Just a question re transgender

[drasticdonkey]

I'm part of a following online (think sci-fi) and I've noticed that this group of people is increasingly made of trans people/gender fluid/queer people etc.

Not only that, but as I've gotten to know the group more/become closer to people I've noticed the following:

• The prevalence of mental health issues in this group
• the prevalence of adhd/autism in this group
• many of them have POTS, or chronic pain conditions or ehlers Danlos.
• the clothing and hair is also very similar, almost like a uniform
• they enjoy certain sci fi shows/certain characters and really become fixated on every aspect of it
• fights often erupt as people get easily offended over very silly things and almost compete to be the "worst off or have the worst mental health" if that makes sense

I suppose my question and thoughts turned to "is any of this connected?!". Has any science/research properly investigated these links? Aibu to wonder if all these things are connected - in particular the medical aspects?

I'm not aiming to offend on this thread but really I'm just curious re the genetic aspect

I've been involved with patient feedback services, regular face to face support groups for long covid, long covid charity work as well as multiple different areas.

While different labels maybe attractive to personality types the assumption that conditions are just gained like a badge of honour is absolute nonsense and no I am not self diagnosed I have spent years going through tests, and formally diagnosed as I also had a positive covid test.

People with long term health conditions which are vastly under researched and vastly misunderstood have a tough enough time of it without a "discussion point" from a bloody Sci fi group observation! It makes a complete mockery of very real people with very real conditions by saying oh yes they all seem to have it. It makes those of us living these god damn awful conditions daily seem like we have somehow gone you know what I fancy this week.....constant fatigue, headaches, eye pain and the inability to care fully for my children solo. It's insulting.

You have described my daughter and her group of friends.

I'm a firm believer ASD and gender confusion are a team.

There are many teenagers who you have described in my daughters SN school, in comparison to my nieces and friends children who attend busy mainstream schools.

My personal belief is, DD has always felt out of place, a misfit, she is not trans, she went through the pronoun phase, thankfully it passed.

Placemarking until I can come back, because it's so interesting!

Where did I suggest you personally were self diagnosed? @Scottishskifun If you look at my comment, I didn't say anything at all about you because obviously I don't know anything about your own situation. I wouldn't jump to assuming someone on here was in the category I'm describing as demographically speaking, that is actually quite unlikely! But it doesn't mean that demographic doesn't exist. I'm sorry you've taken personal offence but this demographic is a real thing and the phenomenon being discussed is affecting genuine patients. If that's you, then your care is likely also being affected even if you're not aware that it is.

Many of the patients being negatively affected, like me, have long term conditions dating back many, many years (long before Covid), and these conditions predate the social media phenomenon, predate "sickfluencing", and predate the current issue of the very same conditions becoming fashionable. So we can directly compare our experiences of care now vs care in the past.

Casing point no these illnesses are not made up just because you hadn't heard of auto-immune conditions doesn't mean they haven't existed for a long time with the exception of long covid as that's been around since covid funny enough and one of the reasons it was accepted was due to the high prevalence.

Fibromyalgia first described in the 19th century, ME 1940s, POTs first recorded in medical literature 1873 etc. MCAS is more understood from 2010 but mast cells were discovered in the 19th century.

What has increased is prevalence of number of people with the conditions especially linked to covid infection. Approx 60% of long covid sufferers also have been diagnosed with POTS it is not possible to fake a POTS test it's based on very specific criteria, blood pressure and heart rate hence tachycardia in the T.....

They are becoming more heard of because levels of sufferers is increasing.

@Scottishskifun Actually it is entirely possible to fake a POTS test, and people talk about how to game their result in chronic illness groups!

@verysmellyjelly you stated the following "may mean that a lot of people diagnosed with them don't necessarily have "true and honest" diagnoses (accurate, thoroughly validated and confirmed, not self diagnosed or "cheated" on a clinical test, not bought from a corrupt private doctor)."

Would love to know how someone fakes a POTs test....its very specific and mostly involves either a tilt test or test monitoring blood pressure and heart rate over a period of time.
There is no long covid test developed currently same with fibromyalgia it is diagnosed via ruling out other conditions and multiple clinicians. My blood work has always come back "clear" with the exception of low vit D and B12 levels also common in long covid suffers despite taking both as supplements.

Buying a diagnosis in the UK?! the private immune consultants in the UK have very long wait lists and are very respected in their fields.

Yes there are people who self diagnose without proper medical input but thats not limited to autoimmune conditions. I had a friend who would tell me her headaches were migraines....as a migraine suffer since a child (and yes medically diagnosed by neurologists as I was young for them to start so they originally thought I had something else) could tell no it was just a headache and surprisingly when she had a actual migraine she thought she was having a stroke!

The ME community spent years fighting this sort of language that it was a mental health condition etc.
As I said the language you use minimises people's actual conditions.

How do you fake a POTs test please tell?!
I was hooked up to a heart monitor, a BP monitor and was monitored through out. Not sure how someone can get their resting heart rate to exceed 120 bpm just by wanting to fake a test!

