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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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