Gender

Feel like a change is the answer?
Image by Nicki Varkevisser CC BY 2.0 Cropped

Your feelings can be real ... and misleading

Let's look to those who have been there

Every story sounds correct until you hear the other side. This page presents a balancing cautionary view so you have a more complete big-picture to make informed decisions.

Most of the quotes on this page are from teenage girls, however their thoughts and statements apply just as much to guys who are looking at gender issues.

It [gender dysphoria] is definitely a real feeling! But being uncomfortable is part of being human. If you can’t cope with those feelings, then you need help learning better ways to cope…Feelings are feelings. Feeling something doesn’t mean it is true or real.

Today

Gender Dysphoria and transgender issues are receiving a lot of publicity in the media. The media push is coming from 'politically correct' activists who have enticed a lot of the media, medical and professional community to go along with them.

Other established and respected medical and professional organizations see the gender movement as dangerous and possibly 'mass hysteria' and have published responses highlighting their concerns.

The widespread focus on gender issues has produced a new group of young people wrongly self-diagnosing with Gender Dysphoria.

All expressed they were convinced by trans activists that transition was the answer and now they live with the negative consequences of that decision.

Activists would have the public believe that anyone who expresses a wish to be the other gender should be allowed and encouraged to do so. Credulous politicians have translated their demands into law.

...parents expressed anxiety over the speed with which the gender professionals involved accepted their teenagers’ self-diagnosis, demonstrated by recommendations for puberty blocking agents after a single visit.

Clinicians are divided. Adelaide endocrinologist Professor Jenny Couper upholds the court veto. “You can’t reverse testosterone treatment for female to male adolescents, which makes paediatric endocrinologists pretty anxious.

Definitions

Gender
Traditional meaning was either of the two possibilities: male gender or female gender.
Gender Dysphoria
The condition of feeling one's emotional and psychological identity as male or female to be opposite to one's biological sex.
Transgender
Transgender people have (taken on) a gender identity or gender expression that differs from their assigned sex. Transgender people are sometimes called transsexual if they desire medical assistance to transition from one sex to another. (Wikipedia)
Cisgender
A term for people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth. Most of the population are 'cisgender'.
Infertility
Biologically unable to produce children.
Trans-desister
A person who previously started and has now stopped the gender change process.

What causes transgender feelings?

Dysphoria Always Has a Deeper Root

So many traumas can cause gender dysphoria, including emotional loss, abuse, and extreme changes in the home. According to research, almost two-thirds (62.7 percent) of transgender people have some type of co-existing psychiatric disorder, such as depression, phobias, and adjustment disorders.

My psychologist understood I had dysphoria and we worked through the trauma that caused it.

I’m glad she (mum) didn’t believe I was a boy trapped in a girl’s body. I’m glad she found a psychologist who saw how scared and angry and hurt I was and who wanted to help me with those things first instead of also helping me transition to be a boy.

They’d say I should think about why I felt that way, the reasons for feeling that way, and any other perspectives or reasons someone might feel that way. And that I should also think about my history and my experiences and relationships and why I might feel uncomfortable or not want to be a girl.

Adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational part....Teens process information with the amygdala. This is the emotional part.

How gender is changed

All of the steps below have permanent affects on your body - affects that will last the rest of your life (possibly up to 90 years).

  1. A young person takes 'puberty blocker' drugs usually before puberty actually starts. This action delays all the normal processes of puberty associated with the birth gender - such as semen production in guys. This treatment leads to infertility.
  2. Later in the teenage years, hormone drugs are taken which promote normal puberty development of the opposite gender in the person - such as breast growth in guys. This treatment leads to infertility.
  3. Still later, surgery is often undertaken to make a guy look like a woman in his pants and vice versa for girls.
  4. The new sex organs have some sensation but do not function as true sexual organs - the changes are cosmetic so the person looks like they feel they should. Here's How Sex Reassignment Surgery Works Washington Post

Junk science?

It would be very easy to dismiss the concerns of professionals as 'bigoted old men' or similar derogatory names. The other way to look at this is to see the concerns as coming from those extremely experienced and respected in their field of expertise. They have seen fads come and go (of which 'gender' is the latest) that leave a legacy of people behind without any responsibility for the damage that has been caused.

Current popular delusions are aspirations ... to transcend the laws of biology and transmute human nature. Among them is the popular belief that gender is fungible (interchangeable), so that whether we are born male or female is of no consequence.

Another manifestation of denial of the biological differences between the sexes takes the form of a man’s declaring, in effect, “My gender is what I say it is. I feel like I’m a woman in a man’s body, and I demand that I be treated like one.” The demands that society accommodate such absurd personal delusions are becoming ever more aggressive.

In short, a mature and stable self-image involves knowing oneself and one’s place in the world. Life’s inevitable vicissitudes (fluctuations), at every developmental stage from childhood to old age, can test our self-image and produce self-doubt. Popular delusions such as the transgender craze offer simplistic explanations and solutions for the multidimensional life crises of identity.

Transient developmental crises that would be amenable (responsive) to appropriate psychotherapy are turned into profoundly life-altering, irreversible physical mutilations.

These kids are being lied to by the very people they should be able to trust: doctors, psychiatrists and teachers. They are being reinvented, medicated and operated on in some creepy Dr Moreau-ish experiment that can only end in disaster for most of them.

Moreover, in recent years, advocacy on behalf of the transgender community has seen medical gatekeeping reduced so that, in many places in the US, young people like Molly can access medical transition without any diagnostic or assessment process.

