3 ms·
>In other words, we can ask 30 or 40 year olds, did you feel unhappy with your identity as much as today's youth feel about their identities but couldn't wouldn
by slg 5y ago
>In other words, we can ask 30 or 40 year olds, did you feel unhappy with your identity as much as today's youth feel about their identities but couldn't wouldn't express it?
This won't be accurate for a few reasons.
First, there are certainly people in denial about these feelings. A society that is more hostile to trans people will yield a society that has more trans people denying their true identity. That should be obvious. Sometimes that denial is only outward which could result on them lying on a poll. Sometimes that denial will even be to themselves which means they couldn't be truthful on a poll.
If you have spent time around young children you have probably learned that it is difficult to understand a feeling without being able to name that feeling. Similarly it is possible for people to be experiencing gender dysmorphia without realizing that it is specifically gender dysmorphia. I have heard trans people talk about having a general lack of comfort in their body or just the sense that they were somehow wrong that they couldn't explain until they later in life realized they are trans.
Also trans people tragically have a shorter average life span due to increased rates of violence and suicide. Simply measuring the percentage of 40 years isn't going to be comparable to a percentage of 15 year olds because many of those 15 year olds sadly won't live to see 40.
- mc32 5y agoAccording to parent comment a significant fraction of the cohort are experiencing some form of unhappiness with their identities. If that is true, and a handful of commenters are making similar claims, then we could have seen alarming numbers of suicides amongst teenage girls, but we have not, so we'd have plenty of survivors to interview and understand better.
- slg 5y agoIt doesn't follow that the rate would need to be "alarming" previously. Imagine 1% of teenagers are trans and 5% of suicides of teenager are trans. It wouldn't matter what the suicide rate would be and it would still have an impact on the total trans rate among 40 year olds.
- orand 5y agohttps://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-stream/2021/6/22/why-are-so-many-teen-girls-in-the-us-attempting-suicide https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-stream/2021/6/22/why-a... “The proportion of mental health–related emergency department visits among adolescents aged 12–17 years increased 31 percent in 2020 compared with the same period in 2019, the report said. Visits for suspected suicide attempts among girls aged 12-17 then jumped 50 percent from February to March 2021 compared to the same period in 2019. The increase among boys the same age over the same period was just 3.7 percent.“
- hkai 5y agoOkay so we can't ask today's 30 or 40 year olds about their feelings growing up? This makes your theory conveniently unfalsifiable.
- slg 5y agoI never said we couldn't ask. I said it wouldn't be accurate to use their answers to project onto current young people. And just because it might be unfalsifiable doesn't mean it would be any less true.