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Given the response to my post below about culturally bound illnesses I figured it would make sense to write out a top level post specifically discussing gender dysphoria, since I expressed a desire to avoid that topic initially. I was inspired by Scott Alexander's recent post on culturally bound illnesses.
The basic idea of my previous post is that some illnesses which seem quite common in our society, things like anorexia, depression, chronic pain, and gender dysphoria, seem likely to be highly culturally mediated - i.e. they would not exist if the cultural norms we are inoculated in didn't account for them. This goes against the standard narrative for LGBTQ+ people, who often put forth the idea that before a minority gets social approval, there are a ton of 'closeted' individuals who simply live in suffering. Under this model, the social approval actually creates the urge to, for instace, sleep with the same sex or transition gender. (I'm less confident about homosexuality being highly cultural.)
I'm sure someone here could give a better history of rough numbers of trans individuals/gender dysphoria cases over time, but the gist seems to be that numbers have exploded recently. A quick search shows laughable results such as:
And then on the exact same website:
This is some of the most clear double think I've ever seen, and I tend to be much less invested in the trans debate than many here. Other studies are more honest explaining that:
I think this whole topic presents a clear problem, but I'm less sure about the actual solution. I'm sure many would jump at the chance to say we should just tell people who have gender dysphoria to suck it up and keep it to themselves, but I doubt the feasibility of that given how easy it is to create subcultures on the internet. Also, if you try to apply that frame to other problems like say anorexia, or depression, the failure modes become extremely clear.
Then again we can't just let these culturally created illnesses run rampant through our culture, and I predict they will only become increasingly problematic as our communication infrastructure and leisure time scales up. Ideally we want to replace these unhealthy cultural memes with healthier ones, but we run into a chicken and egg problem.
So - what are your recommended solutions to the issue of transgender ideation and other culturally bound issues?
Expand the Universe of Acceptable/Respectable Ways to be a Man or to be a Woman
I want to be clear on what I think "trans-ness" is: there may be some hard-core of people with a physical brain-illness/defect that causes them to feel born in the wrong body, but the majority of people tempted by transition are pathologizing the natural feeling present in most people of not living up to the Masculine/Feminine ideal. Most people who transition either dislike or feel incapable of living up to their gendered ideal, and flee it rather than fail at it. I've also spoken about how Ricky Bobby morality has poisoned our youth: the idea that you can do whatever you want as long as you're the best at it means that most people are inevitably failures, and that they respond to failure by seeking out extremely obscure games and metrics to regain self-esteem (looks nervously at rock climbing wall).
I suspect that a big part of what causes men to consider transition is an over-intense idealization of what a man is. When transwomen talk about how they weren't men, how they felt that masculinity didn't fit them, they often aren't describing actual men I know, they are describing a cross between early-season Don Draper and peak-80s Stallone/Ah-nold, they're describing a being of infinite assertiveness and Nietzschean-Ubermensch privilege over the world. In these poor minds, there but for the grace of God after all, a man is Ron Jeremy in the bedroom and Gordon Gekko in the boardroom and Audie Murphy in a fight. That's a cool ideal, one I might strive towards at times, but it is one that no one meets.
If one considers that to be a man one must meet that standard, the only conclusion one can reach is that one is not a man, can never be a man, the project of being a man will always fail. What is trangenderism then? It is an alternative project for those who fail at the project of their birth gender. If being a man means if you ain't first you're last, means the world telling you that you are never good enough until you're a 10% bodyfat crossfit competitor who runs his own corporation; being trans means the supportive section of the world telling you that you are doing a great job, it's a project you can't fail at. It's a hobby that 100% of people who try are affirmed in how great they are at it, even in the early stages, and that hobby/project grows to consume the lives of those who feel they can't succeed at anything else.*
A man can earn 100k and squat 400lbs for reps; he'll be surrounded by people telling him he needs to work harder until he's Elon Musk and that 400lbs isn't bad for a noob but what's the record and anyway maybe you could drop a weightclass and keep the lifts up. When a man puts on a little bit of eyeliner and posts on a trans subreddit, he's surrounded by people telling him he is super valid and totally passing gorgeous.
