4thWaveNow

roslynholcomb:

4thwavenow:

Those of you who have been following me for awhile know where I’m coming from as a gender-critical parent.  I recently took a tour of trans parenting Tumblr blogs, and they’re full of what you might expect. A very small sampler:

“Parents please please please talk to your children about gender identity.
please teach children that there are more than two genders and that gender  is not what genitals you have”

“What my kindergartener taught me about gender”

“A mom and her 3-year-old explore gender”

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And of course, there is plenty of hate for parents who aren’t toeing the line.

The general theme is: Kids ALWAYS know best. Defer to your child and their self-defined gender identity, with no questions asked, no matter how young your child is.

I’ve recently heard from three gender-critical parents of teen girls who want to transition, or who already have. All three are discouraged. They feel like they’ve stumbled into an upside-down reality where they are told to ignore their instincts and doubts and enter the brave new world their children have created.

If there is to be a change in the dominant paradigm, parents are going to have to be involved. They’ll have to find a way to buck the trend. It won’t be easy, and they’ll need support.

I can’t imagine how traumatic this must be for the parents. They need to remember that questioning your parents, your gender and everything else is a normal developmental stage. And if your kids don’t hate you at some point you’re probably doing parenting wrong. 

I would think about some of the crazy shit I wanted to do when I was that age and how fucked up my life would’ve been had my parents actually let me. This is a learning stage for kids and we have to let them learn and grow, but we also have to keep them from doing stuff that will have PERMANENT consequences. 

And what is different now from when we were growing up–completely different–is that parents have basically zero societal or professional (psychologists or MD) support for even raising tentative questions. I went through 50+ blogs this morning, There was only one teen girl who stopped to consider whether her parents might have a point. Every other post consisted of jeers and ridicule at the transphobic, ignorant moms and dads who dare to put the brakes on even **medical transition**. 

Here is an excerpt from the one post I found that even hinted that mom might have a point. And of course, in response to this agonized post, the strangers on the Internet convince her that they are the experts. They know. Her mother’s words should be disregarded

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“But secretly I’m scared she’s right. What if I am making all this up? Yeah yeah, who would choose this right? But what if I did? What if I’m so “confused by everything” as my mom said that I’ve convinced myself Im trans?

It doesn’t seem right. I know what I feel, but she just gets in my head. This is so much harder than anyone tells you. How do you even get through these conversations and stick to your guns? I don’t know if she’s right and I’m confused or Im right and she’s manipulative. I love my mom, but I hate that she does this to me. I asked her to just support me through this and all she could say was that “I support you in everything else you do, but this is weird and it goes against everything about who you are. You don’t like to take Advil but you’ll pump yourself full of hormones. You’re terrified of surgery, but you’ll go through with getting rid of something that is a part of you. It’s not you.”

I don’t know what to do. Im so lost.

butiwasntaboy:

I have a friend who recently announced that she is transgender. Now in her early 20s, for several years she was out as a lesbian, but set her sights on straight women who were unattainable and eventually broke her heart. (She is a beautiful girl, and even though physical attraction is not the most important thing in life, I think it is worth noting, because this is a person who has decided to become a man and deny herself the feminine beauty to which she was born.) She developed really strong crushes, most of the time did not even approach them and let them know what her feelings were, and spent her time alone, pining over these young women. The only reason I know this about her is because I noticed her sadness and basically called her out, saying “I think I know what is going on here. Are you okay?”. The reason that this was so obvious to me is because I have been there myself. The first time I ever experienced love as a teenager, it was for a girl I was very close friends with. She was beautiful, and I was entranced by her physical appearance, but also by her personality. Any time I would call her on the phone, my heart would beat out of my chest, and when I would see her, I would actually get weak in the knees. I would find excuses to talk to her, and became friends with her by mirroring her personality to a very large extent. At my young age, it didn’t matter whether or not I was being true to myself, because I just wanted to be near her. As an adult, I can honestly say that if transition had been available at that time, I might have pressured my parents to allow me to do so. However, after seeing what my trans friends have go through, and how much of a distraction focusing on physical appearance can be, I am deeply thankful that that was not an available choice for me. Not transitioning enabled me to focus on who I wanted to be on the inside, and to develop into a successful human being, gender aside. (You can read more about my personal feelings involving feeling “male” in my post titled, “Praying for a penis”.)

