This morning, after descending into the bowels of the site “Kiwi Farms” (the lair of some of the Internet’s more colorful denizens), we tweet-stormed about the unethical “gender specialists” who profit from the identity confusion of teens addicted to anime and Tumblr-inspired cosplay. The particular Kiwi Farms thread discusses what many of us parents are all too aware of: The impact of hours of pretend-identity play on our kids’ desire to make their Internet fantasies a reality “IRL.”
The question is: Where the hell are the developmental psychologists, sociologists, autism experts, and responsible journalists [more and more an oxymoron] on this issue? It’s not like this stuff is happening in secret.
Here is the “storified” tweet storm, reproduced below.
When I was 14/15, I believed I had psychic powers. I’m sure if I was growing up today, I would be some genderspecial.
Ok. Really support you talking common sense about the online social contagion that is the trans trend. However you are coming over very Daily Mail here. Are you seriously suggesting anime cosplay is turning kids trans?! That’s like saying playing computer games causes kids to commit violent crime.
The link here is that kids into anime are far more likely to spend excessive time online – especially on tumblr, which they’re exposed and vulnerable to the trans trend.
It’s multifactorial. While correlation does not equal causation, it doesn’t mean hours of pretending to be something you’re not–especially if you have autism or other social anxiety–is irrelevant to the teen trans trend. Tumblr and anime are entangled for many of these kids. It’s like one of the Kiwi Farms commenters pointed out: add Tumblr “callout culture” to the cosplay addiction, and you’ve radically increased the overall toxicity of the brew.
Iowa State researchers say there is a strong connection between violent video games, youth violence, and delinquency.
New study on violent video games show impact is lasting https://youtu.be/JY3hHQOWjlU via @YouTube
Violent video games are a risk factor for criminal behavior and aggression: http://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2013/03/26/violentvideogames
Violent Video Games, Delinquency, and Youth Violence: New Evidence: http://www.soc.iastate.edu/staff/delisi/10%201177_1541204012460874.pdf
The supposed connection between video games and violence has been disproven since the 1990s.
Consider just the game “Call of Duty”. I bought it for my husband for Christmas a few years ago. He’s a super peaceful guy (when I say he’d make a great hostage negotiator people always agree) But he opened the wrapping paper and then played for 13 straight hours.
But here’s the thing – people who play Call of Duty in the US alone kill billions of people in the game play every year, and yet, outside Chicago, the murder rate is going down, and has been going down for as long as Call of Duty has been available.
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.
“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued,
“The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
I think it’s not so much that anime and cosplay cause kids to turn trans as that adults seeking to financially profit and socially engineer through transgenderism have jumped in and are exploiting this teen exploration for all it’s worth. It perverts the self exploration process of kids, often with very destructive results which may be permanent or at least very hard to undo. Exploration of identities is in itself perfectly normal for kids to do and adults should not barge in on it with their own agendas. I remember a few years back we had Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is a little after my youth, but to my knowledge kids were not becoming trans left and right as a result of the dressing up and playing parts in that culture.
My kid’s a rabid gamer but not the anime kind. More fantasy rpg. I do think that because she prefers to play male characters virtually 100% of the time (afaik, maybe in Sims there would be some token females) she sees this as self-validation of her innate maleness. There are certainly lots of trans communities online that would tell her just that: “You want to play as males, you must obviously BE a male.”
Drives me nuts.
Bella C, agree w/you regarding “excessive hours on line” and potential effects thereof, in terms of crossover in other areas of the internet.
I will add, briefly, that I do wonder about the effect on the brain of a female-bodied person in inhabiting only male personae for literally thousands of hours, so that your internal image of yourself is constantly reinforced as male. When you step away, look in the mirror, and you expect to see whatever you think of as “male” (which in an rpg is pretty invariably a good looking and powerful dude) — when you don’t see that, it’s gotta piss you off at some level, every day. So when someone else online tells you that transition can MAKE you look like that, instead of this weak little girl you see yourself as … I can see how it’s so so tempting. You know? But the price of chasing that male body, in terms of physical and psychological health, is so incredibly high. So much better to accept fantasy as fantasy, to be enjoyed as fantasy. Thus the crying need for more mature brain development before such irrevocable decisions are made. To give a person time to figure out if they can, in fact, separate fantasy from fact.
