Just a question re transgender

There are several groups of people that are being conflated by some posters.

Do you remember the concept of the Friday afternoon car? The lemon, made when factory workers were tired and looking forward to the weekend and paying less attention to detail!

Some bodies feel like that- lots of comorbidities, all real, possibly auto immune, some trivial, some severe, shit to have to live with.

Then there are the teens who catch everything they read about and pathologise normal experiences.

Recognising the second group doesn’t invalidate the first.

Though I left a support group where the leader genuinely had lots of health issues but seemed to want to extend the symptom list beyond what was reasonable. It was like a matter of pride to show what we have to put up with and say ‘I suffer from 73 of the 95 symptoms of [fibro].’ Half of what she said was really helpful, the other half embedded a ‘too ill to manage’ mindset.

There is/was a thing for tattoos of one indicating a suicide attempt. Not sure if tatoos were relevant here though - I don't think you can claim exclusive ownership for the use of such a generic thing.

@Nonstopnoise - I couldn't have put it better myself! I still absolutely dread making phone calls and will try and avoid it wherever possible despite being in a fairly professional job. Another reason my relative gives is that she's too anxious for interviews - not realising that it's not a pleasant experience for anyone really!

No, it doesn't, but I can see where she was coming from. I had no idea about any of this!

@Garlicworth Thank you for posting the link, it's an interesting read! It doesn't actually prove what the original poster was claiming, though.

Hypermobility of joints is one of the causes for some retained primitive reflexes. Retained reflexes are associated with a lot of abnormal functioning.

"Multiple studies show that children who have retained reflexes have discrepancies in sensory development, postural disorders, decreased motor/cognitive performance, and decreased psychomotor development."

Primitive reflexes disappear as a child's nervous system develops proprioception and learns how to voluntarily control the body. I'm unclear on what is cause or effect with many of the affected functions but it's thought that physiotherapy can partially or wholly complete 'integration', after which the individual will have fewer issues growing up.

https://www.occupationaltherapy.com/articles/understanding-primitive-reflexes-they-impact-5409-5409

What's your evidence for this?

But this is part of the problem. Ds has ASD and ADHD and when he finished Uni he had all sorts of reasons for not getting a job - a very long list indeed. Starting with - what people with ASD can’t do. I’m afraid I’m not very trendy on this thinking because I said - you either learn to do it or accept a limited life while you wait on the world to change to suit you. Everyone is scared of doing stuff, no one likes getting up in the morning, no one likes making that phone call - - you might find it harder but what choice do you have and the only way to learn is by just jumping in.
Back home, away from Uni he is no longer surrounded by ND people telling him it’s ok to opt out. He’s got a job - now that was a big learning for him and he needed a lot of scaffolding but he kept going - he’s gained so much confidence and he hasn’t mentioned anxiety in months - he feels like a different person - full of optimism. Sometimes it’s not being ND, sometimes it’s just plain old fear and nerves - like we all experience.

I don't disagree. What's wrong with this picture? The expectation of 'performing' as an assigned gender. We were doing so well with freeing kids of sex-role stereotypes ('gender'), encouraging them to develop their interests, talents and personalities regardless of what is now called cis-heteronormativity. Nobody needed to try and change sex, only to find their personal selves in their natural bodies.

Then some bunch of transhumanist Americans with bottomless funding decided to start indoctrinating everyone that we are not our bodies. That we can & should change our fleshbags to be what 'we' - the disembodied self - feel suits us. Medical institutions and weird fetishists alike glommed onto this with enthusiasm, adopting the relatively easy sell of changing sex if you don't feel comfortable being a walking sex-role stereotype (who the fuck does?)

That their movement has become an enforcement of gender stereotypes whistles right over most of their heads, although the teams that drive it are well aware. They exist, btw, and their strategy documents are published.

It makes me really, really sad. Girls should be playing football or Warhammer with total confidence by now; boys should be playing with fashion and makeup; all the young people SHOULD have been quite at home with their physical sex and felt free to be themselves, untrammelled by outdated 'gender' expectations.

But that doesn't feed a vast medical industry or deliver under-confident young bodies to fetishists. So we've got this instead.

Is that the long winded condescending way of the usual attempt to shutdown something you don't like 'educate yourself'?

