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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2674 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 6, 2024

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I need some advice.

My depressive 22yo nephew just came out as MTF trans, is changing his name, and will be starting hormone treatment. It’s a huge shock: he’s been depressed for years, is mildly autistic, but he’s a gamer and has had manosphere opinions in the past so I would never have thought this possible.

This terrifies me because my 5YO son is also mildly on the spectrum and is impressionable. Now that this is “in the family” I am worried he will cotton on to it.

My personal view on trans is neither here nor there, but for the record I think it’s a mental illness spread by social contagion (like anorexia). This may be incorrect, but if it is, what model should I have for this?

My primary concern is to minimize the odds my son becomes trans, or becomes confused, exposing us to questions from his school, etc.

How should I handle this? What should I tell him about his cousin? What would you do?

My personal view on trans is neither here nor there, but for the record I think it’s a mental illness spread by social contagion (like anorexia).

I'd dare say that your personal views are extremely relevant. If you didn't view it as a mental illness, you wouldn't have anything to worry about.

Realistically, the best thing to do is probably try to explain it objectively: some people get tattoos, some people do drugs, and some people transition. I think TheBailey covers this fairly well.

Depending on your comfort with the alternatives, I'd also point out that men can absolutely wear dresses, play with dolls, and learn how to do makeup. Sometimes "trans" is really just "I want to play with my sister's cool toys". Usually this ends up just being a phase - the allure of the forbidden is a lot stronger, and also you start to realize there's social consequences unless you're majorly autistic (I'm mildly autistic, but I can definitely tell whether this sort of behavior is situationally appropriate)

That said, it's worth noting that transition is one of the safest, least-regretted medical decisions a person can make. Just don't rush into anything surgical and most of it is fairly easily undone. I can still easily pass as a guy if I'm in an area where being trans/female makes me feel unsafe. Even if you view it as a mental illness, the actual known-successful treatment IS "be chill and play along with their delusion."

(Not surprisingly, this is a topic I know a lot about, and am also wildly biased about - feel free to ask me questions, although I don't check the site super-regularly)

How often do you see your nephew?

Twice a year, approx

I probably teach my kids about mental illness and try to sugarcoat that his cousin is ill in a gentle way (which he is via depression, which you can motte and bailey for the trans thing if you get called out on it). I'd teach my kids binary genders by showing, not telling.

I'd take comfort in the fact that by the time your child reaches adulthood, this social contagion is likely to be in decline (with more clearly explored science on hormone disrupters, links to autism, studies on conversion leading to suicide etc).

It seems like the direction of travel is for child transition to stop but for adult transition to be normalized.

Since you take the social contagion stance, you will need to “vaccinate” him against the idea.

Have “the talk” where you explain clearly and directly and honestly — especially since you say he's somewhat on the spectrum, I remember when I was his age I could always smell when I was getting a sideways explanation — what you want him to understand about the situation from your own perspective, putting it at the appropriate level for the kid, for example for a 5yo it might be something like:

> Some people aren't happy with being born a boy or a girl.
> Sometimes, these people will use makeup and costumes to disguise themselves as what they *want* to be seen as.
> Sometimes, they'll even use drugs and surgeries to try to change their bodies to look more like a boy or more like a girl.
> When they try to do that, it usually doesn't work out so well, because you *can't* actually change a boy into a girl. [Go into detail here about what exactly *you're* worried about going wrong!]
> If that's something you ever start to worry about, remember that you can always talk to us about it. [Aside: Do you have a trusted spiritual leader you could direct the kid to, such as a pastor or youth study group leader that shares your beliefs and has competence is handling issues age-appropriately? If so, maybe brief that spiritual leader about your concerns beforehand so he knows whether to answer or to tell the kid to “ask your parents”.]

If you don't feel comfortable having that talk, but you're concerned that others are going to take the talk to him and present the wrong premises, or present the premises in the wrong order, in order to effectively “infect” him…

My primary concern is to minimize the odds my son becomes trans, or becomes confused, exposing us to questions from his school, etc.

