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FtM or MtF transgenderism? These are meaningfully different things.
That study didn’t separate the two. IMO anime and similar media plays a role in causing MTF, I have no idea what causes FTM though
It's almost certainly more porn than anime, but you obviously can't bring up porn when coming out to your parents.
Unless you're Andrea Long Chu maybe.
Judging by the sheer quantity of anime avatars I see among the online trans, I rrally think it's the anime. I've personally witnessed the anime -> furry -> trans pipeline, but have never heard of porn being a major part of anyone's trans origin story.
Not that I necessarily think it's the anime itself that does it (though a genre where nearly all men look like ladyboy twinks and nearly all women look like 13 year old schoolgirls can't be particularly healthy for a developing sexuality). It's that anime as a subculture attracts a lot of mentally ill weirdos.
I'm inclined to think that there's some further underlying factor that explains the trans + anime connection, rather than a specifically anime -> trans pipeline (and maybe that underlying factor is just "autism").
I unfortunately can't serve as a perfectly controlled experiment, because I was exposed to anime from an extremely young age. But I was having persistent thoughts about wanting to be a woman by the time I was around 10 years old, and prior to that time, I had only been exposed to what I would consider to be very "normal" mainstream children's anime with pretty normal male role models, like Pokemon and Yugioh and DBZ (Cardcaptor Sakura got shuffled in there too, but, I would be shocked if one show with a female protagonist had such a profound lifelong impact on my psychology).
All three of these media franchises contain, as a central part of the protagonist’s path toward their desired social rewards, a magical identity transformation:
Yugi learns that his true identity is an extraordinary Pharaoh, and that this real identity was lurking within his body and waiting to appear after some puzzling around
Pokémon have their identities changed in a powerful and stunning way; Charmeleon, Butterfree, from egg to eggmazing
Goku shifts into a Saiyan which changes his fundamental identity into something cosmically-important
What is unconsciously grafted into the adolescent’s understanding of the world is that such magical identity transformations are normal and extremely desirable. They are sensed as “reinforcing” in that they occur at key junctions where a character obtains something highly desirable, and where he is otherwise in a stressed or confused state. We can imagine an idea being unconsciously smuggled into the mind: “what if I have my own shocking identity transformation which results in the social rewards I have been pining for? Doesn’t everyone have one of these?”
Where effeminate anime comes in, is that across many anime franchises the female characters are the most “privileged” and anxiolytic within the cast, and usually the most beautiful to boot. Imagine you’re a youth who, as @Botond173 and @4bpp suggest, has a lot of stress related to their gender and social identity. Your favorite activity to reduce stress is to vicariously live another life (essentially inhabiting the body of a new person), and the person you are vicariously experiencing often has a magical identity transformation that drastically improves his life. What’s more, the most comforting / anxiolytic / socially-desired objects in the animeverse are women. Often these women, or girls, are overly-feminine. You’ve essentially been primed to vicariously inhabit another life as relaxation, you’ve been conditioned to associate the highly-feminine with the most comfort, and you’ve been conditioned to expect an identity change to fundamentally flip your life for the better. Now, maybe still, for a lot of people this doesn’t do anything. But let’s say you are wired a little differently, autism or etc. And then on top of this, there are communities that are now ready to shower you in superabundant social praise and validation for your identity transformation, and even the media seems to be on your side, and there are psychological tricks that this community employs purposefully or inadvertently (look at how colorful you will be now; so much novelty; you’re part of a tribe and get a flag and grievances and purpose and . . . ).
Re: the porn element mentioned by @Tanista, one of the ferishes that seem to be far more common among MtFs is “puppygirl” et al. This is essentially the fantasy that you are so socially-desirable that someone wants to command you around all day as a pet, while at the same time providing a comforting identity through the outsourcing of control over your life. I think this is similar to the anime etiology in that there is an identity change which comes with a huge shift in social esteem.
There is some relevant data for this theory, eg the HomeStuck fandom is 50% transgender (100x prevalence?) and the media franchise is essentially (1) I had a fundamental life-altering identity transformation through logging into a digital social ecosystem [sburb]; (2) the coolest and most beautiful and less stressful characters are all women.
I think this is brilliant.
What I would add is that your phrase "magical identity transformation" is fundamentally normal for teenagers. It is both the biological reality of puberty and the narrative logic of progressing from child to adult. "Young adult" media inherently concerns the realization of conflict in the world and the boy's need to become a man. (The Pokemon anime is fundamentally for children because the world is basically good and the conflict is all in good fun, with occasional exceptions. The games are closer to puberty media.)
A lot of trans experience starts with anxiety over puberty, so it makes a lot of sense to me to connect this to soothing soft media.
Is it really that high now?
I thought it had more to do with Homestuck's fascination with alternative sexualities. If I remember correctly by the end of the original story there were maybe two main characters left who were not at least ambiguously gay.
