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On a related point, what I'm uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west. I understand there's been a massive increase in cases for transmen in the UK and USA for example. Is this because we can identify these conditions much better now? Maybe. I don't have the background to say for sure. There is a real fear in society though that woke schools of thought are a harmful influence to the above rise. Again we need to be careful here. Personally what I do know is that growing up I had for a time quite severe identity issues (not about gender) but it was also a time when society encouraged the view of everyone being unique and mysterious and don't put labels on things. There wasn't anyway near this current level of identity politics and wokeness. I appreciate it's a bit of a stretch but in some ways it does feel now in society there is a growing pressure to box people's identities in more. Im so glad I grew up without the internet and could just be, and be a confused kid growing up without labels.

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Alternative explanation: there have always been as many transgender kids, but they hid it because they knew they'd get bullied by everyone, including their own parents.

This. It's amazing what you find in the shadows, in the periphery of our culture, when you simply look. For a long time, we just refused to see what was right in front of us. There's a long tradition of transgenderism, and anthropologists have been writing about it for a while.

But that's not the whole story. Kids are also very malleable, open to peer pressure and easily assume identities that earn them acceptance by their peers.

Exactly. Transphobia often leads to trauma after getting ostracized by one's peers. I've never seen evidence of "wokeness" being nearly as nasty. You don't get bullied or singled out for not being trans.

If I say I'm hetero and only date biologically born women, wouldn't I be considered transphobic and be ostracized by the woke community?

I doubt that. Resonable people recognice that there is a diffrence between a personal preference of who to fuck, and telling others who they should prefer to fuck.

"Reasonable people" seems awfully "no true Scotsman"-y to me

But I don't know that it actually is. There's no “everyone will be fine with this” – implied is a “most people are reasonable”, so it isn't the right form of argument to be a No True Scotsman.

No, it's a simple inital assumption about good faith actors. In my opinion, this is a strategy that often pays off.

No. One of my friend is lesbian and active LGBTQ+ member (pro-bono doctor for the one who needs it in her community now, that's what i mean by active), and she knows i only date biologically born women, her friends knows it, never had any issue with them.

I’m a homosexual man. I’ve been called out by woke friends because I’ve said that generally gay men are not attracted to vaginas. I’ve been called closed minded and a right wing asshole for saying that I would not date trans men, and that heterosexual intercourse will never be gay.

I have to keep these opinions quiet now because of the negative social backlash I’ve gotten.

I can’t believe we live in times where we have people in the lgbt community who criticize homosexual men as being “genital fetishists” for being attracted to only men of the same sex.

I can guarantee that the backlash you got was less about your personal opinion, but for calling a relationship between a cis men and a trans man straight.

It's just a really shitty thing to do, and it's not even accurate. Attraction models do not solely work based on genitals, there's a lot of other characteristics that go into that.

I don't like what GP is saying either; it's sneaking some very judgmental opinions under the umbrella of "they want to force me to have sex with X", which is bad faith.

But you don't know how his argument with his friends went, so it's a little arrogant to tell him "they were probably mad at you because you said X".

The problem is with the generalization, which is present in the entire comment. I can't imagine the original conversation was significantly less abrasive.

Generalization is the problem. It is not accurate to say that all gay relationships require two penises.

It is also wrong to call a lesbian transphobic because she finds testicles unattractive and vaginas attractive. She is entitled to be honest about her sexuality.

I can't believe I need to say this, but there are trans women with vaginas and without testes.

Nobody says you're not allowed to have genital preferences. Chromosome preferences (with everything else equal) however seem legitimately transphobic to me. They're more a rejection of trans people than stemming from a preference in attraction.

OK, but I'm trans and I'd say your "woke" friends are talking nonsense and I hope that they will all actually wake up and realise what inane nonsense they're talking.

Now what? Are trans people not allowed to have different opinions and ideas about anything? As a gay man, would you say that all gay men see everything in the same way? For example, if I ask 100 gay men their opinion on gay marriage, will I get 100 identical answers, or...?

What I'm trying to say is, whenever someone says something stupid to you, remember that they are just one person expressing one opinion and that this opinion may well change as time goes by. Don't assume that all of society, or all of one particular segment of society, has the exact same, or even similar, view.

Also to be blunt, I doubt this "negative social backlash" you've gotten is as bad as that, or even that it's the kind of backlash you get outside of Twitter. But maybe I'm old. I transitioned in the 90's when most transwomen I knew identified as gay men. Try that one for a woke debate, some day. Anyway we didn't have Twitter back then so you wouldn't be called a "genital fetishist" to your face for not liking vag else most transwomen would have been decried as "genital fetishists". Eeew, fish and all that.

My point is I think that people will come up with all sorts of dumb ways of thinking when something becomes an "issue". We're still at the point in the curve, with trans issues, where they are "issues" whereas being gay has more or less been assimilated in mainstream culture (and that's part of why gay men are being attacked by "woke" folk). Wait it out. In a few years people will be reading all those woke tweets and blogs and tumblrs and laughing, mostly good-heartedly.

Where’s the strong backlash against the nonsense?

What kind of backlash do you want to see? If we're talking about arguing with idiots on twitter 24/7 then I don't think most people are prepared to do that.

And why does there need to be a "backlash" even? Do we absolutely need to have a big old culture war everytime somebody says something stupid?

> I’ve been called closed minded and a right wing asshole for saying that I would not date trans men, and that heterosexual intercourse will never be gay.

You're conflating two very different things here: "I would not do this", and "If someone does this they're not really gay".

It feels like a motte-and-bailey fallacy to me.

Well there's definitely some people who think that, they say as much on their videos. One I watched claimed the only way to get rid of transphobia was for straight people to understand that you don't get to care about what kind of genitals your date has. You ll find out in bed.

Interesting! Do I lose the ability to chose based on other things, then? Like, I prefer brunettes, would that be permitted, or should I be hair-color blind and just take what I’m given? I know you’re not an advocate for it, just interesting that some people hold this conviction!

