[This post was prompted by Andree. To prompt a post, back me on Patreon.]
In the past ten or fifteen years, there has been a massive increase in the number of transgender people. A 1997 estimate– from the clinic that treated over 95% of transgender people in the Netherlands– suggested 1 in 10,000 people assigned male at birth and 1 in 30,000 people assigned female at birth are transgender. Today, the best surveys suggest that 0.6% of people in the United States identify as transgender. How did this increase happen?
If you read LGBT history, it is striking how many people are what we would presently call transgender. Classic lesbian novels such as the Well of Loneliness depict recognizably transgender experiences. Stone butch women wore masculine clothing, behaved in a masculine fashion towards their partners, and did not allow their partners to touch their genitals; some people who had a stone butch identity, such as Leslie Feinberg, eventually identified as transgender. In the gay male community, we see “drag queens” who lived as women, used female pronouns, and desired bottom surgery (for an introduction, I can’t recommend highly enough the documentary Paris is Burning and David Valentine’s excellent Imagining Transgender). There were many heterosexual men who crossdressed regularly, and even special cruises and conferences which catered to them; again, many of these men took hormones or even sought surgery (Amy Bloom’s Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses is unsympathetic and rather transmisogynistic, but an interesting resource).
What did these people have in common? If they bought hormones, they did so on the grey market; if they got surgery (and most either couldn’t afford it or had spouses who objected), they flew to Thailand. Most did not biomedically transition. They also did not legally transition, and often did not socially transition: crossdressers were male at work and around their family; many drag queens and butches lived as their assigned gender during the work week. Their experiences are recognizably transgender experiences, but they are invisible to gender clinics, survey-takers, and much of the cisgender population.
Today, we have better access to transition treatment: while there is still gatekeeping, it is rare in the Anglosphere to be denied hormones because you’re gay, because you use your genitals during sex, because you’re a trans woman who wears pants, or similar. That leads more people to transition and more people to transition through a gender clinic instead of on the grey market.
Being transgender is also more socially acceptable in many ways. It is a double-edged sword; if people are more aware of transgender people, it is also harder to go stealth. But trans people tend to experience less housing discrimination, job discrimination, and familial rejection than they used to.
Trans people respond to incentives. It’s not true that gender dysphoria automatically leads to transition. Some gender dysphoric people have a choice between transition or suicide (although to be fair even in this case we would expect some of that population to show up in the suicide statistics instead). But if the cost of transition is high enough, many gender dysphoric people dissociate and depersonalize and are depressed, many gender dysphoric people live for the weekends or trips into the big city where they can be themselves, and many gender dysphoric people will have secret fantasies that they never tell anyone about. As transition becomes more accessible and socially acceptable, people are less likely to use non-transition coping mechanisms for gender dysphoria.
Equally important, I think, are the narratives which are available to frame our experiences. One of the reasons people identify as transmasculine instead of stone butch, or transfeminine instead of drag queens, is that these are the narratives we have to put our experiences into. The lines between gender-non-conforming people and transgender people are not as sharp as we’d like to believe or as would be politically convenient. We gender-non-conforming and gender dysphoric people are, often, an inchoate mass of feelings and desires and incoherent yearnings; it is often hard to know what we want as opposed to what we don’t want. We reach out to our communities for labels and identities and ontologies, and those labels and identities and ontologies wind up shaping what we desire. Of course they do. That’s how people work.
The same person, with the same desires, may identify as a butch lesbian, a radical feminist, a nonbinary person, or a queer trans man, depending on what segment and era of the LGBT+ community they are part of– and they might be equally happy and comfortable in each identity, if it is socially legible to their community. I think it’s a mistake to say that that person “is really” nonbinary, or “is really” butch, or “is really” a radical feminist. They have certain wants, certain needs, and certain ways of articulating those wants and needs are socially legible to their communities. (I wrote a similar process here, with regards to gray asexuality.)
As trans-related identities, labels, and ontologies displace their predecessors, and people are more likely to understand themselves from a trans-related framework, more people are likely to identify as trans and to transition (at least socially). To some extent, the incentives and labels explanations feed into each other: as more people come to understand themselves as trans, the conditions for trans people improve; as the conditions for trans people improve, more people come to understand themselves as trans. But I believe they are distinguishable and both play a role.
