I was trying to figure out what @Aspidistra meant by it.
I am happy for you and your child that your approach is helpful. And making bc a confident statement that there is no greater risk on average across society is not justified on the basis of that cite, based on the critical analysis shared by @Kimstu. I’d personally want to see data matched by demographics other than discordant gender identity before I’d be comfortable putting any claim “to bed”
Of course as parents we want to protect our children from feeling that they need to live in fear. I suspect however that denial that there are those who hate them just for who they are, and that there are some who would even be violent against them based on their identity, is not the approach I’d choose if I was the parent, any more than a young Black man would be well served by a parent telling them that there is no risk of them being harmed by being profiled. But that’s just me, from the comfortable position of not having to walk in your shoes.
Yes, for example it would not surprise me if transgender people on average come from more affluent and more stable environments where they are more likely to feel secure enough to come out as trans, which would also lead to their having a lower baseline homicide rate.
I just don’t think that the concept of a gender identity is a useful one.
The full theory of gender identities seems to be something like “Everyone has a sense of their own gender. This is innate and cannot change. Your innate sense of your own gender is what makes you a man or a woman, irrespective of whether your body is male or female.”
That’s basically the “package” I’m rejecting, in favour of something more like “Everyone(*) has a sex. People have all sorts of feelings, positive, negative or neutral, about the sex they happen to be. These feelings can change. Most of the time your sex doesn’t matter because we live in a fairly gender-neutral world, but in some specialised circumstances it does. Some people’s personality, or behaviour, might be more like the other sex than their own sex, but we can’t really define a category of “behaviourally other-sex” or “other-sex-by-feelings” people because there are too many different dimensions of behaviour and feelings”
Yeah, I don’t know any trans people who would accept the “… and cannot change” part of a “full theory of gender identity.” Certainly, I know several trans people who feel this is true for them personally, but they’d still be mindful of not throwing gender fluid people under the bus like that.
For me, just existing made me a social pariah and at risk of beatings/killings/RAPE from other students. The biggest advocate of the latter was, like the one who tried to kill me for THREE YEARS after I dropped a pop fly in a 7th grade gym class softball game, a fellow girl.
We are talking about this specifically in the context of whether teenagers are putting themselves at risk of being beaten up or killed though. Most teenagers who are identifying as trans these days are female. Visually, they’re indistinguishable from just any girls wearing trousers and hoodies. I do know that male people get gender-policed harder than female people, but that’s more a problem for adults.
As far as general murder rates go, the Trans Murder Project data and the Williams Institute survey are probably the best data out there. In order for trans murder rates to be very much higher there would have to be a large cohort of trans people being killed who were not in contact with any LGBT services which would notice their death, and didn’t have friends in the LGBT community who might go to a Trans Day of Remembrance and want to talk about their dead friend. That seems like a big assumption. I think at the very least we should avoid saying that we know murder rates among trans people are very high if we don’t have high quality data showing that.
[quote=“Babale, post:31, topic:1006960, full:true”]So in conclusion… are there kids who identify as trans (or especially non binary) not because it helps them overcome gender dysphoria (our traditional definition for a trans person), but because they want attention or to be part of the LGBTQ+ ‘scene’, etc? Almost certainly, yes.
But those kids aren’t going to medically transition. They may or may not eventually start to conform to gender roles again when they grow up. But does any of that really matter?
[/quote]
This has been exactly where I, for one, have been coming from.
I’m sorry, but in this context we can benefit from more precise language. I’d initially be presuming “female” meant
female presenting, whether AFAB or AMAB, but I am getting the impression you mean AFAB presenting as male?
Anyway, do you have a source for that claim? The data I have (see below) says that at least for adults it is pretty evenly split:
Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming.
Actually I think the thought that most would have such contact is a huge assumption.
Relevant the thread from the source below is two items:
- the reported rate of transgender among teens varies greatly between states. IOW there are communities in which it safer to explore this openly, and ones in which it is kept hidden.
- there is a higher rate of transgender among teens than among adults, implying what we already know: some transgender teens become gender concordant by adulthood. My take on that is simply that identity is confusing during teen and young adult years. Not that this is attention seeking.
- At the state level, our estimates range from 3.0% of youth ages 13 to 17 identifying as transgender in New York to 0.6% in Wyoming. Our estimates for the percentage of adults who identify as transgender range from 0.9% in North Carolina to 0.2% in Missouri.
Overall, based on our estimates from 2016-2017 and the current report, we find that the percentage and number of adults who identify as transgender has remained steady over time. The availability of the YRBS data has given us a more direct look into youth gender identity and provides better data than was previously available to us for estimating the size and characteristics of the youth population. Youth ages 13 to 17 comprise a larger share of the transgender-identified population than we previously estimated, currently comprising about 18% of the transgender-identified population in the U.S., up from 10% previously.