I mean, you can decide if it ever goes that far, but trans people do not owe you disclosure about their genitals just like you do not owe your partners your entire medical history.

It's probably still the right thing to do, purely because the trans panic defense is still a thing and it would be unsafe, but I see no moral obligation here.

Do we not owe disclosure of certain things as part of our social contract? I would expect a partner to disclose certain things that are non-obvious, but potentially relevant to a relationship/hookup. But maybe I’m wrong, or painfully backwards. I would like to know, though, if you believe we owe no disclosure at all, prior to an engagement?

If you are not into trans women, the onus is on you to disclose that, not on the trans woman. This is because there is a long history of violence against trans women who disclose it, so as a cis man you need to do your part.

I think you might be right! I never thought of it like that.

If someone starts a conversation with you and then asks you on a date, you have no obligation to tell them anything.

However if a person driving a Ferrari wearing a 5k suit and a 50k watch asks someone on a date, that person may be under the impression that they are going on a date with a rich person and that they will not be going to McDonald's.

I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with taking your date to McDonald's. Plenty of people love McDonald's. But it is not the same thing and that date may not go well.

And that implies that gay people do not exist. A lesbian who says testicles are gross does not actually have a genetic sexual desire for biological women.

Depends why you're saying it. Context matters.

If you're saying it to prove a point I mean yeah people see through that

Some people would consider that transphobic:

https://medium.com/@QSE/when-you-say-i-would-never-date-a-tr...

Others would say they're not saying that, but that your preference is influenced by transphobic culture:

https://www.curvemag.com/blog/transgender/the-often-misunder...

I'm sure others would be fine with it.

I'm trans and I'd be fine with it and I think of the arguments that it's transphobic as misguided at best, malicious at worst. There seems to be a vocal contigent of transwomen who identify as lesbians who try to argue that a lesbian who is not trans and doesn't want to have sex with a transwoman (even one with male genitalia) is transphobic. This sounds to me like a kind of very, very bad pickup line.

On the other hand, I'd like to know what the OP, shtps, would think if they dated a transwoman without knowing she was trans and later found out about it. People have committed violent crimes because they didn't know, or at least claimed they didn't know as a defense.

So there is something there that needs clearing up. If you're attracted to someone and then later find something about them and decide you're not attracted to them after all, that's not the fault of the person you initially found atttractive. Agreed?

I want to start a family in the traditional sense like my parents and grandparents have done before me, so I would be disappointed to find out I was dating a transwoman. Similarly I'd be disappointed to find out if a woman didn't want children or wanted to live a lifestyle incompatible with my own. It isn't going to work out and I'd have to ultimately call it off.

It's not about 'who's at fault' really. It will sooner or later come up and it is better sooner than later for both parties. If I'm dating a woman and she doesn't mention that she already has children, which is a big deal for me, then we're both just wasting our times because that's something I can't compromise on.

I don't know why this even needs to be stated, but violence is not an option in either of these cases.

I'm a little bit confused. At first you talked about "dating" someone, now you're talking about starting a family. These seem to be different, not necessarily mutually exclusive, but not necessarily identical, goals. Can you explain?

It needs to be stated that violence is not an option because many times violence has been used against trans women and the defense of the perpetrator was "I didn't know she was trans".

Sure. Dating is essentially the way we assess a suitable potential partner. The end goal in (hetero) dating essentially boils down to starting a family and this is also implied and assumed unless stated otherwise.

I guess nowadays people also informally call "having casual sex" dating. I'm also not sexually attracted to trans women if that's what you're getting at. We would not even be able to have sex.

Ok, we're on the same page regarding the violence.

If you have these preferences then the onus is on you to disclose them. As long as you say "I would like to be in a relationship with someone who can have children with me" on your first date, and not discriminate between e.g. trans women and cis women who can't give birth, it's ok.

I have no problems with disclosing that.

Attraction doesn't work like this. You're not attracted to chromosomes, you're attracted to femininity.

I could understand if you'd find some to most trans women not attractive, but a categorical exclusion seems transphobic to me.

There are trans women where you really can not tell, even if you're in an intimate relationship. At that point it moves from being a genuine preference to bigotry.

But I can see what you're actually asking: Is anyone going to yell at you because you're not dating them. The answer is no.

Unless you real question was not a question, but more of an implication that something that literally never happens must happen on a grand scale. Damn the woke mob forcing me to fuck trannies!

Refusing to date the whole group due to a choice made in principle is obviously transphobic, by definition.

Not being attracted to this or that person is perfectly natural. Reminder: a lot of trans people "pass" perfectly.

"ostracized by the woke community" in another strawman.

Perhaps you want to date a women to find a partner you want to eventually have children with?

Yes but even then it’s not “I don’t date trans women” it’s “I don’t taste women who can’t give birth”

Then you should rule out the large number of women who either do not want or cannot have children.

Perhaps there's something else going on?

Trans women are "biologically born women".

As a trans person I do not believe in a firm sex/gender distinction. The evidence clearly suggests gender identity (unlike race) has a major biological component.

I'm a trans woman. What evidence is that you are citing?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/is-gender-identity-biologi... and https://www.kqed.org/futureofyou/the-biological-roots-of-gen... are good overviews.

Case studies like David Reimer are pretty definitive, in my opinion.

The David Reimer case is not really "evidence" of anything. At best it's more like a hint or a suggestion. "Evidence" should mean there is a scientific theory and someone conducted an experiment to prove or disprove it and, hey, look at the evidence, it tells us something about the theory. The Reimer case was a complete destruction of a person's life, but it was not perpetrated as an experiment of any kind. Although if I remember correctly the perpetrator did claim he was testing a theory, the unethical and haphazard, disorganised way in which he went about it completely discredits any pretense to science.

So, other, actual evidence, please? A citation in a journal would do. E.g. Yu & Yu 2017 "Gender identity has a biological component" or something of the sort. Something we can accept is "evidence" in a mainstream, standard sense, not in the sense given to "evidence" by the internet, like "I know of something that agrees with my personal beliefs so it's evidence that I'm right".

