Something like that, yes
It would be really weird for a teen to act out in ways that could get them ostracized, bullied, assaulted, or even killed. I get that negative attention is still attention, but the risk of death seems like a pretty significant deterrent.
Having said that, it wouldn’t surprise me to know that there’s at least 1 teen with terrible risk assessment skills, and an extremely high need for attention. I’m sure it’s happened once, but it would be a mistake to believe most are just acting out. There are much safer and more effective ways to act out.
Have you ever parented a teenager?
Starting around puberty many teens engage in risky behavior, that may lead to death, injury or social problems, experimenting with alcohol, tobacco, drug use, food disorders, sexual activity, reckless driving, and other stupid human tricks.
And in many cases, once the kid starts getting actual positive attention, the dangerous behaviors cease. Yes, it’s stupid. Teenagers are stupid sometimes. Heck, so are adults.
Both. And it’s not something in the past. I still feel very uncomfortable in female-identified groups.
Either that or the people being surveyed were interpreting “feeling” or “not feeling” like your birth sex in a different way from how you are. Sociology questions have to be worded very carefully in order to make sure that they’re measuring the thing they think they’re measuring.
Were you on the boards a few years ago when we were discussing experiences of visual imagination? It was one of these topics that kind of blew up in the mid 2010s because researchers were studying it and there were a bunch of newspaper articles. The threads on the topic (and my IRL discussions) were absolutely chock full of things like “oh my god! you mean when you imagine things you are ACTUALLY MAKING PICTURES in your brain?? Wild!” on the one hand, and “no, wait! how can you possibly say you’re imagining stuff if you don’t MAKE A PICTURE of it in your head, like a normal person?” on the other.
I think about that subject in relation to the gender debate quite a lot. We know much less about the inside of each other’s heads than we think we do
Yeah, there’s definitely a lot about how many people (both trans and cis) think about their gender that I clearly don’t understand.
Fortunately, full understanding isn’t necessary for respecting people and their preferences.
I’ve actually been looking at the young transfem subcommunity on Twitter. Granted, most of them are college aged. But even among the kids I see, not a one seems to regret transition. The younger ones are thankful to the older ones who kinda acted as mentors.
In fact, most of them talk about a denial phase. Rather than something they jump onto without thinking, they spend a lot of time trying to convince themselves they are not trans.The online community seems very welcoming and I even feel somewhat jealous of it, yet I see no sign that any girl or enby jumps in without a lot of consideration.
I went to high school with a girl who was always doing really strange things to get attention, almost always with negative results. Were she to be a teenager nowadays, I really think she would have done something like this. (She died some years back, barely into middle age; IDK how.) Some kids may also think, “I’m going to be bullied anyway, might as well give them some good reasons.” The most memorable thing was when she went out for wrestling, and no, we didn’t have a girls’ team, not ca. 1980. After a lot of hand-wringing, they decided to make her the team manager.
The year I was a senior, and she was a junior, she was not at our school, and a lot of people did wonder what happened to her. I saw her one day at Target, where I worked, and she was quite obviously pregnant. Most likely, she went to the maternity school that they had at the time, and because nobody later saw her with a baby, most likely she placed it for adoption when it was born.
I also went to high school with a girl who seemed quite normal, and always had perfect hair, makeup, and clothes. Imagine my shock around the year 2000 when a person on a Discovery Health Channel’s “Changing Sexes” program, on the f-to-m episode, held up his high school graduation picture? I nearly fell off the couch.
I am currently parenting 2 of them.
Yes they do risky things. But none of it involves the risk of them becoming a social pariah or possibly catching a beating/killing from another student.
The point isn’t whether teenagers do risky things, it’s that the cost of becoming trans is severe enough that most kids will do it only if it’s something they need to do, not to act out. It’s not all high 5’s and coming-out parties, people will harass you over a sustained period of time and even kill you in some casers. That takes commitment, it’s not done on a whim.
This is something I wonder about, maybe as an exception to what I wrote above. The allure of online communities can be incredibly powerful to those who lack parental support or peer acceptance. When they find this love and acceptance readily available in their phone, it can make it easier to bear the ostracism they find in real life. This is not just for transitioners but for Trumpers or flat-earthers or what-have-you.
That being said, I think most trans people are trans, but I think it’s fairly well understood that many people nowadays are doing things that seem unbearably hard if you don’t know they have a crowd of people in their phone supporting and encouraging them, giving them a sense of community and purpose.
There is a big risk, as parents, of doing a thing I call “living in your own childhood”. Even though, intellectually, you know that Things Are Different Now, you can’t help to some extent assuming the same kinds of social mores and social pressures you remember from your own teen years are the same ones your kids are facing.
Taking inventory of all the trans kids that I know from all of my own kids’ social groups, realistically, I think one MtF kid (out of four MtFs) was a social pariah. But this kid had also had other mental health issues, no boundaries - there were just a lot of possible reasons for them to be very tiring and hard to get along with. And no FtM kids were social pariahs in any way - they had a very tight friend group, and my middle kid pretty easily picked up another pretty good friend group in college. (This seems to parallel how gender non-conformity works in general - nobody cares about girls wearing trousers, people are still jumpy about boys wearing skirts)
I know there are still other experiences out there (Brianna Ghey is an obvious example) but I don’t think you can assume that any individual kid is exposed to an environment where coming out as trans gets you ostracised by your social group.
