Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Since you take the
social contagionstance, 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…
…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).
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.
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.
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?
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”.)
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
autogynephiliayet? That seems to be a larger and more insidious “threat” thansocial contagion, at least for males.Gender and the Brain with an AGP Neuroscientist - Benjamin Boyce on YouTube
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:
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
https://voetica.com/poem/3341
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
It's so strange to see /tttt/ rhetoric on here.
Do you take HRT from a prescription? Or DIY?
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.)
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 options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link