We have a lot of ND, Pots, hypermobility in family. I believe that the hyper mobility drives infant reflexes not going dormant which is linked into ND / Pots etc.

Me too!

Medievalist. The generation gap looks different but never changes.

The first time I saw a link between Sci Fi and trans was the Wachowski brothers (who became the Wachowski sisters-unusual for the time) they are the ones who wrote and produced The Matrix, in1999.

In fact one of the characters Trinity in the Matrix who Neo falls in love with was origionally going to be a woman in the matrix (false world), and a man in 'real life', but they thought that the plot twist would be too much for a mainstream audience.

NameChangedForThis1985
Ah yes.... "some other fatigue causing illness or chronic pain illness that isn't yet diagnosed and is a mystery"
Also known as Lazyitis. Family member has it which means she doesn't get up until 2pm, 3pm, 4pm so she couldn't possibly get a job and she's soooo tired. Forgetting that she stays up online until 4 in the morning.

I thought that just meant you had a liver complaint! That is explained in Three Men In A Boat:

"With me, it was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all. .... I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being “a general disinclination to work of any kind.”"

Ah yes.... "some other fatigue causing illness or chronic pain illness that isn't yet diagnosed and is a mystery"

Also known as Lazyitis. Family member has it which means she doesn't get up until 2pm, 3pm, 4pm so she couldn't possibly get a job and she's soooo tired. Forgetting that she stays up online until 4 in the morning.

And before anyone comes at me, I know it's common for people with ASD to have alternative sleep patterns. I'm autistic myself and had years as a child and teenager where I would barely sleep, or sleep all day and stay away all night. But I had to force myself out of it.

EDS groups are full of these people who have often self diagnosed EDS! Often autistic, ND, trans, queer, nerdy, alternative types. These tend to be the ones who have self diagnosed

No and I didn't diagnose myself I was diagnosed by 2 different Drs which was followed up with a consultant led long covid clinic where they also discovered POTs.

I had a positive PCR test when I caught covid was extremely unwell and never fully recovered. The positive test just made it more straightforward for Dr's to say long covid after 6 months of ongoing symptoms and lots of tests. Took me 3 years to see the consultant led long covid clinic with more tests.
4 years in and had to learn to manage it like many other people with hidden long term conditions do everyday.

To be honest, I think the medical profession make most of them up and we would be better without them.

I wouldn't assume that they aren't here.
I think it's important to understand that quite a few people like this believe their own story, that explains a lot of the behaviour.

Wait, are you saying you used a COVID test to diagnose long COVID?

The trouble is with Sci fi ( and I'm a fan- fits, doesn't it, with my teen years?) Is that you CAN do anything or be anything. Lots of Iain Banks' characters switch sexes, but that's because of futuristic science- magic that I'm not even going to begin to understand, because that would be like trying to make a chair do magic stuff because I've read Blyton's Wishing Chair. And in those books, it's just because they can, rather than because they feel they're in the wrong body.

I doubt that many of the SF writers of the1940s and1950s such as Clifford D Simak or Isaac Asimov or H Beam Piper or Brian Aldiss or Robert Heinlein or Roger Zelazny or Cyril Kornbluth or Larry Niven or Fritz Leiber made the mistake of writing a pot of message rather than a good story. In fact Heinlein actively advised against it as being bad for sales; most of them were in it to make a living rather than ideological reasons, after all, apart from Larry Niven who had shedloads of dosh and wrote for fun. (An exception would be L Ron Hubbard, but even he didn't take his new religion seriously at first, just as a something he had made a bet about. And as a way to make money...)

Yes, sci-fi has always been thoughtful. More than it is now in many ways, the growth of nerd culture hasn't really led to better stuff, just more junk.

But it has absolutely not always been dominated by people who seem to want to make fictional stories the basis of their identity.

I think it reflects a loss of systems of meaning in society.

The people are looking for systems of meaning to animate their lives. Pop culture doesn't offer it, their education didn't offer it, and they have no religion. They don't really know enough to be philosophical Marxists or existentialists or even stoics.

So to replace the ethical parts of religion they adopt social justice culture, and for the poetic part, they become fans Star Wars or Dr Who or whatever.