I’m keeping my own list of open questions and theories about boys and men who identify as trans. What questions, hypotheses, and directions/suggestions for future research do you have?
As for future research, we desperately need to know the real stats on the side effects wrong sex hormones. These young people, both men and women, seem to think that by transitioning they simply change their risk to that of the sex they pretend to be. They need to know the REAL risks.
I have been told I absolutely cannot take birth control pills with estrogen or an estrogen HRT because I have migraines with auras. It's a stroke risk no matter what your age. So even when I've needed something estrogen based for a medical reason, doctors tell me it's a hard "no" or it can only be for a very short period of time (a week or two) and they are very clear that it's a high risk treatment and will be stopped as soon as possible. I always wonder if they ever tell men with migraines with auras no or drive home the risks like they do with me.
Funnily - in a cruel way - those who've been convinced to render themselves incapable of producing their own sex hormones will need to rely on the pharmaceutical industry for the rest of their lives, whether they stay on cross-sex hormones or not.
There will also spring up in the near future an entire new avenue of pharmaceutical profit - in figuring out how to undue the harms that cross-sex hormone treatments & puberty blockers have created!
Thanks, Jeanne (sorry, my "like" button is broken). I've seen this before and while it is convincing to me, the affirming crowd can dismiss some of them as case studies, some as non-relevant for other reasons (just look at comments by Ana and Allistar). So many people dismissed Cass report, sometimes I think that no amount of research can make "true believers" change their minds. I guess more than new research, we need honesty about the existing data.
I am interested in the influence of sympathetic female peers on these young men. Many girls and young women welcome these boys/young men with open arms into "sisterhood", teaching them to use makeup and otherwise "affirming" them. It must feel nice, especially for the sensitive, shy men. I don't think anything of a kind happens for trans-identifying girls / young women who want to befriend boys/men .
I have so many questions about/related to the boys:
1) I can understand why a parent would not see evidence (or want to see evidence) that their son has AGP. But what is behind the drive to insist that there are only two types of trans in boys - homosexual and AGP - and there are absolutely no exceptions? Why must EVERY straight boy/young man who identifies as trans have AGP - not some of them, not a large portion of them, but ALL of them - for the people coming from this angle? Why can't their theories survive without it being true for EVERYONE? Why would the concept of a subgroup of boys who were taken into a social contagion the same way the girls are be such a problem for them? Although females are more susceptible to social contagions/psychogenic illnesses, there have definitely been males who were caught up in them (for example, Havana syndrome, glass delusion). I am completely baffled (and troubled) by the rhetoric of 100%, no exceptions all straight boys are AGP, not because I deny some boys are AGP but because it's the same one answer for everyone, all or nothing thinking, that got us into this mess to start with. It's the same kind of rigidity you see from Jack Turban, Joanna Olson Kennedy, or Lydia Polgreen. When does *anything* in psychology or the social sciences have one answer that applies to everyone in a group?
2) What is the role of OCD, obsessive thinking, and addiction-like behavior that seems apparent in some of these young men? Should that be a treatment approach for some of these young men?
3) Researchers like Bailey and Blanchard insist that AGP can’t ever be learned or created (ie, through porn exposure). It’s something you’re born with. Is there any research that backs that up? Can AGP be seen on a brain scan or genetic tests? In family studies, can they really rule out shared environmental factors or a third inherited trait that makes a male vulnerable to the obsessive thinking and behaviors seen in so many with AGP, a trait that is actually independent of sexuality? Sort of like a gene or brain structure dysfunction that causes a person to be more impulsive would make a person more likely to be involved in a crime, but that would not be a “crime gene” or a “crime brain.”
4) Can AGP spread through social contagion, a form of “pseudo-AGP,” like TikTok Tourette’s? Maybe “Reddit AGP?"
These are my questions too. I don’t believe AGP is something that is innate or a sexual orientation because why would this be the etiology for heterosexual and for homosexuals it’s a different innate trait or femininity and therefore plausible? Sexologist , Charles Moser has critiqued Blanchard and Baileys work. I haven’t read all of his work, but he has a personal website that has the papers or links to journals submissions for anyone to see. He also says others do not believe in AGP, unfortunately, he doesn’t name them.
3. Listening to podcasts by Benjamin Boyce and reading others, it seems that a seed is planted for some men that leads them to think they are different. They search the internet and find AGP. This is a category that is created (Laurence Kirmeyer) and looping occurs (Ian Hacking). And before the internet, somehow these men found each other via the Beaumont Society. Which makes me wonder if this was a cult in the early days.
4. What is different for me is that a social contagion does not have cultish characteristics such as a us vs them mentality, mind bending ideology, authoritarian or totalist control, estrangement to name a few.
5. In two of my comments on X, young men were trying to argue that AGP is innate and how they deal with it is by transitioning. In both of those, the young man had to call in an older or more experienced TRA to help with his arguments. It appeared to me that not only were these men grooming the young males, but they were indoctrinating them into a cult within a cult.
6. @ElizaMondegreen if you haven’t viewed a symposium with Bailey, Hsu, Lawrence and Phil Illy, reach out as I can give you a copy. I was gobsmacked at some of their theories of what constitutes a sexual orientation.
So many good points. Perhaps you were the one who shared one of the Blanchard critique articles with me somewhere else. I read one of them and was struck by the criticism of Blanchard's shifting narrative around AGP. I can't help but wonder if there's an element of diagnostic creep at play. At minimum, I find it odd and bordering on unscientific to keep insisting that the old framework still applies unchanged and without need of updating/expansion despite the drastic changes in society and culture around this issue.
I also wonder if this applies to AGP (and gender dysphoria), that it is a description of a behavior, not an explanation.
Interesting you brought up Boyce's podcast. I feel like Illy's first interview with him tells a different story about himself and gives a lot more insights than his later ways of talking about himself.
Re: your discussion on X with the young men. I feel the horseshoe theory applies very strongly here and that the two ends are getting closer to the point of overlapping.
The symposium: I'm not sure if you are referring to something I saw a year (two years?) ago, but Illy was there presenting and teaching his personal theories and research as a featured presenter. I thought it was very odd. Are there other fields of science where someone without training in the field and who just suddenly showed up on the scene gets to present and talk about his personal theories at professional events as if he's an established expert? It feels like letting Jenny McCarthy be a presenter at a conference about serious research in autism because she proclaimed herself an expert with her "PhD from Google searches" and her personal expertise borne of her conviction that she cured her son's autism through supplements and diet.
Do those researchers think that other fetishes are something you're born with? Foot fetish? Exotic-woman fetish (I knew a few of those guys in grad school, and they are usually unattractive and socially inept).
What is the role of pop culture in promoting female beauty as a kind of power? What is the role of humiliation in the trans phenom and why do boys and men find that type of eros appealing? Does class intersect in any way with this phenomena? To what degree is the plunge into virtual life the world has taken a factor? Is there any data suggesting that trans boys and men are more likely to spend time in the virtual world rather than the real one? How can we shift to a world where masculinity is not regarded as toxic?
I've heard due to dating apps the same 15 ish percent of men are getting all the girls.. combined with dopamine-sapping porn, online red pill propaganda there's more hopelessness and less motivation to rise above the 85th percentile.
Yeah, at 74 I'm not exactly tuned in to the dating scene but it seems....from what I've read, is that men who don't measure up are put in their place by the apps. Romance is displaced by an ugly Darwinian process of elimination.
>How can we shift to a world where masculinity is not regarded as toxic?
I don't think "toxic" is the issue. The more "toxic" the male internet celebrity, the better he seems to do lately. What's more relevant, I think, is that they're all somewhere on the doofy-to-hideous axis. To young people, "man" = "fat/grossly roided and ugly and tasteless" and "takes basic care to stay in shape and look presentable" = "woman."
