Teenage girls identifying as boys

[LayAllYourLoveOnMe]

Morning everyone I’m still struggling to articulate my own thoughts on this. When I do discuss the issue with friends in real life I feel like I’m parroting things that have been said on this forum

I’ll be grateful for (more) help getting my thoughts in order

I think the starting point is that being born a girl brings unique challenges especially as your body grows and changes in the teenage years. boys and men respond to that (helped by other females) and use a variety of techniques to put you and keep you in your place.

The grey area for me – the area I’m struggling with – is that I can see that a teenage girl who identifies as a boy may well have positive even logical aspirations and aims. The girls who would’ve been tomboys or androgynous in previous eras are likely to come from the same subset of young women who identify as trans today .

I think the essence of objections to this in this forum are that these young women are being mis-sold a solution by people whose motives range from well-intentioned to really dark. What distinguishes us from previous generations of concerned older women? After all this is a story as old as time .

I can see two potential distinguishing features. firstly, all these changes come ultimately from changes in plastic surgery technology and social media technology. Both of these operate to mask the extreme nature of the hormonal and surgical interventions that are on offer. Yet they are extreme and there is a real risk to health. Secondly those institutions that in previous generations would’ve naturally taken on the guardianship/conservative role are failing to do so and indeed often doing the opposite. This leaves the older women as the only people taking the long view and perhaps that is why we are targeted for attack.

Any thought welcome.

When I first started hearing about this stuff, my first thought was, "Haven't we already won this battle?" It is shocking how far back we have gone.

I think what I'm getting from this is that the impulse behind the girls' actions is as old as time - it's a response to sexism that becomes urgent at puberty.

What's also as old as time (or at least since the teenager was invented) is the desire to find a new tribe and to identify strongly with it.

And again what's as old as the hills is the concerned response of older women with life experience and the girl's tendency not to listen to that.

For me, this is a solid base for thinking about the issues affecting teenage girls.

"Identifying as trans" is however a different form of rebellion today to what it was ten years ago, twenty years ago and thirty years ago it didn't exist. So that's moving target and hard to debate without muddle.

also I don't think we can help troubled young women by accusing them of moulding themselves to a stereotype (Even though that's where we think they are at risk of ending up). Their urge to do this is going to come from a variety of very nuanced positive and negative places. And things are different to five years ago or ten years ago.

Back in the 70’s, there were (of course) some people who were trans. Jan Morris comes to mind, for example.
But it wasn’t immediately assumed that everyone who didn’t fit sexist stereotypes was therefore ALSO trans, and it wasn’t a fashionable thing for vulnerable kids to latch onto or be encouraged into.
It was simply one possibility among many - teenagers could explore other options or simply be themselves in all their lovely diversity. Many of my male contemporaries had shoulder length hair and were gentle hippy types, many girls had cropped hair and wore trousers, there were a few gay teens at school and nobody tried to tell them they were in the wrong bodies!
It was a very different social environment, with no internet, no violent porn freely available, and the fashion at the time was to be nonconformist rather than following a trend like sheep. I find the modern unquestioning assumption that even young children are actually transgender quite shocking- especially when they are encouraged to hide it from parents and seek damaging medical treatments such as binding, puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones and mutilating surgery.

I think we are donning rose-coloured spectacles here.

In my Catholic school in the 1980s it was

• very difficult not to fit with the sexist stereotypes of the time
• nice to have shorter hair but it was all puffed up like Princess Di's.
• closet-time if you were gay: I distinctly remember being bullied "Are you a lezza?"
• the long-haired boys... well....yes.... I wasn't accepted by them though... too bloody clever by half.

I simply don't recognise the fashion being to be nonconformist. Of course we thought things we did were nonconformist! And of course we were just being punks or goths or whatever. We just found a different tribe, that's all. Think about The Breakfast Club - wow, you could be a princess and a jock! But that language came from the very strength of those stereotypes.

Plus you could be a slag, or easy, etc etc etc. Or uptight, or a school-marm..... there were then, as now, an almost infinite number of ways to be wrong as a young woman.

Admittedly, Babdoc, one problem we did NOT have was being told that our feeling that our bodies were wrong arose from us literally being in someone else's body - I grant you that :)