Is 1 in 137 Teens Transgendered?
No...no they are not.
If that article doesn't trip your bullshit detector, I'd say you need to go have it recalibrated.
(Remember how 1 in 10 people were homosexual back in the '80's? Off by a mere order of magnitude...)
My guess about that article: it's a description of a political project, not a scientific one. And I'd be willing to bet money on it...if I could find anyone foolish enough to bet. (Though...to be fair...this kind of thing usually isn't provably bullshit for years...so...I guess nobody really wants to bet over that kind of time frame...)
If that article doesn't trip your bullshit detector, I'd say you need to go have it recalibrated.
(Remember how 1 in 10 people were homosexual back in the '80's? Off by a mere order of magnitude...)
My guess about that article: it's a description of a political project, not a scientific one. And I'd be willing to bet money on it...if I could find anyone foolish enough to bet. (Though...to be fair...this kind of thing usually isn't provably bullshit for years...so...I guess nobody really wants to bet over that kind of time frame...)
posted by Winston Smith at
11:32 PM
4 Comments:
Adolescence is a time of great psychological and physical change, and of trying on new identities. It's not surprising many kids feel uncomfortable in their developing bodies, rebel against gendered expectations (boys should be tough, girls should be sexy), and pick up on the latest online buzzwords. It would be relatively harmless if kept to experiments with dress and pronouns, but some are demanding puberty-blocking drugs and cross-dressing hormones, which can have damaging long-term effects. And unfortunately, some adults are refusing to be adults and to challenge this.
Word, A.
Adolescence is a confusing time. And to make it worse, we impose expectations on people that are largely inconsistent with their natural inclinations...and often don't make much sense. I'm sure *some* people don't have any trouble with it...but it confused the hell out of me ah tell you hwhut. I'm glad if society is loosening up on that stuff a bit... (But the transgender stuff isn't the ticket. All it does is turn a kinda crazy system on its head and add an incoherent metaphysics.)
But, as you say, in a way it's, in a way, just a new way of expressing old confusions. Perhaps not a lot more harmful than the old ways...unless medical treatment gets involved...
...oh...and/or the restructuring of society...
Strangely, I guess, I didn't have the vaguely described issues above with adolescence. I was just a pathetic, ostracized loser. Didn't seem to be a result of gender-based issues, though...
This shit is pernicious, if you ask me; one thing I do know is that I was pretty easily impressed with adult opinions and this is the sort of garbage that could've convinced me I had a ready-made explanation for my woes in a legitimate medical issue.
The worst this garbage will do, in my opinion, is convince people they have some sort of medical reason to allow themselves to sit back and accept their inability to deal with reality while simultaneously demanding special treatment and adulation for the bravery and strength they do not and need not have.
Oh, and in the process, they'll destroy their lives with weird "medical treatment" and discover upon reaching adulthood that they've virtually prevented themselves from ever having the normalcy they craved.
Also word.
Yeah, ditto on pathetic, ostracized, loser-dom... But also: I was just baffled by the strange requirements of masculinity... Growing up on a farm, where people were pretty much just people, I just didn't really get all the emphasis put on weird, meaningless shit... I basically had to puzzle out a bunch of stuff that seemed to come naturally to others. And I resented it, ah tell you hwhat.
I don't think I'd have been susceptible to this particular contemporary madness...but there were all kinds of things that could have messed me up if my head had been filled with lunatic theories about them. In fact it was, and I was: evangelical Christianity...which, thankfully, I got over pretty soon...
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