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On a related point, what I'm uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west. I understand there's been a massive increase in c

On a related point, what I'm uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west. I understand there's been a massive increase in cases for transmen in the UK and USA for example. Is this because we can identify these conditions much better now? Maybe. I don't have the background to say for sure. There is a real fear in society though that woke schools of thought are a harmful influence to the above rise. Again we need to be careful here. Personally what I do know is that growing up I had for a time quite severe identity issues (not about gender) but it was also a time when society encouraged the view of everyone being unique and mysterious and don't put labels on things. There wasn't anyway near this current level of identity politics and wokeness. I appreciate it's a bit of a stretch but in some ways it does feel now in society there is a growing pressure to box people's identities in more. Im so glad I grew up without the internet and could just be, and be a confused kid growing up without labels.

jmopp 5y ago
It follows directly from more acceptance of being transgender in society. It is not pleasant to have to sit with gender dysphoria for years - and then when you eventually do treat it, to have to spend thousands undoing changes to your body. Much better to treat it before it becomes a problem.
joconde 5y ago
Alternative explanation: there have always been as many transgender kids, but they hid it because they knew they'd get bullied by everyone, including their own parents.
- deleted 5y ago
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- sammalloy 5y ago
  This. It's amazing what you find in the shadows, in the periphery of our culture, when you simply look. For a long time, we just refused to see what was right in front of us. There's a long tradition of transgenderism, and anthropologists have been writing about it for a while.
- mopsi 5y ago
  But that's not the whole story. Kids are also very malleable, open to peer pressure and easily assume identities that earn them acceptance by their peers.
  - joconde 5y ago
    Exactly. Transphobia often leads to trauma after getting ostracized by one's peers. I've never seen evidence of "wokeness" being nearly as nasty. You don't get bullied or singled out for not being trans.
    - shtps 5y ago
      If I say I'm hetero and only date biologically born women, wouldn't I be considered transphobic and be ostracized by the woke community?
      - deleted 5y ago
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      - progre 5y ago
        I doubt that. Resonable people recognice that there is a diffrence between a personal preference of who to fuck, and telling others who they should prefer to fuck.
        drstewart 5y ago
        "Reasonable people" seems awfully "no true Scotsman"-y to me
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        But I don't know that it actually is. There's no “everyone will be fine with this” – implied is a “most people are reasonable”, so it isn't the right form of argument to be a No True Scotsman.
        5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
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- bennysomething 5y ago
  However there are things appearing such as clustering of cases (for want of a better word) amoung groups of friends. Times did a piece on it a few years back can't find it. Anyway that would suggest that prevalence stats might muddied somewhat.
  - corobo 5y ago
    Friends tend to be similar -- you are the average of your 5 closest friends and that -- it is true that my ADHD diagnosis came about because a friend was diagnosed. We became a friend group in college because we were all outcasts in high school haha. Turns out for a few of us the root cause of the social outcasting was different brain wiring A lot of the things they described had a "wait that's a symptom??" reaction. I have since suggested to a couple of friends to get checked for ADHD in a similar manner if they seem like they might be struggling with it. Worst case they're now in the mental healthcare system and have access to a therapist who can figure out what they're struggling with When you find a good place you tell your mates about it
  - Nullabillity 5y ago
    Makes sense to me that people would be more comfortable coming out of their closets if they have friends who have already blazed the way. There's also the little detail that people tend to cluster based on interests and personality traits in the first place, so I could see many ending up in the same circles even if none of them were out yet.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    I'm guessing there are three effects there: • People with shared experiences often cluster together in friend groups. (There are autistic friend groups, yet you'd get laughed out of the village for saying “Sally caught autism off her friends”.) • People tend to come out around people it's safe to come out around. • Seeing your friends coming out as [whatever] might make you properly consider whether you might also like guys, or Minecraft, or not being a woman. And they're the same effects in anyone with a socially-frowned-upon interest. Think of the tabletop-RPG-playing “nerds” of yore.
- corobo 5y ago
  Slightly more morbid take on that: Folks aren't killing themselves thinking they're broken or wrong as often as they would have before treatment was more known/widespread
- krona 5y ago
  If social stigma is no longer an issue, why aren't we seeing transitioning across the entire adult population in equal proportion, and not primarily in children?
  - joconde 5y ago
    > If social stigma is no longer an issue, Who said that? It's probably becoming less of an issue, but it's definitely not disappeared.
    - krona 5y ago
      Sure, but are you implying the remaining stigma applies unequally and is dependant specifically on age? Is there any evidence of this?
      - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
        It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if adults with decades of experiencing living with that stigma would choose differently from young people without those decades of experience.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    Probably because it’s much harder for adults to change their identities. They have lives, responsibilities and dependants. Unlike children they can’t change their identities on a whim without repercussions, or negative impacts on people they care about. I imagine that many people would rather ignore their “true” identity, than risk losing a spouse they care about, or disrupting their children’s futures.
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    We do? I've seen more adult trans people come out in the past year than the entire decade of 2000-2010.
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  Alternative explanation: like previous social rebellions like punks, goths, etc... It is "fashionable" and driven by the trends of the time.
hnbad 5y ago
