Even by ROGD-skeptics’ own restrictive definitions, the U.S. Transgender Survey shows evidence of 2,127 people who reported a time course consistent with ROGD.
I am grateful for the efforts of all scientists and clinicians who are resisting the "gender affirmative care" movement and their unethical behaviors.
What is more telling than the number of kids who get official diagnoses, however, is the vast number of young Millennials and Gen Z'ers who are adopting "trans" and "non binary" identities, or who are supporting them in others, as a cool anti-Establishment lifestyle. The main difference between this latest generational fashion and the hippies, goths, etc., is that the "adults" and "The Establishment" mostly stayed out of youth lifestyles in the past. Or, at least the exploitation of the youth fads was more or less limited to making money off new clothing styles, makeup, and piercings.
Children are struggling, and they are having a particularly hard time with puberty. The reason so many girls want to change sex (and are being lied to that they can) is because they want to escape what is the most misogynist, sexist period of my life. There is no such thing as trans, yet the ideology has captured every democratic institution, and that was done in the most un-democratic way.
There is the slander, bullying, assaults, and threats of rape and violence that have become the norm when we stand up for women's rights. We used to be vilified, but never to this degree. There has been the shovelling of resources from the bottom to the top, and the women and children at the bottom are suffering for it. Violence against women is increasing astronomically.
"There is the slander, bullying, assaults, and threats of rape and violence that have become the norm when we stand up for women's rights. "
This statement matches my experience online. I would add that the level of denial of sexism, denial of sex-based discrimination, insufficient outrage about the above described problems is at least as high as it was 50 years ago. Women are once again fair game for mistreatment, and vocal members of both the "left" and the "right" support this development.
But, do you really think sexism is the same as it was 50 years ago? My experience of the world and the huge number of women in all positions in society would seem to argue that it’s a much different world.
Women have far more access to higher education and public employment than we did in the mid-twentieth century. The representation of women at the highest levels of power in the U.S. is still poor. In the private sector, 90% of CEO's of fortune 500 companies are men. In government the number of women has increased greatly from what it was; about 25% of U.S. Senators are women. We have not, of course, yet elected a female president. At mid-levels of power in private companies and public bureaucracies women occupy many more positions than at the highest levels.
While the improvements are wonderful, there are other trends that are not. One ominous trend is that the increase in power of women in public life is now being blamed by some prominent conservative for most of our current national problems. Examples of writers who are promoting this idea include Christopher Rufo and Heather MacDonald. Conservatives in the House of Reps recently voted in Mike Johnson, who thinks that women's primary role should be to "raise the next generation." (I guess men won't have a role in that).
When I have challenged these ideas online, the men who responded have mostly offered blatantly sexist opinions, such as "women are unfit to lead" and verbal abuse. In response to identifying myself as a feminist, I have received death threats and menacing video clips about what sender intends to do to me. As a result, I have stopped posting on a number of sites that focus on topics of importance to me, particularly those that challenge woke extremism. I assume that many other women are reluctant to post critiques of sexist thinking and actions online, since this is the reaction that happens. I did also receive death threats in the 1970's when my feminist activism attracted some media attention. However, the latest wave of violent misogyny exceeds anything I have experienced in the past. Men in some conservative circles appear to regard threats against women who speak up for women's rights as very acceptable. People on the woke left apparently view violence against women as acceptable as long as the men perpetrating the violence say they are women, or label the victims as TERFS.
Violence against women is the primary tool that is used globally to instill fear in women who try to increase their access to power, resources and opportunity. One of the first goals of the Second Wave feminist movement was to bring attention to the level of violence against women in the U.S., both on public streets and in family homes. The recent rise in the use of verbal abuse, threats of violence and actual violence to intimidate women advocating for women's rights is a serious problem. The general silence about this issue is even more alarming.
