I'm 82. There are times when I regret how ageing has weakened my physique. I'm not keen on bothering others with my wrinkled frame. At the same time, like millions of others who've grown old, I enjoy surviving into old age with many pleasures to be enjoyed. Your quotes about self-disgust in some women are a revelation. I am astonished and horrified at the violence of the language you quote. How terrible that anyone can be so self-loathing about themselves. How especially vile that there are individual and institutional parasites eager to affirm such bizarre animosity, exploiting it as an opportunity to hustle profit from drastic surgical and pharmaceutical solace. Albrecht Durer , among many great artists, made some wonderfully beautiful images of women in old age, but also - see his 'Ugly Duchess' - satirised on canvas physical features that might induce such self loathing. In my long life I've met women who by cultural account are ugly in flesh but entirely the opposite in spirit. Life's light shines brightly from every pore of their irregular bodies. And who am I , a male, with my biologically limited judgements of what is and isn't exciting and attractive in a woman, to even start to make a judgement on the multitude of ways a woman can love herself entirely separately from the gaze of others.
I took refuge in a male identity in the 1980s - obviously pre-Internet. I daily thank the Gods that I was able to be gender non-conforming without having such hateful language put into my mouth, because I would have wallowed/exulted in it.
Luckily, I only had access to the limited contents of my 14 year old brain, and grew out of it naturally, as most would if we left them alone. You are right; the self-hating vitriol is inhuman. Shame on any movement whose bequest is such vile ugliness. I am ashamed for them.
she describes the motivation behind transition as desire to “feel better, even if it doesn’t fix everything.”
This is the key to understanding what's driving so many of these young women. They are so full of broad, generalized self-hatred and desperate unhappiness. It's like the deep self-hatred, emptiness, and unhappiness that people with borderline personality disorder feel so intensely and are so desperate to escape. It's overwhelming and feels like it will be this way forever and they are desperate for a way to make it stop. Taking all this generalized misery and focusing it on one thing - gender - given them something to blame, and more importantly, a belief there's a way out of it. It becomes a lifeline out that they're desperately holding onto. For some, just having a plan with actions to take is enough to give them hope and some relief through a combo of the energizing side effects of T, the placebo effect, and getting care and attention from others, even if it's negative attention because fighting family, doctors, and society can bring the relief of doing and feeling *something* other than despair and self-hatred, and the harms and complications seem worth it to them. How sad it is that these are the girls and women whose cases are called "successes." And then we have the girls and women written about here who tragically learn it's still not enough. Doctors and therapists are mistreating these girls so badly.
I could relate to a few of those quoted comments. As a teen I hated wearing a swimsuit. Girls' swimsuits showed every curve of the figure and made you feel so exposed. Boys swimsuits' were loose and baggy and showed nothing. I think it's sad they don't realize that exposed feeling can be pretty universal. And they also don't seem to realize that so many of us all over the planet are feeling the sadness and loneliness of the decade (or century?) that we are living in. It's not gender dysphoria, it's the misery of living in a disconnected world in communities that have broken down.
Profound. I weathered the change from boy to man in organic surroundings 70 years ago. The changes in my body were expected, remarked upon, only sometimes teasingly – the first shave, the eruption of intense sexual feeling, the change of voice, not obeying my parents so much and so on. These things just ‘happened’; their strangeness taken for granted. I'm not being nostalgic. The changes included secrecy, embarrassment and at times shame, but I was in much company. That for me was in the 1950s. That change came also with the prospect of a driving licence, a bank account, my own passport, being able to watch ‘A’ films at the cinema, the vote (not quite yet then) with the realisation of the state requiring my military service – becoming a citizen of the UK looking forward to that rite de passage – my 21st birthday. Similar but varied markers came with the more dramatic metamorphosis of girl to woman. Those rites of passage and the markers that eased, encouraged and celebrated, that complicated and dramatic biological and psychological transition have withered - for all the detailed sophistication and vast 'tolerance' of contemporary sex education. The roles of men and women have overlapped and become negotiable – as has history and the interpretation of current affairs. We hear far less of ‘your 21st birthday’. There’s no military service. The married family comprising a husband and wife and two children is now just one of many in a diverse mix of domestic arrangements. Individuals expect to be able to travel the world. Whole populations are freer but also more transient. Coherent settlement - ‘neighbourhoods’ - have become atomised, fragmented ‘stranger-hoods’. Mainstream media, and its homogenised one-way narratives on radio, TV, and in the cinema have been disintegrated by individualised viewing of small screens and keyboards interacting with the rest of the world. Yeats’ much quoted poem, ‘The Second Coming’, seems entirely prescient.
First, trans ideology ignores the elephant in the room which is actually more like the sci-fi Alien creature from the film series. Misogyny: a world in which women all too often feel inferior to, and threatened by, men. Every one of the statements in the article refers to a feeling of being objectified and diminished by society on the basis of sex.