So that's a lot of words on the problem, what do I think is the solution? We need to expand the universe of how you can be a man. Not just in terms of masculine/feminine interests, though I don't really buy into gendering most things anyway (I love a fruity cocktail on a Saturday night and a sweet iced coffee to chase the hangover away Sunday morning), but in terms of what success looks like. When the masculine ideal was having a steady job, getting married, raising kids as a good father, and maybe owning a home, a lot of men could feel like they fulfilled that ideal. How do we modernize that ideal for a world where women have entered the workforce and often in pair-matched cases out-earn men? Where violence is so proscribed that too many men die without any scars? Where delivering security to your family is impossible, even being secure that you have a family can be impossible?
I'm not sure how we do that, but rebuilding a complete masculinity that men can aspire to is how we solve gender issues, both the kind that end in surgery and the kind that end on incel forums. Hell, I consider the best project that feminism can undertake to help professional women achieve their ambitions to be building a better Himbo, in the Joe Rogan mold, who can support his brilliant lawyer/executive/politician wife without feeling less-than because he draws his self-worth from other sources. Everything else is downstream from there.**
*I don't believe this has much correlation with objective measures of success/failure/masculinity, rather with self-perception of success/failure/masculinity, which is only marginally related.
**I think most of this could be flipped to the feminine with more or less the same effect, but obviously I am somewhat less familiar with what it feels like to be a woman.
The relentless positivity of the trans community isn't a positive - it's a negative. It's a defense against the immensely shitty situation of potato-shaped Norwood 3s getting memed into thinking they can become cute anime girls. It's fleeing to the sanctuary of a Legally Protected Class.
Personally, as a gay man who suffers from pretty awful insecurity about himself (particularly my disgusting body), I've found that one thing that has helped me feel like more of a man has been doing a physical labor occupation.
Absolutely. It's terrifying to think that without a very physical job and a few active hobbies I might have turned into one of those poor nerdy guys getting literally brainwashed by anime.
Thanks for teaching me the term for my family's balding pattern...
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I agree that the things you've outlined (everything is a tournament profession; success at being a man is measured in terms of impossible ideals; the previous masculine success parameters are less attainable than they used to me) are real problems. Probably solving them would mitigate the kind of gender issues that "end on incel forums" (or in suicide, another thing that's been trending up).
But I'm not sure I buy that these are root causes of a substantial fraction of MtF transitions. Are the majority of transitioners really people who have decided they should become a woman because they think they will fail (or have failed) at being a man? I'm curious as to what evidence makes you think that is the case. If you're right, that makes the problem much easier than I think it is, which is a really good thing!
I have no idea, and we aren't really asking that question to transitioners. Detransitioners often talk about things like that, but they are a particular subset of people, and if nothing else subject to the same biases that eg Ex-Mormon or Ex-Muslim forums are subject to.
I can go dig through forums to find evidence, but this isn't an issue I think about a lot so this is more the gestalt from the Myers-Young Associated Statistical Survey, acronym for short.
I can recall, though not cite offhand, numerous examples of trans people in writing and in real life telling me what feeling like "not a man" and "not a woman" felt like. And it always involved some kind of assumption that because I am a man I strongly feel a constant sense of being a masculine stereotype. When my experience of being a man is constantly falling short of that stereotype, from 13 to 31, and probably onward to the grave. I'll try to find the Slate(?) article in particular that I'm remembering, but it was a piece by a transwoman contra-TERFS arguing that transwomen never had male privilege because before transition they "weren't the men who were hitting on their secretaries, the guys making dirty jokes in the locker room after the football game, the frat boys having competitions in objectifying women." Right away you have the apex fallacy, equating "men" to executives, athletes, popular fraternity brothers; and not to autistic nerds, janitors, or obese unemployed. The idea that if you aren't a really great man then you aren't a man at all.
I think this problem is much bigger and harder to deal with than a "medical illness" answer; this is a society wide phenomenon experienced by most people, transitioners are just those at the bottom of the fragility/mental stability totem poll who slide off into the strange.
Not only are we not asking, the question is so politically fraught we probably couldn't get good answers anyway.
I wonder if that assumption is more likely to be a cause or an effect. By which I mean, you've observed a certain misconception in your trans acquaintances about what it's like to be a normal man; how do we tell the difference between the chain (have this misconception) -> (think they fail at being a man) -> (want to be a woman) -> (trans), vs the chain (want to be a woman) -> (trans) + (reinterpret ordinary experiences as evidence for transness) -> (implicit misconception)? Not saying you're wrong, just the second seems more intuitively plausible to me and I'm not sure how one would tell.