Having strangely acute episodic memory, I recall where and when as a 5-year-old I thought “Maybe I’m not a boy” when I grasped that I would not marry a woman and have kids. I called myself a “Janie-girl” to friends and parents. Unhappy about being bullied incessantly through childhood for feminine behavior - being a girl - by 9 I had self-diagnosed transsexualism with the help of the public library, I could probably walk to the stack with the books on psychiatry still. It reassured me that I would grow up and marry a man, and adopt kids. By 11 however as puberty began, after seeing and reading about gay men instead of listening to bullies, I began to realize I was plain old gay, and a year later at 12 was happily jacking off fantasizing about myself as male with men having sex.
That narrative is so common as to be unremarkable - and why I am fascinated by the current debate. Of course gay children are “confused” about sex and adult issues - they aren’t adults, no concept of sex other than what mommies and daddies do. Of course they’re unhappy about having the body of a boy and being g bullied about having behaviors “of a girl”.
Of course teens dislike their body changing. The time delay between when teens are unhappy about a body change, and being exposed to fictional trans explanations shortened drastically after 1998, then , due to zero buffering between teens and misinformation.
It used to take longer than a cycle of puberty for information to diffuse through a population (see slow rate of diffusion of teen pregnancy myths) then suddenly information flowed very rapidly (see the teen pregnancy rate that peaked and fell off a cliff just as Internet became worldwide - 1991 accelerated up to when “16 and Pregnant” began airing.) I suspect trans misinformation began to be seeded around a 1998 when Google came online, and an inflection began around 2004/5 with YouTube and Facebook becoming ubiquitous, then 2006 with Twitter.
The doubling rate of trans diagnoses - period in which the number doubles - slid feom around 9 years from 2000, to 2 years in 2019, a classic logistic growth curve (see bass diffusion models also). It’s not hard to reverse engineer the parameters at this point and see where the phenomenon is going ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function ), and where it ends.
I would posit that all trans identification before 20 is categorically “Rapid” since historic trans identification was decades later.
"That narrative is so common as to be unremarkable - and why I am fascinated by the current debate. Of course gay children are 'confused' about sex and adult issues - they aren’t adults, no concept of sex other than what mommies and daddies do. Of course they’re unhappy about having the body of a boy and being g bullied about having behaviors 'of a girl'."
This exposes the hypocrisy and indifference to children's well-being of the LGBTQIA2S+ industrial complex that has taken up residence in so many American schools. They may paper school hallways with the rainbow colors of the gay movement and make "Pride" a more significant event on the national calendar than July 4, but the truth is they care only about the children who they've manipulated into "identifying" as trans or "queer," whatever that is. There is an abundance of pedagogical materials aimed at turning tots into affirming experts on the full spectrum of gender identities, real and imaginary.
But who in the school system is looking after the interests of what some call proto-gay youth like the younger self Sufeitzy describes above? By now it is second nature for teachers to inform little boys that they might discover that they are little girls, and that would be OK. Never mind that it's pure fiction in almost all cases.
Speaking as a former sissy who had no doubts that I was a boy and who was not at all unhappy about having a boy's body, when are the sex and gender commissars going to get around to informing sissy boys (and the horrid little gender cops who torment them) that sissy boys often develop into gay men, and that would be OK too? That at least has the advantage of being true.
You and I agree precisely. My parents, and extended Aunts and Uncles, older brothers and sisters were of the Marlo Thomas “kids will be kids” generation (all aggressive union-supporting, civil rights-marching Democrats) and essentially ignored my behaviors. School teachers were either frightened of me (teaching myself Calculus and Number Theory in 4th grade) or simply called me a girly-boy (phys-ed, that helped a lot) or gave support for whatever I was interested in ( I played 6 musical instruments at national competitive level by high school). Everyone was aware I was bullied, but bullies were occasionally chastened.
Today adults have been groomed by TRA’s, into pushing children as I was into a TRA fantasy world. The major error people make is to think children are groomed. It’s adults who have been recruited and groomed, repeating slogans and fictions and delivering children as I was into the trans fantasy world. Where are the gay leaders telling such teachers to modulate the bullying and teach acceptance of behaviors as authentic, from rhe child as they are - in my case a sissy boy, pure and simple.
