I just want the insanity to stop. The mutilation and medication. The predatory men in women's and girl's spaces, prisons, sports, jobs. Someone make this nightmare go away.
Laughter is what is needed. Most of the trans women look ridiculous. When you laugh at someone, you show that you have no respect for them. They do not deserve respect. They are complete fools and deranged. Laugh!!!
You are confusing cross-dressers with transsexuals, do you know what ladyboys are? Do you enjoy laughing @ birth defects, the disabled & minorities?UDHR🌈
Since 1 in 2,000 human births gender nonspecific and used to be randomly surgically assigned, trans is part of our biology & history, it's commodotizing it into for profit lucrative growth industry that leads to abuse of @ risk youth & women.
Two outmoded and misleading terms for a few dozen differences of sexual development, none of which compromise our mammalian gonochorism even at the individual level.
Unfortunately, we are the someones. And while I think humiliation is not the answer, quiet assertion of reality is. But the road is hard and enduring the derision, the mocking, the anger and the shunning is an important part of returning to truth.
Thank you Laura Becker for standing up to Page’s narrative. She’s a cultural force right now and the trappings of her narcissism, her need for attention might lead young people into regretful, permanent medical treatments.
Ellen Page is a narcissistic and very troubled person. She is unfortunately a role model, who has used her own failed transition to adulthood to convince other troubled girls that transforming herself to a man can fix the problems in her own head.
That's not the case. Ellen is not a man. She is a mutilated woman.
A remarkable and very insightful review. I found this paragraph particularly powerful: "Reflecting on my own trans experience, a desire to escape the strictures of feminine beauty rituals was a large motivator for why I thought I should become man, but I also never had any maternal instinct. I believed, as many young women do, that being a mother was a social role of burden, a prison of labor, childcare, and little to no individual freedom that was granted to men by default. As I’ve grown older and matured, my perspective has shifted. Although the societal expectation of women to exclusively assume motherhood can be oppressive, I’ve come to recognize that childbearing and rearing are a meaningful gift, enhancing rather than diminishing individuality and personhood."
I recently learned that Christine Jorgensen, the most famous trans(sexual/gender) ever was a gay man before changing.
A deeply religious gay man who was guilt ridden to be a homosexual and decided that the only resolve to that tension was to become a woman. Reminds me of page and of the way Iran treats its homosexuals.
It's astounding how much of trans ideology center on "transing away the gay" instead of "praying away the gay".
Helpful to read your insights on Page. She is a tragic figure, but it's extremely difficult to have empathy for her when she serves as a role model for self-harm. On one hand we have Hollywood's promotion of regressive stereotypes and acceptance and enabling of horrific behavior. On the other hand, we have Hollywood's glorification of the damaging, medically assisted rejection of self. Profits at all cost.
A splendid review that deftly reviews and critiques Page's experience while interweaving your own as lesbian, autistic and de-transitioned. Thank you.
As an older-generation lesbian, I am grateful that the notion of dysphoric "gender identity" -- that I was actually a boy because I was a tomboy attracted to other girls -- was no where present during my youth. Otherwise, I might have been seduced by this madness, too, and done harm to my perfectly healthy, perfectly female body, which has carried me through a woman's life.
I especially like this: "....what exactly does she want us to believe? Are we expected to accept that she has always been, or has transformed into, a man? ... I want to say: Your pain is real, Ellen. Your joy is real. I believe your experiences. But I disagree that you are a boy, or a man."
We can feel and express compassion without validating illusion and mental dis-ease. Well done!
As a baby boomer, I grew up in a non-Western country, before TV, never mind social media. I was considered a tomboy, which was descriptive rather than judgemental. Yes, I resisted my mother's attempt to dress me in frilly clothes, which was fine. My cohort of school mates (all girls) were not particularly ultra feminine, the way girls are socialized more and more to be in the last 40 years. In my day, high school girls barely wore make up or sexualized themselves. Looking through my school year book, at least a third of graduates could be mistaken for dykes/lesbians today. Although most of them are not. Having short hair was unremarkable. Most were sporty. So just to observe that the pressures on girls growing up currently to be self consciously feminine is way more brutal than it was in my youth.