The “risk of getting killed” thing should really be put to bed at this point too. As per the Trans Murder project, the general murder rate of trans people is much lower than the rate in the general population, and has been for years. I know that teens are taught otherwise, but being told you’re in danger in the abstract while your direct social experience doesn’t actually have examples of that danger is pretty alluring for some teens.
Cite, please. I am finding exactly the opposite.
Transgender people over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime
US data from Trans Murder Monitoring, last full year (2022) - 44 deaths ( TMM numbers - TvT)
Trans people in the US - 1.6 million as of 2022 (How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States? - Williams Institute)
Murder rate - 2.75 per 100k (calculated)
General US murder rate - 6.4 per 100k (List of countries by intentional homicide rate - Wikipedia)
Your cite does not seem to be about murder, as such
A 2014 paper on homicide rates for trans people found that trans people as a whole had a lower rate of victimization than their cisgender peers, but Black and Latina trans women had a significantly higher risk.
What is with this comparison? It doesn’t even make sense. No one thinks becoming a Trumper or flat-earther is hard.
But, more importantly, these women are happy with their transition. They do not transition back. Hence they are transwomen.
You seem to have overlooked the point of my posts to just focus on a single part you could take out of context.
According to your link, though, the data is pretty doubtful.
I also wonder how much those stats may be affected by transgender people being underrepresented and/or invisible in particular high-homicide-risk populations. For instance, gang violence, AFAICT, contributes something over 10% of all US homicides? Then there’s the elevated homicide risk for police and security officers, and to a lesser extent various customer-facing jobs like retail sales, compared to the general population. I would imagine that all those occupations (especially “gang member”) are ones in which it’s a lot tougher to be openly transgender than in more “sheltered” professions.
So it would not surprise me if that phenomenon is skewing the numbers towards higher apparent homicide risk for cisgender people (except in the case of Black and Latina women). When we look at the whole spectrum of violent victimization, though, from murder through rape to simple assault, as LHoD’s cite indicates, transgender people in general are at significantly higher risk.
TL;DR: Although available data indicate that (known) transgender people are less likely than cisgender people to be homicide victims if you count all homicides, it may nonetheless be true that transgender people are disproportionately more likely to be murdered specifically because of their identity.
So it could actually be quite misleading to attempt, as Aspidistra seems to be suggesting, to “put to bed” the " ‘risk of getting killed’ thing" for transgender people.
“Don’t worry, trans folks, you’re actually at a lower risk of becoming a homicide victim than cisgender folks are! Largely because virulent social transphobia will keep you from being accepted as a transgender person in most jobs where homicide is most common! Of course, you’re still way more likely than the average cisgender person to be violently assaulted or murdered specifically for being considered a loathsome unnatural freak, but don’t think about that, just focus on your lower overall homicide risk!”
Since I actually have the welfare of my child as my first consideration, yes, I do tell them that they aren’t at particular enhanced risk of being murdered “just for being who they are”. Because this does not appear to be the case, and I don’t have a goal of making my child stressed and unhappy by imagining themselves to be threatened by dangers that aren’t actually there.
I have also, I hope, innoculated them against the belief that people who don’t believe in their gender identity think that they’re “loathsome unnatural freaks”. I did this by the simple process of honestly telling them that I myself don’t believe in immutable gender identities at all, and that this has absolutely no impact on the fact that I love my child dearly.
So now they don’t have to live in fear of people disbelieving in their gender identity. They experienced it, it was fine, we can all move on with our lives. This seemed to work pretty well.
Hmmm, this somehow got personal to you rather fast. When I alluded to your remark about “putting to bed” “the ‘risk of getting killed’ thing”, I didn’t realize that you were thinking of the topic from the perspective of individual conversations that you as a parent are having with your transgender child. Of course I, a random internet stranger, have no knowledge—and am offering no opinions—specifically about what you, a random internet stranger, should discuss with your own child.
However, I do have some opinions about the desirability of a general policy of trying to downplay and dismiss the realities of increased risks for transgender people, whether it’s because we don’t want to make transgender kids “stressed and unhappy” or for any other reason.
We can’t just pick one data-factoid that we find comforting because it seems to indicate low risk, and ignore accompanying facts that we find less comforting because they indicate higher risk. If we’re talking about overall risk of violence to transgender people, we need to take into account the numerous studies, like the one in LHoD’s link, that indicate that their risk is in fact higher than those of cisgender people. We shouldn’t just cling to the isolated reassuring finding that hey, when we look specifically at all homicides, without any context of motive or situation, then the risk to transgender people is relatively low, for reasons that are not at all well understood.
The reasons why the risk of violent victimization is overall higher for transgender people, on the other hand, are quite well understood. Namely, transgender people are widely hated, despised, and discriminated against, and consequently are overrepresented in many populations especially vulnerable to violence, including the homeless and sex workers.
I’m all in favor of encouraging dialogue among people with different opinions about gender identity. But I don’t think we’re doing transgender people any favors if we try to minimize or handwave away the potential and actual harms of widespread societal transphobia, or the fact that transphobia is often masked as a more superficially polite critique of so-called “gender ideology”.
Does this include that you don’t believe in cis male and cis female identities?
In other words, do you mean that you believe that everybody’s gender is subject to change?
Define “subject to change”.
I don’t think all people who today identify as whatever gender are subject to change.
I do think that every person’s gender identity could have been radically different had they grown up in a different society with radically different views on gender.