Thing of Things 
“Today, the best surveys suggest that 0.6% of people in the United States identify as transgender. How did this increase happen?”
“The survey is conducted by an interviewer via landline and cellular telephone. ”
I do think whenever making statements based on phone survey data to remember
the (non constant) lizardman constant.
Big reputable poll of Florida residents finds 10% of them believe Ted Cruz is the Zodiac killer.
Click to access PPP_Release_FL_22516.pdf
A certain fraction of polling answers will be bollox no matter how reputable.
When you’re on question 312 and the person on the phone said it was only going to take 5 minutes people will start giving fake answers and of course some people will just give fake answers no matter what.
“have I ever identified as anything but my assigned sex at birth? Sure, I’m a fucking trigender pyrofox.”
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If it’s telephone, I’d be somewhat concerned about the possibility that transgender people (or people who realize they’re transgender and are willing to admit it) would be underrepresented among (voice) phone users. (E.g., I’d expect younger generations to be more likely to know and admit they’re transgender, and also less likely to use phones.)
Do we know what the lizardman constant is when asking questions about oneself rather than about beliefs?
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See also: An Anglo-American Alliance, which is as far as I can tell is the first reference ever to transgender people existing in the modern era.
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How are you defining ‘modern’?
Because I remember there being what we would now recognise as a trans woman in the tedious middle section of War and Peace.
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What was her name?
(Also, I object to you calling the middle section of War and Peace tedious. Clearly it was the end that was!)
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There’s just not space in my head for the names of anyone but the most important characters in Russian lit. And even then, the ‘who is everybody and what’s their patronym’ page was very well thumbed.
Some cursory googling hasn’t helped.
They were a serf of one of the relevant nobles. IIRC, it was the bit where Natasha goes on a hunt. Not even an eventful hunt, like in La Reine Margot, which drives forward all sorts of plotlines. Just ‘some folks go hunting. Look how aristocratic they all are.’
If not the hunt, then somewhere in the bit that’s all Natasha loitering around somewhere provincial and being all angsty.
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@Lambert
I managed to find the relevant passage:
“A third person rode up circumspectly through the wood (it was plain that he
had had a lesson) and stopped behind the count. This person was a gray-bearded old man in a woman’s cloak, with a tall peaked cap on his head. He was the buffoon, who went by a woman’s name, Nastasya Ivanovna.
‘Well, Nastasya Ivanovna!’ whispered the count, winking at him. ‘If you scare away the beast, Daniel’ll give it you!’
‘I know a thing or two myself!’ said Nastasya Ivanovna.”
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@Estera clare
My understanding is that cross dressers are often not trans.
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It’s highly ambiguous, being just a throwaway paragraph about some peasant.
And the whole point of Ozy’s post is that how people identify is, to a certain extent, driven by what labels exist in their society.
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Equally important, I think, are the narratives which are available to frame our experiences. One of the reasons people identify as transmasculine instead of stone butch, or transfeminine instead of drag queens, is that these are the narratives we have to put our experiences into. The lines between gender-non-conforming people and transgender people are not as sharp as we’d like to believe or as would be politically convenient.
Eh. There’s still a fundamental difference, seems to me, between just being a free person who happens to want particular things, and unsurprisingly these don’t line up with gendered expectations because why would they, and wanting things because of how they related to social expectations of gender roles.
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> The same person, with the same desires, may identify as a butch lesbian, a radical feminist, a nonbinary person, or a queer trans man, […] They have certain wants, certain needs, and certain ways of articulating those wants and needs are socially legible to their communities.
Alternatively, it could be that there have always been (roughly) the same percentage of trans, nonbinary, gay, etc. people, but now we have better information, such that, say, a person who would have incorrectly thought he was a butch lesbian in the past now is able to correctly determine that he’s a trans man.
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Alternatively alternatively, we may not want to prematurely rule out the hypothesis that our information environment has gotten worse. Having more total information (via internet, queer centers at universities, &c.) doesn’t necessarily help if a lot of it is disinformation.
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@chridd
Sure, but the opposite is may also be true. A person who correctly identified as butch in the past may now incorrectly identify as trans. Or perhaps both butch and trans are imperfect identities.
One of the things I commonly see in activism is an insistence that the facts fit a black/white world view, where people are encouraged to sort themselves in the boxes that the ideology of the activists recognizes. Furthermore, they are encouraged to blame their problems or attribute their successes to attributes that the ideology considers crucial.