My starting point is simple. More Adam Driver. Less Chris Pratt. Kill Andrew Tate.
How much is this a strategy for "beta males" who feel they cannot compete or measure up in today's jacked-up culture of masculinity? Why? What stories do they tell themselves about this decision?
Thinking of this business as some kind of "strategy" is entirely wrongheaded. It is ever more difficult for anyone to get any degree of human attention - we are all losing out to the phone. Engaging in this business gets a young person massive new attention from parents & peers (positive and/or negative) as well as massive new attention from medical personnel & school staff. This king of business is one of the few ways left to earn eye contact with other human beings. It's not any different from other forms of self-harm - it's just like cutting. Without these attention-earning actions, all they'd see of other people is the backs of their phones. Smash an iPhone, save a life.
To me the phrase "jacked up culture of masculinity" evokes something more akin to the macho action romps of the 80s starring men like Schwarzenegger and Stallone. I'm not even sure men like Andrew Tate come close as influencers of culture. To me it seems like it's never been easier to be a gender non conforming male, if not in style then at least in character, although my frame of reference only really starts in the 90s. It's like men are running away from something that hasn't been seen as mandatory or even desirable in 40 years, and even then could be seen as something of a blip, a reaction against a trend that started in the 60s.
It has worked. I know of a couple situations where 1. a straight man identifying as a trans lesbian found a naive gay girlfriend with autism and 2. Middle aged Straight man with AGP was able to at least have sex with younger queer-ish females a few times where he wouldn't have otherwise given the relatively choosey market. Conversely,
2 gay female "trans men" I know have been unable to find girlfriends and had to make do with male sex partners.
Most of these men are completely unconvincing as "female". The face is too large. The breasts are in the wrong place. How can they see themselves are "cute babes". Look at Richard Levine, who goes under the name of "Rachel". This is a hideous man with long hair. How does he maintain the self-delusion that he is an attractive woman, or even an ugly woman?
How do they maintain the self-delusion? The same way that the fat-positive movement gains steam; by audaciously lying and finding that a significant portion of society is willing to be complicit in the bald-faced lie and even applaud it. To be able to make a clearly false claim about yourself and have people afraid to refute it - that's an addictive power trip. I don't think the perpetrators actually believe the lie themselves; if they did it would ruin the game.
Does that mean in ten years we'll be getting stories about liberal women who married Palestinian men, moved to the middle east and were stunned to find out that traditional Islamic culture is even more conservative than the conservative Christians they used to denounce as fascists back home?
My ex-husband told me, after I discovered his 3 crossdressing diaries, that he never considered full-time crossdressing or any kind of medical interventions to make him "appear more female." Then he read something about Christine Jorgensen, an early "transitioner" who acquired fame. My question is, if an understanding that one truly cannot change sex is accepted, will the confused patient start to accept his biological sex and start to focus on a productive life as a male in society? My ex is basically obsessed with his "rights" both in his job as executive in a tech company, with our 2 sons whom he constantly indoctrinates, and in his public facing activities as a "female martial arts" hobbyist.
Covid lockdowns. What did that experience do to these teen boys? The isolation, the doom, the hygienic control and self consciousness, the move to online society, the long nights of physiologically damaging blue light and EMF bathing, the lack of embodied physical living beyond even lack of exercise, the online failing at school experience, the lack of positive social feedback that friendships in person constantly offer, the political divisive es same and demonization over covid matters, the mental guidance given by game theory type snarky high speed assessments of any topic including gender, the disrupted maturation stage which normally calls for increased independence and responsibility and risk taking...
Gaming avatar culture and the odd masked anonymity of covid culture, as well as the whole disembodied distancing experience. When my kid returned to school, everyone was masked, and he couldn't even tell who they were, not to mention no way to get to know them in the midst of school time/activity regimentation and distancing. They didn't invent in person avatars nor emoji sign language, so it was austere and alienating.
You might want to check out this article about body dysmorphia and masking. There's an explicit and obvious connection to gender dysphoria in one of the people they interview that is right there in the story but left hanging and unexplored
The psychological match of disorientation, confusion, uncertainty, instability, depression, with organized and unquestionably dogmatic ideologies, whether about covid hygiene or gender whose potential denial or questioning was shown to result in canceling, trolling, demonization of any heretics... That's some dogma you can rely upon if any naysayer may be publicly flogged!
I want to know how effective a period of time free from internet, anime and porn would be in treating gender dysphoria. Would a month working on a ranch in Montana free from those 3 be enough to break the spell?
Sure - but to stay sane when they get back, they'll need some real-life friends who don't believe in this barbarity, and who actually do fun things together rather than just scrolling their phones in the same room. Tall order these days. Might be better just to stay in Montana.
Sad but true. There's a lot of elements needed to bring a boy back to sanity. Like any other addiction, they can fall back into it at the slightest hiccup, too, even if they do have sane and healthy friends.
I don't think this is a helpful mindset. It's not like wearing a skirt if he feels like it or roleplaying as a woman if he feels like it is going to lead to the whole self-castration, denial-of-reality business. When you adopt frameworks like that, you contribute to the notion that the only way to engage in those activities is to be "trans" - you create a situation where, if he wants to experiment in those ways, he has to join that world and leave yours.
There used to be a very clear distinction between a drag queen and a transsexual. In fact, in the first season of RuPaul's Drag Race, a guest judge (some famous woman, idk) says to one of the contestants - drag name Raven - that she thinks he could teach her how to be more of a woman. He's visibly insulted, and says "Honey, I'm a man in a dress." (More recent seasons of the same show are so fully "trans"-infected that you'd never guess it used to be very, very different.)
Also, boys are not particularly susceptible to this particular derangement compared to girls. In fact, there are far more FtMs among the younger generations. Crossdressing and roleplaying as the opposite sex is fun -- it's been around forever. That some young people have such an interest is NOT the problem we have - the problem we have is sickos, wackos and pill-pushers telling young people 1) that they can make roleplay into reality, and 2) that doing so will make them "permanently happy."
It's not too different from wanting to be a cowboy. You can dress like one and talk like one if you like, but you can't carry a real gun around on your hip all the time, and you can't be on a horse all the time. (Unless you become a mounted policeman. Then you can. Whereas you can't do the deranged business of which we speak by any means at all. So there's the difference...)
I've heard it said that a narcissistic middle-aged man might become trans in order to get attention, at the time of a new baby (eg grandchild) in the family becoming a new focal point...?
Consider boys who have been sexually abused and perhaps even tortured when they were young finding refuge in shedding all forms of maleness. There are many forms of self hate, self loathing, and self destruction. Some boys become antisocial, some turn to substance abuse, some become abusers themselves, and some in their confusion, frustration, and grief attempt to avoid all that with a cross-sex identity that can “harden” during adolescence. Look up the “Jake” interview in the “Soft White Underbelly” series. (Note that not too long after the interview Jake had taken his own life.)
Sex is often a way to find self value too. He can be desirable and valuable when he is wanted or used sexually. He might not be enough as is, and becoming offers the possibility of achieving a value that is not assured by birth.
There is a lot of complex psychology here. I am interested in learning more about the self hate angle with regard to gender identity issues, especially in the case of sexual abuse. People I know personally have been touched by this.
I just learned that someone I knew who transitioned rather late in life is dead at a less than ripe old age. I wonder what effect bottom surgery has/had on life expectancy.
If the operation was performed on a fully developed male, rather than someone who'd had growth suppressants throughout adolescence, no material would be needed from the colon. Normal males living in the country are interested in having sex with sheep, so perhaps they aren't all that fussy.