Yes! or that the only female characters are hypersexualized and probably don’t represent a normal or healthy schema of womanhood
True. In real life, I prefer female friends to male ones, but the way females are often portrayed in media is very unrealistic and hypersexualized. That’s especially true for a lot of video games. One of the few video games that didn’t sexualize its female characters was The Last of Us. The game does take place post-zombie apocalypse, but it’s still nice to see that the female characters are all wearing practical clothing as they go across the US. It’s very nice, but it’s also very much the exception to the rule.
So, I can see how, especially for a lot of video games, the male characters might be a lot more relatable since they actually get to have a personality beyond one-dimensional love-interest or token sex object.
I keep seeing stuff about girls thinking they are boys because they identify with male characters…or want to be the male characters. So have I , all my life. As a girl watching Blake’s 7, did I want to be cool and sexy Jenna, the glamorous space smuggler? No. I wanted to be Avon. Why? Because as another fan put it: “He is allowed by story conventions to be many things that I as a brainy woman would like to have permission to be. He can be cold, arrogant, driven, “difficult”, curious, eccentric, ill-tempered. And yet he is still lovable. I’m jealous.”
All of those traits are common for Aspies. I remember adoring Blackadder as well, wanting to be cynical, sarcastic, misanthropic, savagely witty….and it took a long time for it to dawn on me that these characteristics arent considered lovable or desirable or sexy in women and even less so in girls. Not many men want a girl who is icy and remote and interestingly damaged. Kurt Cobain is a tortured genius: the girls queue up,. but Courtney Love is a scary harridan: the men stay away….so other girls actually want to BE Kurt, not Courtney.
We need more characters like Bridget Jones: she’s messed-up, but she’s great. And we need a lot more like Scarlett O’Hara. The thing is, with female characters, it still starts with what they look like, even if that’s now more varied, and then their personalities are never like anyone real, or if they are, they are the type of woman Aspie-type girls dont like: women whose clothes are always well put together, even if its just jeans and shirt….and they wear the clothes unconsciously, always just so, and they always have this moral compass that never wavers, and always assertive…
Scarlett, now: her clothes are weapons, and so are her good looks. She has followed her mother’s and Mammy’s instructions to act silly, because it works to get men…whom she sees as her prey. Scarlett is interesting and complicated and difficult, but she’s ‘lovable’! She’s very real: why arent there more heroines like this, instead of the one-dimensional Hunger Games type? Maybe GOT’s Samsa could appeal, where Arya would not.
This stuff is important. These girls need to know why it is they are identifying with, or wanting to be, the men.
I have to say there are plenty of male characters whose physical appearance is front-and-center when understanding their character – Spock leaps to mind.
Tweet number 6 made me laugh a little with regards to “hirsutifying blue haired 16 year olds” because my daughter who is certain she is a boy has cycled through no fewer than 6 hair colors in the last year, beginning with blue, and most recently asked me to dye her hair pink. I am all for this kind of reversible experimentation at this age and have become a pretty adept hair colorist, but I did feel a bit amused that she sees no connection between her constant desire to try on new hair colors and her abrupt gender identity change. Notably her girlfriend — who to all appearances is pretty conventionally feminine — now identifies as gender fluid. Such a weird moment to be a girl it seems.
It definitely is!! Adolescence is already a time where kids experiment with self-expression (which I agree is healthy and an important part of coming “into” yourself). But to completely deny biological reality and push that idea onto our kids is so irresponsible, harmful, and frankly ridiculous, and it’s really horrific that professionals are buying into it and pushing these beliefs on kids during such a fragile and precarious time in their development. I am a therapist who is working to help kids with gender identity issues find more healthy ways of viewing themselves and their bodies.
