fierceawakening:

anaisnein:

I’m intuitively certain that the best reported numbers of trans people grossly underreport actual prevalence, because the concepts and lexicon weren’t out there on the mainstream culture table till quite recently

in Gen X and preceding age cohorts, maybe some older millennials, the trans people who actually figured out their shit and ended up getting counted as trans people were those whose dysphoria (whatever type, this isn’t a specifically medicalist point) was so severe and constant they literally couldn’t repress it or interpret it as anything else so it was basically own it or death. I bet money there are four or five times as many people in middle age looking at all the trans visibility this last few years and slowly going “… oh” internally (and maybe doing something about it, but quite likely just carrying on with their lives and the adaptations and compensations they’re already adept at: these are the ones who could survive if not thrive in their birth gender assignments in the first place and their sunk costs are high) as people that age getting counted as trans by the official statistics

the average young USian person on this website is growing up in a world where trans is a thing that some people are. it’s a tough af position to be in, there’s still a hellish zip code lottery kind of like there was for being gay in 1990, etc, I’m not suggesting it’s a bed of roses or easy to claim, my point is that it’s a position that exists to be in. it’s there in the differential as a possibility. and I don’t know if young people realize how novel that is

I agree with this, because I’m pretty sure I’m one of those people. Whether I’m “a gnc woman” or “a person who needs T” matters less to me than whether I can present in the way I want to, though I won’t be surprised if I ever try t and go “well yep”