As has been said many times already, gender roles are not the same as gender identity.
I'm sure it's very easy for you, a cis person, to say if only we didn't have these pesky gender roles then trans and other non-binary people wouldn't feel the need to identify differently to their body. Being trans is by orders of magnitude very different to that.
By golly gosh, there are trans men who like make up!!!
There are 'effeminate' gay trans men.
Heavens to Betsy, there are trans women who shave their heads!!!
There are butch lesbian trans women.
*clutches at pearls*
I find it amazing VP that this has to be repeatedly said, but clearly it does.
And its a subject where people will make grand statements that they don't agree with treatment, or misrepresent how that's made, yet will also acknowledge they don't know much about it. And then in the face of people trying to educate/explain, do the fingers-in-ears routine. You see it playing out on comment pieces online, blogs, all the time.
And smokedout is right, a lot of this stuff is precisely harping back to the attitudes to especially young kids coming out as gay/lesbian/bi. 'How can they possibly know?' shriek the straight adults who have never questioned their heterosexuality! 'They might grow out of it?'.
In my experience, those with the worst gender identity disorder never 'grow out of it' - even if they're been able to continue their lives without any kind of transition. I have a friend who's just come out to me. Mid 30s now, but the familiar story - *knew* they were different somehow around 4/5, but couldn't articulate what/why, other than a deep incongruence with their body and confusion over gender. And feeling completely trapped in those feelings because of not being able to share them with parents, peers growing up for fear of ridicule, rejection, being told they were mad. So, it gets buried for years and years until it affects their health again later in life.
And whilst I share reservations about any increasing (over) diagnosis of kids at a young age being trans, although puberty blockers around 10+ seems a reasonable path of treatment for those that show the most extreme sense of dysphoria to at least
buy them some time whilst the effects aren't reversible and they can explore carefully with psychiatrists and those around them how they feel and identify. There really is no 'railroading' of trans people into it - its usually trans people struggling to convince others of who they are and they need help/treatment.
I do think that the push amongst trans activism towards identifying 'brain sex' as a be-all for explaining trans existence, whilst understandable, is probably the wrong route to be going down in trans equality (though, I'm not discounting there could be a complex set of variables that one day might, but might never proved). For the same reason that gay/lesbian people have had to fight for their own rights regardless of whether there's a 'gay gene', etc. We had years of the 'can we prove gay people are born like it, or is it nurture' and it merely hurt gay people and didn't progress liberation. Most people now accept that gay people know that they're gay, without asking them to 'prove it' scientifically, or that perhaps they can be 'straightened out' when they're a kid with reinforcement of rigid gender roles, etc.
I don't know why I'm posting again on a thread I said I wouldn't, but I just despair at the same old arguments going circular. And whilst I wished Stella would/could also offer her personal experiences/insight into this more as I think cis people can learn from it, I understand why she soon gets upset by it all and has to give such threads a wide berth again. Trans people are subject to questioning of their existence and experiences like no other group right now, and everywhere - on the street, in the workplace, receiving end of hostilities on the internet all the time, even having to 'convince' gender clinic psychiatrists (almost always cis).
And finally, that a majority of cis and straight people in this World can still spend so much time pulling apart the minority of trans people whilst simply asserting 'let's get rid of gender and that'll do it' whilst upholding gender and doing little to smash it (at least the minority of lesbian rad fem seperatists are not hypocrites in this regard) is just privileged of the highest order. In the same way that most right-thinking people wouldn't do with sexuality these days. And its worse when its those that otherwise say they are generally supportive of trans people.