Second, instead of hearing and honouring these experiences, which are very real, we absolve society from taking responsibility for them. The famous sociologist CW Mills said that if a sliver of a population experiences a common problem, then the cause lies within those individuals. But if a significant portion of the population experiences a common problem, the cause of that problem lies outside those individuals, it's a social problem. Trans ideology personalises and privatises this social problem and in doing so robs us of the opportunity to solve that problem. In this way, trans ideology is brutally oppressive of women because it not only protects misogynistic norms from investigation and resolution but forces individual women to deal with them.
Third, in forcing women to deal with misogyny it also forces them to internalise and blame themselves for being unable to negotiate a terrain that is often hostile to them. It's like blaming a powerful, elegant horse for being unable to climb a steep mountain. It's not the horse's fault, it's a lack of fit, and in the case women, it's society's responsibility to find a way of creating a more welcoming terrain.
Wow, this is so sad, and enraging that the trans movement turns a blind eye to the clear self hatred, self harm and misogyny driving these women to pretend they are men.
Honestly I recognize some of these feelings in myself over the years, but at a much lower level. The female body is relentlessly mocked and sexualized, it makes sense those messages would work their way into the minds of young women. And yet, we exist neutrally as human animals despite all of it. I see this as the opposite side of the coin to women who become obsessed with femininity and enhancing their bodies sexually through surgery. Either way their whole lives become dedicated to a performance to either escape or fulfill these cultural expectations. I do feel bad for them.
Reading stories and opinions of people who think they are the wrong sex is like trying to make sense of what a person with schizophrenia is trying to say.
„We don‘t perceive us the way we are“…( not the way we wish to be? Even unrelated to gender/sex maybe?)
I think part of that is simply puberty. I know many female teens who feel that way but now with the gender ideology introduced to kids, it‘s obvious that many struggles are channelled to this one major problem when it‘s probably not about „gender dysphoria“ in many cases. When you know of mainly one concept of struggle with how your body looks /changes, you assume it must be that. And when you are celebrated for having an issue instead of listend to, engaged with in a sincere way and thoroughly assessed by a good therapist, chances are even bigger that you „choose“ gender dysphoria as a cause for all your pain and struggle. All the changes that come with puberty, physically and psychologically as well as socially, aren‘t easy, especially when you are not well prepared, accompanied, guided by parents or other adults you trust, who are giving you the needed confidence by example that everything will work out fine. And that it is a process like from toddler to teen, where you learn one step after the other, that there is no expectation that you suddenly are an adult who has to cope with any adult stuff instantly and and on your own. That it is ok to ask, to be insecure about anything new. AND, very important: social media presentations of anything are momentary and most often either totally faked or edited, filtered to make a person or situation seem perfect - or the other extreme: like a total mess to be interesting. Seems to be a way out for people who think they can never achieve the perfection presented by others on sm, so they chose the other extreme. All in between, real life, with ups and downs, struggles and solutions, don‘t seem to be a thing.
Extra important: Porn is giving teens a completely illusionary image too of how they „should look“ and „perform“. No wonder girls are panicking about their bodies when many of them are introduced to that kind of sexual world they feel far away from. No desire like shown in porn, no looks like in porn, no idea how to get there, when they absolutely shouldn‘t anyway bc it IS fake. (Same for boys. They are under pressure too, a little bit different, but not that much.But it‘s about girls here, so I‘m keeping my thoughts with the girls/young women)
There seems to be a gap between childhood and adulthood called puberty no one likes to deal with anymore as there are ideas distributed how to close the gap or rather evade it and either stay child without adult duties and responsibilities ( puberty blockers 😱) or jump to adulthood right away by „changing sex“ which obviously isn‘t possible but I think you know what I mean by this extremely simplified statement that of course isn’t reflecting the awful state the young girls are in, I’m just thinking of what it could be about from an ideologue’s view. ( Don’t think on your own, come here and you’ll be happy, problems solved. By excluding the puberty process of maturing, they get many loyal cult members. That’s where I’m coming from w this. And the insecure frightend girls are in the exactly fitting state to be caught)
I was mainly taken aback by one comment that the person noted her hands and wrists were smaller than men's. There are a lot of very sad and misguided people in the Western world.... misguided by a misguided society. I am very very sad and angry because of it, not just shocked.
This is sad. Women caught between two forms of gender transition: on the one hand, mainstream patriarchal society treating women like a collection of embarrassing, disgusting parts for men to insult then consume (like the painting of how Picasso sees women— a collection of grotesque yet titillating parts), or on the other hand, this alternative which is also patriarchal, which tells women they *can* be treated with respect— if they erase anything female about their bodies.