I’m assuming MLM means “man-loving man” in that context. I’ve only ever seen it as an abbreviation for multi-level marketing, a pyramid scheme by any other name. The KF boards are really creepy (to put it mildly), and I hate how they talk about autistics, but once in awhile they do talk sense. Thinking back to how I was as a teen, and how many other teens are, it’s not such a big leap to say too much game-playing can lead to the lines between reality and fantasy being blurred. As opposed to when I was a teen in the Nineties, though, now it’s harder and harder for teens to have a life outside of the Internet unless their parents are proactive and limit their access.
Thanks for posting this. I know a couple of guys (both adults) who have come out as trans in the past year and they are heavily into anime and gaming culture. There’s definitely got to be a link here. From what they tell me about their trans experience I get the impression that they are autogynephiles. I know they were bullied a lot as kids and are very socially isolated (including contact with women.) I don’t know if they watch porn or not but these days the females in even regular anime are very sexualized and I almost want to conclude that they’ve become attracted to something that doesn’t exist in the real world (anime girls) and are trying to make it a reality with their own bodies. Does that make any sense?
I also think its something else. The socially isolated Asperger’s type people generally dont like the modern style of dress. Its hard enough to try and read social codes, and clothing is helpful. At one time, people’s clothes accurately reflected their status and sex and profession, plus, everyone used to dress in a smart and highly ordered style. There were rules, about what hat went with what dress, etc. For Aspies, this would be a great relief. Have you ever noticed its seems to be common for Aspies to wear vintage clothes, to love the 1920s especially? I often read of isolated kids showing up to social events with things like walking sticks, dressed in suits.
The modern style has no clear boundaries. Everyone dresses the same, really, boy and girl, rich and poor, black and white. In my experience, most men like a traditional feminine style…are entranced by it, even, and I can imagine this might be even more so for Aspies….maybe the male Aspie sexual response is coded differently…maybe its more clearly aroused by seeing something that is strongly coded, old-style: ‘girl’. It could be confusing, perhaps, to be aroused by someone dressed the same as the boys. And if no girls are wearing “girl”, yes, maybe they are doing it themselves.
I have thought this for a while: whether its a coincidence that as scarcely any modern girls bother past about age 18 with very feminine prettiness, so many men are taking up the prettiness themselves. It’d be interesting to see if women suddenly went back to dressing High Femme whether the men would pack it in. I think there’s a lot of deep unconscious ingrained-over-centuries stuff going on. The High Femme style is a style of vulnerability: shoes you cant run in, tight clothes you cant breathe in; combined with the style of teasing and playing hard-to-get: the dropped eyes, peek-a-boo signals, etc…and the mix of vulnerable and unavailable has been designated ‘desirable’ by men, for thousands of years. Its still very new for women to be challenging, totally independent..and walking right up to a man and selecting him. Lots of men cant cut it in this world: there they are, complaining about ‘modern harridans” (Adapt or perish, guys) and admiring adolescent-minded simpletons like that Roosh character. Guys who read Return of Kings want girls who are young, pretty, and who make very little money and are devoted to the man with no needs of her own. Its not hard to imagine these poor creatures absolutely require a woman to look vulnerable (so as not to challenge him and make him feel all manly) and also seem unavailable (so they can deny any rejection). This could all be a perfect storm: a lot of men who cant handle the new world combined with progressive politics applauding trans and kick-started by Jenner…one by one, they start acting the girl who doesnt exist anymore…I think this is different to AGP…its the (hopefully) last kick of the old-fashioned male chauvinist. Reduced to playing what they inwardly despise, because they cant get it up for a smart high-earner in flat shoes!
Your comments about Aspies and understanding dress “codes” is an interesting one. I’m still being assessed for having HFA and I remember, growing up in the 1990s, you could easily work out who “your people” were by looking at how they presented themselves. This doesn’t happen so much these days.
Also, you mentioned the 1920s – I’ve always loved the ’20s and ’30s precisely because that was a time when gender roles really started to get thrown out of the window, although this progress was halted and didn’t really start again until the 1960s. Give me the geometric shapes and the innovative colours and decorations of the ’20s (or the ’60s) over the fluffy femininity of the ’50s, or the high-maintenance sleazy look of today, any day.