I'm glad I'm not going through my teen years in this current harsh climate of excessive femininity, because I might have been pressured into believing transitioning was the right choice...there but for the grace of god.
As for Ellen Page (& Kristen Stewart), I recognized both their budding lesbian hood in their early pre-pubescent roles. Ellen Page in Marion Bridge, and Kristen Stewart in Panic Room. I do wonder about the different trajectories of their journeys to adulthood.
I think it's harsh to describe Ellen Page as narcissistic. Her memoir describes a very troubled & unsupportive childhood & predatory experiences in Hollywood. Her memoir could just have easily been about how difficult it was to come to terms with being a lesbian, rather than coming out as trans. Perhaps Kristen Stewart had a more accepting family & supportive mentors later on. That can be a whole other separate & interesting discussion, if anyone cares to start it?
I agree that Page's memoir could encourage other young girls to believe transitioning would be a solution to their non-conforming selves, and that can be dangerous. But she's not the only one who's been swept up in this transcult. It's just deeply sad that she has been, for now...
I'm glad you shared your experience. I agree Page's story is sad more than anything; certainly, I do not perceive her as narcissistic. (That said, I find that an apt descriptor for many trans-identified men, whose impression of "women" is often an offensive caricature and whose demands for validation as "women" are endless.) Page had a tough go, didn't get the support she needed, and ended up losing her marriage and mutilating her body. It's a distressing outcome for an immensely talented and sensitive young woman who, in health and wellness, would have continued to consider herself as such.
I agree, throughout my teens, we hardly wore makeup, we were new wavers and followed the UK music scene, post punk which meant we dressed down and teased our hair. In fact the fashion we followed was masculine. My daughter was a tomboy from the age of four, she rejected boys clothes, I shopped in the boys department right up until she was 12. She held onto her blonde long hair and scooped up inside her caps. She was always mistaken for a boy, which I hated. However as parents we never made a big deal of it, she played sport with boys and competed alongside boys, she had many girls as friends and boys alike. I always loved the way her girlfriends never criticised her dress and accepted her for being a Tom boy. My daughter is a beautiful girl , still plays competitive sport, doesn’t comply with the sex stereotype of women hood. Gender ideology wasn’t on trend when she was growing up thank god.
My question for the women who have mastectomies are they really happy? How can they see themselves in the mirror and view their scar is beyond me, for the women I know that have lost breast to cancer they grieve their women hood. Gender ideation is a mental illness that is being fed by social media and the medical fraternity.
The long term impacts on not treating people with their sex confusion and body dysmorphia, will come back to haunt them all:
It seems to me the combination of low self esteme personality traits are often a self-fulfilling prophecy. It projects as victim which attracts bullies. And if those bullies include parents and other adults that own a role that would attract a desire for acceptance, the problems would be amplified.
Kids with high self-confidence might develop the opposite result... the what does not kill you makes you stronger rule manifest.
I think many people struggling with gender identity are the former.
I have no sympathy for Ellen Page. None whatsoever. Think of how many tens of thousands of young girls (and boys) have been indoctrinated to follow in her very public footsteps.
Absolutely right. She is using her own failure to become a normal adult to convince other young women that they can fix their problems by mutilating themselves.
Mutilation does not fix the problem. That's why suicides spike 7-10 years AFTER transition.
Preview of the predictable and nightmarish coming attractions post sex lobotomies: lifelong incontinence, infections, even losing the ability to defecate & pee: https://exulansic.substack.com/p/vaginoplasty-volumes-the-piss-toll-921 Read about your tax dollars & insurance premiums at work (Exulansic also has an excellent article on American Mind – Genital Mutilation for the Masses – that describes these surgeries). The comments are interesting. I'm increasingly finding myself, like this commenter, all out of patience and compassion with Transchurch members and their obnoxious entitlement:
"For me, it's not about compassion for these people anymore. It's about compassion for the ripple of soft disasters they leave in their wake. I'm infuriated by the money they spend on these cosmetic surgeries, apparently without a care in the world for anyone else. I'm angry on behalf of the caregivers who will inevitably be forced to be intimately familiar with their creepy, carved-over excuses for reproductive organs when they end up in a nursing home with early onset dementia from the hormones. I am positively frantic about the fact that there is a very real possibility that my gynecologist will not be able to fit me in when I need her because one of these toads is squatting on their patient roster.