The real issue is that men are never held responsible sigle for disrespecting the female form and the people that come in that form- women and girls. Of course, for their harm to women to stop, the entire structure and philosophy of patriarchy would have to be dismantled— bc it exists in the first place as a coping mechanism for men’s feelings of inferiority and lack of control since they naturally possess none of the means of reproduction other than their own embarrassing urges. Sadly, men seem totally averse to building any male empowerment movements that don’t end up devolving into misogyny. I know not everyone agrees with that take- but to me, the whole gender identity thing wouldn’t even exist— for FTMs or MTFs— without the hatred of women.
As always, brilliantly written, poignant and painful, and oh, so sad. The circular logic and denial that feeds into staying on the path is frightening. I hope things turn better for these women, soon.
I can't help but wonder if this is the result of too much materialism (in both the philosophical and capitalist meaning if the word) or too little. On the one hand "you are your body" is about as materialist as it gets and is a line often used by so called Terfs, but the way transgenderism treats the body as a thing to be modified, a sort of human meat puppet is also very materialistic.
Given that atheists and agnostics seem to be the biggest proponents of Transgenderism I can't help but wonder if Trans is a natural outgrowth of a materialistic worldview, or is it the revenge of the spiritual. Do many Atheists have a malnourished spiritual side that finally found an outlet in the Trans movement?
I wonder how religious/spiritual the TIF community is. My gut says believing in Transgenderism is inherently a spiritual belief but the real world evidence doesn't seem to be bearing this out.
I noticed years ago when the "Fat Acceptance" movement was having a moment that the fat activists tended to talk about their bodies as though they were something completely separate to themselves. They would speak of "existing in a fat body" in a way that kind of made it sound like their brain had been sort of arbitrarily placed there temporarily, like they had rented a car or something. Then, during all the anti-racism excitement, we heard a lot about "existing in a black body", that once again tended to echo the fact that the person was a separate entity from their physical body.
This, by the way, was something that the Heaven's Gate cult was really into - they even referred to their bodies as "vehicles" and their mass suicide was "exiting their vehicles" to allow them to ascend to the spaceship they thought was following the Hale-Bopp comet, where presumably they'd be assigned new "vehicles" more suited to space life. I think the cult leaders were influenced by a variety of sources ranging from Christianity to Star Trek; but they definitely seemed to have embraced the ancient Gnostic philosophy that the physical world was created by a demiurge and was flawed and evil, as were our physical bodies, which were quite separate from our souls, and it would be a good thing to exit them as quickly as possible. This was in contrast to the Catholic doctrine of incarnation, in which body and soul are inextricably intertwined. A lot of the theological arguments in the early Christian era were about the physical nature of Christ - it seemed that many people had no trouble believing in Christ's divinity but a lot of them were quite convinced he could not have possibly had a physical body, that was just a repugnant thought.
So it would seem logical that if your soul is completely separate from your body, and your body is just some sort of animated meat sack that your soul somehow is placed into, that you might wonder if it was somehow accidentally placed in the incorrect meat sack. I mean, I get it on some level - I remember being a young teenage girl who went through puberty quite rapidly. I certainly felt like my little-kid brain had been placed into an alien body that was shaped like a grown woman's, and being totally freaked out not only by it being taller and curvier and shaped very differently than I was accustomed to but also by all the sudden attention I was getting from older boys and men.
In fact, I don't think I ever really felt truly comfortable with my body until I was pregnant. I remember being amazed that my body somehow seemed to know what to do, without any intervention on my part, and was able to grow an entire human being, push it out into the world, and then provide food for the new human - and at the same time I experienced profound mental changes as I became a mother.
So I think maybe a lot of the undercurrent of anti-natalism in modern society affects girls in a weird way. Pregnancy and birth are gross, dangerous, and traumatic in this narrative; small families mean people don't see pregnancy, birth and babies much firsthand. Teenage girls don't babysit much anymore so they find the abstract idea of "baby" to be some sort of repulsive, screaming little parasite. They are constantly told pregnancy is something to be avoided at all costs, except you're also expected to be sexually active; and being "sex positive" often seems to involve trying to have a stereotypical male view of sex where lots of casual encounters are seen as a good thing. So motherhood and babies = bad; but that leaves the only purpose of a female body as a sexual plaything for men, and if they've been watching porn they probably get the idea that sex is all about raping or choking the woman. No wonder they feel dysphoric and uncomfortable with their secondary sex characteristics!
I'm rambling, but I think there's a lot of factors feeding into the trans thing.
Yes, my jaw was on the floor reading about Heaven's Gate a few years back. The de-sexing, the "vehicles" and "meatsuits." The same language and mentality is back.
