I feel like burning some karma, so here's an unpopular opinion: the recent rise of gender dysphoria can be explained by the increasing endocrine disruptor load of the younger generations.
It's more like left-handedness (or good old homosexuality), in that the rate of incidence is not increasing but rather that social repression has backed off slightly and people feel a bit more confident being out.
People can be a bit more open about their gender when they're less afraid of being killed for it.
I would also 'guess' that those who transition and dress moving from female to male, can 'pass' more easily in society. Even if someone still has female features, if they dress like a guy, no one cares.
He didn't say that they weren't :-/
What evidence are you basing this statement on?
He’s talking about the increase. He never claimed trans is new.
I hear this exact same argument for autism, adhd, gender disphoria, cancer, heart disease...
I also hear about how hard it is to come out, and how you should believe what someone tells you because no one would sign up for this lifestyle without good merit. And I also hear about the increase of hate crimes, and the fact that it is the topic de jour of modern American politics.
Seems like we are consistently eating our cake and having it too, here.
Also I’m sure it would only explain part of the observed increase, since there are social factors at play.
- Not every trans person experiences gender dysphoria
- Trans people have existed historically and widespread non-binary gender identities have been observed in indigenous societies prior to modern pollution
- There are men who take estrogen for health benefits and they generally don't report gender dysphoria or desire to transition
- Men with low testosterone levels generally don't report gender dysphoria or desire to transition
- There's no literature whatsoever suggesting any link between hormone levels or other endocrinologic factors and gender dysphoria or the desire to transition
- Being openly trans was practically illegal and subject to mockery, harrassment and violence until fairly recently, even more so than being an openly gay man was
- Due to the "underground" nature of trans identities, many elder trans people lacked the language or concepts to express their identity, instead landing on more socially acceptable identities (e.g. gay men or lesbians) or adopted labels like "transvestite" whereas young people are more likely to embrace identities under the queer, trans and non-binary umbrella
- While society and the law has become a lot more accepting of queer and trans identities, access to mental health and medical care like hormone treatments and surgery is often gatekept to "protect" people seeking it (with the implication being that they are likely wrong about thinking they need it) and a diagnosis of "gender dysphoria" is usually one of the most reliable ways to gain access to these even when it doesn't accurately describe the person's experience ("autogynophilia" is the mirror version of this where "gender euphoria" specifically for trans women when allowed to express themselves as women is medicalized and framed as a sexual fetish to delegtimize it)
For the record, I'm not trans but I know and have spoken to trans people in my personal life and have read a lot about it from "both sides".
(note that people demanding sources like this are often selective about what they demand them for...)
If you're more inclined to believe technobabble than sociological explanations when you don't understand the facts behind either, that's a bias you might want to investigate further.
EDIT: FWIW most of the medical claims I made are the null hypothesis: I can't demonstrate that there is no literature suggesting a link between "natural" hormone levels and gender dysphoria but the claim could be dismissed by showing literature that demonstrates it.
The closest you can find is the hogwash pseudoscience of "rapid onset gender dysphoria" but that's arguing for a social contagion and it's citing the subjective experiences of parents of trans people and thus defines "onset" as "when the parent found out" (and "rapid" because this is usually close to an open social or even medical transition). To make this even more meaningless, it gathered those reports from a forum specifically for parents who dislike that their kid identifies as trans, i.e. who likely gave the kid no reason to come out to them while they could avoid doing so and thus would likely have been the last person to find out rather than being trusted with this information early on. Again, I don't need to cite sources for this. You can literally look up the "study" and you don't need a degree in sociology to understand the obvious bias and shoddy controls that went into it.
If you don't believe that trans people existed before the 1980s, I suggest you look into the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, whose research on gender and sexuality fell victim to one of the first book burnings of the Nazis.
If you don't believe there are indigeneous communities with non-binary gender roles, you can literally google that.
If you don't believe people who would have chosen to identify as "trans" had they been born later used and continue to use other terms to describe themselves, there are literally people doing this and saying so, publicly and openly.
By insisting that I give you a thoroughly sourced thesis paper in response to an equally unsourced claim, you're shifting the burden of proof. And you're doing so without pointing out which specific claim you want sourced, what kind of source you'd find acceptable and why you can't do this yourself.
You'd think "correlation does not equal causation" was widely understood enough that I just need to say "piracy prevented global warming" and people would know what I mean but let me reiterate: you can't just say "X happened and Y also happened around the same time, so X likely caused Y" unless you can demonstrate not only that X and Y happened around the same time but also that X directly contributes to Y.
OP1 - Here is my unpopular opinion.
OP2 - May or may not be right.
OP3 - Here is a big list of reasons why you're wrong.
The first two didn't provide any sources either, admittedly, but they didn't really make any statements of fact.
I didn't ask to pick on you or because I have some political motive(honestly, I have no idea or opinion on whether OP1 was right), only because it was the first post presented as definitive in the chain.
Honestly I think we should take OP1’s thesis seriously, but not as proven. And as usual cut down on pollutants for the wildlife it does affect.
Uh, isn't this sort of definitional? My impression is that every trans person is experiencing gender dysphoria; that's like, what trans is.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/26895269.2022.21...
It talks a lot about "gender incongruence".
There is also "gender euphoria" which may be experienced by people who do not/did not experience dysphoria.
I'm not sure whether from a clinical standpoint distress about incongruance is the same as dysphoria.
There are a lot of people who would have failed to meet previous diagnostic criteria but nonetheless are happy to have received gender affirming medical care. I think the best we can do is provide people with bodily autonomy on an informed consent basis.
Side note. Why does Android keep auto-correcting dysphoria as dysphagia. Wtf is dysphagia anyways?
You called being trans a "social contagion" in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37291089
And for anyone reading this, I really have no issue with trans people. Pretty much everyone starts with a clean slate with me in my book.
For example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lj4V-Nme86U
This is most of the reason why it's become so controversial in recent years, because law and policy are being implemented based on this, rather than the previous, medicalized understanding.
The movie industry started to boom in the early 1900s, which is precisely when left-handedness rates skyrocketed: https://i0.wp.com/slowrevealgraphs.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
Personally I think that the way the media talks about the male half of the population is responsible. Nobody ever says anything good about men, the male brand has become as toxic as Enron, and some people don’t want to be associated with it anymore.
You actually do see it happening everywhere.
But social environment is obviously a major factor too. Some of the recent uptrend is likely learned.