The Daily Mail (sorry) reviews Abigail Shrier’s book on the fad for girls to decide they are boys:
The picture that emerges is something much more complex than the familiar narrative of ‘born in the wrong body’. None of these girls appeared to be trans until their teenage years. Some are lesbians – but as one young woman explains to Shrier, being a lesbian is ‘just not very cool… it’s a porn category’, whereas being trans is celebrated. Others have eating disorders or issues with self-harm: for them, taking male hormones and having surgery to remove their breasts seems like another way to attack the body.
Lesbian is a porn category? Says it all, doesn’t it.
Shrier argues that this is being driven by social contagion. Trans identification spreads through schools, through friendship groups, through ‘influencer’ videos that offer a rose-tinted take on transition. But the medical pathway is not something to be taken lightly. Hormone treatments lead to lifelong infertility alongside other health problems. What’s euphemistically called ‘top surgery’ is actually an elective double mastectomy, while ‘bottom surgery’ to masculinise genitals is rarely undertaken and subject to heinous complications.
Not to mention all the rest of it. It just seems so much more trouble than simply being yourself without worrying about gender rules.
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8 responses to “Just not very cool”
‘Born in the wrong body’? Pshaw. Here’s a YouTube comment thread from a few days ago that illustrates the other narrative.
So, thinking about this makes me sad and angry. What we have here is apparently a teenage girl who was abused by her cousin, and she’s rather broken by traumatic shame and self-loathing. She searched for a way to make the pain go away, and being trans is her way to do that.
Now, there are better and worse ways to deal with emotional trauma. One way, for instance, is drowning yourself in alcohol. That way is bad. Another way is talking to a therapist. That way is good. It’s pretty clear that denying physical reality, living in a fantasy world, and setting yourself up for a lifetime of medication and surgeries is a very bad way.
People who reinforce the delusions of someone like this young woman are exactly like the enablers of alcoholics. Except worse, because of all the deleterious consequences of maintaining such a significantly counterfactual delusion.
Children, adolescents and those who have been abused are very easily persuaded that they are a ghost driving a meat machine, which is why all religions, including this new trans one, target the young and vulnerable. Because if we are really a ghost, then what happens to our body can be separated from what happens to the real us. Cutting bits off our body then becomes merely a way to show the world the real us. And when that doesn’t work (because, in reality, we are our bodies) it becomes an unbearable attack on our very last line of defence. There is nowhere left to retreat to, once we have already retreated into our minds.
tigger, that mirrors my experience, but I did not become trans, I became anorexic. If trans was a fad when I were a young girl, who knows? I know the trans community will be very sympathetic and caring towards someone exploring their “authentic self’, and thinking about trans. I know because I have a young friend, suffering from depression, who Googled his symptoms. Guess what he found? I’m hoping it’s not too late for him, but he seems to have drunk the Kool-Aid to the very bottom of the glass.
A ghost driving a meat machine. What a wonderful way to put it.
iknklast, I’m not remotely surprised, although saddened, by your friend’s falling for the trans narrative. If I could fall for it in middle age, it’s easy to see how a younger person would succumb. My youngest sister fell for the anorexia version of self-loathing. She’s fifty. I’m twelve years older, and it never came near my consciousness. It didn’t seem to be a thing at the all-girls school I attended, which had its faults, certainly (neither my other sister and I have fond memories); but the youngest went to a different, mixed, secondary school. My mother was probably the biggest influence there – she was paranoid about being overweight (she wasn’t) and was ‘on a diet’ for most of my childhood. I was actually seriously underweight, but she’d panic if I put on a pound. It’s a miracle, really, that I’ve never been on an intentional weight-loss diet in my life.
Lady Mondegreen, it is rather wonderful, isn’t it? I wish I could remember where I first encountered the concept.
tigger, I fortunately beat the anorexia thing, with many hospitalizations and years of therapy, and realizing my ex only wanted a trophy wife, so his constant complaints about me being “fat” were just so much of his own desire to have the woman on his arm that everyone would envy. But I still struggle with body dysphoria, and I never talked about that much with my therapist, not in any real way. My current therapist and I are talking about it, so hopefully, someday, I can look in the mirror and see me, not my mother. Right now I can’t even look in a mirror.
Iknklast, this type of struggle is really hard and of course intensely personal. Weirdly, despite being so personal I think it’s also very wide spread. I reckon that most people I know are at the least dissatisfied with their bodies and probably have at least some aspect of their bodies they find distressing. I don’t know anyone who likes seeing themselves in a mirror, let alone naked.
I’d go as far as to say that anyone who doesn’t suffer some for of body dysphoria probably has a personality disorder.
I recognise that many people suffer much more deeply than others – so I’m in no way trying to minimise others suffering.
“The Left Hand of Darkness ” by Ursula K Le Guin is a useful story for this topic.
Ok nowadays lots of people are going with trans like it is a fashionable piece of clothing-
Oh look I’m cool I’m down with trans people! That is not how it is. Mostly people are a confused mess and are just playing follow the leader. I’ve only known a few trans people.
Their struggle and their humanity and beauty are real. It is not something you can
put on a bumper sticker. Anyway, i recommend that book.