I think I’m woke, but it seems obvious to me that everybody has sexual preferences that go way beyond the gender of their partner. Some prefer tall and dark, some prefer petite blondes. Some people prefer big black and beautiful. How can we make moral judgement about people’s sexual preferences?

I guess the alternative would be that you have to be willing to have sex with everybody of your preferred sex? Are there people who actually think this?

Sure but go spend about 9 minutes around the kubernetes Twittersphere (a group with a large amount of white trans people) and you’ll see very quickly just how nasty it can be in its own way

I don't know if that's true anymore entirely, in a broader context.

(I am sure that trans people far more often have far worse experiences still)

I've heard stories, both online and from my sisters (who live in a pretty woke neighborhood and have a pretty woke circle of friends) about kids and teens who were "criticized" for being "too gender conforming" by "concerned" parents and friends alike. And stories about teens and grownups being ostracized and called names for politely rejecting trans or same sex people flirtations[1].

While I don't think these anecdotes are outright bullying, of course, it shows a certain direction, and it shows certain parental and peer group pressures building up in certain cohorts of society. All this can cause a certain amount of trauma and confusion[0], especially in kids and teens who haven't had a chance to explore and form their personality and identity on their own to a sufficient degree yet, when e.g. you as a kid get a sense that your parents are unhappy about you or when friends and peers call or at least insinuate you are "a bit of a" transphobe or homophobe because your brain is interested in the opposite sex and opposite sex genitalia.

[0] I am NOT saying all trans people are just confused. But I do think that some kids and younger teens are in fact just confused. Well, all kids and teens are constantly confused about everything, that's part of growing up, which is to a great part trial and error and trying to make sense of things and experiences. But this kind of confusion I am talking about relates to the old stories of "My parents wanted a boy and only got me, a girl, so I tried to be as much a boy as I could growing up trying to please them", but with a new slant to it, that might possibly involve hormone therapy at worst.

[1] One more slightly related anecdote, I am directly biased here: When I was like 17 or 18 (still in school, so, long ago), I was at a party and had a guy hit on me. I am a guy myself, but straight. Fine no worries, I told him nicely I am not interested. He (admittedly quite drunk) would then follow me around for some time, trying to convince me with zingers like "only a man knows how to suck another man's cock to perfection, I can show you, follow me!". The following days people would ask me why I "hate gays". What happened after that guy struck out with me is that he went around telling people I am a "gay hater". It took quite some effort to explain myself to people that I in fact do not hate gays and am not "grossed out" by gays, etc, just do not find them to be sexually attractive partners for me personally. I am sure some of my peers still thought I am a rampant homophobe afterwards. The more you defend yourself, the more guilty you look and all that. I am convinced this affected some of my friendships negatively and certainly messed with my mind[2]. I dread to imagine what it's like growing up now in some hyper-woke community, socialized by shit storms and parents and teachers who think math is racist and it's OK to punch "nazis".

[2] One openly bisexual girl from my grade remarked to me "Now you got a glimpse at what it is like for me a lot of the time". True that, only a glimpse, but bad enough for me already.

While this is technically true I think one should be careful to insinuate that this is an underlying cause. I don't think most people would say the same about homosexuality for example. It's just a more elaborate way of saying "it's a phase".

We know that the vast majority of the time gender disphoria starts and stops spontaneously in kids. In other words, it’s almost always just a phase.

“We know”? Why would you even think making a statement like this is acceptable without a source?

I hadn’t heard this before. Can you point to some research on this?

Saying it's cultural influence doesn't mean it's just a phase. I'm sure most people have life long personality traits that came from cultural influences.

Moreover, even if being gay or trans is just the result of cultural influence doesn't mean we should respect it any less. That said, it's worth asking the question isn't it?

Which is exactly the reason most children conform to the "normal" gender stereotypes.

The number of left handed people rose dramatically after we stopped beating children who wrote with their left hand.

People had precisely this same concern about gay people over the past few decades. And the same concern about things like heavy metal music.

When your argument rhymes so well with these obviously broken prior arguments, it is worth re-evaluating.

However there are things appearing such as clustering of cases (for want of a better word) amoung groups of friends. Times did a piece on it a few years back can't find it. Anyway that would suggest that prevalence stats might muddied somewhat.

Friends tend to be similar -- you are the average of your 5 closest friends and that -- it is true that my ADHD diagnosis came about because a friend was diagnosed. We became a friend group in college because we were all outcasts in high school haha. Turns out for a few of us the root cause of the social outcasting was different brain wiring

A lot of the things they described had a "wait that's a symptom??" reaction. I have since suggested to a couple of friends to get checked for ADHD in a similar manner if they seem like they might be struggling with it. Worst case they're now in the mental healthcare system and have access to a therapist who can figure out what they're struggling with

When you find a good place you tell your mates about it

Makes sense to me that people would be more comfortable coming out of their closets if they have friends who have already blazed the way.

There's also the little detail that people tend to cluster based on interests and personality traits in the first place, so I could see many ending up in the same circles even if none of them were out yet.

I'm guessing there are three effects there:

• People with shared experiences often cluster together in friend groups. (There are autistic friend groups, yet you'd get laughed out of the village for saying “Sally caught autism off her friends”.)

• People tend to come out around people it's safe to come out around.

• Seeing your friends coming out as [whatever] might make you properly consider whether you might also like guys, or Minecraft, or not being a woman.

And they're the same effects in anyone with a socially-frowned-upon interest. Think of the tabletop-RPG-playing “nerds” of yore.

Slightly more morbid take on that: Folks aren't killing themselves thinking they're broken or wrong as often as they would have before treatment was more known/widespread

If social stigma is no longer an issue, why aren't we seeing transitioning across the entire adult population in equal proportion, and not primarily in children?

> If social stigma is no longer an issue,

Who said that? It's probably becoming less of an issue, but it's definitely not disappeared.

Sure, but are you implying the remaining stigma applies unequally and is dependant specifically on age? Is there any evidence of this?