1. Early exposure to pornography and thus misogyny. Woman as object to be used.
2. Social media exposure to autogynephiles under the seemingly more benign guise of “gender identity”. (Think creepy ol Jeffrey Marsh) Social media contagion in general.
3. Misogyny and woman-hating culture. Why would they want to be women then you ask? To dominate the idea of woman. Woman is NOT a sex class, it is an identity to be worn, enjoyed and dominated. There you get ideas like “trans women are better women”.
I cannot help thinking of my own kid to exemplify the questions. How can a teen boy who spends years actively enjoying his attributes on his own decide to dampen that pleasure with hormones and blockers? Why would he exclaim about getting rid of his package as though he can't wait? Did I not witness from a parental distance that self physical exploration had been a happy source of pleasure in the years before going trans?
Furries? How does the furry identity play into going trans?
The porn experience. How is this affecting teen boys?
What does a boy encounter if he gets on porn sites? Is it a pathway into experiences like MTM, bondage and S and M, furry, fetishes, sissy? What does it do to a teen psychologically to encounter and participate in these experiences? If it were with an in person element, it would be considered sexual abuse, wouldn't it? Isn't it a huge impact? I presume if you expose yourself to something through a sexual experience, it affects in a way different than, say, referring to something with words or from an academic frame and so on. So how does that work? Isn't it basically sex abuse for a teen to be shaped by porn?
I’ve read that there are thought to be two types of male transgender people - homosexual, and autogynophelia. But it appears to me that there are multiple motivations, some of which may overlap. I’m interested in what the motivations are, whether we can categorize them, and what strategies help each group the most. It looks to me like many of the boys my daughter’s age are ROGD kids much like her. They aren’t homosexual, they possibly aren’t AGP, they just seem to have been sucked into this cult and believe that being a white male makes them evil, and vulnerable to and deserving of ridicule, criticism, and collective blame, they feel they aren’t “good enough” at masculine stereotypes, they have been told that feeling different, having social difficulties, not being stereotypically masculine enough, or feeling discomfort with puberty are “symptoms” that mean they are transgender and that the only way to ever be happy in life is to transition. On the other hand, it seems like some males are motivated by the desire to prove to women that we’re inferior, and to mock and objectify women. (Which can accompany AGP but seems somewhat different).
I want to understand a realistic relatively peaceful outcome for agp and how to get men and boys there without leaving a wake of self-harm, other-harm and/or shame or shamelessness(narcissism). Anne Lawrence suggested that agps may be the best candidates for transition (best= ultimately the happiest long term, i think). Men + shame has led to SO MANY TERRIBLE THINGS for everyone. This feels like such an important question. (I am deeply worried about girls too but that feels less mysterious - “phase out this cultural moment and get them through adolescence intact”. )
Yeah, I agree about the girls. They are at tremendous risk of harm right now, but it also feels like they are far less disturbed and I have high hopes for them to age out of this dangerous phase. Their problems and maladaptive solutions make more sense.
I’d like to know what percentage (roughly) of trans-identified males are agp and at what age do most of them decide to transition? From what I understand, many agp’s are attracted to women and this makes me fear them more in places where women/girls are vulnerable.
This would probably too hypothetical, but when people talk about their sense of gender, I often wonder what that feeling or identification would be if that person somehow grew up alone. Maybe as a foundling raised by wolves. Would that person have a "gender identity"?
With body integrity disorders, I can see believing your body is wrong, wanting an arm removed, etc. I don’t know how transsexuality would work if you had never seen female.
I would take it a step further and say that if you’d grown up in an isolated group where there were males and females but no stereotypes about how each of those types of people should look or behave, there’d be no gender identity.
Exactly. 'GI' is a construction, an idea- different from one culture to another. And impossible to define in any one particular society, anyway. "Men do this, women this other..." -nobody could agree on an interpretaion or definition - because it's all made-up!
Yes, it makes no sense. They’ll tell you that your chromosomes and reproductive system don’t determine whether you’re male or female. But they can’t tell you what does determine that. But they insist that there is such a thing as male or female, but that’s it’s determined by an unobservable, untestable internal feeling. But yet it’s inborn. But yet it can change (but only in one direction). And gender stereotypes are nonsense, but yet if you don’t conform to them it means you’re born in the wrong body. That your body doesn’t determine your sex, but you have to change your body to match your sex. And then randomly sprinkle in the words sex, gender, and gender identity and use them all interchangeably but define them all using circular references to each other. There, it makes perfect sense, right?
Increasingly I'd say no. They're being taught to believe that 'cis' people having genital preferences is a form of bigotry. They make allowances for trans people though...
I think it is a valid question to ask. This feminist author or that may not preach bad behaviors, but how feminist messages can play out in the real world is something interesting to study. Who reads original texts by feminist authors? Most people get their daily dose of philosophy and ideology from popular media and “Chinese whispers” of friends telling other friends what someone else may or may not have read once upon a time. How do extreme messages by extreme feminists play out in the real world where extremes are the things that grab attention?
In the early 1970s, my mother, who was quite misandrist and androphobic. She also had borderline personality disorder, and could be quite intense. She believed what she wanted to about anything and anyone and would focus on any rationale she could to justify her beliefs and actions. She could be quite out of touch with reality. She latched onto feminist messages in college, in the early 1970s, reading and hearing only what she wanted to, and making up the rest as she needed. Did feminism do this? No, but the mental illness of a developmental disorder met with her experiences, motives, and biases, mixed and the cynicism of the day (which was similar to today) to create something else, something malignant which definitely had an impact on me, a hapless child in all of this. Did feminism have negative effects on me? No, my mother did, using feminism as an excuse.
It would be useful to continue studying cases like my mother’s. We need to understand this general class of psychological problem in humans. We need to get better at battling against it. I don’t have answers for this, especially in such a time when this is super charged by social media compared to a time when my mother only had her National Enquirer to feed off of. (Consider the National Enquirer to have been a loose prototype of what was to come in social media and what passes for “news” these days.)
Lots of good questions here about the teen boys! I would just add two more:
1) SSRI Antidepressants: Evidence of libido suppression as well as reduced genital sensation on these drugs is quite strong in adults. How do they affect teens and pre-teens who have barely begun to experience and deal with their sexuality? Many adults who were gender-dysphoric (or just very gender nonconforming) as children recall the onset of puberty, with its rush of new urges, as helping them sort out who they were. If this is thwarted by medications, perhaps any idea about one's gender identity could feel as real as any others?
2) Families: Based on just a few cases I've seen, I wonder if more gender-questioning boys than girls have "strongly invested parents"? That is, strongly supportive of transition, committed to protecting their Trans Child from stigma, even perhaps entranced by their new "daughter"? Just a thought.
So while I think anime and video games and ofc porn play major role, I’d like to suggest exploring beauty commmunity, amab enbies, male feminists and identifying out of cishet male oppresor status by being only T in LGBT. I feel like there is subgenre of hetero men, who are more fem,like doing something with their look, grew up with youtube and sjw girlfriends and reach conclusion that this all mean they aren’t men, actually.
Gaming and disembodied society. Self creation. Meeting influential people online, say on discord gaming encounters? How does gaming society play into this?
I think in some cases it is a lack of transcendance in their lives. Whilst previous generations had the opportunity for wars to sacrifice themselves for or religious ecstasy this generation has less scope for pursuing that human desire to give themselves over to something bigger than themselves. There is likely some general social evolutionary benefit to having individuals in the tribe that are willing to sacrific themselves for the benefit of the group. This explains the frequent activist movement/trans crossover and cultic behaviour. They feel so stuck in their mundane safe bourgeois lives they eventually decide to transcend their own sexed bodies. This is a charitable interpretation though likely not the whole picture.