For a communist, problems and success will tend to be attributed to class differences. A feminist or MRA will tend to look at gender. An ‘anti-racist’ will tend to look at race. A trans activist will tend to look at cis/trans. Etc.
Furthermore, these attributes are often interpreted in ways that are scientifically not proven or even disproved.
There are many examples of people being mislead in the past (hysteria, Freud, therapy-induced memory ‘recovery,’ etc). Why would today’s activism not have similar problems?
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a person who would have incorrectly thought he was a butch lesbian in the past now is able to correctly determine that he’s a trans man.
This hurts my brain. Can there be a decision as to whether self-identification is the sole determinant of these things and/or whether gatekeeping is bad?
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I’d say gatekeeping is bad because gatekeepers tend to have outdated knowledge (don’t have as much knowledge about trans issues as actual trans people), and because thinking that one is trans is a reliable sign that one is trans, so gatekeeping isn’t necessary.
(I’d say “If you think you’re trans, you’re trans” is a true statement, but it’s true empirically, rather than by definition. …although, even if there weren’t evidence for it, I’d still be in favor of believing people’s self-reports by default unless there’s a really good reason not to, since I think people generally have better knowledge of their internal experience than outsiders do.)
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Then “incorrectly thinking they are a butch lesbian” is not a thing that can actually happen.
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? Yes it is.
My position is that statements about whether one is trans have an objective truth-value and can be wrong in principle, but that we should prefer heuristics that assume people are right about whether they’re trans. (This heuristic is why gatekeeping is wrong.)
This allows for the possibility that lots of people in the past were wrong about being cis, though that does mean the heuristic is wrong in those cases. It also allows for the possibility that lots of people today are wrong about being trans.
I have additional reasons, beyond the more general heuristic, to believe that people who think they’re trans are (empirically) almost always right about that fact, and that anyone who is wrong thinks they’re cis when they’re actually trans and not vice versa. This suggests that the second possibility is wrong, but still allows for the first possibility. (It doesn’t mean that we should try to determine who is wrong, though.)
It also allows for the possibility in theory that someone on the outside could determine whether people are trans, but in practice it mostly causes problems and doesn’t solve much. (Among other things, a person who tries to determine which people think they’re trans but are actually cis, as actual gatekeepers do, rather than vice versa, is going to be pretty much useless. It’s also not clear that such a person would be good even if they could accurately determine who is and isn’t trans.)
Does that make sense?
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@chridd
Desistance is very high for transgender youths. Were those kids wrong when they identified as trans or are they delusional about being cis?
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statements about whether one is trans have an objective truth-value and can be wrong in principle,
This statement may or may not be true, but if it is:
-Gender Essentialists are correct.
-Gatekeeping is not only appropriate, but to be encouraged if one is in favor of only believing true things.
-Self identification or any other subjective technique is invalid to determine gender.
Furthermore, it also opens up the possibility that being trans is also not a true state of being.
If:
a) genders exist in an objective sense
b) genders are discrete categories
c) these discrete categories are distinguishable from one another
There is nothing there about there needing to be any particular number of genders. Indeed, the number of genders is likely to be finite, since the number of humans is likely to be finite. Unless one believes that cisgenders do not even exist, then the number of genders will be significantly less than 10 billion. It might even be two.
This possibility is excluded if we agree that genders do NOT have an objective reality, and therefore one cannot be mistaken about one’s gender. With the possible exception of deliberate gaslighting, such as reassigning a male as a female after a botched infant circumcision or the like.
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“-Gatekeeping is not only appropriate, but to be encouraged if one is in favor of only believing true things.
-Self identification or any other subjective technique is invalid to determine gender.”
No. That doesn’t follow. The whole point of my post was that that doesn’t follow. That only would be true if gatekeeping produced better results than self identification, and it doesn’t.
Introspection is a good way of producing objectively-true facts about the brain. It produces particularly good results when the fact is “I’m transgender”. And gatekeeping, as it’s practiced today and is likely to be practiced anytime in the forseeable future produces particularly bad results.
Nothing here implies that there needs to be only two genders, either. I think there’s sufficient evidence to suggest there are more than two genders, but I don’t know how many.
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I think this is a perfectly good hypothesis, and one I often propose as an alternative to ROGD-based models. However, hypotheses are meant to be tested, and there are some particular domains where it seems threatened.
