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This is an anti-trans talking point and not remotely representative of actual trans communities.
Source: am trans and nonbinary, and I have never heard another trans person complain about me not fitting into specific gender roles. The only people who complain are cis people who think my gender or lack thereof is either a ruse or a mental illness.
That is a straw-man of my position. A large part of the trans community believes hormone blockers should be liberally administered to teenagers and children, for example. That is by definition an attempt to steer healthy biological development into pre-established expectations of body conformity. The entire "transwomen are women" mantra is a vehement call for binarity: transwomen can't simply be transwomen, i.e. free people living their lives how they see fit, they must be externally recognized and validated as this social defined thing called a woman, which they were born into.
So while, of course, a community member would never comment or object to another's degree of conformity, popular variants of trangederism exhibit a strong conceptual agreement that gender objectively exists, as opposed to being an entirely made up thing used to pigeonhole people into social roles according to their biology.
This is in perfect opposition to traditional feminism, which seeks to dismantle oppressive gendered institutions. And in fact, in perfect opposition with the liberal tradition that pursues individual sovereignty and de-marginalization; just imagine using the same discourse of "being born in the wrong body" and "getting the treatment they need" for any other social class that is discriminated against for minor biological variance, such as skin color, height or weight.
So I can see the pressures associated with acceptance or challenges of LGBTQ teens as a possible increase as they make up an increasing part of that demographic. However, I don't think that gender roles specifically play a part since more things are continuously becoming available and accepted regardless of gender.
Um, statistically, trans women are more common than trans men.
I think it is somewhat more common for people who are AFAB to identify as non-binary than for people who are AMAB to do so, which if you consider it part of the same broad class of things might be sufficient to tip the balance back to that side.
Not that I endorse the “social contagion” theory GP is spouting, in the least.
Young white progressive teens in general seem to be following a path that advances the idea society should be progressing towards acceptance, inclusion and mutual progress. Sadly lip service doesn't overturn human nature. Boomers for better or worse seem to take an attitude of "fuck you, on your own" and at some point perhaps it's lower stress just to not be thinking at all times you can control the thoughts of others.
re: minortom
Not an advocate against those able to consent doing whatever want with their bodies. Don't think my argument works against that. Although it would be a fallacy to suggest anything other than the current medical standard results in more deaths and thus advocating otherwise is advocation for suffering; the medical studies never claim it's impossible to achieve less suffering some other way.
I'm hopefully wrong but it seems like you may have made some assumptions that I want to control treatment options for trans people. It feels like I've wrongly been presumed as wanting suffering for trans people; in fact my whole premise was to find out why they are frustrated this way indeed with the hopes they can find new coping strategies.
To note, I don't see why justification is even needed for transition surgery. The (hopefully) wrong assumption I made here is that you stated it like it was relevant in the decision as to whether I should be in favor of it being an option. Even if it made them worse off, they shouldn't be stopped. It's a bit terrifying one even has to include efficacy to justify whether a consenting adult is allowed to modify their body, and worrying comment you've made IMO that presents exactly the kind of problems we have with hyper concern over the opinion of others on what we do with our bodies.
Edit:
re pupptailwags: Yes we should be examining whenever people are engaging in violence, factors behind that happening. I'm quite certain, unlike assertion made below, that people indeed have studied the qualities of males in particular engaging in this kind of violence.
rethelopa: I was replying to a comment talking about why something (male disposition to this kind of violence) hadn't been studied; it has.
[note I'm rate limited, which is reason for replying this way]
There have been 8 mass shootings in America in the last 7 days. No one was running to twitter to speculate about their causes. No politicians were raising concerns about troubling trends. The shootings were going completely unremarked on in national politics… until a shooter happened to be trans.
If you want to speculate that commentators and politicians are giving the other incidents the same attention, we would literally never hear the end of it. On average, almost 2 mass shootings happen per day. But, for some reason, those incidents weren’t given national attention. Curious.
Eventually a dog dies. Now I start wondering "Well dogs are only 1% of the dead animals, may as well not focus on that..." I may miss out on an important observation.
If your presumption is true, that trans are more robust against these kind of acts, now I'm wondering. Maybe unhinged poorly socialized young males are the canaries and trans are yet something new. What's wrong in the coal mine and what can I learn by focusing on the newest subjects.
> In the old days they pretty much had to learn to accept themselves for who they were and not worry about what other people thought, both because no one was encouraging them they deserved acceptance and because few would have budged.
According to scientific research, around 1/3 of patients with gender dysphoria have attempted suicide in the past. The only medically accepted treatment for gender dysphoria is transition. If you're advocating against that then you're advocating in favor of preventable suffering & deaths.
Also, using human nature as an argument is fallacious.
https://www.psicothema.com/pdf/4483.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9501960/
re re:
I understood your comment to be against social acceptance of trans people, (and honestly still do. Admittedly this isn't a best-faith interpretation of your comment, but it made sense in the context I read it in. )
Therefore, my comment wasn't intended to be only about available medical treatment options (including surgical), but also about social acceptance of trans people, which is a kinda important part of all of this.
If that's not how you intended to mean your comment, that's great, because I agree with you on the medial/surgical side of things.
I have no interest in stopping consenting adult trans or any other person from any surgery/treatment, regardless of how efficacious or not it is. But do not make the mistake of believing because it is the only medically accepted treatment of gender dysphoria (which is curiously a treatment for something that is not even a disorder or illness), that it must be the path to least suffering and death.
I understood your comment to be against social acceptance of trans people, (and honestly still do. Admittedly this isn't a best-faith interpretation of your comment, but it made sense in the context I read it in. )
Therefore, my comment wasn't intended to be only about available medical treatment options (including surgical), but also about social acceptance of trans people, which is a kinda important part of all of this.