The period between the wars also saw lots of exploration and technological advance, and women were part of that: all of those aviatrixes and racing drivers, as well as avant-garde poets and revolutionary fashion designers.
I don’t agree with everything you say here, but I think that the comparison with pickup artists is an illuminating one. IMO, the “I’m not a heterosexual male nerd, I’m a lesbian gamer girl with a penis” MTF, and the “born-again douchebag” who takes up weightlifting/nightclubbing as an adult and consciously tries to embody the worst reactionary bro stereotypes, are often two sides of the same coin — guys who are self-conscious about not measuring up to other males and are looking for a way to cope with their own geekiness.
I am glad the media are finally reflecting both sides of this. As you say multi faceted but how so many reasonable adults are persuaded to affirm faulty and unhealthy thinking concerns me. A lack of instinctive common sense and reliance on PC mantra from self serving groups.
“Are you seriously suggesting anime cosplay is turning kids trans?! ”
LOL NO! But the obsession with gay men – real and fictional is not healthy (and homophobic). When I was younger – I had the same problem. I was: 1. Depressed, 2. was unconfortable female body, 3. my ADHD wasn’t diagnosed so I had problems because of this, 4. couldn’t relate to women AT ALL.
I wanted love and relationships but NOT as a woman. I read tons of yaoi manga, read slash stories, roleplayed as gay characters and so on. I couldn’t fathom a relationship with a man AS a woman.
Thank god I didn’t now what tumblr was and in my country – obtaining hormones is not as easy. So I had the chance to grow out of it. I know many other young women who had similar experiences. Internalized misogyny mixed with mental health issues is dangerous.
But what is the trans mantra? You are what you identify as. You always WERE what you identify AS. Wanting to be a man means you are trans and hating your biological sex is healthy and a sign that you are INDEED trans. When gay men are annoyed because you fetishize them and claim to be like them – they are transphobic because validating gender identities is a duty. Everything else is “violent” and literally “kills” trans people.
This isn’t about cosplaying or liking fictional stories.
I wouldn’t say anime makes anyone trans. However, Mimi has a good point. It’s not healthy for hetero or bi women to be obsessed over gay guys, whether they are real or fictional. I got into anime and manga in middle school including the yaoi. I read a wide variety of manga, since I lived in a decent sized city and Borders had a good selection. (Remember Borders?) I have noticed as I’ve gotten older that some fans have been taking it way to far, as in women thinking they are actually gay men or wishing their fairy godmother would make them a gay man. Nowadays, there’s the younger generation (the ones 10-15 years younger than me) who take it to even more outrageous levels and insist that gay men are the oppressors for not wanting anything to do with the “yaoi bois”. Yeah no, it doesn’t work that way. A woman cannot be a man, let alone a gay man. Ditto for heterosexual men who think they’re “lesbians”. Biology doesn’t work that way people.
I’ve also noticed that unless you’re in an anime fandom where the anime has a very small fanbase, you’ll find a lot of support for the trans trend. If you’re not going with some sparkly identity, then you’re cis and therefore bad. The amount of women and girl anime fans who have a social media account where they are preemptively apologizing for possibly offending trans for being “cis” women is depressing.
Scarleteen once answered an advice query from a young woman who said she was straight, but had become obsessed with gay men to the point of wishing she’d been born one. She said she didn’t want to transition, though if she retained those feelings, she might very well have been gotten to by Trans, Inc.
http://www.scarleteen.com/article/advice/im_a_straight_girl_but_wish_i_were_a_gay_guy
On a side note, Scarleteen has also full-on gotten into transactivism, like with rewriting some of their older advice pieces to contain language like “people with uteruses,” “person with a vulva,” “people who menstruate,” and “people with testes.” The Go Ask Alice advice website, for a somewhat older readership, has also been doing this lately.
Yikes, I can tell they are big on the queer-theory and trans-speak just from the rambley nature of that message. I think the only good advice they gave that girl was to think about why she likes coming out stories about gay guys and gay porn so much, but that’s it. The rest of it is just garbage of “look at how speshul and unique and queer everyone is”, along with the idea that there is more than two sexes. (Nope, biology fail.)