It’s about “sissy shaming” and “tomboy shaming” , it always was, and always will be until educators and doctors are forcefully taught and measured in response otherwise.
One significant problem in any research on cross-sex identifying patients of both sexes is that we do not actually know which sex each subject is. If there were controls, their male or female sex is recorded. But due to "self-ID" in countries where the use of wrong sex hormones and/or sex trait modification is called "gender affirming care" the natal sex of the subjects being studied is unclear. Doctors have gone along with medical "self-ID" even though this group must be researched and the natal sex of patients is crucial information. The results of the recent Finnish study in European Psychiatry (66) 1:1-20 from Nov. 2023 include this admission of the biological ID flaw for research.
Yes, and they have done things like assume that girls who identify as trans boys would score similarly on psych testing to actual boys. This has turned out not to be the case. I was amazed when I read that healthcare professionals and research scientists actually believed that girls on testosterone would respond the same way as boys to questions about their psych symptoms and level of emotional distress. This shows how much the researchers truly believe in the woke gender ideology. It's incredible how this madness has taken over some peoples' minds.
Thanks! Here is the link to trans widow #56 story from my collection of data on our experiences. We do not notice any real or authentic "female transformation." When a suddenly demanding, crossdressing husband says he's female or "needs" his fetish, he's aggressive, sometimes violent and utterly not womanly.
Leor Sapir is a voice of clarity and reason on this topic, and I was pleased that he, and Lisa Littman, are featured here.
Sapir does a great presentation on gender medicalization that is IMO a must-view for anyone interested in this topic. I've had to listen several times to ensure I got it all!
Thanks for this. I suggest, in addition, that Q3.1 is flawed and presumptive in itself. A better query might be, "at what age did you perceive yourself to be different from others of your sex?"
In my experience, the initial awareness is not a rejection of one's own sex, but an internal questioning, a "who am I" (common to all) in which some children come to understand that expectations of their milieu differ from the sense of self. Until ROGD became a sanctioned thing, the answer for many may have been: be you, your own kind of expression of your self.
For those in an unaccepting milieu, life could be hell and emergence into a self came later, with independence from parents, milieu.
For the lucky, it meant coming into one's own through life's lessons from the day one realizes that it is not the child, but the world, that needs to change toward accepting the many ways of being male or female.
For anybody, coming into oneself is not an easy progress. We just pretend that it is. My two cents.
Based on what I read and what I hear from teens and young adults, their self-development as individuals relating to peers is basically about them being online or on text of some type. The level of untempered aggression and extreme narcissism online that young people report is very high, which doesn't support positive self esteem in people who are targeted. In addition, the "self" that is developed is intended from the beginning to be a role performed for a camera, with an approving audience, so it's just a persona really.
The personas that young people use to get attention and be cool are weird right now, but they always have been in some youth subcultures. Playing with masculinity and femininity would have been safer for young people if the Establishment of "liberal" adults who comprise their parents and teachers had remained sane, stable and separate. The level to which the upper middle and upper classes have succumbed to the woke mind virus is astonishing to me.
Thank you for engaging with this material. ROGD is observable in my community. For me there is no doubt that it’s real. I have a list of families who are affected.
Pornography is more degrading and violent. And children as young as 8 years old are exposed to it. Boys are learning men like humiliating, degrading, choking women, and girls learn what boys and men want and her role is to give them what they want. I could go on.
You are exactly right about all of this. The point is that the “realization” or, more accurately, the conclusion drawn that one is somehow “in the wrong body” inevitably leads to a re-writing of one’s life to mesh with that conclusion. Any feelings of discomfort for whatever reason will be used to support the conclusion, because the conclusion becomes a fantasy about relief from discomfort. And nobody wants to admit that this is just a fantasy. So the inaccuracy of the responses is inevitable.
The concept of being born in the wrong body is inherently crazy. I am amazed at how often I hear upper middle class white people with advanced degrees repeating it as if it were a normal, accepted belief. A similar concept is found in some religions, especially the ones that regard reincarnation as a real thing. In those cases, however, the belief is usually more that one chose or deserved to end up in one's present body and family, and that a lot of personal work is required to do better next time.
