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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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I've never read the blog you're referring to, but the story reminds me of a different story I heard in, IIRC, This American Life (possibly Radiolab instead) about a FTM transitioner talking about the effects experienced from HRT, which included having a surprisingly overwhelmingly strong sex drive compared to before and also becoming literally better at math. Of course, instead of the host exploring the implications of this in wider society with respect to trans-ness and males and females, he quickly shut that down with a joke about how the person had "set back feminism by 20 years" or something.

I'm also reminded of that one woman who committed suicide a few years ago IIRC, who had written a book about her experience dressing up as a man (no transition, just roleplaying for the book), where she seemed to come to some revelations about the difficulties of men's lives that were completely invisible to her before the experience.

What I find interesting is that, as best as I can tell, MTF trans people are more prominent than FTM ones, though I've heard that FTM is more common, driven primarily by young women and teenage girls (though I've also heard that accurate stats around this are very difficult to come by). And this kind of narrative about how transitioning from man to woman made them realize the unique difficulties that women go through that were invisible to them when they were a man seem much rarer. It's almost always the unique difficulties of being a trans woman that's emphasized, rather than having some epiphany about how the natal other half of the human population experience reality that got awakened to them.

There are multiple explanations for this, and I'd guess they all have some truth. The default, most likely explanation, is that I'm just seeing patterns where there is none. But that's no fun, so if we want to speculate, one reason is that FTM tend to get the more genuine male experience than MTF, because FTM can pass much more consistently than MTF. Another is that the troubles that women face in society as women are so emphasized that it's just common knowledge among men, while the mirror image isn't true. Yet another is that the types of people who transition MTF are very different types of people personality-wise than FTM, which leads to some asymmetry in what they notice about their new experience in their new gender identity. Another similar reason would be that the effectiveness of HRT to go from MTF is different and meaningfully less than the effectiveness to go from FTM, which results in the asymmetry.

I'm also reminded of that one woman who committed suicide a few years ago IIRC, who had written a book about her experience dressing up as a man (no transition, just roleplaying for the book), where she seemed to come to some revelations about the difficulties of men's lives that were completely invisible to her before the experience.

Norah Vincent, Self-Made Man

What I find interesting is that, as best as I can tell, MTF trans people are more prominent than FTM ones, though I've heard that FTM is more common,

I haven't actually seen stats I trust, but the brief amount of looking I've done seems to suggest that there used to be more MTF, but that might not be true anymore, or is at least less true.