That’s another thing. Even if you do think it’s worth burbling about idennniny all the time, it doesn’t follow that idennniny=ONE thing about you. The odds are good that there’s more than one thing about you.
Cheer up peeps! There’s more than one thing about you! Life is rich; people are complex; the road stretches ahead of you; seize the day!
Many young “trans people” are deliberately seeking to make their transness the most important thing about themselves.
I suspect that for a certain particularly large cohort within the trans population, they need it to weigh heavily, to be a tragic burden, to matter more than anything else in their day-to-day lives, because they chose to identify into it for those features.
The combination of simultaneously feeling both incredibly special and incredibly hard-done-by is a hallmark of childhood. That’s probably why young people love Harry Potter so much, ironically enough — he’s both an orphan and a golden child, the most celebrated kid among his magical peers and the most despised in the muggle household that raised him. All that burden can have a calming, stabilizing effect to an overactive mind, like a weighted blanket for one’s thoughts. Maybe that’s why so many young people diagnosed with OCD and ADHD have taken up trans identities.
Plus, they can externalize and simplify the kinds of complex internal struggles that naturally come with growing up and becoming a whole person. It’s hard for anyone to grow up and find him or herself and figure out who she or he is. The more I think about those kinds of struggles that young people go through, the more I’m surprised more of them haven’t caved and seized the quick fix of “trans” that’s been dangled in front of them every day — for some of them, since they were born.
The real heroes are the kids who resisted the temptation to blame the whole material world for their woes, obsessing over their inescapably sexed bodies and how their sex is inescapably identifiable to the rest of the world as the root cause of all the evils in existence…
Attribute vs. Identity
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