I was supposed to he born into a billion-dollar trust-funder body complete with exaggeratedly large male secondary sexual characteristics, CCR5 Delta-32 mutation rendering me immune to HIV, Williams syndrome level sociability, IVS1+5G>A mutation rendering me as muscular as a Marvel Superhero, the intellectual capacity to intuitively understand the relationship between quantum gravity and consciousness, flawless skin, cancer immunity, and great hair - and the moves like Mick Jagger. Unfortunately when I woke up this morning, I remembered that I was clearly not in the right body.
I do recommend the movie "Seconds" starring Rock Hudson as an object-lesson in the problems with the concept "wrong body". It's an almost documentary-level examination of how surgery and dead names don't solve problems. It also has Rock Hudson crushing grapes naked at a party in Malibu - well, as a gay man, what can I say. Not quite as good as Sean Connery in a red bodythong in "Zardoz" - sometimes more is less.
It's one of the most amazing movies almost completely unknown to everyone and if it weren't clearly unintentional, it is a flawless fusion of Faust and what passes for trans theory.
Thank you for this, Sufeitzy! I am suffering slightly from the darkness, although a bit more hopeful now that the Solstice is behind us, and your post makes me laugh! I will check out "Seconds" and "Zardoz." I, too, have been searching the past for good movies, as far back as mid-Sixties Charlton Heston.
With regard to Rock Hudson, when he died I overheard a conversation about him between my mom (born 1912) and a neighbor lady of a similar age. They were quite saddened by his passing and not at all surprised by the news of his gayness. They still thought of him as their own sex idol. The neighbor lady commented, "Everybody knew that he was 'that way,' but nobody cared. He was so gorgeous!"
I was sitting in my laboratory in Paris under the Fontaine Nikki de Sainte Phalle many decades ago weeping one winter, transplanted from LA, weeping. I’m obnoxiously cheerful usually, and it was perplexing until friends told me about SAD. I’m glad I could make you laugh. SAD is so infuriating!
I have a non-scientific observation that a large percentage of kids within this cohort of gender confusion consider themselves below some line in attractiveness as possibly reinforced by their social interactions with peers and exacerbated with social media, and in a highly-material world that we live in made more so by social media, they crash into a position of such low self-esteem that they grow interested in silver-bullet solutions to "fix" it. There are a few problems with this. One - most kids as they are starting and going through the bulk of puberty are awkward and unattractive. They are no longer cute kids, and they are not yet adults. It is natural for many people in their teenage years to feel like they don't belong in their body. It is also common to be confused about sex at that age and time. Two - the peer pressure for material attractiveness is massive within K-12 but almost disappears for most people when they escape to their real life after K-12. Three - children don't have wisdom yet to make decisions that are so profoundly life-changing. For most people, any decision to alter gender should be restricted until at least 18 years old. Frankly, even though people are sexual active before then, I think it is good to consider they should not be until adults. And with respect to gender assignment, if we have a tolerant community that does not judge, for example, a biological female dressing as a male or visa versa, then there should be no urgency for altering gender before the age of 18. And frankly, if community harassment for gender dysphoria is the justification, it does not change, and in fact might get worse, for kids engaged in gender changing procedures.
I agree that there are probably many kids in position of feeling that they aren't attractive. Sometimes, however, they actually are very attractive but have low self-esteem and don't se themselves accurately. For the ones who actually have psychiatric issues, which is probably most of the ROGD set, it looks a lot like the pattern seen in eating disorders. There are a lot of other teens and young adults who are just going through developmental issues that are normal, and many more, in my opinion, who are just swept up in their generations' fashions.
I am grateful for the efforts of all scientists and clinicians who are resisting the "gender affirmative care" movement and their unethical behaviors.
What is more telling than the number of kids who get official diagnoses, however, is the vast number of young Millennials and Gen Z'ers who are adopting "trans" and "non binary" identities, or who are supporting them in others, as a cool anti-Establishment lifestyle. The main difference between this latest generational fashion and the hippies, goths, etc., is that the "adults" and "The Establishment" mostly stayed out of youth lifestyles in the past. Or, at least the exploitation of the youth fads was more or less limited to making money off new clothing styles, makeup, and piercings.