What do you reckon is the reason for the increase in gay kids in the west after the decriminalization of homosexuality in most western countries? Hint: it's the decriminalization and social acceptance allowing gay people to come out of the closet rather than having to pretend they're straight for fear of consequences. The kids aren't being transed. I know there are several mostly British authors having extremely loud voices spreading FUD about "rapid onset gender dysphoria" but that's not even a thing. It's based on a paper that used answers from parents about trans kids. Follow-up research has demonstrated that to the kids it was anything but rapid. You might as well invent a phenomenon of "rapid onset body size" to explain why grandparents will insist "how can you already be so big, it feels like you were a tiny baby only such a short while ago". You're overthinking this, but to ease your mind: people aren't undergoing HRT and surgery because all the cool kids are doing it. They might experiment with neopronouns and gender identity labels for a bit but there's literally no demonstrable harm in that. Also if you think identity politics is a new thing: US politicians literally put God on the dollar bills to appeal to Christian conservatives (prior to that the national motto was always "E pluribus unum", not "In God we trust"). We just don't tend to think of things as identity politics when we take the identity for granted. EDIT: That you see more trans people is a good thing actually. Visibility is the result of social acceptance. And social acceptance is the biggest contributor to reducing suicidality and improving quality of life. Trans people haven't been killing themselves because they're trans, they've been killing themselves because everyone kept telling them they're not. You can't trans a kid any more than you can make them gay.
- kybernetyk 5y ago
  > And social acceptance is the biggest contributor to reducing suicidality That’s not the proper way to treat depression. No amount of social acceptance will lower the suicide rates of people with mis/untreated depression.
  - chownie 5y ago
    It's the proper way to treat depression caused by social rejection, which is as I understand it the bulk of the motivation for suicide among trans people.
pjc50 5y ago
On the other hand, there's no easy way to count the suicides who were closet-trans or just dysphoric without having the words for it. I've now known at least two adults with histories of depression who have transitioned and report being much happier.
deleted 5y ago
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DanBC 5y ago
> I understand there's been a massive increase in cases for transmen in the UK No, there hasn't. You've been lied to. There was no treatment for trans children (in the UK). Then a clinic opened up. We went from zero trans boys to some trans boys. Anti trans campaigners misuse percentages to show an "alarming" rise, when in fact we've simply gone from "none" to "some".
- golergka 5y ago
  That's exactly what the parent comment said, though, isn't it? Increase from none to some is indeed massive.
  - DanBC 5y ago
    No, the parent said that the numbers of trans people have increased. That's not true. The numbers of trans people able to get treatment is the thing that increased. We went from not counting, to counting. So we didn't increase the number of trans people, we just started counting the trans people that always existed.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      He said "cases", though, not "people". I'm not sure if you can say that you have a case without treatment or diagnosis.
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        They said "increase in transgender kids".
        jhgb 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure that it's clear that he meant diagnosed cases. Otherwise the text doesn't make sense. You don't ask "Could the reason for more people with X be more people with X?".
- 5y ago
blub 5y ago
This book’s trying to explain why this is happening for girls: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_Damage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_Damage
- DanBC 5y ago
  That book relies on the concept of ROGD, which is something that doesn't exist. Anybody pushing ROGD, or supporting other people who push ROGD, is anti-science and anti-fact. You should consider why you feel comfortable pushing something that's obviously bollocks, just because it supports your anti-trans activism. https://www.caaps.co/rogd-statement https://www.caaps.co/rogd-statement
  - bsksi 5y ago
    Which one of those psychological associations would have the balls to go against the flow if they felt like it was necessary?
  - skrebbel 5y ago
    Totally off topic, and I have no strong opinion on the whole transgender and ROGD thing (i learned that acronym from your comment), but: > anti-science and anti-fact This combination of words doesn't make sense to me. Science constantly discovers new "facts" that invalidate old "facts". I understand stuff like "the current scientific consensus", but I don't understand how you can call people who question the current scientific consensus on something "anti-fact". Especially in the context of psychology and psychiatry, where lately the facts have been superseding themselves rather rapidly. Tldr, if you're pro science, shouldn't you by definition be ever so mildly sceptical of facts? EDIT: note, I'm not trying to attack you personally nor weasel in some alt right talking point. I've seen words like "anti-fact" used a lot lately, I think I understand where it comes from, especially in the context of American hyper-polarized politics. I guess i wrote.my comment hoping to contribute to slightly more constructive language, at least from the sane side of the aisle.
    - JasonFruit 5y ago
morita2342 5y ago
Depending on how much your surroundings insist on putting labels and associated limitations based on what is between your legs on you during growing up; the puberty experience of one half of society can be more awful. This may also get reflected in current numbers of transmen vs transwomen. A transition is an extreme decision taken based on an unbearable amount of such psychological pain. Wondering what started the labeling too though, I’ve also been teached the value of individualism and fended off any label applied to me.. maybe it’s about realizing that most people out there want to apply labels, so a response to their rigid labels is coming up with unlimited new labels.
bsksi 5y ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095578/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095578/
andy_ppp 5y ago
I understand this might get downvoted and while I agree with the parent I also blame the contraceptive pill, dysregulation of hormone systems (various reasons), environmental toxins and the general malleability of people when it comes to sexuality at very young ages and for reasons we don’t understand. In my father’s generation the vast majority of men by the time they were 25 years old could grown thick beards now I’d say it’s a minority. We should be more curious about where these changes have come from.
- bennysomething 5y ago
  I can't grow a beard, does this mean I have low testosterone levels? I doubt it. Pretty certain my grandad couldn't either.
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    It depends? T level normalcy is a rolling average, and there's been a decrease if you go back far enough. Same thing with sperm count.