I’m assuming that they are referring to the (perceived?) trend of younger AFAB persons identifying as non-binary.
I don’t know the exact stats, but my understanding is that there is a statistically significant* increase in that particular demographic among Gen Z AFAB people.
*Note that statistically significant just means a correlation that’s big enough it isn’t likely to be explained entirely by chance (usually with a 95% confidence level); it doesn’t necessarily mean that any difference is actually making a significant difference in society.
Looking up some stats:
I don’t think your data would show this phenomenon, since it seems to mostly be 2016-17 data?
@Aspidistra, I’m curious if you stand by the posts you made in these threads two years ago.
Do they still represent your feelings about trans people and the trans rights movement?
Interesting. Thanks for the citations.
I am curious about what the overlap is between these AFAB fluid or male presenting individuals and autistic spectrum conditions? And how many stay male presenting in particular into adulthood?
Fwiw, i hang out in a social group with a lot of trans and non-binary college kids. And i see more m-to-f than f-to-m. I do think there are more afab people who identify as non-binary than amab enbies.
My guess would be “pretty evenly split”, and I’d have to see some pretty strong data to believe that trans teens are mostly afab.
Of course, the trans folks i hang out with aren’t teens, they are young adults. Most of them didn’t come out as trans until they left home. I suspect their parents found it “sudden”. I’m not good with names in the best of circumstances, and being in a group where it’s fairly common for people to play with a few names before settling on one (and my trying to keep up) has been challenging. 
They usually change their name and gender presentation in college, but don’t do anything medical until a couple of years after they graduate.
I dunno, the kids who come out as teens may be different.
When I say female, I mean all people who were born with female sex.
As far as most teens identifying as trans being female, I’m talking about my local experience where the ratio is about 2:1
My feelings about trans people and about the trans rights movement are quite separate things.
Since I don’t think that “man” and “woman” are gender identities, I think that the political movement based on converting all references to men and women to mean “man and woman gender identities” rather than male and female sex has been wholly negative, and responsible for some actual human rights violations. If you want to talk specifics, we’d probably need a separate thread for that
As far as actual people go, most of the actual trans people I know are fairly normal, shading to quite vulnerable. But by “normal” I mean “normal for their sex”. Transwomen that I know behave more like everyday men that I know than like everyday women that I know - they’re geeky, mostly work in IT, tend to have relationships with women rather than men. And so on.
I think that social structures that separate men and women are one or other of:
a) not necessary, and we can be all humans together, or
b) based on actual differences between the sexes.
And in cases where it’s the second (like sports) then trying to base a whole system on gender identity when it was originally intended to be based on sex was bound to cause problems. And it has.
The project to replace sex with gender identity has not had general societal consent. I was participating on this board for a couple of decades, happily agreeing “oh, sure, transwomen should be allowed to go in women’s toilets” without realising that anyone thought that transwomen were actual women. So I assumed that everyone understood that the proper definition of a woman was “female person” and that male people who were trying to be as much like female people as possible wouldn’t, say, put themselves in a position where their penis would be exposed (because that would give the game away). Obviously I was wrong about all that. I think most “normies” are in a similar situation, which is why you see lower and lower numbers at every new survey willing to agree that a person’s “gender” (by which I assume they mean whether a person is a man or woman) is based on something other than their sex.
Now I don’t know whether you’re talking about trans boys or trans girls.
And I also don’t know whether you’re saying that you won’t recognize anyone AFAB as being male. Is that what you’re saying?
And if so, to return to my previous question: are you saying that you think cis gender identities are immutable, but trans ones aren’t?
um, I guess that answers that.
The identity of words is unquestionably not immutable. That includes the words “man” and “woman”.
Okay. My impression is that the thread is now done with the subject of the OP. Best of luck to your child and your relationship with them moving forward. Take care.
I think these are very interesting questions that could be very informative about society and about gender. Unfortunately, it does seem like many of the people who bring up these topics do so with ulterior motives.
That’s what the Times data seems to show.
I think the increase in teens identifying as trans is mostly due to teens experiencing gender dysphoria being less afraid of coming out as trans, but I do wonder if the disproportionate increase in AFAB teens who identify specifically as non-binary may have a different cause than gender dysphoria as we generally understand it.
It may have more to do with being uncomfortable with the social role assigned to women, than being uncomfortable with one’s physical gender characteristics.
I think that’s an important topic to research further and to take into account when considering how we as a society should understand trans people.
I do think that these are two distinct phenomenon and should be evaluated through that lens. Unfortunately, it seems that much of that time, this information is used to try and delegitimize both people experiencing gender dysphoria and people who are uncomfortable with the social role their birth gender is meant to embody, rather than trying to understand and better support both groups. That’s just gross.