Ah, I see what you mean. It's an easier problem only for the narrow question of "how hard is it to deal with trans ideation once you are intervening in someone's life", but a broad social problem is much harder to fix than a few people with mental illness.
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This is a great response, I absolutely agree and think I’ve been flailing towards something like it myself. There definitely needs to be a shift in modern masculinity away from physical violence and ore towards social fluency, emotional stability, and overall intelligence. At least that’s where I’ve been able to carve a niche for myself.
Unfortunately it seems like family is a hardwired instinct for a lot of men, and I think a big problem is a lack of male role models. With the rise is divorce rates it’s not uncommon for men to grow up not seeing a single well adjusted, relaxed, competent man. Especially not one in a happy marriage. In fact I’m over thirty and can’t think of a single one in my life, including myself - though I do aspire to be there.
While I do know men who are married and accomplished, they’re all so damn neurotic I can’t seem to respect them or truly look up to them. The media doesn’t help either, with the bumbling dad tropes. I’d be curious if people could name one good father figure in modern media. (Bandit in Bluey is great but he’s a dog.)
Anyway, older men have largely failed to adapt masculinity so I suppose it’s up to the coming generation to salvage what we can.
I think that all men are neurotic and insecure. I have traveled and dated all over the world and every man you can imagine thinks they're a piece of crap at the end of the day. Every man in my family that I've known my entire life is like this. I think it's intrinsic to being a man. I have met men who are insanely hot with huge muscles and are, to me, the perfect example of masculinity and even they are extremely insecure. I am a thousand percent less neurotic and insecure than I was ten years ago but even today I'm just a snide comment away from spiraling again into self doubt. I think it's downstream of sexual selection, men are so driven to procreate and have sex that we lead ourselves into madness when we aren't actively fornicating. It sounds bad at first but taking this perspective has made me more empathetic to fellow men I meet. We're all self doubting. Dating as a gay man can be so dire because we often tear at each others' insecurities. It makes me have more respect for women who seem to be able to lend sanity to the male psyche in a way other men can't.
Also expanding this as a quick reply to @fivehourmarathon's post above, which I agree with strongly: He proposes that we need a new kind of masculinity we can perform or grow into. (I think that's a fair assessment of the point, correct me if I'm wrong.) I think it's a good proposal, however I think an easier fix would be to encourage people on an individual level to actually support and urge on masculine qualities in men. I can remember times people in my life have told me I have certain manly or masculine traits and it is a huge confidence boost for me to remember those times. I think we dislike making these comments as a culture because we don't prize masculinity as a trait.
Wouldn't it be the other way? Sex is far easier to get on demand for gay men than straight men. Straight women don't enable the sexual excesses of men, they check them.
I get this too. My workplace is entirely men and it's nice to 'blend in' and feel accepted.
Yes, I was saying straight men and gay men alike are driven to madness when we're not getting laid. When I think about how much harder it is for straight men to get laid than gay men I feel surprised that straight men are able to keep it together as well as they do. I wouldn't want to jump through the hoops that you guys have to jump through to have sex and don't envy the runaround at all.
Taking this to its dramatic extreme, the older I get the less I care about the trappings of society and can't help but feel like all the niceties and luxuries of life are a sort of masculine "nesting" instinct to attract female mates. Since I don't have to lift a finger to get laid as a gay man and this is becoming more and more clear to me, the allure of luxury goods is less and less appealing- and indeed, at a certain point simply highlight my insecurity rather than enhance my masculinity itself. When it comes to attracting men as a man, you want to display security, and nothing looks less secure than some insane piece of fashion or a botox'd face or a piece of jewelry or a fugly haircut or basically anything other than the body you were born into. Women may demand these luxuries to feel safe, or as a signal that the man is flawed/able to be tamed/sensitive, but men find them as cringe markers of insecurity (which is much easier to notice in someone else than in yourself, by the way.)
I'm not 'you guys', I'm gay as well though I'm not a very typical gay man. But it's my observation that the hoop jumping that straights engage in has value. Men should want to be tested and challenged.
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I am not so sure about this. A lot of male indulgences (luxury watches, expensive liqueur, expensive technical or mechanical toys) are at best tolerated by women, not actively sought out. My internal model is that I have to spent weirdness points to indulge in them. Part of that may also be that my social class actively discourages overt displays of wealth (you're supposed to be more subtle, like talking about that time you spent a sabbatical in Tibet).