…then it seems like you will have to eliminate his contact with any sources of that information. You could, for example, order the trans nephew (under threat of either trespass or you and yours leaving) to “dress like a man” at family gatherings to avoid raising questions, and if you actually think he's going to overstep the bounds of parental authority and share information about gender identity with your son without your oversight, then that needs to be addressed as well; if you think that someone at his school is going to expose him to that information, then look into homeschooling or changing school districts, if you're not up for making a news case out of yourself; etc.

Disclaimer: I was homeschooled by parents who have essentially the same perspective as you do; I turned out trans (MtF) anyway once I found out about it around age 12~13 when I got unsupervised internet access, though none of my 4 siblings did, despite them all getting unsupervised internet access younger than I did.

Thanks for the repl(ies).

I turned out trans (MtF) anyway once I found out about it around age 12~13 when I got unsupervised internet access

Your parents sound like me, though I don’t home school. If it’s not too personal, what did your journey look like? If you became trans after hearing about it on the internet, would an introduction to the phenomenon in some other way have been less appealing to you? What was your pre-existing mental state like? Does being trans make you happy?

My model for how this works for most people is they are depressed for some reason that can’t be pinned down. Despite mental health messaging, it’s still low status to be mentally ill. At some point they go down an internet rabbit hole on trans and realize it’s a way of transmogrifying their mental problems into something sympathetic and avante grade.

would an introduction to the phenomenon in some other way [than self-directed unsupervised internet research] have been less appealing to you?

I pretty much learned everything I could about it as quickly as I could; I doubt there was any kind of manipulation of the order of evidence being presented by parents that would have affected my ultimate conclusion. I spent about as much time as I did on math homework in the basement on my PC reading PubMed and Sci-Hub and forum articles from all sides of the political divide, on that specific topic.

However, to this day it's a small negative facet of interaction with my mother is that she occasionally makes some rueful comment about how I've “bought into this delusion”, since I have explicitly never made any kind of politically disputable claims that I “am I woman” or anything like that.

If you try to take the approach using political rhetoric like “trans people can't accept reality” — remember, one of the aspects of being on the spectrum is taking things literally, and there is an implicit “every/∀” on unqualified general statements in English — or selective facts like “the [genital] surgeries have a high regret rate” (which is relatively undisputed, but for that very reason most trans people don't get those kinds of operations), you may end up briefly getting the kid on board as an ideologue, but when he eventually finds out that you essentially “lied” to get him on board with your particular perspective, you risk ending up strictly worse off from a relationship perspective than had you not broached the topic at all, and having had no impact on his actual outcome.

My model for how this works for most people is they are depressed for some reason that can’t be pinned down. Despite mental health messaging, it’s still low status to be mentally ill.

That may be true. It may even be common. But — if you grant that there are any legitimate cases of gender dysphoria — depression is a symptom of it, so “Joe has depression” does not on its own preclude “Joe has gender dysphoria”.

I live across the country from my family; I see them on Christmas and whenever one of them has occasion to fly out to my city for a business trip. In summer of 2023, when I went back on HRT after an (in retrospect) very ill-advised 18-month experiment in desistance, my father, who would generally invite me out for lunch whenever he was in town, did so again and was astonished at how much I seemed to be “thriving” compared to the last several times he'd seem me; he even took a picture to send back to the family to capture what he saw as he was so struck by it. He was not informed of my having gone back on HRT, and would have disapproved had he known. I have many, many similar anecdotes of people who happened to be against Transgenderism noticing and commenting on marked improvement in my well-being as broadly construed as could be seen from the outside when I first went on HRT seriously around age 17.

Setting aside any bad vibes you're catching from his queer behavior and presentation per se, has your nephew improved academically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, or socially since getting on HRT?

Despite mental health messaging, it’s still low status to be mentally ill.

As a quick tangent: if you're not a single parent, have you and your spouse talked about your approach to Shiri's Scissor childcare topics like antidepressants? Being on the same page, or at least knowing what page you each are on, before a storm hits will make things much easier.

