I don’t think it’s really about wanting to be male, it’s more seeing transition as an escape route from
growing up to be a woman.
When my stepdaughter was crying about hating her body and wanting us to use male pronouns we were in the vestibule bit between the ladies/gents/accessible loos and I pointed at the door to the gents and said ‘Do you really think you should be using that one?’ and she said no, and I said ‘Good, because I don’t think so either and nor do I think you should go to a male prison should you ever be caught shoplifting or something.’
She’s in a massive muddle of mixed messages, I told her that people cannot change sex and she said ‘sex and gender aren’t the same’ so I said ‘gender isn’t real, it’s just sex stereotypes’ so she shouted I KNOW IT’S A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT’ (Good!) - ‘so how will using male pronouns make you more comfortable with your body?’
No answer.
It was actually a relief to see her burst all this into family life in such a dramatic way, because up until now it’s been a teenage-bubble thing, using a boys name to play computer games or getting her mates to call her he/him and wearing a knitted beanie 24/7). It was good to see some good old fashioned door slamming teen angst.
We were out with a group, inc several of my female friends between 30-50 so I was able to say stuff like, look at all these women, do you think any of them give a stuff about leg shaving or sitting with their knees together or any other supposedly socially enforced nonsense? As well as point out that girls that felt the way she does in my era where anorexics, and in her big brother’s era they were all cutting themselves.
She’s complicated, nerdy, socially anxious, bright and hates the sexual attention that her developing figure attracts. Puberty is rough for her, in the way it is for so many girls. It’s rough for boys in a completely different way, and we were able to talk about that too.
Her dad spent his teenage years fighting strangers in pubs and hanging around Hells Angels, so he’s been trying to communicate how the grass isn’t greener, it’s just different.
The problem is, the ‘boy’ she imagine herself to be is another social construct, it’s a uwu trans boy in a bow tie, not an actual male. Loads of detransitioners are reporting that it was when they started passing for male that they changed their minds, they found they couldn’t make friends with girls so easily and women were crossing the street to avoid having them walk behind them. Yet they were still themselves scared of men, or scared of having their trans status discovered. They weren’t any happier, they had traded one kind of social anxiety for another.
I’ve started collecting meaningful and profound tweets from detransitioners. I’m not showing them to DsD yet, she’s only 13, but I’m building a little resource in preparation.
Here’s one from the marvellous ‘Satan Herself’