Good point!
Children are struggling, and they are having a particularly hard time with puberty. The reason so many girls want to change sex (and are being lied to that they can) is because they want to escape what is the most misogynist, sexist period of my life. There is no such thing as trans, yet the ideology has captured every democratic institution, and that was done in the most un-democratic way.
What are you seeing that’s the most misogynist time of your life?
There is the slander, bullying, assaults, and threats of rape and violence that have become the norm when we stand up for women's rights. We used to be vilified, but never to this degree. There has been the shovelling of resources from the bottom to the top, and the women and children at the bottom are suffering for it. Violence against women is increasing astronomically.
"There is the slander, bullying, assaults, and threats of rape and violence that have become the norm when we stand up for women's rights. "
This statement matches my experience online. I would add that the level of denial of sexism, denial of sex-based discrimination, insufficient outrage about the above described problems is at least as high as it was 50 years ago. Women are once again fair game for mistreatment, and vocal members of both the "left" and the "right" support this development.
But, do you really think sexism is the same as it was 50 years ago? My experience of the world and the huge number of women in all positions in society would seem to argue that it’s a much different world.
Women have far more access to higher education and public employment than we did in the mid-twentieth century. The representation of women at the highest levels of power in the U.S. is still poor. In the private sector, 90% of CEO's of fortune 500 companies are men. In government the number of women has increased greatly from what it was; about 25% of U.S. Senators are women. We have not, of course, yet elected a female president. At mid-levels of power in private companies and public bureaucracies women occupy many more positions than at the highest levels.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106320#:~:text=Fast%20Facts,up%2047%25%20of%20the%20workforce
Women continue to be paid less than men, including for similar work, and to perform more of the unpaid work necessary to maintain homes and families.
https://myelder.com/women-bear-the-brunt-of-elder-caregiving/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/women-breadwinners-tripled-since-1970s-still-doing-more-unpaid-work/
While the improvements are wonderful, there are other trends that are not. One ominous trend is that the increase in power of women in public life is now being blamed by some prominent conservative for most of our current national problems. Examples of writers who are promoting this idea include Christopher Rufo and Heather MacDonald. Conservatives in the House of Reps recently voted in Mike Johnson, who thinks that women's primary role should be to "raise the next generation." (I guess men won't have a role in that).
When I have challenged these ideas online, the men who responded have mostly offered blatantly sexist opinions, such as "women are unfit to lead" and verbal abuse. In response to identifying myself as a feminist, I have received death threats and menacing video clips about what sender intends to do to me. As a result, I have stopped posting on a number of sites that focus on topics of importance to me, particularly those that challenge woke extremism. I assume that many other women are reluctant to post critiques of sexist thinking and actions online, since this is the reaction that happens. I did also receive death threats in the 1970's when my feminist activism attracted some media attention. However, the latest wave of violent misogyny exceeds anything I have experienced in the past. Men in some conservative circles appear to regard threats against women who speak up for women's rights as very acceptable. People on the woke left apparently view violence against women as acceptable as long as the men perpetrating the violence say they are women, or label the victims as TERFS.
Violence against women is the primary tool that is used globally to instill fear in women who try to increase their access to power, resources and opportunity. One of the first goals of the Second Wave feminist movement was to bring attention to the level of violence against women in the U.S., both on public streets and in family homes. The recent rise in the use of verbal abuse, threats of violence and actual violence to intimidate women advocating for women's rights is a serious problem. The general silence about this issue is even more alarming.
Having strangely acute episodic memory, I recall where and when as a 5-year-old I thought “Maybe I’m not a boy” when I grasped that I would not marry a woman and have kids. I called myself a “Janie-girl” to friends and parents. Unhappy about being bullied incessantly through childhood for feminine behavior - being a girl - by 9 I had self-diagnosed transsexualism with the help of the public library, I could probably walk to the stack with the books on psychiatry still. It reassured me that I would grow up and marry a man, and adopt kids. By 11 however as puberty began, after seeing and reading about gay men instead of listening to bullies, I began to realize I was plain old gay, and a year later at 12 was happily jacking off fantasizing about myself as male with men having sex.