Culturally bound as you say, but male adornment as status symbol dates back to before the Greeks. The Great Male renunciation is the anomaly not the historical norm.
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Basically they are extremely driven workaholics or highly passionate about something, but they're also constantly anxious and can't seem to relax. They don't have a confident, relaxed air is another way to put it. Hard to put into words I suppose.
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I think you’re on to something and it does kinda dovetail with something I’m noticing on the other end of the spectrum— what they think a woman is, or what it feels like to be an “internally female being”. The thing I’m seeing is a conflation of the trappings of femininity— dresses, domestic activities, an femininity in the aesthetic choices of media and decorative art. Now, there are women like that, and women who aren’t. Most natal women don’t do that stuff, and certainly don’t do it all the time. And for that matter, a lot of women like and even play sports, like masculine-coded media, wear t-shirts and jeans and skip the makeup.
What I think we’ve done to gender is made gender into a completely binary choice, and said that if you don’t do them or don’t do them “right” it’s obviously because you aren’t that gender. And it’s really weird because we don’t do this with any other identifying choices. I can be a Christian in lots of ways without my identity being questioned too much. I can be my race no matter how much or how little of the cultural aspect I identify with (I can even identify with the cultural aspects of other ethnic groups and still keep my racial identity— nobody has ever questioned whether an Americanized Japanese descended person was still Asian, or whether an Otaku was White). Gender somehow is a uniquely binary situation where you either identify 100% with all the trappings of culture and aesthetics or you surrender the man or woman card.
But then I think a lot of how modernity has commodified identity bears some blame here. Identity in the West, outside of race is largely a set of choices to be made, which isn’t how identity worked for most of human history. For most of history, you were given almost everything in your identity, then you lived up to that. You didn’t save the princess because you wanted to be a knight. You were born into that warrior caste and thus behaved like a knight. And even if you didn’t, you were still a knight, just a bad one. But if you have to be a good knight, perfectly chivalrous and brace and awesome with a sword to be a knight, then what do you do with a bad knight? And if being a knight is a choice, might a bad knight simply go be something else?
One thing that applies to those who transition into gender or into Christianity is that the convert must demonstrate zeal, while those born into a religion can be lax. I'm going to use Islam because it is more racialized in America. There is nothing in the Quran about race, my blonde hair and blue eyes qualify me for Islam as easily as my Pakistani friend. But our behavior will be judged differently. If we both move through the same mosque community, I obviously a convert and he obviously born into the faith, I will be held to a higher standard before being taken seriously. If he drinks a little, eats some bacon occasionally, misses prayers sometimes, people might say he is a bad Muslim but they will not doubt that he is a Muslim. If I convert, and then I keep drinking and eating pork, most people would say I never converted at all, that it's all a farce, a put on.
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FWIW this is basically the exact rift between people who are "trans" and people who are "gender nonbinary" (or queer or otherwise gender nonconforming) in the LGBT world. I remember back on tumblr around 2010 a lot of gay/queer people were quietly shading transgenderism because being trans basically reinforces the gender binary whereas being queer/NB is something outside the binary. You don't hear about it much these days because trans is such a mainstream issue and people who aren't fully on the trans positive bandwagon are labeled TERFs or whatever, but the issue isn't really fully resolved.
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In a society which exalts women, and values their opinion as much as todays western does, men alone cannot redefine what a man is.
Greater acceptance of short and passive men among men, wouldn't alter how the they are perceived by women.
There is a contradiction here in how you cite only examples of men. The disparity between how intrasexual relations are between men, who encourage other men to try harder, to put in more for effort, to achieve greater things, versus how they are between women, where exaltation of self-improvement in the field of femininity isn't common, of praising the most womanly woman, who is great at all things associated with the fairer sex.
One could blame contemporary feminism, which in its vulgar form is interpretted as women being deserving of high status by their mere existence, while men have earn their worth; and the absense of parallel movement as influential which would tell men they are Kings no matter their lack of achievements.
Thus one would expect the sex which, you claim, gatekeeps membership in it would less commonly transitioned into, than the one which places less value on what makes its sex special. Yet as "What is a woman?" is due to feminism each year given a greater variety of answers, trans men are growing faster than trans women.
I agree, which is why I label it as the most important job for Feminism to help promote the careers of professional women.
