What if the real reason that there are “two parties” is that the Uniparty just wanted to get around antitrust regulation? 
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I think the number of Republicans who would disagree with this stance is higher than you seem to think it is. I think a lot of Republicans view transgenderism as an inability to accept reality, and transition care is NOT seen as an appropriate remedy by that group of people.
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Well, you’re getting to the issue.
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+1.
The US is sharply divided down the middle on all things gender, including hormone therapy.
This is not a crazy extremist thing-- it’s more like where gay marriage was 20 years ago.
(Which, was a winning wedge-issue for Bush, iirc. I think Republicans later changed their mind on both gay marriage and Bush, but they were winning at the moment.)
Wow.
A majority of adults surveyed in the poll, 57 percent, said a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth, while 43 percent said it can be different from their sex assigned at birth.
It still amazes me how fucking stupid Americans are and their fundamental need to pick their desired fantasy over object reality.
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I dunno. The number of trans kids is through the roof. Which makes reality hard to accept. Maybe need a thread for it.
It’s almost as if you stop stigmatizing it, the reported population converges to the true population.
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That’s my first thought too, of course, but what’s the true rate?
Why don’t older people join in? Are they all in denial? Or past some point where it’s worth investigating?
What are the old people (who should be trans but aren’t) like now?
What were they like when they were kids?
You could ask some here that have some insight directly
lol. Yes I would appreciate Alyssa’s and Samantha’s opinions.
Although I at least? suspect they don’t want to talk for all trans people, or be made to wildly speculate about population trends.
Out of a random starting number, Pew puts 3% of young adults as non-binary and 2% as trans. Looking around a bit for a survey of teens and geography now…
I’m in my late 40s. My cousin transitioned when she was in her 60s. There is a subreddit devoted to people who transition later in life. People do it.
But it is hard to transition, and even harder to transition when you are older. Physically, you get less breast growth from estrogen, there are health concerns about taking estrogen over a certain age (I think 60), laser hair removal doesn’t work on gray hairs, etc. Psychologically, people who are older grew up in a very trans-unfriendly time and can have decades of internalized transphobia to deal with. Emotionally, it can be hard to want to risk losing your family to transition.
I think it is hard to understate how awful the medical establishment’s attitudes towards trans people was even as recently as the early 90s. There was a rating scale to determine whether or not someone was a “true transsexual” that determined what level of treatment people could receive. That scale included sexual orientation as a factor – if you were a trans woman who is attracted to women, you were not eligible for treatment. You were required to live openly as your preferred gender for a year before you could receive hormones, yet those very same hormones are needed in order to live openly as that gender. This resulted in trans populations sharing tips about what to say to get treatment, which in turn led to doctors not wanting to treat trans patients b/c they suspected the patients were lying in order to get the treatments they wanted.
And the reason why the medical establishment could get away with that is that by and large, trans people were not portrayed fairly or accurately in most forms of media. There was a trans friendly episode of the Love Boat, but that was an outlier. So transitioning was just not something one could even reasonably consider. I expect that older trans people often had similar early childhood feelings to younger trans people, but didn’t have any real idea of what to do with them.
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This particularly makes sense. I guess it still surprises me that they wouldn’t come out to themselves now. Or is that just sort of irrelevant for some people if they can’t practically transition in any way, including socially?
In *Whipping Girl, Julia Serano briefly addresses the uncertainty of how many trans people there are. As of when she wrote the book (2007), the estimated trans rates in the US were still tiny, with 0.2% being a floor and 0.6% being more accepted. But even then, 2-3% was a common estimate in Europe, so she speculated that the US estimates were low. Europe is more trans friendly than the US, but even 2007 Europe wasn’t super accepting so I would guess that number is also somewhat low.
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There’s a term for that in the trans community – someone is called an `egg’ if they haven’t yet come out to themselves.
I think it would be brutally difficult to have your egg crack and not be able to transition. There are so many things that you have to repress that would be impossible to ignore once you are aware of them. Think of it like the Matrix, which was written as a trans allegory: once you are aware of the matrix, can you continue with your ordinary life? With how scary it is to transition, I think if you are older there is a pressure to take the blue pill and not come out to yourself. Or as Morpheus says, “I feel I owe you an apology. We have a rule: we never free a mind once it’s reached a certain age.”
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Dead.
But you knew that.
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Based on my understanding, it is an unmitigated good to identify transgender individuals earlier in their lives, or rather to help them identify themselves, and allow them to transition before they undergo the “wrong” puberty.
And I suspect adult transgender individuals would have a lot of insight into transgender children, because they were transgender children themselves.
However, it does seem like there is the possibility of creating another category of children who are not transgender, but think they are. I’m not sure anybody would have insight into those children. They would be a very different group than the “truly” transgender individuals.
And logically, the probability that a “true” transgender person would identify as transgender when a child is not particularly related to the probability that a child identifying as transgender is “actually” transgender. In other words:
Pr[Identifies as trans child given is truly trans] has little relation to Pr[is truly trans given identifies as a trans child].
So I personally do have some worry that the unmitigated good of identifying transgender children earlier might be mitigated by some “false positives.” I do not know how justified that worry is. I do not think it means we should deny treatment to all children identifying themselves as transgender, or that we should stop efforts to let transgender children know they are loved and accepted.
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Oh, you are including non-binary in your skepticism?
There have always been nonbinary people that conformed to the constraints. In speaking to some of my older (40+ year old) non-binary friends they have eventually found their way into what we used to just call an androgynous life up to this point. It wasn’t easy for them to get there, as everyones growth and understanding has been its own path. Most are married, some with kids, but their partners most always accepted them for who they were despite midt nit using the term non-binary publicly (or at least not until recently).
Bayes Theorem can solve that.
I think.
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Fully agree with your assessment. If you read/listen to conservatives when they’re in private or pseudonymous, a large portion will consider trans people to be at best mentally ill, oftentimes as pedophiles or similar.
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