I think there’s a qualitative difference between media where an identity is fulfilled and media where an identity is radically changed in essence. If you’re a boy born in 1920, what media are you reading where identity is changed in essence rather than fulfilled in development? You’re reading about a cowardly adventurer becoming brave, a soldier rising through the ranks, something of that sort. Or if you’re a boy playing WoW or Oblivion, you start as a grunt whose identity is achieved through an expected transformation. In 2020, you’re more likely to read about someone transforming into an animal, some cosmic being, being possessed by a different spirit, something of that sort. But I don’t know, maybe comic books are a counter example. But I think this is just one of the co-factors involved. If we shamed transgenderism and deleted all of their online spaces, IMO there would be a lot fewer cases; the notion of identity transformation would still be in the mind but it would be expressed by (maybe) shifting careers a lot, changing your name, changing religion, becoming Chinese, whatever else. Yesterday’s Lawrence of Arabia is today’s Lilith of Transbabea, but the Bedouin is more aesthetic IMO.
Per a survey of 7279 individuals, 52.1% of Homestuck fandom participants are transgender. I didn’t consider the possibility that it was because of sexuality representation, thanks for that info. I haven’t read it. Though the rate still seems extremely extreme extra high esp as few of the characters are transgender.
Yeah, as a form of experiential avoidance / negative reinforcement. The vicarious escapism is extra reinforced given the default social stressors. The real trigger though IMO is the extreme validation and praise you find in LGBTc places, with so much color and art and tribalism and such; really just a night v day difference for an at-risk nerd.
Transgender characters? Not as far as I recall, at all. I did a search and it looks like a few were declared trans in the "epilogues" (which came out years later). Part of what happened with Homestuck is that evaporative cooling over time made the remaining fanbase much gayer and more trans than the original population. And it was always fairly gay.
At the risk of launching a Homestuck synopsis nobody asked for: Homestuck is inherently about the fracturing and rebuilding of the self. Especially as it related to teenagers in puberty. The plot of Homestuck incorporates time-travel, multiverses, video game mechanic "god forms," second lives, mind control, fused personalities, and alternate realities. The common denominator is that every major character ends up incarnated in multiple forms and interacts with different forms of their own selves. For a simple and example, take the character Dave Strider. Dave is a relatively normal laconic "cool" young boy who wears sunglasses, who gains the power to travel in time. As Homestuck progresses, it becomes apparent that due to the choices of some other characters, Dave lives in a doomed timeline, so he has to travel back in time and interrupt his past self. Once the timeline is restored, the original Dave allows his personality to be fused with a sort of primordial ethereal power and becomes known as Davesprite. Davesprite and Dave now exist at the same time. Davesprite is a kind of alter-self of Dave, doomed, saved, frustrated, wisened, still "cool". Davesprite and Dave are treated as different characters and at the same time as the same. Davesprite becomes a mirror held up to Dave.
Every character in Homestuck passes through multiple alterations like that just described, most of them more convoluted or involved.
Almost all the characters also pass through to a sort of final form called their "god self". This is a superpowered form brought about by the complicated rules of the video game world. It's basically implied that these god forms are their "true selves," although Homestuck continues to put a lot of caveats around that conception. But the idea, fundamentally, is that each character iterates through multiple versions of himself before passing into a final mature form.
Make of that what you will. I think it is not inherently a metaphor for being trans, but is easily interpreted as one, in the same way that The Matrix has been reimagined as being symbolically a trans story.
At the same time, Homestuck also features this alien species of gray humanoids "Trolls" that are a massive gateway to queer plots. Trolls actually had four different kinds of romance available to them -- one is standard love, one is a kind of hatesex rivalry anti-love, one is a kind of asexual friendship, and one is a basically polyamorous menage-a-trois. Trolls could have all of these different romantic relationships at the same time like wizards with four spell slots to fill. And there were no gender or sexual restrictions on any of these relationships. (It's not even clear in fact why they have two distinct genders, except to facilitate readers in picking their self-inserts.) This convoluted mechanic was the seed of a lot, a lot of queer fantasy and ideation. In fact I think a lot of the original tumblr discourse that created bespoke niche pride flags and polyamorous/asexual woke norms literally came from Homestuck fans. I don't mean this casually: for anyone who wasn't there at the time, Homestuck had a huge influence on the social justice circles that became modern queer leftlib politics.
All this to say, Homestuck had a lot of queer representation. Of the eight main human characters, two were in a (doomed) gay relationship (one was explicitly gay, one was explicitly bi), another two were explicitly made bi, one was implicitly gay, and just three were left as probably straight. The trolls add another gay element since they are basically all canonically bisexual. (There are 24 troll characters, most of them minor, maybe about eight of them major enough to matter.) Note that none of this was inherent in the premise of the story. If you read Homestuck naively you would probably not suspect anything gay was coming for the first ~500 pages. The author just kept adding more and more gay characters and elements. The fanbase got gayer and gayer. To the point that on the cusp of the final battle that ends Homestuck once and for all, Dave Strider, who had up to this point been assumed to be perfectly heterosexual, who was the subject of the most popular heterosexual fan ship, confesses homosexual thoughts in his diary and is probably actually bi. Chronologically this is like if Ron Weasley came out as bi one scene before Voldemort is killed.
I think the trans stuff comes later. Once Homestuck was "over" the author eventually extended the story with some dubious sequels half-written by himself half-written by elevated fans, deliberately blurring the lines between canon and fanfiction. I think by then most fans had trailed off. I certainly had.
Anyways I don't know that I have a particular point. I haven't thought about Homestuck in years. Anybody who was never familiar is probably underestimating how big a deal it was once upon a time. For a cohort of left-leaning downwardly-mobile and first-generation college-going white Comicon Americans Homestuck was really big. As big as anything. It's amazing to me how little of it is in the culture now.
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