@OvaHere
One thing that did spring to my mind- particularly when reading comments from posters who expressed real concern about rises in the number of children identifying as trans- was whether people say 40 or 50 years ago were making similar comments except about gay people? I suspect 50 years ago it was very rare for children to openly say they identified as gay because of the social context at the time, (but that doesn't mean they didn't exist) however there would surely have been more gay people in their late teens/early 20s being open about their sexuality leading to some form of concern for some members of society. I don't really know where I'm going next with this rambling thought- but interested in others' views.
I've considered this as have many others here. The questions for me are why there is such a divide in demographics - 4000% rise in female children/teens? What causes this disparity?
Ditto middle aged transitioners are overwhelmingly male - if a certain percentage of people are randomly 'born in the wrong body' shouldn't we see a more even spread across age and sex demographics?
My mum immediately said this about the rise in transitions. That you have huge numbers of girls (half autistic, and many with very troubled pasts) seemingly determined to opt out of having a sexed female body, and then you have a large cohort of middle aged heterosexual males, many very aggressively demanding full and equal access to spaces where women are, in law and in practice, fully entitled to exclude men.
Those are very, very different groups of people. And she made the point that transsexuals, in the old school sense, tended to be gay males who had been adamant, as soon as they were old enough to speak at all, that they were girls. Which is a different group, again.
The thing is, I don't think most of us with concerns started with concerns. I for one was always a staunch supporter of trans people achieving full social and political equality. It's the concept that you erase sex - and with it, women's own efforts towards social and political equality, and indeed basic safety from male predation - that alarmed me. And parallel, I'm alarmed by very young girls taking hormones that could harm them badly, and having surgeries that can't be reversed, when we have no real evidence of any merit on the long term efficacy of that, or whether they may come to bitterly regret it. I'm also alarmed that so little concern seems to be informing medical care, related to the co-morbid problems the group may have. SOME cases will, I absolutely believe, be of genuine dysphoria. But how many will have other root causes, that could be addressed, instead, that drive the dysphoria? So are you just treating a symptom of a greater distress, or the actual cause?
It wouldn't matter, really, if transition were purely social. Who cares, in that case (with due respect paid to peers, in terms of sex as well as gender). It does matter if healthy young people are entering into a hugely medicalised pathway that has no clear way out.
Being gay has no impact at all on anyone else. Nor does it impact the healthy bodies of the kids in question, let alone involve medicalised interventions with serious risks. If there's nothing wrong with gender dysphoric kids, why are we consideringly medical interventions? And why is nobody really demanding that we look at why so many kids with mental health problems - which this cohort clearly do have, unrelated to the dysphoria, because mental health problems in autistic kids are the norm and not the exception - want to transition, and what drives that desire? Why is it bigoted for parents and others to express concerns? We're talking drug treatments for life, carrying proven and serious risks, and the most serious and invasive forms of surgery imaginable, should transition hold. 89% plus will outgrow dysphoria without hormone blockers, yet 100% transition with them. That's a massive issue, and it's not transphobic to sound the alarm.