I don't feel sorry for these people anymore. What I feel is a vague hope that they live in other states or other countries mixed in with a detached belief that it would be good for everyone if they would buy into Canada's standards for assisted suicide. That's all.
And by the way; after my open heart surgery, it was made abundantly clear to me that pooping would have to become a priority. You can't live if you can't poop."
Could you post the reference for suicide increasing after transition. I would like to read about this, so as to debate effectively with pro-transition arguments.
I grew up with a younger cousin who wanted to be a boy even as a child.
We never once entertained that she was straight, but way back then we missed a lot about her wishing she were actually a boy.
She was also her mother’s favorite child, but mom didn’t like the masculinity, nor did she seem to notice M was attracted to females.
Her father died when she was a toddler.
By the time she came out as a lesbian, most of the family had already recognized and accepted that she was attracted to females, but I don’t think M accepted her own homosexuality and she definitely always wanted to be male.
We were glad when she came out, and I hoped that meant she’d be more accepting of herself, but no.
She was domestically violent towards her partners and I think it came from her own self loathing.
My poor cousin struggled mightily with her sexuality, and gender identity.
We lost her to drug addiction and overdose.
My younger brother was closer to her and he felt she just never could accept she was a lesbian, and it was easier for her to think of herself as a heterosexual male. For my brother, she could hang with the guys, and be like the guys, but she was a female.
In many ways we loved her more than she could love herself.
Surgery doesn’t change the ingrained self loathing.
This is true for all cosmetic fixes. Those new boobs will not change your life.
Botox doesn’t stop time. Sure there’s the initial happiness, but when that wears off, you’re still you.
Many of us do not accept ourselves and often we project that outwardly.
My cousin thought we hated her. We didn’t.
She hated herself, and she should still be here, but she just couldn’t bring it to stay.
You can change your body, your clothes, your name, but you are still going to be you, and you’re the one who has to come to terms with it.
I don’t think so called gender affirming care would have saved her.
thank you for sharing this personal account. This was another story in which I’ve heard that people become obsessed with the superficial values of society. A lot of my spiritual journey has been to accept my physical condition- i.e. body, environment/season etc. as it is momentary. Where ‘home’ truly resides is within one’s self. I’m not very close with my family, but I had mentors my entire life by the blessing of the universe’s ways, and they guided me towards acceptance and my overall view of my belief system. So to hear this struggle of gender identity just makes me think back to how I struggled with anorexia (among many other things), although I do not know what these folks are going through, but that it is a mere surface-level infatuation that if you feed the hungry monster it only grows. Accepting is one thing, encouraging and shoving it down the throats of the youth is an entirely other thing. It’s hip, it’s cool and whether they know it or not it is a ploy to keep them weak. If we recognized each other as other sentient beings and we could learn to just accept ourselves as all divinely unique, this wouldn’t be so mainstreamed. Alas, we are a country of entertainment-driven people who want yet, another show. That is at the demise of these who are struggling, their mental health. They need help, it is a call for someone to love and care for them and most don’t know how to love. It is taboo to talk about love, therefore we go around aimless and just recycling what we learned from our own broken families.
There is a lot involved with these traumas and I am not even touching on a fraction of what people experience. This is what I have discovered in researching and from my own personal interactions with some that I have ran into, I mean you cannot escape the narrative in this day and age. Again, thank you for sharing.
Attractive but mentally ill young people have become the ideals to emulate among Gen Z Americans. We need to be looking at why this is true for the kids who are doing the emulating. They are the ones who are perpetuating this social pathology, not the disturbed individuals they have set up as celebrities.
Thank you for this piece - I appreciate its empathy and compassion. It's given me some insight into how to help guide girls who are gender-nonconforming, should they begin to feel distressed about their bodies in adolescence.
