fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #4759 ]

[ SECRET POST #4759 ]

⌈ Secret Post #4759 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[The Mandalorian]

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02. https://i.imgur.com/jciwSVo.png
[linked for nudity at OP's request]

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06. [minor spoilers for The Witcher]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 07 secrets from Secret Submission Post #681.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There are some statistics to back it up. 65% of minors growing out of gender dysphoria is the lowest percentage a study has found (to my knowledge). My experience is not applicable to everyone. But I do think there is a surplus of, "Go trans! It'll be great!" when that's necessary or true for everyone - yet that's what it's treated as. Even questioning someone feeling as if they are trans is considered bigoted and hateful. If you have everyone telling you ONE THING, especially when young and trying to find yourself, that pressure has an effect.

And fandom? Is 95% saying that.

And significant number of people who experience gender dysphoria eventually cease to. Why can't we discuss that?

I also find the current message somewhat inconsistent. "Love your body! Unless your trans. Then you're totally right to want to change it/want it to be different."

Doing something radical to your body should always be a last option, imo. Not the first.

It. Fucking is. The last option.

+1 OP doesn't know shit.

Given then that we're prepared to accept that trans people exist, it seems to follow that we should try to affirm and be welcoming to them. That should be our guiding light. So questioning someone's ability to decide if they are trans, I really don't see how something like that is compatible with affirmation, for instance. I'm not totally sure what you mean by talking about questioning someone feeling they're trans but I don't see a lot of reasonable interpretations of it.

Of course it's a reality that desistance does happen, and we should be upfront about the variety of ways to relate to gender, and it's my personal experience that fandom and Internet people are good at that although I'm quite sure that there are corners of the internet where this isn't true. But if we're focusing on finding corners of the internet to criticize we could go on forever with doing that. And I think, in general, the world is a great long way away from being too welcoming and affirming to trans people to the point where we need to push back on trans acceptance to even the scales.

Let me try to put it another way.

So, take goth kids. Are they goth because that's somehow seen as cool by the world at large? No. Do they independently all realize they just LOVE black? Not generally speaking. By being goth they enter a community that will accept them, or at least most of them, and take on the traits of that community. (Disclaimer: sister was a goth. She did it as a matter of acceptance with peers and rebellion against adults.)

In other words, I'm not talking about the world at large, necessarily. I'm talking about fandom, which is a strange and generally isolated world.

I think it can be very tempting to people to fit themselves into roles to be a part of the community. If the community completely affirms trans, by which I mean, if you have gender dysphoria you MUST be trans. So affirmation, from what I have seen, means not acknowledging the potential use of waiting, or dealing with concurrent mental illness, which about 50% of people who suffer from gender dysphoria have, or trying to get at other issues that may be causing those feelings.

In my case, I'm in INTJ (a personality type). A whopping 5% of INTJ's are female. So, I 'think like a man'. Finding this out? BIG LIGHT BULB. I wish I'd known about it far earlier.

But suggesting this to someone who has gender dysphoria is considered transphobic and bigoted. IN FANDOM, where I spent most of my teenage years. That's where I'm coming from.

I don't know where you're getting the idea that trans or GNC people aren't waiting long enough or getting mental assessments--in a lot of places, that is literally a prerequisite for any kind of medical transition.

I am also an INTJ woman--never been told it makes me think like a man, never questioned myself as anything but cis. So not really sure what you mean by that, either. People are different.

Hey, you know the Briggs-Meyer chart was invented by a woman who wrote puff pieces for magazines and her mom? Your totally scientific "think like man" notions are about as grounded and rational as a Buzzfeed quiz that declares it can tell your personality type from your taste in vegetables.

I'm not saying your ideas would get more traction if your BIG LIGHT BULB moment wasn't based on the pop psychology version of a Hogwarts House sorting quiz. I will say it's not helping your case.

Why is that any stupider than 'I always liked wearing pink, and didn't like trucks, boom, I must be trans'?

NAYRT: Very few people in the trans community say that.

And most of the people in the trans community who do say that are being incredibly flippant because some chucklefuck has spent the last 30 minutes smugly interrogating them about their gender identity and they've lost their last shred of patience.

Yeah, like. We're given so much pressure to come up with a nice and simple little origin story that could be compressed into someone's screenplay, that kind of nice little symbolic moment. Yes, I have those moments in the past. But that's not the day to day crud of having to put on an act five or six days a week (I don't leave the house on the last day), of committing a dozen acts of self-censorship in a day, of overcompensating the blandness of my wardrobe so I don't get clocked and bashed.