Over the past year or so, my friend has become completely obsessed with trying to pass. She binges on YouTube videos, signs up for FTM dating sites (although she has not transitioned), and abruptly abandoned the clothes that she used to wear in exchange for exclusively “men’s” clothes. I’ve seen her spend countless hours looking at herself in the mirror, imagining her body as male, trying to figure out the best way to pass.

There are many reasons that these choices strike a chord with me: One, who gets to decide what “men’s” clothes are, and why is it so important for her to choose them? Can’t they just be clothes? Why does “being a male” mean that she can no longer wear the clothes that she herself used to love? Another thing that seems sad to me is that when she goes out in public, instead of just enjoying her life and the reason that she has decided to go out, her reason for leaving the house is to see if she can pass. She has developed a very affected gait, swaggering around the way that she thinks that men walk. Sometimes, she forgets to do it, and for a second I see the person she was for the first 2 1/2 decades of her life, and it is a thing of beauty. The fact that she thinks she needs to do this at all just to be accepted by society is, however, heartbreaking. I have referred to what I feel is a very conservative climate, pressuring NGC women to transition, rather than being who they are, and when I see her deliberately changing who she is and becoming a stereotype, it is very sad. Why can’t she just walk however she walks and not feel compelled to imitate men? Why won’t society let her?
I will admit that when a lot of my friends told me that they were trans, my first reaction was unconditional support. I felt like any choice that they wanted to make regarding their bodies was theirs to make, and my liberal brain screamed something like “fight the power”. I told my trans friends how much I supported them, how beautiful they were, and how I couldn’t wait to see what they would look like with their new bodies. But then I started thinking about it. REALLY thinking about it. I questioned the duplicity of a society that appears to be so accepting of homosexuality and transitioners, but is actually sending the message that if you feel inside your brain that you are the opposite sex, you must therefore change your body to match. I think it is because most people, however accepting, do not want to deal with the fluidity of sexuality. They want to look at a person and know things about them by their appearance, rather than accepting that we do not come from cookie cutters, and have many different brains and personalities, regardless of body image.
That being said, the purpose of this post is not to criticize trans people, but to examine why physical appearance has become so important. This current obsession with pronouns and physical appearance leaves little room for inner growth and reflection. And suppose a person does transition and successfully “pass”? Does that change their moral compass, core values, or personality? Will “passing” make them better partners? It seems that while many people could be growing inside, this physical distraction might be preventing them from developing as humans. While focusing on “passing”, are they missing life?

I still feel like a male a lot of the time, but avoiding the trans trap has allowed me to focus on who I want to be as a person. Instead of bowing down to society’s pressure to present in a way that makes it easy for THEM, I chose ME and focused on how to be the person I want to be on the inside. When I see how little time “passing” leaves for self-reflection, I wonder if putting this pressure of physically presenting on hold would actually be a relief to my trans friends. My hope is that they would become free from worrying about whether or not their bodies “match” their brains. My body matches my brain perfectly. Because it’s MINE. What people think is no longer important.

Please feel free to respond to this post, and ask questions, as well as to answer any of the questions I posed in this post.

Is this an epidemic now?

no-lies-detected:

redressalert:

genderdeceit:

4thwavenow:

Just curious: How many of you gender non-conforming girls/women feel pressure (from peers, media, whatever) to “transition” to male? Is it worse in some geographic areas or countries? There’s quite a bit of pressure in more urban or “blue” states here in the US. What’s your experience, girls on the front line?

(FtM perspective (sort of. I don’t know if that fits anymore. I stopped giving a shit a while ago))

I feel like one of the most dangerous aspects of the pressure to transition is that, often, it does not feel like you are being pressured. There are not many people saying ‘oh, you don’t make a good woman—transition!’ (though I have seen more and more of this over the last year or two), but rather there is a great deal of gentle coaxing and ‘innocent’ mistakes and assumptions (the preferred pronouns thing comes to mind here, or the stories I’ve heard from butch lesbians about being asked WHEN they plan to transition).

Obviously, there is and always has been a pressure for GNC women to become more gender conforming. Ten, twenty years ago, that pressure was for such people to act more like what society expects from a woman. But now, there is another option, and it is a disturbingly tantalizing one. Transition is an instantaneously appealing option, especially for those of us who deal with sex dysphoria and are promised (falsely) that it is a solution.

