I’m on my way home from Ireland today! Look for updates from the European Professional Association for Transgender Health and Genspect conferences! To be fair, the prompt was “what’s your dumbest dysphoria trigger?” and respondents delivered. But please tell me more about how transition just frees you up to be your true self and how your inner sense of gender identity has nothing to do with stereotypical sex-role expectations:
This just proves that no matter how many hormones and surgeries they get, it will not alleviate dysphoria. There will always be one more thing about their bodies to fixate on and hate, one more thing that they have to fix before all their problems will be solved.
Reminds me of a friend of my daughter's who switched plates laid out for my birthday cake a few months ago. Took the slightly bluer one from my place when I wasn't looking.
(A young woman...on testosterone.)
I switched it back, told her it was my fave plate. She lied, said it was closest to her place. I didn't press the matter, kept it light.
How weak, if the colour of a plate can affect your sense of self. How completely useless this delusion makes people for real life if they continually have to rearrange every small and big thing to assist their faking it, which they are told is authenticity.
This person should get out in the open air, volunteer to teach children to read, work their way through Bleak House... Back in the Stone Age, adults would advise "Don't think about it, and it'll go away". Am tempted to dish out this unhelpful truism.
She's faking it, and she knows it: and her every attempt to get away from that unwanted realisation just brings up yet another reinforcing feature.
Her raging internalised misogyny as she enumerates every perceived nuance of difference between the anatomy, physiology and socialised behaviour of the sexes makes her miserable -- by reminding her counterproductively of how female, or otherwise "feminine" she is.
What might it take to tip her into detransitioning? Eg an encounter with second wave feminism -- to explain imposed sex role stereotyping?
How long (if ever) before DSM classes this painful condition as induced mental illness, brought on by belief in "gender identity"?
Reading this I could only think that this is such a female experience living in patriarchy. Trying to escape it in all the wrong ways (self-destructive, self denying, self hating), they just dived even more into misogynistic stereotypes.
What a convoluted way to practice self-hatred. They’re all so typical now. Not special. When the scales fall.... hoo boy. that’s one reason to want to wake up in the morning. How does this horror movie end? I’ll make popcorn.
Long, long, long before the internet was a thing, I went through a period as a girl where I had a weird thing with things needing to be balanced. This was pre-teen: I would say the years 8 to 10 or 9 to 11? So if I brushed one side of my face accidentally, I had to brush the other side of my face. Or if I stepped on a pebble I'd be acutely uncomfortable until I could step on something similar in size with the other foot. This wasn't fed to me by tumblr and I talked about it with my mom years later and she said, "yeah, I remember you having tics for a while and being a bit worried about it". I was surprised because I thought I'd done it all subtly and secretly. I have no idea what made it go away (to be honest, the foot thing still happens a bit actually... but otherwise I don't think about any of it ever), but it was very intense at the time. It must be a brain development or hormonal thing? and perhaps it is more common in girls? But I can imagine if those intense feelings had gotten cathected to a rhetoric about gender dysphoria it could have spiralled quickly. Instead it was a brief, intense, and almost entirely private episode that did me no long term harm.
Narcissism leaps out at me in many of the comments, and I believe our technological advances have created more self-absorbed teens and adults, and the self-absorption common today is a drag on our society. I expect teens to be self-absorbed as they figure out a direction in life, but instead of helping them grow into an adult on a path, many adults in our institutions and marketers encourage more navel gazing among the young.
It's heartbreaking and alarming to see such obsessive self consciousness, the whiny lamentations, and the refusal to accept the non negotiable limits and defining qualities of being a female in a female body. These peeks into their broken psyches illustrate just how much modern human society itself is broken. And how much it has failed to prepare these young people for adulthood and reality. How much WE have failed.
Absolutely fascinating revelations from the "trans" community, and not altogether that surprising. Not that I'm thrilled that my confirmation bias is getting a nod lol, but my goodness does it ever validate what I've been thinking and saying about gender-affirming care NOT being the be-all end-all for folk struggling with this. From what's being described with these admissions, they can bloody well go through with all of the hormones, surgeries, etc., and STILL be burdened by dysphoria. Meaning that the affirming care didn't deal with the root issue, because it almost never does.