That narrative is so common as to be unremarkable - and why I am fascinated by the current debate. Of course gay children are “confused” about sex and adult issues - they aren’t adults, no concept of sex other than what mommies and daddies do. Of course they’re unhappy about having the body of a boy and being g bullied about having behaviors “of a girl”.
Of course teens dislike their body changing. The time delay between when teens are unhappy about a body change, and being exposed to fictional trans explanations shortened drastically after 1998, then , due to zero buffering between teens and misinformation.
It used to take longer than a cycle of puberty for information to diffuse through a population (see slow rate of diffusion of teen pregnancy myths) then suddenly information flowed very rapidly (see the teen pregnancy rate that peaked and fell off a cliff just as Internet became worldwide - 1991 accelerated up to when “16 and Pregnant” began airing.) I suspect trans misinformation began to be seeded around a 1998 when Google came online, and an inflection began around 2004/5 with YouTube and Facebook becoming ubiquitous, then 2006 with Twitter.
The doubling rate of trans diagnoses - period in which the number doubles - slid feom around 9 years from 2000, to 2 years in 2019, a classic logistic growth curve (see bass diffusion models also). It’s not hard to reverse engineer the parameters at this point and see where the phenomenon is going ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function ), and where it ends.
I would posit that all trans identification before 20 is categorically “Rapid” since historic trans identification was decades later.
"That narrative is so common as to be unremarkable - and why I am fascinated by the current debate. Of course gay children are 'confused' about sex and adult issues - they aren’t adults, no concept of sex other than what mommies and daddies do. Of course they’re unhappy about having the body of a boy and being g bullied about having behaviors 'of a girl'."
This exposes the hypocrisy and indifference to children's well-being of the LGBTQIA2S+ industrial complex that has taken up residence in so many American schools. They may paper school hallways with the rainbow colors of the gay movement and make "Pride" a more significant event on the national calendar than July 4, but the truth is they care only about the children who they've manipulated into "identifying" as trans or "queer," whatever that is. There is an abundance of pedagogical materials aimed at turning tots into affirming experts on the full spectrum of gender identities, real and imaginary.
But who in the school system is looking after the interests of what some call proto-gay youth like the younger self Sufeitzy describes above? By now it is second nature for teachers to inform little boys that they might discover that they are little girls, and that would be OK. Never mind that it's pure fiction in almost all cases.
Speaking as a former sissy who had no doubts that I was a boy and who was not at all unhappy about having a boy's body, when are the sex and gender commissars going to get around to informing sissy boys (and the horrid little gender cops who torment them) that sissy boys often develop into gay men, and that would be OK too? That at least has the advantage of being true.
You and I agree precisely. My parents, and extended Aunts and Uncles, older brothers and sisters were of the Marlo Thomas “kids will be kids” generation (all aggressive union-supporting, civil rights-marching Democrats) and essentially ignored my behaviors. School teachers were either frightened of me (teaching myself Calculus and Number Theory in 4th grade) or simply called me a girly-boy (phys-ed, that helped a lot) or gave support for whatever I was interested in ( I played 6 musical instruments at national competitive level by high school). Everyone was aware I was bullied, but bullies were occasionally chastened.
Today adults have been groomed by TRA’s, into pushing children as I was into a TRA fantasy world. The major error people make is to think children are groomed. It’s adults who have been recruited and groomed, repeating slogans and fictions and delivering children as I was into the trans fantasy world. Where are the gay leaders telling such teachers to modulate the bullying and teach acceptance of behaviors as authentic, from rhe child as they are - in my case a sissy boy, pure and simple.
It’s about “sissy shaming” and “tomboy shaming” , it always was, and always will be until educators and doctors are forcefully taught and measured in response otherwise.
