teenage girls and middle-aged men

[onlytherain]

I have read a few times here and elsewhere that the two groups with the highest rates of being trans or highest increase in transitioning are teenage girls and middle-aged men. I can only find data for teenage girls. Could someone please point me to data supporting the claim that middle-aged men are a group with high transitioning rates?

This might help clarify.

"Trans people seek gender care at different stages of their lives
Our recently published study examined gender clinic referrals across the entire lifespan._
We used data from publicly funded gender clinics in Melbourne and Amsterdam across a three-year period between 2016 and 2019. The Amsterdam and Melbourne services received 2,044 and 1,903 referrals respectively.
We found remarkably similar results in both countries. The majority of adolescent referrals (around 70%) were for trans boys and non-binary people assigned female at birth. However, among adults, this observation was flipped, with the majority of adult referrals being for individuals assigned male at birth.
Specifically, 55% of referrals of those aged in their 20s were for individuals assigned male at birth. This grew every subsequent decade, reaching around 80% for those in their 50s and beyond.
What do these findings mean?
Previous surveys from Sweden, Belgium and the United States indicate the proportion of people assigned male and female at birth who are transgender is roughly equal.
Assuming these two groups share a similar desire to access gender clinics, you would expect the number of referrals to be around the same over the course of a lifetime.
Our new findings are consistent with this expectation but the likelihood of referral to gender clinics seems to be influenced by both the sex a person was assigned at birth, as well as their age. While those assigned female at birth are more likely seek referral as adolescents, those assigned male “catch up” in later years.
So rather than an over-representation of those assigned female at birth, adolescent referral patterns most likely reflect an under-representation of assigned males."

Why is this happening?
Trans misogyny is a unique type of discrimination trans girls and women face. It combines transphobia, the hatred for and discrimination against trans people, with misogyny, the prejudice and contempt towards women.
The impact of trans misogyny is far-reaching. During adolescence, trans girls experience higher rates of bullying and victimisation than trans boys and cisgender peers.
During adulthood, trans women remain at high risk of abuse and violence. They are also more likely to encounter housing discrimination, homelessness, unemployment and poverty than the general population.
Faced with such daunting prospects, it seems much harder for trans girls to reveal their gender identity as adolescents at an already uncertain time of their lives.
But as trans girls progress into adulthood, we suspect an intrinsic desire to express their gendered sense of self eventually tips the balance in favour of “coming out”. As a result, we see more trans women seeking gender care in their 20s, 30s and beyond.

https://theconversation.com/critics-claim-gender-clinics-are-seeing-an-excess-of-trans-boys-but-new-data-suggest-otherwise-257817#:~:text=Trans%20people%20seek%20gender%20care,in%20their%2050s%20and%20beyond.

I remember the days when it were all green fields and only middle-aged men were 'trans'...

If any of that were remotely true we would also be seeing the numbers of middle aged women ‘discovering their true selves’ and adopting a trans identity.

But it isn’t, so we don’t.

Lies and supposition are no replacement for facts.

OP, there are many threads on here discussing and even hearing from trans people about what causes trans identification among the different age groups and between the sexes. The theories posited above do not match with what is actually observed in real life.

So the question remains: why do so many middle-aged men suddenly discover their inner lady-feels? 🙄It's a mystery, for sure.

Anecdotal evidence doesn’t qualify as statistical data.

This @onlytherain

I'm sure there's a few threads on here where it was discussed that the gender clinics had stopped keeping data on numbers by sex of trans identifying children.

IIRC they stopped recording that data because the it was showing that autistic girls were were the largest cohort.

Autism, homosexuality, and prior sexual abuse were all showing up as repeated themes with the children who ended up in the gender clinics.

I find Ray Blanchard to be very enlightening on the this subject in regards to middle aged men.

IIRC they stopped recording that data because the it was showing that autistic girls were were the largest cohort.

That cynical lack of follow-up was one of the worst things about it, as Time To Think makes clear.

Once you know about Malaga Airport, you can't unsee it.

One really interesting thing about the Trans UK subreddit is that you quickly pick up a sense of the sub's demographics.

The majority of posters are young TIFs, often very young, and invariably with really poor mental health. You know this because they're always talking about their poor mental health. Often they mention autism diagnoses.