Interesting comment. My two cents: A reaction to organized religions which results in "atheism" (kind of a huge umbrella term for many different belief systems, in my opinion) is as much a contribution to the origins of transgenderism as anything else. Religion being foisted onto countless millions of "unbelievers" (including innocent children) has created untold havoc on human societies for millennia, continuing into the present day. I think materialism is an offshoot of the dualism/mind-body split in most major religious teachings. If only human history had taken a different path... (well, it has taken a different, more harmonious path for some small societies, but that's another discussion) but it didn't, and we're living with the consequences, especially the poor young women in this article, as are so many others. Sorry, I'm a bit of a downer sometimes.
I have commented that some trans people may have chosen the wrong gender before birth. In the case of some children, they may be remembering themselves from lives as the opposite sex.
Something like 40% of the world believes in reincarnation, and the growing numbers of people who have had near-death experiences proves that it is true. NDEs, in fact, are the proof that we survive death. There's nothing lunatic about the concept of reincarnation.
From my perspective, there is not - nay, cannot be - such a thing as an "immortal soul" that goes through endless incarnations. It is, to my mind, a lunatic belief, regardless of how many people believe it.
I'm sorry you have such a limited imagination. If you are not willing to look at the available evidence that we survive death, and I suspect you aren't, then your opinion doesn't matter much.
I spent many years looking for evidence, and found nothing. My imagination is fine, thank you, but I do not confuse it with reality. I might be wrong, but it doesn't matter in the end.
I'm reminded of those people who get a little cosmetic work done, and then all of a sudden they are addicted to the surgeon's knife, never satisfied with each new "improvement". Ironically, the people who become addicted to cosmetic "improvement" were often very attractive before their addiction started. Obsession and extremism and self-hatred somehow come together in a poisonous brew.
I've mentioned Blaire White before, the conservative trans woman who is on social media. (I'm going to call her "she" out of respect, as she is on the right side of the trans issue.) Instead of pretending that she is a real woman, she was happy to simply look the part. She never had bottom surgery, although she did have top surgery. She has said publicly that she is keeping her male genitals in case she decides she wants to be a parent. We live in such a shallow society that one wonders why the trans men in Eliza's article can't just be happy to have gained the appearance of what they want to be. Of course, White was a smallish man before her transition, and she looks like a very convincing woman now. Some trans men are so small and slender that they simply look pixie-ish. (NO, CHASE STRANGIO, YOUR ODD NAME AND MULTIPLE TATTOOS DO NOT MAKE YOU LOOK LIKE A MAN.)
I can't help wondering how things could be different for these young women (trans-identified or not) if the second wave had actually taken hold of society, instead of the backlash that came after, which took over. No one here need agree with me, but these young women are suffering at least in part because of "patriarchy" (that dreaded term) -- it's real, like it or not, admit it or not. Thanks again, Eliza, for an excellent article!
P.S. Young men suffer from it too, trans-identified or not. Anyone else here ever read or listened to interviews of Robert Jensen? It could be tough going (especially when he talks about pornography), but enlightening and worth your while. Again, just my opinion.
The rejection, the abnegation, the utter loathing of femaleness in these quotes produces the same visceral repulsion and DANGER signals in me as reading excerpts from incel forums going on about "femoids." I don't believe these young women have followed those same winding online paths at all, and yet somehow they've ended up at the same place: 'If only I were a REAL person, not this disgusting, reviled creature of flesh, I could skateboard freely.'
Oh, Eliza! I hope you don't get depressed with these women saying such nonsense about the female body! While I felt longer legs would have jump-started my nascent dance career when I was in my 20s, I knew I had the skills of musicality, memorization of lengthy sequences and expressiveness at all speeds of motion. When I participated in improve groups, there was a tendency of the guys to pick me up and carry me around--I had to make it clear at the start that Ute's not floating today. Now at age 67, I'm thankful the hard floors didn't completely wreck my knees; I can weed, wheelbarrow woodchips around and replant the roses growing too big for that corner. The lack of gratitude these young women stew themselves in will never cease to shock me. They spend the best years of their lives with their noses in the phones. I weep for you, young women! Ideas for learning flexible strength, grace, gratitude and acceptance, my series, Movements for Wellbeing:
"Maybe, just maybe, the next step will finally deliver."
This seems to be a very American attitude. Happiness is always just around the corner. The worse the current struggle is, the more the light at the end of the tunnel shines with tantalizing brightness.
It’s simply unbelievable to me, a man, that any one of either sex can look at the female body and see anything other than the most beautiful creation in the world.
I'm 82. There are times when I regret how ageing has weakened my physique. I'm not keen on bothering others with my wrinkled frame. At the same time, like millions of others who've grown old, I enjoy surviving into old age with many pleasures to be enjoyed. Your quotes about self-disgust in some women are a revelation. I am astonished and horrified at the violence of the language you quote. How terrible that anyone can be so self-loathing about themselves. How especially vile that there are individual and institutional parasites eager to affirm such bizarre animosity, exploiting it as an opportunity to hustle profit from drastic surgical and pharmaceutical solace. Albrecht Durer , among many great artists, made some wonderfully beautiful images of women in old age, but also - see his 'Ugly Duchess' - satirised on canvas physical features that might induce such self loathing. In my long life I've met women who by cultural account are ugly in flesh but entirely the opposite in spirit. Life's light shines brightly from every pore of their irregular bodies. And who am I , a male, with my biologically limited judgements of what is and isn't exciting and attractive in a woman, to even start to make a judgement on the multitude of ways a woman can love herself entirely separately from the gaze of others.
