I actually think there was a backlash to the feminist movement, and toys and clothes were more rigorously gendered for gen X than for me, a late baby boomer.
Ninja’d.
While only representing male->female conversion, we can probably say that Hijra, in India, have been mainstream for long enough that any (theoretical) temporary effects like fashion, cultural movements, attention seeking, etc. have long since trailed off and that you could do a comparison against them to determine a “true” expected conversion rate. If male->female trans teenagers are more prevalent than Hijra then that might indicate something more on the side of fashion. If not, then we’re better to assume that it’s just what it said on the tin.
I haven’t done that math (which is complicated since, probably, not all of India is accepting and there’s subclasses like Kothi - so you’ll need to do a bit of digging - plus difficulties finding trustworthy surveys in the USA), so I have no opinion other than to say that I understand that Hijra are a tiny percentage of people (e.g. 1 in 1000 - plus or minus given the above complications).
If someone is free to try and wade through that, I’d be curious to see the outcome - either way it goes.
I think it was more about marketing than any ideological stance or reaction to gender norms.
Not necessarily. I’m not an expert, but I get the distinct impression that while Hijra may be “mainstream” in the sense of “recognized as existing”, they’re often not accepted as full normal members of the wider community, but instead are expected to live separately and limited in what work they can do, and may be rejected by their families.
If that’s accurate – and anyone who knows more about it is welcome to correct me – then there are probably some trans people in India who hide it.
Plus which, as we don’t know all the factors which go into it, we don’t know whether we should expect the same percentage in India as in the USA. – there are other societies which recognize more than two genders, though they don’t all recognize the same additional genders. Do they all have about the same percentage of not-cis-male-or-female people as each other? (I have no idea.)
None of which sounds particularly out of line with the US, today.
I think that part of the issue is that the whole notion of gender identity is a very amorphous concept that is difficult to explain and understand. As complicated as sexual orientation is at the very least it can often be boiled down to the question of “When I think of intertwining my nethers with members of that gender is my reaction pretty much universally ‘Ew’ or is it sometimes ‘Yum’.”
With transgenderism its much less clear what it really means. So you may have some teenagers who are feeling bad about their bodies during puberty, feeling emotional distress, and unsure about their role in the world, wondering if that might be because they are transgendered, with no foolproof way to figure it out. Given room to explore they may try it out, come the understanding that no it wasn’t their gender that was the issue and go back to their original gender. That wouldn’t be either a case of acting our for attention or an actual case of transgenderism. But just a kid trying to figure things out.
So, “no”?
There is this thing about teenagers ‘trying on lifestyles as if they were hats’ - one week they’re going to go vegan; the next week they’re going to stop the whole world using plastic; the week after that, they’re really into poetry; another week and they’ve found religion, and to finish off the month, they’re walking around in trenchcoats, carrying French newspapers that they can’t even read, or whatever.
Alongside all of that mixture of nonsense and possible virtue, they are also developing as human beings, including trying to understand who and what they are, and trying to express and inhabit that.
I think there is a tendency for older people looking in on all of this to (mistakenly) lump it all into one category of ‘teenagers being weird to get attention’.
I’ve also seen stories about TPTB mandating that if a child wishes to be identified as a gender other than the one on their school records, the school has to tell the parents. (As if the parents don’t know; think about it.) The biggest problem I can see with that is if a teacher has a child in their class that they don’t like, and the child isn’t “changing” but the teacher also knows that telling the parent(s) that they are could cause some big problems in the family, so they do that.
If a teacher wants to bully a child, that in itself is a problem, and if it weren’t for those parental notification laws, they’d still find some way to do it.
But the parents don’t necessarily know: A child might still be hiding “in the closet” from them, out of fear of abuse. And teachers are supposed to be someone that a child in fear of abuse from their parents can safely turn to.
It is my impression that many of these laws/rules are intended to out kids who may find school a safe space, but home not a safe space. In general, I think if a queer kid doesn’t feel comfortable telling their parents, then there may be a good reason not to tell the parents. However, living out at school, but closeted at home will probably not last too long.
My kid was “they/them” at school for quite some time before telling us parents. It wasn’t really secret from us, just never talked about. I held off on changing their pronouns until I was asked to. The school never contacted us directly about it.
My kid is very good at compartmentalizing stories. So one version of a narrative is maintained at school, another at home, a third to grandma, etc. This is one of the things that made us suspicious of the “truth” of non-binary, because it was different in different places, similar to the school story of multiple younger siblings at home (at home they are an only child).
I have every reason to believe my kid finds home a safe space. We’re the ones who took them to pride festivals and stuff before they ever came out as non-binary, and my wife was one of the founding members of the local PFLAG.
Of course not everyone who is trans is the same but I would be surprised if this did not apply to some. That thought is also part of what gives me pause considering the high rate of overlapping trans and autism. Such could be due to some shared brain function that predisposes to one also predisposing to the other. It is a very reasonable guess. But I wonder if in some the social discomfort of autism increases that discomfort with their bodies and their being unsure about their place in the world with trying on gender identity as a possible way to feel like they fit somewhere better somehow. I don’t know. Again though, if so, that is not attention seeking, or trying to excuse other behaviors.
First off, teachers aren’t the ones seeking parental notification laws. Second, the biggest problem you see is that some teachers might use parental notifications to bully kids? Not that parents might be abusive, or kick the kids out?
I have never had a strong sense of belonging to my gender. If someone waved a wand and was like, “starting tomorrrow you will present as a man and use he/him pronouns” I’d be cool with that. (Although my husband might not be, lol!) And I (again as someone who suspects strongly I’m on the spectrum) have the sense that autistic people have a reasonably high rate of not particularly having a strong sense of gender (my autistic kid is the same way; my NT kid is rather attached to his gender). I’ve thought before that if I grew up in these times I’d probably at least have experimented with identifying as trans, in much the same way that @Buck_Godot talks about – though not necessarily because I felt bad about my body exactly, but more because I didn’t feel particularly like a girl. (But also I didn’t feel particularly like a boy, or even like a nonbinary person.)
