hugbox aren't going to tell the truth, they will happily lead more people down the same path as Griffin. Those doctors aren't going to tell the truth as long as the cash is rolling in. TRAs at large aren't going to tell the truth as long as they can keep the grift going. Allies don't even care enough to know the truth as long as they get social validation for saying all the right things.
I had a long and very careful conversation this weekend about the whole current state of trans things, particularly with teens, with a young, fairly liberal person I know who was unaware/ skeptical that hormones and surgeries didn't have extensive vetting, with extensive therapy (not aimed at gender affirmation only) first, that lives are being ruined and the bar to life-changing measures is low...and paid for, etc. I mentioned Griffin's outcome. I think it made a little dent.
Adolescence is a scary, distressing time, even for the well adjusted. Suddenly your body is changing in ways you don't understand, you're developing new desires, and it's even painful, the literal growing pains you felt in your very skeleton. Everyone experiences "dysphoria" at some point in this process.
Cults deliberately seek out people in transitional periods who are in distress, then offer them a seemingly simple solution to their problem. Then they systematically isolate them from positive influences to ensure that they're the only source of advice the person has. Blaming someone for falling for this is bullshit.
This is more "there but for the grace of God go I."
There are very, very few people who would never fall for a cult tailor-made for them in their moment of greatest weakness.
Adolescence is the time you start to franticly search after an identity, your identity. This is the most important thing in the world to you, to figure out who you are. And social agents like the media and your peers tell you that a very important part of it is to figure out your gender identity. The media and social media you consume, your friends, health organizations, psychologists, your teachers even sometimes, everywhere you are bombed with the message that this gender thing is very real and very important. You have very little experience in life, your perspective is often skewed, things that are not actually that important seem extremely important, you have little understanding of how this world really works, still don't have much if any critical thinking skills. Hormones are all over the place and a lot of changing is happening, your body is developing which could be scary and uncomfortable (especially for teenage girls, the sexualization of the female body is crazy). You might feel uncomfortable with your body but you don't really know what to attribute it to. Maybe it's gender dysphoria?
It might be easy for us who are older and didn't grow up in this environment to see how wrong this idea of gender identity is. But when you are a teenager, just trying to figure out the world around you, trying to figure out yourself, and you are being flooded with this shit, things that you think you can trust like science, psychologists, doctors, adults you idolize, seemingly all agree and affirm that this gender identity thing is real... I firmly believe most of the kiwis here would be at least "questioning".
That's why I mostly hate this idea/ideology and the way Western society as a whole seems to take leave of its senses and embrace this highly destructive and dangerous idea, rather than the trannies/pooners/enbies themselves, unless they are coomers or seriously degenerate. Okay, it's not entirely true, I do hate them, their entitlement, their sense of victimhood, their misplaced hatred, how illogical they are... but I pity them too, and feel a genuine grief about this generation. A lot of them are brainwashed, has been brainwashed from a young age. Many are just stupid kids and stupid, very young adults. Society, the responsible adults who were supposed to look after them, had failed them.
The other part of the conversation was about the reality of grooming (here I was able to cite Chris Tyson and the contents of those chats/discords*), the acceleration effect of trendiness, and the problems that have been magnified by legal and insurance company policy changes, and governmental and corporate embrace of the trans phenomenon, in the last 5 - 10 years.
* My convo partner apparently can't stand MrBeast (and had no awareness of Tyson) but I knew it would be a familiar reference, and verifiable.
This person, though quite young, is pretty wise - and will work with young people as a career. Even before we got to "but wait, you need to understand what is really going on for a growing number of people," I heard what I consider a mature and nuanced view of what teens may go through (your first paragraph is practically a transcript...), an interest in respecting kids struggling and grasping for answers, and a firm awareness that those teens will often find "answers" that don't actually answer the real questions they have (iow, mistaking other issues for gender issues) and that kids change identities and interests and self-perceptions many times through adolescence and beyond.
So: a rational person barely out of the teens who has grown up with all of this trans stuff being constantly acknowledged and formally normalized, currently at a liberal school in a very liberal area, and who intends to be working with kids in an influential, formative role that, as a profession, is notoriously politically liberal, who was willing to have a thoughtful exchange and ingest new information. I was heartened.
I was sexually abused literally as soon as I hit puberty, that made me want to poon out much more than any fearmongering
I am (truly) sorry that happened to you and that it had the impact it did. What I keep coming back to is that until transing out was presented as a potential pathway,
virtually no one thought, "aha, that's what I need to do." Pooning out as a response either to abuse or, even more commonly, being noticed and assessed for body development wasn't an option until it was socialized and normalized. In other words, it's not a natural reaction, but a manufactured one, and it's a very dangerous one (I don't have to tell you that, and I'm not, but thinking more about it as a phenomenon).
This topic has been discussed here many times. Obviously there are varied causes of Pooning. Sometimes it is indeed a hysterical and immature reaction to unwanted/unexpected attention. I think that in itself raises the question of why these girls are not emotionally and mentally equipped to deal with these things (not SA, which I acknowledge is different, but generally being hit on by men). How is it that humans have existed for thousands of years without this epidemic of Pooning Out? Are we to believe that no teenage girl was ever hit on before the mid 2010's?
I think a lot of parents have basically abandoned their roles and teenagers receive far less supervision and guidance than they did in the past but we also live in an era where Feminists have been extremely successful in programming girls from birth to believe that All Men Are Rapists and that any attention at all from a man is Practically Rape.
Teenage girls used to vie for attention from older boys and men. They still do, in many cultures.
Got 75% through this and thought omg Iron Jaguar and I agree...and then you had to go with the usual dismissive and ignorant bullshit. No, this is not feminism's fault. God.
This is an excellent point that always brings out the top hats from the BP regulars. But it's true. Look at old folk songs and journals and novels by women. This idea that it has always been hell on earth to turn 13 and grow boobs is some bizarre feminist spin, possibly co-authored by our sick hypersexual "anything goes" popular culture.
Weird. I've been a feminist for 35 years and never thought that. I loved my boobs when I got them at 10, and I love them now ("and they're fantastic"; "Larry David," you'd better get my reference here.). I'm as flummoxed by the perspective as anyone. But I'd say it's a rather more complex set of situations than "the feminists." Including, in the last 10-15 years, the hypersexualized atmosphere and norms of the internet, and the tolerance of increasingly degrading actions and language about women both on and off the internet.
(See, e.g., the many posts here on the Farms referring to women as "holes." Not some woman who hurt the speaker personally, nor about "mean" women, but about women, period. If men reduce women to nothing more than an orifice to slam your dick into, not terribly surprising that women/girls can develop fear, shame, and, I suppose, a desire to neutralize or escape that kind of soul-killing reduction of oneself to a mere piece of furniture to be sexually violated.)
So when folks want to blame feminism, a little bit of critical self examination and reflection on their own individual and collective contributions to the damage might be useful.
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