It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if adults with decades of experiencing living with that stigma would choose differently from young people without those decades of experience.

Probably because it’s much harder for adults to change their identities.

They have lives, responsibilities and dependants. Unlike children they can’t change their identities on a whim without repercussions, or negative impacts on people they care about.

I imagine that many people would rather ignore their “true” identity, than risk losing a spouse they care about, or disrupting their children’s futures.

We do? I've seen more adult trans people come out in the past year than the entire decade of 2000-2010.

Alternative explanation: like previous social rebellions like punks, goths, etc... It is "fashionable" and driven by the trends of the time.

> On a related point, what I’m uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west.

Broad acknowledgement (though there remains some sharp and often violent denial, so while better than the best the current situation isn’t at the limit of this) that gender identity can differ from socially ascribed gender and that such a difference is cause for realigning socially ascribed gender to gender identity means that people whose gender identity differs from their socially ascribed gender both are likely to have:

(1) a framework for understanding the source of their discomfort that would not exist absent the degree of acceptance, and

(2) a license to identify their understanding of the source of their discomfort to others that woud not exist without the degree of acceptance, and

(3) a hope of relief that would not exist without the social norm of realigning ascribed gender to match gender identity.

Naturally, this means that more people aren’t just going to keep quiet and attempt to fit into the box society has assigned them at whatever pain it takes, as would previously have been the case because there was no visible alternative.

> but it was also a time when society encouraged the view of everyone being unique and mysterious and don't put labels on things.

I'm glad, for your sake, that you felt like this about society, but I can assure you that at no time that any living person grew up was it the case; and, particularly, the labels put on those who failed to outwardly conform to gender norms tended to be quite harsh.

> I appreciate it’s a bit of a stretch but in some ways it does feel now in society there is a growing pressure to box people’s identities in more.

That’s, literally, the opposite of the case.

Depending on how much your surroundings insist on putting labels and associated limitations based on what is between your legs on you during growing up; the puberty experience of one half of society can be more awful. This may also get reflected in current numbers of transmen vs transwomen. A transition is an extreme decision taken based on an unbearable amount of such psychological pain.

Wondering what started the labeling too though, I’ve also been teached the value of individualism and fended off any label applied to me.. maybe it’s about realizing that most people out there want to apply labels, so a response to their rigid labels is coming up with unlimited new labels.

There was a recent podcast that goes into deep detail of the causes of this phenomenon. How immense social, political, and even legal pressure suppresses those critical to transgender theory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSKQfATa-1I

I understand this might get downvoted and while I agree with the parent I also blame the contraceptive pill, dysregulation of hormone systems (various reasons), environmental toxins and the general malleability of people when it comes to sexuality at very young ages and for reasons we don’t understand. In my father’s generation the vast majority of men by the time they were 25 years old could grown thick beards now I’d say it’s a minority. We should be more curious about where these changes have come from.

It's dangerous to dismiss transgenderism to be the result of psychological mishaps caused by environmental mishaps.

You're effectively presenting a transgender person as a second class person, or a mistake.

You're also aligning the ability to grow a beard with being a 1st class citizen.

It is equally dangerous to ignore environmental factors. We also know that male fertility is on a sharp decline but don't know why, this may be related and should be investigated.

And we know biphenol/phthalate chemicals mimic estrogen in the body and have been in just about everything for the last couple generations. At least it has to be considered. Hormones

Nope, what you’re doing is totally misrepresenting what I’ve said. I’m saying if there are more effeminate men you’ll have on average more people who are transgender. Myself I can barely grow a beard and have man boobs that I’m trying to get rid of and hardly any body hair (yet my Dad has a full beard and hairy chest, I’m asking why is there this big difference in just one generation) but hopefully I still count as a first class citizen!

> I’m saying if there are more effeminate men you’ll have on average more people who are transgender.

How is this true?

How will these men mean there are more transgender people in the world?

I don’t think you’re trying to discuss these things honestly. Are you really saying sexual characteristics aren’t controlled by hormones and these sexual characteristics don’t have any effect on how humans think about their gender?

So in this case, do these characteristics stop a man from identifying with the gender they were born with?

We all start off genderless until testosterone washes over the male unborn foetus starting some of the gender characteristics like penises and brain changes. I think (it’s hard to tell as you’re so muddled in your thinking) you’re taking the bell curve of differences and how those differences manifest and attempting to make up concrete rules. Statistics doesn’t work that way.

If testosterone is the defining characteristic of being male, I have no idea why trans people born male need take hormones to reduce testosterone levels.

Also gender is independent of sexual apparatus.

I really don’t get your argument at all. Testosterone and other androgens can increase masculine features. In a purely statistical sense gender and sexual apparatus are heavily correlated, but then I see gender as being more of a spectrum than a binary anyway. I think these things can be influenced by the environment a lot, if you believe you’re a bunch of chemical reactions happening in a biological system how can what we be anything apart from hormones, genetics and culture interacting to express a gender?

The development of masculine features or otherwise in no way necessitates the development of a matching gender identity.

What exactly do you think being transgender means?

Yes.

If you've never been fit enough to do something like a muscle up then you have no idea what having testosterone feels like.

I'm saying this as a former blob who got fit during covid by accident. You are your body and your body happens to have a mind, not the other way around.

This has nothing to do with transgenderism at all. Completely different issue.

Be aware that men are coming under the same pressure on appearance that women have had for decades.

I'm in my 50's, and can remember a time when there wasn't this awareness of men's bodies. While it was admirable to be fit, and women certainly appreciated muscles and a lack of a beer gut, it wasn't seen as that important. Men could be flabby and still seen as physically attractive.

Moobs are normal. Not being able to grow a thick beard is normal. Body hair, or any hair, or not, is normal (I could count the number of hairs on my chest in my 20's and never once considered this to be unusual or in any way affecting my masculinity). I have friends who were balding in their mid-20's and that was normal.

The difference between 30 years ago and now is not in men's bodies. It's in our attitudes to men's bodies.

