Where are all the middle aged women who should be transitioning

As damaging and reductive as I feel the current state of affairs is, I am ever the optimist... that when it finally settles down gender binary will have erroded in the process. I.e. everyone will wake up and realise they're taking shite and gender is still a social construct!
As a girl in exactly the situation described above mid 80s I can confirm that was indeed the case re: homophobia. So there is some improvement in terms of visibility. But what is becoming increasingly clear to even my most all embracing trans-supporting friends is that the current state of affairs is just as homphobic, primarily disadvantaging lesbians and seemingly being led by gay men who are cheering on young girls on YouTube talking about surgery on their clitoris (at age 13 i didn't even know what that was and nevermind YouTube we didn't even have a video recorder...that's how ancient I am!)...

The OP is right though... teens didn't have access to the things needed to look like a porn star. Waxing, beauty treatments etc were not a thing at all. I didnt even know grown women who did that in the 80s. Perms yes, and that was it. Porn was very hard to access. Relied on videos being lent around. Everyone was poorer. And teens didn't have vast wardrobes of clothes. Just jeans and tshirts, jumpers.

barleybadminton are you going to answer my question?

You said the reason there isn’t a huge spike in middle aged females transitioning is because they have already transitioned, then you said the huge spike in teenagers indicates to you there must be lots of female adults who are too scared to transition. Which is it?

In the 80s and 90s makeup and dressing up were for older people - not teenagers - and you only dressed up in “feminine” clothes occasionally - the rest of the time you wore jeans and grungy checked shirts or tops. There were many more single sex schools (most in the U.K. state sector went co-ed around 2010).

This just isn't true, there were hardly any single sex state schools in the 80s and 90s, I grew up in a large city and there was just one very small girl's comprehensive school and no boy's school except the local private school.

The 80s and 90s were the age of Rambo, Madonna dancing round in a leotard, shoulder pads, big hair, conspicuous consumption and then lad's mags and girl power into the 90s. And casual sexual harassment, page 3 on workplace walls, queer bashing and section 28. Action films were full of butch men rescuing pretty helpless women and the city centres were full of lairy casual blokes and young women in stillettos and miniskirts dancing round handbags. Perhaps it wasn't like that in your social circle, but let's not rewrite history - being visibly gay or gender nonconforming was incredibly dangerous back then, far more than now and things are still a long long way from ideal. Even boys having long hair and girls wearing trousers was controversial in the 80s, its little wonder trans kids felt unable to come out. There were 1500 kids at my upper school and not one came out as LGBT because it wasn't safe to do so, homophobic bullying was rampant, and not just from the kids but teachers and other adults as well.

Middle aged women - or ‘AFAB folks’ to use the lingo - have too much shit to deal with already. Who wants to deal with the hassle and risk of taking testosterone and having mastectomies on top of menopause, teenage offspring-wrangling and becoming invisible and irrelevant to everyone else?

Maybe women also have less motivation to transition because once we hit menopause we become more gender neutral anyway. Men ignore us after 40 so we can happily subsist in our ‘non-binary’ invisible realm of jeans, Birkenstocks and make-up free living.

When not being sent death / rape threats for having opinions, that is.

@NotBadConsidering yes skewed data as i said. Not just cos of population but because Brighton.....And still tiny amount relatively speaking.. But of the 8 none are under 35. My 2 friends are 48 and 51. The 51 year old started 10 years ago, the 48 year old about 5 years. The rest are variable degrees of progressed.
But I wouldn't have known a single transman in 2005.
As I said though...tiny amounts...
And yes they have been in Brighton longer than trans but they're not from Brighton. Who from LGBT community is?!?
They were all butch lesbians when I met them. The others who aren't friends I know from work and hobby groups and are more SM friends these days iyswim.

@foxgoosefinch

100% this

If you want your child to 'make it through' then they have to find another outlet. And even then its no guarantee. Because school isn't it. And all of the fun stuff of old (although with questionable safeguarding) has gone. Such as discos, youth clubs and dare i say it underage pubs n clubs. Really what's left?!?

We had a young teen friend of one of my DDs visit our home recently and she identifies as Pansexual. She's 13. My DD is a bit . This child was a bit in shock at how utterly boring our actual real gay life is... i feel it was a huge disappointment and I think she's subsequently has a rethink on being Pansexual
How different to my teen years where I'd have loved to have met a real life gay person!

