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No, we should drop the whole exercise and stop giving the concept any thought space at all, because it doesn't exist other than as a cognitohazard/toxic meme. A child (especially an autistic one, which appears to make up a huge proportion of "trans" individuals) going through puberty and having a hard time does not know what's going on. They don't know why they're having a hard time, they don't understand their own emotions, or why they are having a hard time relating to others but what they do know is that it is unpleasant and they would like it to stop. The child doesn't know that approximately everyone has a hard time during puberty and adolescence, since they've got no frame of reference outside of themselves, and they don't know that nobody who is honest has a solution to that difficulty other than growing out of it.
Enter the well-meaning teacher or activist, who offers a silver bullet: the reason you feel weird and like you don't fit and your body is uncomfortable isn't because you're autistic or going through puberty, it's because you're in the wrong body, so all you have to do is transition. Kids are susceptible to believing what an authority tells them, especially one proffering a solution to their problems, and on top of that the authority often primes them by asking if they "feel like a boy" or other questions about internal state that no one healthy ever thinks about and then uses the kid's ambivalence as evidence in favor of the theory. (And now the poor autistic kid thinks normal people have either a pink or blue light in their head telling them what they are, and this is just one more reason they're not normal, and etc)
Of course this is a basically unfalsifiable theory under the best of circumstances, and there's no way to "try it on" to see if it works. When it inevitably fails to solve the problem and in fact makes it even worse, proponents can blame the failure on not doing it early enough, not doing it hard enough, or "transphobia", all of which boils down to "do the thing that isn't working harder". Even if the kid could see through the smokescreen and realize that this isn't helping, the cult-like qualities of the social changes (love bombing, breaking down of relationships, renaming) make it borderline impossible to walk back. It's a social and cognitive trap that vulnerable people are susceptible to, it makes their lives measurably worse, and the only way to cure it is to burn it out of the culture entirely before it gets any more rooted. Giving it legitimacy by taking it seriously as a field of medical research only empowers it.
I understand the problems with the current approach with dealing with the problem. All of which are tied into politics.
But how do you propose we deal with the real phenomenon then?
God is not going to stop sending us people who want to be the other sex to a pathological degree. You're engaging in the same wishful thinking as the gender constructionists if you think tabooing the concept is going to make that stop.
And we don't really know how or why GD happens, we just know that it does and has been before we had a word for it. Anybody that tells you we know the mechanics of it (including muh brain scan studies) is selling something.
So if we are to find any sort of solution, surely it has to provide for studying the problem. Or we're just leaving these people to fend for themselves.
Surely you wouldn't be against studying schizophrenia because it also has the potential for social contagion?
My position is that it's not a real phenomenon, and I thought I made that clear from the first sentence in my comment. There are sexual fetishists that can be dealt with largely by ignoring them, but GD is not a real thing with a medical cause. Telling people that it is is the thing that creates it.
Yes, you deal with it the same way you deal with furries/otherkin/people that think they're literally able to do magic. You pat them on the head and say "no you aren't a girl, you've got a dick and that's what that means." If they want to play pretend beyond that, fine. But if we collectively stop giving it space, then the number of people that want to play pretend will drop back down to a totally unnoticeable number and we won't have to care as a society at all.
I would say that it is a real phenomenon, in the same manner that chronic pain is a real condition even if no cause is found. If you feel you're experiencing it, you're experiencing it, even if it were psychological in nature. Body dysmorphia doesn't go away by saying it's not real any more than you can cure depression by simply telling someone they don't actually have it that bad.
The way I see it, I don't care if an adult wants to get bolt-on boobs for any reason. My breaking points are:
A) Children. In particular, the constant framing of trans children as suicide risks I believe is social contagion. If "there have always been trans people" then why is this danger of suicide only talked about now?
B) The elevation of the meaningless concept of "identity."
C) The accompanying suppression of noticing or speaking about a person's sex.
D) That any research towards curing gender dysphoria without transitioning would be framed as genocide.
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If the people studying schizophrenia were causing the rates of schizophrenia to leap by 5x without actually helping people who had it... then yeah, knock it off.
It's very unclear that trans people are being helped. And the people studying it are tainted by activism and by shoddy science.
I reject the myth that a trans person is suicidal unless they can medically transition. It appears, instead, that after a medical transition, the mental illness is not in fact cured, and now there are serious physical impairments as well.
Trans people existed prior to the present epoch. No one said they didn't. But there is clearly a huge amount of social contagion that dwarfs any conceivable benefit from all the "science" that has accumulated in this area during the last two decades.
Toleration, not celebration, should be the order of the day.
But that did happen for a bunch of other legitimate mental illnesses. Surely we all remember the bulimia/anorexia or the DID fads of the past decades. And we did manage to put a lid on the social contagion for those without completely denying their existence.
...we did?
I think so but then again I haven't looked at recent numbers. Maybe all those tiktoks about talking to your mind buddies reignited it.
Yeah, I remember it was big on Tumblr a decade ago, too, and it seems like it's worse today. I would expect that if the graph added two more data points for "2010s" and "2020s" they'd probably be a lot higher than the "2000s".
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Perhaps intolerance should be on the table as well, particularly if it is spread via social contagion.
Or at the very least gatekeeping. Ostracizing posers or not granting them entry/status would make it much less socially enticing to take on any "trait" that you want. Bring back shame. Everyone knows that a large portion of people claiming statuses conferred by being trans or gay or nonbinary are clearly doing it for status. Not being able to turn people away from a group means that the incentives of the group change to fit the people that don't belong.
I feel like a lot of the people getting their status out of things like: nonbinary, genderfluid, aromantic, pansexual, pronouns, or getting status out of things like unverifiable or self-diagnosed illnesses, or even things like homosexuality and bisexualty are getting that status because of the power that has been given to trans ideology. If you take away the idea that you can just claim an illnesses or trait and become a protected, unique, and celebrated person then, in an ideal world, the words become just words again.
I hear a lot of younger people call themselves many things but I find it very hard to believe them, even to the point that I don't really believe some people when they say they're gay because when they do they're 90% of the time obviously doing it so that people will treat them differently/better and I base this on it being brought up apropos of nothing and having yet to see said person give off any other tell that they might be gay, like ever having a boyfriend/girlfriend or even exhibiting other traits that I'd associate with being homosexual. Might be just a normal response of a person who is actually gay trying to fit into society these days but if that's the case it's a sad state of affairs.
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