One significant problem in any research on cross-sex identifying patients of both sexes is that we do not actually know which sex each subject is. If there were controls, their male or female sex is recorded. But due to "self-ID" in countries where the use of wrong sex hormones and/or sex trait modification is called "gender affirming care" the natal sex of the subjects being studied is unclear. Doctors have gone along with medical "self-ID" even though this group must be researched and the natal sex of patients is crucial information. The results of the recent Finnish study in European Psychiatry (66) 1:1-20 from Nov. 2023 include this admission of the biological ID flaw for research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJhFbqL_KU&t=10s
Yes, and they have done things like assume that girls who identify as trans boys would score similarly on psych testing to actual boys. This has turned out not to be the case. I was amazed when I read that healthcare professionals and research scientists actually believed that girls on testosterone would respond the same way as boys to questions about their psych symptoms and level of emotional distress. This shows how much the researchers truly believe in the woke gender ideology. It's incredible how this madness has taken over some peoples' minds.
Thanks! Here is the link to trans widow #56 story from my collection of data on our experiences. We do not notice any real or authentic "female transformation." When a suddenly demanding, crossdressing husband says he's female or "needs" his fetish, he's aggressive, sometimes violent and utterly not womanly.
https://wordpress.com/post/uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com/6568
Thanks Dr. Littman.
Leor Sapir is a voice of clarity and reason on this topic, and I was pleased that he, and Lisa Littman, are featured here.
Sapir does a great presentation on gender medicalization that is IMO a must-view for anyone interested in this topic. I've had to listen several times to ensure I got it all!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZpijyN8FLE
Thanks for this. I suggest, in addition, that Q3.1 is flawed and presumptive in itself. A better query might be, "at what age did you perceive yourself to be different from others of your sex?"
In my experience, the initial awareness is not a rejection of one's own sex, but an internal questioning, a "who am I" (common to all) in which some children come to understand that expectations of their milieu differ from the sense of self. Until ROGD became a sanctioned thing, the answer for many may have been: be you, your own kind of expression of your self.
For those in an unaccepting milieu, life could be hell and emergence into a self came later, with independence from parents, milieu.
For the lucky, it meant coming into one's own through life's lessons from the day one realizes that it is not the child, but the world, that needs to change toward accepting the many ways of being male or female.
For anybody, coming into oneself is not an easy progress. We just pretend that it is. My two cents.
Based on what I read and what I hear from teens and young adults, their self-development as individuals relating to peers is basically about them being online or on text of some type. The level of untempered aggression and extreme narcissism online that young people report is very high, which doesn't support positive self esteem in people who are targeted. In addition, the "self" that is developed is intended from the beginning to be a role performed for a camera, with an approving audience, so it's just a persona really.
The personas that young people use to get attention and be cool are weird right now, but they always have been in some youth subcultures. Playing with masculinity and femininity would have been safer for young people if the Establishment of "liberal" adults who comprise their parents and teachers had remained sane, stable and separate. The level to which the upper middle and upper classes have succumbed to the woke mind virus is astonishing to me.
Thank you for engaging with this material. ROGD is observable in my community. For me there is no doubt that it’s real. I have a list of families who are affected.
Pornography is more degrading and violent. And children as young as 8 years old are exposed to it. Boys are learning men like humiliating, degrading, choking women, and girls learn what boys and men want and her role is to give them what they want. I could go on.
I do think pornography is an influence in lots of this.
according to many de transitioners, it was.
You are exactly right about all of this. The point is that the “realization” or, more accurately, the conclusion drawn that one is somehow “in the wrong body” inevitably leads to a re-writing of one’s life to mesh with that conclusion. Any feelings of discomfort for whatever reason will be used to support the conclusion, because the conclusion becomes a fantasy about relief from discomfort. And nobody wants to admit that this is just a fantasy. So the inaccuracy of the responses is inevitable.
The concept of being born in the wrong body is inherently crazy. I am amazed at how often I hear upper middle class white people with advanced degrees repeating it as if it were a normal, accepted belief. A similar concept is found in some religions, especially the ones that regard reincarnation as a real thing. In those cases, however, the belief is usually more that one chose or deserved to end up in one's present body and family, and that a lot of personal work is required to do better next time.
