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Notes -
New Aella survey post on child sexual assault just dropped: https://aella.substack.com/p/a-whole-lot-of-csa-data
I think her analysis is generally unobjectionable, but do find it notable that she buries the lead on the "non-cis" sexual assault findings. I didn't dig into the crosstabs, but non-cis people are plausibly getting sexually assaulted even before they become openly non-cis. And while there's plausibly causation in the direction of abnormal pre-egg-breaking/transition behavior being more likely to attract sexually assault, the data re: non-cis people reporting more CSA still very much supports the hypothesis that either:
It might be that these hypothesis are both correct, but for different population subsets. For example, nonbinary people might be disproportionately motivated by a desire to escape a concept they associate with their assault, while transgender people are the ones afflicted by a root factor. (Or vica-versa, either explanation would be possible.)
I would personally bet on the second hypothesis predominating, though. And in particular, the associations re: social class/parental age/trauma are suggestive of some specifically anxiety-related problem. Working hypothesis: If you grow up poor or insecure or to young parents or female you become anxious and depressed, which leads you to be more likely to suffer sexual assault, more likely to interpret past events as sexual assault, more likely to start identifying yourself as non-cis (because of body image issues? Data is obviously underspecified and outside the scope of aella's post), and more likely to be negatively affected long-term by sexual assault when it does happen.
...So if you have kids, and want to maximize their chances of identifying as cisgender into adulthood, your top priority should be reducing their opportunities for anxiety. Openly worrying about drag queen story hour and queer books would be ironically counterproductive.
Ideological disclaimer: as a catholic I believe there are only two genders, fixed at birth, but as a transhumanist also I'm in favor of letting anyone, including children, do whatever they want to their own bodies. (I accept some nuance re: having to get psychologists/a judge to sign off that someone is truly acting in their own uncoerced self-interest, with increasing scrutiny in proportion to the danger posed by the modification and the mental irresponsibility of the requestor.)
One big issue is the difference between the, for lack of better labels, the meaningfully transsexual transgender person, and the the "trender" transgender person.
The meaningfully transexual trans person, who has typically had their feelings since they were young despite lack of input, maintain their desires to transition over long spans of time and put effort into presenting themselves in the world as their identified gender are rare. Like really really rare.
The recent Kansas decision to pull changed drivers licenses actually gave us some workable numbers on it. Apparently 1700 people are impacted by the decision, and chatgpt pulls up "Active driver’s licenses (most recent full year reported): 2,099,927 licenses."
That makes for less than one tenth of a percent of trans people who had the gender marker changed (assuming there wasn't even any data input false positives which at such rarity I wouldn't be surprised if errors was a significant number of them). Of course not every meaningfully trans person will have had a changed license, and perhaps many of them would have left Kansas before this anyway so there could be a selection effect but even if we doubled or tripled, it's an incredibly small number of people who actually meaningfully transition in that way.
The people who "find their identity" on Tiktok or Instagram or whatever and dye their hair weird colors and also tend to fake being DID/Autistic/tourettes/etc and are just generally "omg I'm so quirky" types seem to be in much greater abundance. Those types definitely seem to be more disproportionately the former explanation, that wanting to disconnect from negative associations with their sex can be a primary motivator for them. It's not the only one, after all they're "teehee I'm so quirky" types trying to stand out and be special in other ways, but it sure does seem to be true of many.
I don't really think the debate about gender is even that useful. As Ymeskhout wrote about the transgender sticker fallacy and Scott Alexander has wrote about before in categories were made for man, while the world might come from a divine power, words and labels don't. I have no issue acknowledging trans people as their identified gender so long as they are living generally within that space. Words and labels also can shift depending on context. In the context of giving birth, trans women are not women, but in the context of what section of the store they buy their clothes or what gender roles they try to match in society, they are. This applies to cis women as well, a woman born without a uterus is not a woman in the context of giving birth either, as it does not apply to them. Another way to look at it would be like a sticker of a door on a plastic car. In the context of opening and closing it as an entrance into the toy vehicle, it's not a door. In the context of appearances it is a door. Vice versa, a secret passage in a bookshelf is a door for the context of being an opening and closing entrance, but not a door in the context of appearance.
We see this right now with the Olympics banning people with the SRY gene. While it's definitely been touted in the media and online as a ban on trans people, the real world effect will almost entirely fall on the intersex competitors given the rarity of trans athletes at the Olympics (one in ~twenty years). Someone like Imane Khelif who for basically her whole life has lived in the context of being a woman, in a country that is very hostile and violent towards trans people too, is now considered not woman in the context of the Olympics and among many activists pushing for the ban. So Imane Khelif is in a state of flux, she's a woman according to one of the most trans hostile countries on the planet and has been that her whole life, and yet considered a man for the Olympics.
And chromosome arguments fall flat trying to reconcile this, because the idea of man and woman in society existed far before genetics and chromosomes were ever known about. A case like Khelif is not just considered a woman by Algeria, she would have been considered a woman by basically everyone in history before (at the very earliest) the 1900s when sex chromosomes were discovered. It can be argued that Khelif should count as a man in the context of the Olympics, but expanding that much further is actually against the traditional usage of these terms.
Regardless I agree with the end point, I think people (including children) should be allowed essentially maximal freedom to themselves (as long as it is of course, to themselves and not others) and if someone makes a mistake or fuckup then that is the price of freedom. Allowing the notion that big government has any moral claim to speak over me and my decisions and my autonomy is something I will not ever do. If someone gets addicted to drugs and dies, that is their fault. If someone overeats, that is their fault. If someone takes hormones or puberty blockers and then regrets it later, that is their fault. And when I do things I regret, that is my fault. If someone is too intellectually retarded to be held responsible for their own decisions, then they should be held in a mental hospital or the like. If paying privately, the most a doctor should really have to do is a consent form so it's known that the patient made their own choice and assurances against fraud (not providing the agreed upon treatments) and negligence. If paid by insurance then they meet the insurance standards too.
IMO an even more problematic issue that confounds all discussions about transgenderism is that trans people are treated as one group instead of being separated into people on autism spectrum and the rest. Every "non-famous" MTF person (ie. I've run into them in real life / specific FB groups / other forums in person instead of reading about them from some source) I know of are obviously on the spectrum, many of them are deeply weird in other ways and they have stereotypical hardcore male intellectual interests (to the extent that some tech groups have multiple orders of magnitude more MTF people than actual women). Not surprisingly none seem to have shown any indication of feeling "woman trapped in a man's body" as kids / teenagers / young adults. I have a hard time believing their experience or behavior matches particularly closely to the "modal" MTF group who felt they were born into the wrong gender from young age.
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I will caution that there's some selection effects going on: in addition to a lot of trans people going to the coasts, many Red Tribe states require or required significantly more documentation of interventions than one might expect. Kansas wasn't the most extreme, there - some other states mandated certain types of surgical intervention - but even before trans stuff became a culture war lightning rod, it was well-known to be enough of a hassle that even some eligible people dodged it.
The numbers in California are probably closer to 1-in-400.
Probably not a great example: there's been leaked information claiming Khelif to have 5a-reductase deficiency, which would have been detected as an (ironically, false) doping incident at least as of 1984.
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