“She just gets in my head”

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I recently took a tour of trans parenting Tumblr blogs, and they’re chock full of what you might expect. A very small sampler:

“Parents please please please talk to your children about gender identity. please teach children that there are more than two genders and that gender  is not what genitals you have”

“What my kindergartener taught me about gender”

“A mom and her 3-year-old explore gender”

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And of course, there is plenty of hate for parents who aren’t toeing the line. The milder posts are tips for how to educate parents about how wrong they are if they don’t immediately say “Cool!!” when their kid says he/she is transgender.

The general theme is: Kids ALWAYS know best. Defer to your child and their self-defined gender identity, with no questions asked, no matter how young your child is.

I’ve recently heard from three gender-critical parents of teen girls who want to transition, or who already have. All three are discouraged. They feel like they’ve stumbled into an upside-down reality where they are told to ignore their instincts and doubts and just fully accept the brave new world their children have created.

If there is to be a change in the dominant paradigm, parents are going to have to be involved. They’ll have to find a way to buck the trend. It won’t be easy, and they’ll need support.

What is different now from when I was growing up and adults were voicing legitimate concerns about stuff their teenagers were doing (like drugs, say, or unprotected sex) is that parents have basically zero societal or professional (psychologists or MD) support for even raising tentative questions.

I went through 50+ blogs this morning, There was only one teen girl who paused to consider whether her parents might have a point. Every other post consisted of jeers and ridicule at the transphobic, ignorant moms and dads who dare to put the brakes on even **medical transition**.

Here is an excerpt from the one post I found that even hinted that mom might have a point. And of course, in response to this agonized post, the strangers on the Internet convince her that they are the experts. They know. Her mother’s words should be disregarded

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”But secretly I’m scared she’s right. What if I am making all this up? Yeah yeah, who would choose this right? But what if I did? What if I’m so “confused by everything” as my mom said that I’ve convinced myself Im trans?

It doesn’t seem right. I know what I feel, but she just gets in my head. This is so much harder than anyone tells you. How do you even get through these conversations and stick to your guns? I don’t know if she’s right and I’m confused or Im right and she’s manipulative. I love my mom, but I hate that she does this to me. I asked her to just support me through this and all she could say was that “I support you in everything else you do, but this is weird and it goes against everything about who you are. You don’t like to take Advil but you’ll pump yourself full of hormones. You’re terrified of surgery, but you’ll go through with getting rid of something that is a part of you. It’s not you.”

I don’t know what to do. Im so lost.

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Much more typical is this post:

it makes me so fucking angry when i see people like my friends with parents completely unsupportive of them being trans. i honestly don’t think parents should be trusted to make those kinds of decisions and they shouldn’t be allowed to have control. most parents deal with trans children in the worst ways possible and it’s sickening.

it might have negative health effects but i will totally advocate for other people self medicating when their parents aren’t accepting. at the point where nothing can be done to convince parents, you have to take things into your own hands. especially when dysphoria is too much to live with

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It might have negative health effects, but who cares?

Yeah I know they love their top surgery

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An Anon suggested I visit a Tumblr blog run by a happy FTM. I’ve seen plenty of them, and this one was like all the others: Filled with post-op top surgery pix, advice on packing, confessionals about all the changes wrought by “T,” and asks from 15-year-olds about how to access treatment when their parents weren’t jumping on the bandwagon. What there isn’t is a single voice arguing that maybe you could explore your more “male” traits without medicalizing the whole thing.

Here’s the thing: Just because all these young transitioners are flying high on their newfound chemical-surgical changes doesn’t mean questions don’t need to be raised. In fact, that’s just the point: The mad rush to extreme medical solutions for the problem of dissociation from one’s own body is exactly the reason why blogs like this are important.

And voices like mine are few and far between. I’ve heard from a few parents who want to speak out, but they have mostly been cowed into submission and shouted down with accusations of “Transphobia!” or “You are responsible for the suicide of transgender kids!”

Young FTMs and hysterectomy: “It’s all stagnant down there.”

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 I received a few comments on my Tumblr blog from people who are surprised that young women who are “transitioning” would choose—and readily receive from surgeons—complete hysterectomies. Making a permanent decision to have or not have children at such a young age seems…hasty. We’re talking 18-25-year-olds here.

While I had previously viewed 10 or so YouTubes from FTMs reporting on their sterilization, I never actually googled “FTM hysterectomy,” but did so today.  Guess how many videos came up in the search?

2720.

Most of the video titles have the words “recovery” or “post-op” in them as well.

