Harrowing first-person account of transboy culture

@WhatterySquash When Trump was reinaugurated and said that there are only two genders, Today FM (Irish) were laughing at how ridiculous and far right the notion is to not let under 18s transition to their desired sex. I actually fucking despair that this was being promoted as the right opinion and anyone who disagrees is a bigot. Say what you want about Trump but he stated a fact which is NOT UP FOR DEBATE. I hope the silent majority pulls through and this crap will die out.

Agree, there was also a thing on radio 4 today about misinformation online affecting kids, and schools trying to address it and teach kids not to believe everything they see on tiktok etc. No mention of the fact that schools (and many other institutions) have been pushing a huge load of illogical, sexist and unevidenced rubbish about "gender" and trans, in line with online misinformation. How are kids supposed to trust them either?

Maybe a controversial take but I'm watching the new series Adolescence which goes into the current social media incel culture. With all these new shows trying to keep up with the times and make shows with relevant issues, we never see anything critical of the whole trans debate and kids transitioning? Which is obviously as we know a massive problem online with young people. I think the likes of BBC and streaming platforms have gone woke and are too scared to be seen as being critical...

Thanks for reviving this @youngstupid it’s a powerful (lengthy!) read. The need for a tribe is so well observed and yes trans is absolutely girls’ Lord of the Flies moment

Thank you for reviving this thread.

Just placemarking to come back to it later.

I agree with so many PPs about how and why this happens, the need to show you’re different and special, or to escape from the sexist and stereotyped expectations on girls, or to avoid being boring, square and guilty of oppression by rejecting “cishet” status. And that we used to deal with these feelings in other ways, like being a goth, emo, “alternative” or even totally different tribes like the born-again Christians at my school - they were all tribes that gave people a community and allowed them to reject expectations, especially girls. Sport, music and drama etc also gave teens these RL communities and identities - and I think they still can for some.

But I also think this whole “gender” identity experimenting could work in a healthy, undamaging way too. The way it’s linked to sexual fetishes and sexuality, and the idea of medical transitioning, is what’s causing the problems - not actual gender nonconformity. If we could encourage kids to see rejecting gender stereotypes and experimenting with make-up, clothes etc as an identity without that being about your sex, like we did in the 80s, it could be harmless and even positive.

I mean clearly the whole cult-like and dangerous aspect of it is way out of control and not going to be turned around easily - but I still think it’s worth explaining it to kids in that way - that of course you can break free of gender stereotypes and that doesn’t actually have to be about wanting to change your sex, or have to involve playing into the hands of big pharma. Just as we all understood the concept of a a “tomboy” - not a boy, just a stereotype-rejecting girl - transgender could come to mean rejecting stereotypes, as a way to rebrand itself as all the harms and dodgy connections become more and more widely seen.

Back then there were a lot of tribes to choose and an unspoken feeling it would only be temporary.

So true, Sinister. I can now see how protective those tribes were, in a way. People you socialised with in real life, of about the same age, and with responsible adults somewhere nearby — even if you didn’t want them in your face.

Not so much space and opportunities for predators, irl or on a screen.

I’ve never previously understood why any politically left-wing person could support trans ideology. It’s so essentially ultra-individualistic and antisocial. But having read Helena’s story I think I do now understand, at least why teenagers fall for it.

It’s because they hear little about genuine left-wing action, but are soaked in identity politics, which makes them feel guilty and worthless. Teenagers are easy prey.

The beauty of gender ideology is it provides a way to game this system, so that you can get some of those targets off your back and enjoy the camaraderie of like-minded youths. You can’t change your race, and pretending to have a different sexuality would be very uncomfortable in practice. But you can absolutely change your gender, and it’s as easy as putting a “she/they” in your bio. Instantly you are transformed from an oppressing, entitled, evil, bigoted, selfish, disgusting cishet white scum into a valid trans person who deserves celebration and special coddling

A PP said something like 'keep teenagers off the internet' but if I'm not putting words into her mouth, I doubt if she meant 'entirely and altogether', which would be impossible. It was impossible when this thread was started, and it's still impossible.

I'd interpret or rephrase it as 'make sure teenagers maintain a balance between the internet and real life'. Helena's experience shows that online fantasy can become more immediate and real than real life, not so much a welcome escape from the stresses of everyday life, but an actual alternative reality - which clearly has its own set of stresses, and dangers.

And that might mean adults having to look critically at their own online life.
It's not just teenagers who are tethered to their phones almost 24/7:

In 2021, UK mobile phone users spent an average of four hours per day on their devices. This is an increase of 0.3 hours in previous years, which has steadily increased since 2019.
According to a 2021 Ofcom survey, the amount of time people spend on their smartphones is increasing year-by-year:

• People in the UK check their smartphone, on average, every 12 minutes of the waking day.
• Two in five adults (40%) look at their phone within five minutes of waking up.
• This figure reaches 65% for those aged 35 and under.