I cited only examples of men because I am a man, I experience life as a man, so it's easier to write, and the post was long enough without getting into women. But I think women suffer from an equally destructive set of societal expectations in today's world. A pretty girl used to be pretty enough if she was top ten in a high school class of one hundred, now she has to be prettier than thousands, pretty on a scalable level. But also a young professional girlboss, but not too successful then men won't like you; smart but not too smart. A 40 year old middle class housewife 100 years ago had pride, easy and carefree, secure in her home in her husband in her children in her place in the community. Today we expect women to be all things at all times, and we never give them security. We expect a 40 year old woman to fuck like Samantha from Sex and the City, to Lean In like Sheryl Sandberg, to mother like a Mormon mommy blogger, or maybe to Tiger Mom like Amy Chua, to craft and decorate like an Insta influencer, to never get old but never be young and naive either. She is to raise her kids to be independent and leave her and maybe call her once a month after, she is to love her husband who at any time might leave her alone having wasted her first fruits in sacrifice to a false promise of forever.*
Transmen equally view being male as an accomplishment, as a project to create meaning in their lives. Transmen are satisfied with being male, they don't have to strive to be ubermensch when mensch is good enough.
*Very, vanishingly few women benefit from divorce. It is mostly a negative sum transaction. It is popular for men to view themselves as the victims, and therefore women as the putative victors; in reality as in Roadhouse nobody even won a fight.
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Find susceptible people before they get eaten by the toxic memes, and give them genuine sympathy and counseling, I guess. Tell better stories and offer better philosophies so that they don't latch on to the destructive ones. The cat's out of the bag, which is why this is an issue to begin with, so pure shame or pointed silence is off the table -- they'll just go find groups that tickle their ears. The teenage girl who is uncomfortable with her body needs personal care before she gets convinced that being anorexic would make her special or that she'd be happier as a boy.
I guess this solution is just "Replace the unhealthy cultural memes with healthier ones," but there's really not any other possible solution anyway. This is a cultural problem and you can't just Do Something to solve cultural problems.
Well, there is a first step to replacing the unhealthy memes with healthier ones that doesn't require winning the whole culture, and that's making sure the healthy ones are at least on offer and available to the people who need them. Be the change you want to see in the world?
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Why do you think this is double think? Youths and adults are different groups and if you read down to where they explain this headline:
"Overall, based on our estimates from 2016-2017 and the current report, we find that the percentage and number of adults who identify as transgender has remained steady over time. The availability of the YRBS data has given us a more direct look into youth gender identity and provides better data than was previously available to us for estimating the size and characteristics of the youth population. Youth ages 13 to 17 comprise a larger share of the transgender-identified population than we previously estimated, currently comprising about 18% of the transgender-identified population in the U.S., up from 10% previously."
This they say is a result of new data from the fact that: "Additionally, in 2017, the YRBS, a national survey of high school students, began asking respondents if they are transgender."
The YRBS (Youth Risk behavior Survey) data was only available after they made their last estimates in 2017. So the explanation could be that there is more in depth data than before so their previous estimate was low, or it could be that the numbers of youths identifying as trans has gone up in the past 6 years while the number of adults so identifying has remained the same. Or some mix of the two. But I am not sure why doublethink is involved at all.
As to the last question, do we need to do anything different at all? At a societal level the number of people identifying as trans is still very very low, and the data from this report might suggest that the increase in youth trans does not translate to adulthood in any case. You could probably surgically transition all 300,000 youths and it really will not have much impact at a social level (not saying you should, just that you could without too many wider impacts). If their parents and doctors agree they need treatment, then treat them, if they don't and the kid wants it anyway then there are already established legal processes for emancipation and the like.
Only at the time of measurement. Youths grow into adults, and unless there's some proposed mechanism intervening, one would expect trans youth to grow up into trans adults, and trans adult to have been, at one point, trans youth. Thus today's trans adults are yesterday's trans youth, and today's trans youth are tomorrow's trans adults. Absent some other influence, a doubling in the number of current trans youth over past baselines would indicate that when those youth grow up, there will have been a significant discontinuity in the number of trans adults from the last generation to this one.
Something else has to be going on for both of the hilighted statements to be true.
They point out the youth figures from the new estimate are now derived from a direct question added to the survey post-2017, where before they were estimating by other means. So that would be the baseline something that could enable both statements to be true.
