Okay, the fact that this is still a “debate” is honestly the dumbest crock of shite to me, but as a trans youth myself I feel I can give some perspective to those who are uneducated yet still curious.
No, we don’t do it for attention. In fact, seeing as the attention we do get is negative a lot of the time, it can be quite crippling if anything. No, we do it to find ourselves. We are initially discontent with who we were born as and what roles we’re expected of due to that. Perhaps we simply don’t feel we fit with the typical expectations of what we were born as. It’s always a case-by-case basis so you can’t speak for every person who transitions.
But what we seek, above all, is inner contentment and peace. It’s so liberating to have agency over yourself and who you are. It’s so freeing to not just recognise that you’re discontent with what role you were born into, but to also make a change for yourself that will improve your inner well-being. Because no matter what happens in your life, no matter what jobs or relationships or friends you have…you’ll always have yourself. Being happy with who you are is probably the most important thing you can do for your mental well-being, and just “sucking up” those feelings isn’t going to help you out.
I hope I explained that okay, I tried my best from off the top of my head. It’s hard for us, but I feel it’s a worthy cost if it means we can be at peace with ourselves and find a community to bond with.
This whole attitude of people wanting to be insulated from people they don’t want to date/get jiggy with is just bizarre to me. Over the course of my life I have been approached by a number of people who expressed such interest in me and if I wasn’t interested I declined politely - is it REALLY that much of an imposition to say “Thank you, but I’m not interested at this time” or “I’m sorry, but you’re not my type.” and move one with life? I guess so, at least for some people.
This may not be a reliable source - it’s the only one I’ve seen, and appears to be linked with Rumble and other similar sites - but it’s about a 14-year-old boy in the Kenosha, WI area who claims to identify as a girl, and as a result is using the girls’ locker room, with rather unpleasant results. This story says that multiple people have also reported him to administration to threatening to shoot people, and nothing has happened as a result, which has me wondering what is really going on, or who he’s related to.
…from the story: (spoiled because NSFW and constant misgendering)
If the story is true (and based on the anecdotal nature of the allegations, the advertising that popped up on the page for me, the constant misgendering throughout the article and the background of the author, I have my doubts) does that sound like behaviour that would be tolerated in any bathroom by any person? It wouldn’t matter if the person was trans or not. Its just unacceptable behaviour, full stop. This isn’t a story about a trans kid. It isn’t relevant. If the allegations are true, then it’s just plan anti-social behaviour and should be dealt with as such.
(And the adverts! Is that normal for some local news in the US? The first was for the the local carwash: innocent enough. Then an advert for corporate armed security, one for the local DA and one for a defense attorney, one to “remove unattractive antenna towers”, and a cryptic anti-planned parenthood sentence that was vaguely threatening with a link to a random gmail account)
It’s not uncommon for websites for local TV stations and newspapers to be ad-heavy (and with some questionable ads). That said, I’m skeptical about that particular site.
I know where Kenosha is – it’s in the southeastern corner of Wisconsin, about 50 miles from me, but I’m not sure that that’s a legitimate news site. Note that it has sections entitled “Legal Victories” and “Dangerous People in Kenosha County,” and there doesn’t seem to be any “About Us” or identifying information about who’s behind the site.
Since I haven’t seen it anywhere else, and other people are calling out apparently false stories, like one about a local attorney who was allegedly arrested for sex crimes when there are no other stories elsewhere, I’m thinking the story is fake, and a lot of people are going to be filing slander lawsuits.
I used to be an ROGD believer myself, and the idea of “clusters” was a big part of the reason why. It seemed awfully suspicious that for such a rare condition, so often when one person came out as trans, it happened within a few years of someone else they knew also coming out. Social contagion! A-ha!
Then I got to experience it first hand.
Basically everyone who I’ve come out to has been surprised. But the first time I came out to a close friend—someone I’d known for about 25 years by then, although we’d only kept in touch sporadically for the last decade—his response wasn’t “I can’t believe you want to go through all that”. It was “I can’t believe you’re being so honest about that”. Because, as it turns out, he had a lot of the same feelings that led me to transition, and he’d had them for a long time; he had enough details at the ready, and they lined up well enough with some things I’d observed about him, that I’m sure he didn’t make it up on the spot.
“What an odd coincidence,” I thought.
Then I learned that another friend I’d known for nearly as long, but had had even less contact with recently, also started transitioning around the same time I did.
“Must be something in the water,” I thought.
Then I learned that one of my cousins, estranged from my side of the family, who lived across the country and who I hadn’t seen or heard from in 20 years, had also started transitioning a little bit after I did.
“Wait a minute,” I thought. “All those those annoying gender people online who say clustering happens because proto-trans people somehow manage to group up before any of them transitions… maybe they’re right.”
I’ve had things in common with those friends all along; that’s why we were friends. And besides sharing some fraction of DNA, that cousin also reportedly had a bunch of things in common with me. If she’d been in contact with my side of the family, we probably would’ve gotten along well before either of us transitioned.
It turns out those things are also correlated with being trans.
That’s another part of the reason I believed in it, actually. “Don’t trans people know all along? Wouldn’t someone else have noticed by now if they really were?”
Now, looking at how people responded to me when I came out, I can see that my own gender business must’ve seemed just as “rapid onset” to them as so many teenagers’ gender business does to their parents. To them, one day I was a regular guy, confident in my masculinity, and the next I day I wanted to be a woman.
In my mind, though, it wasn’t rapid at all—it was the culmination of thoughts I’d been having for 30 years. I’d just been missing a tiny piece of the puzzle. Once I found it, everything else snapped into focus. Every single time I’d blown out a birthday candle, I’d wished to be a girl. Silly, right? Of course it was, and I knew that… but still, it couldn’t hurt, you know? Just in case.
And then there were all the times I “pretended” to be a girl in chat rooms, including the time I got so invested in it that I made two good friends who I eventually had to come clean with. I had mentally filed it away as trolling, but there was never a punchline, no cackling victory. Just a role I was playing, one that for some reason was always female. And so on.
In retrospect, those were very trans things to do.
But I wasn’t telling people about all that at the time, certainly not my family. It was a weird topic to bring up out of the blue, and I never heard anyone else talking about it. It sounded pretty silly when I laid it all out like that. And what could anyone have done about it anyway, I thought? I wasn’t going to suddenly turn into a girl; that’s not how reality works. I’d heard of “sex change procedures”, but those weren’t for me, I thought. Those were for boys who thought they were girls and couldn’t stand being in a boy’s body. I, on the other hand, was a boy who knew I was a boy but wanted to be a girl, and I could tolerate being in my body, as disappointing as it was. Completely different. And besides, it wouldn’t really be the same as if I’d been born female, so what would be the point? Best to just keep all that to myself.
In retrospect, those were also very trans thoughts to have.
So, that’s why it came as a shock to everyone else: they weren’t privy to my thoughts all those years. If they were, I think most of them would have realized a lot sooner than I did that this was in the cards.
And I can also see why it often seems like “social contagion”, because social interactions were in fact part of how I figured this out. If I hadn’t been on that forum at the right time, heard this person describe what it was like for them, or learned that about transitioning, maybe I’d be in a very different place right now… still having all those same thoughts, telling myself year after year that this is just how my life is going to be and I have to accept that, not knowing that I could do something about it.
Likewise, in the 1960s, the proportion of left-handers in the population seemed to be rapidly rising. Partly due to increased acceptance on an individual basis, and partly due to the “social contagion” of parents sharing information about why it was no longer encouraged to try to “correct” a child’s lefthanded tendencies.