  - odiroot 5y ago
    As a data point: my T levels are completely normal and I cannot even grow a reasonable goatee at 34.
- lwhi 5y ago
  It's dangerous to dismiss transgenderism to be the result of psychological mishaps caused by environmental mishaps. You're effectively presenting a transgender person as a second class person, or a mistake. You're also aligning the ability to grow a beard with being a 1st class citizen.
  - shtps 5y ago
    It is equally dangerous to ignore environmental factors. We also know that male fertility is on a sharp decline but don't know why, this may be related and should be investigated.
scollet 5y ago
What's your actual goal with this comment?
- hnarn 5y ago
  FUD
jurassic 5y ago
Anecdotally, in the startup where I worked there was one summer in 2017 when 3 white women (a significant percent of the women in the office at the time) all suddenly came out as non-binary and asked to be called they/them. If that's not some kind of freaky bandwagon thing going on then I don't know what is. It was like a competition to see who could get the most oppression points or something. Now I'm in a different company, with a lot of folks who are pretty clearly biologically female claiming the non-binary identity. Most confusing of all to me are the non-binary people who still self-describe as lesbians. Do they think gender is a thing or not? I'm expecting a pretty harsh backlash against all this gender politics at some point. I'm not sure when or how it will manifest, but even some of my LGB friends privately tell me they think it's gone too far. For the most part, though, they are too afraid to say anything in public because they don't want to get attacked and possibly lose their jobs over it. It's clear that the gender radicals have wielded online bully tactics to gain full control over the range of acceptable discourse. LGBT are often portrayed as some kind of monolithic entity in mainstream media, but the reality is that there's a lot of ideological tension in the mix between the cis and trans people. The only place I see these tensions spilling into the open is in the UK, where the LGB Alliance and Stonewall organizations are at odds. Wondering when the same will happen in the US. Let me lay out the tension for those who may not be familiar. On the one side you have LGB people who mostly say their sexuality is immutable and based on attraction to specific sexes. "Baby, I was born this way" in the words of Lady Gaga. As an example, maybe you're a lesbian which means a woman who is attracted to other women; for most of history this was understood to mean a person of the female sex attracted to another person of the female sex. Meanwhile you have trans activists trying to stretch the meaning of words like "man" and "woman" to the point that they don't really mean anything anymore. Anybody can be a woman if that's how they identify today, which has the effect of broadening what it means to be a lesbian in a way that some lesbians may not agree with. The status quo today is that if you're a lesbian and not willing to include the "female penis" in your sexual orientation, you're at risk of being called a TERF/transphobe. This seems like an irreconcilable difference of views. Despite what you might think if you've read this far, I do not hate trans people. I have sympathy for them and whatever lack of self-acceptance has led them into their current path. I make an effort to use preferred pronouns and be respectful to those I work with. But I'm also extremely concerned about what the collateral damage to LGB people will be when Republicans capitalize on woke extremism at the ballot box.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> On a related point, what I’m uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west. Broad acknowledgement (though there remains some sharp and often violent denial, so while better than the best the current situation isn’t at the limit of this) that gender identity can differ from socially ascribed gender and that such a difference is cause for realigning socially ascribed gender to gender identity means that people whose gender identity differs from their socially ascribed gender both are likely to have: (1) a framework for understanding the source of their discomfort that would not exist absent the degree of acceptance, and (2) a license to identify their understanding of the source of their discomfort to others that woud not exist without the degree of acceptance, and (3) a hope of relief that would not exist without the social norm of realigning ascribed gender to match gender identity. Naturally, this means that more people aren’t just going to keep quiet and attempt to fit into the box society has assigned them at whatever pain it takes, as would previously have been the case because there was no visible alternative. > but it was also a time when society encouraged the view of everyone being unique and mysterious and don't put labels on things. I'm glad, for your sake, that you felt like this about society, but I can assure you that at no time that any living person grew up was it the case; and, particularly, the labels put on those who failed to outwardly conform to gender norms tended to be quite harsh. > I appreciate it’s a bit of a stretch but in some ways it does feel now in society there is a growing pressure to box people’s identities in more. That’s, literally, the opposite of the case.
franczesko 5y ago
The question would be, how many people who declare up front that they're transgender are actually medically diagnosed with such condition and how many just jumped on the bandwagon of what is fancy on the internet right now? Disclaimer - personally, I'm sceptical about the concept and scientific grounds behind transgenderism and I expect my comment to be downvoted.
- lwhi 5y ago
  Preempting downvotes, because you know your comment is not acceptable to the majority, feels like a very cynical device designed to limit that behaviour.
  - franczesko 5y ago
    I'd be cautious about referring to what is acceptable to the "majority" and claiming that the concept receives a broad support, as in reality it seems that it's quite the opposite.
    - lwhi 5y ago
      I suppose it depends whether you're making the comment in a community where the majority are cis gendered men or not. And furthermore, if you weren't expecting the majority to disagree you've just certified the comment as disingenuous anyway.
      - franczesko 5y ago
        I was expecting a discussion about the merit of my comment and not an immediate downvote just because someone might not like opinion.
narrator 5y ago
If you want to go deep down the rabbit hole here, break your brain, probably ruin your career and seriously damage your ability to interact with woke culture ever again, you can listen to an interview with the author of the book, "The Transgender Industrial Complex" in which the author alleges with copious documentation that the transgender movement is complete astroturf. He did deep research to discover where the transgender movement came from and the enormous amounts private foundations spent on astroturfing thousands of organizations, academic researchers that cite each other and cultural influencers to jumpstart the movement: https://myth20c.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/the-transgender-industrial-complex/ https://myth20c.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/the-transgender-ind... I think it's fascinating to think that our entire culture could just be made up by a bunch of mischievous billionaires fucking with us. It's like we're just cattle in the matrix being programmed from above. It almost makes the real world seem magical.