I took refuge in a male identity in the 1980s - obviously pre-Internet. I daily thank the Gods that I was able to be gender non-conforming without having such hateful language put into my mouth, because I would have wallowed/exulted in it.
Luckily, I only had access to the limited contents of my 14 year old brain, and grew out of it naturally, as most would if we left them alone. You are right; the self-hating vitriol is inhuman. Shame on any movement whose bequest is such vile ugliness. I am ashamed for them.
This part:
she describes the motivation behind transition as desire to “feel better, even if it doesn’t fix everything.”
This is the key to understanding what's driving so many of these young women. They are so full of broad, generalized self-hatred and desperate unhappiness. It's like the deep self-hatred, emptiness, and unhappiness that people with borderline personality disorder feel so intensely and are so desperate to escape. It's overwhelming and feels like it will be this way forever and they are desperate for a way to make it stop. Taking all this generalized misery and focusing it on one thing - gender - given them something to blame, and more importantly, a belief there's a way out of it. It becomes a lifeline out that they're desperately holding onto. For some, just having a plan with actions to take is enough to give them hope and some relief through a combo of the energizing side effects of T, the placebo effect, and getting care and attention from others, even if it's negative attention because fighting family, doctors, and society can bring the relief of doing and feeling *something* other than despair and self-hatred, and the harms and complications seem worth it to them. How sad it is that these are the girls and women whose cases are called "successes." And then we have the girls and women written about here who tragically learn it's still not enough. Doctors and therapists are mistreating these girls so badly.
I could relate to a few of those quoted comments. As a teen I hated wearing a swimsuit. Girls' swimsuits showed every curve of the figure and made you feel so exposed. Boys swimsuits' were loose and baggy and showed nothing. I think it's sad they don't realize that exposed feeling can be pretty universal. And they also don't seem to realize that so many of us all over the planet are feeling the sadness and loneliness of the decade (or century?) that we are living in. It's not gender dysphoria, it's the misery of living in a disconnected world in communities that have broken down.
Profound. I weathered the change from boy to man in organic surroundings 70 years ago. The changes in my body were expected, remarked upon, only sometimes teasingly – the first shave, the eruption of intense sexual feeling, the change of voice, not obeying my parents so much and so on. These things just ‘happened’; their strangeness taken for granted. I'm not being nostalgic. The changes included secrecy, embarrassment and at times shame, but I was in much company. That for me was in the 1950s. That change came also with the prospect of a driving licence, a bank account, my own passport, being able to watch ‘A’ films at the cinema, the vote (not quite yet then) with the realisation of the state requiring my military service – becoming a citizen of the UK looking forward to that rite de passage – my 21st birthday. Similar but varied markers came with the more dramatic metamorphosis of girl to woman. Those rites of passage and the markers that eased, encouraged and celebrated, that complicated and dramatic biological and psychological transition have withered - for all the detailed sophistication and vast 'tolerance' of contemporary sex education. The roles of men and women have overlapped and become negotiable – as has history and the interpretation of current affairs. We hear far less of ‘your 21st birthday’. There’s no military service. The married family comprising a husband and wife and two children is now just one of many in a diverse mix of domestic arrangements. Individuals expect to be able to travel the world. Whole populations are freer but also more transient. Coherent settlement - ‘neighbourhoods’ - have become atomised, fragmented ‘stranger-hoods’. Mainstream media, and its homogenised one-way narratives on radio, TV, and in the cinema have been disintegrated by individualised viewing of small screens and keyboards interacting with the rest of the world. Yeats’ much quoted poem, ‘The Second Coming’, seems entirely prescient.
This is sad and depressing on so many levels.
First, trans ideology ignores the elephant in the room which is actually more like the sci-fi Alien creature from the film series. Misogyny: a world in which women all too often feel inferior to, and threatened by, men. Every one of the statements in the article refers to a feeling of being objectified and diminished by society on the basis of sex.
Second, instead of hearing and honouring these experiences, which are very real, we absolve society from taking responsibility for them. The famous sociologist CW Mills said that if a sliver of a population experiences a common problem, then the cause lies within those individuals. But if a significant portion of the population experiences a common problem, the cause of that problem lies outside those individuals, it's a social problem. Trans ideology personalises and privatises this social problem and in doing so robs us of the opportunity to solve that problem. In this way, trans ideology is brutally oppressive of women because it not only protects misogynistic norms from investigation and resolution but forces individual women to deal with them.