Men (and women, as always) are being taught to hate our bodies because businesses can profit from that emotion. We are being told that no-one will love us unless we're taller, stronger, hairier. We're being fed images of "perfect" men as aspirational targets that we should aspire to match (and to get there we need to buy a bunch of products, obviously).

We need to learn that all bodies are different, and all are acceptable. It's normal to have flabby bits. If you have to hate something, don't hate your body, hate the people telling you that your body is not good enough.

Please do some research before you state facts.

Testosterone levels have been decreasing for decades, in significant amounts. https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/10/02/youre-not-t...

I'm stating my experience. This is a fact.

Interestingly, the Forbes article you're referencing is partially based on this paper: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26126... which confirms a link between advertising and voluntary testosterone testing (entirely supporting my point). Men are being targeted by advertising that encourages them to think about their bodies differently.

No, actually testosterone levels have been dropping, sperm counts have been dropping, and American men are vastly more obese and overweight than they were even 50 years ago. That is a change.

Just watch one of those old “Berlin in the 1920s” or “NYC in the 1970s” videos. You’ll quickly notice the almost complete lack of overweight people.

So, is the answer in our diet? Our types of jobs? This is an interesting phenomenon, and I wonder the cause.

Diet, sedentary jobs, lack of walkable cities, and (for better or worse) removal of shame culture. If you’ve spent any time in east Asia, you’ll notice that being overweight is strongly looked down upon by society at large. This shaming doesn’t exist in America.

As to shaming, I suspect causation goes the other direction, fat shaming has decreased because the number of fat people has increased.

Looking at the time frame, I don’t think the other things you mention fit either. They just haven’t changed that much since the 70s. And they don’t explain wild and lab animals also being fatter now.

I think you’re right. What about general propensity to obesity (as in genetically, or whatever) being more prevalent? I know people that eat far worse than me, and do far less than me, but are still far skinnier than me.

I wonder about the testosterone.

I have never had my testosterone checked. I knew one guy who had has checked, and it was by a female doctor who put him on pills.

I've always wondered where that testosterone level database is?

Maybe they test in the military? I don't know, but would like to know.

I just found a study, but didn't dig into it:

"Travison and his team analyzed data from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, a long-term investigation of aging in about 1,700 Boston-area men. Data from the men were collected for three time intervals: 1987-1989, 1995-1997, and 2002-2004."

It is a pretty common thing for researchers to study. Here is one:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17436...

>Just watch one of those old “Berlin in the 1920s” or “NYC in the 1970s” videos. You’ll quickly notice the almost complete lack of overweight people.

Being fat in the 80s is being skinny today. It's uncanny rewatching movies where the fat kid everyone picked on then would be on the average to skinny side today.

Whenever I bring that up I get someone popping out of the wood work saying that the 80s had heroin chik, unrealistic body expectations and on and on.

But the fattest state in 2000 (Mississippi) is skinnier than the skinniest state today (Colorado) [0]. And in 1990 the fattest state (again Mississippi) was half as fat as Colorado is today.

Forget being transgendered the majority of the US would look barely human to anyone from the 80s.

[0] https://stateofchildhoodobesity.org/adult-obesity/

> Being fat in the 80s is being skinny today.

No, its not.

> It's uncanny rewatching movies where the fat kid everyone picked on then would be on the average to skinny side today.

The distribution of body types in film (in the 1980s and otherwise) represents the fashions of the motion picture industry, not (except coincidentally) broader society. The relation of that fashion to broader society is very much not consistent.

> Forget being transgendered the majority of the US would look barely human to anyone from the 80s.

Being an actual person from the 1980s (70s, in fact) I can say with some confidence that this is not true.

So obesity rates haven’t increased dramatically? If that’s your argument, I’m afraid you’re simply misinformed.

And no, there are plenty of videos of normal people that have nothing to do with “the fashions of the motion picture industry.” Millions of video clips are available right now online.

> So obesity rates haven’t increased dramatically?

They’ve increased to “a very large minority, even in the fattest state”.

What used to be “fat” has not become “thin”, its just “fat" has become more common.

> And no, there are plenty of videos of normal people that have nothing to do with “the fashions of the motion picture industry.”

Yes, and they’ll show that overweight and obese people are greater proportions of the total. That I didn’t argue against.

The ridiculous hyperbole is what I took issue with.

>The distribution of body types in film (in the 1980s and otherwise) represents the fashions of the motion picture industry, not (except coincidentally) broader society. The relation of that fashion to broader society is very much not consistent.

>>Whenever I bring that up I get someone popping out of the wood work saying that the 80s had heroin chik, unrealistic body expectations and on and on.

>>But the fattest state in 2000 (Mississippi) is skinnier than the skinniest state today (Colorado) [0]. And in 1990 the fattest state (again Mississippi) was half as fat as Colorado is today.

Dear god you can at least read the part of the post where I already answered that point.

You are confusing social pressure with environmental changes.

marcus_holmes correctly points out that in some cultures men are under more pressure to fit into a gender stereotype around being really muscular.

(And it's well known that women receive even more pressure to be slim and so on)

This is true regardless of the worsening food quality and availability making people fat. Or environmental factors reducing sperm count and so on.

I am guessing it is mostly exercise and diet related.

People 50-70 years ago on average lived a very different life style in the US. The fear was that people weren’t getting enough food in the United States and the modern food industry was born and kind of over corrected and now obesity is the problem we are trying to solve.

On top of that I am shocked by how little the average American exercises, and I just don’t mean going to the gym and running, I mean basic, walking and doing something, anything physical.

It’s likely something environmental. Wild animals and even lab animals on strict diets are fatter now than they were in the 70s. A recent article discussed on HN proposed plastics and lithium contamination as two possible culprits.

While I do not disagree with anything you say, you also completely ignore that chemical pollution in our drinking water and food has been shown to cause changes in us.

Instead of completely ignoring their point and just telling them to accept themselves as they are, why should we not also be looking at our environment and asking if it is impacting us?