I guess my advice would be to lay off the gay porn for a while and maybe find a shrink who isn’t going to write a blank check for testosterone. (I know she said she wasn’t interested in SRS, but I really think a lot of these gender therapists coach people who are uncertain into it.)
I’ve noticed from my experiences with women like her that a lot of them are heterosexual or bisexual and want a relationship with a man without being treated like a sex object, and think being a gay man would allow that to happen.
I could write a book about how much I hate terms like “people with uteruses”, “people who menstruate”, and birthing parent so much. Anything to avoid saying “woman”. Anything to avoid pointing out that men have pensises and many of them use them to rape other women.
As a childfree-for-life lesbian, it really annoys me when they use childfree and/or infertile women as tokens to justify this. Pointing out that only women can get pregnant and give birth is not the same as saying infertile women don’t exist or that all women who can must reproduce. Similarly, pointing out that only women can have menstrual cycles doesn’t erase women who have gone through menopause or have a medical condition where they don’t have periods for whatever reason. Once they’ve used childfree and/or infertile women as tokens, they go right back to not caring about us. I mean, who cares that society still has a big, misogynistic problem with women who don’t have children. We instead need to fawn over men who want to be women.
I used to be part of that community years ago, but now I am okay with being a gender non conforming female. I think it’s harder to accept that in this decade because young girls are being pressured to be like their favorite male characters or entertainers, but they are being fed with unrealistic expectations thanks to the mainstream LGBT and social media. Most of the time, they’re are just lesbian or bisexual girls trying to reenact scenes from their favorite gay boy (yaoi) anime shows. Most I know do end up in lesbian relationships, but the younger ones just say they’re “boifriends”, but in reality, they are in a lesbian relationship. That’s just my experience.
I would be careful with that forum because it’s a very far right platform, but then again I’m seeing radfems citing right-winged articles about the realities of transgenderism because the liberal media now refuses to do that unfortunately.
You have probably seen some version of this by now, but, for your readers:
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/susan-bradley-how-trans-activists-are-unethically-influencing-autistic-children-to-change-genders
“I would be careful with that forum because it’s a very far right platform!
That’s not true. They laugh about everyone. Of course they aren’t nice but they aren’t far right.
They now claim an 11,000 signature petition, but EVERYONE knows they game their petitions, using multiple system ids to signature bomb.
The documentary in question is now up on BBC iPlayer (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b088kxbw/transgender-kids-who-knows-best), I haven’t had time to watch it yet, but the description was so surprising (I was expecting the usual mainstream treatment), that I came straight here to see if it had been mentioned yet:
It probably isn’t available to non-UK residents, and is only up for a month.
I think an important causal factor here is that social media and Internet forums make it easy for well-meaning acquaintances to play along with the fantasy. In my own experience with adult-onset MTFs, while it’s difficult for people who aren’t part of the trans subculture to keep up the pretense in a face-to-face interaction (much less in the long-term close contact of friendship or parenthood), on social media it’s easy to click “like” on someone’s carefully curated photo, to ostentatiously use their “correct” name and pronouns, or to post a “you go girl/boy” drive-by comment. A lonely introvert who spends most of their life online can easily rack up hundreds of Facebook likes or Reddit karma points from well-meaning casual acquaintances eager to signal how accepting they are now that trans is the Next Big Civil Rights Frontier.
With all due respect, I do agree with the suggestion that singling out anime as a cause, rather than a correlating factor for geeky kids who spend a lot of time on the Internet, risks coming across as an EC Comics-style moral panic. But it’s absolutely true that online geek/fandom communities are terrible recruiting grounds for at-risk teens. In the context of MTFs, being the sort of introverted boy who prefers imaginative fantasy play to competitive roughhousing is one of the classic “not like the other guys” traits that gets retroactively turned into “…and therefore, I was a girl all along” upon exposure to trans ideology.