Here's a thought experiment for the cis people here. Just imagine that every day of the week, you had to put on a fur suit and pretend to be Mickey Mouse. Almost everyone else is either Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. You conduct all of your conversations in a falsetto. The world is made for big three-finger gloves. You turn on the TV and half the jokes are "Mickey and Donald don't understand each other." The stores are filled with variations on red pants with suspenders or sailor's suits.

If you had to do that every day for 40 years of your life, and if you don't, the other Mickeys and Donalds harass you or worse, wouldn't you get tired of it? Wouldn't you want just the tiniest bit of space to take off the fucking fursuit?

I've been in treatment for gender dysphoria for three years. I've gotten no pressure to medically, socially, or legally transition. In fact, my care team has been extremely supportive of my extremely slow and careful process of disclosing my gender identity to supportive friends.

My real-world trans community supports the full range of identity and expression, including non-transitioning trans people and destransitioned people who ID as gender-nonconforming. It's not, "Go trans! It'll be great!" It's "OMG, this kid at school felt me up through my binder because he wanted to see what it felt like," and "My mother dumped a fuckton of transphobic text messages just before the holidays, how do I deal with this?"

In my city, there are two providers who advertise prescription services for trans clients. One woman goes to her VA caseworker, who lives an hour away in the next state. None of the people who have had confirmation surgeries have done so in-state, (there might be a provider upstate, I don't know). HRT and blockers require a referral to get the prescription, a referral to get insurance, and a commitment to maintenance checkups.

If you think young people are fast-tracked from liking yaoi to trying to look like Janet Mock, you really don't have a clue as to how this really works.

I know of someone who went through less than six months of counseling and had a double masectomy and hormones.

Normal insurance. Maybe some state laws apply about what's covered, I don't know.

20% trans people are refused medical care outright. 28% don't seek medical care treatment due bad experiences. 28% have experienced harassment in health care. 50% have had to teach care providers about trans issues. Fewer than 50% have had surgery.

Those numbers are for basic medical care. Trans people I know, more than one, have had trouble finding a health care provider for flu season. I am not out to my primary, because her practice is part of a Catholic network.

I mean, every system can be gamed by someone willing to work it hard enough. But is that typical? Is that standard practice among the health care professionals? Is it something that's actually recommended by most of the trans community? No, no, and no in my experience, and the stats on anti-trans health care discrimination back me up there.

You know nothing, do you?

Do you have any idea?

I live in the UK. If you're trans here, you'll need...
- About two to four years on a waiting list, in which time you'll almost certainly have nothing.
-Several appointments with different people with at least three months between each before a diagnosis.
-Months of trying and altering dosages to just hope you can find the right one for you.
-At least two years of HRT before even being considered for any surgeries.
- God knows how long on another waiting list, depending on the surgery you need.

That isn't special. That's the typical experience. Even in places with less severe waiting lists, it's constantly about jumping through the damn hoops and having to fight to convince someone that you ARE valid and DO need HRT, if that's what you feel you need.

HRT and surgery is NOT some first option that they hand out like sweets. It's not a "discussion" when it comes to people who desist. It's transphobes and their useful idiots abusing statistics to spin a narrative. Kids who appear to have gender dysphoria growing out of it just means they didn't really have it, or that it was brought on by something else, unlike the rest of us who just have to suffer with it.

The only way this "discussion" ever ends up going is "...And that's why you gross trans people should have to deal with your dysphoria some way we don't have to see or think about." Or the other favourite, "We just need to "fix" their brains, right? Fundamentally altering a person's brain and killing who they are is fine if they're a gross trans person, am I right?""

"Kids who appear to have gender dysphoria growing out of it just means they didn't really have it"

sorry but as someone who has worked with kids and teenagers, i'm gonna have to disagree with that. it's entirely possible and not even that unusual for kids to have gender dysphoria and grow out of it, especially if they're gender non-conforming and/or queer. puberty can really do a number on a kid mentally, doubly so if it happens quickly or if they're one of the first kids in their grade to hit puberty.

...You are, at best, badly misreading the message being given to young trans people. No one is saying they should go out and take hormones and get surgery, in part because we know how hard that actually is in the real world. We're saying it's okay to feel like your body is wrong and want to change it, that this doesn't mean there's something wrong with them. This is something some people go through, here's what it can mean, here are resources and people you can talk to while you figure it out.

And here's the thing - those 65% of minors who wind up growing out of gender dysphoria? They aren't the ones who grow up to be adult trans people who go through the transition process. They experiment with gender expression for a few years and find something that works for them, and get to do so while being supported by their peers. The detransition rate for trans people who actually begin the process of transitioning is between 1% and 8%, and most sources give numbers towards the lower end of the scale.

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[ SECRET POST #4759 ]

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