For example, if one of you thinks that “trying whatever the doc recommends for a few months” is a great first-resort for a kid who's been acting funny, while the other views any psychotropic prescriptions as the absolute last resort only after ruling out any reasonable possibility of lifestyle changes fixing it, finding that disagreement out only when it's time to choose is going to make things much, much harder and more stressful than they need to be.

(And of course, an alleged GD case would be just one somewhat central instance of the general case of “things like antidepressants”.)

At some point they go down an internet rabbit hole on trans and realize it’s a way of transmogrifying their mental problems into something … avant-garde

Circling back around: does your son have a large fraction of queer people, same-sex-attracted people, or “allies” in his sphere of influence, which I assume is mostly his cohort at school plus the school staff? Is there any “clout” to be got?

You mentioned your nephew was 22yo; is he in college, or a NEET, or somehow in a workforce that's got him to to this, or do you think it's only to look cool for the apocryphal “strangers on the internet”?

Has anyone put the bug in your ear of the concept of autogynephilia yet? That seems to be a larger and more insidious “threat” than social contagion, at least for males.
Gender and the Brain with an AGP Neuroscientist - Benjamin Boyce on YouTube

… [and] sympathetic …

It may be worth noting: something that has exploded in either popularity or awareness over the past few years is arguably the opposite of that — not people chasing any kind of attention, but just staying in the closet and not drawing attention to themselves while quietly medically transitioning:

It may be the case that … simply dressing and acting a minimally surprising way while trying to find a partner, will prove a huge waste of [time], and that my only actual shot at finding [a good spouse] is to embrace some more flamboyant identity than [my current approach,] the absolute-maximally conservative option … [which] feels the most natural to me

That word was not even a blip on Google Trends all the way up thru December 2019, yet I saw that very word in use in forum and imageboard culture around 2010, as I guess some kind of sleeper strategy.

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

SCP-3125 is an extremely large, highly aggressive anomalous metastasized meme complex originating externally to our reality and now partially intersecting it. … Because humans have no natural exposure to ideas as aggressive as SCP-3125, human minds have no protective evolutionary adaptations against it. Individuals possessed of SCP-3125 become incapable of entertaining weaker, "conventional" ideas, and become instead wholly bodily subordinate to the purpose of serving and disseminating the core concepts of SCP-3125.

https://voetica.com/poem/3341

Christopher Robin
Got up in the morning,
The sneezles had vanished away.
And the look in his eye
Seemed to say to the sky,
“Now, how to amuse them today?

You are MtF trans? I don't mean to get overly personal. I would suggest my advice to you a few weeks ago regarding online dating was misplaced, as I haven't the foggiest notion how the dynamics of dating a woman would be for a MtF trans person. Apologies.

No apology needed; you responded to my question exactly as I asked it. I am currently presenting as a more or less regular guy as I'm seeking an essentially “traditional” heterosexual relationship. I may have forget to explicitly say that in my post, but I (it seems correctly) assumed that that's the implicit default and was supported by subtext of my message. It's not hard to hide breasts, and when people dote on my complexion I always tell them it's “just” from a low-carb diet and collagen supplementation, which I'm sure are also contributing factors.

I figure that politics and health issues are a “3rd date or so” topic, so I plan to disclose this around then; I'm not actually trying to “trap” anyone or do the classic boomer behavior of waiting 15 years into a marriage and then acting out by cheating.

Not to put too fine a point on it but are you saying that you still consider yourself a woman but wish now to be involved in a relationship with a woman? But you are "presenting as" (to use your terminology) a "regular guy" (whatever that may mean...I guess male who watches football and drinks beer?) This seems as if it should inform a great deal about your dating strategy.

Not to put too fine a point on it but are you saying that you [do] consider yourself a woman

No; I don't consider myself a woman. I consider myself a male who takes estrogen and bicalutamide more or less as a cosmetic procedure and/or mental health intervention, while acknowledging the tradeoff that this will make it much more difficult for me to woo a physically and mentally hale wife. I have had this perspective unchanged since I first learned what transgenderism was and realized the category seemed to fit me (modulo the actually-being-on-HRT aspect, of course).

but wish [to] be involved in a relationship with a woman?