> Myself I can barely grow a beard and have man boobs that I’m trying to get rid of and hardly any body hair

Do you by chance sit around at a PC all day and get less exercise than you really should? I'm not sure I'd pin this on a biology thing just yet, there's so many things that could cause that

Losing weight and getting exercise gave me all sorts of "manly" traits. Turns out sitting around letting your muscles go to goo can mess with your systems a bunch. I have to shave too often now if anything haha

However if we wanted to turn this into a hypothesis our first stumble is that not all gender dysphoric people are overweight, so it's probably not that

> not all gender dysphoric people are overweight

Who said this?

I do four hard weight focused workouts per week of 1.5h each so 6h of exercise. I probably need to address diet, but even so, lots of fresh home cooked meals in there. Maybe need to do more cardio but that tends to set off my SVT. Thanks for asking.

I'm not saying that you said it, I'm saying we can probably rule it out as a hypothesis because there's no correlation that I know of. Admittedly I have never looked into it so only know the people I know

It came up as a thought because you mentioned manboobs, which I have personal experience with hence the rest of my comment, but aside from that my words are my own

> However if we wanted to turn this into a hypothesis our first stumble is that not all gender dysphoric people are overweight, so it's probably not that

Like all the “why are people gay‽”-type nonsense, I also think it's not that – but people are complicated. There is not going to be a single factor for anything, so I don't think that's a valid reason to discard the hypothesis. “There is no real correlation in the first place” would be.

What do the men look like on your mother’s side?

I can't grow a beard, does this mean I have low testosterone levels? I doubt it. Pretty certain my grandad couldn't either.

It depends? T level normalcy is a rolling average, and there's been a decrease if you go back far enough. Same thing with sperm count.

As a data point: my T levels are completely normal and I cannot even grow a reasonable goatee at 34.

There seemingly are some environmental factors out there diluting testosterone levels (certain plastic seem like a risk, for instance), but pubescent boys are not taking contraceptive. That's a weird specific bogeyman to call out.

Don't downplay the influence of interracial mixing in the Americas, where I will perhaps incorrectly assume you live. Large amounts of body hair are not a universal male trait. Europeans and Mediterraneans are much hairier than Native Americans. If your ancestors were mostly on one side of that, then sure, they were hairier. Many of my more distant ancestors had no body hair at all.

You may notice a tradeoff here, as the same sensitivity to DHT in your hair follicles that causes facial hair to proliferate also causes male pattern baldness, and Europeans go bald much more often.

In utero it’s possible that unborn children are receiving a dose of the pill when mothers don’t realise they are pregnant, for example.

On the other hand, there's no easy way to count the suicides who were closet-trans or just dysphoric without having the words for it. I've now known at least two adults with histories of depression who have transitioned and report being much happier.

Look for stories of people who are post-op or have gone a large portion of their life as trans. Sometimes they end up figuring out it's not for them. In most of those cases, it's not really that they were tricked or coerced, it's just that they get more help than people who do not identify as trans, but after they fully transition it disappears. In some rare cases a young person is pushed by someone.

You see the same thing with people who attempt suicide. People who attempt suicide have better life outcomes in general because they are given more help. Notably suicide is infectious and can trigger copycats.

This doesn't mean I think transexualism is fake -- there's a really interesting nature article where they use ML to identify the sex of brains separate from the body's apparent sex. But there definitely are incentives to ID as trans.

It follows directly from more acceptance of being transgender in society. It is not pleasant to have to sit with gender dysphoria for years - and then when you eventually do treat it, to have to spend thousands undoing changes to your body. Much better to treat it before it becomes a problem.

Anecdotally, in the startup where I worked there was one summer in 2017 when 3 white women (a significant percent of the women in the office at the time) all suddenly came out as non-binary and asked to be called they/them. If that's not some kind of freaky bandwagon thing going on then I don't know what is. It was like a competition to see who could get the most oppression points or something. Now I'm in a different company, with a lot of folks who are pretty clearly biologically female claiming the non-binary identity. Most confusing of all to me are the non-binary people who still self-describe as lesbians. Do they think gender is a thing or not?

I'm expecting a pretty harsh backlash against all this gender politics at some point. I'm not sure when or how it will manifest, but even some of my LGB friends privately tell me they think it's gone too far. For the most part, though, they are too afraid to say anything in public because they don't want to get attacked and possibly lose their jobs over it. It's clear that the gender radicals have wielded online bully tactics to gain full control over the range of acceptable discourse.

LGBT are often portrayed as some kind of monolithic entity in mainstream media, but the reality is that there's a lot of ideological tension in the mix between the cis and trans people. The only place I see these tensions spilling into the open is in the UK, where the LGB Alliance and Stonewall organizations are at odds. Wondering when the same will happen in the US.

Let me lay out the tension for those who may not be familiar. On the one side you have LGB people who mostly say their sexuality is immutable and based on attraction to specific sexes. "Baby, I was born this way" in the words of Lady Gaga. As an example, maybe you're a lesbian which means a woman who is attracted to other women; for most of history this was understood to mean a person of the female sex attracted to another person of the female sex. Meanwhile you have trans activists trying to stretch the meaning of words like "man" and "woman" to the point that they don't really mean anything anymore. Anybody can be a woman if that's how they identify today, which has the effect of broadening what it means to be a lesbian in a way that some lesbians may not agree with. The status quo today is that if you're a lesbian and not willing to include the "female penis" in your sexual orientation, you're at risk of being called a TERF/transphobe. This seems like an irreconcilable difference of views.

Despite what you might think if you've read this far, I do not hate trans people. I have sympathy for them and whatever lack of self-acceptance has led them into their current path. I make an effort to use preferred pronouns and be respectful to those I work with. But I'm also extremely concerned about what the collateral damage to LGB people will be when Republicans capitalize on woke extremism at the ballot box.

> Anecdotally, in the startup where I worked there was one summer in 2017 when 3 white women (a significant percent of the women in the office at the time) all suddenly came out as non-binary and asked to be called they/them. If that's not some kind of freaky bandwagon thing going on then I don't know what is.

