Some of this “gender identity” stuff is trendy. Some no doubt is legitimate
On what do you base this?
Those that change their minds later.
I mean, it’s not like there aren’t a lot of people at any given time changing their minds about pretty much anything that they previously considered part of their identity. Including their religion, their name, their sexual orientation, their profession, their family relationships, you name it.
That doesn’t mean that people who change their minds were making their original choices just to be “trendy”. So saying “well, some of this gender stuff must be just trendy because some people change their minds about it later” isn’t a very persuasive argument.
The OP seemed to be asking a “yes or no” question about if teens who claimed to be “trans” if they’re “acting out”. IMHO, in some cases I believe it’s “yes” because today it seems to be “trendy”. Fine if you don’t agree, it’s my opinion based on the fact that some change their minds later. But clearly there isn’t an “in all cases” answer to the OP’s question.
My WAG is that yes, a small but significant minority of young people that identify today as trans may change their mind and identify as cisgender later.
…and that’s fine. I wouldn’t call it “acting out”; more that people can be confused and just working things out. Heck, I’m 45 years old and I’m still trying to work out a significant part of my own self-identity so I don’t blame people for not having it all worked out at 13.
What’s not going to happen though, is for a child in a relatively unclear state of mind to push all the way through to gender reassignment surgery; which is a very long and traumatic process only embarked and kept on by those with a very firm conviction.
I teach HS in a magnet school, which tends to be more accepting in general. I’d say that most years these days, 5 or 6 students of about 125 want to go by a name or pronouns that are different than whatever they were assigned at birth.
I deliberately try to avoid having any sprt pf opinion about how durable these changes are. I do think many are exploring gender identity. Exploring gender identity in HS is nothing new. I mean, hair bands, pretty boy Tiger Beat covers, and goth all heavily leaned into gender ambiguity. We just didn’t switch pronouns. I also think teenagers often exert control in areas where they have the prerogative to do so, and changing your name is a pretty basic form of that that’s been around forever. Pronouns are an extension of that.
In no way would I characterize these behaviors as “for attention”, and i really, really wouldn’t want to message that if this sort of gender exploration doesn’t stick, it was fake the whole time. That sort of dichotomy is, ironically, sophomoric.
Breaking Bad came out in 2008 and a plot point is how Walter Jr doesn’t want to go by his dad’s name anymore so he tells everyone to call him “Flynn”.
Also, and this is important, the more accepting society is of that kind of thing, the more teens will dare to explore it.
When it was beyond the pale to be gay, only those who were strongly homosexual and had a high sex drive ever admitted to homosexuality. But sexuality exists on a spectrum. When it’s okay to be gay, some bisexual kids will explore homosexuality. Maybe that will stick, and maybe they’ll settle down with a spouse of the opposite sex and rear bio-kids with their spouse. But it doesn’t mean they were faking their same sex relationships.
Similarly, when it was beyond the pale to be trans, only the kids with enormous gender disphoria admitted to it. But gender also exists on a spectrum. Now that it’s more acceptable to be trans, more kids are exploring their own gender identity. Some of them will end up being comfortable in the gender they were assigned at birth, and maybe just keep a few gender-non-conforming quirks. Others will ultimately transition for good.
I think that exploration is healthy. I’m not worried that a lot of mostly-cis kids will get their genitalia cut off just because a lot of kids who lean NB want to be called by a new name and new pronouns. There’s a very long journey between changing your pronouns and taking hormones, let alone surgery.
A couple weeks later: boy howdy.
To folks speculating that trans kids are doing it “for attention”: what massive and risky life changes did you adopt as a teenager in order to get attention?
Adults tend to vastly overestimate how much of a teenager’s world revolves around adult attention, or even around “peer attention.” A tremendous amount of that behavior is teenagers figuring out what feels right for them in their own lives, and while it might look remarkable from the outside, that doesn’t mean they’re doing it in order to look remarkable.
The idea that some teens get pregnant for attention is downright bizarre. How many adults do you know who say, “Yeah, when I was a teenager, I wanted attention, so I got pregnant”? I know a lot of grownups, and precisely zero who say that.
Any time you think a teenager is doing something for attention, the overwhelming probability is that that’s a reflection of your adult psyche, not a reflection of their teenage psyche.
Yeah, definitely ISTM that many kinds of identity reshaping (sexual orientation, gender identity, whatever) tend to fall more or less into one of two categories:
- exploratory, experimental, quite possibly temporary; and
- “persistent, insistent, and consistent”: “I’ve always known this about myself”, “this is just who I am”.