But, as one FTM said in a post-op video, “it’s all just stagnant down there” when you’re taking “T.”  Might as well drain the swamp?

Teen suicide and the chilling effect on dialogue

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Another teenager who identified as transgender committed suicide yesterday. Blake Brockington, the first trans homecoming king in the nation, jumped off a bridge in Charlotte, NC and died immediately.

Teen suicide is the most horrible thing imaginable, and we all need to do whatever we can to prevent it.  Gender dysphoria—the pain resulting from a sense of dissociation from one’s own body and biological sex—is a very real phenomenon, as anyone who has experienced it will tell you. After one of these tragedies, the dominant message is that suicidal ideation in people who are “gender non-conforming” is solely the result of transphobia and the lack of (usually) parental support for “transition.”  Parents, family members, and anyone else who was not fully on-board with the young person’s desire or efforts to change his or her gender are vilified, often to the point of death threats and stalking.

But maybe, just maybe, some of these young people want to die because 21st century society has given them the message that they cannot live their lives legitimately and happily in the bodies they were born in if they do not conform to gender stereotypes. That if they don’t like “girly” things or are “sissy boys,” or if they identify with and enjoy pursuits and body ornamentation traditionally associated with the opposite sex, they and their families must push for a medical diagnosis that will commit them to a chronic, expensive health condition involving lifelong drug treatment and repeated plastic surgeries; that they will have to live like Type 1 diabetics, requiring treatment for the rest of their lives. How can all of this pressure to conform not contribute to a sense of hopelessness and despair?

When a young person takes his or her own life, we must absolutely ask “why.” But a teen suicide should not shut down an open-minded discussion about root causes and conditions. Blake was out as trans. While Blake faced a lack of family support for “transition,” things seemed to be improving. The high school was open-minded enough to allow Blake to be their homecoming king. Blake was an activist with a purpose, well respected by many, with a long life to look forward to. Is the reason for Blake’s suicide simply that society or family weren’t supportive enough of the dominant transgender paradigm, or could there be a more complex explanation? Is gender therapy the only answer for a gender non-conforming person in pain?

I write this not to trigger hate or anger against any person, no matter how he or she identifies. I write as the parent of a gender non-conforming child whom I love more than anything on earth. Reading about another teen taking their own life is awful. But Blake’s suicide does not make me question gender politics less: it makes me question more.

How is this not a cult?

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“Could I be MtF?” asks a 14 year old male in the middle of puberty: He’s not unhappy with his male body, in fact he explicitly says he’s happy with it.

http://transgenderreality.com/2015/03/23/another-teen-goes-from-im-happy-in-my-male-body-to-i-am-truly-a-girl-in-a-few-days/

This is how fast it can happen. In days. How does a teen go from “I’m happy in my body” to “I NEED black market hormones to transition” in a week?

…because that’s how teen brains work: instant gratification. Lack of insight. Planning, judgment, the ability to consider future consequences, and self monitoring are simply not mapped into the neurons yet.

Then why is it—WHY—that the cutting edge in trans thinking and activism now is that “gatekeeping” is awful; that people shouldn’t have to wait at all for treatment; that “informed consent” is enough, and we need to let people start hormones and initiate surgery even younger? ACCESS is the magic word now.

When will the medical and psychological professions wake up?

The linked website, “Transgender Reality: What trans people are really saying online”,  is an important resource that I hope will gain a lot more followers. There is an actual process of indoctrination going on on the Internet, and most liberal parents are simply unaware of its power and reach.

Baby boomer’s head explodes: How did identity politics gain all this traction?

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One of the defining characteristics of a totalitarian ideology is that no one is allowed to question it. So it is with identity and gender politics today in leftist academic and activist circles. In the wake of the great liberation movements of the 20th century, how did this even happen?

I read a post today from a young lesbian who would be defined as “butch” by today’s standards, who is attracted to other butch women. Somehow this has become unacceptable. Taboo even, she says. She has faced ridicule and actual disgust because she isn’t attracted to who she is SUPPOSED to be attracted to: femmes. But guess who and what is cool? Trans “fags”—women who have “transitioned” into gay men. THEY are allowed to love each other.

All of this blows my baby boomer mind. When I was coming of age in the late 70s and 80s, I never heard any such term as “gender nonconforming.” Those of us who had relationships with other women would probably all be seen now as soft butch. Most of us didn’t bother with makeup or shaving or worrying about our looks. We reveled in each other. No one talked about who was “cute.” We called each other “women”—not girls. Our lover’s brain, as well as her confident way of moving through the world, were the primary attractants. We looked at the old butch-femme dynamic as quaint and old-fashioned. They were our foremothers, but we felt we’d been liberated from those rigid roles.  We were simply women-loving-women. Period.

