- Joined
- Aug 14, 2017
I wish someone told this girl about getting a breast reduction, which many (feminine!) cis women get and are happy about. It’s okay to not like having giant titties! It doesn’t mean you’re a man!I've been fascinated by this girl:
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I also wrote something on her back here, but I decided to go through her posting history properly. Since she post so much shit at considerable length, you can write something of a history and it's actually straight bingo for a teenage girl troon-out. Moreover, she has this weird tendency to write posts that can only be understood in light of other posts which makes this an interesting exercise.
Some miscellaneous background:
She is 18 (making her ~14 in the 'before'), grew up in "a liberal town" in Oregon that is not Portland and is currently studying CS at Reed College; a liberal arts college "known for its ... progressive politics [and] de-emphasis on grades." She goes by 'Alan,' not exactly sure what her birth-name is other than that it is four letters long, begins with A and an 'L' in it; I believe this makes it Ayla since she implies that it doesn't start with "Al" and that it isn't particularly unusual. Decided she was a "trans man" in Sept 2020 and is still pre-everything.
She has an older sister and a half-brother. Her parents are not divorced. Her father is unemployed, probably majored in philosophy (she writes a lot of random shit) and she seems to imply that he has mental health issues. It's not clear what the deal is though, as I said above: she doesn't care all that much for the comprehension of her readers. Relatedly, her older sister has a history of unspecified mental health problems including self-harm. I think her half-brother is her father's and this implies that they have psychological issues of some sort as well:
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This doesn't actually make sense, but the "what my dad gave me and my siblings" is almost certainly mental health issues based on post history clues.
History:
She was an undeniably feminine child and teenager:
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And was a fan of the Youtuber Zoella, for example; definitely not your tom-boy type. She does have a few atypical interests and proclivities though, she seems to have developed an interest in video games and in high school was on the robotics team. She is also planning on majoring in CS and has a slightly repetitive interest in programming:
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The idea of being a "woman in CS" or related themes shows up quite a bit. It seems like an identity that mattered to her, in one post she expresses that she feels she is letting down her sex by transitioning and therefore giving up the "woman" part of it.
Anyways, like all such cases her problems began with puberty:
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There are a couple of things that stand out here: the non-specific anxiety issues, the big breasts and anime. There's definite some yaoi in there:
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At the same time she also started having issues with her sexuality which seems to have begun with her having difficulty to relate to her friends' feelings re. men:
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...which she was assisted in by her "nb and very outwardly queer" friend and YouTube videos (never a good influence). She seems to have had serious issues with locating herself sexually:
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She never seems to evince any real sexual attraction of a physical nature in her posts. There is a kind of uncertain abstractness in the way she talks about sexuality. Also note the aversion towards heterosexual relationships as a woman. From 15-18 she seems to have somewhat stable in her identity, then over the summer of 2020, she has some sort of mental crisis:
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She does this in stages, by first being "genderfluid" before - with the help of YouTube - settling on "trans man":
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Some 'elder' FtM also helped affirm her in as a True Man:
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And her college is also facilitating her in her new found quest to fuck herself up:
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As indicated above, her family - her mother in particular - is not taking it well:
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This is real Feels, IMO. The certainty that your dear daughter is hurting herself, the helplessness of not knowing what you can do and the impotence of feeling denied the right to do anything. Her mother sees her elder sister's self-harm in Ayla's desire to amputate her breasts:
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I feel that she doesn't fully comprehend the fullness of the love and care a parent feels for their child:
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This girl is well and truly down the rabbit-hole. Totally ensconced in troondom.
Why?
As I said back at the beginning, this girl is a real bingo card. She grew in a hyper-liberal environment and with plenty of exposure to 'LGBTQ+' type stuff. She also wasn't worried about her family's reaction; she had come out as lesbian (though it doesn't sound like her mom took this seriously) and thought that coming out as 'trans' would be no different. She had a 'non-binary' friend at 15 for example, and her CS classes are apparently full of MtF troons:
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There's also that "elder trans friend," who again helps her believe that 'trans' is a valid and normal thing and the fact that her college's HCC is willing to aid and abet her in this folly.
Media is another factor. Aside from the aforementioned anime & yaoi consumption, there's also this:
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And there was at least one other post about shows with troons. Additionally, she was - by her own admission - influenced by FtM YouTubers, in particular Jammidodger, of whom she seems to be quite a fan.
