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Some what shocked there has not been a top level post about the Annunciation School Shooting yet given the obvious culture war angles and parallels to the Covenant School shooting of a few years back (religious school, trans shooter - though FtM vs MtF).
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/annunciation-catholic-school-minneapolis-shooting-08-27-25
I had missed that the Covenant shooter was determined to have not acted out due to any real culture war stuff, but just due to your generic mass shooter mental illness + desire to be remembered cocktail.
I would guess that throwing in the Culture War angle makes it a lot more likely that the shooter's name and face get passed around, though in this case seems like he was just crazy more so than any particular niche of the political compass.
Presumably gun control will be in the news again a bit.
That both of the recent transgender terrorists targeted their own childhood school could mean something. Does their mental illness spring from a form of arrested development occurring at the puberty age? Could it have to do with a failure on behalf of those around them to reinforcement and affirm the biological changes that happened at this age? Could transgenderism — for the ones not seeking sexual gratification — be caused by the mind being “stuck” in the age where one learns about their body, due to some obscure early life trauma or a lack of social affirmation, and their mind tries to rekindle the feelings of that age through the artificial rediscovery of their body via “coming out” and hormones? This is something to dwell on, because there does seem to be a sub-expression of transgenderism which is obsessed with nostalgic things but which is not sexualized, and this is a distinct from the other subexpression which craves its own sexual humiliation (eg that Canadian teacher with the enormous boobs who sent her one sextape to her HR lady; the Matrix-dominatrix brothers…)
That is a lot of conjecture for N=2.
I am skeptical of your nurture hypothesis. I think people have different sliders in their heads towards which genders they are sexually attracted and as which genders they identify.
Social approval of LGBT will then make it more likely that they will reveal their nonstandard orientation to the world. If your gender identity slider is at 0.7 away from your birth gender, if you see your classmate being called brave for coming out you might decide that you are trans. If your society reacts to LGBT by throwing them from tall buildings, you are much more inclined to play being a cishet.
Here is another explanation: quite a few kids make traumatic memories in school. Often because other kids are jerks, sometimes because teachers are jerks and sometimes without any concrete bully to blame.
I think mass shooters are somewhat likely to pick a place with strong emotional connotations rather than shooting up a random mall they have never set foot in before. Ideally, they would want to travel back to the past and shoot up the place where they feel it all went wrong, but the best they can do is to come back to the same place and murder some kids.
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Does this theory apply to the VA Tech, Uvalde, Sandy Hook, Parkland, UT clock tower, or Columbine shootings? Because that’s how far down the list I had to go before finding one that wasn’t a current or former student.
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I'm not sure there's much meaning to be ascertained, most school shooters target their own current or former school as a default.
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From my perspective, it seems pretty obvious that a lot of FtM types in particular are far less interested in becoming men than they are afraid of becoming women, and so their "dysphoria" is driven more by a desire to prevent adulthood. It's less about what they transition to ("boys"), than what they don't transition to (adults). This makes sense when you assume they've been infected by a highly virulent memeplex that is essentially uses their bodies to reproduce itself and spread laterally (using modern communications technology) rather than generationally. Arresting their development is a good strategy, because it prevents them from wasting time and energy on such irrelevant things as their own reproductive success. I perceive this pattern less among MtF types, but I guess it exists.
Older highly successful memeplexes tended to be much more symbiotic with their hosts, since being pro-natal was a good way of spreading itself. Making children was one of the most effective ways the memeplex's host could make more hosts, but modern communications and transport technology changes everything. This is probably the fundamental reason for collapsing birthrates, and transgenderism is an extreme manifestation of that.
I think that objectively, female puberty can be a rather unwelcome change.
Getting your period (and knowing that this will continue through the next few decades) seems much less desirable than getting the odd nocturnal ejaculation.
If you are a sporty 10yo who was so far playing soccer with 10yo boys, knowing that they will get more muscles while you will grow tits, and that your character sheet has just gotten a new core stat "hotness" which will strongly influence most social interactions in your adult life might very well feel unfair.
And the very idea of pregnancy might thrill some girls but invoke Alien-level body horrors in others.
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I have seen some reasonably compelling anecdotal evidence that FtM correlates very strongly with eating disorders ("take hormones to avoid getting curves!") and also with childhood sexual abuse ("I don't want to be seen as a woman if this is how they're treated!"). And also that those two are nontrivially correlated with each other.
Not trying to imply that this fits all cases, but it read as quite believable to me.
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Huh...
This makes me think that FtM transsexuality and MtF transsexuality are actually a lot more symmetrical than I previously realized.
Someone here once mentioned that FtM transsexuality was driven by an urge to "self annihilation", which I thought was great and accurate. Although it did make FtMism out to be a rather different phenomenon than MtFism, since MtFism is pretty clearly driven by positive desire.
But if we instead think that the key issue underlying all forms of transsexuality is the individual's relation to femininity. FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity, MtFism = attraction to and desire to possess femininity. Then we can start to conceive of the two forms as being separate manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon.