They want to be special, just like everyone else , but more so. They don’t want, generally speaking, to be mistaken for Amish girls or Mormon girls or Trumpy girls, or 18th century girls, but cool a different just like everyone else but a little more special girls
Well-written essay, quite impressive, at least on a quick skim. But one of many cogent observations:
LB: "Page’s idea of what it means to be a girl or woman, or not to be a girl or woman, is regressive. She believes that enjoying boy’s toys or preferring comfortable clothes indicated she was not a girl, and that her attraction to women, like boys and men are, disqualified her from girlhood. This is both factually untrue and a dangerously misleading narrative to impart upon gender non-conforming young women."
Atypical personality traits -- which show a great deal of sexual dimorphism -- really should not justify mangling our bodies to more closely resemble those of the other sex. As I recently put it in a comment on your FTM post:
Quote: For example, you talk about "agreeableness" which might be seen as one dimension on a multi-dimensional gender spectrum. Nice illustration of that idea in this joint probability distribution for agreeableness versus sex. Females are, on average, more agreeable than men -- about 4.1 versus 3.8 respectively. But some females are atypical, they have agreeableness factors more typical of males. One might say that IF agreeableness is one dimension of that multi-dimensional gender spectrum THEN those atypical females with agreeableness measures "significantly" below 3.8 have a masculine gender (agreeableness):
I just want the insanity to stop. The mutilation and medication. The predatory men in women's and girl's spaces, prisons, sports, jobs. Someone make this nightmare go away.
The way to make it go away is to stop treating the trans as if they should be respected.
They should not. We should laugh at them.
No, we should not laugh at them, but we also shouldn’t lie to them.
Laughter is what is needed. Most of the trans women look ridiculous. When you laugh at someone, you show that you have no respect for them. They do not deserve respect. They are complete fools and deranged. Laugh!!!
I don’t think mental illness is funny, but you do you, Boo.
You are confusing cross-dressers with transsexuals, do you know what ladyboys are? Do you enjoy laughing @ birth defects, the disabled & minorities?UDHR🌈
Since 1 in 2,000 human births gender nonspecific and used to be randomly surgically assigned, trans is part of our biology & history, it's commodotizing it into for profit lucrative growth industry that leads to abuse of @ risk youth & women.
Nobody is born gender nonspecific, nobody gets randomly surgically assigned, and trans isn’t part of anything inherent to humanity.
FALSE! What are intersex & hermaphrodite?
Two outmoded and misleading terms for a few dozen differences of sexual development, none of which compromise our mammalian gonochorism even at the individual level.
Dozen? HAH! Bigot.
Unfortunately, we are the someones. And while I think humiliation is not the answer, quiet assertion of reality is. But the road is hard and enduring the derision, the mocking, the anger and the shunning is an important part of returning to truth.
Humiliation is rarely the answer to finding balance.
Thank you Laura Becker for standing up to Page’s narrative. She’s a cultural force right now and the trappings of her narcissism, her need for attention might lead young people into regretful, permanent medical treatments.
Ellen Page is a narcissistic and very troubled person. She is unfortunately a role model, who has used her own failed transition to adulthood to convince other troubled girls that transforming herself to a man can fix the problems in her own head.
That's not the case. Ellen is not a man. She is a mutilated woman.
Exactly.
A remarkable and very insightful review. I found this paragraph particularly powerful: "Reflecting on my own trans experience, a desire to escape the strictures of feminine beauty rituals was a large motivator for why I thought I should become man, but I also never had any maternal instinct. I believed, as many young women do, that being a mother was a social role of burden, a prison of labor, childcare, and little to no individual freedom that was granted to men by default. As I’ve grown older and matured, my perspective has shifted. Although the societal expectation of women to exclusively assume motherhood can be oppressive, I’ve come to recognize that childbearing and rearing are a meaningful gift, enhancing rather than diminishing individuality and personhood."
This really resonated with me. I’m grateful for this paragraph.
I recently learned that Christine Jorgensen, the most famous trans(sexual/gender) ever was a gay man before changing.
A deeply religious gay man who was guilt ridden to be a homosexual and decided that the only resolve to that tension was to become a woman. Reminds me of page and of the way Iran treats its homosexuals.
It's astounding how much of trans ideology center on "transing away the gay" instead of "praying away the gay".