Anecdotally, some people only start feeling severe dysphoria after contact with the trans community. I can think of several cases where this has happened according to self-report, and of people who don’t think this applies to them, many report that their preexisting dysphoria was a subtle, not-immediately-linkable-to-gender-issues kind of dysphoria (e.g. depersonalization) that could be thought not to *really* be gender dysphoria.
Depending on how broadly this applies, this seems to be in contradiction with the hypothesis. This hypothesis is proposing that the dysphoria always existed in the first place, not that it pops up in specific trans-supporting social environments.
In addition, it seems that very often several people in the same social group will come out as trans around the same time. (Littman found this in her ROGD study, but I was skeptical about the generalizability of her findings due to her sketchy sample, so I tested it myself with self-report from trans people and found a similar effect.) Why is this? Are there just a ton of latent trans people waiting to come out in any social circle? Can we find a bunch of heavily gender dysphoric people in conservative transphobic circles? Can we find evidence that people who have traits that contribute to gender dysphoria manage to find each other before they come out as transgender?
I find it difficult to respond to hardcore critics of your hypothesis without first finding more evidence in these domains.
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“Can we find evidence that people who have traits that contribute to gender dysphoria manage to find each other before they come out as transgender?”
On the one hand this seems theoretically implausible. How could a group of people organize itself along the lines of a shared attribute of which none of its members were aware? On the other hand, I remain awed by how gay people find each other in societies with no formal training, no open queer culture, and high levels of violent homophobia. My theoretical model suggests that nobody would ever find anybody; in fact this is not the case.
So I’m forced to admit that something is afoot here which I don’t understand. Something similar may be operating in the “we were all trans all along!” social clusters, even if it’s hard to articulate how it works.
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> On the other hand, I remain awed by how gay people find each other in societies with no formal training, no open queer culture, and high levels of violent homophobia. My theoretical model suggests that nobody would ever find anybody; in fact this is not the case.
Maybe it is more an artifact of what is possible to see, like the streetlight effect.
You don’t hear about the isolated gay in a very repressive society, as that person, or their sexual orientation, become invisible.
Similarly, on the groups that come out you also don’t see the connections that were cut because they don’t fit the group.
I don’t think it is too hard that some unknown characteristics filter people in groups that share the same attributes, it is just not something not easy to articulate.
But, in hindsight, it is easier to explain it.
For example, football is strongly associated with maleness in Latin America, and gay people dislike it because the association (there is even a joke that if you don’t like it, it is because you are gay) or just because they don’t like it.
Then, the cause and the effect get mixed, and liking football starts to work as a filter.
It does not work all the time, but it gives you some information.
As people interact and sort themselves into groups, you will eventually find one group of men that don’t like football and are gay, but you will probably ignore the ones that don’t match it.
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There may be ways in which subtle gender dysphoria influences traits that are less subtle, and then people find each other based on the less subtle traits.
Like… anecdotally, there are certain interests that are common among trans people, like programming, gaming, various art forms, anime. It could be that having subtle gender dysphoria tends to lead people to those interests somehow. Like… those are all solo activities that don’t involve people’s bodies that much, so maybe subtle social dysphoria pushes people away from social activities and subtle body dysphoria pushes people away from activities involving their body, even if they’re not aware of why. Or, those are all things that generally aren’t that bad if things go wrong, so maybe subtle dysphoria increases anxiety levels, pushing people away from more risky activities. Or, most of those involve imagining being in a different place or a different world, so maybe a subtle feeling of wrongness in the current world pushes people towards those interests. Or maybe there’s a combination of factors. Whatever the case, things like “likes programming” aren’t as subtle as subtle gender dysphoria, and programmers are likely to find other programmers, leading to more dysphoric people in programming communities than the general population.
But then, at least for me, I had some fairly strong feminist views at one point in my life, which probably had something to do with some part of my brain subconsciously thinking of myself as female, even though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. But that means I’m more inclined to be in feminist-leaning programming communities than in highly-sexist programming communities, and if this is common among trans people, then there will be an even higher concentration of trans people in feminist-leaning programming communities.
If there are lots of things like this, it may turn out that subtle dysphoria tends to, say, influence people to be furries, highly liberal, interested in specific aspects of programming and certain types of games, only comfortable talking online, have certain types of personality traits and mannerisms, have a certain type of outlook on life, etc., and those traits tend not to otherwise occur together except by coincidence, in which case any community with all of those traits would be mostly trans.