It's not banning the internet, which would be impossible, but not giving unlimited internet access via smartphones to under-16s so they don't get that total immersion in everything the online world has to offer, good, indifferent and absolutely horrific and damaging, until they are older and have experienced a bit more of life off-line.

Unfortunately, that's not happening; the stats I quoted above found that:
As of 2023, half of all nine-year-olds in the UK own a smartphone.

No nine-year-old needs a smartphone; a 'Nokia' phone is all they need to be able to make emergency calls, and even contact friends, without the ability to send photos. Image-sharing is a growing area of dodgy contact between young teenagers, i.e. 'sexting', and 'self-generated child abuse images' - children are tricked into sending explicit photos of themselves, which then end up on child abuse websites.
ESET UK Research reveals teenage sexting epidemic – with almost three-quarters of U18s regretting sharing intimate photos and videos online | ESET

Helena practically lived on Tumblr - at school, at home - so obviously had unrestricted access to it, while still a young teenager.

Unlimited 24/7 access to smartphones/internet is not a good thing.
So if the PP meant 'Don't let teenagers be online 24/7', I agree.

The fact that in 2025 there's more discussion about this e.g. banning smartphones in schools, is a step in the right direction.

Commenting on this ancient thread to bump because I think all parents of vulnerable tweens need to read this. It's a long read but absolutely fascinating. As a 21 year old who was around during the tumblr era, everything this woman wrote about the poisonous communities is no word of a lie. I was almost sucked into this myself as a 12 year old tomboy. So glad people are waking up. The online trans movement is a poisonous cult.

Absolutely agree. We need to get gender identity ideology out of our schools or at least teach it for what it is a belief system based on sexist stereotypes.

Yes I often ponder on this, I'm a 90s girl and we had an excellent music and festival culture back then which kind of gelled things together, sometimes all you had to do was have the right band t-shirt on.

Things weren't perfect but being parts of groups like this spending so much time in real life, dodgy parties and night's out, it really helped some difficult teenage years for many of my friends. Definitely part of the answer is coming off the internet and just being with your mates and being yourself.

I also never see these groups out and about together any more.

An interesting and terrifying thread in equal measures. TambourineOfRepentance (fab name) pointed this out:
So much of their life is spent online and there's such a denigration of anything which isn't perceived as new or progressive that they don't seem to have any reference point to check it against.

So many of their reference points online are precisely the type of unhinged adults / groups that responsible adults / parents would normally steer them away from . We're allowing these people to step in and influence them and tragically, so many adults in education, the law, local government etc are so blinded by the "be kind" mantras that they fail to exercise any critical faculties and actually look at the harmful ideologies being sold to vulnerable teenagers.

Such an interesting and heartbreaking read. I do feel for the generation we have now, yes I was that isolated insecure girl, annoyed boys ignored me but baffled by male attention when it came, thinking it would give me validation, I became a goth partly because it meant I was the one isolating myself rather than everyone else, partly because modern culture didn’t really give me anything, at least the music was great. Back then there were a lot of tribes to choose and an unspoken feeling it would only be temporary. Music culture isn’t what it used to be, my DC listen to music from the 70’s and 80’s. I wish they could grow up with the freedoms of those times.

”Keep kids off the internet” is great advice from someone on the internet 😂 and can’t really be implemented without everyone coming off the internet, and I don’t think that is going to happen. But I think there should be more awareness of how the internet is a polarising place which has had a very defined effect on the world socially and politically over the last 10 years or more.

The genie is well and truly out of the bottle and is not going back. We need to find ways to manage it and to educate kids

A large part of the problem is that schools, politicians and other supposedly responsible adults are also encouraging this. They should be helping children to avoid being groomed online, but instead they're contributing to the grooming themselves.

Yes. This is the solution to many problems, IMO.

I completely agree, MrsAvocet. In the course of the lockdowns, two of DD's friends came out as non-binary...countless others are gender fluid in some way.

Covid created echo-chamber childhoods for many.

My 16 year old has several friends who sound very like Helena. At the risk of sounding like I'm blaming Covid for everything, I do wonder if the pandemic has exacerbated the situation for this particular age group. Aside from the additional anxieties and stresses it provoked, both generally and more specifically for the exam cohorts of the last few years I think social isolation has increased and spending a lot of time online has become legitimised. The loss of real life social opportunities and things like sports clubs etc being closed, plus the switch to online everything at the start of the pandemic must have had an impact.
"Keep your kids off the internet" just isn't practical for most people. Unless you are literally standing over your teenagers every time they use the internet and you never let them out of the house, I think its impossible to know everything they view. If you don't let them have devices, they will use someone else's. We were always pretty strict about no internet in the bedrooms, until the start of the pandemic when suddenly we had 2 teenagers homeschooling and 2 adults WFH in the same house. It became impossible to insist that everyone only used the PCs in the office and there was no way that I could be 100% certain that when they were online they were doing exactly what they said they were all the time.I think they were honest most of the time but I caught them gaming in what was supposedly a maths lesson on the odd occasion so I know they did mess around at times.
I don't know what the answer is, but banning internet access for teenagers isn't it. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle and is not going back. We need to find ways to manage it and to educate kids and yes, parents do have responsibilities in those areas - it concerns me deeply when I see very young children with basically unrestricted internet access. But it's far too simplistic to just say "don't let them use it" especially once they are secondary school age. I think any parent of teenagers who thinks they know what their children are doing 24/7 is deluding themselves. We need to be trying to equip them to deal with this world, not locking them away as that just doesn't work.