- polote 5y ago
  > I think it's fascinating to think that our entire culture could just be made up by a bunch of mischievous billionaires fucking with us. Not "could" but "is". That's how media works, if all media agree to say something wrong during some period of time, that will become true. (Example : Aztrazeneca vaccines, masks, ...). And most media belongs to billionaires. The only thing is that they don't belong to the same billionaires and thus don't most of the time push in the same direction which creates some diversity I'm not saying this is the case here, but media and propaganda are very close things
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  Cultures through history had genders we would call transgender.[1] Your source's references include "How The Jews Of Weimar Germany Ensured The Rise Of National Socialism" and "Plandemic Documentary: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history
  - narrator 5y ago
    The "Myth of the 20th Century" is a podcast that is banned on all podcast services because they will interview people on extremely controversial topics. If you play the game of "this person believes X and a crazy person also believes X, therefore they're crazy," then you shouldn't listen to this podcast and just go about your life as you normally would. This is only if you want to deeply question your reality, and possibly ruin your life by becoming aware of things that go against the mainstream.
ushakov 5y ago
> what I'm uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west Big Pharma marketing initiatives, as they have to sell hormone blockers and other drugs to help transition transgender people are their revenue, even if someone isn’t actually transgender, but has doubts/insecurities, money doesn’t smell
- refurb 5y ago
  Those drugs are all generic for the most part. Nobody is making big money off of them.
swebs 5y ago
There was a recent podcast that goes into deep detail of the causes of this phenomenon. How immense social, political, and even legal pressure suppresses those critical to transgender theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSKQfATa-1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSKQfATa-1I
R0b0t1 5y ago
Look for stories of people who are post-op or have gone a large portion of their life as trans. Sometimes they end up figuring out it's not for them. In most of those cases, it's not really that they were tricked or coerced, it's just that they get more help than people who do not identify as trans, but after they fully transition it disappears. In some rare cases a young person is pushed by someone. You see the same thing with people who attempt suicide. People who attempt suicide have better life outcomes in general because they are given more help. Notably suicide is infectious and can trigger copycats. This doesn't mean I think transexualism is fake -- there's a really interesting nature article where they use ML to identify the sex of brains separate from the body's apparent sex. But there definitely are incentives to ID as trans.
konogasa 5y ago
It's not a new thing. In some parts of the world at least transgendered women typically transitioned during their puberty, at 13 or 14. A great source for this observation is 'Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes' by anthropologist Don Kulick, who followed a group of trans sex workers in Salvador. Most of them transition from young boys to teenage sex workers after a sexual encounter with an adult male. From personal (though anecdotal) experience this is a common pattern in many cultures of the so-called Global South, if we include in that South East Asia. Basically for most of the 20th century, most transwomen who transitioned, transitioned in their puberty and went straight into sex work. What has changed recently is that many more trans women transition later in life, after having lived for many decades as men, having married and had children and careers well outside sex work etc. Perhaps because of a more general shift of ideas about gender and sexuality (gay men are nowadays not considered effeminate or feminine just because they fancy men) most transwomen in western countries were generally of this later kind. Then the wheel shifted again. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that the number of people transitioning later in life and in a context that had nothing to do with underage sex and sex work, helped convince society that transition does not have to mean sex work (although in most of the world, it still does, by and large, so what I say applies to more western societies) and that gave more space to younger trans women and also young trans men to express their identity without fearing that a life of humiliation and inevitable sex work awaited them. In my part of the world, when I was transitioning in the late 90's a trans woman who was not into sex work was something unheard of and indeed I had to immigrate to be able to do anything with my life. As to concerns about giving young children puberty blockers etc, I would have to say that this is much better than 13 year olds taking cross-sex hormones without medical supervision and then going to the red light district to display their budding breasts with pride. I hope all this doesn't come across as "wokeness". My concern about other trans women has always been the limited opportunities they've had in life, in my part of the world, and the squalid, degrading and dangerous conditions in which they had to survive as a result (google a bit about the transgendered community in Istanbul if you have strong nerves). I tend to think of all the outrage about identity issues on Twitter as a pleasant change of tone from the grim darkness that was before. A link to that book: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo3621380.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo362138...
a-saleh 5y ago
I think it is just about growing knowledge and acceptance on one side and growing need to demarcate yourself on the other. Everything is a spectrum, right? I remember ~20 years ago, when I knew nothing of being trans-gender as a concept, and I bearly heard of some people being trans-sexuals. These days I am fairly on board with the concept of gender as being a role in society you choose to play, that is often informed by your sex, but doesn't have to.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  I suspect your last sentence is going to offend some people. There are a lot of people who don’t feel strongly gendered, I’m one of them, and I suspect you are too from that sentence. Seeing gender as a social role makes sense to us. However, there are other people who do feel strongly gendered, and for them gender isn’t just a social role but part of their core identity. I suspect at least half of cis folks and nearly all trans folks fit into that group.
deleted 5y ago
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jmopp 5y ago

