"We just don’t sabotage our lives for no good reason."
Because doubt is ever-present in online trans communities, the need for reassurance is bottomless. Bids for reassurance take many forms: Tell me I'm not the only trans person who didn’t ‘know’ when they were six. Tell me it’s got nothing to do with trauma. Tell me it’s just my internalized transphobia. Tell me you were anxious before you started testosterone, too. Tell me you feel the same way I do.
People seem to find consolation—however temporarily—in sentiments like: I don’t know what I am but I know I’m not a girl. I don’t know what to call myself but I know I don’t want these breasts. I don’t know where this is going but I know I can’t keep living like this.
And then there’s what I’ve come to think of as the backstop: appeals to the adversity transition inevitably entails: Why would I tear my life to shreds if my trans identity weren’t real? Who would *choose* to live life on hard mode*?
Or, as a recent commenter on r/FTMOver30 put it, in response to a young woman seeking a balm for her anxieties about transition: “We just don’t sabotage our lives for no good reason.”
No, you see, this is very important. You must understand. We are compelled to sabotage our lives. We had no say in the matter.
It’s always easier to say “I can’t” than “I won’t,” to take refuge in the impossibility of doing otherwise. One hears this kind of language all the time in trans spaces. But the equation—transition = sabotage—is breathtaking, betraying what it was meant to conceal.
This commenter’s whole response is worth breaking down because it’s packed with popular fallacies:
There are rare situations where hesitance is real inner wisdom speaking, but it takes extreme circumstances for someone to follow through on a non-genuine impulse to transition. Involvement in a rare cultic or manipulative environment where you’re actually being pressured to transition, for example. That happened in the Twin Flames Universe cult, and it took truly massive amounts of brainwashing and coercion to get cis people considering transition. If there weren’t a super extreme external circumstance, there would need to be an extreme and highly specific internal one. Like some combo of very specific mental illness/neurodivergence, PLUS nonexistent internal coping tools and self-awareness, PLUS a past trauma or current social setting that somehow makes transition seem safer.
Our brains are so oriented to seek survival and safety. We just don’t sabotage our lives for no good reason. Even people who seek safety in ways that make no rational sense to a random observer always have very real personal reasons for doing as they do. People with schizophrenia who jump out windows do that to escape the monster they see chasing them. People who routinely self-sabotage do so because it feels like a more tolerable pain than the pain they’ve come to expect otherwise. Etc. And the TERF reasoning of “if anyone can accuse you of having Trauma or mental illness/neurodivergence of any kind you can never trust yourself again (unless you’re in alignment with our ideology and then congrats you’re so insightful and healed) is transparently bullshit. Trauma survivors and mentally ill/neurodivergent people who’ve learned to self-reflect are the most insightful and self-aware people I know. So if you don’t, like, have an unresolved issue that’s historically caused rash decisions you regret, and no one is forcing you, and you’re not sitting on a pile of utterly unaddressed mental illness and trauma… chances are you want to transition because you’re trans and you need to. But you could maybe explore with a trans friendly therapist to ease your fears, or start on low-dose so the changes come extra slow.
Doubts are only in “rare” and “extreme circumstances” worth heeding. Factors influencing transition would need to be “super extreme,” like being part of a cult (…) or a highly improbable collision of internal factors like “very specific mental illness” and “nonexistent… self-awareness,” etc. Since no one who spends a lot of time ruminating and then feeding their ruminations into the hive mind will ever identify as lacking in “self-awareness,” there’s no cause for concern: “chances are you want to transition because you’re trans and you need to” (and there’s that necessity again).
When it comes to next steps, the advice rarely varies: Spend more time with fellow believers. (You can do this in nifty 50-minute sessions by paying a trans-friendly therapist.) Start sinking costs.
With trans identity, such sunk costs are often the only form of ‘proof’ on hand, the main source of reassurance that you did what you had to do and that you could not have done otherwise. No matter your lingering doubts, the price you’ve paid to transition—in lost opportunities, broken relationships, amputated body parts, health risks—speaks for itself: “We just don’t sabotage our lives for no good reason.” Therefore, because we sabotaged our lives, our reasons must be sound.
*Yet another video-game metaphor, you’ll notice.
"...it takes extreme circumstances for someone to follow through on a non-genuine impulse to transition..,Like some combo of very specific mental illness/neurodivergence, PLUS nonexistent internal coping tools and self-awareness, PLUS a past trauma or current social setting that somehow makes transition seem safer."
This was maddening to read. Doesn't this person see that this is EXACTLY the combo we are seeing in the thousands of teenage girls and young women we are so worried about and trying to protect??
- A very specific mental illness? Oh, you mean like borderline personality disorder, which has a core feature of unstable and shifting identity? Or an eating disorder focused on hating and controlling the features of the female body? Or a depression so severe you would do anything to escape and be someone else? You mean all those comorbidities the "terfs" have been telling you we need to consider?
- Neurodivergence? Again, haven't we been telling people like this commenter how neurodivergence is a major factor??
- Non-existent coping tools and self-awareness? Check and check. These are EXACTLY what our girls are struggling with. It's why they are struggling so much socially and emotionally and become so vulnerable to these ideas. It's why we sought out therapy for them: to develop coping skills and self-awareness (instead we found therapy had become ideology and endless empty "validation")
- Trauma? A current social setting that makes transition seem safer? This is LITERALLY what we have been saying about these girls.
This commenter needs to realize just how not rare this combo is and stop fighting the people trying to protect these girls she admits could wrongly believe they should transition.
"Even people who seek safety in ways that make no rational sense to a random observer always have very real personal reasons for doing as they do. People with schizophrenia who jump out windows do that to escape the monster they see chasing them. "
Interesting analogy, I wonder how she would cope with this being taken to its logical conclusion i.e. is 'please don't jump out the window' something that could only be motivated by bigotry and hatred?