They say their estimate has increased, not that the true (the actual amount we would see if measured by some omniscient entity) numbers have. Now it is certainly possible their original methodology was actually just as accurate as the direct question method and so the increase is a real one, rather than one driven by the methodology change. That might indicate a recent wave of youth identification. In the reverse if the previous numbers were wrong and the doubled numbers were also correct historically then that might indicate some level of de-transitioning before adulthood.
But because the methodology changed we don't know if either is true.
But that elides the question of what happens between the estimate of the trans youth population, and the survey of trans adults, right?
In what way? There are 300,000 youth trans people and 1.3 million adults (according to their figures) now (or as of 2020 really).
Previously their estimate was 1.6 million in total, 160,000 of which were youths back in 2016.
Presumably all of the youths in the 2016 estimate (using data from 2014-15) aged out of the category and either became adult trans, detransitioned or died. And some number of the adults remained trans, some number detransitioned and some number died. But we don't have those numbers.
There are 391,000 Trans people between 18-24 in their 2020 charts. So some of these would have been from the youth cohort from 2016. We don't know how many were "new" and how many were from the 2016 youth cohort however. It could be there really only were 160,000 back in 2016 and all became adults and trans. Or some number detransitioned and were replaced by new adult trans people.
Is that what you were trying to figure out?
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Indeed, their explanation is that they have better information as the question is now directly asked to youths on the survey post 2017 when it wasn't before, hence why their estimate of the prevalence in youth doubled. But if the measurements are correct then de-transitioning or a recent youth wave would seem to be the most plausible explanations, I would agree.
I have no writings aside from TheMotte, and all I can really offer is that society isn't for anything in particular, it's the emergent behaviors at scale by all the people that make it up. A blind hydra rather than a blind watchmaker perhaps. It will adapt, grow new heads and change as people change and individuals are largely unable to impact it, and governments only marginally more so.
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I'm not trans, but I do have a lot of personal experience with transgender ideation. When I was younger, I seriously considered transitioning many times - it came to the point where I had resolved to confess it to my parents, and ask them about actually getting treatment. I ended up chickening out at the last second though, and never went through with it.
What really got me off the idea for good - what made me stop viewing transition as a live option - was discovering radfem (TERF) blogs online. They were completely unabashed in saying, this is ridiculous, you are not a woman, we will never view you as a woman, what you're doing is harmful to actual women, and you really should just stop. And I ended up concluding, you know what? You're right. This is silly, and I should stop.
So, I'll reiterate what I said earlier and what others have said as well. The solution is to encourage a culture of open and honest discussion where no meme is above criticism. Some people will still choose to go through with medical transition anyway, or develop an eating disorder, or what have you. But it will certainly be less people, if the broader culture encourages them to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.
Sounds like the solution is banning TERF rhetoric which is repressing trans youth.
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Being cruelly blunt? Treat it like mental illness. Nobody thinks anorexia is an identity and it is treated as an illness. Even if it is to an extent culturally-bound (and I wonder about that; there is certainly the element of social contagion, but excessive fasting and problems with food intake have been around for a long time even if not described as a tidy syndrome called 'anorexia'), we don't just nod along helplessly that of course, we must give them their very own flag and add them in to a month of celebration.
Same with transgender issues. Go back to so-called medical gatekeeping; if you really are suffering from dysphoria so severe you would try to cut off your breasts or your penis, then this is a mental issue that needs treatment the same way as if you tried chopping off a hand. Maybe the treatment is helping you find ways to live in your body (and fuck off with the notion of 'conversion therapy'), maybe the treatment is surgery and drugs when you're adult enough and this is long-standing enough that it's not changing any other way. And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts (oh sorry, I mean whatever today's term for alternate sexualities is).
On the other hand, if someone who looks like this insists they are too a real woman and should therefore have access to female-only spaces, that's mental illness. Maybe the best you can do is go along with their delusions, but that does not give them the right to be treated as if they really have changed sex, not alone gender. Transgender competitors in sports? That can go several ways, but mostly that there should be a separate league or division or whatever where all trans athletes can compete against each other. If you changed genders five years ago and have been beating out cis women ever since, I think we can all recognise that something is going on due to natal biology.