I happen to agree with the radfems who claim that men are the "default" gender and women are a deviation from the default. Although I might disagree with them over the specifics. Rather than conceiving of femininity as a "lack" of masculinity, it's relatively clear to me that femininity is something that one possesses in addition to the "default" human state. And this is exactly what we see expressed in the two distinct forms of transsexuality.
I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine. I think both components are present, but to provide a pretty straightforward (hur hur) example, this and this comic (cw: furry, NSFW, FtM/F) says a lot of things about how the ftm character reacts to someone he's penetrating touching there... and also is more gynophilic in his partners than I am, and a longer-running thread revolves around wanting to be a dad, and not just (or even primarily) in the breeding kink sense.
Now, tbf, I haven't stalked the writer's twitter/bluesky enough to be sure they're specifically transmale... but a lot of transmale people in tumblr space found it pretty resonant. And it's not exactly an uncommon framework: most of the other good examples just look like M/M or M/F, are really gay, and/or just a lot kinkier than bedupolker's, but I can provide links if requested. Not always or even often a plausible one in every way -- very few transguys are going to get six-foot-three with a Christian-Bale-as-Batman voice -- but if we're talking about what people want or are attracted toward or fantasize about, it's kinda relevant that you can just look at people's fantasies, these days, and find at least existence proofs.
I'm just going off of my general impressions from hearing FTMs talk over the years. There seems to be a much bigger focus on escaping the responsibilities and restrictions of femininity, and the actual positive desire for masculinity is secondary (but it certainly still does exist in at least some individuals, as your examples show).
It's noticeably different with MTFs because there's such an obvious strong fetishistic sexual component. Of course there's a confounding factor here that explains why we might not see that as much with FTMs, because women have fewer paraphilias overall than men, and the paraphilias they do have aren't felt as intensely. But FTMs could still desire masculine traits in a non-fetishistic way. My impression is that that part of it just isn't quite as important for them on average, but I freely admit I could be wrong on that point.
Of course, if it were the case that FTMs simply straightforwardly desired to be masculine in the way that MTFs desire to be feminine, then that would be fine, because it would still support my original claim that there's a symmetry between MTFism and FTMism. But enough people have pointed out that FTMism seems different on the surface that there should be some sort of explanation for this apparent difference.
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Presumably the presence of a real effort at actual masculinity. Isn't it kind of a trope that many FtM want to be soft, emo, cuddle-and-cry boys? It seems that many transmen don't really have any idea what being a man means, aside from yaoi porn.
Many of them do; I suspect a dynamic (broadly) symmetrical with AGP-vs-HSTS.
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See I tend to see it in the opposite way. Men are not the default, as men have to earn the right to be seen as men. Women have to basically grow boobs and they’re women. Children are children by default as they are born as children and remain so until they become something else. If I have to achieve something to be considered a real man, then being a man is not the default.
I think in both cases you see the person not really wanting to grow up. They want to be the opposite gender in ways that don’t force them into adulthood.
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Given the memes separating "women and children" from "men," there's something deeply ironic and perverse and even darkly hilarious about this. Of course, an FTM doesn't transition to becoming a man, but rather a transman, and I have to wonder, once we remove all the ideologically-based praise and support from being trans, if a typical FTM's experience as an adult in society is closer to that of a masculine/low status woman or that of a median man.
Depends on the type of FTM. One type specifically tries to look like Danny Devito because it will make them invisible. Their dysphoria seems to be related to discomfort with getting attention from men, and becoming invisible is the way to avoid that attention.
That is certainly one dimension along which that particular type of person will benefit according to her own desires, as intended. I suspect that this, even moreso than other typical decisions which are already filled with them, is the kind of decision that has a lot of unintended consequences with significant impact in one's quality of life.
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I see a lot of potential insight in this. One pattern I noticed is that the way that some transgender people's understanding of being the opposite sex appear almost nostalgic, certainly childish, and naive. Namely, MTF appear to see being a woman as akin to being a nubile, young, attractive woman, while FTM appear to see being a man as akin to being a high status man. Which are pretty likely and reasonable misconceptions for someone to form at adolescence.
Now, these are common enough misconceptions among non-trans people that it's possible that there's nothing particularly going on there. It's also possible that these misconceptions being so powerful play into making identifying as trans appear much more attractive. It's unfortunate that we lack a credible social science institution with resources to research something like this, since it's had such huge, transformative effects in our society just in the past decade.
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This seems obviously correct to me, and has a ton of explanatory power when considering the motivations of advocates for childhood puberty blockers. There is a subset of the larger trans activist sphere who clearly see puberty as (at least in some cases, for some children) a profoundly traumatic and unwelcome experience. They want to introduce methods by which kids can have more control and more agency around their pubertal experiences, because they assume most kids (and even most adults) are dealing with the same level of angst about it that they are. These people are obviously typical-minding to an extreme degree — the vast majority of people navigate puberty without too much trauma and get over the awkwardness pretty smoothly — but it’s useful to understand their perspectives.
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