@barleybadminton you confidently suggest we should talk to come gender non confirming teenage girls and people with experience of homophobia. Well, I’m a lesbian and have plenty of experience of homophobia. And I’ve talked to quite a few GNC kids. And the two overwhelming reasons that seem to be behind the increase in “trans/nb” identities are: 1) social pressures about appearance and fitting in. 2) desire to pigeonhole / label nascent adolescent sexuality, especially same sexual attraction, fear of puberty/sex and social contagion around this on the internet ad in social groups.
In the 80s and 90s makeup and dressing up were for older people - not teenagers - and you only dressed up in “feminine” clothes occasionally - the rest of the time you wore jeans and grungy checked shirts or tops. There were many more single sex schools (most in the U.K. state sector went co-ed around 2010). This coincided with a massive rise in youth culture around self-presentation on social media, massive pressure on girls to look attractive, growth in the porn culture. The pressure around appearance for young teenagers is immense. In particular, if you are not a stereotypically attractive girl you are made to feel absolutely dispossessed and disposable. This starts very very young now.
When I grew up, it was possible to accept that maybe you were just a bit ordinary or a bit plain or a bit ugly, and you might feel sad and upset about it, but there were other identities to take up - the clever one, the religious one, the kind one, the sporty one, the shy one, etc. etc. Since 2000 those other spaces, other identities, have been closing. By the late 2000s, if you weren’t pretty or popular, there was nothing left for you. If you were a bit plain - well, you didn’t fit into femininity and you were worthless, because no matter how clever or funny or nice you were, none of that mattered if you weren’t pretty and socially successful.
That’s some background just as a brief sketch of what’s been happening in the past couple of decades. And of course that coincides with all sorts of social media and porn culture and the increase in acceptability and affordability of cosmetic surgery, as well as the decline in single sex schooling and so on.
I work with young people and have seen this transition happening, and it’s made me sad for them for a long time. But the key thing is that girls who aren’t pretty or aren’t up for the whole social media duckface/contouring/obsessive appearance thing don’t have other tribes to go to. It’s been a monoculture for the last twenty years. No different music and academic and indie tribes to be part of. So now you take a girl who’s a bit awkward or androgynous or not stereotypically pretty, or is afraid of puberty, or is self conscious about her wonky teeth or big nose or whatever, or doesn’t want to grow up yet, or is having crushes on her friends, is in a position where she is alienated from the main teenage culture, and the gender/trans cult is the only other option. Basically - dislike your body or feel unpretty or alienated? You’re trans.
- lots of teenage girls have same sex feelings. It’s common and a natural part of puberty, whether the girls end up straight or gay or bi. But this in conjunction with 1) now produces an immediate labelling of “queer/trans”. And any generalised teenage depression feeds into this too - with questionnaires on which gender and sexuality you are constantly floating around the internet. I’ve seen first hand a rather lonely and vulnerable girl on a Discord chat, who had substantial family problems, loneliness and was attracted to women, and very self-conscious about being what she felt as “ugly”, be eventually convinced by others that actually she was trans and a they/them. It made me very sad to see it, but I could not intervene as there was a lot of brainwashing about “terf rhetoric” going on and not listening to anyone who didn’t “affirm”. But to my eyes the poor girl was perfectly normal, just in a suffocating family environment during lockdown and very self-conscious about her appearance, her lack of friends and her same-sex crushes - and she was easy prey for being convinced of being a transman when actually she needed some social interaction, to live away at college and to enjoy dating girls and feeling less pressure about her appearance.
A young daughter of a close colleague is transitioning at the moment after being non binary for a while. It’s sad to see because when you talk to her as someone with some life experience, she is clearly a young lesbian who believes that she has to be validated by a “community” by becoming trans. She really just wants a girlfriend and not to feel that she’s ugly compared to the current beauty standards which are enforced on young women. If you don’t fit them, you have to reject them utterly.
Middle aged women for the most part more often can see those beauty standards for what they are, and care a lot less about being thought not to conform to them. We also grew up in a time when there were other options for one’s life, too.