I'm doctrinaire enough I'd even row back on changing birth certs because fuck it, those are identity documents. If I can legally have mine changed to pretend my parents had a son not a daughter, why can't I legally have it changed that I was born in the US and so am an American citizen? Or that I was born five years later so I'm younger? Or that I'm a different race because you know, I've always identified deeply with Tibetan culture? Either it's a legal document or it can be switched around to include/exclude elements at whim, in which case it should be as binding as Monopoly money for use in any kind of official context.
That being said, treating it like mental illness should also mean de-stigmatising it like mental illness. No, it's not normal, but it's a condition people suffer from. If we don't blame people for suffering from schizophrenia or depression, we don't blame them from suffering from delusions that they're a different sex. We treat it, we help and support them, we don't mock them - but we don't invent a flag and a celebration month, any more than we have a "Happy Global Bipolar Disorder Day! Hurrah for you, you perfectly ordinary normal person!"
Perhaps I can prevail upon you to be kind to perverts? I encourage you to read my essay downthread; I believe the thing you are referring to is more common, and more complicated, than you think -- but that aside, surely having disordered desires should be treated as a mental illness, in much the same vein as the other things you describe?
If you want to call it a paraphilia, go ahead, I'm not fussed either way. I think it's a small proportion but I also think that unfortunately they are the loudest and most visible and most online.
I also think there is a difference between someone so distressed at their biological sex that they want to cut off the distinguishing characteristics, and the types who complain about the cotton ceiling and how it's transphobia if cis gay women don't want to have sex involving a dick.
I think in the rush to be accepting and supportive, a lot of sketchy stuff got past and now the allies and activists are kind of stuck - they've nailed their colours to the mast, they feel that if they row back on anything then it's giving in to the demands of, well, the likes of me and denying the reality of trans people.
But the more the crazier stuff gets out into the mainstream, the worse the backlash will be, and the genuine trans people who only want quiet lives will suffer. The trenders, the attention seekers, the sexual assault crowd and the lunatics will be okay, the ordinary person who isn't Rachel Levine or Sam Brinton will get the worst of it.
It seems we differ in our estimates here. Maybe it would help to draw a distinction between, let's say, people with disordered sexual desires (in which group I would include any autogynephilia in natal males), and people who are "visible perverts" (you know about them because they do perverted things in public or are publicly loud about their proclivities). I agree that the latter group is rare and unrepresentative of trans people, and it's crazy that the trans lobby doesn't want to get rid of them (probably this is downstream of "pride" stuff). I think, though, that the former group includes probably the majority of MtF trans individuals as well as a decent percentage of men who don't transition. This is probably not usually acknowledged because it's perceived as unflattering to trans people, and to be fair the people loudly crowing about how "it's just a fetish" are being cruel and are not helping the matter.
I think we ought to have some charity even for the "visible perverts" crowd; they need it even if they don't deserve it -- but what I'm really referring to here is the other group. Right now all they are hearing is either total silence, "Eww, you pervert", or "That means you're really a woman deep down! You must be trans!" I think there is a need for counseling, along the lines of "So, you know how you really really want to be female? And how you find that idea sexually arousing, too? Yeah, that's a thing; it's something a bit wrong with you, but it doesn't mean either that you are disgusting or that you are 'really' a woman or should try to become one. Let's try to help you figure out how to deal with your feelings."
It's difficult to work in the interests of a group who is doing obvious, immediate and lasting damage to everything they touch, who do not actually want the help you advocate offering, and who will make their best effort to harm anyone who tries.
It's a big ask, is what I'm saying.
Are you referring to trans activists, the "visible perverts", or to the "disordered desires" group? Granted there is overlap, of course, but I think it's the first two groups who are doing the damage. A lot of the third group doesn't (or doesn't yet) even consider themselves trans! If you want them to not get eaten by the trans meme, you've got to provide some kind of compassionate support. Because when the options are suffer in solitude, get shamed and ridiculed, or listen to the seductive whispers telling them that they can satisfy their desires and join a group that will continually affirm them, it takes a pretty strong will to not pick the third option.
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Not if they're going to be officially deputized by the State to (mission-)kill anyone who offends them.
I don't actually think people are generally unwilling to accept people like this- after all, there was no pushback on deputizing them partially for this reason- but I don't trust cops, least of which those that are in uniform, even less if they're Thin Blue Liners. If I had to talk to one of them, I wouldn't even admit to jaywalking lest they take that as an excuse to bust out their inner Eric Cartman. The ride is indistinguishable from the rap these days.
