Tumblr is full of confused kids being brainwashed into believing they’re trans. That’s not the case for you, but it’s the most common experience here. Social coercion of psychologically vulnerable teens is rampant. I think your situation is unusual.
I disagree. I don’t think my situation is unusual at all.
If you had seen me when I started transitioning, a blue-haired kid in her late teens on Tumblr, you would have seen no difference between me and the “confused kids” you’re talking about now. My being a little older and further along in this experience doesn’t make me different.
As I said in my last post, you aren’t seeing these “confused kids” as independent agents capable of critical thinking and decision making. Instead, you treat them as pawns in an ideological war; the implicit suggestion is that the only reason they have for their choices is because they were “brainwashed” by someone else. The suggestion is that no “rational” person would take the actions they have.
You aren’t seeing their thought process, their perceptions, their feelings, their lived history. You aren’t seeing their resistance to the oppressive structures they’re navigating (typically with little to no support), because you disagree with their methods and think you know better. You refuse to empathize with or relate to them, keeping yourself distant, seeing yourself as separate. You, me, and the “confused kids” all have more in common than any of you like to believe.
Calling us “confused” or “brainwashed” is not support. We hear it from everyone -- trans activists, internet “radfems”, religious conservatives. Each does it in order to push their own take on our experience. They proclaim, “These women are just confused! The REAL reason they did X is because <insert ideological opinion here>.” Few of these people care what we actually have to say, unless they can take context-free snippets to bolster their own narrative.
Meanwhile, reality carries on. Regardless of whether it’s a “good thing”: the decision of whether or not to transition, and what that process entails, is now a part of the reality that is “growing up female” that we all have to navigate. It’s a decision that every young woman is now presented with. Transitioning doesn’t solve the fact that we are oppressed, but for some of us who are suffering, there are things about it that are/were appealing. But it also has its consequences that we have to live with, and might not help as much as we’d originally hoped. We need to be able to talk candidly with each other about transition, without condescension for one another.
My personal suggestion -- if you consider yourself a feminist, and you’re upset by how many young women are transitioning, you need to not distance yourself from us. We have made different decisions than you, but we are not fundamentally different from you. We are all dealing with oppression in the best ways we know how at any given time. We are all fighting to survive, and we need to see each other in that. We need to be there for each other, not look down on one another.
We need you to see our inherent value and ability. Ability to thrive, make mistakes, learn, grow, heal, contribute, change the world, make things better.
You don’t have to agree with another woman’s decisions or ideas (past or present) in order to see her as capable and competent.
