“Do you feel uncomfortable with yourself in some way?”

Many young teens come to the realization that they are transgender through watching videos online, particularly on YouTube. There has been a dramatic increase in young people being referred for treatment because they are transgender. The increase is so large that many people, especially parents of young trans people, are beginning to ask the question if we are witnessing the phenomenon of social contagion.

Clinic sees 20-fold increase in referrals

Number of pediatric referrals quadruple

This graph comes from an article about the rise of gender identity related referrals in the UK:

Source: The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust

Many parents of young people tell similar stories about kids who go on YouTube binges, and end up identifying as transgender, and then go on to wanting to transition medically. This is especially common for girls. So what are they being told in these YouTube videos? Let us have a look at one example:

Partial transcript:

[1:09]: Do you feel uncomfortable with yourself in some way? (…) There must be some sort of discomfort with yourself currently. Look inside yourself and think about the times where you may have felt discomfort from hearing your birth name, from being referred as though your assigned sex, or simply feeling discomfort on wearing the clothes off your back. Those are just general examples but really look inside yourself and think back  on to the past of situations that really should have been taken as no big deal but they were taken as such and you never really knew why.

[1:42]: Have you tried experimenting outside your assigned sex? Maybe if you have an inkling that you’re trans, but you don’t know where to go from here. Try experimenting by wearing things that are not typical of your assigned sex, you know like wear T-shirts if you’ve been used to wearing dresses or something like that. (…)

[3:43]: Have you seen or are familiar with other stories of transgender people? If (…) you’re still somewhat on the fence, ah, I would definitely check out some other people’s narratives or stories, and find if you’re, if there are some that are relatable to you. Find like you identify, or you’re finding like, similar struggles with other people who are going through somewhat the same, similar struggles as you. (…) They will definitely  be helpful to you, to help you figure out whether or not you are trans

There are three points about this video that should give you pause. One, viewers are urged to comb through their memories for any discomfort they recollect, and such memories are to be taken as signs of trans-ness. No other options are even acknowledged. Two, superficial preferences like clothing are taken as proof of trans-ness. Feeling comfortable in a T-shirt is a diagnostic sign. Three, the viewer is encouraged to delve into the stories of  people with “similar struggles” to find experiences that are similar to their own. The video goes on to mention the video blogs of other trans people. This means that the viewer is encouraged to seek only confirming evidence. What if there are stories by people who felt the same way but were not actually trans? Such people certainly exist, as seen here, here and here (just a few examples), but these stories never come up in the types of videos shown here.

These YouTubers are giving young people bad advice. They mean well, but the results have chilling consequences when young people go on to medically transition based on the type of advice presented here.

Like to wear comfortable clothes? Dislike sexism? Change your sex!

A 19 year old woman posts to reddit’s community “asktransgender”:

So I’m 19 right now and identify as female. Ever since I was younger I’ve always leaned towards the masculine side. I’ve always worn boys clothes, for as long as I can remember. When I was maybe 10/11, I would wear boxers and I felt very comfortable in them. When I reached 7th or 8th grade, I tried to start wearing female clothes. I never felt comfortable in girls underwear or shirts (I do usually wear girls jeans). When I was in 5th grade (elementary school) or maybe a little younger, I tried pushing for my parents to start calling me Joey after one of my favorite tv characters.

Fast forward a few years and I’ve recently come out as gay. I always wear boys clothes. I got a haircut and feel ten times more comfortable with it. She/her pronouns sort of make me uncomfortable, but I get embarrassed when people say he/him infront of my friends. I really lean towards the name Nick. I’ve always been big into video games and I’ll always make a male character, etc.

Recently I’ve been introduced to the Trans community and I’ve been watching a lot of videos on transitions so now I’m sort of confused with everything.

Some replies:

“Your experience sounds fairly typical of trans people”

And:

“You’re textbook trans”

Preferring comfortable clothes and short hair means you should change your sex.

Another poster asks “am I actually a man?“:

I was assigned female at birth. However, I have never been comfortable living as a woman. Even as a young child, like in kindergarten, I hated wearing dresses and would throw tantrums if forced to. Eventually my parents stopped. My first boyfriend called me “secret Asian man” in fact because I have so many masculine traits– I am good at science and math, I like driving, I like fixing things, I like video games and am extremely good at them (better than most men), I play a very masculine instrument, etc, etc.

If you didn’t see me or know my name but were just told about me and my interests, you would think I was a man. I also HATE how being a woman is so limiting. I have been subjected to sexist discrimination, harassment, assault, the lot of it. I am fucking sick to death of it and I KNOW if I had been assigned male at birth, I would never have experienced it. I just lost a very good job because my boss wanted to sleep with me and I rebuffed him, which caused him to retaliate against me and when I complained, I was fired. I HATE living in this female body and I want a male one. I am just scared of coming out, honestly. Scared of what my family and friends will say. I feel like I would have to move to another city to truly be able to start over.

Hating dresses, being good at science, and playing a “very masculine instrument”  – as if no women can do these things.