I am curious why married men all of a sudden decide they are trans and lesbian ? Are there signs in the marriage ? How is the wife supposed to be ok with this ?
I'm interested in how similar/different the struggle with stereotypes and fear of "not measuring up" to perceived idealized standards is between tims and tifs
I wonder if men and women (and girls and boys ) grew up in a truly egalitarian society with healthy sex roles, would boys and men get obsessed with this skewed idea of "femaleness"? So I wonder if boys and men would feel and behave differently if they didn't live in a "hyper-masculinized" culture, such as the US, in which natural femininity is viewed as "otherness" and taboo, where the aesthetic and emotional/behavioral choices for boys and men seem so narrow and negative (to me anyway), not to mention the ubiquity of online pornographic images that lie about women (and men for that matter)... I harken back to the few years in the 1980s where young men were given the option of "androgyny," personal adornment and self-expression. So in that case, who would want to "transition"? Anyway, I hope this makes sense. Sorry for going on. Thanks for asking such a good question, Eliza!
I am a male who enjoys the physical act of sex. Many of these men who are young have not had sex. In some cases, they have never even masturbated or so I hear. Why would anyone choose a course of "treatment" which would involve stopping a portion of normal response that they have never even experienced? Would requiring a young man to have sex be an effective strategy to slow down the trans train?
“Requiring a young man to have sex” with whom? Please don’t suggest a prostituted woman. I can’t imagine that any sensitive young man would find paid rape something he’d want to repeat. The fact that these men are not chosen by women for sex is a large part of the problem. Maybe lessons in making themselves attractive (from personal hygiene to creating social confidence) would be a better idea? Or even the idea that no-one owes them sex? They actually have to make it an attractive idea to women?
The rule here is the "white-board" rule - we are not debating ideas, just suggesting them. You don't need to either approve of my suggestion, or disapprove.
I think that if you talk to kids about this phenomenon and share your thoughts before they get exposed to it they are much more likely to be able to resist it. Let them know that there are people out there who will try to convince kids that they are transgender, or that if they don’t fit all the stereotypes it means they’re the opposite sex, and that you believe those people aren’t mentally healthy or happy, and that it’s nonsense. I would tell them that they should still be polite to such people if they encounter them, but that they shouldn’t listen to anyone who tells them that people can change sex.
I found and then lost a trove of data taken from reddiitors showing reasons for transitioning and "easier to find a girlfriend" was super high. I agree that it is true for as long as it is a trendy category, though some will go just from a .0004 percent likelihood of getting laid to a .004.
Questions:
- what percentage are AGP?
- what percentage were influenced by porn? How about sissy hypno porn specifically?
- how many experienced some level of encouragement or manipulation from an older male online? (An especially hard one to quantify as even if they are open to revealing this, they may not have known the real identity of who they were talking to and they may recognize it ss manipulation until later in life)
Were they speaking from actual experience or was the idea that they'd have an easier time finding a lesbian girlfriend vs a straight girlfriend more an article of faith?
A compendium from lived experience. The expectations of assuming a female identity is to improve life however transition can be subsequently be a hindrance. The trans identity can so fully consume one's life affecting and impacting family & social relationships,educational,athletic and career goals. In reality one cannot change biological sex as the physical male bone structure is much larger than a female. It is very difficult for most males to pass as a woman even with hormonal and surgical interventions. The transitioner needs to consider the feelings of others especially the impact on women and girls (entering women's private & safe spaces, and competing in female sports.) Are there pre existing physical and mental health issues ? Taking estrogen is an unknown risk as estradiol is not designed for the male body. Once common side effect is the dramatic reduction in sex drive, and possible enhancement of preexisting comorbidities. Vaginoplasty surgery does not create a female vagina and reproductive system. The neo vagina will try to close even with rigorous dilation and there is no natural lubrication. Additionally there are risks of urinary tract infections,incontinence,and the inability to have sex. In conclusion one must realize identifying as trans does not mean becoming a woman but a male living as a woman perhaps as a guest.
I know this stuff started in academia but to what extent is nerd culture at fault for propagating it to young boys and men. At this point it seems like every nerd space both online and irl is officially pro trans. Is it a bad case of the Geek Social Fallacies playing out in real time?
Are we at a point where AGP isn't enough to explain why heterosexual boys are getting into transgenderism? Is "the love of oneself as a woman" still a meaningful motivator or are there other motivators now? Like, are they fleeing masculinity or do they just really want to be able to get changed with the girls at school.
I'm curious about what roles autism and being on the spectrum might play. I was startled to hear Dr. Az Hakeem say (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No1ux09kPwY) that autistic individuals are more satisfied and have less regret after they transition.
This might be related to why someone thought to add an autism flag to the progress pride flag.
Upon further research, it was a neurodiversity symbol (rainbow infinity) added by some orgs but not widely accepted as part of the Progress Pride flag.
Establish whether there is a real link and a progression between the trauma driving reactive attachment disorder in childhood (abandonment, abuse, profound criticism) and the various expressions of Cluster-B disorders in adulthood - this includes both body dysmorphia and anorexia. It is not happenstance that body dissociation and self-loathing occurs and is a key driver in the variant delusions for all these disorders.
My questions would start with at what age were you given access to a PlayStation ? Later perhaps a computer and it’s games? Then a mobile phone with its internet access in your hand constantly un regulated . At what age and how long were you left alone with these devices ? Do you take part in any sport which might keep you grounded in your own body and its limits?
I think asking what their first games console was would matter as well. Someone who started with a PS1 grew up in a different world than someone who started with PS 3 or 4.
Would love to know how this population compares to general population re: rates of OCD and eating disorders, age of first smartphone acquisition, ditto first gaming account, family structure, history of bullying, SES background, cultural background, highest educational attainment (and which topic), employment patterns (incl hybrid / working from home).
As for future research, we desperately need to know the real stats on the side effects wrong sex hormones. These young people, both men and women, seem to think that by transitioning they simply change their risk to that of the sex they pretend to be. They need to know the REAL risks.
Yep, absolutely pervasive... and unfounded.
I have been told I absolutely cannot take birth control pills with estrogen or an estrogen HRT because I have migraines with auras. It's a stroke risk no matter what your age. So even when I've needed something estrogen based for a medical reason, doctors tell me it's a hard "no" or it can only be for a very short period of time (a week or two) and they are very clear that it's a high risk treatment and will be stopped as soon as possible. I always wonder if they ever tell men with migraines with auras no or drive home the risks like they do with me.
Funnily - in a cruel way - those who've been convinced to render themselves incapable of producing their own sex hormones will need to rely on the pharmaceutical industry for the rest of their lives, whether they stay on cross-sex hormones or not.
There will also spring up in the near future an entire new avenue of pharmaceutical profit - in figuring out how to undue the harms that cross-sex hormone treatments & puberty blockers have created!
It's like we're putting together all the parts to make a shitty cyberpunk dystopia just without the glitzy neon façade.
Lots of high quality evidence of the harms of exogenous estrogen on male bodies. https://mungeribabu.substack.com/p/estrogen-is-really-bad-for-men
Thanks, Jeanne (sorry, my "like" button is broken). I've seen this before and while it is convincing to me, the affirming crowd can dismiss some of them as case studies, some as non-relevant for other reasons (just look at comments by Ana and Allistar). So many people dismissed Cass report, sometimes I think that no amount of research can make "true believers" change their minds. I guess more than new research, we need honesty about the existing data.
