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.
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.
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.”
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.
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).
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.
True. We also would need Pr[is transgender], the unconditional probability a child is transgender, and Pr[identifies as trans given is not trans].
Since Pr[is transgender] is relatively small, Pr[identifies as trans given is not trans] can also be small while keeping Pr[is not trans given identifies as trans] relatively large.
A lot of conservatives seem to consider Pr[is transgender] = 0, which means every child identifying as transgender is mistaken about themself.
But I think that even a person who thinks people can be transgender, eg who think Pr[is transgender] > 0, may become afraid that too many children are falsely identifying themselves as transgender, and support policies that punish transgender people.
Though non-binary statistic is a lot less dramatic. The difference between our generation (1%) and the next generation (3%), could just be a matter of awareness or whatever.
With trans, the gap between us (0.3%) and the actual rate (3%) would imply that almost every trans-person in our generation is in denial, including most open, informed, life-long lgbt allies.
The points that Samantha made helped here-- about the treatments, about the ‘blue pill’, and about it being worthless knowledge if you can’t socially or physically transition.
I think that gender/sex is one of the few categories that we often consider to partially precede our individuality.
For example, i am american, but in some sense i choose to be american. certainly i can imagine me as not american. most categories we use to describe ourselves are like that, i think, at least in anglo american culture.
Perhaps not so with gender. It is a group that is part of our identity.
So the language to talk about being transgender seems a hard one to develop. It has changed even in the last 10 years or so, with “transgender” replacing “transsexual” for example. For those of us outside the community, or me at least, it can be confusing.
This may support the argument for why so many in prior generations did not identify themselves as transgender.
I wonder if the mods might want to break out the gender tangent into a separate thread.
Given the current political climate, it’s relevant to politics, but I think we’re straying from the darned things some Republicans say.
I started writing out a contribution to the tangent, but then I realized it was going to be a real digression from the supposed topic of this thread…and it looks like the query I’ve been waiting on was going to complete before I finished organizing and composing my remarks.
The arbitrary value and stratification of gender imposed by culture drives individuals away from their natural gendered selves. Our culture (like most cultures) have arbitrary constraints by gender. A couple of flippant examples “that’s women’s work.” “It pays to be a man if you desire to lead a corporation.”
Those constraints can put an individual in conflict with their gender.
My question is “why do so many straight people give a shit about any of this stuff?” It’s not really impactful in any meaningful way for the vast majority of people.
I’m curious how many nonbinary people identify as such more out of discomfort for societal expectations tied to gender vs inherent identification. Like girls feeling a disconnect because they’re not interested in make up and babies and “female” things or guys who aren’t interested in sports and trucks and “male” things, and not identifying with society’s definition of what characterizes one as male or female, leaving them with a nonbinary label (vs labeled as a tomboy or sissy).