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In common parlance, persecution is understood to mean being harassed etc. for no good reason. Per Wiktionary:
If there's a nationwide manhunt for a convicted murderer who escaped from prison, no one says that the murderer is being "persecuted", even though the people hunting for him obviously want to do harm to him (in the form of arresting him and returning him to prison).
"To discriminate" simply means "to tell two different things apart" e.g. a discriminating taste in fashion. In common parlance, it's often used to mean "unfairly discriminated against". I presume the paper was using the word "discrimination" in the latter sense of the term, but perhaps @crushedoranges was arguing that, while certain trans people may have been discriminated against, they have not been unjustly discriminated against as they claim. (To illustrate: if you don't get picked for a basketball team because you're short and unfit, in a very real sense you have been discriminated against — but outside of the Harrison Bergeron universe, few would argue that you have been unjustly discriminated against.)
In my experience, trans activists tend to characterise a lot of perfectly banal behaviours as "transphobic", such as describing trans women as "biologically male" or similar. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that a trans-identifed male reported that he was stopping his transition because of "discrimination" on the part of his family members, but if you were to dig into this "discrimination", you would find that it amounted to the person's family members saying something along the lines of "I love you and I am deeply sympathetic to your situation, but it's a simple statement of fact that, given your physiognomy, you are unlikely to ever convincingly pass as female, and if you medically transition you will probably regret it a few years down the line". This is "discrimination" in the sense that it's true that tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed men have a much harder time passing as female than men with none of these characteristics; but I don't consider it unjust discrimination, any more than not picking the short unfit person to play on your basketball team.
The study is saying discrimination happens and that it functions as a motive for de-transitioning. In JTarrou's first comment, he says the discrimination is a "fantasy" and it's not a real external reason to de-transition. But it seems to me that even "not-unjust" discrimination can function as a motive to cause people to de-transition. So at the very least you are using a different definition than him, would you agree?
I think being told "because you are tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, it will be exceptionally difficult for you to convincingly pass as female no matter what medical interventions you undergo" might strictly speaking qualify as "discrimination" (in the same way that a short, unfit person not getting picked for the basketball team is "discrimination") – and yet it's so far removed from what ordinary people think of when they hear a scary word like "discrimination" that "fantasy discrimination" seems like a reasonable gloss.
Sure, if that's the modal "discrimination" they face. But it isn't.
Let's explore your scenario further. Telling them "because you are tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, it will be exceptionally difficult for you to convincingly pass as female no matter what medical interventions you undergo" is not really where the discrimination occurs.
If my friend is tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, and he wants to transition to be a woman, I'd try to use that argument to dissuade him. Why does that argument hold any persuasiveness at all? It's because we know if he actually transitions, he/she would face great adversity in the society as a manly, ugly, non-passing trans-woman.
And if they are tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, and they decide to transition, but half-way through, pre-op, they feel the society treat them as a freak, or a sexual deviant, or mentally ill, or just an extremely ugly woman, and they decide to not go through with it. Is that really inconceivable?
I'm having a hard time parsing this. I'm sure it must suck for people to think you're mentally ill when you aren't. I'm sure it must suck for people to treat you as if you're mentally ill when you aren't.
But for most of its history, the concept of being transgender was seen as synonymous with suffering from gender dysphoria (or, as previously known, "gender identity disorder"). I have it on good authority (including from people in this very thread) that medics don't just hand out HRT to anyone who requests it, but rather that these medications are rigorously gatekept and people who want to take them subjected to a painstaking screening process, weeding out the malingerers from those legitimately suffering from gender dysphoria. So when I see a clearly male person walking down the street wearing clothes cut for a woman's body, and with visibly budding breasts because he's recently commenced a course of HRT — like, statistically, it's reasonable for me to assume that he's been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and hence mentally ill, right? Are you suggesting that it's a form of "discrimination" for people to correctly identify that mentally ill people are, in fact, mentally ill, and treat them accordingly? In a different context we would call that "accommodation".
"I suffer from a mental illness that made me want to do X, but it made me sad when people started treating like I have a mental illness, so I decided to stop doing X." I don't understand any part of this.
I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but if you start your transition, people treat you like an ugly woman, and you decide to detransition specifically for that reason, it sounds like you don't want to be a woman so much as you want to be a hot woman. In other words, you're not exactly beating the autogynephilia allegations.
And if you consider autogynephilia a real thing (I certainly do) and think that someone who experiences it is a sexual deviant (certainly that's true in the statistical sense that it's a rare condition; your mileage may vary on the "moral disgust" definition of "deviance"), it's a statistical probability that a given trans woman experiences autogynephilia, with estimates ranging from 60-75% of trans women.
This sort of reminds me of a column I read years ago in the heavy metal magazine Terrorizer. They had a monthly column written by a standup comedian (whose name escapes me) who was a big metalhead and looked the part: long hair, piercings, tattoos etc. He was discussing a piece of legislation currently being debated in the House of Commons which would essentially make facial piercings and tattoos protected characteristics, and it would be illegal to discriminate against people with these features. In this column, he said that this was ridiculous: by getting facial tattoos or piercings you are making a conscious decision to deviate from the beauty standards and social expectations of your community, and you can't have your cake and eat it. If you want to work in a customer-facing job, don't get face tats. No one forced you to. If you really want a face tat, you must accept the trade-offs that come with that decision.
