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Transgender rights are under attack. But trans people 'just want to thrive and survive.'
(www.usatoday.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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I really really don't understand what people have against you. What you do with your body is obviously none of their business whatsoever. I don't get why people even want to have an opinion about that.
FWIW I'm really happy for you that you can live your life in the proper body to match your soul and I'm an LGBTQI+ ally <3 (and a little on the Q side myself).
I can understand people don't want to be trans because they are simply in the right body or they aren't but have religious doubts or whatever but that deep hatred I see even in some of my "friends" scares me.
No one wants to be trans. We just are born with it and have to figure it out. It's basically a medical issue. I didn't choose to do anything to my body either. The choice isn't there when not transitioning can deteriorate to being fundamentally incompatible with staying alive. A lot of bigots insist that transitioning is some trendy or otherwise low stakes thing but our lives would be so much easier if it was as easy as just not transitioning.
I apologize , that didn't come across as intended. I didn't mean to imply that it's a matter of wanting at all.
I just argue against the narrative that somehow trans people are forcing cis people to become trans. Obviously they don't 'want' that because they are in the right body for them. This is where all the "Don't say gay" idiocy comes from.
But of course the whole premise is BS. And yes I know it's not a choice <3
I'm sorry, but this is just not true. It's necessarily at least partially a psychological and social issue. Why am I certain about this? Because there are clear distinctions in the number of transgender people in different time periods and different age groups. Our species hasn't changed in 10-30 years, but these numbers have changed massively.
If you're steelmanning the argument of "terfs", this is the thing they're critical about. If we are in some easily correctable way causing trans people to appear where they in other circumstances would not, this should be looked into. For instance, the number of transgender identified people doubled during the Covid years. So perhaps it's not a good idea to hole up teenagers in their rooms every day and prevent them from seeing their peers?
This is not to say that people with this condition (whatever its reason) should be treated differently from those without the condition. As you said, almost nobody wants to be trans, so if it can be actually prevented (in ethical ways, not like electroshock therapy or conversion therapy or some other absolute shit like that), that's certainly a good thing?
Considering it's only relatively recently that being trans wouldn't get you arrested (and earlier murdered), of course there are more openly trans people now!
Yes, judicial acceptance contributes to its being a social issue.
Right after that you suggest that the number of trans people now over the past is something about trans people and not about humanity.
The number of trans people has not changed.
The number of trans people who feel comfortable in their own bodies has changed.
This could be true. You're claiming it way too strongly, I think. It could also be that the acceptance of transgenderism is causing people to form transgender identities. This is not an absurd concept given neuroplasticity and the theory of Behaviorism.
I mean the difference is likely not based out of a difference in the number of trans people but in the cultural risk one has in living out of the closet. Destigmatizing left handedness saw a sudden generation jump in people who were left handed. If you don't think you are likely to be accepted you struggle in darkness.
The covid bump has another possible explanation. My trans nature long existed in the shadow. My industry is such where it's all short term employment and causing your team any friction could mean falling to the bottom of the employment pool. I didn't try to be out because it came with drawbacks. Coming out to people is also the process of onboarding everyone and that transition period where people know but are still fucking up your name and pronouns takes a lot of your mental energy. It some ways it sucks less when people don't know they are hurting you. Then it's just not their fault. Once they know the struggle to switch how they think of you is plain. It's obvious they don't think of you as your gender, they just are faking it until they do and that disparity draws more attention to your own body and presentation and the uphill battle of true acceptance even if they are theoretically on board with trans issues. My Mom STILL fucks up my name and pronouns and even though she loves me it's like an admission that she will NEVER actually see me as I see myself. It's difficult to do that and work a soul crushing job at the same time so it was something I did one person at a time and I was a fucking hot mess in the process.
Then Covid happened and I was isolated in my cohort of friends and family to whom I was spottily out to. I had the time to DO the work and have the conversation and be the hot mess. I figured out I was trans back when I was 21 but there was a fifteen year gap before I came out to people outside because it seemed like a monumental task where I would risk losing a huge chunk of my relationships, risk my career and still have to juggle going to work every day even when I felt like dying. But since people started talking about it and showing trans issue support it gave me hope that there would be light on the other side. So by the time covid came around I was half-out.
But then during covid I got to live as myself full time. It's like having an allergy you are exposed to all the time. You don't realize exactly how shitty you feel until you stop being exposed to it and you realize that your capacity to feel generally more energetic and healthy is actually way higher than you thought... And returning to exposure makes it hit that much harder.
Returning to work I realized how bad I actually felt and felt more compelled to do something about it. Having the time to actually do the work, not on myself but on the people around me, gave me a taste of what it feels like to be healthy and it's hard to forget being actually happy and then willingly just go back to being miserable. From the outside it might look like being cooped up caused me to be trans but it's the opposite. Being cooped up gave me time to properly socially transition where the risks were lowered.
Great anecdote, thank you for that.
This is one of the difficult parts for most of us normies, I suppose. If I imagine myself in a woman's body, the thought doesn't fill me with neither anticipation nor dread. It seems to me that my identity is not at all linked to my gender. Is this just a symptom of being too comfortable with the current situation and not being able to properly imagine how a conflict would feel like?
Probably. I ask cis folk about this pretty frequently because while I understand being trans I don't actually know what it is like to be cis, it is just sort of assumed mutual experience amongst cis folk. Trans is my lived experience and our society insists we need to defend our needs in ways that make sense to them but cisness is just as interesting. I encounter two camps. The majority of cis people I ask this question to just don't feel strongly about their body on the axis of their sex. They might feel dysmorphias around not looking good by the rubric of their sex that's more about how the privilege of beauty or ugliness impacts their lives.
