@FlyingOink
I experienced being hit on by men and women regularly. I still do.
You might pass 100% but you are in your late thirties, early forties and this is not the case for most women, regardless of how varied their social lives might be.
Certainly not getting "hit on" by both men and women. Where are you getting "hit on" by women, it is unlikely to be in Iceland. Do you spend a lot of time in clubs and pubs? Women rarely approach men to "hit on" them, lesbian and bisexual women are even less likely to approach a random woman or transwoman.
I'm glad you assumed I was posting in good faith, but again I have to say your posts sound like fantasy. You are humblebragging about your perceived attractiveness and linking it to being a victim of harassment and a potential victim of sexual abuse. That reads to me like some porny fanfic. Also you've derailed this thread and you aren't contributing to the topic of blockers in girls. I get that you are in favour, and that you credit them with your ability to live entirely in stealth mode, but there are numerous questions you've avoided and you seem to keep coming back to yourself, your looks, and your ability to pass.
It's a fair point that I'm already quite uncomfortable about - it's almost impossible to have a frank discussion about treatment that has an outcome on physical appearance without creating this perception, even when simply responding to questions, and it's not like we don't already have a stereotype of being self-absorbed and obsessed with minor appearance details; I'm acutely aware of the rate at which I'm burning goodwill and consuming oxygen in a space that isn't exactly friendly, and I think I've responded to most of the questions that have been asked to which I can give a useful answer, so I'll make this and one recurrent point the last unless anyone has any particularly burning further things to ask. I honestly wasn't expecting to actually see good-faith responses; I expected to just provide a datapoint and disappear - so thanks for engaging.
In answer, then: I spend very little time in clubs and pubs! I was rather more of a socialite in my early twenties, but it always felt like a chore; I don't really like dancing; I really don't enjoy how alcohol makes me feel and I enjoy the way it makes other people behave even less. I've been through the miserable experience of watching (and even moreso hearing about second-hand) one long-term partner's many alcohol-related near misses that I'm absolutely done with it. However, I do have an active social life and hobbies that see me travel across the country and abroad (well, until the pandemic anyway) on a regular basis, meeting a lot of new people.
I get that this sounds like a far-fetched fantasy; it honestly makes me feel kind of embarrassed for having existed, like I have to apologise for being happy - and it's a matter of some frustration that without detonating my entire life and opening myself up to harm, there is no way I can give specific details. I've probably already said too much, but cost/benefit weighting says that it's worth it just to provide a real datapoint.
Maybe one day I'll blow my cover of anonymity, write a book, then spend the rest of my life regretting it and wishing I could put the genie back in the bottle. That's a future problem, I suppose, and it's likely to come with exactly the same general response you've illustrated here; nobody is allowed to talk about experiencing parts of transness as a positive, liberatory thing without inviting exactly this kind of comment.
Anyway, answers: the last. Should blockers be given to teenagers?
I think it's clear I absolutely believe trans girls should be given access to blockers, if they ask for them, after careful evaluation, based on my own positive experiences of having been on them. I had no negative side-effects; they eased the misery of growing up under testosterone, which I unreservedly hated, and am deeply thankful for having been saved from.
Should trans boys be given access to blockers, if they ask for them, after careful evaluation? As a matter of principle, of course my answer should be an unreserved yes - however, I think a measure more leeway can be given here.
Testosterone really does a number on your body, and the irreversible effects on vocal cords, height and hair growth especially are sources of immense pain if unwanted.
Estrogen likewise comes with a whole bucket of extremely unpleasant effects if unwelcome - ones which require unpleasant and dangerous surgery to address - but when it comes to a tug of war between the two, it's testosterone that seems to have right of way in terms of permanent, irreversible and distressing effects that are liable to cause harm and lead to negative long term outcomes.
There is, of course, a component here where our culture absolutely despises trans women. They're traitors to the patriarchy and invaders of the sisterhood; wretched creatures that our media tells us are inherently worthy of contempt and disgust. We've become so good at warping their stories and framing everything they do and say in a negative light that, well, they're damned regardless of what they do and how they behave - and that cannot help but feed back into the issue. We, culturally, see physical markers of maleness as undesirable when present in women. We're all prisoners of this miserable paradigm. I hate it - it's such an awful, wretched state of affairs, and the sooner we're free from it, the better.
