as "toxic masculinity", such as competitiveness, dominance, playful insults, not talking about feelings, hierarchies, etc.
The same goes for students I'm teaching now, although it's obviously more distanced so I'm less confident here, but as far as I can see there is virtually no connection between their outward presentation of male-ness and actual masculine behaviour (or vice versa for MtFs).
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