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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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I have no idea, and we aren't really asking that question to transitioners. Detransitioners often talk about things like that, but they are a particular subset of people, and if nothing else subject to the same biases that eg Ex-Mormon or Ex-Muslim forums are subject to.

Not only are we not asking, the question is so politically fraught we probably couldn't get good answers anyway.

I can recall, though not cite offhand, numerous examples of trans people in writing and in real life telling me what feeling like "not a man" and "not a woman" felt like. And it always involved some kind of assumption that because I am a man I strongly feel a constant sense of being a masculine stereotype.

I wonder if that assumption is more likely to be a cause or an effect. By which I mean, you've observed a certain misconception in your trans acquaintances about what it's like to be a normal man; how do we tell the difference between the chain (have this misconception) -> (think they fail at being a man) -> (want to be a woman) -> (trans), vs the chain (want to be a woman) -> (trans) + (reinterpret ordinary experiences as evidence for transness) -> (implicit misconception)? Not saying you're wrong, just the second seems more intuitively plausible to me and I'm not sure how one would tell.

I think this problem is much bigger and harder to deal with than a "medical illness" answer; this is a society wide phenomenon experienced by most people, transitioners are just those at the bottom of the fragility/mental stability totem poll who slide off into the strange.

Ah, I see what you mean. It's an easier problem only for the narrow question of "how hard is it to deal with trans ideation once you are intervening in someone's life", but a broad social problem is much harder to fix than a few people with mental illness.

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