I do think that trans boys have less immediate, devastating pressure to get on an early treatment pathway; testosterone is a vicious body-warping engine of transformation, and -without wanting to minimise their struggles in the slightest, as the monkey's paw definitely curls in other ways- they tend to get an easier ride as late transitioners.
Does that mean I think they should be prevented from accessing blockers at a young age, or moving onto CSH/HRT whatever you want to call it?
Quite aside from that being an incredibly heartless way of looking at things; one which completely disregards the multi-component nature of the trans kid experience, focussing on aesthetic physical changes alone and concerning itself largely with the comfort of an external observer; it's also fundamentally unfair and cannot help but feed into a poisonous narrative that minimises, infantilises and ultimately rides roughshod over the experiences of trans boys, casting them as tragic victims who have no idea what they're doing, hypnotised by the evil tune of the GNRH Analogue pied piper leading them astray.
This feeds into what I've noticed is a recurring theme here, which is framing discussion of blockers in terms of desistance as a desirable outcome - and by inference, thus, transition as a negative one. Perhaps understandable; this discussion is very much held from the perspective of concerned parents just wanting their children to be happy and safe, and if they'd just get over this whole gender nonsense then we can get our little girl/boy back.
I think it's possible for people to get very, very confused and transition for the wrong reasons; seeing it as an unrealistic panacea for all their issues. Obviously this is a road to generating an immense amount of misery, and I do not envy the task of adolescent (and indeed adult) psychiatric services in trying to help people find a path ahead that's right for them. There are parts of the internet with an -incredibly, horrendously awful- perspective on transness that genuinely creep me out, and I hope that people caught up in them are able to one day escape those patterns of thought.
I think it's possible for transition to not be right for a person -right now- but absolutely be right later in life. It's a harder road, but a lot of that difficulty comes from our society being so cruel to people who dare not conform. I think it's even possible for transition to be right for a person now, and for them to later seek to detransition/transition back without, at any point in that journey, being 'wrong'. Gender is complicated - I don't claim to understand it; I can only relay my experiences of a relevant part of it.
It's certainly not a journey I'd wish on anyone; I've found happiness at the end of it, but that's very much in spite of the many challenges, and the many nights spent crying myself to sleep and cowering in terror are definitely a sobering counter to any experience of euphoria.
We're barking up the wrong tree when it comes to desistence. Blockers don't cause kids to become trans - that's a frankly perplexing chicken-and-egg conflation, and I'm honestly not quite sure how you get there logically without deciding on a destination and working your way back. It would be fascinating to see more comprehensive stats on desistence with or without them, but the only way to get those would be to senselessly deny the suffering of desperate people at their most fragile. The entire notion that they're some kind of magical transing juice betrays a worldview that disregards people's stated experiences - not to mention that Kiera Bell's own story flies in the face of this hypothesis anyway.
Blockers do help kids -who were going to transition anyway- do so with as little suffering as possible, and help mitigate the crushing pressure and sense of a ticking clock for those who need more time to decide if it's right for them. They certainly make it easier to transition, alongside an enormous number of cultural factors that make transitioning in today's world have rather less of a withering attritional character to it. I wouldn't be to heartless as to say that the difficulty of transitioning in the past somehow made anyone's journey more valid - that's once again an abhorrent way of looking at the entire concept of suffering.
They were right for me. They were right for some of my friends. They would have been right for several more of my friends, had they even known they were an option at a time when they would have been relevant. Kiera Bell's experiences indicate that they weren't right for her, and there are a small number of people - which will only grow in time, because the genie is most definitely out of the bottle now - around the world for whom this is the case. Gender is complicated, journeys don't have to be linear, it's important that we hear her perspective, ideally in a neutral environment without the ludicrous weight of having to be an ambassador for everyone with a similar experience.
I admire her bravery in speaking up; I despise the way her situation became a source of harm for others, and a rallying cry for reactionary forces.