Harrowing first-person account of transboy culture

[Beancounter1]

Hi,
I found this article:
lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name?s=r

It is such a powerful read, if you want an insight into what some teenagers are going through. A young woman gives a detailed account of her transition and detransition, emphasising the emotional and psychological aspects.

Poor girl. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest. Anyone can join the mad house, but they can’t leave! Very scary.

My kids are most definitely not having unsupervised access to the internet!

You're right. Even for teenagers- who'd you expect to have an immature understanding of sexual and romantic relationships- there's contact with reality at all. Which maybe wouldn't be so bad if they realised that these cartoonish depictions of gay men were largely fantasy but they don't. So much of their life is spent online and there's such a denigration of anything which isn't perceived as new or progressive that they don't seem to have any reference point to check it against.

Agree totally.

The gay men I know in relationships... Yes actually often one is slightly more "effeminate" or camp. Sure they have female friends. But they're actually really really bloke-ish too and do a lot of men only stuff. And their sex lives are different without the power imbalances inherent in het relationships. Lots of hitting up grindr for threesomes etc. It really is nothing a teen girl imagines.

What particularly struck me is that these teen girls are not lesbians, or 'tomboys', they are just regular girls, but with mental/emotional issues that mean they are vulnerable to being sucked into this cult-like subculture, with absolutely no idea what real adult and gay relationships are like.

Her dad tried to do 'blokey' stuff with her, but she didn't want to do boy things, she just wanted to feel she had an acceptable identity. Because being straight and white is not an acceptable identity.

Helena sounds remarkably intelligent, articulate and perceptive considering she's in her early twenties. It seems hard that those skills - nascent as they would have been in her teens - weren't sufficient to help her then.

It’s the government’s and councils and health boards and politicians and schools who are encouraging this.

why as a young person being appladed and told you are the most vulnerable ever would you not belive it

And that you need special treatment

It's interesting that she wasn't interested in 'blokey' things. I'm a teacher and we have had the typical explosion of transboys in the last few years and I've been struck that every single one of them stays firmly in the girls' friendship circles. If anything, they have fewer male friends than most of the girls. Other than cutting their hair, binding their breasts, wearing baggier trousers, using the disabled toilets and being told they are special, they are not 'living as boys' in any way, because they don't actually want to. They just want to escape the expectations on girls.

I fully agree that Tumblr is a toxic place. I’m in my late 20s now but spent a lot of time on it in my mid teens. It was instrumental in my developing an eating disorder. They cracked down on pro-ED materials but gender ideology stuff has sprung up in its place.

This 100%. I’m a teacher too and see this.

Me too - early 30s now but very similar experience. I had an eating disorder tumblr way back in 2011.

I also found it heartbreaking to read, and very interesting. It confirms something I've had unformed in my head for a while, that for many transing teenage girls, the goal isn't to transition out of one sex into the other, it is to move out of the dreaded 'cishet' into 'trans'.

Trans has become decoupled from -sexual already, now it's being decoupled from -gender. Being trans is the entire aim and identity in of itself. Stating "I am trans" is all of it for young girls like Helena. It's "I am special", "I am different - but in a good way", and also "I am not broken, I am not mentally ill, I am not wrong - I only feel those things because I am trans and the world is unaccepting of trans people like me". As well as "I am not a straight, white, middle class, cis-gender BAD PERSON FROM THE OPPRESSOR CLASS". It is not only "I'm not like all the other girls" it's "I'm not like all the other Oppressors".

I also agree with @HermioneWeasley re. the teenage-girlification of gay men. The gay men I know are just... men. They may be a bit more feminine (obviously some are not) but they aren't girls, they aren't interested in acting like they're 14 years old at a sleepover.

Wow. What a brave woman to share her story, its terrifying that this is happening to so many young females.

There has always been a huge swathe of teenaged girls who have hated their bodies, hated becoming adult women, and hated themselves full stop really. This is just the current manifestation of those thoughts.

When I was a teenager 20 years ago, we only had anorexia and self harm. If we'd had "trans" I am 100% sure that would have been me.

I know it's not especially helpful to draw parallels between things that aren't really the same, but I'm just imagining how differently my life would have turned out if I'd gone to the GP (weighing 7 stone) and said "I'm really fat and I need to lose weight, but my mum insists I'm skinny and unwell" and the GP had said to me "of course you're fat if you say you are. It's disgusting that your mum is refusing to acknowledge your true authentic self. Let's slip you some diet pills secretly and when you're 18 you can have a gastric bypass"

Ahh Tumblr. I loved it when it was just a site to find others with shared interests.

True. They have no "male interests", and the motivation for their transition isn't that they feel like they're male. It's more that they idolize certain males, and want to transform into them, or their "type". It's like a kiddie crush when you don't know if you want someone or want to be someone.

Really interesting reading of the article and the thread. Total minefield. Agree with the pp who mentioned goth and emo. That was me - I was looking for a reason why I wasn't in the popular crowd and why the boys didn't like me and why I was shy and sad sometimes, and dressing goth and being "alternative" explained that - I would totally have gone in for trans, I see that now having read this.
Feel for my daughter and the world she's going to grow up in. I hope it's something less sinister than ED / self harm/ trans.

Feel for my daughter and the world she's going to grow up in. I hope it's something less sinister than ED / self harm/ trans.