Kiwi Farms is frustratingly informative. It’s a “point and laugh at the freaks” website which caters to Internet trolls with a right-wing bent… and yet it’s the only site shining a flashlight on the ugly truth that in the real, offline world, many of the middle-aged MTF ringleaders of social media trans culture are lowlives and scam artists. No respectable journalist is willing to lift up this rock and report honestly on the fact that people like “Zinnia” Jones, “Sarah” Nyberg and “Brianna” Wu are a bunch of creepy underachievers who you’d never in a million years let anywhere near your kids in real life.
I agree about Kiwi Farms. I sometimes lurk their forums, not wanting to agree with anything written there because of the mean-spirited premise of the site. However, I must admit that if I manage to skip over the rudeness and silliness, there are some insightful comments, as well as (often) well documented, illuminating information on some of the most unethical male transwomen who need to be exposed for what they are. Other than Kiwi Farms, only perhaps GallusMag at GenderTrender is willing, as heteronerd put it, to “lift up this rock” and shine a light on the worms, bugs and lizards wriggling around underneath. These male transwoman creeps have a very vocal, almost constant online presence and no doubt many of our kids know who they are, and may even be influenced by them.
Like heteronerd, I also wish there was a mainstream journalist willing to tackle this topic.
Greta Gustav from TransLifeline comes to my mind. This apparent suicide hotline for trans people is a SCAM. Only Kiwifarms talks about this and has tons of evidence. Not the ´gay/trans/left media.
I was reading “hold on to your kids”, it is about attachment theory and youth. The theory in the book is that our society makes it easy for kids to attach to each other rather than their parents. Your mileage may vary on how true that is, but there is a lot of compelling discussion of youth based cultures generally. It may be worth a read. Or perhaps 4th wave now could contact the authors to get opinions about youth trans identification.
I’ve been thinking over some theories myself. Going back to my teenhood, we did mess about with our”identities” in various ways: swapping names with each other for the day, convincing others we were sisters when we were not related, pretending to be French/other nationalities, insisting on being called a strange version of our names, trying to develop psychic powers, inventing our own slang and codes, for secret chatting and annoying others. One game we had was giving each other boys’ names and inventing “boy personalities” for ourselves. One of my friends will still answer to “Billy”.
None of this meant we were French, psychic, male, or long-lost siblings, although we could be quite persistent in our little games. The difference with now is that our identity play was carried out in verbal form only, with scribbled notes at most to document it. Teen girls today are playing the same sort of identity games, but their arena is the internet, where nothing is secret and nothing can really be deleted. It also leaves their interactions wide open for agenda-laden adults to intervene, which never happened to us, and only rarely happened to others when a pervy teacher or odd parent stuck their oar in.
We also weren’t in an echo chamber like Tumblr. Our ideas came and went when we got bored of them. There was no real aspect of performance, and there was no-one watching who would be disappointed when we went back to spelling our names correctly, or admitting we were English.
This is a bit rambly, but I’m hoping that someone will come along and give a proper name to what I’m talking about.
Yes, I also played those sort of identity games when I was 14/15. I had psychic powers, was a unicorn in a person’s body, and had an alter ego that I could switch into. A big factor in helping me grow out of these was recognizing that these were anti-social ideas that would lead to isolation if they continued. If I had been in a Tumblr echo chamber where every identity is validated, who knows, I might be an otherkin witch with headmates today.
This is why pushback from parents is so necessary, because kids aren’t going to get it anywhere else.
I did the same thing when I was a teenager. I’m American, so I had friends who pretended to be British (we have this stereotype that you guys are sophisticated). A friend, who was also a girl,and I had an in-joke that we were just like these two anime characters we liked. (I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t decide we were like two male anime characters we liked, otherwise we’d be subjected to the mindscrew message we were really dudes.)
Trying on different identities is normal as a kid and a teenager. What’s not normal is adults taking it at face value and reinforcing a fantasy idea.
OMG, my high school days were full of fake British accents!
And at Girl Scout camp one summer, all the girls in my cabin group took boy names. We totally acted like girls as usual, but called each other boy names – mine was Doug.
