Wow, so anecdotal evidence here is suggesting that a puberty offset from ones peers could cause dysphoric feelings. Now I’m really wondering if this is something that can contribute to people feeling trans or genderqueer or whatever.
It would make for an interesting survey amongst people in the trans/queer community. And considering there is plenty of evidence showing puberty appearing at younger and younger ages it’s apparent why this is happening now.
It also suggests a way to help people in your life going through a dysphoric puberty. Not freaking out, teaching the kid how to buy appropriate clothing and talking to them frankly about how their body will be perceived might help them through all that. And that goes for 8yo girls with mature chests as well as 18yos who are still pretty short and child-like. And of course letting them know that their body is strong and wonderful even if it is a few years off the norm.
My opinion has always been that
late puberty or really just late physical development, e.g. height, lack of musculature, would predispose a boy towards developing something that could be labelled as "gender dysphoria." Moreover, I also suspect that this sort of experience could affect a boy's psycho-sexual development so as to increase the likelihood that they might develop somewhat odd sexual interests due to their feeling a lack of "plausibility" if you will in more normative sexual fantasies.
In general, insecurities over being insufficiently masculine or capable as a man are a trend in sub-set of troons, both AGP and HSTS types. That guy who is the personification of Shrek, /r/BarelyAPrincess(?) or something like that, is a really good example of this phenomenon. He wrote an absolute rambler of a life-story about how insecure he was as a man. You can't - of course - ever really trust AGP anecdotes but the whole story is so amazingly pathetic that I largely believe it and that he's only lying by omission (I don't remember him including the part where he commits the sin of onan while violating Deuteronomy 22:5).
Link:
Shrek 5
Does anyone has any opinions on this "evidences" I've got from a Reddit troon as a gotcha? Any care to dissect it? Basically "transitioning is the only way to alleviate dysphoria!!".
I've got it, so far most study that talked about positive outcome of transitioning is quite flawed due to inadequate control groups, no long term study (short term survey after transitioning will always yield positive result similar to other dysmorphia - due to the "high" and honeymoon phase).
This Docs also mention cultures with third gender as part of trans history. And I am from a culture with third gender myself and they don't really see themselves as "real women", most people don't either. Which is the greatest flaw if you're bringing up that being trans has essential truth that goes beyond the social category of being trans. These phenomenas are just culture bond.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19xGowbPKoV9p-jCELkMo21zWADMUMzWrno05JBvFBnM/mobilebasic
What do you think of this?
Pretty standard collection of basically all pro-troon research. Many dubious surveys, might be worth noting that
surveys in general are a dubious form of a research in most situations.
Spends a fair amount on the Karolinska study as well, the "rebuttal" to which has, to me, never really made all that much sense. On the point of suicide rates, the author didn't find anything because the CIs are just huge so it's not saying that "differences in ... suicide attempts" disappear - it's saying absolutely nothing because your CI is 0.7-5.3 with a median of 2.0! And, for violence, the study itself says nothing for 89-03:
This is the only place where FtM and MtF statistics are actually de-aggregated and for the aggregated stats, the issue is once again that the study basically just says nothing because the study is just woefully under-powered. In fact, the only reason you even get statistically significant results at all is because the OR is just absolutely insane in the early cohort, the adjusted OR for death by suicide is 5.8-62.9(!) with a mean of 19.1 (!!).
It is fair to criticize TERFs for over-interpreting the study or w/e but this interpretation is just a
fundamental misunderstanding of null-hypothesis testing:
When your CI is 0.7-5.3 and type something like this all you found was that you need to break out your undergrad statistics notes and do some revision.
Another unrelated thing I noticed:
I don't think that I need to say anything about this.
The source here is an NPR article that just says that they don't cause infertility in a throw away [citation needed] comment by Norman Spack. I don't believe there is any evidence on the consequences of long-term pubertal suppression in trooned-out kids. It's actually quite difficult to study the issue since prescription of puberty blockers seem to massively increase persistence rates and I imagine that desisters are liable to just drop off the face of the earth from a research perspective. Moreover, the flippancy over fertility due to the existence of preservation treatments is not really defensible. Fertility preservation is not even remotely risk-free especially when you are talking about potentially preserving sperm or eggs for 20 years. You can add to that the costs and high risk of failure especially for females.
False conflation of sexual orientation; an identity that makes to a real underlying experience, i.e. that of arousal at images/situations/persons of a particular sex and gender identity; a nebulous notion that maps to nothing in particular.
This study I hadn't seen before, it is supposed to show something that brain function and puberty blockers but reading the abstract, you can't help but laugh. A follow up study is definitely in order, subjects ought to be the researchers though since they evidently need their greater brain function checked.
The first link is to an Olson study which is pay-walled so I've downloaded it and attached it. The study is pretty well known but not what I would call a "large body of researching (sic)." It's one of those studies where you're not really sure what the thought process was in cooking it up since it's not clear that they really show anything or indeed that they could have shown anything at all. The basic gist is that they gave a bunch of kids IAT tests and they found gender-congruence which maybe sounds cool or something but IAT is notoriously complete nonsense and no one has any clue what exactly it's measuring either in this highly non-standard use-case or more generally as a tool for detecting bias. The other thing they did was basically see if the kids wanted to do girl things or boy things and wouldn't you believe it they found that they wanted to do gender congruent things! Now, if this all sounds fucking stupid that's because it is and Kristina Olson is a noted moron.
As an aside, 'gender identity' as a concept is basically pseudo-scientific, it is completely unfalsifiable and makes no predictions since literally anything is considered possible. In children, sympathetic researchers like Olson will often muddle it with gender expression (a theoretically distinct concept) as she does here (the second link in the above screenshot):
Gender expression is often held up as evidence of the realness of the condition and in the aforementioned study is even used to argue that the subjects have stable cross-sex gender identities. But this raises the question of why you would invoke the idea of their possessing a "gender identity" different from their natal sex as opposed to saying that they just possess sex-atypical interests? That this could result in peculiar identification is eminently plausible since we know that young children often conceptualize sex/gender in very superficial ways, especially at very young ages. This is also gets at what I mean by gender identity just not making any predictions, if children were to display sex-congruent interests etc. then that would be fine since gender expression is not gender identity etc. and if they display gender-congruent interests then that can also be fine since their just expressing their gender identity.
In my view, the only reason that 'gender identity' as a concept exists to begin with is to deal with AGPs or really for AGPs to deal with being AGPs since AGPs like Serano play a significant role in popularizing the tripartite framework of gender identity/gender expression/sexual orientation. They obviously invented it to get around the fact that they are seldom feminine tending to be either few-screws-loose turbo-male lunatics or autistic nerds who are their own sort of masculine. Gender identity just lets you basically say that you are a woman because you say you are without grounding it in really anything or admitting the possibility that you could be talked out of the idea.
As a final throwaway point, I'm not sure that it's even clear that such a thing as 'gender identity' even makes sense as some kind of cognitive faculty or whatever have you. I don't really believe it fits at all in any widely accepted model of human cognition, or at least not any that I find compelling and there's no faculty that anyone would accept as being analogous to how gender identity is often framed.