Aren't we all going to be living our lives in the Metaverse? A 3d virtual reality world that is coming and will supposedly take over every aspect of our lives? Work, sport, education, entertainment, social interaction, travel. My head explodes just thinking about it. It's going to replace the Internet as we know it and we all know the good/bad sides of the online world. What I don't understand yet though is how will humanity reproduce and survive if we are all living in this 3d virtual reality? Take me back to the 1980's please!

I read this in full last night. I have read before that Tumblr was its own world and that there was a point in time when things like pronouns and so on were happening but this article really brought it all out for me. It's really brave to write this and to open up your life in this way.

I also read yesterday that the government may go down the NZ route with incremental changes on the sale of tobacco so that children will never be old enough to buy it. I find that utter madness next to the harm that's being done online to children. Given what else they could be up to, I'd almost be pleased if the worst my DC did was smoke! It's a reasonably normal test of the boundaries, I always thought.

But being able to be accessed by anyone, any ideology, being sent breast binders in the post, being online for unlimited periods of time with god knows what that does to your normal healthy brain development...and it's tumbleweeds. Has been for decades now with successive governments. And what we are seeing now is the canaries in that coal mine. Still there's no action - unless it's to get Stonewalled and uncritically embrace it.

One of the things this article has left me thinking is perhaps trying to encourage my daughter as she gets older, to be involved in multi-generational socially diverse clubs / interests / persuits. It seems that there was a feedback loop with this author, and I found it interesting that having a job where she heard other conversations and saw other viewpoints was something that helped bring her back around.

In my own feedback loop, Mumsnet seems to full of the tras women are women debate and I hadn't really heard much about FtM, so that was very insightful. It's totally totally understandable the way she depicts it

It confirms something I've had unformed in my head for a while, that for many transing teenage girls, the goal isn't to transition out of one sex into the other, it is to move out of the dreaded 'cishet' into 'trans'

I follow a transman called Aaron Terrell on Twitter and Aaron says the same. That girls aren’t wanting to “transition” to boys/men, they want to be trans.

I think Aaron is right, that being trans is cool and infinitely more accepted than being neurodivergent or same sec attracted.

I agree with what everyone else has said on this so far. In addition, it's sad to me that the patriarchal virgin/whore roles of women are only being challenged by these kids by either 'queering' and embracing the whore role or attempting to turn into a 'man'. It shows that these young women are taught that they should either serve men in any degrading ways they demand and with a smile on their faces, or else become a man themselves. These are the two options or else you're a vanilla, prude, virgin etc. Women still aren't allowed to have boundaries, to say no and have their own sexuality and desires

I know I bang on evangelically about this, but I really recommend volunteering with the RDA (Riding for the Disabled) and wish I'd done it as a teenager. The riders and helpers are from all kinds of backgrounds, and as a lot of the assistance is physical there is no time to think about yourself, and you go home tired but in a good way.

We get a lot of shy, nervous teens (never been near a horse before) and I'm always impressed with how quickly they pick stuff up and how their confidence blooms. There are also jobs for everyone without being senior or experienced; just being on hand to go and fetch something can be massively useful.

And horses genuinely don't give a shit about race/class/sexuality etc so are true levellers.

I'm not sure that it's immaturity that means teenage girls aren't feeling ready for adult sexuality. Adult sexuality according to the internet (porn, message boards, more porn, jokes in popular culture, onlyfans, porn) is terrifyingly aggressive and I don't imagine anybody would be ready for that at 14.

I remember I wasn't ready for sex at all until I was about 19/20 and trying to navigate relationships when I was 16 was terrible because I was convinced that everyone else in the world had already had sex and nobody would want to just hold hands and kiss, which was exactly what I wanted to do. I was so scared that boys wouldn't like me that I projected this false air of confidence and did things I wasn't really comfortable with just to show that I was willing. This was the first generation of everyone having access to internet porn and it was tame compared to today. I cannot imagine how intimidating the current porn soaked, domination obsessed, "kink-informed" idea of sex is to young girls. No wonder they are scared of it. That seems sensible to me, not immature at all!

My 16 year old has several friends who sound very like Helena. At the risk of sounding like I'm blaming Covid for everything, I do wonder if the pandemic has exacerbated the situation for this particular age group. Aside from the additional anxieties and stresses it provoked, both generally and more specifically for the exam cohorts of the last few years I think social isolation has increased and spending a lot of time online has become legitimised. The loss of real life social opportunities and things like sports clubs etc being closed, plus the switch to online everything at the start of the pandemic must have had an impact.
"Keep your kids off the internet" just isn't practical for most people. Unless you are literally standing over your teenagers every time they use the internet and you never let them out of the house, I think its impossible to know everything they view. If you don't let them have devices, they will use someone else's. We were always pretty strict about no internet in the bedrooms, until the start of the pandemic when suddenly we had 2 teenagers homeschooling and 2 adults WFH in the same house. It became impossible to insist that everyone only used the PCs in the office and there was no way that I could be 100% certain that when they were online they were doing exactly what they said they were all the time.I think they were honest most of the time but I caught them gaming in what was supposedly a maths lesson on the odd occasion so I know they did mess around at times.
I don't know what the answer is, but banning internet access for teenagers isn't it. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle and is not going back. We need to find ways to manage it and to educate kids and yes, parents do have responsibilities in those areas - it concerns me deeply when I see very young children with basically unrestricted internet access. But it's far too simplistic to just say "don't let them use it" especially once they are secondary school age. I think any parent of teenagers who thinks they know what their children are doing 24/7 is deluding themselves. We need to be trying to equip them to deal with this world, not locking them away as that just doesn't work.