Helpful to read your insights on Page. She is a tragic figure, but it's extremely difficult to have empathy for her when she serves as a role model for self-harm. On one hand we have Hollywood's promotion of regressive stereotypes and acceptance and enabling of horrific behavior. On the other hand, we have Hollywood's glorification of the damaging, medically assisted rejection of self. Profits at all cost.
A splendid review that deftly reviews and critiques Page's experience while interweaving your own as lesbian, autistic and de-transitioned. Thank you.
As an older-generation lesbian, I am grateful that the notion of dysphoric "gender identity" -- that I was actually a boy because I was a tomboy attracted to other girls -- was no where present during my youth. Otherwise, I might have been seduced by this madness, too, and done harm to my perfectly healthy, perfectly female body, which has carried me through a woman's life.
I especially like this: "....what exactly does she want us to believe? Are we expected to accept that she has always been, or has transformed into, a man? ... I want to say: Your pain is real, Ellen. Your joy is real. I believe your experiences. But I disagree that you are a boy, or a man."
We can feel and express compassion without validating illusion and mental dis-ease. Well done!
As a baby boomer, I grew up in a non-Western country, before TV, never mind social media. I was considered a tomboy, which was descriptive rather than judgemental. Yes, I resisted my mother's attempt to dress me in frilly clothes, which was fine. My cohort of school mates (all girls) were not particularly ultra feminine, the way girls are socialized more and more to be in the last 40 years. In my day, high school girls barely wore make up or sexualized themselves. Looking through my school year book, at least a third of graduates could be mistaken for dykes/lesbians today. Although most of them are not. Having short hair was unremarkable. Most were sporty. So just to observe that the pressures on girls growing up currently to be self consciously feminine is way more brutal than it was in my youth.
I'm glad I'm not going through my teen years in this current harsh climate of excessive femininity, because I might have been pressured into believing transitioning was the right choice...there but for the grace of god.
As for Ellen Page (& Kristen Stewart), I recognized both their budding lesbian hood in their early pre-pubescent roles. Ellen Page in Marion Bridge, and Kristen Stewart in Panic Room. I do wonder about the different trajectories of their journeys to adulthood.
I think it's harsh to describe Ellen Page as narcissistic. Her memoir describes a very troubled & unsupportive childhood & predatory experiences in Hollywood. Her memoir could just have easily been about how difficult it was to come to terms with being a lesbian, rather than coming out as trans. Perhaps Kristen Stewart had a more accepting family & supportive mentors later on. That can be a whole other separate & interesting discussion, if anyone cares to start it?
I agree that Page's memoir could encourage other young girls to believe transitioning would be a solution to their non-conforming selves, and that can be dangerous. But she's not the only one who's been swept up in this transcult. It's just deeply sad that she has been, for now...
I'm glad you shared your experience. I agree Page's story is sad more than anything; certainly, I do not perceive her as narcissistic. (That said, I find that an apt descriptor for many trans-identified men, whose impression of "women" is often an offensive caricature and whose demands for validation as "women" are endless.) Page had a tough go, didn't get the support she needed, and ended up losing her marriage and mutilating her body. It's a distressing outcome for an immensely talented and sensitive young woman who, in health and wellness, would have continued to consider herself as such.
I agree, throughout my teens, we hardly wore makeup, we were new wavers and followed the UK music scene, post punk which meant we dressed down and teased our hair. In fact the fashion we followed was masculine. My daughter was a tomboy from the age of four, she rejected boys clothes, I shopped in the boys department right up until she was 12. She held onto her blonde long hair and scooped up inside her caps. She was always mistaken for a boy, which I hated. However as parents we never made a big deal of it, she played sport with boys and competed alongside boys, she had many girls as friends and boys alike. I always loved the way her girlfriends never criticised her dress and accepted her for being a Tom boy. My daughter is a beautiful girl , still plays competitive sport, doesn’t comply with the sex stereotype of women hood. Gender ideology wasn’t on trend when she was growing up thank god.
My question for the women who have mastectomies are they really happy? How can they see themselves in the mirror and view their scar is beyond me, for the women I know that have lost breast to cancer they grieve their women hood. Gender ideation is a mental illness that is being fed by social media and the medical fraternity.
