But I couldn’t help but look at this and see next generation consumerism. When you can have anything you want, what do you want? To be someone else.
Now, some people really are born that way. I have zero argument with this claim. My kids knew a girl who, when she was 5, was saying “when I get breasts I am going to cut them off”. Camille Paglia dressed up as a male character of some sort every chance she got when she was a child. Even now, she identifies as transgender, even if she seems to oppose actual surgery for most people.
I got to thinking, though, that there are huge potential social gains from deciding to become transgender. This article actually summarizes from a position of data the conclusions I formed independently. This article is worth reading in its entirety.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-mind-and-brain/201811/why-is-transgender-identity-the-rise-among-teens
Littman hypothesizes that ROGD [Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria] can be cast as a maladaptive coping mechanism for other underlying mental health issues such as trauma or social maladjustment, but also for other exceptional traits like high IQ and giftedness. The peer support, prestige, and identity leveraged by the youth who proudly come out as trans certainly appears to be protective in their circles.
And:
The notion reported by parents that the ROGD appears to be “scripted” is also telling. Medical anthropologists describe the process of outsourcing negative feelings to cultural narratives and systems of beliefs as “idioms of distress.” These beliefs can be partially grounded in science and biology (as is the case with current brain-based mental health culture), or not at all (as is the case in cultures that explain mental illness through the idiom of spirit possession). When extreme forms of distress and coping arise through novel social pressures and spread through implicit imitation, strange epidemics of “mass psychogenic illnesses” have been documented. These have extended to dancing plagues, possession epidemics on factory floors,fugue states, or epidemics of face-twitching. These conditions are described as “psychogenic” (originating in the mind) when no underlying physical cause can be determined. But the term “sociogenic,” which highlights the social context in which these conditions occur, is a better description.
Now, they do note that there are negative factors as well:
As Littman’s study shows, this social signaling strategy also comes with strong disadvantages, particularly as it increases conflict between trans youth and the “cis” majority of the population, which, tellingly, includes a majority of the LGBT community.
I had not really grasped the extent of this conflict, until I read about trans activists nailing rats on the doors of a rape clinic: https://www.theblaze.com/news/trans-power-womens-rape-shelter-faces-death-threat-and-vandalism-for-rejecting-transgender-women
My own reasoning was thus: when you “come out” and decide to “transition” you can expect to be praised as brave. Anyone questioning you about ANYTHING can be termed transphobic. You get a LOT of attention. Everyone wants to know how you are doing. It is virtually MADE for social media. You get to post regular updates, get to vent about real or imagined incidents of bigotry.
And the whole thing might take several years. During this period, you are a star. And you get to focus all your attention on this one problem, and not the problems of life, not the problems of earning an income or educating yourself, not the problem of becoming a mature, socially responsible adult. To all criticisms of anything you do or say, you can accuse them of transphobia.
So there is a huge secondary gain in this. But the whole thing feels to me like getting a tattoo. You might think, nobody is that stupid, that short sighted, that shallow, that naive. Honestly, I disagree. I see stupidity around me I can’t begin to fathom. Every misanthropic impulse I have in me is strengthened, the more I deal with today’s youth. As I’ve said many times, I can’t see how good comes from any of this.
And the whole thing wears off eventually. You transition. You get the hormones–which you have to take for life, as far as I know, and the health effects of which I don’t think are really known–and you do the surgery, and after all the hoopla, and attention, and novelty, there you are: the same person you always were, without the attention, without the gratification of being able always to defend against all criticism with a non sequitur.
You are in the world, different, but the same. All the problems of life–paying the rent, finding true or at least stable love, deciding what life means for you, picking a vocation–are not diminished in any way. Perhaps they ARE amplified by your decision. Perhaps some residual prejudice remains.
And I just can’t help seeing, in my minds eye, people saying “what the fuck was that all for?”
As he says in the article, there is a very robust connection with social media involvement and this decision. To put it mildly, social media is fickle. Today’s star is tomorrows goat.
I can’t help but seeing many of these kids feeling suicidal depression 10-15-20 years down the road. They didn’t do it for the right reason. They made a foolish decision when they were young, that is very, very hard to undo. Hell, even for people who made this decision when it WAS hard, or harder, say 30 years ago, their suicide rates skyrocket several decades after surgery. I think the statistic I saw was a rate 400% higher than the population as a whole. That’s not success, by any standard.
How is it that wisdom, and patience, and thinking things through has become passe? How have we become so deluded that those with life experience think we need to automatically trust the judgment of brainwashed youth? Do we not owe them more, if we love them? Should we not want them to be happy, to thrive, by learning how to live as adults in a sometimes difficult and nearly always confusing world? Do adults really not owe their children more than abject and astonishingly craven subservience?