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This was maybe the case through the 00s, but there are modern examples now like Onii-chan Wa Oshimai that are decidedly pro-trans, or at least trans-neutral. Onimai is definitely not a kids' show though, and it's not the sort of thing that children would randomly stumble onto by chance, unlike how say, a child in the 90s/00s might randomly have been exposed to other "effeminate" anime like Ranma or Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura (granted, everyone is given open access to the internet and Discord from birth now, so, you never know).
The funny thing about Kodaka's games is that they're just a bit... zesty, in general (and this has only ramped up over time with Hundred Line and Shuten Order), and thus have attracted a very large tumblr/fujo type of fanbase in the west, despite being ostensibly targeted at a mostly male audience.
Yeah I'm really fascinated by this. This is a common phenomenon whenever genderbender media breaks containment and gets some mainstream exposure. There were many confused comments online about Onimai, ranging from "why isn't he more pissed off at his sister for doing nonconsensual medical experiments on him and turning him into a girl? That's assault" (lol) to "it's a serious story about the struggles that young women face in adolescence" (infinite omega lol). The answer to all that of course is that you're not supposed to think that hard about it because it's essentially porn; it's just, porn that's transmitting on a frequency that you're not tuned into.
Tanya I can confirm is totally desexualized though. The genderswap is just a plot device to get the story going and then it's essentially never brought up again. There are quite a few isekai and other stories like that now.
I mostly agree with you. I think a lot of people are just genuinely, sincerely flabbergasted by the idea that anyone could ever desire to be the opposite sex, unless they were coerced into thinking that way by external circumstances, and "it's all discord grooming" is their attempt to proffer some sort of explanation that they can make sense of. I don't think grooming plays nearly as big a role as some other people here do.
That being said. I was deadass talking to someone just the other day who told me "this guy in a Rust discord convinced me to start taking estrogen". I'm 99% sure they weren't memeing. They were a couple years into their transition. So my reaction was 1) of course it was Rust lol, and 2) sometimes the conspiracy theories and most damning accusations about your political opponents simply turn out to be true.
This part I don’t really agree with though. I’m a consistent anti-egalitarian to the end. Broadly speaking, if a male can’t get laid on his own, then he shouldn’t be having sex; social engineering efforts to the contrary would be dysgenic. (Although I still support monogamous marriage as a preferable social order over polygamy, and I don’t feel particularly inconsistent in doing so.)
Rust, the game, or Rust, the programming language?
The latter makes more intuitive sense, but I could believe either.
The language.
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You know what being MtF and a Rust enthusiast have in common?
It’s the goddamn autists at it again.
Yeah, I was thinking about the link between autism and transsexuality recently. (I almost prefer to use terms like "spergy" or "spergy personality traits" over "autistic", because I'm somewhat skeptical about the existence of autism as a legitimate diagnostic entity, and at any rate most of the people who call themselves "autistic" don't seem to me to have any serious diagnosable disorder; they just have personality traits that are outside of the norm, that's all. But I'll continue to use "autistic" to mean "people who generally have spergy personality traits, at any degree of severity".)
One thing I noticed from my admittedly limited sample of talking to autistic women is that their speech patterns and thought processes are very close to those of autistic men in many ways; they experience many of the same struggles as well (personal, social, etc). The gap between autistic men and autistic women is noticeably smaller than the gap between normal men and normal women. This got me to thinking that, if an intrinsic part of autism is a decreased desire/ability to express highly differentiated sexual behavior that would be typical of one's birth sex, then both autistic men and autistic women might be more likely to experience a less defined and more fluid sense of gender identity (almost like they got thrown into a "third gender" bucket together) and thus might be more likely to be drawn to transsexualism.
I don't think this is a complete explanation or anything; at the very least there's still something uniquely malebrained about the whole phenomenon of MTFism; but I still felt that it was worth noting.
I don't have strong opinions one way or other about how autistic men / women differ but I do feel very strongly that they're both absolutely massive confounders unless they're separated from the non-autists when it comes to behavioral questions, such as "what makes someone want to transition?"
Well I thought we were in agreement that autistic men were overrepresented among MTFs at least, and therefore it would be pertinent to analyze things from that angle.
There are of course non-autistic transitioners too.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply I disagree. Only that the way people generally approach trans issues is almost intentionally designed to avoid reaching meaningful conclusions because they don't separate autistic vs non-autistic transitioners.
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