I am interested in the influence of sympathetic female peers on these young men. Many girls and young women welcome these boys/young men with open arms into "sisterhood", teaching them to use makeup and otherwise "affirming" them. It must feel nice, especially for the sensitive, shy men. I don't think anything of a kind happens for trans-identifying girls / young women who want to befriend boys/men .
I have so many questions about/related to the boys:
1) I can understand why a parent would not see evidence (or want to see evidence) that their son has AGP. But what is behind the drive to insist that there are only two types of trans in boys - homosexual and AGP - and there are absolutely no exceptions? Why must EVERY straight boy/young man who identifies as trans have AGP - not some of them, not a large portion of them, but ALL of them - for the people coming from this angle? Why can't their theories survive without it being true for EVERYONE? Why would the concept of a subgroup of boys who were taken into a social contagion the same way the girls are be such a problem for them? Although females are more susceptible to social contagions/psychogenic illnesses, there have definitely been males who were caught up in them (for example, Havana syndrome, glass delusion). I am completely baffled (and troubled) by the rhetoric of 100%, no exceptions all straight boys are AGP, not because I deny some boys are AGP but because it's the same one answer for everyone, all or nothing thinking, that got us into this mess to start with. It's the same kind of rigidity you see from Jack Turban, Joanna Olson Kennedy, or Lydia Polgreen. When does *anything* in psychology or the social sciences have one answer that applies to everyone in a group?
2) What is the role of OCD, obsessive thinking, and addiction-like behavior that seems apparent in some of these young men? Should that be a treatment approach for some of these young men?
3) Researchers like Bailey and Blanchard insist that AGP can’t ever be learned or created (ie, through porn exposure). It’s something you’re born with. Is there any research that backs that up? Can AGP be seen on a brain scan or genetic tests? In family studies, can they really rule out shared environmental factors or a third inherited trait that makes a male vulnerable to the obsessive thinking and behaviors seen in so many with AGP, a trait that is actually independent of sexuality? Sort of like a gene or brain structure dysfunction that causes a person to be more impulsive would make a person more likely to be involved in a crime, but that would not be a “crime gene” or a “crime brain.”
4) Can AGP spread through social contagion, a form of “pseudo-AGP,” like TikTok Tourette’s? Maybe “Reddit AGP?"
These are my questions too. I don’t believe AGP is something that is innate or a sexual orientation because why would this be the etiology for heterosexual and for homosexuals it’s a different innate trait or femininity and therefore plausible? Sexologist , Charles Moser has critiqued Blanchard and Baileys work. I haven’t read all of his work, but he has a personal website that has the papers or links to journals submissions for anyone to see. He also says others do not believe in AGP, unfortunately, he doesn’t name them.
3. Listening to podcasts by Benjamin Boyce and reading others, it seems that a seed is planted for some men that leads them to think they are different. They search the internet and find AGP. This is a category that is created (Laurence Kirmeyer) and looping occurs (Ian Hacking). And before the internet, somehow these men found each other via the Beaumont Society. Which makes me wonder if this was a cult in the early days.
4. What is different for me is that a social contagion does not have cultish characteristics such as a us vs them mentality, mind bending ideology, authoritarian or totalist control, estrangement to name a few.
5. In two of my comments on X, young men were trying to argue that AGP is innate and how they deal with it is by transitioning. In both of those, the young man had to call in an older or more experienced TRA to help with his arguments. It appeared to me that not only were these men grooming the young males, but they were indoctrinating them into a cult within a cult.
6. @ElizaMondegreen if you haven’t viewed a symposium with Bailey, Hsu, Lawrence and Phil Illy, reach out as I can give you a copy. I was gobsmacked at some of their theories of what constitutes a sexual orientation.
So many good points. Perhaps you were the one who shared one of the Blanchard critique articles with me somewhere else. I read one of them and was struck by the criticism of Blanchard's shifting narrative around AGP. I can't help but wonder if there's an element of diagnostic creep at play. At minimum, I find it odd and bordering on unscientific to keep insisting that the old framework still applies unchanged and without need of updating/expansion despite the drastic changes in society and culture around this issue.
I also wonder if this applies to AGP (and gender dysphoria), that it is a description of a behavior, not an explanation.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychologically-minded/201907/a-psychiatric-diagnosis-is-not-a-disease
Interesting you brought up Boyce's podcast. I feel like Illy's first interview with him tells a different story about himself and gives a lot more insights than his later ways of talking about himself.
Re: your discussion on X with the young men. I feel the horseshoe theory applies very strongly here and that the two ends are getting closer to the point of overlapping.
The symposium: I'm not sure if you are referring to something I saw a year (two years?) ago, but Illy was there presenting and teaching his personal theories and research as a featured presenter. I thought it was very odd. Are there other fields of science where someone without training in the field and who just suddenly showed up on the scene gets to present and talk about his personal theories at professional events as if he's an established expert? It feels like letting Jenny McCarthy be a presenter at a conference about serious research in autism because she proclaimed herself an expert with her "PhD from Google searches" and her personal expertise borne of her conviction that she cured her son's autism through supplements and diet.
Do those researchers think that other fetishes are something you're born with? Foot fetish? Exotic-woman fetish (I knew a few of those guys in grad school, and they are usually unattractive and socially inept).
What is the role of pop culture in promoting female beauty as a kind of power? What is the role of humiliation in the trans phenom and why do boys and men find that type of eros appealing? Does class intersect in any way with this phenomena? To what degree is the plunge into virtual life the world has taken a factor? Is there any data suggesting that trans boys and men are more likely to spend time in the virtual world rather than the real one? How can we shift to a world where masculinity is not regarded as toxic?
I've heard due to dating apps the same 15 ish percent of men are getting all the girls.. combined with dopamine-sapping porn, online red pill propaganda there's more hopelessness and less motivation to rise above the 85th percentile.
Yeah, at 74 I'm not exactly tuned in to the dating scene but it seems....from what I've read, is that men who don't measure up are put in their place by the apps. Romance is displaced by an ugly Darwinian process of elimination.
>How can we shift to a world where masculinity is not regarded as toxic?
I don't think "toxic" is the issue. The more "toxic" the male internet celebrity, the better he seems to do lately. What's more relevant, I think, is that they're all somewhere on the doofy-to-hideous axis. To young people, "man" = "fat/grossly roided and ugly and tasteless" and "takes basic care to stay in shape and look presentable" = "woman."
My starting point is simple. More Adam Driver. Less Chris Pratt. Kill Andrew Tate.
🤣
How much is this a strategy for "beta males" who feel they cannot compete or measure up in today's jacked-up culture of masculinity? Why? What stories do they tell themselves about this decision?
Thinking of this business as some kind of "strategy" is entirely wrongheaded. It is ever more difficult for anyone to get any degree of human attention - we are all losing out to the phone. Engaging in this business gets a young person massive new attention from parents & peers (positive and/or negative) as well as massive new attention from medical personnel & school staff. This king of business is one of the few ways left to earn eye contact with other human beings. It's not any different from other forms of self-harm - it's just like cutting. Without these attention-earning actions, all they'd see of other people is the backs of their phones. Smash an iPhone, save a life.
To me the phrase "jacked up culture of masculinity" evokes something more akin to the macho action romps of the 80s starring men like Schwarzenegger and Stallone. I'm not even sure men like Andrew Tate come close as influencers of culture. To me it seems like it's never been easier to be a gender non conforming male, if not in style then at least in character, although my frame of reference only really starts in the 90s. It's like men are running away from something that hasn't been seen as mandatory or even desirable in 40 years, and even then could be seen as something of a blip, a reaction against a trend that started in the 60s.