When you see the idea of transition or IDing as something other than woman, you are presented with so many new ideas about who you can be—FtM, NB, GQ, demi, or whatever other language is going ‘round the circles these days. And the moment you mention your desire to explore outside of what is traditionally associated with womanhood, you get so much support. Whenever you mention that you switched pronouns or came out to your parents or your best friend or that you talked to your doctor about T, you get patted on the back and told what a great job you’re doing and how people are proud of you. I can’t imagine how appealing this level of support is for a teenager.

(and don’t get me wrong, most people who offer support are not doing it with malicious intent. They are doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, and some of the most loving, generous, kind people I have met in my life are transmen. It’s a wider social problem that extends far beyond these individuals or even the trans community as a whole)

And worse, no one ever questions it. No one questions it! That is the scariest thing about this surge in trans politics. No one questions your self diagnosis. It’s outright taboo. During my transition, I saw a therapist. I had two doctors prescribing my testosterone. I had a third doctor aware of my transition, but treating a separate medical issue. I came out to my friends, my family, my employers. The only time that the motivation for my decision to transition was questioned was by my father. When I came out to him, he asked me if this was about liking women.

(It wasn’t—I like men—but it’s a perfectly valid question given the current state of trans politics)

I don’t know exactly where I was going with this, but I almost feel like ‘pressure’ is too simple a word for the phenomena of this massive spike in transition or female disidentification that we’ve seen over the last few years. It’s almost more akin to a mass psychogenic illness.

genderdeceit, thanks for this, so well put. Yes. It’s not like other kinds of “peer pressure” I have known. It’s…more insidious somehow. And tricky because it seems like a positive thing, as the “opposite” of being forced into stereotypical femininity. But it’s not the opposite. Not really. The idea that it is, is endlessly seductive. You really got it.

I also appreciated your saying that the transmen who do this don’t have malicious intent. I get really upset sometimes thinking about how I evangelized and looking at the domino effects—how many other young dykes I knew followed my lead down this path. I never intended harm. I know that. But intent isn’t magic. I do feel differently about the “allies” who “support” and encourage this, though. 

Not being questioned—or even the idea that you should not be, the promise of it, the ethos that posits anyone who questions you is a bigot—was so seductive for me as well. That felt like power. A lot of people questioned me, but it made me feel righteous and unfairly persecuted, and even stronger in my resolve to defy them.

Ha, now who’s rambling. Anyway, what you said is awesome and thanks for speaking your piece. Hope to hear more from you.

I think pressure is a big part of it, and people definitely see transition as a way out of problems that shouldn’t even be problems. I know a rather extreme MtF example.

I recently found an old friend of mine on tumblr that I hadn’t spoken to since high school ended — he is a trans activist dating a transwoman and now considers himself trans as well.  He’s super active on social media and talks openly about his transition.  I’ve known him since he was 12, and he was always a typical horndog straight boy who had no interest in girly things.

When he came out as trans, his justification was literally nothing more than because he thought he wasn’t manly enough and would make a better girl. That is the ONLY reason. There was no sex dysmorphia (he’s doing HRT so he can be prettier but keeping his ladypenis, of course), he’s still ostensibly straight (his trans partner is post-op and passes fairly well), nor are there other psychological reasons (aside from his apparent insecurity).  He even admitted on his blog that transitioning seemed to be easier than going through life as an unusual male.  

The worst part is now that he’s started living as a woman he’s been posting pornographic selfies all over the place (he never did this as a guy).  Having been a huge porn consumer all this time, it’s been hammered into his brain that woman = sex object, and getting men to fap to his panty shots is validation that he’s a real woman.  It’s sad and ridiculous.  Nothing about it is healthy.

I’m sure that dating someone who was trans really helped to solidify the “if they could do it, I can too!” mentality.  People think it’s so easy to switch bodies like it’ll solve everything and never stop to think about the medical realities of taking high doses of synthetic hormones.  Transitioning is not a magical coping mechanism that will make your life complete, but so many people talk about it like it is.

Anyway, I can only imagine how much pressure there is on NGC women to just “get it over with” and go FtM because warping your body to fit your personality into the appropriate stereotype is the natural order of things now.

“Smashing the gender binary” my ass.