The long term impacts on not treating people with their sex confusion and body dysmorphia, will come back to haunt them all:
Another great piece from Laura Becker--thank you!
I hope she is a regular contributor! Love her stuff!
It seems to me the combination of low self esteme personality traits are often a self-fulfilling prophecy. It projects as victim which attracts bullies. And if those bullies include parents and other adults that own a role that would attract a desire for acceptance, the problems would be amplified.
Kids with high self-confidence might develop the opposite result... the what does not kill you makes you stronger rule manifest.
I think many people struggling with gender identity are the former.
I have no sympathy for Ellen Page. None whatsoever. Think of how many tens of thousands of young girls (and boys) have been indoctrinated to follow in her very public footsteps.
Absolutely right. She is using her own failure to become a normal adult to convince other young women that they can fix their problems by mutilating themselves.
Mutilation does not fix the problem. That's why suicides spike 7-10 years AFTER transition.
Preview of the predictable and nightmarish coming attractions post sex lobotomies: lifelong incontinence, infections, even losing the ability to defecate & pee: https://exulansic.substack.com/p/vaginoplasty-volumes-the-piss-toll-921 Read about your tax dollars & insurance premiums at work (Exulansic also has an excellent article on American Mind – Genital Mutilation for the Masses – that describes these surgeries). The comments are interesting. I'm increasingly finding myself, like this commenter, all out of patience and compassion with Transchurch members and their obnoxious entitlement:
"For me, it's not about compassion for these people anymore. It's about compassion for the ripple of soft disasters they leave in their wake. I'm infuriated by the money they spend on these cosmetic surgeries, apparently without a care in the world for anyone else. I'm angry on behalf of the caregivers who will inevitably be forced to be intimately familiar with their creepy, carved-over excuses for reproductive organs when they end up in a nursing home with early onset dementia from the hormones. I am positively frantic about the fact that there is a very real possibility that my gynecologist will not be able to fit me in when I need her because one of these toads is squatting on their patient roster.
I don't feel sorry for these people anymore. What I feel is a vague hope that they live in other states or other countries mixed in with a detached belief that it would be good for everyone if they would buy into Canada's standards for assisted suicide. That's all.
And by the way; after my open heart surgery, it was made abundantly clear to me that pooping would have to become a priority. You can't live if you can't poop."
We are animals. We must poop. We must pee. We must eat. We must drink. We have urges driven by hormones.
The trannie insanity denies our fundamental animal nature.
There is a name for when you enjoy doing it on other people, now scat!
Mutilation multiplies the problem.
Could you post the reference for suicide increasing after transition. I would like to read about this, so as to debate effectively with pro-transition arguments.
I grew up with a younger cousin who wanted to be a boy even as a child.
We never once entertained that she was straight, but way back then we missed a lot about her wishing she were actually a boy.
She was also her mother’s favorite child, but mom didn’t like the masculinity, nor did she seem to notice M was attracted to females.
Her father died when she was a toddler.
By the time she came out as a lesbian, most of the family had already recognized and accepted that she was attracted to females, but I don’t think M accepted her own homosexuality and she definitely always wanted to be male.
We were glad when she came out, and I hoped that meant she’d be more accepting of herself, but no.
She was domestically violent towards her partners and I think it came from her own self loathing.
My poor cousin struggled mightily with her sexuality, and gender identity.
We lost her to drug addiction and overdose.
My younger brother was closer to her and he felt she just never could accept she was a lesbian, and it was easier for her to think of herself as a heterosexual male. For my brother, she could hang with the guys, and be like the guys, but she was a female.
In many ways we loved her more than she could love herself.
Surgery doesn’t change the ingrained self loathing.
This is true for all cosmetic fixes. Those new boobs will not change your life.
Botox doesn’t stop time. Sure there’s the initial happiness, but when that wears off, you’re still you.
Many of us do not accept ourselves and often we project that outwardly.
My cousin thought we hated her. We didn’t.
She hated herself, and she should still be here, but she just couldn’t bring it to stay.
You can change your body, your clothes, your name, but you are still going to be you, and you’re the one who has to come to terms with it.