It follows directly from more acceptance of being transgender in society. It is not pleasant to have to sit with gender dysphoria for years - and then when you eventually do treat it, to have to spend thousands undoing changes to your body. Much better to treat it before it becomes a problem.

joconde 5y ago

Alternative explanation: there have always been as many transgender kids, but they hid it because they knew they'd get bullied by everyone, including their own parents.

deleted 5y ago
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sammalloy 5y ago
This. It's amazing what you find in the shadows, in the periphery of our culture, when you simply look. For a long time, we just refused to see what was right in front of us. There's a long tradition of transgenderism, and anthropologists have been writing about it for a while.
mopsi 5y ago
But that's not the whole story. Kids are also very malleable, open to peer pressure and easily assume identities that earn them acceptance by their peers.
- joconde 5y ago
  Exactly. Transphobia often leads to trauma after getting ostracized by one's peers. I've never seen evidence of "wokeness" being nearly as nasty. You don't get bullied or singled out for not being trans.
  - shtps 5y ago
    If I say I'm hetero and only date biologically born women, wouldn't I be considered transphobic and be ostracized by the woke community?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - progre 5y ago
      I doubt that. Resonable people recognice that there is a diffrence between a personal preference of who to fuck, and telling others who they should prefer to fuck.
      - drstewart 5y ago
        "Reasonable people" seems awfully "no true Scotsman"-y to me
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        But I don't know that it actually is. There's no “everyone will be fine with this” – implied is a “most people are reasonable”, so it isn't the right form of argument to be a No True Scotsman.
        5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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bennysomething 5y ago
However there are things appearing such as clustering of cases (for want of a better word) amoung groups of friends. Times did a piece on it a few years back can't find it. Anyway that would suggest that prevalence stats might muddied somewhat.
- corobo 5y ago
  Friends tend to be similar -- you are the average of your 5 closest friends and that -- it is true that my ADHD diagnosis came about because a friend was diagnosed. We became a friend group in college because we were all outcasts in high school haha. Turns out for a few of us the root cause of the social outcasting was different brain wiring A lot of the things they described had a "wait that's a symptom??" reaction. I have since suggested to a couple of friends to get checked for ADHD in a similar manner if they seem like they might be struggling with it. Worst case they're now in the mental healthcare system and have access to a therapist who can figure out what they're struggling with When you find a good place you tell your mates about it
- Nullabillity 5y ago
  Makes sense to me that people would be more comfortable coming out of their closets if they have friends who have already blazed the way. There's also the little detail that people tend to cluster based on interests and personality traits in the first place, so I could see many ending up in the same circles even if none of them were out yet.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  I'm guessing there are three effects there: • People with shared experiences often cluster together in friend groups. (There are autistic friend groups, yet you'd get laughed out of the village for saying “Sally caught autism off her friends”.) • People tend to come out around people it's safe to come out around. • Seeing your friends coming out as [whatever] might make you properly consider whether you might also like guys, or Minecraft, or not being a woman. And they're the same effects in anyone with a socially-frowned-upon interest. Think of the tabletop-RPG-playing “nerds” of yore.
corobo 5y ago
Slightly more morbid take on that: Folks aren't killing themselves thinking they're broken or wrong as often as they would have before treatment was more known/widespread
krona 5y ago
If social stigma is no longer an issue, why aren't we seeing transitioning across the entire adult population in equal proportion, and not primarily in children?
- joconde 5y ago
  > If social stigma is no longer an issue, Who said that? It's probably becoming less of an issue, but it's definitely not disappeared.
  - krona 5y ago
    Sure, but are you implying the remaining stigma applies unequally and is dependant specifically on age? Is there any evidence of this?
    - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if adults with decades of experiencing living with that stigma would choose differently from young people without those decades of experience.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- avianlyric 5y ago
  Probably because it’s much harder for adults to change their identities. They have lives, responsibilities and dependants. Unlike children they can’t change their identities on a whim without repercussions, or negative impacts on people they care about. I imagine that many people would rather ignore their “true” identity, than risk losing a spouse they care about, or disrupting their children’s futures.
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  We do? I've seen more adult trans people come out in the past year than the entire decade of 2000-2010.
CodeGlitch 5y ago
Alternative explanation: like previous social rebellions like punks, goths, etc... It is "fashionable" and driven by the trends of the time.