Thanks for the quote last time from Dr. Ray Blanchard (Atlantic Monthly, 2002, now archived at ChildrenofTransition.org, as it has been scrubbed from AM) about the disconnect between reality and fantasy, how Blanchard and his "sexologist" cohort don't even recognize the sexism they promote. The entire raison d'etre, the foundation of their version of diagnostic sexology, is based on the need for this man, who "dresses as a female" to keep his job and remain in the powerful spot of supporting the family. Blanchard, Cantor, Bailey and Zucker were never, ever concerned with the trapped wives. They assumed, based on their 1940s and 1950s childhoods, that their job was to normalize a man "changing sex' and yet staying the head of the household. They did no studies on the PTSD of the wives, no studies on the mental health issues the children developed because of these narcissistic fathers. It's telling. They don't care about women, just the men who "wish their penis was part of your wife's body." (got that one from this very blog, thanks!)
Eliza - I continue to enjoy your anthropological spelunking into Reddit.
Some of this stuff is simply funny (clapping shoes, talking too much, having emotions = woman) - out there, bare, as quotes. Zooming out, of course, it's sad and it's a commentary on how these poor souls came to see the world in, ironically, such a binary fashion.
It is also telling that there are so many quotes that acknowledge sexual dimorphism, where the hard-nose activist position is that we're simply "sexed" based on our rather arbitrary bits and the rest is programmed into us by nurture/culture.
I'd have less of an issue if folks were just more nakedly transparent about the fact that they're pursuing some sort of body modification that pursues an imagined self-image, but does not alter reality - much like plastic surgery, extreme tattooing/piercing or the body modification subculture that does stuff like split their tongues or implant silicon horns. Each of those folks (I'm heavily tattooed, for instance) are pursuing unnatural modifications, including even people trying to look reptilian or crazy-huge boobs - but none of them push the rest of us to accept that they've *always* looked that way, or that we must pretend they never altered themselves, or literally are reptiles or whatever, or that it's anything other than their preferred, yet unusual way of looking and living.
That, I think, would be the recipe for everyone simply shrugging and going home on this issue. The edge cases and "who's welcome in what space" would more easily resolve if the ideology could simply accept that "transwoman" meant "man who has altered himself to appear as much like a woman as possible" instead of "is literally the same as a natal woman."
Oh, here I am overexplaining. Guess I'm off to the gender clinic!
This just proves that no matter how many hormones and surgeries they get, it will not alleviate dysphoria. There will always be one more thing about their bodies to fixate on and hate, one more thing that they have to fix before all their problems will be solved.
Everyday may more of them wake to reality.
Reminds me of a friend of my daughter's who switched plates laid out for my birthday cake a few months ago. Took the slightly bluer one from my place when I wasn't looking.
(A young woman...on testosterone.)
I switched it back, told her it was my fave plate. She lied, said it was closest to her place. I didn't press the matter, kept it light.
How weak, if the colour of a plate can affect your sense of self. How completely useless this delusion makes people for real life if they continually have to rearrange every small and big thing to assist their faking it, which they are told is authenticity.
This person should get out in the open air, volunteer to teach children to read, work their way through Bleak House... Back in the Stone Age, adults would advise "Don't think about it, and it'll go away". Am tempted to dish out this unhelpful truism.
"Fake it till you make it..."
"I feel like I'm just faking"
She's faking it, and she knows it: and her every attempt to get away from that unwanted realisation just brings up yet another reinforcing feature.
Her raging internalised misogyny as she enumerates every perceived nuance of difference between the anatomy, physiology and socialised behaviour of the sexes makes her miserable -- by reminding her counterproductively of how female, or otherwise "feminine" she is.
What might it take to tip her into detransitioning? Eg an encounter with second wave feminism -- to explain imposed sex role stereotyping?
How long (if ever) before DSM classes this painful condition as induced mental illness, brought on by belief in "gender identity"?
Reading this I could only think that this is such a female experience living in patriarchy. Trying to escape it in all the wrong ways (self-destructive, self denying, self hating), they just dived even more into misogynistic stereotypes.
What a convoluted way to practice self-hatred. They’re all so typical now. Not special. When the scales fall.... hoo boy. that’s one reason to want to wake up in the morning. How does this horror movie end? I’ll make popcorn.
Internalized misogyny is ugly.