While I'm sure a same-sex committed relationship would have plenty of potential to be both fulfilling and mutually beneficial, I've always been absolutely sure that I want to have and personally raise my own biological kids. If a suitable man were to actually pursue me and be willing to accommodate the whole Dave Rubin style high-effort surrogacy thing, I guess I could in theory be open to that — I believe am “meta-attracted” enough to be on par with my fundamental gynephilia, not that it's a practical thing to compare anyway — but if I have to put in the effort to be the pursuer, then I want to at least be pursuing a relationship that has some inherent potential for the whole “having kids” thing to be relatively straightforward.

Of course, every straight male has the fantasy of being actively wooed by a suitable woman; but you don't need to plan for the case where everything simply falls into your lap and works out perfectly; it's the genuinely likely positive outcomes that need to be harvested on purpose.

"presenting as" […] whatever that may mean...

I have medium length hair kept clean and brushed out but broadly unstyled, and I always wear men's button-up shirts with either slacks or jeans. I am currently undergoing laser facial hair removal so I don't have to shave as often; but I don't wear makeup, I go by a conventionally male name, and I don't engage in “voice training” or any other kind of intentional attempts at acting “Queer” or performing femininity. While occasionally I will so-called “male fail” (people mistaking me for a woman, at least until I speak,) I'd like to think I barely even register on “gaydar”.

^I don't know whether that addresses your confusion. If it doesn't, I think I'll need a more specific question. If it seems like I'm intentionally dodging your request for my underlying ethos with an incoherent stream of nominally relevant but disconnected facts, I promise that I am not trying to be obtuse.

This seems as if it should inform a great deal about your dating strategy.

It may be the case that this “false advertising” strategy — that is a quote; I have been accused of it IRL, though not by anyone I actually dated — of simply dressing and acting a minimally surprising way while trying to find a partner, will prove a huge waste of both my own time and my prospective partners' time, and that my only actual shot at finding an excellent, willing life partner (of either sex) is to embrace some more flamboyant identity than the absolute-maximally conservative option, but I want to at least shoot my shot with this approach first as it feels the most natural to me.

Interesting. Thanks for being so forthright. As a straight male who has been wooed, it's not my fantasy and I'm not a fan. Just to get that out there.

I don't have much to offer, I'm afraid. Way different Weltanschauungen. Miles apart. But then perhaps I'm miles apart from many here, in different ways.

Probably IRL we could sit down and maybe I could straighten you out. Just kidding. We could have an interesting chat though, I bet.

I didn't click the embedded link. Maybe I will on my computer tomorrow.

It's so strange to see /tttt/ rhetoric on here.

I consider myself a male who takes estrogen and bicalutamide more or less as a cosmetic procedure and/or mental health intervention

Do you take HRT from a prescription? Or DIY?

It's so strange to see [transgender 4channer] rhetoric on here.

Sorry to mince words, but I believe I kept my post pretty free of rhetoric. I gave a true, relevant, and politically neutral description of the situation and why I'm approaching it the way that I am; and I imported two minor pieces of jargon which already breached imgeboard containment and made it into the wider internet lexicon 3 years ago and 13 years ago.

(If your choice of words wasn't meant that specifically, and you actually meant “jargon” or “ideas”, just ignore this; I'm only taking umbrage with the possible implication that I'm at least in part running some kind of scripted dialogue tree or other regurgitation that's been optimized for Persuasion. If you didn't mean “rhetoric” in that way, I apologize for my misunderstanding.)

Do you take HRT from a prescription? Or DIY?

Started DIY; currently DIY; though I spent a year or so with an MD supervising / writing scripts at one point. That was no value added and I got bad vibes from the doc anyway (in 2018 she had never even heard of bicalutamide despite allegedly being specifically an endocrinologist and prescribing HRT for other MtF patients; she tried to switch me over to spironolactone, which is known to cause long-lasting brain fog and may actually cause problems with breast development).