Top rated reply:

“trans with doubts doesn’t equal cis”

The poster further explains that part of what makes her dislike “being a woman” is the harassment she received for having unshaven legs:

When disliking harassment and preferring certain styles of hair and clothing is making people “question their gender” to the extent that they ask other people for advice about it, that says a lot about the narrow gender roles people are feeling confined by. Furthermore, it seems to be a wide consensus in the online trans communities that the act of questioning your gender itself means that you are trans. This sentiment is very pervasive.

Transcript from 00.30: “so first off, if you guys questioned it, um, you probably are transgender”

Enter a caption

According to the poster in the screenshot above, if you’re questioning that very likely means you are trans.

“cis people don’t usually question their gender”

On the webpage of a “gender therapist”, the following advice is offered:

The first thing I want to talk about is the question of “How do I know I’m transgender?” being very, very big in and of itself and breaking it down in bits and pieces.

Let’s talk about how, if someone is even asking themselves that question it probably means, at the very least, they are feeling uncomfortable with their current gender role. So more than likely, the answer to that question (“Am I transgender?”) is “yes.”

If people are even asking the question, it means that more than likely they are transgender, according to this gender therapist.

We have seen this in previous posts here as well.

So we have people growing up steeped in narrow gender roles, questioning their gender, and being told that the very act of questioning means they are transgender. Combine that with medical transition many places being trivially easy to obtain, and you have a situation where people are doing irreversible changes to their bodies on very flimsy grounds.

“questioning to fulltime in 9 months”

“from questioning in may to hrt in september”

“why wait?”

“got my prescription within a month and a half”

“questioning in June, Spiro and E in january”

Sexist gender roles + confused young people + the notion that questioning means you are trans + easy access to hormones = a rush of people modifying their bodies in rather extreme ways in order to fit in.

I didn’t like doing all the stereotypical girl things

A young teenager tells the internet “how I knew I was trans”:

Partial transcript:

basically…it has to do with my coming out story…and…well…ever since I was a little kid I knew there was something different about me and I didn’t like doing all the stereotypical girl things that all my friends liked to do at the time. I…as soon as I was able to dress myself I…I started dressing from the guys department

(…)

my mom put me in ballet and I decided no I don’t wanna go to ballet, I’m gonna play in the mud and so yeah. I did sports as a little kid and I was really into that kind of stuff and I always thought that I’m eh…I’m different

(…)

I dressed like a guy every single day, I wore guy clothes, guy shoes, I did guy things, hung out with guys, um, everything that a little boy would do. My mom started getting mad, she  told me I need to dress like a little girl and act like one too. And I was like “no mom I don’t like doing that and I never wore dresses and  never wore a skirt, never wore heels. Graduation was a…graduation was horrible, I mean…dress shopping, it didn’t feel right!

(…)

halfway through sophomore year I was watching this video on YouTube of a boy and his transition, and I was like oh my god, this makes sense now

It’s a familiar story in many ways. A female child who does not like to do the things that society tells little girls that they should like.  Parents who, as the kid grows older, to an increasing degree try to force the kid into this role they do not want. And finally, discovering YouTube and the many “transition videos” on it. Bingeing on these videos for a couple of weeks, and suddenly wanting to change their sex.  These kids end up medical patients for the rest of their lives. They want to start taking testosterone. Ten, twenty years ago, finding yourself as a teen meant getting a tattoo of a Chinese character, maybe some piercings. For these kids, it means starting medical treatments that can make them sterile. After five years on testosterone, the cancer risk explodes and a complete hysterectomy is required. Quite the price to pay for wanting to escape the restrictive feminine gender role.

Several commenters have similar experiences to the young person in the video:

“I’ve always tried to force myself to be ‘girly'”

Where is feminism for these young women? Where are the role models that can show them how to be women without being “girly”?

A similar comment on a different video:

“I binge watched videos for a week, and I just knew”

Again and again, we see this tale. Young women who dislike performing femininity discovering transition videos, and becoming transgender.

A slightly different story, told by Aydian Ethan Dowling, is seen in the video below. As a young girl, Dowling was not gender policed as heavily as many other aspiring transitioners.

Partial transcript, from around 8:15:

I didn’t know what transgender was. I didn’t know you could live that. Maybe if I knew that when I was younger, maybe I would have, um you know. Maybe I would have been more vocal about wanting to do that [transitioning], or maybe I would have known earlier that I wanted to do that. But I didn’t know I was transgender. I didn’t! I had no idea. Ah. Maybe if I lived in a house where…you know, I was being the girl, I was made to do dishes, or, or, clean, or cook, or you know, do my nails, or what, you know. I didn’t have those pressures of doing that.

So apparently, according to Aydian Dowling, if a girl is not trans, she’d be just fine with being made to do dishes, cook, and do her nails. And presumably, if Dowling had been made to do those things, then “maybe I would have known earlier”, to quote the video.