I'm not sure that it's immaturity that means teenage girls aren't feeling ready for adult sexuality. Adult sexuality according to the internet (porn, message boards, more porn, jokes in popular culture, onlyfans, porn) is terrifyingly aggressive and I don't imagine anybody would be ready for that at 14.

I remember I wasn't ready for sex at all until I was about 19/20 and trying to navigate relationships when I was 16 was terrible because I was convinced that everyone else in the world had already had sex and nobody would want to just hold hands and kiss, which was exactly what I wanted to do. I was so scared that boys wouldn't like me that I projected this false air of confidence and did things I wasn't really comfortable with just to show that I was willing. This was the first generation of everyone having access to internet porn and it was tame compared to today. I cannot imagine how intimidating the current porn soaked, domination obsessed, "kink-informed" idea of sex is to young girls. No wonder they are scared of it. That seems sensible to me, not immature at all!

I know I bang on evangelically about this, but I really recommend volunteering with the RDA (Riding for the Disabled) and wish I'd done it as a teenager. The riders and helpers are from all kinds of backgrounds, and as a lot of the assistance is physical there is no time to think about yourself, and you go home tired but in a good way.

We get a lot of shy, nervous teens (never been near a horse before) and I'm always impressed with how quickly they pick stuff up and how their confidence blooms. There are also jobs for everyone without being senior or experienced; just being on hand to go and fetch something can be massively useful.

And horses genuinely don't give a shit about race/class/sexuality etc so are true levellers.

I agree with what everyone else has said on this so far. In addition, it's sad to me that the patriarchal virgin/whore roles of women are only being challenged by these kids by either 'queering' and embracing the whore role or attempting to turn into a 'man'. It shows that these young women are taught that they should either serve men in any degrading ways they demand and with a smile on their faces, or else become a man themselves. These are the two options or else you're a vanilla, prude, virgin etc. Women still aren't allowed to have boundaries, to say no and have their own sexuality and desires

It confirms something I've had unformed in my head for a while, that for many transing teenage girls, the goal isn't to transition out of one sex into the other, it is to move out of the dreaded 'cishet' into 'trans'

I follow a transman called Aaron Terrell on Twitter and Aaron says the same. That girls aren’t wanting to “transition” to boys/men, they want to be trans.

I think Aaron is right, that being trans is cool and infinitely more accepted than being neurodivergent or same sec attracted.

One of the things this article has left me thinking is perhaps trying to encourage my daughter as she gets older, to be involved in multi-generational socially diverse clubs / interests / persuits. It seems that there was a feedback loop with this author, and I found it interesting that having a job where she heard other conversations and saw other viewpoints was something that helped bring her back around.

In my own feedback loop, Mumsnet seems to full of the tras women are women debate and I hadn't really heard much about FtM, so that was very insightful. It's totally totally understandable the way she depicts it

I read this in full last night. I have read before that Tumblr was its own world and that there was a point in time when things like pronouns and so on were happening but this article really brought it all out for me. It's really brave to write this and to open up your life in this way.

I also read yesterday that the government may go down the NZ route with incremental changes on the sale of tobacco so that children will never be old enough to buy it. I find that utter madness next to the harm that's being done online to children. Given what else they could be up to, I'd almost be pleased if the worst my DC did was smoke! It's a reasonably normal test of the boundaries, I always thought.

But being able to be accessed by anyone, any ideology, being sent breast binders in the post, being online for unlimited periods of time with god knows what that does to your normal healthy brain development...and it's tumbleweeds. Has been for decades now with successive governments. And what we are seeing now is the canaries in that coal mine. Still there's no action - unless it's to get Stonewalled and uncritically embrace it.

Feel for my daughter and the world she's going to grow up in. I hope it's something less sinister than ED / self harm/ trans.

Aren't we all going to be living our lives in the Metaverse? A 3d virtual reality world that is coming and will supposedly take over every aspect of our lives? Work, sport, education, entertainment, social interaction, travel. My head explodes just thinking about it. It's going to replace the Internet as we know it and we all know the good/bad sides of the online world. What I don't understand yet though is how will humanity reproduce and survive if we are all living in this 3d virtual reality? Take me back to the 1980's please!