Love your body

Everybody at some point has to make a decision to love themselves 'warts and all' (including their body). Choosing to love yourself is a choice you make whatever your feelings are at the time.

I eventually stopped looking for validation as something I would never be, and started the process of loving myself.

For a long time, I’ve been hesitant to talk about my experience with trans. I was embarrassed, for one, into being duped by an agenda that wanted to convince me I was something I’m not, nor would ever be....because there’s something more important at stake: young women learning to love themselves. If I can convince even just one girl to love her body for what it is, and to know that no amount of dissatisfaction with stereotypes, or love for suits and sports, or short hair, or discomfort with her anatomy makes her less of a woman, then any shit cast my way is worth it.

I don’t know anyone my age who hasn’t felt uncomfortable about their bodies at some point. Everyone I know wishes there was something different about their bodies.

If it is on your mind 24/7 and you feed that idea, you give that idea power – and you start to feel like you need to do something to your body to feel better.

It isn’t conversion therapy to learn to love yourself or at least, feel like you can live in your own body without hurting it on purpose.

If medical transition wasn’t available, I don’t think it would matter if a girl thinks she’s a boy for a while, because she wouldn’t be encouraged to do things that are harmful.

You weren’t born in the wrong body because that’s not possible.

You were born into a society where looks mean everything. But really our bodies are just what keep us alive. Why don’t we fight back against the idea that any person looks wrong as they are? Your “outside” doesn’t need to “match your inside.” The outside isn’t important enough to hurt yourself over.

Go outside. Move your body. Make art, do something. Don’t spend time with other people’s stories about self-loathing and self-diagnosis. Stop feeling oppressed when you’re probably not oppressed. I know transitioning can make you feel like you get a lot of control but medically transitioning doesn’t give you power. It just makes someone else money.

What are you feeding your mind?

It is a known fact that whatever you continually focus your mind on becomes stronger and a self fulfilling prophecy for you. This does not just apply to gender issues but to life in general.

There’s a very specific kind of mental mind-fuck that went on on Tumblr during this time that cultivated the perfect atmosphere for confused, self-hating teens (which is like, all of them) to somehow come to the realization that they’re transgender. First came a kind of twisted rewriting of history, women like Joan of Arc...became ‘trans men who didn’t know at the time, because it wasn’t accepted’.

Another thing was the constant validation of trans people. In order for me to become instantly ‘valid,’ all I had to do was be a man. How could I do that? By feeling like one. What did that feel like? I don’t know, since I didn’t feel like a woman, which I now realize is because I can’t; woman isn’t a feeling.

The most harmful message to come out of the cultist ideology of trans rights is that 'you are x because you feel like x'. But in the same way that I didn’t feel working class, or feel like a white person, or feel like a Midwesterner, I didn’t feel like a woman, which according to trans ideology, meant I wasn’t ‘cisgender’, and so from that the leap was easy for me to make: I must be a man.

It at the time all seemed very progressive: by ignoring history and biology, we could rewrite reality, and anyone could be anything they wanted. First of all, words didn’t have meaning anymore. According to new gender logic, even male and female were fluid.

By the time my mother figured out what was going on with me, I was in deep. Female-to-Male transition videos filled my Youtube suggestions.

Moving on

There is still medical help out there that will get to the cause of your gender dysphoria and not just treat your symptoms. You might have to look hard and ask some pointed questions to find the specialist help you need.

You can start the ball rolling by paying attention to what your mind dwells on and learn the art of loving yourself.

Going to someone who would try to get to the root of my identity and dysphoria and resolving that cause itself instead of validating my mental illness and okaying a lifetime of hormones, mutilation, and sterilization was paramount.

The most helpful thing she did for me was make me examine why I identified as a boy, and what that meant. By being asked to define what being a boy felt like without using anything that I already knew was only a stereotype about boys, and my subsequent failure to do so, I eventually came to terms with the fact that I couldn’t be one.

In general, kids that desist are a bit embarrassed by the whole thing. They don’t want to be paraded through the press, admitting they ‘made a mistake’, or to be on the receiving end of accusations of transphobia and deception: they just want to forget about it and get on with life. You won’t hear much from them. You won’t see photos of them in glossy magazines & on the internet.

Once everyone around you is reinforcing your delusion it must become very hard to turn back from the glitter-strewn yellow brick road. It’s even harder for those who detransition. 21 year old Zhara says, “It sounds weird so I don’t usually say it. It’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to go back.”

More information

Sex Change Regret website
A first-hand view from a guy who has been there - he changed his sex and then reverted back again.
Lily Maynard website
A really in-depth look at the gender scene - by the mother of a trans-desister.
4th Wave Now website
The purpose of this site is to give voice to an alternative to the dominant trans-activist and medical paradigm currently being touted by the media.

Be smart on the web

This site might not help your personal situation. The purpose of this site is to give you information from other sources that you might not have heard before. That way you can make your own informed decisions about what can be complex issues in your life.

Every issue has different points of view and it is wise to consider all available information (including the author's motives ) to arrive at the best decision for yourself. All information from the internet (including this site) and media in general should be approached with caution.

Misinformation and true information often look awfully alike. The key to an informed life may not require gathering information as much as it does challenging the ideas you already have or have recently encountered. This may be an unpleasant task, and an unending one, but it is the best way to ensure that your brainy intellectual tapestry sports only true colors.

References

The following addresses cannot be hyperlinked ( this page will lose secure status) - copy and paste addresses.
  1. Susan Bradley is a consultant child psychiatrist, formerly chief of psychiatry at Hospital for Sick Children and head of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Toronto. She is an emeritus professor at U of T.
  2. Richard Corradi is a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.