Third, in forcing women to deal with misogyny it also forces them to internalise and blame themselves for being unable to negotiate a terrain that is often hostile to them. It's like blaming a powerful, elegant horse for being unable to climb a steep mountain. It's not the horse's fault, it's a lack of fit, and in the case women, it's society's responsibility to find a way of creating a more welcoming terrain.
Trans ideology does the opposite.
Wow, this is so sad, and enraging that the trans movement turns a blind eye to the clear self hatred, self harm and misogyny driving these women to pretend they are men.
Honestly I recognize some of these feelings in myself over the years, but at a much lower level. The female body is relentlessly mocked and sexualized, it makes sense those messages would work their way into the minds of young women. And yet, we exist neutrally as human animals despite all of it. I see this as the opposite side of the coin to women who become obsessed with femininity and enhancing their bodies sexually through surgery. Either way their whole lives become dedicated to a performance to either escape or fulfill these cultural expectations. I do feel bad for them.
Agree completely. Very sad, yet understandable.
Especially with the porn these kids are growing up watching by age 10-11
Poor kids. It horrifies ME. WTF is it doing to their little brains 😔
Reading stories and opinions of people who think they are the wrong sex is like trying to make sense of what a person with schizophrenia is trying to say.
Makes zero sense sense
„We don‘t perceive us the way we are“…( not the way we wish to be? Even unrelated to gender/sex maybe?)
I think part of that is simply puberty. I know many female teens who feel that way but now with the gender ideology introduced to kids, it‘s obvious that many struggles are channelled to this one major problem when it‘s probably not about „gender dysphoria“ in many cases. When you know of mainly one concept of struggle with how your body looks /changes, you assume it must be that. And when you are celebrated for having an issue instead of listend to, engaged with in a sincere way and thoroughly assessed by a good therapist, chances are even bigger that you „choose“ gender dysphoria as a cause for all your pain and struggle. All the changes that come with puberty, physically and psychologically as well as socially, aren‘t easy, especially when you are not well prepared, accompanied, guided by parents or other adults you trust, who are giving you the needed confidence by example that everything will work out fine. And that it is a process like from toddler to teen, where you learn one step after the other, that there is no expectation that you suddenly are an adult who has to cope with any adult stuff instantly and and on your own. That it is ok to ask, to be insecure about anything new. AND, very important: social media presentations of anything are momentary and most often either totally faked or edited, filtered to make a person or situation seem perfect - or the other extreme: like a total mess to be interesting. Seems to be a way out for people who think they can never achieve the perfection presented by others on sm, so they chose the other extreme. All in between, real life, with ups and downs, struggles and solutions, don‘t seem to be a thing.
Extra important: Porn is giving teens a completely illusionary image too of how they „should look“ and „perform“. No wonder girls are panicking about their bodies when many of them are introduced to that kind of sexual world they feel far away from. No desire like shown in porn, no looks like in porn, no idea how to get there, when they absolutely shouldn‘t anyway bc it IS fake. (Same for boys. They are under pressure too, a little bit different, but not that much.But it‘s about girls here, so I‘m keeping my thoughts with the girls/young women)
There seems to be a gap between childhood and adulthood called puberty no one likes to deal with anymore as there are ideas distributed how to close the gap or rather evade it and either stay child without adult duties and responsibilities ( puberty blockers 😱) or jump to adulthood right away by „changing sex“ which obviously isn‘t possible but I think you know what I mean by this extremely simplified statement that of course isn’t reflecting the awful state the young girls are in, I’m just thinking of what it could be about from an ideologue’s view. ( Don’t think on your own, come here and you’ll be happy, problems solved. By excluding the puberty process of maturing, they get many loyal cult members. That’s where I’m coming from w this. And the insecure frightend girls are in the exactly fitting state to be caught)
Wow. All of the comments from transitioners were horrifying.
I am shocked that ANYONE would think replacing sex organs could fix anything. I'm also shocked at the naivety.
It's easy to think that when everyone you trust is telling you so.
I do understand.
I was mainly taken aback by one comment that the person noted her hands and wrists were smaller than men's. There are a lot of very sad and misguided people in the Western world.... misguided by a misguided society. I am very very sad and angry because of it, not just shocked.
This is sad. Women caught between two forms of gender transition: on the one hand, mainstream patriarchal society treating women like a collection of embarrassing, disgusting parts for men to insult then consume (like the painting of how Picasso sees women— a collection of grotesque yet titillating parts), or on the other hand, this alternative which is also patriarchal, which tells women they *can* be treated with respect— if they erase anything female about their bodies.
