A new study is out that provides a variety of estimates of the number of US adults who identify as trans. All of the estimates have something in common:
In one year, between 2020 and 2021, the number of young people identifying as trans nearly doubled. The effect is more pronounced among some groups than it is among others, but it basically holds up across the board.
It's one thing for this number to be steadily increasing. Maybe that's because trans identities have become less marginalized, which makes it easier to go public as trans. But something is way off if you get a sudden huge spike in a single year. I can't really think of any plausible explanation for this that isn't some kind of methodological artifact.
Partly, I think it's related to the relatively recent and rapidly growing number of open discussions, primarily by young adults, in niche channels in all forms of social media. And there's the successful monetization of being trans or transitioning (including the marketing of non-prescription drugs) and the rise of niche medical practices targeted to trans, including an easier path towards HRT.
Or maybe it's a methodological artefact. ¯\(°_o)/¯
Literally there has been no monetization of transition related care.
So you're saying that medical offices that target trans care are not making money?
So you're saying you're saying you're a dishonest bigot?
Hormone pills and injections were invented a hundred years ago. They're already used by cisgender people at higher numbers. They're ultra-cheap.
Most trans people seek sliding scale or free talk therapy.
There's a tiny bit of market for breast forms or safe binders - but that's been marketed to women for decades.
There's just no massive monetization to be had here. No treatments are mandatory, nor are they specifically profitable.
Crissa, I think you are awesome.
Yeah, just to underline and emphasize what you say, Crissa:
There are no treatments given to trans people that aren't given to cis people in much greater volume. Cis women have breast augmentation and breast reduction a lot more than trans men/women.
And then, on top of that, medical care is monetized everywhere we look in America. For instance, my cardiologist's practice buys and operates a bunch of expensive scanning equipment which they then send their patients to. I love my cardiologist, I think she's done well by me. AND, this is a recipe for overprescribing. Patients don't mind, they think they are well cared for. The only thing stopping them is insurance companies.
So there also that.
AND, I am a cis male. I don't want to be on estrogen, or T-blocker. I don't want surgical alterations. No amount of salesmanship is going to change my mind, because I have an internal sense of my gender that isn't just about me looking down at my crotch and observing what's there.
Exactly like a trans person has, only their internal sense doesn't match their body. Nothing changes my mind. Nothing changes their mind.
You're overthinking what I said.
Fee for a service is monetization. There's nothing wrong with that.
There is a lot of demand for such services and in turn is resulting in an explosion of specialized medical groups targeting trans, which in turn gives more people the opportunity to safely seek support.
There's been huge growth in the supplements category directed at trans women who, without insurance, cannot afford to get HRT.
Monetization is a good thing. It brings greater access to trans from whence there were lots of hurdles.
You should know me by now. I believe trans athletes should be allowed to compete in their preferred gender category. I believe existing civil rights (and more broadly
UN human rights) provide the legal basis for protection of trans from attacks or exclusions. As such, I'm not going to respond to the accusation of being a bigot.
Basically all of the monetization I've seen of trans issues has been the likes of JD Vance soliciting donations, Jesse Signal building a career inspecting trans folks like insects, and of course the Jesus-for-a-dollar types in every 'vangy church.
You want to see crass commercialization of trans bodies? Turn on the 700 Club on your teevee.
yup.
dohrk 2.0 smoking the blocked 'n reported shit. getting high on jessie singal & katy hercog's supply.
The number was increasing since 2014 and the jump in 2021 is not remarkable given that increase. Other age groups show less increase - were they asked different questions? There is no need to call on any "methodological artifact" other than limited sample size which may give noisy results. It may be difficult to sample the exact same population every year.
Kevin, among many others, keeps giving too much importance to inter period variation which may not be meaningful.
There are two effects, both real, but hard to separate. The first is the astonishing rise of a new quasi- religion in which redemption is finding your true self in another sexual category. The second is the ever-changing definition of “trans”.
