It appears that a lot of us are feeling a profound sadness having watched the video. I think it must be watching some of the worst fears we've had for these children be proven to be true.
I haven’t watched the video as I couldn’t find it, though I did see the clipped version. But profound sadness is what I feel when I look at my daughter’s generation. She is lesbian and has a number of transitioned friends, I believe, though I’ve only met one.
I hope I’m catastrophising, but I can’t really imagine any outcome for these young people than a gradual realisation that transitioning has actually not resolved the problems it was supposed to, but has caused a lot of physical damage, which can’t be undone.
I never wanted to be a woman and spent huge chunks of my young life (and continue to some extent) pushing myself so hard (and failing) to be “as good as a man” that I have ended up with a body that is completely exhausted and neurologically and psychologically somewhat broken. Ironically, I think that if I had been born earlier, when women were not expected to compete with men, I would have been happier and healthier.
So possibly I’m projecting, but I see these young women as being in an even more extreme position than I was, and the solution they have been offered is so extreme that I can only imagine a lifetime of regret as their bodies gradually break due to the medication.
I am fortunate that my daughter hasn’t gone down this line. Ironically, she now has a feminine girlfriend and is showing some signs of channeling her father’s laziness as the “masculine” one in the relationship. So all my striving to be “as good as a man” were stupid as the man I married just let me break myself.
Apologies, I seem to have wandered off the point, but I don’t want to delete as I haven’t ever put these thoughts together before.
Either way, I think my daughter is going to be faced with a lot of second hand unhappiness. The brave new world her friendship group has bought into will likely fall apart, and her transitioned friends will find themselves in a kind of limbo where they don’t really fit into, or have a space in wider society. They will have to negotiate a return to a world where transitioning is no longer fashionable and all the transtenders have moved on, leaving those who actually moved over to the medical pathway and thus locked themselves in. They will likely have to face the fact that they are a tiny minority who have removed themselves from the sexed spaces where they actually fit (even if they didn’t want to) without ever really managing to move into the opposite sex spaces, thus leaving themselves with nowhere to go. Perhaps society will create spaces for them. There are already separate toilets being created in their part of the world but I’m not very optimistic when it comes to more complex situations, such as hospital wards. I think it could be a very long, lonely life for anyone who finds themselves in that situation.
Profound sadness is about right, not just for these young women, but for the direction the world has gone, where women have striven for equality, but have instead found only a different kind of oppression.