The real issue is that men are never held responsible sigle for disrespecting the female form and the people that come in that form- women and girls. Of course, for their harm to women to stop, the entire structure and philosophy of patriarchy would have to be dismantled— bc it exists in the first place as a coping mechanism for men’s feelings of inferiority and lack of control since they naturally possess none of the means of reproduction other than their own embarrassing urges. Sadly, men seem totally averse to building any male empowerment movements that don’t end up devolving into misogyny. I know not everyone agrees with that take- but to me, the whole gender identity thing wouldn’t even exist— for FTMs or MTFs— without the hatred of women.
As always, brilliantly written, poignant and painful, and oh, so sad. The circular logic and denial that feeds into staying on the path is frightening. I hope things turn better for these women, soon.
I can't help but wonder if this is the result of too much materialism (in both the philosophical and capitalist meaning if the word) or too little. On the one hand "you are your body" is about as materialist as it gets and is a line often used by so called Terfs, but the way transgenderism treats the body as a thing to be modified, a sort of human meat puppet is also very materialistic.
Given that atheists and agnostics seem to be the biggest proponents of Transgenderism I can't help but wonder if Trans is a natural outgrowth of a materialistic worldview, or is it the revenge of the spiritual. Do many Atheists have a malnourished spiritual side that finally found an outlet in the Trans movement?
I wonder how religious/spiritual the TIF community is. My gut says believing in Transgenderism is inherently a spiritual belief but the real world evidence doesn't seem to be bearing this out.
I think there is something to what you say.
I noticed years ago when the "Fat Acceptance" movement was having a moment that the fat activists tended to talk about their bodies as though they were something completely separate to themselves. They would speak of "existing in a fat body" in a way that kind of made it sound like their brain had been sort of arbitrarily placed there temporarily, like they had rented a car or something. Then, during all the anti-racism excitement, we heard a lot about "existing in a black body", that once again tended to echo the fact that the person was a separate entity from their physical body.
This, by the way, was something that the Heaven's Gate cult was really into - they even referred to their bodies as "vehicles" and their mass suicide was "exiting their vehicles" to allow them to ascend to the spaceship they thought was following the Hale-Bopp comet, where presumably they'd be assigned new "vehicles" more suited to space life. I think the cult leaders were influenced by a variety of sources ranging from Christianity to Star Trek; but they definitely seemed to have embraced the ancient Gnostic philosophy that the physical world was created by a demiurge and was flawed and evil, as were our physical bodies, which were quite separate from our souls, and it would be a good thing to exit them as quickly as possible. This was in contrast to the Catholic doctrine of incarnation, in which body and soul are inextricably intertwined. A lot of the theological arguments in the early Christian era were about the physical nature of Christ - it seemed that many people had no trouble believing in Christ's divinity but a lot of them were quite convinced he could not have possibly had a physical body, that was just a repugnant thought.
So it would seem logical that if your soul is completely separate from your body, and your body is just some sort of animated meat sack that your soul somehow is placed into, that you might wonder if it was somehow accidentally placed in the incorrect meat sack. I mean, I get it on some level - I remember being a young teenage girl who went through puberty quite rapidly. I certainly felt like my little-kid brain had been placed into an alien body that was shaped like a grown woman's, and being totally freaked out not only by it being taller and curvier and shaped very differently than I was accustomed to but also by all the sudden attention I was getting from older boys and men.
In fact, I don't think I ever really felt truly comfortable with my body until I was pregnant. I remember being amazed that my body somehow seemed to know what to do, without any intervention on my part, and was able to grow an entire human being, push it out into the world, and then provide food for the new human - and at the same time I experienced profound mental changes as I became a mother.
So I think maybe a lot of the undercurrent of anti-natalism in modern society affects girls in a weird way. Pregnancy and birth are gross, dangerous, and traumatic in this narrative; small families mean people don't see pregnancy, birth and babies much firsthand. Teenage girls don't babysit much anymore so they find the abstract idea of "baby" to be some sort of repulsive, screaming little parasite. They are constantly told pregnancy is something to be avoided at all costs, except you're also expected to be sexually active; and being "sex positive" often seems to involve trying to have a stereotypical male view of sex where lots of casual encounters are seen as a good thing. So motherhood and babies = bad; but that leaves the only purpose of a female body as a sexual plaything for men, and if they've been watching porn they probably get the idea that sex is all about raping or choking the woman. No wonder they feel dysphoric and uncomfortable with their secondary sex characteristics!
I'm rambling, but I think there's a lot of factors feeding into the trans thing.
Yes, my jaw was on the floor reading about Heaven's Gate a few years back. The de-sexing, the "vehicles" and "meatsuits." The same language and mentality is back.
There was a good podcast about Heaven’s Gate a few years ago.
Yes, I’m a bit obsessed with cults and cult podcasts (ask if you want recommendations) because I want to understand the manipulation techniques.
Name it, please!