"This above all: to thine own self be true." - William Shakespeare.
Same as it ever was. But start by understanding what it means to be true to our human nature, which is to follow Bob Dylan's "Don't criticize what you can't understand" advice, which if everyone followed in 1964, the times they would have been a-changed by 1965. Better late than never.
My Conviction
You know kids, I wish every mother
and father in this theater would go home tonight and make a speech to their
teenagers and say kids, be free, no guilt, be whatever you are,
do whatever you want to do, just so long as you don't hurt anybody.
Right? Right!
I would just like to say that it is my conviction
That longer hair and other flamboyant affectations
Of appearance are nothing more
Than the male's emergence from his drab camoflage
Into the gaudy plumage
Which is the birthright of his sex
There is a peculiar notion that elegant plumage
And fine feathers are not proper for the man
When ac---tually
That is the way things are
In most species
The definition of 'trans' hasn't changed in decades. We've just demedicalized the parts that didn't need to be diagnosed.
How do I know? I transitioned in the 90s.
What the fuck are you even talking about
Here's a thought experiment. I'm going to assume you are male, based on your handle.
If you were going to be home alone all day, and it was really hot, and wearing a skirt that was left around was going to make you feel much more comfortable, would you do it? I'm thinking you wouldn't. I know I wouldn't.
This doesn't seem to have anything to do with my particular configuration of plumbing, and everything to do with my sense of who I am. I am a men, one way I express that is by not wearing skirts. (Yeah, there are kilts, are you Scottish?)
What would be the impact on you if you, a cis male, found it necessary to stay in drag 24/7 for a month? That would not feel good, would it? Why not? What if nobody you know saw you? It would still be annoying, right? I would find it annoying? Mrs. Doubtfire got to come home and take off the costume, after all.
Where do you think that comes from?
millions of women in the US have to deal with the shariah xtian definition of life beginning at conception (hello texas!) but the xtians pretend that they're unduly burdened by the fact that a much smaller number of trans people might happily live their lives without the threat of shariah xtian prison sentences
shariah xtian 'freedom' relies on their ability to imprison people who don't want to live according to shariah xtian principles, but the alito court says the reverse is not true
"...I can't really think of any plausible explanation for this that isn't some kind of methodological artifact. ..."
How about it's a fad?
It's not at all a fad for young people to be desperately searching for their true selves and at the same time be desperately searching for peer approval and following the crowd. Smoking, drug use, vaping, sex and all sorts of other things have followed a similar pattern that waxes and wanes as it becomes "what the cool kids are doing" - those things you might call a fad as it's just people trying to be socially accepted.
But to write off every struggling young person who's uncomfortable with their body and unable to find their place in the world is uncharitable. Give them space to figure out who they are and quit trying to sort everyone into defined categories. It's not harming anyone.
+1
thanks for putting jumbo shear in his place. with votes.
Why the toxicity here? Why does an opinion that you happen to disagree with call for "putting someone in their place"? Last I checked, "putting someone in their place" is code for "I think I am superior to this person and I am going to enforce my idea of what the hierarchy should be with violence and abuse."
If you have a different opinion, argue it like a citizen instead of stooping to this level.
Maybe because calling freedom from gender roles 'a fad' is toxic to those who it's very important and typically, in the past, suffered horribly from discrimination, abuse, and subsequently suicide and self harm.
is minding your own fucking business a fad?
or maybe threatening people with prison for shit you don't understand is a fad?
+10
Is being callous a fad, too?
The twitter link noted some details from the abstract including, "The increase was driven by those identifying as transgender men or gender non-conforming."
So it sounds like people in those age groups are more likely to reject gender identity in general, with young women specifically rejecting what society deems as "female" and adopting a more male persona.
There is not one way to be "trans" or one definition that is agreed upon it seems among all groups.
The increase in trans men (or non binary AFAB) may be a key. It's noteworthy that there's nearly no panic about this group, and it's long been the case that women can cross-dress without attracting notice.