I may check out one of those trans and queer focused “telehealth” providers (doc-in-a-box / pill mill) now I'm 26 and could use a prescription to foist 80% coinsurance for this cosmetic maintenance medication off on my coworkers and employer via health insurance… thanks, Obama!

While I'm generally pretty skeptical about credentialism, since I've seen even well-regarded doctors make pretty bad mistakes, and especially trans-related stuff you tend to either get vastly over-hesitant (like your mentioned brain fog combo, I've also seen docs prescribe combos that have known cancer risks) or under-cautious, it can definitely be worthwhile to have a second set of eyes for a lot of the endocrinology stuff.

You're far enough along that you're not likely to see the 'whoops I accidentally a whole order of magnitude' level problems that come up in newbies, but even people who have good access to blood testing for things like liver function often find themselves least able to think through the numbers if there's a problem.

Sorry, you've probably already considered these tradeoffs, but the downsides are severe enough that I'm bound to offer it anyway in case you haven't.

More comments

Jargon is a better word, I didn't mean anything by rhetoric. And it's not just the terms, I feel like your viewpoint is also very similar to the depressed repressors there, but I guess that has also (tragically) spread outside of the board.

I mean, be honest that his cousin is mentally ill leading to delusions. Trying to sugarcoat his delusions to make them 5yo palatable will do nothing but make him feel more willing to imitate the cousin.

If you do this, just be aware that it'll almost certainly come out because children have no filter at all. A 5 year old is very likely to go "Dad says you're mentally ill!" at some inappropriate time.

A 5 year old is very likely to go "Dad says you're mentally ill!" at some inappropriate time.

@Highlandclearances Do you talk politics with the kid at all? Is he mentally developed enough to understand the idea that “there are some things we could get in big trouble just for believing”, & to grasp the severity of “big trouble means that they might even take you away and you'd never get to see us again”?

There are a very small number of cases of kids claiming to be trans and being taken away from parents who don’t ‘affirm’. These cases seem to have other, actual, child abuse going on, but I’ll concede that it’s possibly a legitimate danger to lose a trans child for being opposed to transgenderism.

I’m not aware of any parents losing custody for opposing transgenderism when the child is cis.

I’m not aware of any parents losing custody for opposing transgenderism when the child is cis.

I'm not aware of this ever actually happening, but Scotland's recent hate speech bill makes it a legal possibility for someone to be arrested for a political opinion they expressed verbally in the privacy of their own home, and "gender identity" is a protected characteristic in Scotland.

There are a very small number of cases of kids claiming to be trans and being taken away from parents who don’t ‘affirm’. These cases seem to have other, actual, child abuse going on

I agree that the number is small, but how are you getting the idea that there was other abuse in these cases?

but I’ll concede that it’s possibly a legitimate danger to lose a trans child for being opposed to transgenderism

California was one step away from legally mandating that possibility. What makes you think that non-affirming = abuse is not a popular belief among social workers?

There are a very small number of cases of kids claiming to be trans and being taken away from parents who don’t ‘affirm’ … I’m not aware of any parents losing custody for opposing transgenderism when the child is cis.

How do you factor out / mitigate the toupée fallacy there?

I’ll concede that it’s possibly a legitimate danger to lose a trans child for being opposed to transgenderism.

My recommendation was a specific instance of the general case of just giving your (non-abused) kids yearly don’t talk to the police training, a great first step towards keeping them out of the clutches of the poorly-run infrastructure that's supposed to target other people. Admittedly the technique isn't exactly “asymmetric”, but to the extent it's cheesing the system — well, if the good parents don't use it, it won't stop bad parents from using it anyway.

I’m well aware kids have no filter. But structuring your life around avoiding giving offense to people who are, at best, deeply confused is misguided.

I didn't say OP should do that. I just think that one should bear it in mind, so that they are prepared for potential consequences. Knowledge is power, and all that.

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