I was supposed to he born into a billion-dollar trust-funder body complete with exaggeratedly large male secondary sexual characteristics, CCR5 Delta-32 mutation rendering me immune to HIV, Williams syndrome level sociability, IVS1+5G>A mutation rendering me as muscular as a Marvel Superhero, the intellectual capacity to intuitively understand the relationship between quantum gravity and consciousness, flawless skin, cancer immunity, and great hair - and the moves like Mick Jagger. Unfortunately when I woke up this morning, I remembered that I was clearly not in the right body.
I do recommend the movie "Seconds" starring Rock Hudson as an object-lesson in the problems with the concept "wrong body". It's an almost documentary-level examination of how surgery and dead names don't solve problems. It also has Rock Hudson crushing grapes naked at a party in Malibu - well, as a gay man, what can I say. Not quite as good as Sean Connery in a red bodythong in "Zardoz" - sometimes more is less.
It's one of the most amazing movies almost completely unknown to everyone and if it weren't clearly unintentional, it is a flawless fusion of Faust and what passes for trans theory.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seconds_(1966_film)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz
(I've read too many books, seen too many films, read too many papers, and had too much Champagne this evening).
Thank you for this, Sufeitzy! I am suffering slightly from the darkness, although a bit more hopeful now that the Solstice is behind us, and your post makes me laugh! I will check out "Seconds" and "Zardoz." I, too, have been searching the past for good movies, as far back as mid-Sixties Charlton Heston.
With regard to Rock Hudson, when he died I overheard a conversation about him between my mom (born 1912) and a neighbor lady of a similar age. They were quite saddened by his passing and not at all surprised by the news of his gayness. They still thought of him as their own sex idol. The neighbor lady commented, "Everybody knew that he was 'that way,' but nobody cared. He was so gorgeous!"
I was sitting in my laboratory in Paris under the Fontaine Nikki de Sainte Phalle many decades ago weeping one winter, transplanted from LA, weeping. I’m obnoxiously cheerful usually, and it was perplexing until friends told me about SAD. I’m glad I could make you laugh. SAD is so infuriating!
Thank you, Sufeitzy! I am feeling a bit better now even though the sun is still setting on my afternoon dog walks.
I have a non-scientific observation that a large percentage of kids within this cohort of gender confusion consider themselves below some line in attractiveness as possibly reinforced by their social interactions with peers and exacerbated with social media, and in a highly-material world that we live in made more so by social media, they crash into a position of such low self-esteem that they grow interested in silver-bullet solutions to "fix" it. There are a few problems with this. One - most kids as they are starting and going through the bulk of puberty are awkward and unattractive. They are no longer cute kids, and they are not yet adults. It is natural for many people in their teenage years to feel like they don't belong in their body. It is also common to be confused about sex at that age and time. Two - the peer pressure for material attractiveness is massive within K-12 but almost disappears for most people when they escape to their real life after K-12. Three - children don't have wisdom yet to make decisions that are so profoundly life-changing. For most people, any decision to alter gender should be restricted until at least 18 years old. Frankly, even though people are sexual active before then, I think it is good to consider they should not be until adults. And with respect to gender assignment, if we have a tolerant community that does not judge, for example, a biological female dressing as a male or visa versa, then there should be no urgency for altering gender before the age of 18. And frankly, if community harassment for gender dysphoria is the justification, it does not change, and in fact might get worse, for kids engaged in gender changing procedures.
I agree that there are probably many kids in position of feeling that they aren't attractive. Sometimes, however, they actually are very attractive but have low self-esteem and don't se themselves accurately. For the ones who actually have psychiatric issues, which is probably most of the ROGD set, it looks a lot like the pattern seen in eating disorders. There are a lot of other teens and young adults who are just going through developmental issues that are normal, and many more, in my opinion, who are just swept up in their generations' fashions.
Why is it that no one ever mentions this? https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/