Long, long, long before the internet was a thing, I went through a period as a girl where I had a weird thing with things needing to be balanced. This was pre-teen: I would say the years 8 to 10 or 9 to 11? So if I brushed one side of my face accidentally, I had to brush the other side of my face. Or if I stepped on a pebble I'd be acutely uncomfortable until I could step on something similar in size with the other foot. This wasn't fed to me by tumblr and I talked about it with my mom years later and she said, "yeah, I remember you having tics for a while and being a bit worried about it". I was surprised because I thought I'd done it all subtly and secretly. I have no idea what made it go away (to be honest, the foot thing still happens a bit actually... but otherwise I don't think about any of it ever), but it was very intense at the time. It must be a brain development or hormonal thing? and perhaps it is more common in girls? But I can imagine if those intense feelings had gotten cathected to a rhetoric about gender dysphoria it could have spiralled quickly. Instead it was a brief, intense, and almost entirely private episode that did me no long term harm.
Narcissism leaps out at me in many of the comments, and I believe our technological advances have created more self-absorbed teens and adults, and the self-absorption common today is a drag on our society. I expect teens to be self-absorbed as they figure out a direction in life, but instead of helping them grow into an adult on a path, many adults in our institutions and marketers encourage more navel gazing among the young.
It's heartbreaking and alarming to see such obsessive self consciousness, the whiny lamentations, and the refusal to accept the non negotiable limits and defining qualities of being a female in a female body. These peeks into their broken psyches illustrate just how much modern human society itself is broken. And how much it has failed to prepare these young people for adulthood and reality. How much WE have failed.
Absolutely fascinating revelations from the "trans" community, and not altogether that surprising. Not that I'm thrilled that my confirmation bias is getting a nod lol, but my goodness does it ever validate what I've been thinking and saying about gender-affirming care NOT being the be-all end-all for folk struggling with this. From what's being described with these admissions, they can bloody well go through with all of the hormones, surgeries, etc., and STILL be burdened by dysphoria. Meaning that the affirming care didn't deal with the root issue, because it almost never does.
what a load of nonsense. they all need to be told to pull their bloody socks up!
Thanks for the quote last time from Dr. Ray Blanchard (Atlantic Monthly, 2002, now archived at ChildrenofTransition.org, as it has been scrubbed from AM) about the disconnect between reality and fantasy, how Blanchard and his "sexologist" cohort don't even recognize the sexism they promote. The entire raison d'etre, the foundation of their version of diagnostic sexology, is based on the need for this man, who "dresses as a female" to keep his job and remain in the powerful spot of supporting the family. Blanchard, Cantor, Bailey and Zucker were never, ever concerned with the trapped wives. They assumed, based on their 1940s and 1950s childhoods, that their job was to normalize a man "changing sex' and yet staying the head of the household. They did no studies on the PTSD of the wives, no studies on the mental health issues the children developed because of these narcissistic fathers. It's telling. They don't care about women, just the men who "wish their penis was part of your wife's body." (got that one from this very blog, thanks!)
Eliza - I continue to enjoy your anthropological spelunking into Reddit.
Some of this stuff is simply funny (clapping shoes, talking too much, having emotions = woman) - out there, bare, as quotes. Zooming out, of course, it's sad and it's a commentary on how these poor souls came to see the world in, ironically, such a binary fashion.
It is also telling that there are so many quotes that acknowledge sexual dimorphism, where the hard-nose activist position is that we're simply "sexed" based on our rather arbitrary bits and the rest is programmed into us by nurture/culture.
I'd have less of an issue if folks were just more nakedly transparent about the fact that they're pursuing some sort of body modification that pursues an imagined self-image, but does not alter reality - much like plastic surgery, extreme tattooing/piercing or the body modification subculture that does stuff like split their tongues or implant silicon horns. Each of those folks (I'm heavily tattooed, for instance) are pursuing unnatural modifications, including even people trying to look reptilian or crazy-huge boobs - but none of them push the rest of us to accept that they've *always* looked that way, or that we must pretend they never altered themselves, or literally are reptiles or whatever, or that it's anything other than their preferred, yet unusual way of looking and living.
That, I think, would be the recipe for everyone simply shrugging and going home on this issue. The edge cases and "who's welcome in what space" would more easily resolve if the ideology could simply accept that "transwoman" meant "man who has altered himself to appear as much like a woman as possible" instead of "is literally the same as a natal woman."
Oh, here I am overexplaining. Guess I'm off to the gender clinic!
My brain just screams "Get this woman some proper mental-health care."
This is the saddest thing I’ve ever read.