Katelyn Burns: The internet made trans people visible. It also left them more vulnerable.

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

www.vox.com/platform/amp/identities/2019/12/27/21028342/trans-visibility-backlash-internet-2010

An interesting read. Some excerpts below. I found it really interesting how this writer cites the internet as the reason for them transitioning, and also for the organising and pushing for trans rights etc.

The story of how we got to a point where centuries-old conceptions of gender are now being regularly challenged in popular culture begins and ends with the thing that we love to hate: the internet.

While the early internet of the 2000s established a way for trans people to connect with each other quickly and over long distances, the second wave of web progress — social media and YouTube — has helped trans people leverage visibility into substantial policy gains.

In the background of all these high-profile transitions, a decade and a half of digital organizing had already been taking place, positioning the trans community for its moment in the sun. Since the trans community is relatively small, roughly only 0.6 percent of adults in the US, traditional local organizing was next to impossible outside of large cities like New York or San Francisco. For trans people, the internet became a critical revolutionary tool.

According to Roberts, the early internet not only helped trans people organize politically, but also gave trans people access to transition resources and language to describe their gender identity on a massive scale. Starting with the rise of blogs in the early 2000s, trans people created internet spaces and conversations for their own survival.

For me, it was a steady mix of YouTube, Reddit, and other internet forums that eased my transition-related anxiety. One result of anti-trans propaganda is that, even for trans people, it’s hard to trust that treatments like surgery or hormones will produce the results you want. Seeing before and after photos on transition timelines of other trans people helped me conceptualize how hormone replacement therapy would work on my own body and appearance, and I eventually took the plunge.

I would agree with the assessment in the thread title, though possibly for different reasons to Burns.

But "century's old concepts of gender" aren't being challenged by the trans movement, they are being reinforced.

Indeed small blanket - it reinforces girl = pink sparkles and dolls. It’s so completely regressive!

You should read this, which was published in 2000 and predicts ROGD: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/

"Why do certain psychopathologies arise, seemingly out of nowhere, in certain societies and during certain historical periods, and then disappear just as suddenly? Why did young men in late-nineteenth-century France begin lapsing into a fugue state, wandering the continent with no memory of their past, coming to themselves months later in Moscow or Algiers with no idea how they got there? What was it about America in the 1970s and 1980s that made it possible for thousands of Americans and their therapists to come to believe that two, ten, even dozens of personalities could be living in the same head? One does not have to imagine a cunning cult leader to envision alarming numbers of desperate people asking to have their limbs removed. One has only to imagine the right set of historical and cultural conditions."

Transition-related anxiety ought not to be erased - that anxiety is doing its job of slowing you down, assessing risk, waiting, trying other ways of managing GD, avoiding uneccessary medications and surgeries. It's telling you something important.

Even for those whose GD is persistent over a long period, and utterly intractable, the extent to which anxiety over taking major and often irreversible steps can be erased is questionable. Denied, yes. Better accepted and worked through with an ethical professional.

People in this situation need therapeutic support, not bloody Reddit and YouTube.

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/
"Why do certain psychopathologies arise, seemingly out of nowhere, ... and then disappear just as suddenly? Why did young men in late-nineteenth-century France begin lapsing into a fugue state, wandering the continent with no memory of their past? ... What was it about America in the 1970s and 1980s that made it possible for thousands of Americans and their therapists to come to believe that two, ten, even dozens of personalities could be living in the same head?"

Confessions, that is fascinating. It's exactly what's happening now. If only it would vanish just as suddenly.

Confessions Fascinating.
Also worth reading is this article about Russell Reid, who is quoted in the article you linked.

www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/may/25/health.society

"Patient B first saw Dr Reid in January 1988 following a series of traumatic events including the breakdown of her two marriages, the death of her mother and redundancy.

The male to female transsexual told the GMC that the psychiatrist never addressed these issues, nor obtained a second opinion."

"Patient C, a convicted paedophile, first saw Dr Reid in 1993. He told the inquiry he had never cross-dressed before meeting Dr Reid, and had only wanted to become a woman in order to win back his ex-boyfriend."

"Patient D, who suffers from manic depression, told the GMC that Dr Reid failed to recognise that she had manic depression when he treated her.

She became wrongly convinced she needed a sex change after watching a TV documentary. The GMC heard that she eventually became so ill that she thought she needed a sex change in order to fulfil her delusion that she was Jesus."

Hacsi Horvath (a mtf transsexual who detransitioned after 13 years of "masquerading as a woman") has written about the perceived feasibility of "sex change".

"People with GD have cultivated an idealized vision of themselves as the opposite sex. At a critical point of rumination, after the patient has sufficiently disparaged his or her actual life and idealized life as the opposite sex, he or she realizes that body parts of the opposite sex may be obtained through the services of doctors (Raymond 1979, Billings 1982). Actually transforming into the opposite sex starts to seem feasible. The self-conception “splits” in two, and idealization becomes identity. Having negated any value in their actual male or female presence in the world, and now feeling themselves to actually be the self-generated persona, patients perseveratively ask themselves, “what’s stopping me?” “Feasibility” seems to trigger the split. Here begins the acute phase of GD."

4thwavenow.com/tag/hacsi-horvath/

Thanks @ThePurported that is such an interesting update.

One thing that struck me while reading it is that the Guardian would now never in a million years publish anything about de-transitioners.

Reading anything written about trans stuff before about 2015 is truly enlightening in how much stuff is now being effectively covered up/not published for fear of causing "offence".

Forgot to add - it's not really surprising that a doctor who supports unnecessary amputations ended up being found guilty of serious misconduct really.

What should be of concern to us all is that he "was a member of an expert committee set up by the Royal College of Psychiatrists to draw up new UK care guidelines on the treatment of Gender identity disorder. He stepped down as a member of the group in the wake of the GMC inquiry."

Presumably he therefore was partially responsible for the GRA in its current form.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Reid