Have you considered that they may have been talking about it privately, and decided to come out at the same time to reduce the risk of being singled out for it? I don't see how the timing implies a "bandwagon". It seems obvious that doing that together is less scary than alone.

Interesting, i think the same is happening in France, a schism between cis and trans of the LGBTQ community.

For what it's worth, i think the gender fight in the media is not worth it for anybody. I dont see an end anytime soon, and i'd rather have gay marriage settle, add counseling in schools for kids who need it, and then maybe the LGBTQ+ community can start fighting this gender fight. Transversal fights are surely worth it (as Fred Hampton and the BPP proved), but i think this one we might want to avoid until we fix the rest.

In Spain this thing is not quite of the same dimension (even though there's a lot of propaganda being pumped by leftist parties) but I already encountered some cases.

Also, I'm hearing more and more what It would be conservative opinions from the gay people I have more trust with. Which is quite unexpected for me.

>Also, I'm hearing more and more what It would be conservative opinions from the gay people I have more trust with. Which is quite unexpected for me.

You can only say you have a real gay friend when they show you their Nazi Furry dungeon and start talking about degenerates.

The number of homofascists in the closet is hilariously large.

I’m not sure why there would be a backlash. Why would anybody else care if I identify as male, female, or nonbinary? And frankly, why should I care about what those people think?

I think it is just about growing knowledge and acceptance on one side and growing need to demarcate yourself on the other. Everything is a spectrum, right?

I remember ~20 years ago, when I knew nothing of being trans-gender as a concept, and I bearly heard of some people being trans-sexuals.

These days I am fairly on board with the concept of gender as being a role in society you choose to play, that is often informed by your sex, but doesn't have to.

I suspect your last sentence is going to offend some people.

There are a lot of people who don’t feel strongly gendered, I’m one of them, and I suspect you are too from that sentence. Seeing gender as a social role makes sense to us.

However, there are other people who do feel strongly gendered, and for them gender isn’t just a social role but part of their core identity. I suspect at least half of cis folks and nearly all trans folks fit into that group.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095578/

It's not a new thing. In some parts of the world at least transgendered women typically transitioned during their puberty, at 13 or 14. A great source for this observation is 'Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes' by anthropologist Don Kulick, who followed a group of trans sex workers in Salvador. Most of them transition from young boys to teenage sex workers after a sexual encounter with an adult male. From personal (though anecdotal) experience this is a common pattern in many cultures of the so-called Global South, if we include in that South East Asia. Basically for most of the 20th century, most transwomen who transitioned, transitioned in their puberty and went straight into sex work.

What has changed recently is that many more trans women transition later in life, after having lived for many decades as men, having married and had children and careers well outside sex work etc. Perhaps because of a more general shift of ideas about gender and sexuality (gay men are nowadays not considered effeminate or feminine just because they fancy men) most transwomen in western countries were generally of this later kind.

Then the wheel shifted again. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that the number of people transitioning later in life and in a context that had nothing to do with underage sex and sex work, helped convince society that transition does not have to mean sex work (although in most of the world, it still does, by and large, so what I say applies to more western societies) and that gave more space to younger trans women and also young trans men to express their identity without fearing that a life of humiliation and inevitable sex work awaited them.

In my part of the world, when I was transitioning in the late 90's a trans woman who was not into sex work was something unheard of and indeed I had to immigrate to be able to do anything with my life. As to concerns about giving young children puberty blockers etc, I would have to say that this is much better than 13 year olds taking cross-sex hormones without medical supervision and then going to the red light district to display their budding breasts with pride.

I hope all this doesn't come across as "wokeness". My concern about other trans women has always been the limited opportunities they've had in life, in my part of the world, and the squalid, degrading and dangerous conditions in which they had to survive as a result (google a bit about the transgendered community in Istanbul if you have strong nerves). I tend to think of all the outrage about identity issues on Twitter as a pleasant change of tone from the grim darkness that was before.

A link to that book:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo362138...

What do you reckon is the reason for the increase in gay kids in the west after the decriminalization of homosexuality in most western countries? Hint: it's the decriminalization and social acceptance allowing gay people to come out of the closet rather than having to pretend they're straight for fear of consequences.

The kids aren't being transed. I know there are several mostly British authors having extremely loud voices spreading FUD about "rapid onset gender dysphoria" but that's not even a thing. It's based on a paper that used answers from parents about trans kids. Follow-up research has demonstrated that to the kids it was anything but rapid. You might as well invent a phenomenon of "rapid onset body size" to explain why grandparents will insist "how can you already be so big, it feels like you were a tiny baby only such a short while ago".

You're overthinking this, but to ease your mind: people aren't undergoing HRT and surgery because all the cool kids are doing it. They might experiment with neopronouns and gender identity labels for a bit but there's literally no demonstrable harm in that.

Also if you think identity politics is a new thing: US politicians literally put God on the dollar bills to appeal to Christian conservatives (prior to that the national motto was always "E pluribus unum", not "In God we trust"). We just don't tend to think of things as identity politics when we take the identity for granted.

EDIT: That you see more trans people is a good thing actually. Visibility is the result of social acceptance. And social acceptance is the biggest contributor to reducing suicidality and improving quality of life. Trans people haven't been killing themselves because they're trans, they've been killing themselves because everyone kept telling them they're not. You can't trans a kid any more than you can make them gay.

> And social acceptance is the biggest contributor to reducing suicidality

That’s not the proper way to treat depression. No amount of social acceptance will lower the suicide rates of people with mis/untreated depression.

It's the proper way to treat depression caused by social rejection, which is as I understand it the bulk of the motivation for suicide among trans people.

Your argument would be valid if I didn't qualify the context. I wasn't talking about depression and at no point did I indicate that I was.

Also the proper way to treat depression is to identify the underlying cause, which can be simply rooted in brain chemistry but can also be environmental.

If you're suicidal because your family and social circles reject you for who you are and society in general treats you unfavorably and you are constantly harassed or fetishized by strangers, the problem isn't your brain chemistry.