I don’t think so called gender affirming care would have saved her.
Deep down inside she’d still know the truth.
thank you for sharing this personal account. This was another story in which I’ve heard that people become obsessed with the superficial values of society. A lot of my spiritual journey has been to accept my physical condition- i.e. body, environment/season etc. as it is momentary. Where ‘home’ truly resides is within one’s self. I’m not very close with my family, but I had mentors my entire life by the blessing of the universe’s ways, and they guided me towards acceptance and my overall view of my belief system. So to hear this struggle of gender identity just makes me think back to how I struggled with anorexia (among many other things), although I do not know what these folks are going through, but that it is a mere surface-level infatuation that if you feed the hungry monster it only grows. Accepting is one thing, encouraging and shoving it down the throats of the youth is an entirely other thing. It’s hip, it’s cool and whether they know it or not it is a ploy to keep them weak. If we recognized each other as other sentient beings and we could learn to just accept ourselves as all divinely unique, this wouldn’t be so mainstreamed. Alas, we are a country of entertainment-driven people who want yet, another show. That is at the demise of these who are struggling, their mental health. They need help, it is a call for someone to love and care for them and most don’t know how to love. It is taboo to talk about love, therefore we go around aimless and just recycling what we learned from our own broken families.
There is a lot involved with these traumas and I am not even touching on a fraction of what people experience. This is what I have discovered in researching and from my own personal interactions with some that I have ran into, I mean you cannot escape the narrative in this day and age. Again, thank you for sharing.
Self-flagellation, rumination, starvation: sounds like an ascetic religion
"Let us prey [sic] ..."
Attractive but mentally ill young people have become the ideals to emulate among Gen Z Americans. We need to be looking at why this is true for the kids who are doing the emulating. They are the ones who are perpetuating this social pathology, not the disturbed individuals they have set up as celebrities.
Thank you for this piece - I appreciate its empathy and compassion. It's given me some insight into how to help guide girls who are gender-nonconforming, should they begin to feel distressed about their bodies in adolescence.
Nicely written, and logical. The occasional “heteronormative” word pops in. “Ordinary” would be clearer, as in “Ordinary clothing choices for a girl”
What adolescent wants to be "ordinary"?
They want to be special, just like everyone else , but more so. They don’t want, generally speaking, to be mistaken for Amish girls or Mormon girls or Trumpy girls, or 18th century girls, but cool a different just like everyone else but a little more special girls
Page child actor since last century so her norm is receiving attention working in make-believe.
It’s called normcore. Few adolescents want to stick out and be scrutinized.
Normcore not actually a word.
Alas, ‘tis one of the 600,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary:
https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=Normcore
I'm 20th century, so no terf, cis or normcore, glad I'm dead soon.
I’m probably older than you are 😉
I remember punk & mohawk.
Well-written essay, quite impressive, at least on a quick skim. But one of many cogent observations:
LB: "Page’s idea of what it means to be a girl or woman, or not to be a girl or woman, is regressive. She believes that enjoying boy’s toys or preferring comfortable clothes indicated she was not a girl, and that her attraction to women, like boys and men are, disqualified her from girlhood. This is both factually untrue and a dangerously misleading narrative to impart upon gender non-conforming young women."
Atypical personality traits -- which show a great deal of sexual dimorphism -- really should not justify mangling our bodies to more closely resemble those of the other sex. As I recently put it in a comment on your FTM post:
Quote: For example, you talk about "agreeableness" which might be seen as one dimension on a multi-dimensional gender spectrum. Nice illustration of that idea in this joint probability distribution for agreeableness versus sex. Females are, on average, more agreeable than men -- about 4.1 versus 3.8 respectively. But some females are atypical, they have agreeableness factors more typical of males. One might say that IF agreeableness is one dimension of that multi-dimensional gender spectrum THEN those atypical females with agreeableness measures "significantly" below 3.8 have a masculine gender (agreeableness):
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joint_probability_distribution_by_sex_and_agreeablenes.jpg
Unquote
https://funkypsyche.substack.com/p/the-archetypal-ftm-sensitive-quirky/comment/21336364