There's a minority of TIMs who seem to be older, often quite a bit older, who show really obvious male pattern behaviour, which can range from just hogging the conversation to quite dodgy creepy uncle type stuff.

Sometimes the vulnerable girls come this close to peaking and I wonder if they're going to rediscover basic feminism just by observing male behaviour in trans spaces - though they couldn't call it feminism, it would have to be AFABism. But they always pull back from peaking. Female socialisation is a hell of a thing.

That's an interesting perspective, thanks.

The statistical data shows a jack of middle aged women identifying as trans. 🤷‍♀️

*lack 😬

Probably because middle aged women weren't born yesterday and know that you can't identify your way out of all the bullshit that we have to deal with.

Readers note:

Statistics prior to 2016/2017 are rendered meaningless due to the rapid and huge increase in female children registering in clinics since then. It also doesn’t cover the very large unreported number of children who are not registered at clinics and who still have declared gender identities.

If you are looking for accurate proportions of who has and has not got a transgender identity, please do look at statistics that are up to date. Otherwise you will get a distorted view.

Ain’t that the truth.

I think it is because women have more freedom to circumvent gendered expectations. Especially when it comes to things like clothes. So older women feel no pressure to "change sex" to be their true selves. They'll just wear what they want.

Um, that wasn't your initial claim which was about cause not numbers.

Nobody should be expected to make medical changes or to change their identities to wear specific clothes. And no person should have to act like that person wearing particular clothes is a sex that they are objectively not.

And women are far less prone to paraphilias than men.

For those for whom a trans identity derives from a sexual drive (to wear women’s clothes or to fantasise themselves with women’s body parts) it is overwhelmingly men.

(Summarized from Dr Az Hakim, psychiatrist who worked in this field in the UK.)

Transactivist groups and individuals have relentlessly targeted children of all ages - in schools, children's organisations, the NHS and to society's eternal shame, even children in care of the state. These powerful organisations have been led by the predominantly male born adults, many with autogynephilia. These men make up the powerful organisations who've (until recently) have been granted so much power over society.

Children have been gaslit with the notion that their developing uncomfortable bodies can be wrong, but a sex change is the solution. Sex change is an adult "interest" and the young have neither the insight or experience to navigate such an incoherent and dangerous to the young and impressionable, ideology.

Teenage girls are particularly susceptible via social contagion. Those of us who work with children know that illnesses like anorexia can spread amongst a peer group with social media speeding this up significantly. Hence teenage girls being the other group over represented in thinking their bodies are flawed. Accurate data can be hard to find as until recently transactivists defined research and data capture as "transphobic". Hannah Barnes book "Time to Think" is a good source.

Unfortunately the trans lobbyists have been immensely successful and attracted massive funding, including from the state. This has been misused in an attempt to remove fundamental safeguarding principles that should apply to all children.

There is now a massive pushback on all this with the two successive governments accepting the criticisms and recommendations of the Cass Review, this govt starting to put in place restrictions on the abuse of puberty blockers and "sex change" hormones for young people. Plus legal & social action against the intimidation, bullying and lies that have been used to enforce this ideology on an unconsenting public.

What has been done to children is unforgivable but it will sadly be some time before we see the charlatans who targeted the young like this, in court to answer for their crimes.

The idea that young women feel more able to be trans than young men, so this explains why more men do it in middle age because they are "catching up" is crazy - there was a time eg in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, when young women were not coming out as trans, when it simply wasnt "a thing". So you would expect there to have been a huge bump in numbers of middle aged women now coming out as trans. But that never happened.

There simply has never been this "catch up" of older women.

Jack.... worked too 😉

I think you're right.

If the transness (for want of a better word) was truly innate, we would now be seeing the excess of late transistioning women who weren't able to in earlier decades. But we aren't.

Which is yet more reason to believe the huge spike in young women transistioning currently is driven by social contagion, rather than anything innate.

(A bit like how if the suicide myth was true, there would have been way more unexplained suicides by trans people who were unable to transistion as that wasn't then an option. But there aren't).

Its sobering to consider that even given the rough time young FTM people are likely to have, they'd rather transistion than be a young woman in today's society 😪