My conversation with Lydia Perovic

I talked to the wonderful Lydia Perovic a few weeks back — you can find our conversation here:

Gender is an idiom of distress that is incredibly salient right now

Excerpt:

What are some of the forums that you’re following? 

For my academic research I hang out on the Reddit forums FTM, FTM men, FTM over 30, and the two detrans sub-reddits. But I keep track of a much broader range of them. I do monitor the Male-to-Female forums too; the one that is a real trip is called Translator. They're almost all middle-aged autogynephiles. It’s really a bunch of men talking about their lives falling apart but getting support for it from other people. You can do it sister! kind of support. It will be topics like, “I came out to my wife and she wants to divorce me and I feel really invalid” or, “I came out to my therapist and he said that I'll never pass as a woman and I feel really invalid” and then everybody's like No, you look great! Or, “I put my face into FaceApp and is this even possible for me” and of course the answer is no but everybody would be like “oh yes it's totally doable”. It’s a wild place. 

So it’s a support group? 

It's a support group for people who need a different kind of support than the kind that they're getting there. I would say.

Have you noticed if the lockdowns made any difference in any of these spaces?

So, early in lockdown, I saw a lot more activity on the detransition forums. And I thought that that was the way that things were going to go. Because a lot of people would go on the detransition forums and they would say, you know, once I was stuck in my apartment all the time and I wasn't gendering myself I realized it was all bullshit and it didn't matter. But that was the first three months or so. Then I don't know what happened, if we hit a certain point of isolation and derangement, but in 2020 there was just this enormous uptick in people “realizing that they were trans”.

There was this sad and hilarious article I think in the UK’s Independent that referred to the pandemic as a mass egg cracking event. Realizing that you're transgender means that you're, like, hatching. 

Maybe this is just me but I remember being a student and summer would come along and you'd be away from school for a couple of months and you would have these fantasies - well, I would have these fantasies where I would come back and I would be cool. And grown up. I would be attractive to everyone. I think that among the many other things going on in the pandemic one of them was, I'm going to emerge from lockdown and out of this chrysalis - transformed.

It’s a big project. This new identity. 

You come to a point in life where some kind of transformation is being asked of you and there's this diversion from whatever kind of growing up or changing that you need to do into trans. You see it with kids who are having trouble navigating puberty and moving into adulthood. You see it with college students who aren't sure what they want to do when they grow up and maybe it's really scary but if they're trans now they have this road map and also this excuse to not hit the other milestones that they might be afraid of because they're trans and how could you expect them to. And you also see it, curiously, with a population of women who are in their 30s and 40s and have young children and they're coming out as transgender. I think that one of the motivators there is, after you have kids as you hit your middle age as a woman, you kind of have to come up with this new script for your life and our narratives about aging are not very kind to women. So you don’t have to accept any of it if you can be a man. 

Sadie/Jude Doyle comes to mind. And I know an academic/poet who came out as nonbinary in her late fifties. On Instagram.

Yeah, you've kind of run out of the young woman plot where you, especially if you're a straight woman, you attract a mate and you have children and then it's like, oh shit, what am I supposed to do now? So you get this new plot.

Do you see this wave subsiding, going the way of anorexia, for example?

Well, I'm not sure that wave has subsided. But I think that there is a certain core of people who have a kind of a severe formless distress or discontent with life and that they are going to attach themselves to whatever narrative is the most compelling in their time. The reddit forum for women who are over 30 that I mentioned? When I look at that forum I think these are the same women who would have been in the recovered memory movement and they would have had their lives fall apart for that reason. They might have gone even further into the satanic panic and now they are in the gender thing and whatever comes after gender, these are the same women who will be in that too.

I think right now the recruiting pool for gender is a lot bigger than that and a lot of the people for whom it's more of a phase, they're going to get unblocked in some other area of life and they're going to be able to move out of it hopefully with as little damage as possible. But there is just going to be this kind of core of people who just have deep problems around self rejection and problems of living and a desperation for an answer. And they will either cling onto this after it has lost currency for everybody else or they will migrate to whatever the next iteration is.