It has worked. I know of a couple situations where 1. a straight man identifying as a trans lesbian found a naive gay girlfriend with autism and 2. Middle aged Straight man with AGP was able to at least have sex with younger queer-ish females a few times where he wouldn't have otherwise given the relatively choosey market. Conversely,
2 gay female "trans men" I know have been unable to find girlfriends and had to make do with male sex partners.
This ideology never seems to benefit women much..
For sure, and many don't even hide it. Have you seen videos on transmaxxing?
Most of these men are completely unconvincing as "female". The face is too large. The breasts are in the wrong place. How can they see themselves are "cute babes". Look at Richard Levine, who goes under the name of "Rachel". This is a hideous man with long hair. How does he maintain the self-delusion that he is an attractive woman, or even an ugly woman?
His title is Admiral-General of the United States.
Please show him respect.
That is a joke isn’t it ?
The title Admiral-General I stole from a Borat movie. It's the one where he's an Arabic dictator visiting New York.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9BOekoBxIo
Levine's real title is just Admiral. Don't ask why someone who has no connection with the navy is called an admiral.
How do they maintain the self-delusion? The same way that the fat-positive movement gains steam; by audaciously lying and finding that a significant portion of society is willing to be complicit in the bald-faced lie and even applaud it. To be able to make a clearly false claim about yourself and have people afraid to refute it - that's an addictive power trip. I don't think the perpetrators actually believe the lie themselves; if they did it would ruin the game.
What does the romantic and sex life look like? Is it still the same issues? Are there unique cultures of relationships for men who go to be women?
Many young women are more likely to date someone of a trendy category. Now is a great time to be a male Palestinian college student..
Does that mean in ten years we'll be getting stories about liberal women who married Palestinian men, moved to the middle east and were stunned to find out that traditional Islamic culture is even more conservative than the conservative Christians they used to denounce as fascists back home?
I’m curious about the anime of it all.
There’s a lot of interesting research on anime’s appeal to autistic people/people with social deficits
What about the appeal of science fiction to people with social deficits?
My ex-husband told me, after I discovered his 3 crossdressing diaries, that he never considered full-time crossdressing or any kind of medical interventions to make him "appear more female." Then he read something about Christine Jorgensen, an early "transitioner" who acquired fame. My question is, if an understanding that one truly cannot change sex is accepted, will the confused patient start to accept his biological sex and start to focus on a productive life as a male in society? My ex is basically obsessed with his "rights" both in his job as executive in a tech company, with our 2 sons whom he constantly indoctrinates, and in his public facing activities as a "female martial arts" hobbyist.
Covid lockdowns. What did that experience do to these teen boys? The isolation, the doom, the hygienic control and self consciousness, the move to online society, the long nights of physiologically damaging blue light and EMF bathing, the lack of embodied physical living beyond even lack of exercise, the online failing at school experience, the lack of positive social feedback that friendships in person constantly offer, the political divisive es same and demonization over covid matters, the mental guidance given by game theory type snarky high speed assessments of any topic including gender, the disrupted maturation stage which normally calls for increased independence and responsibility and risk taking...
Gaming avatar culture and the odd masked anonymity of covid culture, as well as the whole disembodied distancing experience. When my kid returned to school, everyone was masked, and he couldn't even tell who they were, not to mention no way to get to know them in the midst of school time/activity regimentation and distancing. They didn't invent in person avatars nor emoji sign language, so it was austere and alienating.
You might want to check out this article about body dysmorphia and masking. There's an explicit and obvious connection to gender dysphoria in one of the people they interview that is right there in the story but left hanging and unexplored
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/02/21/us/body-dysmorphia-masks-trnd
The psychological match of disorientation, confusion, uncertainty, instability, depression, with organized and unquestionably dogmatic ideologies, whether about covid hygiene or gender whose potential denial or questioning was shown to result in canceling, trolling, demonization of any heretics... That's some dogma you can rely upon if any naysayer may be publicly flogged!
I want to know how effective a period of time free from internet, anime and porn would be in treating gender dysphoria. Would a month working on a ranch in Montana free from those 3 be enough to break the spell?
Sure - but to stay sane when they get back, they'll need some real-life friends who don't believe in this barbarity, and who actually do fun things together rather than just scrolling their phones in the same room. Tall order these days. Might be better just to stay in Montana.
Sad but true. There's a lot of elements needed to bring a boy back to sanity. Like any other addiction, they can fall back into it at the slightest hiccup, too, even if they do have sane and healthy friends.
I don't think this is a helpful mindset. It's not like wearing a skirt if he feels like it or roleplaying as a woman if he feels like it is going to lead to the whole self-castration, denial-of-reality business. When you adopt frameworks like that, you contribute to the notion that the only way to engage in those activities is to be "trans" - you create a situation where, if he wants to experiment in those ways, he has to join that world and leave yours.
There used to be a very clear distinction between a drag queen and a transsexual. In fact, in the first season of RuPaul's Drag Race, a guest judge (some famous woman, idk) says to one of the contestants - drag name Raven - that she thinks he could teach her how to be more of a woman. He's visibly insulted, and says "Honey, I'm a man in a dress." (More recent seasons of the same show are so fully "trans"-infected that you'd never guess it used to be very, very different.)
Also, boys are not particularly susceptible to this particular derangement compared to girls. In fact, there are far more FtMs among the younger generations. Crossdressing and roleplaying as the opposite sex is fun -- it's been around forever. That some young people have such an interest is NOT the problem we have - the problem we have is sickos, wackos and pill-pushers telling young people 1) that they can make roleplay into reality, and 2) that doing so will make them "permanently happy."
It's not too different from wanting to be a cowboy. You can dress like one and talk like one if you like, but you can't carry a real gun around on your hip all the time, and you can't be on a horse all the time. (Unless you become a mounted policeman. Then you can. Whereas you can't do the deranged business of which we speak by any means at all. So there's the difference...)
Great idea.
I'd like to know if there are any common reasons middle to late aged men begin identifying as trans other than AGP.
I've heard it said that a narcissistic middle-aged man might become trans in order to get attention, at the time of a new baby (eg grandchild) in the family becoming a new focal point...?
How would one quantify “self hate” and how does self hate manifest itself in trans-identifying men?
Yes, this, very much so.
Is it self hate when he says: I realized who I really am and have always been, so I need to change my body and clothes and name to be who I really am.
How do mental gymnastics get labeled depending on the definitions used? How can the same thing be variably framed?
Consider boys who have been sexually abused and perhaps even tortured when they were young finding refuge in shedding all forms of maleness. There are many forms of self hate, self loathing, and self destruction. Some boys become antisocial, some turn to substance abuse, some become abusers themselves, and some in their confusion, frustration, and grief attempt to avoid all that with a cross-sex identity that can “harden” during adolescence. Look up the “Jake” interview in the “Soft White Underbelly” series. (Note that not too long after the interview Jake had taken his own life.)
Sex is often a way to find self value too. He can be desirable and valuable when he is wanted or used sexually. He might not be enough as is, and becoming offers the possibility of achieving a value that is not assured by birth.
There is a lot of complex psychology here. I am interested in learning more about the self hate angle with regard to gender identity issues, especially in the case of sexual abuse. People I know personally have been touched by this.
I just learned that someone I knew who transitioned rather late in life is dead at a less than ripe old age. I wonder what effect bottom surgery has/had on life expectancy.
And if you have an artificial vagina, what normal male is interested in sex with a male who has had a hole constructed in his colon?
If the operation was performed on a fully developed male, rather than someone who'd had growth suppressants throughout adolescence, no material would be needed from the colon. Normal males living in the country are interested in having sex with sheep, so perhaps they aren't all that fussy.
N.B.: transitioned at age 53, died at age 73.
That painting of Narcissus says it all! No questions!