hnbad 5y ago

What do you reckon is the reason for the increase in gay kids in the west after the decriminalization of homosexuality in most western countries? Hint: it's the decriminalization and social acceptance allowing gay people to come out of the closet rather than having to pretend they're straight for fear of consequences. The kids aren't being transed. I know there are several mostly British authors having extremely loud voices spreading FUD about "rapid onset gender dysphoria" but that's not even a thing. It's based on a paper that used answers from parents about trans kids. Follow-up research has demonstrated that to the kids it was anything but rapid. You might as well invent a phenomenon of "rapid onset body size" to explain why grandparents will insist "how can you already be so big, it feels like you were a tiny baby only such a short while ago". You're overthinking this, but to ease your mind: people aren't undergoing HRT and surgery because all the cool kids are doing it. They might experiment with neopronouns and gender identity labels for a bit but there's literally no demonstrable harm in that. Also if you think identity politics is a new thing: US politicians literally put God on the dollar bills to appeal to Christian conservatives (prior to that the national motto was always "E pluribus unum", not "In God we trust"). We just don't tend to think of things as identity politics when we take the identity for granted. EDIT: That you see more trans people is a good thing actually. Visibility is the result of social acceptance. And social acceptance is the biggest contributor to reducing suicidality and improving quality of life. Trans people haven't been killing themselves because they're trans, they've been killing themselves because everyone kept telling them they're not. You can't trans a kid any more than you can make them gay.

kybernetyk 5y ago
> And social acceptance is the biggest contributor to reducing suicidality That’s not the proper way to treat depression. No amount of social acceptance will lower the suicide rates of people with mis/untreated depression.
- chownie 5y ago
  It's the proper way to treat depression caused by social rejection, which is as I understand it the bulk of the motivation for suicide among trans people.

pjc50 5y ago

On the other hand, there's no easy way to count the suicides who were closet-trans or just dysphoric without having the words for it. I've now known at least two adults with histories of depression who have transitioned and report being much happier.

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DanBC 5y ago

> I understand there's been a massive increase in cases for transmen in the UK No, there hasn't. You've been lied to. There was no treatment for trans children (in the UK). Then a clinic opened up. We went from zero trans boys to some trans boys. Anti trans campaigners misuse percentages to show an "alarming" rise, when in fact we've simply gone from "none" to "some".

golergka 5y ago
That's exactly what the parent comment said, though, isn't it? Increase from none to some is indeed massive.
- DanBC 5y ago
  No, the parent said that the numbers of trans people have increased. That's not true. The numbers of trans people able to get treatment is the thing that increased. We went from not counting, to counting. So we didn't increase the number of trans people, we just started counting the trans people that always existed.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    He said "cases", though, not "people". I'm not sure if you can say that you have a case without treatment or diagnosis.
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
      They said "increase in transgender kids".
      - jhgb 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure that it's clear that he meant diagnosed cases. Otherwise the text doesn't make sense. You don't ask "Could the reason for more people with X be more people with X?".
5y ago

blub 5y ago

This book’s trying to explain why this is happening for girls: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_Damage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_Damage

DanBC 5y ago
That book relies on the concept of ROGD, which is something that doesn't exist. Anybody pushing ROGD, or supporting other people who push ROGD, is anti-science and anti-fact. You should consider why you feel comfortable pushing something that's obviously bollocks, just because it supports your anti-trans activism. https://www.caaps.co/rogd-statement https://www.caaps.co/rogd-statement
- bsksi 5y ago
  Which one of those psychological associations would have the balls to go against the flow if they felt like it was necessary?
- skrebbel 5y ago
  Totally off topic, and I have no strong opinion on the whole transgender and ROGD thing (i learned that acronym from your comment), but: > anti-science and anti-fact This combination of words doesn't make sense to me. Science constantly discovers new "facts" that invalidate old "facts". I understand stuff like "the current scientific consensus", but I don't understand how you can call people who question the current scientific consensus on something "anti-fact". Especially in the context of psychology and psychiatry, where lately the facts have been superseding themselves rather rapidly. Tldr, if you're pro science, shouldn't you by definition be ever so mildly sceptical of facts? EDIT: note, I'm not trying to attack you personally nor weasel in some alt right talking point. I've seen words like "anti-fact" used a lot lately, I think I understand where it comes from, especially in the context of American hyper-polarized politics. I guess i wrote.my comment hoping to contribute to slightly more constructive language, at least from the sane side of the aisle.
  - JasonFruit 5y ago

morita2342 5y ago

Depending on how much your surroundings insist on putting labels and associated limitations based on what is between your legs on you during growing up; the puberty experience of one half of society can be more awful. This may also get reflected in current numbers of transmen vs transwomen. A transition is an extreme decision taken based on an unbearable amount of such psychological pain. Wondering what started the labeling too though, I’ve also been teached the value of individualism and fended off any label applied to me.. maybe it’s about realizing that most people out there want to apply labels, so a response to their rigid labels is coming up with unlimited new labels.

bsksi 5y ago

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095578/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095578/

andy_ppp 5y ago

I understand this might get downvoted and while I agree with the parent I also blame the contraceptive pill, dysregulation of hormone systems (various reasons), environmental toxins and the general malleability of people when it comes to sexuality at very young ages and for reasons we don’t understand. In my father’s generation the vast majority of men by the time they were 25 years old could grown thick beards now I’d say it’s a minority. We should be more curious about where these changes have come from.

bennysomething 5y ago
I can't grow a beard, does this mean I have low testosterone levels? I doubt it. Pretty certain my grandad couldn't either.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  It depends? T level normalcy is a rolling average, and there's been a decrease if you go back far enough. Same thing with sperm count.
- odiroot 5y ago
  As a data point: my T levels are completely normal and I cannot even grow a reasonable goatee at 34.
lwhi 5y ago
It's dangerous to dismiss transgenderism to be the result of psychological mishaps caused by environmental mishaps. You're effectively presenting a transgender person as a second class person, or a mistake. You're also aligning the ability to grow a beard with being a 1st class citizen.
- shtps 5y ago
  It is equally dangerous to ignore environmental factors. We also know that male fertility is on a sharp decline but don't know why, this may be related and should be investigated.