And all of this could happen without anyone consciously trying to find other trans people or even realizing that’s what’s going on. And then some people in one of these accidentally highly-trans communities comes out, and almost all of them realize they’re trans, because almost all of them are trans.
(This isn’t that different in principle from, say, drag queens finding other drag queens and then realizing a bunch of them are trans; it’s just that it’s obvious why being trans and being into drag would go together, and I think there are also things like that that are less intuitively obvious. Also, I might be wrong about the details, but I still suspect something of this sort happens.)
In any case, I do have some (preliminary) evidence (which I don’t think I should publicly give details about for reasons) that there are more closeted and not-realized-it-yet trans people with geeky interests than in the general population, which suggests that some sort of effect like this is happening, rather than explanations that involve some social circles/types of people just being more likely to come out or explanations that involve people becoming transgender after finding other trans people.
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I think it’s worth collecting hard evidence of this, but in practice the effect sizes I’ve seen on this have been modest in size.
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I believe I’ve discussed this in the past, but my belief is that gender dysphoria/the precursors to transness are not randomly distributed across the population, but rather are linked to certain other psychological traits. (Homosexuality in reference to birth sex is obviously one of them; the research isn’t very clear, but autism is likely to be another.)
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Is anybody else seeing a giant seriffed ‘s’ in the ‘recent comments’ bar?
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It seems to be a combination of a pingback with a big icon and a bug in the stylesheet.
(Some stylesheet somewhere has table.recentcommentsavatar img.avatar { max-width: none; }, which is overriding a correct max-width declaration elsewhere in the stylesheet.)
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All I can think of saying when I close my eyes and see me as who I am, that I am myself and that “is really” that, no labels, no looking down at my bits and checking out what is there or not there. I am myself.
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Reblogged this on Random Me.
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“Equally important, I think, are the narratives which are available to frame our experiences. One of the reasons people identify as transmasculine instead of stone butch, or transfeminine instead of drag queens, is that these are the narratives we have to put our experiences into. The lines between gender-non-conforming people and transgender people are not as sharp as we’d like to believe or as would be politically convenient.”
If there were no difference between trans people and gnc people then trans women/ trans men/non binaries wouldn’t be offended when compared to butch women/drag queens/cross dressers. It’s clear that most trans people feel that they are fundamentally different on some level from gnc people. I’m a butch women and I used to believe that their was a continuum connecting trans and gnc people. But time spent around online trans spaces has made me feel that the similarities between trans and gnc people are superficial. It’s not a matter of degree but kind. Trans people may engage in some of the same behaviors as gnc people but the motivations are completely different.
For example a trans woman may wear a dress in order to be perceived as a woman. She may not like dresses she may even hate dresses but the perception of being a woman is of primary importance to her. A butch woman on the on the other hand doesn’t wear suits and ties in order to be perceived as a man. Being perceived as a man is likely to offend her or conversely she may be indifferent to how people perceive her gender just so long as she gets to wear a suit and tie. This contrasts greatly with trans men who feel a need to be seen as men and would hate being perceived as a woman even a very masculine woman.
This demonstrates a clear line between trans and gnc people. Trans people reject the gender they were assigned at birth. And put a significant amount of time and energy into having the gender they want to be affirmed by society. Cis gnc people do not practice this rejection. They are either neutral towards their assigned gender or they fully embrace it. Maybe your projecting and assuming gnc people are secretly uncomfortable living as their assigned gender. But I can say from experience as a butch woman that is not the case for most of us.I love being a woman and have no desire to be anything else.
“As trans-related identities, labels, and ontologies displace their predecessors, and people are more likely to understand themselves from a trans-related framework, more people are likely to identify as trans and to transition (at least socially)”
There is no basis for assuming that trans identities are displacing gnc identities. Gnc people still exist and were not going anywhere anytime soon. While some trans people are former gnc people. The reverse is also true some gnc people are former trans people. In recent years there has been an increase in media coverage of trans people as well as research. Meanwhile coverage of gnc people has largely stagnated. This can create an perception of a decline in gnc people. But that doesn’t mean gnc people are going away. In fact the reverse could be happening their may be an increase of gnc of people their is no way to know without sound research.
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