You can fake passing out but your BP would give you away

I'm not going to instruct people on how to fake a test result. It's commonly understood among the groups of people who discuss factitious illness and malingering online that you don't disclose the exact details of how to falsify or distort tests. But POTS is one of the easiest diagnoses to fake, which is partly why, unfortunately, it is so disregarded by medics.

I'm not sure why your responses are so hostile. I am myself hugely negatively affected by people malingering and/or faking illness, so of course it's frustrating for me, but I'm not accusing you personally in any way at all. As I said, the Mumsnet demographic is unlikely to do this. I have very longstanding diagnoses of some of these conditions myself so you are wasting your time lecturing me about them. I'm very far from minimising; I'm saying that the faking and malingering of real illnesses affects those who do genuinely have them.

The behaviours of the illness faking and "sickfluencer" demographic have had direct, huge negative impact on my own healthcare so you'll have to forgive me for seeming annoyed by them. It doesn't mean I have any animus against anyone with these diagnoses who is on this thread. I find it highly unlikely that people who are faking are on Mumsnet, for the most part.

It's not so strange that a lot of similar people are attracted to SC-FI or fantasy Op, both areas attract a lot of fan fiction by people who'd really like a different life and/or secret powers that would make them different but in a good way.

Charlize43, yes indeed, Satanism! When a Presbyterian minister's academic hood is assumed by a monomaniacal (and ill-informed) social worker to be Satanic ritual garb, a badly-made balsa aeroplane is a crooked cross, and Neptune from Holst's Planets Suite is ritual Satanic music. I'm not sure how the videotape of an episode of Blackadder was thought to be Satanic, nor the detective book by Ngaio Marsh, but you can find evidence of Satanism anywhere if you have the right bee in your bonnet.

Speaking of fads, Liz Taylor should never have worn hot pants!

But I think it might be that the reason we didn't have so many alphabet diseases in the seventies wasn't that the diseases themselves didn't exist, it was that they were spoken of by name rather than a bunch of initials. MS was Multiple Sclerosis, for instance.

That’s not good at all. What services were these?

I think your post has been misinterpreted by several posters on this thread.

Yes, I had misunderstood

Yes, sci-fi has always been thoughtful. More than it is now in many ways, the growth of nerd culture hasn't really led to better stuff, just more junk.

But it has absolutely not always been dominated by people who seem to want to make fictional stories the basis of their identity.

I think it reflects a loss of systems of meaning in society.

The people are looking for systems of meaning to animate their lives. Pop culture doesn't offer it, their education didn't offer it, and they have no religion. They don't really know enough to be philosophical Marxists or existentialists or even stoics.

So to replace the ethical parts of religion they adopt social justice culture, and for the poetic part, they become fans Star Wars or Dr Who or whatever.

I doubt that many of the SF writers of the1940s and1950s such as Clifford D Simak or Isaac Asimov or H Beam Piper or Brian Aldiss or Robert Heinlein or Roger Zelazny or Cyril Kornbluth or Larry Niven or Fritz Leiber made the mistake of writing a pot of message rather than a good story. In fact Heinlein actively advised against it as being bad for sales; most of them were in it to make a living rather than ideological reasons, after all, apart from Larry Niven who had shedloads of dosh and wrote for fun. (An exception would be L Ron Hubbard, but even he didn't take his new religion seriously at first, just as a something he had made a bet about. And as a way to make money...)

The trouble is with Sci fi ( and I'm a fan- fits, doesn't it, with my teen years?) Is that you CAN do anything or be anything. Lots of Iain Banks' characters switch sexes, but that's because of futuristic science- magic that I'm not even going to begin to understand, because that would be like trying to make a chair do magic stuff because I've read Blyton's Wishing Chair. And in those books, it's just because they can, rather than because they feel they're in the wrong body.

Wait, are you saying you used a COVID test to diagnose long COVID?

I wouldn't assume that they aren't here.
I think it's important to understand that quite a few people like this believe their own story, that explains a lot of the behaviour.

To be honest, I think the medical profession make most of them up and we would be better without them.

No and I didn't diagnose myself I was diagnosed by 2 different Drs which was followed up with a consultant led long covid clinic where they also discovered POTs.

I had a positive PCR test when I caught covid was extremely unwell and never fully recovered. The positive test just made it more straightforward for Dr's to say long covid after 6 months of ongoing symptoms and lots of tests. Took me 3 years to see the consultant led long covid clinic with more tests.
4 years in and had to learn to manage it like many other people with hidden long term conditions do everyday.

EDS groups are full of these people who have often self diagnosed EDS! Often autistic, ND, trans, queer, nerdy, alternative types. These tend to be the ones who have self diagnosed

Ah yes.... "some other fatigue causing illness or chronic pain illness that isn't yet diagnosed and is a mystery"

Also known as Lazyitis. Family member has it which means she doesn't get up until 2pm, 3pm, 4pm so she couldn't possibly get a job and she's soooo tired. Forgetting that she stays up online until 4 in the morning.

And before anyone comes at me, I know it's common for people with ASD to have alternative sleep patterns. I'm autistic myself and had years as a child and teenager where I would barely sleep, or sleep all day and stay away all night. But I had to force myself out of it.