scollet 5y ago

What's your actual goal with this comment?

hnarn 5y ago
FUD

jurassic 5y ago

Anecdotally, in the startup where I worked there was one summer in 2017 when 3 white women (a significant percent of the women in the office at the time) all suddenly came out as non-binary and asked to be called they/them. If that's not some kind of freaky bandwagon thing going on then I don't know what is. It was like a competition to see who could get the most oppression points or something. Now I'm in a different company, with a lot of folks who are pretty clearly biologically female claiming the non-binary identity. Most confusing of all to me are the non-binary people who still self-describe as lesbians. Do they think gender is a thing or not? I'm expecting a pretty harsh backlash against all this gender politics at some point. I'm not sure when or how it will manifest, but even some of my LGB friends privately tell me they think it's gone too far. For the most part, though, they are too afraid to say anything in public because they don't want to get attacked and possibly lose their jobs over it. It's clear that the gender radicals have wielded online bully tactics to gain full control over the range of acceptable discourse. LGBT are often portrayed as some kind of monolithic entity in mainstream media, but the reality is that there's a lot of ideological tension in the mix between the cis and trans people. The only place I see these tensions spilling into the open is in the UK, where the LGB Alliance and Stonewall organizations are at odds. Wondering when the same will happen in the US. Let me lay out the tension for those who may not be familiar. On the one side you have LGB people who mostly say their sexuality is immutable and based on attraction to specific sexes. "Baby, I was born this way" in the words of Lady Gaga. As an example, maybe you're a lesbian which means a woman who is attracted to other women; for most of history this was understood to mean a person of the female sex attracted to another person of the female sex. Meanwhile you have trans activists trying to stretch the meaning of words like "man" and "woman" to the point that they don't really mean anything anymore. Anybody can be a woman if that's how they identify today, which has the effect of broadening what it means to be a lesbian in a way that some lesbians may not agree with. The status quo today is that if you're a lesbian and not willing to include the "female penis" in your sexual orientation, you're at risk of being called a TERF/transphobe. This seems like an irreconcilable difference of views. Despite what you might think if you've read this far, I do not hate trans people. I have sympathy for them and whatever lack of self-acceptance has led them into their current path. I make an effort to use preferred pronouns and be respectful to those I work with. But I'm also extremely concerned about what the collateral damage to LGB people will be when Republicans capitalize on woke extremism at the ballot box.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> On a related point, what I’m uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west. Broad acknowledgement (though there remains some sharp and often violent denial, so while better than the best the current situation isn’t at the limit of this) that gender identity can differ from socially ascribed gender and that such a difference is cause for realigning socially ascribed gender to gender identity means that people whose gender identity differs from their socially ascribed gender both are likely to have: (1) a framework for understanding the source of their discomfort that would not exist absent the degree of acceptance, and (2) a license to identify their understanding of the source of their discomfort to others that woud not exist without the degree of acceptance, and (3) a hope of relief that would not exist without the social norm of realigning ascribed gender to match gender identity. Naturally, this means that more people aren’t just going to keep quiet and attempt to fit into the box society has assigned them at whatever pain it takes, as would previously have been the case because there was no visible alternative. > but it was also a time when society encouraged the view of everyone being unique and mysterious and don't put labels on things. I'm glad, for your sake, that you felt like this about society, but I can assure you that at no time that any living person grew up was it the case; and, particularly, the labels put on those who failed to outwardly conform to gender norms tended to be quite harsh. > I appreciate it’s a bit of a stretch but in some ways it does feel now in society there is a growing pressure to box people’s identities in more. That’s, literally, the opposite of the case.

franczesko 5y ago

The question would be, how many people who declare up front that they're transgender are actually medically diagnosed with such condition and how many just jumped on the bandwagon of what is fancy on the internet right now? Disclaimer - personally, I'm sceptical about the concept and scientific grounds behind transgenderism and I expect my comment to be downvoted.

lwhi 5y ago
Preempting downvotes, because you know your comment is not acceptable to the majority, feels like a very cynical device designed to limit that behaviour.
- franczesko 5y ago
  I'd be cautious about referring to what is acceptable to the "majority" and claiming that the concept receives a broad support, as in reality it seems that it's quite the opposite.
  - lwhi 5y ago
    I suppose it depends whether you're making the comment in a community where the majority are cis gendered men or not. And furthermore, if you weren't expecting the majority to disagree you've just certified the comment as disingenuous anyway.
    - franczesko 5y ago
      I was expecting a discussion about the merit of my comment and not an immediate downvote just because someone might not like opinion.

narrator 5y ago

If you want to go deep down the rabbit hole here, break your brain, probably ruin your career and seriously damage your ability to interact with woke culture ever again, you can listen to an interview with the author of the book, "The Transgender Industrial Complex" in which the author alleges with copious documentation that the transgender movement is complete astroturf. He did deep research to discover where the transgender movement came from and the enormous amounts private foundations spent on astroturfing thousands of organizations, academic researchers that cite each other and cultural influencers to jumpstart the movement: https://myth20c.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/the-transgender-industrial-complex/ https://myth20c.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/the-transgender-ind... I think it's fascinating to think that our entire culture could just be made up by a bunch of mischievous billionaires fucking with us. It's like we're just cattle in the matrix being programmed from above. It almost makes the real world seem magical.