1. Early exposure to pornography and thus misogyny. Woman as object to be used.
2. Social media exposure to autogynephiles under the seemingly more benign guise of “gender identity”. (Think creepy ol Jeffrey Marsh) Social media contagion in general.
3. Misogyny and woman-hating culture. Why would they want to be women then you ask? To dominate the idea of woman. Woman is NOT a sex class, it is an identity to be worn, enjoyed and dominated. There you get ideas like “trans women are better women”.
4. “Trans” as gay conversion.
Eliza,
I have two posts that are germane to your research.
A Few Questions for the Non-Binary/Gender-Fluid Set
Please help us understand what being Non-Binary/Gender Fluid means and what you expect us to do about it.https://yourunclepedro.substack.com/p/a-few-questions-for-the-non-binarygender
Ask your doctor:
https://yourunclepedro.substack.com/p/ask-your-doctor-if-transitioning
I cannot help thinking of my own kid to exemplify the questions. How can a teen boy who spends years actively enjoying his attributes on his own decide to dampen that pleasure with hormones and blockers? Why would he exclaim about getting rid of his package as though he can't wait? Did I not witness from a parental distance that self physical exploration had been a happy source of pleasure in the years before going trans?
Furries? How does the furry identity play into going trans?
The porn experience. How is this affecting teen boys?
What does a boy encounter if he gets on porn sites? Is it a pathway into experiences like MTM, bondage and S and M, furry, fetishes, sissy? What does it do to a teen psychologically to encounter and participate in these experiences? If it were with an in person element, it would be considered sexual abuse, wouldn't it? Isn't it a huge impact? I presume if you expose yourself to something through a sexual experience, it affects in a way different than, say, referring to something with words or from an academic frame and so on. So how does that work? Isn't it basically sex abuse for a teen to be shaped by porn?
Go see Fight The New Drug. It’s got over a decade of research and anti-porn advocacy under its belt.
I’ve read that there are thought to be two types of male transgender people - homosexual, and autogynophelia. But it appears to me that there are multiple motivations, some of which may overlap. I’m interested in what the motivations are, whether we can categorize them, and what strategies help each group the most. It looks to me like many of the boys my daughter’s age are ROGD kids much like her. They aren’t homosexual, they possibly aren’t AGP, they just seem to have been sucked into this cult and believe that being a white male makes them evil, and vulnerable to and deserving of ridicule, criticism, and collective blame, they feel they aren’t “good enough” at masculine stereotypes, they have been told that feeling different, having social difficulties, not being stereotypically masculine enough, or feeling discomfort with puberty are “symptoms” that mean they are transgender and that the only way to ever be happy in life is to transition. On the other hand, it seems like some males are motivated by the desire to prove to women that we’re inferior, and to mock and objectify women. (Which can accompany AGP but seems somewhat different).
I want to understand a realistic relatively peaceful outcome for agp and how to get men and boys there without leaving a wake of self-harm, other-harm and/or shame or shamelessness(narcissism). Anne Lawrence suggested that agps may be the best candidates for transition (best= ultimately the happiest long term, i think). Men + shame has led to SO MANY TERRIBLE THINGS for everyone. This feels like such an important question. (I am deeply worried about girls too but that feels less mysterious - “phase out this cultural moment and get them through adolescence intact”. )
Yeah, I agree about the girls. They are at tremendous risk of harm right now, but it also feels like they are far less disturbed and I have high hopes for them to age out of this dangerous phase. Their problems and maladaptive solutions make more sense.
I’d like to know what percentage (roughly) of trans-identified males are agp and at what age do most of them decide to transition? From what I understand, many agp’s are attracted to women and this makes me fear them more in places where women/girls are vulnerable.
This would probably too hypothetical, but when people talk about their sense of gender, I often wonder what that feeling or identification would be if that person somehow grew up alone. Maybe as a foundling raised by wolves. Would that person have a "gender identity"?
With body integrity disorders, I can see believing your body is wrong, wanting an arm removed, etc. I don’t know how transsexuality would work if you had never seen female.
I would take it a step further and say that if you’d grown up in an isolated group where there were males and females but no stereotypes about how each of those types of people should look or behave, there’d be no gender identity.
Exactly. 'GI' is a construction, an idea- different from one culture to another. And impossible to define in any one particular society, anyway. "Men do this, women this other..." -nobody could agree on an interpretaion or definition - because it's all made-up!
Yes, it makes no sense. They’ll tell you that your chromosomes and reproductive system don’t determine whether you’re male or female. But they can’t tell you what does determine that. But they insist that there is such a thing as male or female, but that’s it’s determined by an unobservable, untestable internal feeling. But yet it’s inborn. But yet it can change (but only in one direction). And gender stereotypes are nonsense, but yet if you don’t conform to them it means you’re born in the wrong body. That your body doesn’t determine your sex, but you have to change your body to match your sex. And then randomly sprinkle in the words sex, gender, and gender identity and use them all interchangeably but define them all using circular references to each other. There, it makes perfect sense, right?
A perfect description!
Another question : Is there a code of conduct that they must disclose their trans status when dating?
Though it’s usually pretty obvious.
Increasingly I'd say no. They're being taught to believe that 'cis' people having genital preferences is a form of bigotry. They make allowances for trans people though...
Nothing but pain down this track.
How has feminism encoraged their self hate ("toxic masculinity") and belief that the sexes are interchangable, and how aĺl this leads to...etc
Feminism does not say that sexes are interchangeable. It doesn't "encourage self hate." What utter nonsense.
I think it is a valid question to ask. This feminist author or that may not preach bad behaviors, but how feminist messages can play out in the real world is something interesting to study. Who reads original texts by feminist authors? Most people get their daily dose of philosophy and ideology from popular media and “Chinese whispers” of friends telling other friends what someone else may or may not have read once upon a time. How do extreme messages by extreme feminists play out in the real world where extremes are the things that grab attention?
In the early 1970s, my mother, who was quite misandrist and androphobic. She also had borderline personality disorder, and could be quite intense. She believed what she wanted to about anything and anyone and would focus on any rationale she could to justify her beliefs and actions. She could be quite out of touch with reality. She latched onto feminist messages in college, in the early 1970s, reading and hearing only what she wanted to, and making up the rest as she needed. Did feminism do this? No, but the mental illness of a developmental disorder met with her experiences, motives, and biases, mixed and the cynicism of the day (which was similar to today) to create something else, something malignant which definitely had an impact on me, a hapless child in all of this. Did feminism have negative effects on me? No, my mother did, using feminism as an excuse.
It would be useful to continue studying cases like my mother’s. We need to understand this general class of psychological problem in humans. We need to get better at battling against it. I don’t have answers for this, especially in such a time when this is super charged by social media compared to a time when my mother only had her National Enquirer to feed off of. (Consider the National Enquirer to have been a loose prototype of what was to come in social media and what passes for “news” these days.)
Lots of good questions here about the teen boys! I would just add two more:
1) SSRI Antidepressants: Evidence of libido suppression as well as reduced genital sensation on these drugs is quite strong in adults. How do they affect teens and pre-teens who have barely begun to experience and deal with their sexuality? Many adults who were gender-dysphoric (or just very gender nonconforming) as children recall the onset of puberty, with its rush of new urges, as helping them sort out who they were. If this is thwarted by medications, perhaps any idea about one's gender identity could feel as real as any others?
2) Families: Based on just a few cases I've seen, I wonder if more gender-questioning boys than girls have "strongly invested parents"? That is, strongly supportive of transition, committed to protecting their Trans Child from stigma, even perhaps entranced by their new "daughter"? Just a thought.
