I have a new post up at Genspect on YouTube influencers, trans identity, and doubt.
As your child consolidates a trans identity, they’ll inevitably experience questions and doubts—after all, what’s more questionable or doubtful than the idea that despite your body—your only way of existing in the world—and despite your entire upbringing, you were never what you appear and always knew yourself to be?
That’s why so many of these videos and online resources zero in on the problem of doubting your new transgender identity—and then set out to disarm those doubts.
Trans vlogger Jackson Bird (91,600 subscribers) opens the video “Am I Really Trans?” with an upbeat “Hi, I’m Jackson Bird and today I want to talk about doubt, one of my favorite subjects, specifically today about doubting your transness!” (No joke: doubt is one of my favorite subjects, too! But we might approach the question of what to do with doubt rather differently…)
Videos like this reassure young viewers that not only are doubts and reservations normal and nothing to worry about or take too seriously (“I would be surprised if most people don’t feel some sort of doubt at some point, even after they transition,” Bird says)—doubting you’re trans is actually a sign of being trans. After all, “most cis people don’t spend a whole lot of time wondering if they’re trans.” No matter where your doubts come from, no matter what your doubts center on, even if you didn’t know what transgender meant until 20 minutes ago, even if you’ve never experienced gender dysphoria, even if you didn’t figure out you were trans “until you were 35 million [years old]”:
“… it doesn’t matter how you figure it out. Like if you were just grocery-shopping and you were going down the cereal aisle and one of the cereal boxes said ‘Did you know that you’re a trans person” and you just broke down crying and then the Cereal God descended from the heavens and gave you a list of gender therapists in the area, if you felt like you connected with that moment and felt like you were really trans… then you probably are.”
There’s an intimacy to these videos: they’re candid, confessional, packed with personal disclosures. No topic is too small or too private to mention. Click ‘play’ and the vloggers speak, as if in real time, putting words to formless discontent. Transition timelines and trans video bloggers feature heavily in youth accounts of coming to understand themselves as transgender. Other resources, like the widely shared Gender Dysphoria Bible, likewise reassure readers that doubt is a sign of transgender identity, not a signal to reconsider whether transition is right for you:
“Gender Dysphoria also causes depression, which further contributes to and reinforces those doubts. This all leads into a massive cluster of self invalidation that can lead someone to struggle over and over again to accept their own gender identity. But here’s the thing… only trans people are worried about if they are actually transgender! A cisgender person does not have this obsession with their identity, they think about it, they process it, they move on. If you keep returning to these thoughts over and over again, this is your brain telling you that you took a wrong turn.”
Therapists with YouTube channels get in on the action, too, like this woman who ‘reassures’ viewers that their obsessive thoughts about whether they might be transgender will never go away and will only get “stronger and stronger” with time:
The confusion arises when the masculine feelings or the feminine feelings or the longing or the obsessive thoughts come and go. When they fade away, people mistakenly think that they are gone forever and that it was just a phase. But the feelings always return. Think of it this way: the tide comes in and the tide goes out but no one ever says the water is no longer there. As you grow older, you will find that not only do your feelings return, they will grow stronger and stronger.
I want you to think about your other feelings and longings. Are you ever permanently angry or hungry or tired or happy? I ask this because—for some reason—people make an exception with their feelings about their gender when no other feeling or emotion is always present. When you are sad or happy, do you ever think that you will never be sad again if these feelings are gone forever? No. Then why do you think that you will never be having these feelings of longing, feminine feelings or masculine feelings, ever again? It’s not a phase. It’s coming back. It always comes back. It is denial that causes you to assume that these feelings are gone for good.
But where does that denial come from? Denial is actually very normal to start with because, if you think about it, who actually wants to be transgender? This is not something that people volunteer for, so it would make sense that you would be reluctant to accept this about yourself. Then think about how many times you have received gendered messages over your life. Almost everything is about your gender: from the color of your toothbrush, the way you were expected to behave, to the clothing you were expected to wear, all the way down to where we are supposed to use the bathroom and how you are supposed to use it. You are battling thousands and thousands of messages about your gender they began very early and continue to this day…
The implication is clear: time spent deliberating is time lost. Move forward. Now.
After all, you can always change your mind! So, even if you’re not sure—because you’re in denial!—why not just get a prescription for testosterone so you can see how it feels to hold that prescription in your hand? Why not fill it and see how it feels to hold that vial and syringe? Nobody says you have to inject it! This is just a neutral process of self-discovery. Taking a big step in one direction in no way predetermines the next step you’ll take.
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Read the full piece here!
One of the things that has become clear to me is that trans activists are trying to increase their numbers. I find myself thinking about Anita Bryant, who was so obsessed with the idea that GAYS were trying to convert children. She was HALF right -- it wasn't gays who wanted to do that, it was a much more dangerous group yet to come, trans activists. However, for trans people to try to influence children is much worse than gays trying to influence children. That's because the trans life is such a highly medicalized life. To be your "true self" requires hormones and multiple operations. Most children would be better off just accepting their sex as their gender.
Trans people are seeking legitimacy. The purpose of their ideology (the focus of which is "gender identity") is to make them appear normal. ("I feel like a woman, therefore I AM a woman just like you are.) If they can increase their numbers, then that makes them seem even more legitimate, and it gives them power in society. Already, however, their power in our society is outsized, although I couldn't tell you why.
Basically, if you are one person out of 200 who dresses like the opposite sex, then you look more like a weirdo than if you are one out of 20, and that makes trans people feel less legitimate. If the group you are part of is 5% or 10% of the population, like it is with gays, then society has no choice but to accommodate you.
Trans people have been presenting themselves to society as experts on gender, but they aren't. If anything, they are just experts on gender dysphoria -- but truly, I don't think they are even experts on gender dysphoria. If they were, they would have better judgement about who is trans and who isn't.
In other words, they would recognize that a lot of kids question their gender (especially now that it is trendy to do so), but that doesn't mean all those kids are trans. (The idea that just THINKING about one's gender makes a child trans is obvious nonsense.) I think that trans activists KNOW that they are trying to convert kids who aren't actually trans, but they don't care. They are so hungry to feel normal and/or to increase their numbers that they will try to convert anyone.
Even though they are at odds with each other, trans activists and born-again Christians remind me of each other. In both cases, they are intent on gaining influence over as many people as they can, no matter how bad their ideas are.
Maybe kids are experiencing distress because their HUMAN feelings, interests, and behaviors are being categorized into masculine and feminine. Maybe instead of telling kids to change their bodies, we should allow them to change their minds and challenge sexist bullshit.