polote 5y ago
> I think it's fascinating to think that our entire culture could just be made up by a bunch of mischievous billionaires fucking with us. Not "could" but "is". That's how media works, if all media agree to say something wrong during some period of time, that will become true. (Example : Aztrazeneca vaccines, masks, ...). And most media belongs to billionaires. The only thing is that they don't belong to the same billionaires and thus don't most of the time push in the same direction which creates some diversity I'm not saying this is the case here, but media and propaganda are very close things
pseudalopex 5y ago
Cultures through history had genders we would call transgender.[1] Your source's references include "How The Jews Of Weimar Germany Ensured The Rise Of National Socialism" and "Plandemic Documentary: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history
- narrator 5y ago
  The "Myth of the 20th Century" is a podcast that is banned on all podcast services because they will interview people on extremely controversial topics. If you play the game of "this person believes X and a crazy person also believes X, therefore they're crazy," then you shouldn't listen to this podcast and just go about your life as you normally would. This is only if you want to deeply question your reality, and possibly ruin your life by becoming aware of things that go against the mainstream.

ushakov 5y ago

> what I'm uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west Big Pharma marketing initiatives, as they have to sell hormone blockers and other drugs to help transition transgender people are their revenue, even if someone isn’t actually transgender, but has doubts/insecurities, money doesn’t smell

refurb 5y ago
Those drugs are all generic for the most part. Nobody is making big money off of them.

swebs 5y ago

There was a recent podcast that goes into deep detail of the causes of this phenomenon. How immense social, political, and even legal pressure suppresses those critical to transgender theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSKQfATa-1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSKQfATa-1I

R0b0t1 5y ago

Look for stories of people who are post-op or have gone a large portion of their life as trans. Sometimes they end up figuring out it's not for them. In most of those cases, it's not really that they were tricked or coerced, it's just that they get more help than people who do not identify as trans, but after they fully transition it disappears. In some rare cases a young person is pushed by someone. You see the same thing with people who attempt suicide. People who attempt suicide have better life outcomes in general because they are given more help. Notably suicide is infectious and can trigger copycats. This doesn't mean I think transexualism is fake -- there's a really interesting nature article where they use ML to identify the sex of brains separate from the body's apparent sex. But there definitely are incentives to ID as trans.

konogasa 5y ago

It's not a new thing. In some parts of the world at least transgendered women typically transitioned during their puberty, at 13 or 14. A great source for this observation is 'Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes' by anthropologist Don Kulick, who followed a group of trans sex workers in Salvador. Most of them transition from young boys to teenage sex workers after a sexual encounter with an adult male. From personal (though anecdotal) experience this is a common pattern in many cultures of the so-called Global South, if we include in that South East Asia. Basically for most of the 20th century, most transwomen who transitioned, transitioned in their puberty and went straight into sex work. What has changed recently is that many more trans women transition later in life, after having lived for many decades as men, having married and had children and careers well outside sex work etc. Perhaps because of a more general shift of ideas about gender and sexuality (gay men are nowadays not considered effeminate or feminine just because they fancy men) most transwomen in western countries were generally of this later kind. Then the wheel shifted again. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that the number of people transitioning later in life and in a context that had nothing to do with underage sex and sex work, helped convince society that transition does not have to mean sex work (although in most of the world, it still does, by and large, so what I say applies to more western societies) and that gave more space to younger trans women and also young trans men to express their identity without fearing that a life of humiliation and inevitable sex work awaited them. In my part of the world, when I was transitioning in the late 90's a trans woman who was not into sex work was something unheard of and indeed I had to immigrate to be able to do anything with my life. As to concerns about giving young children puberty blockers etc, I would have to say that this is much better than 13 year olds taking cross-sex hormones without medical supervision and then going to the red light district to display their budding breasts with pride. I hope all this doesn't come across as "wokeness". My concern about other trans women has always been the limited opportunities they've had in life, in my part of the world, and the squalid, degrading and dangerous conditions in which they had to survive as a result (google a bit about the transgendered community in Istanbul if you have strong nerves). I tend to think of all the outrage about identity issues on Twitter as a pleasant change of tone from the grim darkness that was before. A link to that book: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo3621380.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo362138...

a-saleh 5y ago

I think it is just about growing knowledge and acceptance on one side and growing need to demarcate yourself on the other. Everything is a spectrum, right? I remember ~20 years ago, when I knew nothing of being trans-gender as a concept, and I bearly heard of some people being trans-sexuals. These days I am fairly on board with the concept of gender as being a role in society you choose to play, that is often informed by your sex, but doesn't have to.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
I suspect your last sentence is going to offend some people. There are a lot of people who don’t feel strongly gendered, I’m one of them, and I suspect you are too from that sentence. Seeing gender as a social role makes sense to us. However, there are other people who do feel strongly gendered, and for them gender isn’t just a social role but part of their core identity. I suspect at least half of cis folks and nearly all trans folks fit into that group.

deleted 5y ago

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