There was a comment upthread about how people are afraid to denounce Islam and functionally treat its adherents as wearing suicide bomb vests because they threaten violence to those who say those things. This is the same thing, except top-down rather than bottom-up.
And yes, it makes things objectively worse for any member of the violence-advantaged class (for example, men adopting the Pence rule makes the life of the honest woman more complicated). But that class, on a population level, does not generally care enough to change this- it is useful when the economic game is zero-sum.
I confess that I am confused by this response. Who is being officially deputized by whom to kill whom? And how does any of this make sense in the context of @FarNearEverywhere's parent comment, which already posits a massive change in how the official parts of society deal with trans stuff?
Trans people are being deputized by the state to wreck the lives of normal people. They've been granted official "victim" status, which gives them a frankly absurd level of protection from normal criticism, which they then routinely abuse in a variety of novel ways. When normal people who haven't kept abreast of our mercurial social reality object, they get hammered, often as not via state or pseudostate enforcement mechanisms.
You're saying that it would be better for people to be kinder to Trans individuals. But only a vanishing minority of the objections to Trans individuals have to do with their Transness, as such. People are objecting to the active "recruitment" of children by agents of the state, the vociferous defense of actual perverts, the extension of charity to sexual criminals, the weaponization of serious state power to enforce fringe ideology, and to the damage done to ordinary people who attempt to exercise their purported civil rights in response. Trans people, as such, wield immense, absurd, and almost entirely unaccountable power under our current system, a highly visible fraction of them are quite gleefully abusing that power in highly visible ways, and the rest are refusing to restrain this fraction, refusing to criticize or hold them accountable, and vociferously attaching anyone else who tries to do so.
You are right that they need help, but they need to be stopped more, because they are cooperating with efforts to do serious damage to our society.
I guess I don't see how this has much to do with what I'm saying. The post I was originally responding to suggested:
as a way to dissuade these people from transitioning. In other words, tell people with autogynephilia that they are disgusting and should go away, which seems both cruel and unlikely to work. I'm proposing compassion instead, because I don't want these people to end up deciding they are trans, I want them to get help.
For whatever it's worth I have little love for the trans lobby and am pretty incensed at all the propagandizing and abuse of state power to enforce their ideology. I just happen to think that many, probably most, trans individuals are also victims here, in much the same way that lonely people who get targeted by lovebombing and join a cult are.
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People absolutely do, particularly on social media. It's a well-known problem.
Yeah, but that's part of the mental illness aspect. There aren't (I hope) people rushing to proclaim themselves "allies" and that this is something to be celebrated, not treated.
The day we get to "starve yourself to death day" as a national celebration, then we can throw in the towel.
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In a word, gatekeeping. Assuming gender dysphoria is at least partially a culturally-independent phenomenon, attempt to separate such cases from the far more common culturally-dependent ones. And do not consider any "treatment" aimed at anything but relieving the ideation in the latter cases.
But how do you gatekeep when the only gauge is based on feelings? This is my biggest frustration talking to people about trans - it always boils down to "that's how I feel" and there's no real way to get around that since it's not a logical proposition.
Make it costly. It is very nearly costless to articulate a feeling. However, people feeling severe distress are far more likely to engage in costly activities to try and relieve it. Gatekeep transition therapies behind assessments that a patient is likely to (or has) attempt or engage in behaviors that are harmful to themself or others in order to relieve it. If someone is willing to self-mutilate out of extreme dysphoria and will do so regardless of what anyone else does, it's probably better that the same operation be performed by a trained surgeon less likely to make quite as much of a horrifying botch of it. Anything else, the focus should be on reintegration of self-perception and physical self.
Depends on the surgeons, seemingly there are some who do make horrible botches. Or the money-grubbers, who will push their services to young people like this wonderful specimen of my nation who is now infesting yours:
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If someone actually skilled at such things, perhaps a psychologist or a therapist of some sort (or maybe a trial lawyer), cannot with high reliability tease out the difference between someone with a culturally-dependent ideation (a "transtrender", to use the pejorative) and someone with something more deep-seated than that, then the entire profession of mental health is bogus. This is possible, but in that case there is indeed no solution better than telling all to "suck it up". I wouldn't expect to be able to reliably figure it out from casual conversation, although those close to the person with such feelings might be able to.
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