But none of this really answers the question: why? It's a hard question and one made doubly hard by her not really seeming to know either. The primary driver behind it seems to have been body dysmorphia over her breasts:
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I don't know why she developed some neurosis over her breasts, but once that got going it seems that courtesy of the environmental influences, she latched onto 'being trans' as an explanation:
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And then smuggled in all the other anxieties, confusions over her personal identity and some general feelings of oddness into the catch-all of 'gender dysphoria.' Beyond her breasts, her views seem bizarre and contrary to her desire to troon out:
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She doesn't have significant "bottom dysphoria" and her fantasies about being a man come off as inchoate and empty:
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Why do you need to not have breasts to do any of this? What, indeed, does being a man have to do with any of it? What does it even mean to [live] as a man? She doesn't seem to really cogitate on the why, she just takes it as a sort of biological axiom that she needs to do all these things. She believes this is a "biological thing":
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But, of course, it's not. That doesn't even sound like a plausible thing to believe at a subjective level; why did this "biological" desire to do this to yourself not appear until you were 18? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to see as extension of past behaviors and feelings? Of confused longings to be something different, to be sure in who you are, to have an explanation for "everything." Where she is now seems truly unfortunate, her latching onto being a "trans man" doesn't seem to have obviously improved her well-being, there's talk of "gender euphoria" over presenting as male, but at the same time there's this:
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And that's actually saddening. I cannot know the whole texture of her life, but my thinking is that she has suffered through the increase 'gender dysphoria' after her 'revelation.' This is a pretty standard outcome - once you 'diagnose' yourself, you hone in like a hawk on gender issues and the result somewhat inevitably is mental turmoil.
It's doubly saddening, because she does seem to have actual problems that go beyond mere teenage angst. Now, I might be schizo posting from here, but my hypothesis is that she is mildly autistic and a good deal of her experiences could be explained in that light.
The priors on this being true are pretty high just since feminine/heterosexually-inclined girls are the most autistic sub-population amongst troons. Pediatric gender clinics typically run up >50% ASD/suspected ASD amongst boys and girls, and rates of up to 70% have been reported in girls in Australia.
Moreover, the repeated confusion and uncertainty over her sexual orientation is extremely common in girls with autism, as is a lack of desire for sexual contact. Girls with autism also have sky-high rates of anxiety disorders, something she certainly seems to suffer from. Beyond mere statistic inference, she constantly says things that are strikingly odd. To get us started, consider this:
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Now, there's nothing unusual about wanting big boobs as a tween, but the way she formulates this is unusual and it's part of a broader pattern in how she talks about being girl. She constantly talks about feeling a sense of lost identity and just looking at the world around her:
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She writes at other times that she didn't feel she really understood being a woman and instead took it as a sort of "competitive" pursuit, and that it was something she did because she thought it was expected of her. A lot of this seems to have been slightly ret-conned as being linked to her gender dysphoria:
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That word 'masking' is a choice one. She also has written multiple times about feeling 'dissociated', of 'feeling uncomfortable at having a physical form' and not '[feeling] like an actual real human person':
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This pattern of not knowing "who [you] are," of being guided by social mimicry. This here is from a qualitative study of women with autism:
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Sound familiar? That feeling of exhaustion is one that she has written about as well.
There is also this which is a real "Oh...":
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Hyper-vigilance to touch is very common in autistic individuals. It also shows how 'gender dysphoria' works to absorb all her struggles and uncertainties; a guiding narrative for her to understand all the things she never could.
There are other little things as well: the slightly stereotyped way she talks about being a programmer, the way her posts often seem to leave out some part of the context or depend on other posts that she could have no expectation that anyone had read. Is that a sign of mild ToM impairment? She always has 'social anxiety' - practically ubiquitous in girls with autism - which alone might mean nothing, but given everything else I'd beg to differ:
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It is always difficult - and dangerous - to diagnose people via reddit posts and ultimately, only she and those who know her best, can say whether it provides a truer explanation for all that she feels. My firm feeling is that she would greatly benefit from, at the very least, investigating the matter. See an autism specialist, one that is experienced with girls & women with autism because she desperately needs something to help her understand why she is the way she is. And this is not the answer:
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Top surgery might stop you from bruising your ribs, but will it really fix your problems? Will you really be any closer to feeling at home in your body, comfortable in who you are? It can be easy to think you know the answer, but we are all easily fooled most of all by ourselves. When anyone struggles with mental illness, they inevitably come to feel an insatiable longing to have things finally be at an end. It drives people to seek these little nirvanas - "perfect" solutions - that in our dreams will finally get the spider off our backs, and each and every time, we are wrong.
I wish this girl and all these FTMs had an older butch woman in their life.
