Comment by dehugger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dehugger | Hacker News Reader

I see a common theme of cis (meaning not trans) that are confused about why numbers for trans people are rising. I'll take my best shot at explaining what I believe to be the reason.

If you ask most trans people why the numbers are going up you'll typically get the same response: awareness and exposure to other trans people that can help explain gender dysphoria.

Many trans people do not understand that they are suffering from gender dysphoria. It's not a crystal clear set of symptoms. They will rationalize or bury symptoms, which are more or less entirely mental, and it is frequently not at all apparent to an outside observer that they are experiencing it.

I distinctly remember the first time I read a forum with others describing gender dysphoria and how it manifested for them. I discovered that feelings I thought were something only I felt, that no one else seemed to understand, actually had a root cause which was shared by others. That there was a name for what was "wrong" with me, and that I could fix it. I was 26.

Awareness about gender dysphoria has risen and more people are finding out that there is a name and a solution for the wrongness that they experience. It's only natural that more trans people are coming out.

It's unfortunate that cis people cannot experience what gender dysphoria is like, even for a moment, because they have no frame of reference for why it is so confusing for trans people, especially prior to them realizing what it is that they are experiencing.

Eventually things will level off as the number of people with gender dysphoria that have recognized and treated it approaches 100%, though I doubt it will come to rest anywhere near there.

You have to be careful when you talk about "awareness" in this way... Teenagers are easily influenced. If they start seeing news of their peers facing any adversity, they start reporting they, too, have it. This is well known and a kind of meme these days.. look up "Tiktok tics"[0]... the much worse version of this is suicide epidemics, which always happens when there's a local suicide.

[0] https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/dying-attention...

See also: rising rates of self-diagnosed ADHD and Tourette Syndrome arising through heavy social media use.

e.g. -- https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-developing-tics-...

Furthermore teenagers are the "IT'S NOT A PHASE MOM" group (it was definitely a phase).

A professional diagnosis with ADHD doesn't rely on any actual biological testing and only upon a performance by the patient and maybe evidence submitted from teachers/bosses/friends/family/etc, and it's known that a patient can fake their way to a diagnosis. So I don't care if ADHD is self-diagnosed or not, if somebody wants to get a "real diagnosis", it's easy as shit for anybody to get one, and "real diagnosis" is rising at the same time that self-diagnosis is regardless.

People can diagnose themselves with whatever they want, psychiatric diagnosis is largely bullshit, my question is more why do people WANT to diagnose themselves with these conditions, and does having labels like this actually help you.

To me, I see this entire phenomenon as being rooted in psychiatry taking it for granted that the more diagnosis's the general population has, the more drugs they're, the more therapy they're in, the better off they are. When psychiatry seems to think that more is better, why shouldn't teenagers think that too? Psychiatry has been applying more and more labels to the general population for decades and decades, if trends continue, todays self-diagnosed teen is next decade's totally valid patient, so aren't teens just getting ahead of the curve by self-diagnosing now?

Put in other terms, it's like asking why the left-handed percentage of the population rose after left-handedness stopped being beaten out of children.

No, because left-handedness is not commonly treated with hormones and surgery, and medical practitioners do not report feeling pressured to eschew normal clinical reasoning when a child presents with left-handedness.

Children had left-handedness beat out of them - surprising and strange for our time; but then is not now.

And the experience of trans people the nation over is not one any person would want to experience. If a person imagined they wanted the adoration and attention of others for being trans, they sure wouldn't want it for long. The mockery from their peers, their elders, their representatives and the literal State actively seeking to "eradicate" them is a *whole lot of harm* just for media clout.

I don't buy the "why would anyone volunteer for adversity" argument.

It seem to me there's a normal function of the teenage psyche that leads a small percentage of them to try to fit in as little as possible: goth makeup comes to mind.

I agree with the parent comment, and don't understand why it's being downvoted.