And I agree that neither of those really qualifies to be called “just acting out”, even if a lot of those in the first category do change their minds later.
Are there also some plain old attention-seeking fakers who don’t have even a tentative sincere inclination towards transgender identity, but are just pretending to for the sake of the current buzz about it? Doubtless: there are always at least a few attention-seeking fakers to jump on any bandwagon. But I doubt that most or even a large minority of trans-identifying teens are just faking it.
Yes, and that journey is quite restrictively surveilled and gatekept by medical professionals. Contrary to what transphobic propaganda tries to tell us, there are not in fact legions of unscrupulous counselors and doctors out there eagerly pushing medical gender transition onto uncertain confused kids.
I just find this idea remarkably bizarre. Ava was assigned female at birth. She feels like a girl, she’s comfortable being a girl. But she thinks people will pay more attention to her if she’s trans, so she starts using he/him and asking to be called Alan, while secretly inside identifying as a girl?
I’ll need to read multiple firsthand accounts of people talking about their experience doing this before I believe it occurs, much less occurs in more than a vanishingly rare number of cases.
I mean, I hung out as a teenager with a girl who said she channeled dead spirits, and another who claimed to be a psychic empath. And while I think both of these teens appreciated the attention they got through the claims, they sincerely believed what they said. They were trying to sort out the complex emotions they were feeling and trying to set them in a narrative that made sense to them, no differently from other teens who find Jesus or who get way into punk rock or who play tons of Dungeons and Dragons.
I do think children of all ages often assert control to demonatrate to themselves that they can, and this is often seen as “attention seeking”. Often this behavior does require others to notice and respond, and can even exert pressure on others to respond in a specific way. Thats what having control and autonomy means. Its true when a toddler spits out food, when a 12 year old wears something their mom would have never picked, and it’s truebwhen a teenager declares that they arent Stacy anymore, its Staci --or Bob. Its also true when a young adult tells their mom they are spending Christmas with their fiance’s family this year.
Characterizing this exertion of control as “attention seeking” is a vast oversimplification, at best.
It seems to me that there are two different, and not necessarily related, things that are being discussed.
One is how someone feels internally about their gender. The other is how someone feels about how society defines gender roles and where they fit in WRT those societal expectations. The two don’t have to be correlated. Just because someone is rebelling against societal expectations of what it means to be male or female doesn’t mean that they internally identify as a gender different than what they were assigned at birth. My guess is that “acting out” (to the extent that’s even a thing when it comes to gender identity) is almost entirely about how society defines gender roles rather than about how someone internally feels about what gender they are.
I think this makes sense, except I prefer the term “autonomy” to “control”, as it’s more specific about what (the self) is being controlled.
I mean, not that I disagree with the thrust of your argument, but… smoking, drug use, binge drinking, trespassing on the railway, climbing electricity pylons… - those were things that my peers did for attention when I was in my teens. I am not sure that appreciation of risk is a factor in what some teens decide to do.
I did some of these things and not others–and the ones I did were out of curiosity or thrillseeking. Agreed that “appreciation of risk” isn’t a huge thing, but I also don’t think attention-seeking is nearly as big a motivator for teens as a lot of adults think it is.
Agreed, in fact I think I’d say there’s a bit less of it around than there was when I was a teen - ‘kids these days’ generally seem a bit more introverted than they were 40 years ago.
But that raises entirely new questions, about how innate gender expression or identity actually is.
If you where raised in a society where the way you dressed, talked, and behaved was in no way correlated to gender. People can dress all kinds of ways, or have any matter of hobby, but there’s no correlation between these things and their gender.
In such a society, people might not even have gender as a particularly important part of their identity, and grouping people as ‘men’ and ‘women’ might be totally alien to them. In such a society, I’m not sure whether “transgender” would be a coherent concept.
Whether such a society could arise among humans depends on how inherently essential to identity gender is in humans. Given the way historical societies tended to behave, I’m not sure we know that yet.
I get what you are saying, but i alao think that its normal and healthy to have some expectations for those who love you, which is a type of control. At times it seems to me that the Gen Z or Gen Alphas are a little too over the top about focusing on your self and not trying to control others. Like, part of being an adult is learning that its okay to ask people to call you by your preferred name, or for insisting mom buy you different clothes, or whatever. Allowing kids to make appropriate demands of others is important.