If that's not how you intended to mean your comment, that's great, because I agree with you on the medial/surgical side of things.
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(Reply to the parent comment:)
It is the best-currently-known-path for least suffering and death. And a lot better than the currently-known alternatives. I'm not trying to say that no better treatment might become available in the future.
(Aside: gender dysphoria is listed in the DSM-5, which is important for health insurance purposes, amongst other reasons. It was previously named gender identity disorder, but was renamed due to the stigma associated with the term disorder. There was also the diagnosis of "transsexualism" (which included homosexuality, amongst others) and the inclusion of these issues in the DSM remains a topic of debate.)
I am intrigued by the intersectionality of transition and social acceptance. You seem to have been following some research here, what have you found regarding the social acceptance of trans persons before and after transition? Are they finding more social acceptance after treatment?
(I don't think they're finding more social acceptance after transition, with some light exceptions as the realization and acceptance of their dysphoria allowes them to find more accepting social circles, and some probably are less accepted by their environment after.)
(I'm also not an expert at this, I've just been parroting some well-known takes but I've looked at research to back them up, as "Source: Reddit" isn't the most convincing)
Although for the record it doesn't even make sense to say "trans person wasn't shooting school in the old days." Pluralization is an appropriate use of English here.
It's funny when they bring up that Simone de Beauvoir quote "one is not born a woman, but becomes one", as the rest of the passage it is from completely undermines what they assume it's about - Beauvoir talks about "the figure that the human female presents in society" and then goes on to critique this:
« On ne naît pas femme : on le devient. Aucun destin biologique, psychique, économique ne définit la figure que revêt au sein de la société la femelle humaine ; c'est l'ensemble de la civilisation qui élabore ce produit intermédiaire entre le mâle et le castrat qu'on qualifie de féminin. Seule la médiation d'autrui peut constituer un individu comme un Autre. En tant qu'il existe pour soi, l'enfant ne saurait se saisir comme sexuellement différencié. »
To Beauvoir, "woman" is a harmful social construct that is forced upon all females, so this doesn't apply to males who call themselves women, because firstly, they are not female, and secondly, they are not forced into womanhood. It's comical how so fundamentally they've misunderstood her point.
Perhaps you're referring to the transmedicalist position? That's rather disapproved of in the trans movement as a whole, from what I've seen.
> gender as a social construct
Have you not seen the memes? https://libreddit.eu.org/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/search?q=gen...
If you ignore realities of present society and pretend that things like gender roles and racial discrimination don't exist today, you can make it look like people are fighting to create those things instead of to reduce them.
Rather, we fight racism by rejecting racialized social roles. There is nothing racist in acknowledging current racial inequality, but it's deeply racist to suggest there exist a "real", inner race that influences our behaviors, and if society pushes us into racialized roles, it's because they don't afirm our "true race".
Similarly, we fight sexism by rejecting gendered social roles, biological sex is a minor anatomical detail that - aside from well specified domains, such as reproduction and raw physical strength - should have no bearing on someone's ability and right to perform any social role they desire.
To do anything else for pragmatic reasons is as if the suffragettes would have dressed up as men on election day and attempt to vote that way; ie, recognize and reafirm the restriction instead of attacking the fundamental inequity of the male-only vote.
Trans people don't be trans in order to fight sexist gender roles. They're trans, and (often) fight sexist gender roles.
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Some pedantic notes that may or may not be relevant:
• The two different domains you list are influenced by different dimensions of biological sex, which can vary independently.
• A social gender, while culturally-influenced, seems to represent something fundamental about human experience.² Many societies' social gender categories do not align 1-to-1 with biological sex classifications, but 'most all of them have them. Meanwhile, race isn't seen outside racists and those influenced by racism: it is a recent³ invention.
• Some people's brains, for whatever reason, do care about the sexual characteristics of the rest of the body. This isn't much of a problem if that "preference" matches what the body is, but it can cause people significant distress when they don't.⁴ ⁵
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¹: Though transmeds would dispute the (perfectly valid) implication in your second sentence. "Born in the wrong body" isn't an entirely accurate explanation: it's more of a lie-to-adults, only required if you've got a stodgy old binarist model in your head that can just about conceptualise the existence of gay people. It's up there with "lesbian relationships are butch/femme": not something we need to be teaching children, though probably better than acting like LGBT people don't exist.
Brandon Ambrosino wrote a good article about the "born this way" argument: it goes into more detail, with anecdotal examples. https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20160627-i-am-gay-but-i...
²: Disclaimer: I'm not speaking from experience. My intuition is that gendering is bad. From observing other people actually liking, and gaining value from, gendering themselves, I suspect there might be value in keeping gender around, for their sakes; however I have not really taken the time to square this with the clear and obvious harm caused by our society's obsessive gender-all-the-things-and-people tendencies.
³: Dating back at most 1400 years, with its European-coloniser incarnation probably not much more than 400 years old, and the modern eugenicist version less than 200 years old.
⁴: This doesn't necessarily even line up with gender! I know a cis guy who went on feminising HRT, and he says it made him a lot happier. (I don't have access to the inside of his head, but I'd be inclined to believe him.)
⁵: Personally, I don't see why someone should need to have a medical condition to get to choose what their body is like. I get the rationale, seeing as these are semi-permanent choices that one's future self might disagree with – but we could apply the same logic to tattoos, nose rings, or earlobe stretching. (Perhaps we should!)
Regardless, the fact remains that many people do have such a medical condition.