Not beating a child is always the right course of action, regardless of whether there is left-handedness that one is trying to "correct".

The kind of "treatment" that someone undergoes for gender dysphoria is incredibly invasive and doesn't seem compatible with the maxim "first, do no harm" unless gender dysphoria were something that had severely negative health outcomes if untreated. Since gender dysphoria is a health issue that's psychological in nature, this needs to be measured against a baseline of psychological health issues actually being quite prevalent even in the general population.

Left-handedness is grounded in physiology and neurology, which are "hard" medical sciences, while gender dysphoria is only grounded in clinical psychology, which just isn't.

When I say "hard" medical science, I roughly mean this: Physiology and clinical psychology both have a history of iatrogenic horror. But for physiology, you need to go much further back in time to find it. And while health intervention on both physiological and psychological grounds have been on the rise, health outcomes on physiological conditions have generally improved through history, while the population seems to be getting sicker and sicker where psychological conditions are concerned.

But that doesn't make sense when you look at the suicide rates of children who are trans. It is thought by some that the suicide rates are high due to lack of acceptance. But if the lack of acceptance caused the suicides, then all of these suppressed trans kids should have dying, but that's not the case. And the comparison between left handedness and transgenderism is absurd, because people have both left and right hands. Transgenderism is more akin to a bunch of kids deciding they have BID and want to cut off limbs. It's about a mental illness causing them to think something isn't true. Imagine what would happen if bulimia became socially accepted and celebrated, do you think we'd see a giant uptick in eating disorders?

I don't think this is entirely comparable as there never was social capital attached to being left handed. Some do think there is with gender transitioning though.

There are parents that transitions their 4-5 year olds. I doubt the kids would meet any clinical diagnosis or that it would be possible to diagnose at that age.

You can expect a higher percentage that will be diagnosed with dysphoria compared to the former baseline, but I don't think we only see that effect. Perhaps it is even the smaller component.

I've heard left handed people consistently being portrayed as being "Creative" and "Artistic" and I tried to be left handed/ambidextrous when I was a child because would be cool or unique. While left handedness doesn't have quite this reputation, being ambidextrous is associated with genius, you hear stories like how James A. Garfield could write Latin in one hand and Greek in the other. I could never use my left hand like this successfully though so I gave this up.

I also intentionally tried to use leftie stances in sports and I was mindfully doing it just to be different because I thought that was cool when I was like, 7 years old. This stuck a lot more, probably because I learned how to do things with a leftie stance from the get-go.

I think you underestimate how much stupid crap kids will try to imitate if they think it's vaguely cool and how much this can stick in a very real way. If I tried to do some sports as a "righty" I would fall on my ass. I was never actually much for social status either and kids actually gave me shit for not using a right handed stance.

Both of these can be true at the same time:

1. Medical transition genuinely helps trans people

2. x% of adolescents who identify as trans will desist in adulthood

> First, do no harm

The fact of the matter is that without a reliably way to differentiate 1 from 2, medical transition will be doing genuine harm to x percent of people. This is a core violation of bioethics. To borrow from Blackstone, I would rather nine trans people go through their biological puberty than perform a mastectomy on or render infertile one adolescent who will later come to deeply regret it.

> The Endocrine Society acknowledges .. it is placing “.. a higher value on psychological well-being, and a lower value on avoiding potential harm.

This acknowledgement is shocking to me, and I imagine it's why there is so much vitriol in this debate. What kind of parent would want to see their child harmed this way by a system which has explicitly de-prioritized harm reduction?

And this is all aside from the fact that one of the main themes of the investigation is the lack of high quality evidence that medical transition uniformly helps trans people.

> And this is all aside from the fact that one of the main themes of the investigation is the lack of high quality evidence that medical transition uniformly helps trans people.

https://www.hcplive.com/view/suicide-risk-reduces-73-transge...

(among *many* others)

I suggest you read the full report: https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p382

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