theunitofcaring:

I’m going to pretend that someone chose to phrase your concern productively enough that people who disagreed with you could engage with it.

“I do have a concern about Tumblr,” this hypothetical person said, “which is that lots and lots of people here transition. One hypothesis is obviously that there have always been lots of people who’d be much happier and have their preferences better fulfilled if they transitioned, and now they’re able to hear about transition from other people like them, identify it as the thing they’ve always wanted, and go ahead with it. As a result, people are much happier and closer to living their best lives, and this is an enormous triumph of modernity and the power of communications to help young people in rare situations connect with the people like them.

But another hypothesis is that many people – not all of them, certainly there exist some people in the category described above – have complicated feelings about their gender and identity which are not best-for-them resolved by transition. But if transition is how everyone they know is solving it, they’ll go for that approach. In that case, a community that encourages people to identify certain kinds of discomfort with your own skin as gender dysphoria, and to address it with transition, might be hurting those people compared to an ideal community that exemplified a wider range of tools and tactics for solving that problem.”

Thanks for sending this thoughtful and productive ask, which avoids unproductive, dishonest and hostile framings even though its topic is sensitive and complex! I especially appreciate how you didn’t spread any misconceptions like that children are getting transition surgery (which is illegal almost everywhere) or that adults are children incapable of making decisions for themselves. I’d be delighted to answer it. 

The first thing that I think it’s important to say is that, yes, some people experiment with whether transition will make their life better and end up finding that it doesn’t make their life better. In many cases, this is pretty costless, and I don’t think we should try to discourage it; if someone cuts their hair, changes their clothes, and asks to try out a new name and pronouns, and then a year later concludes that actually this isn’t improving their life, then I am pretty inclined to call that a success of a society that lets people have more options and figure out what works for them. Almost every popular media article about an ‘outbreak of transgender kids’ at a school describes this – a group of people who decide through non-medical means to try different ways of relating to gender for a while, and then the ones for whom it’s an improvement stick with it, and others stop. 

So social transition being more common as people experiment seems great to me. Ideally people wouldn’t medically transition unless they’re pretty confident it’s the best call for them, and would find medical transition accessible, free and supported, and wouldn’t experience pressure to decide to medically transition early since they’ll ‘never be accepted otherwise’. I think the best way to achieve this is to accept peoples’ identification whether they’re medically transitioning or not, to affirm that medical transition is not the thing that makes you a real trans person, to talk about trans peoples’ bodies with affirmation and never with disgust or contempt if for some reason you need to be talking about other peoples’ bodies at all, and to share lots of stories of the effects of transition to produce informed consent.

There are forces making frictionless, supported social transition hard. One of them is transphobia, of course. If someone tries using they pronouns and a different presentation, and their parents treat them with unceasing hostility and no one ever gets their pronouns right and everyone calls them a liar and a trender and a stupid kid who has been sucked in by the transgender cult, then they’ll never really be able to evaluate whether this option would make their life better if not for all the bullies determined to hurt them for it. (And yes, the parallel idea is also true – if someone is viciously bullied for being a girl or for being a boy, and can escape bullying by opting out into something else, they’re also not getting to really evaluate whether this would make their life better without bullying.) We need to address this by accepting people in a way that is unconditional and not about their gender at all. Whether someone is trans or cis or unsure, they deserve spaces that are unconditionally supportive, allow them room to experiment, validate them in their ability to learn things about themself and choose the life that will reflect their best self, and assure them that a social circle doesn’t depend on choosing rightly.

No one, anywhere, has succeeded at that. But I’m more optimistic about achieving it on tumblr than anywhere else. There are lots of trans people of all ages on tumblr talking openly and honestly about their lives and experiences and what works for them. People trade expertise. Here is where I’ve first seen people articulate ideas like ‘it’s okay to not pursue any medical transition options while still not identifying with your asab’, ‘it’s okay to only transition online’, ‘it’s okay to have a fluctuating or complicated gender identity’, and ‘it’s okay to try stuff even if you’re not sure if it fits’. I’ve seen reasonably nuanced discussion of the risks and benefits of specific aspects of transition, here. I have friends here who have gone on hormones without identifying differently, or identified differently without hormones, or processed their dysphoria in lots of different ways and described their approach and how it helped them. 

I think tumblr can grow into a place that affirms peoples’ choices and offers them lots of choices and produces people who make the best possible choices for them. 

Of course, you’ll disagree with me if you think that it’s terrible for people to transition, ever, even if they’ve had the chance to witness lots of approaches to gender and they’ve identified that one as the one that makes them flourish. But where I’m coming from here is that people flourishing is really good, and people are exceptionally varied, such that the best we can do to promote the flourishing of other people is to give them more options, acceptance, and a picture of what their life can look like if they take those options. And while I don’t think anyone on the internet is doing that perfectly, I would rather be here, where there are lots of visions at least being voiced, than somewhere which is fundamentally not interested in admitting that some people will be happiest if they transition, or that this is a choice they have the right to make.