There are a few things about this post that misrepresent history as well as what is happening currently.
Firstly, I suspect that this poster has realised by now that the 'trans' umbrella is very large and covers many different interest groups. There 'was' trans people in the 60s. They were the very vast majority male people who seemed to fit the autogynephile profile. There was some transvestites who were not declaring they were 'women' but were very much aware they could not be 'women'. There were also transexuals. In the 60s, no one was being told that they had miraculously changed sex.
And some male doctors (from my reading) told some male people that they should access female single sex spaces.... without ever checking with female people before advising this. Because they had no care about female people's needs at all. They, as male people, gave away spaces needed for female people to those male people they considered should just have access. But that is a different issue.
This thought is regressive. Completely regressive:
"The sex you're born into will likely dictate your social groups and the hobbies youre allowed to indulge in, so its understandable that kids who dont really gel with that might start thinking about alternatives. And wishing they could look different. Dress different. Be treated different. Have different friends."
This should never have been something that was ever considered to be any validation of someone 'being in the wrong body'. How absolutely fucked up is that?
"Even before medical options were available, there were men who dressed like women and women who dressed like men!"
"And they did it for no reason other than in made them happy."
And female and male people transition often for very different motivations. And this will have always have been the case. 'making them happy' is an oversimplification and it is frankly irrelevant. No female person should be harmed in any way just because a male person wants 'to be happy'. So, either this poster is uninformed or is trying to make some irrelevant point. Maybe they are saying that female people should just suck up any harm caused by this group of male people .... to keep those male people happy.. And that would also be fucked up.
However, this is concerning and also shows a lack of depth of understanding the current cohort of children seeking to transition.
"kids still end up trans without any external imput. Its clearly internal."
There is a growing bank of evidence to show that actually there is plenty of external input that is harming children. It even causes diagnosis and therapy to be incredibly difficult. We have heard clinician testimony about those 'external' pressures and how parents and other people have suggested and in some cases, transitioned very young children. Susie Green is a very well known example. There are many that can be found on tik Tok or in various reports where parents have transitioned their very young children.
And not only that, but there are also clinicians out there who have been raising the alarms that children are arriving at the clinics after being very obviously coached by either parents, peers or other overly-invested adults and 'support groups.'
Here is one paper which has tried to raise the alarm.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26344041211010777
Published April 22, 2021
Kasia Kozlowska, Georgia McClure et al
Australian children and adolescents with gender dysphoria: Clinical presentations and challenges experienced by a multidisciplinary team and gender service
Part of the conclusion
Our findings indicate that engagement with families, a trauma-informed model of mental health care, and ongoing discourse pertaining to the effects of unresolved trauma and loss need to be part of all gender dysphoria clinics and the services with which they collaborate. Because of their impact on subjective well-being and the development of the self, specific loss and trauma events present crucial opportunities for both long-term psychotherapy and more immediate, targeted treatments. The move to a more comprehensive, holistic model of care—one that takes into account the individual’s developmental history and the experiences that make up that history—has also been echoed in the work of other clinician-researchers (D’Angelo, 2020a; Entwistle, 2019; Giovanardi et al., 2018; Kozlowska et al., 2021; Williamson, 2019).
Our study found that the children and families who came to the clinic had clear, preformed expectations: most often, children and families wanted a diagnosis of gender dysphoria to be provided or confirmed, together with referral to endocrinology services to pursue medical treatment of gender dysphoria. Parents (vs. children) also largely came with the same expectations, though they were more likely to be interested in incorporating holistic (biopsychosocial) elements, including treatment of mental health comorbidities, family support/therapy, and long-term psychotherapy for the child. It was our impression that these expectations had been shaped by the dominant sociopolitical discourse—the gender affirmative model. It will be interesting to track the expectations of children and families in the years to come as sociopolitical discourses become more varied and diverse and as the voices are heard of both those who have done well and those who not done well via the medical pathway.
Our study also found that despite the high rates of family conflict, relationship breakdowns, parental mental illness, and maltreatment (see Table 3)—and our own clinical perspective that both individual and family work were indicated for the majority of families—few families rated themselves as being in a clinically severe range on self-report (SCORE-15). Coupled with the dominant sociopolitical discourse—the gender affirmative model that prioritizes the medical treatment pathway—it is not surprising that the large majority of children and families were not motivated to engage in or to remain engaged in ongoing therapy. These data bring three important phenomena into focus. First, when children and families were given the space and structure to tell the child’s developmental story—nested in the story of the family—they were able to identify and provide a detailed narrative of the key issues that had contributed to the child’s presentation and distress. Without this space and structure, the issues remain undeclared and unaddressed. Second, some families—but also some clinicians—function within a non-holistic (non-biopsychosocial) framework where the child’s developmental experiences are disconnected from their clinical presentation. This non-holistic framework is likely to promote a healthcare delivery model that dehumanizes the child (by not examining the child’s and family’s lived experience) and that promotes medical solutions (correcting the identity/body mismatch) for a problem that is much more complex. Third, as noted earlier, our experience suggests that, insofar as the gender affirmative model is taken as equivalent to medical intervention, clinicians (including ourselves) who work in gender services are coming under increasing pressure to put aside their own holistic (biopsychosocial) model of care, and to compromise their own ethical standards, by engaging in a tick-the-box treatment process. Such an approach does not adequately address a broad range of psychological, family, and social issues and puts patients at risk of adverse future outcomes and clinicians at risk of future legal action.
Please stop spreading misrepresentation and what amounts to misinformation.