Heaven’s Gate, 2021, hosted by Glynn Washington
Whoops it was released in 2017, 10 episodes, still seems to be available
Interesting comment. My two cents: A reaction to organized religions which results in "atheism" (kind of a huge umbrella term for many different belief systems, in my opinion) is as much a contribution to the origins of transgenderism as anything else. Religion being foisted onto countless millions of "unbelievers" (including innocent children) has created untold havoc on human societies for millennia, continuing into the present day. I think materialism is an offshoot of the dualism/mind-body split in most major religious teachings. If only human history had taken a different path... (well, it has taken a different, more harmonious path for some small societies, but that's another discussion) but it didn't, and we're living with the consequences, especially the poor young women in this article, as are so many others. Sorry, I'm a bit of a downer sometimes.
I have commented that some trans people may have chosen the wrong gender before birth. In the case of some children, they may be remembering themselves from lives as the opposite sex.
Oh goody - let's add another lunatic idea to the mix. What could possibly go wrong?
Thank you!
Something like 40% of the world believes in reincarnation, and the growing numbers of people who have had near-death experiences proves that it is true. NDEs, in fact, are the proof that we survive death. There's nothing lunatic about the concept of reincarnation.
From my perspective, there is not - nay, cannot be - such a thing as an "immortal soul" that goes through endless incarnations. It is, to my mind, a lunatic belief, regardless of how many people believe it.
I'm sorry you have such a limited imagination. If you are not willing to look at the available evidence that we survive death, and I suspect you aren't, then your opinion doesn't matter much.
I spent many years looking for evidence, and found nothing. My imagination is fine, thank you, but I do not confuse it with reality. I might be wrong, but it doesn't matter in the end.
I'm reminded of those people who get a little cosmetic work done, and then all of a sudden they are addicted to the surgeon's knife, never satisfied with each new "improvement". Ironically, the people who become addicted to cosmetic "improvement" were often very attractive before their addiction started. Obsession and extremism and self-hatred somehow come together in a poisonous brew.
I've mentioned Blaire White before, the conservative trans woman who is on social media. (I'm going to call her "she" out of respect, as she is on the right side of the trans issue.) Instead of pretending that she is a real woman, she was happy to simply look the part. She never had bottom surgery, although she did have top surgery. She has said publicly that she is keeping her male genitals in case she decides she wants to be a parent. We live in such a shallow society that one wonders why the trans men in Eliza's article can't just be happy to have gained the appearance of what they want to be. Of course, White was a smallish man before her transition, and she looks like a very convincing woman now. Some trans men are so small and slender that they simply look pixie-ish. (NO, CHASE STRANGIO, YOUR ODD NAME AND MULTIPLE TATTOOS DO NOT MAKE YOU LOOK LIKE A MAN.)
I can't help wondering how things could be different for these young women (trans-identified or not) if the second wave had actually taken hold of society, instead of the backlash that came after, which took over. No one here need agree with me, but these young women are suffering at least in part because of "patriarchy" (that dreaded term) -- it's real, like it or not, admit it or not. Thanks again, Eliza, for an excellent article!
P.S. Young men suffer from it too, trans-identified or not. Anyone else here ever read or listened to interviews of Robert Jensen? It could be tough going (especially when he talks about pornography), but enlightening and worth your while. Again, just my opinion.
The rejection, the abnegation, the utter loathing of femaleness in these quotes produces the same visceral repulsion and DANGER signals in me as reading excerpts from incel forums going on about "femoids." I don't believe these young women have followed those same winding online paths at all, and yet somehow they've ended up at the same place: 'If only I were a REAL person, not this disgusting, reviled creature of flesh, I could skateboard freely.'
Oh, Eliza! I hope you don't get depressed with these women saying such nonsense about the female body! While I felt longer legs would have jump-started my nascent dance career when I was in my 20s, I knew I had the skills of musicality, memorization of lengthy sequences and expressiveness at all speeds of motion. When I participated in improve groups, there was a tendency of the guys to pick me up and carry me around--I had to make it clear at the start that Ute's not floating today. Now at age 67, I'm thankful the hard floors didn't completely wreck my knees; I can weed, wheelbarrow woodchips around and replant the roses growing too big for that corner. The lack of gratitude these young women stew themselves in will never cease to shock me. They spend the best years of their lives with their noses in the phones. I weep for you, young women! Ideas for learning flexible strength, grace, gratitude and acceptance, my series, Movements for Wellbeing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLzifwFf2R8&list=PLOFlPPQm71Ii-l-xoAlBZc5Iy9xZyfbUY&index=6
"Maybe, just maybe, the next step will finally deliver."
This seems to be a very American attitude. Happiness is always just around the corner. The worse the current struggle is, the more the light at the end of the tunnel shines with tantalizing brightness.
It’s simply unbelievable to me, a man, that any one of either sex can look at the female body and see anything other than the most beautiful creation in the world.