You’re in Brighton? Skewed data.

Are they all coming out as trans men in their 40s, 50s, 60s, as opposed to being trans for years and deciding to live in Brighton among like minded people? How old are the 8 you know?

I think Barley is right (although it pains me to say it ) that there are a lot more Transmen around now then 20 years ago of middle age... but its still a very very small number relatively speaking. I wasn't exaggerating when I said I knew 8. Only 4 I know as in socially and only 2 of those I would consider friends. But I'm in Brighton.. it has an LGBT population of 14% and obviously right at the heart of this issue.
statistically if you compare transmen within the figures of women as a whole in that age group its a tiny %. Even within lesbians.
I think Barley is right there is a rise. But I'm afraid that I think that of those I know I don't really buy the 'feel like a man' narrative. Its a much deeper issue to do with multiple things and definitely driven by Trans agenda too. There's a lot of social media from these transmen I know. They're not all quietly transing for sure. Also Testosterone is a big part of it. But then I'm on HRT so who am I to judge (although my HRT is proven to improve various health indicators but I believe Testosterone doesn't. Heart disease being a risk).
I might be sounding ignorant here but wondering if taking Testosterone is a bit akin to a snort of coke in how it makes you feel?? I know it changes confidence and attitude. Is it just a medical 'drug'. Certainly it has a bodybuilding link for similar reasons.

@barleybadminton you confidently suggest we should talk to come gender non confirming teenage girls and people with experience of homophobia. Well, I’m a lesbian and have plenty of experience of homophobia. And I’ve talked to quite a few GNC kids. And the two overwhelming reasons that seem to be behind the increase in “trans/nb” identities are: 1) social pressures about appearance and fitting in. 2) desire to pigeonhole / label nascent adolescent sexuality, especially same sexual attraction, fear of puberty/sex and social contagion around this on the internet ad in social groups.

In the 80s and 90s makeup and dressing up were for older people - not teenagers - and you only dressed up in “feminine” clothes occasionally - the rest of the time you wore jeans and grungy checked shirts or tops. There were many more single sex schools (most in the U.K. state sector went co-ed around 2010). This coincided with a massive rise in youth culture around self-presentation on social media, massive pressure on girls to look attractive, growth in the porn culture. The pressure around appearance for young teenagers is immense. In particular, if you are not a stereotypically attractive girl you are made to feel absolutely dispossessed and disposable. This starts very very young now.

When I grew up, it was possible to accept that maybe you were just a bit ordinary or a bit plain or a bit ugly, and you might feel sad and upset about it, but there were other identities to take up - the clever one, the religious one, the kind one, the sporty one, the shy one, etc. etc. Since 2000 those other spaces, other identities, have been closing. By the late 2000s, if you weren’t pretty or popular, there was nothing left for you. If you were a bit plain - well, you didn’t fit into femininity and you were worthless, because no matter how clever or funny or nice you were, none of that mattered if you weren’t pretty and socially successful.

That’s some background just as a brief sketch of what’s been happening in the past couple of decades. And of course that coincides with all sorts of social media and porn culture and the increase in acceptability and affordability of cosmetic surgery, as well as the decline in single sex schooling and so on.

I work with young people and have seen this transition happening, and it’s made me sad for them for a long time. But the key thing is that girls who aren’t pretty or aren’t up for the whole social media duckface/contouring/obsessive appearance thing don’t have other tribes to go to. It’s been a monoculture for the last twenty years. No different music and academic and indie tribes to be part of. So now you take a girl who’s a bit awkward or androgynous or not stereotypically pretty, or is afraid of puberty, or is self conscious about her wonky teeth or big nose or whatever, or doesn’t want to grow up yet, or is having crushes on her friends, is in a position where she is alienated from the main teenage culture, and the gender/trans cult is the only other option. Basically - dislike your body or feel unpretty or alienated? You’re trans.