More and more young women are watching these videos on YouTube. Not just watching them, binge-watching them, and in a very short amount of time they decide that they are transgender. These are often troubled young women, trying to fit in in a society where the genders are becoming more and more separated by stereotypes. Many of them are having a difficult time coming to terms with themselves, with their bodies, with their sexuality. But the implications of the stories told in these videos is often sexist. These young women need other stories, other voices.

 

” I feel like I have to try so hard as a guy” vs “I hate how I’m treated”. Motives for wanting to transition

We have seen previously on this blog that people who want to transition to the other gender often have other motives for doing so than gets presented in the usual stories we see in the media. The stories we see in the media portray being transgender as being true to some inner essence – like the rebirth of  Bruce as Caitlyn, someone who was always there, inside, the real soul inside the body.

In reality? People who transition have many different motives for doing so. Some transitioners feel that their personalities would fit better in the bodies of the opposite sex. .Thinking that the other sex has it better and easier is not uncommon. This is also seen in this post:

Sometimes, sexual feelings are part of it, as we see in this post:

Some questioners (especially the ones who are born female) hate the way they are treated by others as their birth sex:

Regular old-fashioned sexism is now making young women question whether they are really men inside. This is a sexist consequence of a sexist ideology.

When feeling better leads to an identity crisis

A female who describes herself as AFAB (assigned female at birth) and calls herself “genderqueer” has started taking wellbutrin (an antidepressant), and her feelings of gender dysphoria have significantly lessened. She posts to r/asktransgender:

Ok, so I’m AFAB genderqueer/genderfluid and I’ve been experiencing an insane amount of dysphoria on and off (corresponding with fluctuations in masculinity/femininity) since about June. I realized I was genderqueer about 3 years ago, but decided not to anything about it until this summer because, as I said, my dysphoria got intense. I came to the conclusion that I needed a low dose of T to be more androgynous and more able to pass in boymode… and after much angst came out to my mother and brother and asked my PCP for T. She said she’ll look into it (she’s never had a trans patient before) and possibly start me on it in January.

In the meantime, I’ve been struggling with depression on and off my whole life, and it’s been made unbearable by the dysphoria, so I finally accepted her recommendation for an antidepressant. She put me on Wellbutrin (150mg 2x/day) 5 days ago, and I’m already feeling WAY better in terms of my mood, but I also haven’t experienced any dysphoria at all. I tried boymoding once a few days ago, and it felt good, but still no dysphoria. Now I’m really worried that all this gender stuff is just a side effect of my depression, and it’s not real. I mean, not having dysphoria is good, and I know that dysphoria isn’t necessary to be genderqueer, and I still want to boymode and aim for a more androgynous presentation, but I just don’t feel like shit about my body anymore. I never thought that feeling better would make me have an identity crisis. Help?

TL;DR: I’m genderqueer and depressed, went on an antidepressant that works too well and got rid of my dysphoria. Now I’m having an identity crisis. Help?

Note the casual attitude towards taking testosterone – a drug that can have drastic unwanted consequences for females, but that in many transgender groups online is seen merely as something you can take to help you get a certain “look”.

Note also that the poster describes the lessening of trans feelings as an “identity crisis”. Shouldn’t feeling better be a good thing? What do the posters in r/asktransgender have to say? Interestingly, there are a few that have similar experiences:

Interestingly though, many posters stress how this relief of negative feelings isn’t really a solution.

They tell her that her dysphoria is probably still there, just wait. This relief is probably temporary.

“Antidepressants helped me, but I still wanted to transition”.

“You are just treating the symptoms”.

“It may come back.”

The narrative that have been created in these communities is that being transgender is an underlying, physical condition and the only way to cure it is by transitioning – by which they mean taking hormones and often undergoing radical body modifications. When people report finding relief in other ways, the consensus seems to be that these things don’t really help – they are just treating the symptoms, or masking the problem. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We’ll show in later posts that this belief leads to significant perverse incentives pushing people toward dramatic, irreversible changes–making them alarmed or anxious when their negative feelings about their body go away.  It puts one in mind of the internet’s “pro-ana” communities, in which anorexic young women convinced one another that not feeling fat was a moral failing.  Having days when you feel comfortable in your own skin isn’t a sign of progress, even when it’s accompanied by a lifting of depressive symptoms, because it subverts the narrative that as soon as you start to question your comfort with gender roles, you’ve proven yourself to be destined for a permanent, fixed identity as transgender.

The fact that the poster likes being in “boymode” is seen as evidence that she is trans, no other explanation is considered. Could it be that she enjoys wearing masculine clothes? Many women do. Could it be that she likes being seen as a man because women are often catcalled, talked down to, or creeped on my males? Maybe it feels safer? No one asks her this.

Why does preferring a certain way of presenting yourself mean that you are somehow metaphysically the opposite sex? The traditional feminist view that we have bodies, we have personalities and preferences, and that these do not have to “match” seem to have disappeared somehow. Instead we get people feeling like they have an “identity crisis” when their negative feelings about their sex go away, because they somehow think that you need to have a condition to be able to present yourself in the way you wish.