Like it or not, this is also true of anyone who chooses in an unconventional manner, which includes all obviously male people wearing clothes cut for women's bodies. If you're interviewing for a role as an account manager (for which you are well-qualified) and you walk into the interview wearing a clown suit, I suppose strictly speaking you have been "discriminated against" if the interview panel immediately thinks "freak" and decide not to proceed with your application. We're expected to make a special carve-out for any male person who purports to "identify as" a woman and dresses accordingly, but I'm not entirely sure why. It's not like they're compelled to wear clothes cut for women's bodies, and many of them aren't even the least bit discreet about the fact that they're doing so to satisfy an erotic urge.
Did your argument change from "they are not being discriminated" to "they are and it's good"? Because that how it reads.
In the previous comment your argument seemed to be the discrimination shouldn't count because they are trivial and tiny, but in this one it seems like you are agreeing that the discrimination is material, but that it's justified. If my interpretation is wrong, please clarify.
I don't recall ever saying trans people aren't being discriminated against. What I've been consistently saying is that there's a big difference between discrimination and unjust discrimination. If you have gender dysphoria and people "treat you like a mentally ill person", that's "discrimination" – in the same way that it's "discrimination" to make accommodations for people with disabilities. Definitionally, you are treating people differently based on a trait. I literally don't know what the demand is here: "I have a mental illness (gender dysphoria), I am receiving treatment for that mental illness (hormones), it's obvious to everyone around me that I have a mental illness – but I don't want to be treated like I have a mental illness"? It just seems incoherent to me.
If you experience autogynephilia and people treat you like a sexual deviant, that's "discrimination" but, well, you are a sexual deviant. If you dress in a knowingly unconventional manner for your sex and people look at you funny, that's discrimination – but I also just think that's part of the game when you dress unconventionally. No one would care if a goth complained that he stopped being a goth because everyone was looking at him funny, so why should we care here?
I also think the practical effects of the discrimination being experienced matter here a great deal. I don't want trans people to be murdered, beaten up or harassed because of how they identify, nor to be unable to secure accommodation or employment. As trans people are so fond of telling us, they just want to be left alone to live their lives in peace. Over the last ~decade I've had an increasingly hard time believing that's all they want – but if the worst discrimination you can claim to personally experience is that people sometimes look at you funny but otherwise leave you alone to do your own thing, that sounds as close to their stated goal as makes no difference.
I think what you've wrote so far in the previous two comments are reasonable, but the key thing I'm still caught up on is why you don't think such discrimination can motivate someone to de-transition.
Like with the example with the clown suit guy going to interviews, surely when he gets rejected often, he might rethink the clown suits? Okay, maybe not all the time, because there's institutions preaching clown suits acceptance, but a percentage of the people who de-clownsuited give this as the reason is at least plausible?
Or perhaps the example where folks with atypical tattoos and piercings getting treated adversely by society, surely it's understandable that some percentage of the people who covered up their tattoos or gotten rid of their piercings can point to this as the reason?
If a person begins socially and medically transitioning, as a consequence of which they begin to face harassment, abuse, violence and so on, and hence decide that it's not worth the hassle and resume their original gender presentation (even though doing so makes them unhappy) – then that's a travesty the trans community has every right to be outraged by. Whether they're trans women, cross-dressers or drag queens, I don't want any male people getting bullied or assaulted just because they're wearing clothes cut for women. A male person should not get harassed or beaten up for wearing women's clothes, even if by his own admission he's doing it to fulfil a sexual urge.
But if a person begins socially and medically transitioning, as a consequence of which they attract a few funny looks, and hence they decide that it's not worth the hassle and resume their original gender presentation – I have to be honest, I'm nowhere near as sympathetic. To me, the fact that they were so easily swayed by minor social influences like this suggests to me that their gender identity wasn't a particularly stable one in the first place. It's grist for the social contagion model of trans identification. If getting someone to change their mind and revert back to being cis is as easy as getting a fence-sitting goth to remove their piercings, then I have a hard time believing that their gender identity is anywhere near as fixed, deep-seated and innate a characteristic as trans activists would have us believe. And if ten strangers giving you funny looks is sufficient to trigger a change in one's gender identity (or at least sufficient to make you change your mind on socially and medically transitioning), it stands to reason that medical transition on the basis of something so flighty is an even worse idea than it sounds at first brush. Like it or not, if you do anything a bit unconventional, there will be some amount of people who will laugh at you or give you funny looks. Imagine you heard someone say "I tried being a musician, but some people laughed at me and told me not to quit my day job, so I gave it up". A determined musician will keep at it in spite of people laughing at them and telling them not to quit their day job.
Maybe I'd be a bit more sympathetic if the study found that this was a common story: "I started socially and medically transitioning, but some people started looking at me funny or giving me dirty looks, so I decided not to bother – as a consequence of which my anxiety and depression have returned tenfold". But somehow I suspect that this isn't the case.
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