2. lots of teenage girls have same sex feelings. It’s common and a natural part of puberty, whether the girls end up straight or gay or bi. But this in conjunction with 1) now produces an immediate labelling of “queer/trans”. And any generalised teenage depression feeds into this too - with questionnaires on which gender and sexuality you are constantly floating around the internet. I’ve seen first hand a rather lonely and vulnerable girl on a Discord chat, who had substantial family problems, loneliness and was attracted to women, and very self-conscious about being what she felt as “ugly”, be eventually convinced by others that actually she was trans and a they/them. It made me very sad to see it, but I could not intervene as there was a lot of brainwashing about “terf rhetoric” going on and not listening to anyone who didn’t “affirm”. But to my eyes the poor girl was perfectly normal, just in a suffocating family environment during lockdown and very self-conscious about her appearance, her lack of friends and her same-sex crushes - and she was easy prey for being convinced of being a transman when actually she needed some social interaction, to live away at college and to enjoy dating girls and feeling less pressure about her appearance.

A young daughter of a close colleague is transitioning at the moment after being non binary for a while. It’s sad to see because when you talk to her as someone with some life experience, she is clearly a young lesbian who believes that she has to be validated by a “community” by becoming trans. She really just wants a girlfriend and not to feel that she’s ugly compared to the current beauty standards which are enforced on young women. If you don’t fit them, you have to reject them utterly.

Middle aged women for the most part more often can see those beauty standards for what they are, and care a lot less about being thought not to conform to them. We also grew up in a time when there were other options for one’s life, too.

Lol @barleybadminton you’ve quoted two studies, the first included 56 transmen, and the second (conducted by the head of a US hospital trans surgery group!) included 55.

In 2020, in the USA alone 9985 transmen had gender reassignment surgery (compared to 6368 transwomen).

www.plasticsurgery.org/documents/News/Statistics/2020/plastic-surgery-statistics-full-report-2020.pdf

Not quite capturing the whole picture there.

Middle aged women don’t transition because the huge surge in young people transitioning is mainly a social contagion driven by social media. There are similar contagions in history and they tend to affect teenage girls for a variety of reasons. And middle aged women are far less susceptible to such contagions.

Transgenderism has many similarities with the rise of ‘multiple personality disorder’ which was almost unknown until a book and programme popularized it. Soon thousands of people were being diagnosed with it, therapists trained, a professional body formed. But it all fell apart when the law suits came in and now MPD, is, again, almost unknown.

This thread by Malcolm Clark makes a fascinating read:-

twitter.com/twisterfilm/status/1478230008732737537?s=21

Thank you. My sister and I were exactly the same. I remember one Xmas sitting with my Dan Dare Astronaut Kit (it was great, there was a space suit and a communications rig - well, a radio shaped bit of plastic with a notepad stuck to the front, anyway) and my sister loved her crying TinyTears. All her dire predictions about me wanting "boys' toys" came true, funnily enough, but I don't remember her ever mentioning microdosing testosterone.. Thank goodness for that, or God knows where I'd be now, eh? Propping up Barley's (curiously absent) statistical evidence, nodoubt.

@CompleteGinasaur When I was younger, I was into train sets and Action Man, but my younger sister was into baby dolls and Girls World styling head. Makes you think.

They’re*

Well no-one really knows for sure but it's certainly higher then the few hundred trans boys who've been referred for treatment in the last decade or so.

So you don’t know there’s “loads” then .

The real worry is not that there are too many kids referred to GIDS, but so few given the prevalence of trans adults.

But you can’t tell us the prevalence of trans adults. So how do you know this is a concern?

It suggests theres a lot of trans kids out there still closeted, no doubt frightened and not getting any support.

Pure propaganda. So the children can all bravely present to gender clinics because society now allows them to but adults are too afraid to?

And what are you saying here? You said earlier all the transmen have already transitioned, now you’re saying can’t count them because there all too frightened to transition?

Are you dizzy from all that spinning?

Sorry,DoubleTweenQueen, I didn't spot the "identify", so crossposted..

How does one define a transkid, before you go on to diagnose them? I mean, I wouldn't take it on, the consequences of getting it wrong being as catastrophic as they can be..

@barleybadminton What support would be appropriate for these closeted & frightened trans-kids? And how does one diagnose/identify a trans-kid?

and bearing up, definitely x .

@CompleteGinasaur I have no doubt x

Seemed like you knew for sure earlier, Barley.

I fear a certain amount of shifting the ground of your argument may be imminent..

Though, seriously, growing up with proper second wave feminism may just have had a small amount to do with our self-acceptance.

(Just a little bit though, we really are practically perfect in every way..)

The real worry is not that there are too many kids referred to GIDS, but so few given the prevalence of trans adults. It suggests theres a lot of trans kids out there still closeted, no doubt frightened and not getting any support.