Well knock me down with a feather
A study finds what we pretty much knew already:
Most gender-confused children grow out of it.
The majority of gender-confused children grow out of that feeling by the time they are fully grown adults, according to a long-term study. Researchers in the Netherlands tracked more than 2,700 children from age 11 to their mid-twenties, asking them every three years of feelings about their gender.
Results showed at the start of the research, around one-in-10 children (11 percent) expressed ‘gender non-contentedness‘ to varying degrees. But by age 25, just one-in-25 (4 percent) said they ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ were discontent with their gender.
The researchers concluded: ‘The results of the current study might help adolescents to realize that it is normal to have some doubts about one’s identity and one’s gender identity during this age period and that this is also relatively common.’
Because duh. Children are children; they’re still getting used to being human. Lots of changes seem weird or repellent or both when you’re a child, and then over time you get used to them. Some you may still want to fix or reject, but others you don’t. Trying to change your sex is actually worse than getting used to it and figuring out that you can, to a considerable extent, decide for yourself how to live in your sex [gender].
It’s pretty horrifying that a lot of adult people forgot all that in the stampede to be allies to our trans siblings. Many of those adults have children themselves, many more of them know children via friends and relatives and jobs such as teaching, and all of them, without exception, were once children themselves. How have so many of them managed to convince themselves that children who “have doubts about their gender identity” are in touch with a great truth as opposed to just being uncomfortable in an ordinary way that dissipates over time? How have so many managed to convince themselves that it’s better to tamper with children’s sexes rather than watch and wait?
I have no idea how.
Wow, those numbers are even higher than those in the DSM-V, which are already really fucking high.
And yet the runaway train rumbles on.
Nobody likes Nazi Germany analogies, but the phenomenon where everybody remains complicit even in the face of the worst atrocities under certain circumstances when the social system is arranged just-so… I suspect this has to be some kind of vestigial behavioural trait from our bygone tribal apehood. (As so much of human irrational behaviour is.)
The tell that there’s something deeply primitive going on, to me, is that over and over again I hear the same thing: those of us with our eyes open make a good-faith effort to try and show our friends what’s going on, and they flat-out refuse to see or hear it, often on the verge of panic while doing so. Repeatedly, from different people on different continents, I’ve heard about lifelong friends or relatives literally putting their fingers in their ears rather than hearing us, usually right at the point when the listeners seem to know that they’re about to hear something they can’t disprove or ignore. Same with the strange phenomenon of people being less likely to read articles about transgender if they’re presented as more likely to change their minds about it.
A Hannah Arendt-ian view might say that on the matter of transgender, these people prefer to be nobodies rather than somebodies. They place the locus of responsibility outside themselves and they refuse to be persons. Their moral framework rests fundamentally on their sense of obligation to fit into the social groups they’re in. This is in contrast to the “upstanders” (as therapist Stella O’Malley calls them) for whom their moral framework rests on an inner dialogue about right and wrong, who will naturally deviate from the group if their inner moral compasses direct them to. The first group can’t bear the idea that they might have to build up a moral framework about transgenderism out of a sense of right and wrong that comes from inside their own minds — this is completely alien to them. For the second group, the locus of right and wrong already resides inside their own inner dialogue with themselves, so it comes naturally.
It’s strange; there are parallels between Arendt’s philosophical ideas about individuals’ morality and ideas from anthopology and sociology about how societies are organized overall. They both come into play around the subject of gender. Arendt says that people seem to naturally gravitate towards one of two internal moral frameworks: most people rely on obligations to their in-group collective, but a minority rely on their individual, internally-constructed sense of right and wrong instead. Anthropologists say that societies tend to be organized around collectivist values or individualist ones. And furthermore, collectivistic cultures teach people to fit into the gender roles prescribed by the culture they’re in, and individualistic cultures teach people to follow their individual sense of self, which comes from within. See the parallel? People with collectivistic moral frameworks don’t see the problem with transgender, and people with individualistic moral frameworks do, just as societies with collectivistic frameworks foster gender norms and rigid gender roles, and individualistic ones don’t.