Last night my kid changed pronouns again!
I was trying to get my kid’s hair combed and said, “comb your hair,” but my kid thought I was telling my wife to do the combing, “comb her hair,” so my kid said those are the wrong pronouns. When I clarified I was told the preferred pronouns are now I/me/my.
It then became very confusing when it was time to brush my teeth before I went to bed, and lots of pointing and guiding was required to clarify who was supposed to do what.
I appreciate your sharing your perspective and experience. Thank you.
Sorry to double post but I’m hoping to get some help working through some concepts related to the association of autistic spectrum disorders and gender discordance (and the experience shared by @raspberry_hunter). I hope I can do so without causing any offense and want to tread carefully as this is obviously a minefield of a subject.
ISTM that the coassociation suggests that gender identity may be both an intrinsic biological brain process and a learned social construct, that interact to some degree and to different degrees in different individuals.
I think the transphobic side tries to deny the large portion that instrinsic biological brain process plays in gender identity. I count myself as having been simply ignorant about its magnitude until I was educated here several years back.
Probably while so many remain so ignorant of that huge magnitude exploring the possible interactions with learned social constructs is best just let be?
I’ve never been sure if there is an actual correlation with autistic individuals, or if they are just less held back by peer pressure in exploring these things. They already think differently, and tend to embrace that as part of their identity. For example, I know (online) a decent number of autistic people who identify as not really having a gender. I think that allistic (non-autistic) people might be more likely to just stick with their gender assigned at birth in that case.
But if there is an actual increase amongst autistic people, I wouldn’t jump straight to social reasons. There are a lot of mental issues that are associated with autism. Stuff like face-blindness, dyslexia, nervous system issues, etc. Stuff that seems like parts of their brain and nervous system don’t work as they “should.” The connection to gender identity may be another one of these.
That said, of course gender is in some way social. There may be some underlying aspect that people naturally have, but the specific gender roles we have assigned them is defined by society. However, autistic trans folk seem to feel that pull just as strongly as other trans people. For example, trans autistic women seem to generally try to be just as feminine as trans allistic women.
I mean, I don’t think there’s really any significant downside to encouraging more learning and better information about the complexities of human psychology and other real-world phenomena. Not that you’d expect a Doper to say any different, I guess.
But even so, I’m not sure that exploring these complexities about gender identity is really a problem or danger in the sense of “giving ammunition” to the transphobes.
Yes, there’s a lot we still don’t know about the psychology and neurobiology of gender identity. Yes, there seems to be strong evidence that physical features of brain tissue play at least a significant role in determining gender identity. Yes, there also seems to be strong evidence that at least for some individuals, gender identity is at least as much about internalized social constructions of gender norms as about instinctive perception of gender as an innate immutable quality.
All of which is fine, because in all those cases the healthiest societal response is just to let people be whatever gender they are, in the sense of how they persistently, consistently and insistently identify.
If somebody experiences severe distress from living as their birth-assigned gender and feels better living as the opposite gender, then fine, they’re a transgender woman or man, whatever they say. If somebody (who’s competent to consent) wants medical treatment to support their transgender gender identity, fine; if they don’t, fine.
If somebody doesn’t have a strong sense of gender identity and rejects the idea of having a fixed gender at all, then fine, they’re non-binary. If individuals subsequently change their mind about whatever gender identity they previously affirmed, that’s fine too.
All of this stuff, like people changing their marital status or their citizenship or their expressed sexual orientation or their name or whatever, is essentially individual personal business that society as a whole really doesn’t have to micromanage on an individual level. We need to know some basic facts for bookkeeping purposes, and in some cases as part of official acknowledgement or classification on government-issued ID or whatever. And of course people in an individual’s personal social circle are going to be affected by such changes in various ways and to varying degrees.
But it all boils back down to society respecting individual freedom and privacy in individuals’ personal lives as much as possible. It’s not really any of my business why you (generic “you”) decide to change your name and pronouns, whether because you get severe gender dysphoria from the old versions or you’re just tired of having to “pick a side” or you’re working through some issues that will turn out to be temporary, or whatever. As long as this is how you are consistently, persistently and insistently identifying, our (generic “us”) main task is just to let you get on with it.
I know many transphobes have essentially devoted their lives at this point to coming up with rationalizations and strategies for getting all up in transgender/nonbinary people’s business instead of just letting them get on with it, but none of their arguments are rationally convincing. And they’ll go on with their transphobic mischief-making no matter what the rest of us do or don’t talk about.
So I don’t think we should let transphobic malevolence scare us away from making good-faith efforts to understand and discuss the complex realities of gender identity.
I also hope I can post without causing offense!
This sounds right to me. I feel like I would say that for myself personally (and not really intending to speak for any others, although I have observed what seems to me to be similar outlooks in other spectrum-ish individuals – though not all of them!) my intrinsic biological brain process is not particularly strong, and additionally as someone on the spectrum the social construct of gender is not necessarily something that comes super naturally. However, I feel that over the years I’ve learned that social construct to a certain degree and for spaces in which a) I spend a lot of time and b) I have nonjudgmental people around so I don’t worry too much about messing it up. (That is to say, I feel like I can more-or-less follow the social construct of being a woman/feminine in my church community and in my kid’s current school community, whereas I always worried about messing it up a lot in her previous school community where I perceived the moms to be a bit more judgmental (and also I had more trouble following the social construct of “nice private school mom” which is its own thing.) But it’s something that does still feel a little like a performance sometimes.