Mind if I (somewhat cheekily) give it a name from anime (Japanese, but very familiar to anime fans) culture? Chuunibyou:
http://en.dic.pixiv.net/a/Chuunibyou
I find it sad – and disturbing – that our youth culture revolves around being “different” as automatically cool, and being normal, typical, average being looked down upon as uncool. Is it not possible that one of the great things about an individual are qualities that individual shares with a large portion of the population?
I think that’s only true on the internet. Kids still pick on the different kid in school as much as ever.
Interesting – maybe that’s why the internet-driven “different” business is so intense
Was reading your twitter account, dont have one yet. I think this sort of advertising campaign that 4thWaveNow Retweeted
British Gay Eugenics @BritEugCouncil 2h2 hours ago
We fight to incarcerate parents who don’t approve of puberty blockers because ‘what if they’re just gay’? All tips are strictly confidential
might be successful. Shaming gay men into speaking up about this?
I’m wondering if the age at which someone announces they’re trans might be linked to different motivations. Like the 13-14 year olds might be attracted by being part of an internet group that accepts them, in contrast to the difficulties of fitting in at a real school. On the internet, one can just keep lurking until one finds a group where one matches up well enough with the others to feel belonging. At school, the cool group that wants to make you look like an idiot is not so easy to avoid/ignore.
With the older teens who announce “I’m trans” after a semester or so of college, this is an age at which symptoms of certain mental illnesses, most notably schizophrenia and bipolar, become noticed by family & school officials. Considering the literature about the comorbidity of other mental illnesses, could it be that someone who today identifies as trans is reaching out for an explanation for certain difficulties, and since “trans” is all the buzz, the troubled college freshman might try to shoehorn feeling uncomfortable about his/her life into the trans ideology? Especially because on so many campuses “trans” is a community, and mental illness tends to be a solitary and lonely experience.
As for the adult males who announce to their wives and kids that they’re trans, I think the autogynephilia hypothesis fits very well. Also there’s a monumental selfishness in that particular group.
Additionally, mental health services are increasingly tick box exercises in referral onwards. A bit like hospital Triage. Accepting a self diagnosis of Trans as a Cahms counsellor means a couple of sessions of explaining Transition and refer to GID clinic. Job Done! At least the stats look good even if the ‘client’ has not actually been fully assessed. Even if GID probe deeper the young person is affirmed and pursuing a myth instead of being supporting with a reality. No counselling better than ad or rushed counselling.
As an anime fan I’ve seen a lot of these gaybois – female fans who are into yaoi and now excuse themselves by saying they’re actually gay men inside. And as others here have stated, consuming tons of tons of media from a male point of view only is going to have an affect on a young self-loathing teenage girl.
There are also men who have masturbated to too much anime porn and identify as lesbians. You see them frequently on Tumblr and Twitter. The link between trans women and porn is very strong.
Anime in itself is not a problem, but it’s interesting to think of why there is such an overlap between anime fans and trans trenders. I think it is because a lot of anime series are so blatantly unreal much of the time, its attracting an audience of people who want escape from the real world. Another is the fandoms, where kids can spend countless time online exploring these fictional worlds and characters – which is of course true for any fandom. Third, anime is Japanese media and Japan is a strongly patriarchal country on the whole. Anime often has very stereotypical gender roles, girls being objectified and frequently side characters, boys as heroes. Male characters have wider range, from manly to cute and feminine. It’s no wonder a girl might be more likely to identify with a heroic feminine male character so commonly found in anime than a meek or sexualized female side character.
The combination of being a vulnerable young person, mental illness and spending a large amount of time online is definitely giving a lot of kids trouble understanding what’s real and not.
An extreme example is the US Slenderman stabbing case, two 12-year old girls stabbed their friend nearly to death to appease “Slenderman”, a creepy figure invented by internet users. They really thought that he was real. At least one of the girl was seriously mentally ill, and all that internet time didn’t help. That doesnt mean we should ban kids from using the net, or ban anime or whatever. But the link is there, kids consuming tons of internet media and losing grip on reality. And we should talk about it. It’s very interesting.
Quick question: is the “anime gayboi” phenomenon a Western thing, or are Japanese girls doing this too?