So while I think anime and video games and ofc porn play major role, I’d like to suggest exploring beauty commmunity, amab enbies, male feminists and identifying out of cishet male oppresor status by being only T in LGBT. I feel like there is subgenre of hetero men, who are more fem,like doing something with their look, grew up with youtube and sjw girlfriends and reach conclusion that this all mean they aren’t men, actually.
Gaming and disembodied society. Self creation. Meeting influential people online, say on discord gaming encounters? How does gaming society play into this?
Lack of direction and the absence of a better idea. Hence why teen boys and midlife-crisis aged men are most into it.
I think in some cases it is a lack of transcendance in their lives. Whilst previous generations had the opportunity for wars to sacrifice themselves for or religious ecstasy this generation has less scope for pursuing that human desire to give themselves over to something bigger than themselves. There is likely some general social evolutionary benefit to having individuals in the tribe that are willing to sacrific themselves for the benefit of the group. This explains the frequent activist movement/trans crossover and cultic behaviour. They feel so stuck in their mundane safe bourgeois lives they eventually decide to transcend their own sexed bodies. This is a charitable interpretation though likely not the whole picture.
I am curious why married men all of a sudden decide they are trans and lesbian ? Are there signs in the marriage ? How is the wife supposed to be ok with this ?
I'm interested in how similar/different the struggle with stereotypes and fear of "not measuring up" to perceived idealized standards is between tims and tifs
Does the concept of "toxic masculinity" provide an incentive to escape a young man's sexed body--similar to young women wanting to escape femininity?
I wonder if men and women (and girls and boys ) grew up in a truly egalitarian society with healthy sex roles, would boys and men get obsessed with this skewed idea of "femaleness"? So I wonder if boys and men would feel and behave differently if they didn't live in a "hyper-masculinized" culture, such as the US, in which natural femininity is viewed as "otherness" and taboo, where the aesthetic and emotional/behavioral choices for boys and men seem so narrow and negative (to me anyway), not to mention the ubiquity of online pornographic images that lie about women (and men for that matter)... I harken back to the few years in the 1980s where young men were given the option of "androgyny," personal adornment and self-expression. So in that case, who would want to "transition"? Anyway, I hope this makes sense. Sorry for going on. Thanks for asking such a good question, Eliza!
I am a male who enjoys the physical act of sex. Many of these men who are young have not had sex. In some cases, they have never even masturbated or so I hear. Why would anyone choose a course of "treatment" which would involve stopping a portion of normal response that they have never even experienced? Would requiring a young man to have sex be an effective strategy to slow down the trans train?
“Requiring a young man to have sex” with whom? Please don’t suggest a prostituted woman. I can’t imagine that any sensitive young man would find paid rape something he’d want to repeat. The fact that these men are not chosen by women for sex is a large part of the problem. Maybe lessons in making themselves attractive (from personal hygiene to creating social confidence) would be a better idea? Or even the idea that no-one owes them sex? They actually have to make it an attractive idea to women?
The rule here is the "white-board" rule - we are not debating ideas, just suggesting them. You don't need to either approve of my suggestion, or disapprove.
I want to know what role social media and social contagion is playing, and how to inoculate kids against the brainwashing that seems to be going on.
I think that if you talk to kids about this phenomenon and share your thoughts before they get exposed to it they are much more likely to be able to resist it. Let them know that there are people out there who will try to convince kids that they are transgender, or that if they don’t fit all the stereotypes it means they’re the opposite sex, and that you believe those people aren’t mentally healthy or happy, and that it’s nonsense. I would tell them that they should still be polite to such people if they encounter them, but that they shouldn’t listen to anyone who tells them that people can change sex.
I found and then lost a trove of data taken from reddiitors showing reasons for transitioning and "easier to find a girlfriend" was super high. I agree that it is true for as long as it is a trendy category, though some will go just from a .0004 percent likelihood of getting laid to a .004.
Questions:
- what percentage are AGP?
- what percentage were influenced by porn? How about sissy hypno porn specifically?
- how many experienced some level of encouragement or manipulation from an older male online? (An especially hard one to quantify as even if they are open to revealing this, they may not have known the real identity of who they were talking to and they may recognize it ss manipulation until later in life)
I don’t place much stock in self-selected crowds answering questions on Reddit. The respondents also do not know how to control for their own biases.
Were they speaking from actual experience or was the idea that they'd have an easier time finding a lesbian girlfriend vs a straight girlfriend more an article of faith?
A compendium from lived experience. The expectations of assuming a female identity is to improve life however transition can be subsequently be a hindrance. The trans identity can so fully consume one's life affecting and impacting family & social relationships,educational,athletic and career goals. In reality one cannot change biological sex as the physical male bone structure is much larger than a female. It is very difficult for most males to pass as a woman even with hormonal and surgical interventions. The transitioner needs to consider the feelings of others especially the impact on women and girls (entering women's private & safe spaces, and competing in female sports.) Are there pre existing physical and mental health issues ? Taking estrogen is an unknown risk as estradiol is not designed for the male body. Once common side effect is the dramatic reduction in sex drive, and possible enhancement of preexisting comorbidities. Vaginoplasty surgery does not create a female vagina and reproductive system. The neo vagina will try to close even with rigorous dilation and there is no natural lubrication. Additionally there are risks of urinary tract infections,incontinence,and the inability to have sex. In conclusion one must realize identifying as trans does not mean becoming a woman but a male living as a woman perhaps as a guest.
Not to mention the extreme emotions that surface.
I know this stuff started in academia but to what extent is nerd culture at fault for propagating it to young boys and men. At this point it seems like every nerd space both online and irl is officially pro trans. Is it a bad case of the Geek Social Fallacies playing out in real time?
Are we at a point where AGP isn't enough to explain why heterosexual boys are getting into transgenderism? Is "the love of oneself as a woman" still a meaningful motivator or are there other motivators now? Like, are they fleeing masculinity or do they just really want to be able to get changed with the girls at school.
I'm curious about what roles autism and being on the spectrum might play. I was startled to hear Dr. Az Hakeem say (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No1ux09kPwY) that autistic individuals are more satisfied and have less regret after they transition.
This might be related to why someone thought to add an autism flag to the progress pride flag.
Upon further research, it was a neurodiversity symbol (rainbow infinity) added by some orgs but not widely accepted as part of the Progress Pride flag.
Establish whether there is a real link and a progression between the trauma driving reactive attachment disorder in childhood (abandonment, abuse, profound criticism) and the various expressions of Cluster-B disorders in adulthood - this includes both body dysmorphia and anorexia. It is not happenstance that body dissociation and self-loathing occurs and is a key driver in the variant delusions for all these disorders.
Did you eat much chicken when younger?
A fowl question.
I hear that chicken has more estrogen in it than ever before.
What country? I think the use of hormones in poultry has been banned in the USA for a very long time
It was something I heard some time ago.
I wonder what they put it into now
My questions would start with at what age were you given access to a PlayStation ? Later perhaps a computer and it’s games? Then a mobile phone with its internet access in your hand constantly un regulated . At what age and how long were you left alone with these devices ? Do you take part in any sport which might keep you grounded in your own body and its limits?
I think asking what their first games console was would matter as well. Someone who started with a PS1 grew up in a different world than someone who started with PS 3 or 4.
Would love to know how this population compares to general population re: rates of OCD and eating disorders, age of first smartphone acquisition, ditto first gaming account, family structure, history of bullying, SES background, cultural background, highest educational attainment (and which topic), employment patterns (incl hybrid / working from home).
Humans have developed sneaker males like in fish sexual mimicry
https://open.spotify.com/track/4RdpSi00jdvfRLZb3Q1WhB?si=TugplCVzRdKBBr0sRsyHjg this song, singer of the band has transitioned