I have also encountered a minority of cis people who are actually decently euphoric about their gender. Sometimes that has to do with the cultural bits of their experience and sometimes not. The one thing they have in common is they actually just really love what they got going on. Being male or female is an integral part of their self identity.
My personal COMPLETELY unsubstantiated posit that these two versions of cisness are distinct and the with the euphoric version they are basically experiencing the key component of binary trans nature with the one factor different being the body and mind are in alignment and not at odds.
Some of the non-binary agender experience seems almost like an extreme version of what you experience where the concept of gender matters so little internally that it's outside application to aspects of your life become a complete nuisance as if becomes an obstacle to people recognizing the actual person you are as they make too many assumptions about you based on a factor which is personally meaningless.
Not to say this is key to all agender folk. Some folk just react poorly to having any sexual characteristics at all. Non-binary as it's own spectrum is internally made up of such disparate presentations it is like comparing peaches to green peppers. Both are fruit but they practically nothing alike in experience.
The thing is in both cases it's hard for cis folk to really empathize with the trans experience because they either can't get a handle on what it is to care about gender at all or they take their comfort as a given and don't realize just how bad it is to live without that source of confidence.
As a sufferer, it's true. It's very real. I can't argue with your ridiculous post any more than a diabetic can be expected to argue in favor of having access to insulin. Terfs have literally nothing to do with my experience with being trans. Everything you have written here is exhausting to have to deal with and it's insane that people trot out this clowny shit when they have no idea what it's like to live with this their entire fucking lives.
the number of measured sinister people (as in, left-handed, that's where the word comes from) were rising like crazy too when it started gaining cultural acceptance that maybe, just maybe it's not evil that you use your left hand to do things. it was like a whole epidemic, sinister people started popping up left and right.
...and then it plateaued at a flat 12.5% and stayed there since. turns out that's just the biological occurrence rate, but everyone was under-measuring it because people weren't willing to own it up that they're left-handed.
trans people are the same. you get different amounts of persecution for it between different time periods and different regimes, and you get different levels of acceptance in different age groups, but the level of persecution is not zero anywhere. it's not as normalized as just being a lefty. as such, the measured number of trans people is below the real amount in all of these situations, and how much below it is represents the amount of repression and persecution. we'll get accurate numbers for the occurrence rate of people born in the wrong bodies when the stigma is gone.
also, you seriously misinterpreted the medical issue. the issue isn't with the brain, it's with the body. you're not a pile of muscle with some neurons slapped on top of it, you're a brain piloting a meat suit, and if the meat suit is the wrong kind that's what needs to be corrected. and that correction is much easier to do before puberty than after. which is why you need to listen to trans kids and at the very least give them puberty blockers, or preferably adequate hormone therapy. but you can't "prevent" trans people unless you can detect and fix the issue in the womb.
Social acceptance is clearly a factor -- which is why I said that this is also a social issue.
I have yet to find (and I have tried because my close family has a transgender individual) an impartial and comprehensive study on the effects on puberty blockers. I have found plenty of studies separately confirming both sides of the issue. Puberty blockers seem to be at the same time absolutely harmless and the most destructive thing you can give a teenager. I'd be happy to look at such studies.
Sorry, I don't get this. Why cannot it be an issue with the brain? We know for certain that the brain does wonky stuff a lot. Why couldn't this be one of them? Some people get gender dysphoria at a later age, does that mean that their body was correct until that point in time?
Except you can if we consider the possibility that it's created also by psychological or social circumstances. Increased numbers during Covid lockdowns suggest this. If we don't face another pandemic, the statistics should soon enough show us if it actually had any effect -- if the trend continues like this then it obviously didn't have an effect.
I also haven't seen statistical studies about this, and it's probably too early also to study it properly.
have you considered that maybe covid just gave people some much needed time to sit back, relax, and recognize things about themselves?
this isn't rocket science. i get the shtick of the "enlightened" centrist but when one side just wants to exist and the other side wants a trans genocide the right answer isn't maybe a little genocide, as a treat. and if you don't know how to tell apart conflicting data about trans people, you'd do well to actually listen to them for once, as opposed to discrediting them as biased and "just one side".
Yeah, sorry, definite nope to this. We have plenty of data about this, and the data clearly shows dramatically increased mental issues in pretty much all groups of young adults caused by the lockdowns. Whether these issues have anything to do with transgenderism is of course not shown by that data. Mental issues correlate strongly with transgenderism though, but you can legitimately claim that that's at least partly due to social anxiety.
Do you honestly think based on this discussion that I want trans genocide even a little bit? That I want the person in my close family to die?
This is an unfair response. I absolutely disagree with the other poster, but implicitly accusing them of supporting a little genocide, rather than just having a disagreeable opinion, is just so fucking bizarre and uncalled for.
genocide doesn't just mean murder, it means destruction of a people, which can be done by destroying identities even without killing the people behind those identities. i don't think it's inaccurate.
said other poster is actively advocating for a form of conversion therapy, just on little kids instead of adults, while questioning whether trans people are even real or just a delusion. if you hang around literally any oppressed group you'll see this "well-educated genuine concern" and conditional support rhetoric all the time. it's veiled bigotry, nothing more.
They might be a bigot, I don't really know. But nothing they said is so offensive that I could possibly interpret it as suggesting any level of genocide.
It just strikes me as trying to demonize a person to make it easier to reject their position without giving it much thought. Why consider anything coming from the mouth of s genocidal maniac?