Japanese girls are the target audience for manga about feminine gay men, so … I am pretty sure they are doing this too.
“Are you seriously suggesting anime cosplay is turning kids trans?! ”
I wondered about that, too.
Because that’d be seriously insane.
It is being limited, being NOT allowed to try out things and take on different roles that makes girls identify as trans.
That said, the fact that so many girls are so keen on playing male characters in online games and cosplay is caused by the same things as the trans epidemic: Misogyny.
I discontinued using my female pseudonyms in male-dominated gamer forums. It is just safer. Female pseudonyms are sexually harrassed. As are female characters in online games.
Even with table top roleplay games, if you have a male “Game Master” you’re often better off playing a male character, as the guy might try to make a rape of your female character part of the story.
Nothing to do with being trans, you’d have to be a masochist to play female characters in those settings.
Identifying with gay men is a normal human reaction to misogyny – heterosexual women want to be loved and respected by men. And girls are not stupid, they see that men who genuinely respect women are a rare beast. Being loved and respected by men while being a man yourself is much easier to imagine.
Most of the girls who prefer m/m fanfic and roleplay as males do not identify as trans. The fact that those who are into cosplay also spend hours on tumblr is more likely to be the cause of any overlap of those things.
The gender ‘therapist’ who saw our self-diagnosed FtM identifying, cosplaying child refused to talk with us about this subject or even look at the numerous photos of our daughter in her cosplay outfits. Our child who tells her father ‘I feel gross in my body’ and then less than 4 hours later has photos of herself from a convention dressed in a scantily clad female superhero leotard with her breasts on display and completely exaggerated.
On the occasions where she’s presenting as a guy, she doesn’t dress ‘like a man’ – it looks more like she ‘dresses up’ like a man. She resembles a guy as much as Divine resembled a woman. They act more like transvestites than transgendered individuals.
The unquestioning GT has given her a letter of recommendation for hormones without any differential diagnosis. I’ve never felt more helpless. These people are creating the next opioid epidemic. Sure, there are a few people who need HRT, but they (mostly LCSW – people with no medical training) are overprescribing it and handing it out to anyone who asks because the WPATH SoC says they have to. WPATH, which started out with noble intentions, has become the very definition of the inmates running the asylum.
Here is a male anime fan explaining what he thinks the connection is. I thought it was very informative. https://medium.com/@socjuswiz/masculinity-anime-and-gender-dysphoria-8d682abcec54
This explains a lot.
By the way, how dysphoria is handled in anime, is no different than how race was dealt with, via the major animation houses in the US, during the last century. With the exception of one firm [that being Rankin/Bass], practically each major creator of cartoons, had some rather vicious racist content that was produced. And it was considered to be acceptable then….and did not really stop [or at least go into remission] until the beginning of the 70’s.
As such, many…if they did not get their cues on how race relations were in the US from their parents, etc….they got them from cartoons. Think of some of the older MGM[‘Tom and Jerry’], Paramount [‘mid period Popeye’,etc], Warner Brothers [early ‘Bugs Bunny’ et al] and of course……Disney. And yes, those did go away …at parts in the ’70’s….but for some reason, reared a lot of their ugly heads again, in the 80’s. Thanks to that rather ugly initial use of the term….’inclusion’.
[Before it is said, animation..be it stop motion or ‘classic’ same from overseas used to NOT be like this. All one has to do, to see this point…witness the older programs from the 60’s, like ‘Gigantor’, ‘8th Man’..and one will get the point. Those and other items that were contracted for by US firms, were far from that]
What you see in anime, is a blatant refinement of the above, except in terms of gender. And yes it may look cute to those who are either younger or have not had much exposure to the outside world. But more often than not…if one looks at the manner of speech patterns [which is another issue unto itself] or activity in same, one finds that there are seeds of adult content, being covered up in being ‘fun’ to do. Or for that matter, a very very stealth form of ‘grooming’ .
This in some ways, goes hand in hand with the YA literature which is still a hot marketing commodity, or worse…the ‘educational’ materials being handed [more like forced] to/on various school districts in the US and elsewhere.
Scary, ain’t it?????