Transitioning or therapy as the treatment for gender dysphoria

And left pregnant as a result ….
years ago now

Sorry you were raped? My god, I imagine that would very quickly change your mind

Nothing happened quickly but that’s the short version

I didn’t ever look like a boy but I had interests and skills that were considered to be boyish - like trains for example. I wanted to do things that boys were encouraged to do - like rugby and woodwork/ which girls were discouraged. At 6th form I was the only girl in the physics class.

so you think “there is something wrong with me” and go down that rabbit hole

and then at some point you think “it’s not me that’s wrong, it’s other people “

internal or external

Sorry I don’t understand?

you were being bullied for looking / behaving like a boy so thought you were a boy.
and then you stopped thinking that after you were raped? I am so so sorry if that is the case

rape? Accepting the inevitability of being female
recognising it wasn’t me that was wrong - just other people who were wrong / bad - growing up

What were the “main drivers” that made you stop going down this path @backformoreofthesame ?

What's wrong with calling trans-identified males 'women' or 'she'?

Two things. First, calling male people "women" or "she" confuses and misleads other people. It misleads people when a male person is called a "woman" or "she" in a newspaper article, like the Scottish man who put some dodgy substance on a trans-rights sticker and was arrested and was initially reported to the public in the press as a woman because the Scottish police told reporters they had arrested a woman when they knew they had arrested a trans-identified male

Second, do you know the story of the Little Mermaid - the original Hans Christian Andersen fairy story, not the Disney film? In the original story, part of the price that the mermaid pays the witch for taking away her tail and giving her feet is that every time she takes a step it feels like walking on knives.

If you have autism and need to say what you see or know; if you have a lifetime of memories with someone as their birth sex; if you are the relative of someone you love who is wilfully harming themselves; if you are an ex-wife or child of a man living out a sexual fetish; then calling him "a woman" or "she" feels like stepping on a sharp knife. Every time.

I do know people who don't admit to hurt, people who even "buy in" to their relative's story and get very insistent that everyone else in the family has to join in too. You may have noticed this already when you talk about your DSis. You may force yourselves to use wrong-sex pronouns, like the little mermaid forced herself to walk. But doesn't it hurt?

There was very strong stereotyping of children's toys in the past - have a look at any ad for a Hornby toy train set from the 1950s, and it will have a little boy in short trousers with a Fair Isle pullover and a dad with a pipe clenched in his teeth - guaranteed!

Toys'r'Us etc had very distinct separate aisles of Boys Toys and Girls Toys [yes, minus the apostrophes]. The Argos catalogue rigidly divided boys' and girls' toys into different sections.
[The last Argos catalogue I saw had removed the labels 'boys' and 'girls' , but the girls' toys all had pastel colours, and the boys' toys all had dark colours! flames! exclamation marks! - stereotyping is subtle....]

In the early 1990s I actually saw a woman in a shop tap/smack a little girl's hand away from a toy car saying 'NO, that's for boys!'

There was, as posters have pointed out, a period around the 80s when the challenge to gender stereotyping of children had some effect - kids with similar haircuts, similar clothes with dinosaurs on them, similar Kicker-style boots.. a brief period when kids could just be kids.

What we are seeing now is the result of a huge backlash against that - pink, glitter, fairies, princesses, butterflies, came back with a bang to reassert the girliness of girlygirls, and the boys will be boys-ness of real boys.

The Disney Princess franchise - see? commercialisation - was relentless in the mid2010s, there's even a 'National Princess Week' which was started in 2012.

The reinforcement of gender stereotypes which is evident to anybody who grew up in the 70s or 80s didn't just happen accidentally, it was a backlash against the limited advances that feminism had made.

The return of gender stereotypes has been seized on by the trans movement - if you're a boy and you like glitter and princesses, maybe you're not a real boy and have you thought about transitioning to being a girl instead? - and the tradwives movement.
All rocket-fuelled by social media of course.

Don’t forget the impact of porn, especially sissy porn. Porn is not harmless fun.

The typical gender-critical view is that reported gender dysphoria may be genuine distress, but it doesn't mean anyone can change sex. You can't change biological sex, and sex matters for things like privacy and dignity.

I'm also sceptical of the idea of an "internal gender identity", which is often built into the definition of gender dysphoria. To me, that's an unfalsifiable and unhelpful ideological concept.

An analogy: I could be distressed about my height and want to be taller, even have surgery. But I don't have "height dysphoria" or an internal "height identity" that doesn't match my genetics.