If the age of enlightenment was ushered in when individualistic thinkers with individualistic internal moral frameworks took leadership over societies — I’m thinking of the Founding Fathers, specifically — and established that the values of individualism would dominate in society, perhaps our current age, which has suddenly lurched regressively back to old collectivist gender roles, reflects a fundamental shift back to a dominance of collectivistic values over individualistic ones.
You could probably argue that we as a society have rapidly become more influenced by our social interactions with social media apps than we are by social interactions within our local communities. Social media is a collectivist as it gets: an endless popularity contest of likes, on literally a global scale.
Maybe the drug of social media is rewiring everyone’s brains to be less capable of formulating their own sense of right from wrong anymore.
Upstanders just don’t get enough likes.
I think adults have accepted Great Truth Gender Pediatrics in part because of the popularity of child-centered parenting (which may also involve child-centered schooling, child-centered therapy, and, ultimately, child-centered spirituality.) Though we need an antidote to the authoritarian “obey me without question” boogeyman-man method of parental control, the belief that children are fragile, unique flowers needing mostly love and acceptance to bloom can deteriorate rapidly into nonsense. In our rush to validate their feelings, we treat kids like miniature adults— which, as you point out, they aren’t.
Our own recollections of what it was like to be a child might actually be part of the problem here, since it’s not uncommon for us to read our adult emotions and knowledge back into our memories. That we “always knew” or “deeply felt” such-and-such is often influenced by hindsight. Our recollections aren’t pure records from the time, but reconstructions. Child-centered parenting seems to me to be centered on “what I would have wanted/needed when I was a child” and the Mini-Me result of that isn’t necessarily accurate.
Enter the cultural narrative. Just as Lady Catherine De Bourgh confidently knew that “if I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient” on the piano, we might confidently predict that “if I had ever identified as transgender, I would have been the real thing.” By centering the innate wisdom of the child in our view of the world, we subtly place our wise and all-knowing selves in their place. It feels like other-directed sensitivity and kindness — and it’s very tempting.
I wonder if this study and its questions are able to distinguish between a child’s disatisfaction with their “gender identity” (as in the genderists’ putative internal sense of being male or female) and dissatisfaction with stereotyped sex roles they may be finding themselves running up against? If the study is unable to tease out these two different types of “dissatisfaction,” then gender non-conforming children who are not actually dysphoric are going to be lumped in with children who are actually dysphoric, so the rate of desistance and the tendency to grow out of this trans “phase” may actually be being underestimated.
YNNB:
I doubt they’d even try. I suspect most observers already have a strong sense that the two are the same, and they rationalize it away anyways. Which is a shame, because the kids themselves don’t have that sense. They’re being flooded with images of impossible bodies all day, and their young, developing minds are interpreting them as instructions about how they’re supposed to look and act, according to which sex they are.
When the kids react by saying they’re not the sex they are, it’s because they genuinely don’t understand the question.
When the adults humour them, it’s because they’re rationalizing away their own responsibility: they’re giving the kids what they want right now, because it makes the kids at least say they feel happier right now, and it’s what the activists are saying is the right thing to do, and it’s what the new rule books are saying is the right thing to do. On some level they have to know that the kids won’t be happy in the long run, that the activists are crazy, that the rule books are wrong. But all these things work together to take personal responsibility away from the people who know better. They’ve given themselves just enough licence to say, “I was just following orders…”
I hate it.
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@YNnB
There’s a third element here as Ophelia says (and indeed has often said) – even if a child is happy with their “gender identity” and their social imposed gender, puberty is inherently traumatic. The “nature is perfect and if we just trust it nothing bad can happen” types can’t admit that. I suspect they find it easier to believe that it can sometimes get it wrong in a very big way than admit it is always less than perfect.