The future of 'gender-affirming care' in 11 minutes and eight seconds

A friend of mine sent me this video of two young British women gushing about testosterone and everything’s here: the “soft changes” they’re seeking, their ‘embodiment goals’ (escape social expectations, “align” their bodies with their self-concepts, “confuse” the normies), the way they minimize their experiments (including self-medicating) by saying everybody has different hormone levels anyway, their entanglement with ‘sex work,’ the clear role of social influence (one starts testosterone and the other follows, then gets top surgery and hands down her binder), the idea that sharing testosterone prescriptions = love and community, the claim that more or less everything is ‘gender-affirming care’ (so what’s the big deal?), the sense that if performing stereotypical femininity feels like “drag” that means you’re not really a woman, the equation of testosterone and masculinity and strength and freedom—the kind of freedom girls lose at the onset of puberty.

I think the younger generation may be fatigued by pronouns and meltdowns but I fear that the ‘trans’ way of thinking about our bodies—as endlessly modifiable avatars that could always represent us a bit more faithfully if only our jaws were sharper and our chests flatter and our voices deeper—is here to stay.