The question isn't whether or not to treat gender dysphoria as a mental disorder (though in part, of course that is a question too, though one that seems to have been settled) but whether social rejection and harassment are harmful or helpful for trans people. And I'm saying evidence shows it's incredibly harmful and drastically increases suicidality and decreases quality of life (because otherwise social acceptance wouldn't measurably have the opposite effect).

If your concern is health (and mental health) outcomes, not making sure people stick to the gender and presentation they grew up with, the best course of action for trans people seems to be to accept them for who they say they are and make them feel welcome and valid.

There are of course other arguments against accepting trans people but those can be disproven separately and there's no reason to shift the goal posts if we're just talking about suicidality and quality of life.

PS: Of course trans people can also be depressed independently of their transness and in that case they will need to be treated for depression as well. But the specific suicidality rate that is talked about with regard to trans people seems to be evidently linked to their social acceptance, which tracks with other groups. Alan Turing was literally driven to suicide because he was sentenced to chemical castration for not being able to deny being gay.

People are far less likely to develop it in the first place if they are able to transition and their transition is socially accepted.

What's your actual goal with this comment?

FUD

> I understand there's been a massive increase in cases for transmen in the UK

No, there hasn't. You've been lied to.

There was no treatment for trans children (in the UK). Then a clinic opened up. We went from zero trans boys to some trans boys.

Anti trans campaigners misuse percentages to show an "alarming" rise, when in fact we've simply gone from "none" to "some".

That's exactly what the parent comment said, though, isn't it? Increase from none to some is indeed massive.

No, the parent said that the numbers of trans people have increased. That's not true. The numbers of trans people able to get treatment is the thing that increased. We went from not counting, to counting. So we didn't increase the number of trans people, we just started counting the trans people that always existed.

He said "cases", though, not "people". I'm not sure if you can say that you have a case without treatment or diagnosis.

They said "increase in transgender kids".

I'm pretty sure that it's clear that he meant diagnosed cases. Otherwise the text doesn't make sense. You don't ask "Could the reason for more people with X be more people with X?".

I'm pretty sure this is the exact opposite of reality though - there have been clinics for trans children in the UK for decades, and one of the main things affecting the availability of treatment is that the number of cases referred to them skyrocketed recently.

This book’s trying to explain why this is happening for girls: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_Damage

That book relies on the concept of ROGD, which is something that doesn't exist. Anybody pushing ROGD, or supporting other people who push ROGD, is anti-science and anti-fact.

You should consider why you feel comfortable pushing something that's obviously bollocks, just because it supports your anti-trans activism.

https://www.caaps.co/rogd-statement

Which one of those psychological associations would have the balls to go against the flow if they felt like it was necessary?

Totally off topic, and I have no strong opinion on the whole transgender and ROGD thing (i learned that acronym from your comment), but:

> anti-science and anti-fact

This combination of words doesn't make sense to me. Science constantly discovers new "facts" that invalidate old "facts". I understand stuff like "the current scientific consensus", but I don't understand how you can call people who question the current scientific consensus on something "anti-fact". Especially in the context of psychology and psychiatry, where lately the facts have been superseding themselves rather rapidly.

Tldr, if you're pro science, shouldn't you by definition be ever so mildly sceptical of facts?

EDIT: note, I'm not trying to attack you personally nor weasel in some alt right talking point. I've seen words like "anti-fact" used a lot lately, I think I understand where it comes from, especially in the context of American hyper-polarized politics. I guess i wrote.my comment hoping to contribute to slightly more constructive language, at least from the sane side of the aisle.

> constructive language

> sane side of the aisle

That's not how constructive language is done. You don't improve "hyper-polarized politics" by saying one pole represents sanity and the other the opposite.

Fair enough.

I guess, on second thought, there's a place for saying, quietly, among yourselves, "I agree that the opposition is crazy, but it's probably going to be more productive if we engage them like rational people." But that's not a useful public stance.

My reply is the only one which links to a publication which attempts to directly answer OP's question and includes both praise and criticism of said publication.

I think therefore that anyone can judge for themselves whether said publication is "anti-science" or "anti-fact" and your help is not required. I feel perfectly comfortable allowing people to think for themselves, especially since this publication is not obviously bollocks: it was awarded both the Economist and Times book of the year prizes.

Finally, based on what I've seen from the scientific community around politicised topics like this one, any link (especially from US-affiliated organisations) should be by default open to questioning and not unassailable proof. Although given that it's psychology it should probably just be outright ignored for a couple of decades until they manage to form a coherent opinion.

> Anybody pushing ROGD, or supporting other people who push ROGD, is anti-science and anti-fact.

This is an interesting case [2]. The concept of ROGD was introduced in an article in a scientific journal [1], by an assistant professor in Brown University. Then there was a strong reaction from people from outside the scientific community (blogosphere, activists). Later, there's been scientific debate back and forth [2]. But it is interesting, if people from outside the scientific community can win the public debate and get to decide what is science and what is not.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_c...

There have also been strong reactions against ROGD within the scientific community [1]. Like much science, the study has its own share of methodological flaws and biases that should make anyone sensible person the results of the study with skepticism

[1] https://www.gdaworkinggroup.com/blog/2018/12/5/psychology-to...

The question would be, how many people who declare up front that they're transgender are actually medically diagnosed with such condition and how many just jumped on the bandwagon of what is fancy on the internet right now?

Disclaimer - personally, I'm sceptical about the concept and scientific grounds behind transgenderism and I expect my comment to be downvoted.

Preempting downvotes, because you know your comment is not acceptable to the majority, feels like a very cynical device designed to limit that behaviour.

I'd be cautious about referring to what is acceptable to the "majority" and claiming that the concept receives a broad support, as in reality it seems that it's quite the opposite.

I suppose it depends whether you're making the comment in a community where the majority are cis gendered men or not.

And furthermore, if you weren't expecting the majority to disagree you've just certified the comment as disingenuous anyway.

I was expecting a discussion about the merit of my comment and not an immediate downvote just because someone might not like opinion.

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