There are many reasons someone might be distressed about their sex — including stereotypes, body image, sexual assault or sexuality-related harassment. Some may also want to present as the opposite sex and be distressed that they can't.

So I'm wary of framing all of this as a mismatch between "gender identity" and "assigned sex", because that can turn a source of distress into an apparently fixed identity with an obvious solution: transition. That may help some people, but it can also come with costs.

I wonder if there is any contribution also from cultures where sex is more strictly boundaried and segregated in terms of who does what, that has also increased hugely over the last 40 years.

Yes good point.

Hi @FairHippopotama , I'm sorry to hear that about your DSis. To be honest it doesn't matter what we say here, nothing is going to convince her. For what it's worth you're not the only poster here with trans-identified relatives, quite a few of us come here for a space where we can discuss ideas and feelings that we can't express openly in the family.

I do hope she's not crushing her breasts, or doing cross-sex hormones, or planning surgery. The outcomes of medical transition for women are even worse than they are for men.

Like I say, I used to believe that there were some people who were better off as a result of medical transition. I don't any more. It's a shite situation when someone we love is heading for the edge and there's nothing we can do.

(edited for a clearer word)

It should be banned worldwide!

I was going to put that in my post.

A truly horrific outcome

The pink/blue thing seemed to really get going around the 2000s. I remember liking ELC because their toys were generally much more androgenous in primary colours. It was frustrating when they were bought up by mothercare and their USPs was thrown out of the window.

Including babies!

Exactly. A world in which everything can be bought.

I rather agree
ans also the capitalist element to proscribing lifelong “treatment “

Nothing more complex than ‘marketing’ really.

Having gendered clothes/toys helps sell more stuff.

In the 70s, most people couldn’t afford to be fussy about what was for girls/for boys. There were a lot fewer toys overall. Clothes needed to be handed down, so neutrals were preferable.

I know it’s a cliche to say this, but late stage capitalism is behind a lot of this.

Historically, girls and boys were often significantly more likely to play with similar or identical things than they did in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The aggressive, hyper segregated "pink vs. blue" toy aisles we recognise today are a modern retail phenomenon.

I too grew up in the 70s and Ive been amazed at this change, I dont understand where its come from?

100% agree with all of this.

The pink and blue aisles of clothes and toys didn’t exist when I was a child in the early 80s. There were just toys. There were girls’ and boys’ clothes but not the extreme pink princess vs blue tractors we see these days. Photos from the time show my friends of both sexes wearing orange, brown, green, red… a whole range of colours and hardly any slogans. The haircuts were interesting too; pudding bowls, pageboys, ‘Lady Diana’ and all sorts- most of them terrible, especially when they were done at home by mum, but a lot of it was pretty androgynous.

When we were buying DS’s uniform to start reception, he chose the cardigan instead of the sweatshirt, but by the end of the first week had announced he no longer wanted to wear the cardigan because they’re ’for girls’. This was not stipulated in the uniform rules- any child could wear a jumper or a cardigan. The same thing happened with the school choir which he wanted to join but then didn’t because it only had girls in it. I obviously tried to encourage him to follow his own preferences regardless, but at 4 years old, he understandably didn’t feel able to be the odd one out.

I'd like to hope that there's some space in the school history curriculum for pictures of pit brow lassies, Amelia Bloomer, women from the last century and bit wearing trousers for sports, factory work and leisure, and since WW2 as normal female fashion. Even if just pinned up on the school display boards, it would put that nonsense back in its box.

Here's a Dutch one, from more than 70 years ago.

It happened to my DD’s. In London.

girls can’t have short hair. By adults and children alike. Boys can’t dance- school set up a dance club and not one boy signed up. Several expressed interest, but the parents would not sign the permission slips because it’s a girls activity.

think about how many boys you see in your DD’s ballet classes. How many girls you see playing football. Think about how many primary age girls you see with short hair.

my DD’s have actually been asked when buying a blue version of something in a shop if they know there’s a girls one/pink one in the next aisle, and the blue is the boys one. A shop assistant once steered dd away from the pirate watches and redirected her to the pink ones, without even asking what she liked. Just “oh the girls watches are over here”.

the stereotypes persist. You only need to read thread here- posters adamant that girls “naturally” like pink and crafting, and boys are like labradors, need food and exercise. Mums having gender preference because they visualise themselves shopping and going for pamper days with their girls, doing their hair and buying pretty outfits. Not wanting boys because they don’t want to be stood in the cold every weekend watching football.

it’s a massive issue IMO and I think we’re going backwards from when I was a child in the 70’s.