[quote Xiaoxiong]@toocold54 it's difficult to find a book that isn't a memoir of one person's trans experience, which, while often very sad, are by definition personal and anecdotal. To try to educate myself on both sides of this issue I read quite a few. Much more useful to challenge myself and my own views were Unbound by Arlene Stein and Transgender History by Susan Stryker.
I started Juno Dawson's book The Gender Games but couldn't finish it and it shared the problems of many of the memoirs, being mainly anecdotal and dare I say, navel gazing and rather wrapped up in their own experience with no exploration of any impact the person's triumphant transition may have on the people and communities around them.
I felt the need to read all these when desperately trying to understand what was going on and to give the other side of the argument a fair hearing. I would recommend the Stein and Stryker books to anyone on here, as it's important to educate ourselves fully and keep an open mind.
Reading these books certainly convinced me that on balance, I find gender critical arguments are more convincing and coherent. But the miseries of the memoirs also convinced me that we need to massively increase mental health provision, reduce the time teenagers spend online thinking about this stuff, accept LGB people, especially kids, unconditionally and eradicate homophobia, and try to widen our bandwidth of what it means to be a man or a woman without permanently medicalising children or causing a permanent loss of function through surgery on healthy bodies. [/quote]
I find gender critical arguments are more convincing and coherent. But the miseries of the memoirs also convinced me that we need to massively increase mental health provision, reduce the time teenagers spend online thinking about this stuff, accept LGB people, especially kids, unconditionally and eradicate homophobia, and try to widen our bandwidth of what it means to be a man or a woman without permanently medicalising children or causing a permanent loss of function through surgery on healthy bodies.
So much this.