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I was recently at a Faire type event and briefly saw a family I've known for a long time. The mother was a part of my college-aged social circle, and the older daughter is my son's age. They live down the street, and we have little contact for reasons that will be made abundantly clear.
The younger child, chronologically 5, biologically a son, was clad in a full Faire style Faerie Princess regalia, complete with wings. His long hair was plaited, and every article of clothing was not even unisex, but just straight up girl's clothing and sandals. Anyone seeing a picture of the lad would have thought him a girl, and anyone seeing him as I did, in the minute before I made hurried excuses and fled, would have suspected he was a boy by the way he reached insistantly for an ornate foam weapon, like the song in his blood knew his hand was made to grip a sword. He was stymied in his efforts by the gentle chiding of his blue-haired pussy cuck "father" (I use the scare quotes because I'd bet 5:1 odds that the kid is literally not his).
In the time I've known them, in all my observations, I've never seen the boy hold a ball. Pick up a stick. Have a single instant of non-supervised or mildly rambunctious fun.
I feel so bad for that boy, and so angry at his Devouring Mother, who homeschools both children because our Blue State curriculum isn't woke enough. That situation seems at least as bad as gay conversion camp, and I would call it flatly worse if and when it progresses to medical interventions.
And yet.
I'm not going to violently free the poor oppressed child. I'm not even going to call out his mother. I might say something to the daughter's father, a close friend. I feel a deep aversion to so overtly criticizing the way other people raise their kids, even when I find it abhorent. I might try to slip the kid some ball games, and maybe leave a few High Quality Sticks in his yard, but I probably wouldn't even risk a socially awkward conversation for the sake of it.
Where do you all draw the line? At what point would you intervene? When should the State intervene?
If it makes you feel any better (and it is literally the same thing, I'll add), my outgroup claims those don't work. Of course, they would say that, wouldn't they?
Depends on the kid, depends on the family. And really, you just do what you can within your strategic and tactical realities/liabilities; you can't influence if you're dead (either to them or more literally).
There does come a point where you just kind of have to trust the kid'll figure it out. Parents stop being the prime authority figures around
physical adulthoodsexual maturity (for blatantly obvious evolutionary reasons) anyway; this is why, when I hear "the teenage years were hell", I think "yeah, that's 'cause you were bad at parenting/were still under the pretense that the biological age of adulthood is 18, expecting the tricks that worked when they were 5 to work when they're 15, and taking it personally when they do not".I once met one who was like this- 12 years old, standard fundie-type Christian family, tracked out the ass. Had a bedtime on vacation (wtf?). We watched Dirty Harry and he didn't object over the scenes I would have expected him to get upset over were he a party-liner.
Observably, he's going to be fine. Likely, so will this one.
Remember, the specific reason those who worship LGBTesus are destructive is that they impose an adult (sexual) outlook on a child not strongly caring about which gender clothes they wear (his behavior is still male, after all). I suspect that it would have been a fight to get him into those clothes if he actually cared; merely failing to care at this age is not really a sign of malfunction.
Actively adopting the other gender's clothes for the sexual reasons that the other gender wears them at a post-sexual-awareness age... that's different. (It's also only a reliable signal of malfunction in men, since there are no male gendered clothes except maybe boxers.)
Given how hard it has been abused against me in favor of specifically this kind of child abuser? So long as the State is unable or unwilling to punish abuse from women in the same degree it does men my answer is "never".
Not true above a certain level of formality - women's trouser suits look very different to men's suits, starting with the acceptable colour palette. And as the level of formality increases the expectation that women wear dresses gets stronger. This is why tomboys hate formal events - they are used to being able to be performatively androgynous without looking like they are cross-dressing.
And, in reverse, this is how you can trivially differentiate autogynephiles from everyone else (AGPs dress as formally as possible all the time).
I agree that autoandrophiles can exhibit this, but they often don't because the pull effect from "guy clothes" isn't as strong considering there's no article of clothing (except ones you can't see) that aren't trivially available for women; you'd have to go out of your way to be transgressive and most people wouldn't understand it being "designated guy clothes", they'd just see as "woman with unusually poorly fitting clothes".
Are autoandrophiles even a thing? Blanchard was sceptical.
Heck, now the option of identifying as non-binary is more salient, FtMs are barely a thing for autoandrophiles to be a sub-thing of.
Blanchard draws from wayyyy too little experience. I can give you furry examples of autoandrophiles in the gay male, cis woman, and trans man spheres, and even point some pretty clear distinctions between the autoandrophilic (cw: ftm in shibari and y-fronts, artist is nonbinary and I have no clue birth gender) and not-auto-androphilic (cw: ftm in panties, artist is straight male) treatments.
And that's been around for a while. The first Drayk 'intersex' commission I can find was pre-2010, and trying to find a good word that covers what people want in the fantasy (since some people want themselves, but transitioned, and other people want a character that never had to transition) was both getting a lot of controversy and eventually got an awkward compromise on e621 in early 2016.
If you know any lesbians and are under the age of 30, you're likely to run into at least a few lesbians who flirt with transitioning or transition. I had one friend from high school who had a bunch of dating struggles as a lesbian (I'm not sure dating women is easy for anyone), and then started flirting with pronoun changes. A not-entirely-small portition of these end up starting to date men after transitioning, too, becoming convinced that in doing so they would be engaging in the gayest, queerest, most countercultural form of sex. Of course, I'm talking about PIV intercourse.
(T is a hellava drug.)
I've also heard of, though never met, "FTM femboys," who as far as I can tell are women who transition to men who dress as women, which is again a bizarre way to arrive at basically heterosexuality. I realize that the femboy thing is distinct from femnininity proper -- try calling a trans woman a femboy and see how it goes -- but at some point the irony and the flip flopping just goes so far that I can't even entertain the logic.
Even in older circles, there's been a small portion who've long experimented with small amounts of T to go superbutch; some of them have started liking 'sir' outside of the bedroom context, though the majority have largely stayed mum or paved over the matter.
It's pretty rare, but yeah, you can run into that a bit. Pantheggon's probably the most comprehensible to straight(ish) non-furs (and contrast Accelo to see what a bi cis femboy looks like, with the caveat that there's some m/m and even the m/f stuff is about as gay as that can get), though I'm just making an educated guess about the artist's actual gender. Haven't run into it in real life, at least as the sorta thing that they've waved as a flag.
There's a criticism that t4m (or even t4t) transmen can end up 'just' straight with more steps, but I dunno if that really matches up to how it goes in reality, and not just in the sense that some transmen like to top. But I'm really not a fan of the whole 'escalating scale where nonconventional is better' thing, either.
I think some of the weirdness is downstream of seeing-as-a-
state-dropdown-box problems, but a lot of it's that coherent names get overloaded quick. A lot of these people are what I'd consider central examples of nonbinary (ie, wanting to present as mixtures of male and female) or genderfluid (ie, wanting to present as male some times but female in other times), but because the terms also include a bunch of random junk you end up a dozen different people trying to come up with new terms that aren't, which get jumped on in turn and often have pretty stupid-sounding names. I keeping hoping that the versions with actual surface grip will have enough time and brownian motion to have a sort of brazil nut effect going on, but even with actual physics that's really dependent on pretty specific requirements, and it's more likely than not they won't be present here.More options
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