What caused this huge step back?  What was the motivation to snatch away the liberation from the feminist movement—which has actually been aided and abetted by many in the LGBT community? The easy and quick answer is “misogyny” or “male privilege. But it’s got to be more than that. 

What the fuck happened?

#trans chauvinism#second wave feminism#butch femme#gender critical#baby boomer

 

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 Reblog

 

To Be or Not To…Identify as?

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 Notice from the Thought Police:
 
 The verb “to be” will no longer be included in post-modern dictionaries. It has been replaced by the much more malleable “to identify as,” e.g., “I identify as a pickle.” See, you never used to be able to say, “I AM a pickle.” People might think you needed psychological help. Isn’t this a vast improvement? So liberating. So be all you can be! Um, no, I mean, identify as all you can identify as. Or something.

How much pressure are you under to transition?

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I posted this query on my Tumblr blog and the response has been incredible.  Girls and women of all ages and orientations have written eloquently about their experiences in this Brave New World where the coolest thing **ever** is to transition from female to male. The pressure is real.

I thought about bringing the whole discussion over here from Tumblr, but it’s still very active and some posters may not want to be reblogged on a different platform. If you want to see everything, consider registering there, if you haven’t already. You don’t have to actually do more than set up a username and password for an account. In the meantime, here is the link to the thread. 

http://4thwavenow.tumblr.com/post/114370879240/how-much-pressure-do-you-feel-to-transition

 

 

 

 

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Tumblr question: Have you seen studies that show that trans brains are different from other people’s brains and are more similar to the gender that they identify as? I’ve seen some (only in regard to male/female genders) and am curious of your opinion on them.

I have seen some of those studies. There are also studies showing just the opposite (that there is no such thing as a male/female brain). There have ALWAYS been women (and men) who embody characteristics traditionally considered to belong to the opposite sex, and in my view we should celebrate those outliers rather than pathologizing them.  But let’s assume there is some validity to the studies you mention. For me, the existential question is this: Which is the more compassionate, less risky, and more inclusive response: (1.) to DEconstruct gender (as we Second Wave feminists started to do) and encourage people to express themselves in (more conventionally understood) “masculine” or “feminine” ways as they choose, while accepting the bodies they actually are, or (2.) to leap to the conclusion that the one and only solution to the problem of “feeling” like the opposite sex is to attack it with a surgeon’s scalpel and steroids, which can cause serious health problems that must be monitored and managed? Just because the medical profession CAN create a facsimile of a male from a female body, should it? For me, the choice is clear (except in a few rare cases, primarily intersex people).

I fully understand WHY a person feels they need to change their body to match their mind, but the very idea that there is such a thing as a male or female brain is really just that—an idea. If a female dog behaves more like a male dog, does the female dog think about acquiring a penis? We can’t know, and of course, we aren’t dogs, but we ARE animals, exquisite products of evolution. I resonate with the poet Mary Oliver’s advice: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

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If you have access to a university library, Joseph de Rivera wrote a paper called “The Construction of False Memory Syndrome: The Experience of Retractors”. It’s in Psychological Inquiry, 1997, Volume 8, Number 4. The paper discusses how people went through stages of using remembered abuse to explain other problems in their lives, centering their identities on that belief, and cutting off anyone who doubted the abuse. As in modern gender therapy, believer therapists guided this process.

Thank you for this reference. The feminist community fell hook-line-sinker for this too for a number of years, with
devastating results for some families. The sad thing is that sexual abuse of
children is very real, but there is zero evidence that memories of abuse are so
easily forgotten or suppressed. Just as transgenderism has hijacked the pain of
intersex people, the false memory “movement” obscured and cast doubt on
REAL allegations of abuse. Family members who questioned false allegations were
demonized and bonds broken. I fear this is the same thing that is happening
with so many teens who dismiss their parents as “transphobic” for daring
to question the dominant paradigm.

Below is an excerpt from the abstract to your referenced article:
Abstract: More than 300 persons have now retracted charges of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) based on “memories” recovered in psychotherapy. How may we understand their experience? …The accounts of the retractors and their critique of different explanations are presented. ..In all cases, the experiences of the retractors appeared to be determined more by the therapeutic situation than by characteristics of their personalities.