Oh, the panic includes them - those are the ones depicted and complained about (so many genders!) even while they search for reasons to be bioted towards trans women.
My dad had a college roommate (GI Bill in the 40s) who was the guy to beat in the physics classes but who had a noticeable stutter because he was a lefty and the nuns made him write with his right hand when he was a kid. At some point the Catholics quit with the "left hand belongs to Satan" bullshit and suddenly there were a lot more lefty kids running around. This is not because they were being groomed, for crissakes. Freed from oppression they did what came natural and, mind you, they didn't bother anybody while doing it.
"left hand belongs to Satan"
Right-handed people are dextral. Left-handed people are sinistral. Seriously.
Are you being facetious or do you really not know that the Catholic Church had a serious problem with left-handed people up until the last half century?
Are you being facetious, or did you not know the latin rooted words the Catholics used for left and right handed for hundreds of years?
(No shame for not knowing ^-^; I didn't know until I was in college.)
I did know that, but couldn't really care less what words the Catholics used to use for this.
Linguists tell us that the roots of those two words are ancient, which suggests that the cultural bias against lefties goes back to prehistory. Don't just blame the Catholics. Muslims were even worse about this, and so were the Soviets.
It's hard for young people to believe, but bias against lefties used to be deep and widespread. Lefties have come a long ways for it to be regarded as a non-issue today. Lets hope that trans people follow the same path.
the leftorium piece.
Care went from discouraged in most of the country, to supported by federal administration in that year.
Gosh, when people aren't being forced to stay closeted in college, they're no longer closeted.
but what about my freedom to crush someone's skull and tie them to a split-rail fence in wyoming?
remember: were he really a boi, he wouldn't have cried.
Not sure when the polls were taken, but that was right around the time the Covid Pandemic broke, wasn't it? Not sure if there is a causal relationship because I have no idea what they were measuring exactly, why people come out as Trans when they do or really what causes people to be trans, and how any of this might have had to do with what Covid was doing to our society.
Just pointing it out.
I suspect that at least a part of the increase is a statistical artifact. Probability distributions get weird when the true population proportion is close to zero or close to 100%. The percentage of people who identify as trans doubling when the value the previous year was about 1.5% is a lot more believable than it would be if the value had been 15% the year before. Among other things, at the lower value, the normal distribution can no longer be treated as if it is symmetrical.
I'm gonna suggest that Covid isolation is a big part of this, given the timing and my own anecdotal experience with one of my own kids. Pre-Covid, I had a very girly, boy obsessed 5th grader. Then Covid hit, schools shut down, and they spent a year basically in their room zooming into class and rarely leaving the house. This is exactly the age when kids (especially girls) are most likely to start feeling anxious about their gender ID. My kid came out, then decided on nonbinary, much of it fueled by "doing their own research" online. Love this kid like crazy. They can be whoever they want to be. Fully support, etc. But it's hard for me not to see this as partly a cultural phenomenon intensified by the isolation. That chart reflects my experience as a parent, and I'm not inclined to see that year as an arbitrary blip.
That was my thought as well.
Look at the drop in 2020 when people were in lockdown, possibly in living arrangements where it wouldn't be safe to come out.
a cultural phenomenon intensified by the isolation
That cultural phenomena is people thinking that just maybe they're not going to be persecuted for who they are, much like how support for gay marriage broke big so quickly.
"Who they are" is where the rub is. Assuming there's some kind of fixed biological gay/straight or trans/cis binary is an ironic carryover of the conservative male/female binary that so much of LGBTQ+ supposedly rejects. I'm not denying that there's a biological component, even a dominant one in most people's cases, only that there are no social-cultural-experiential factors in the mix. There has always been a degree of malleability in gender and sexuality ID, especially with the young. I'd be curious to see what the under-18 curve was. Bet it's even more dramatic than 18-24.
First, Crissa, thank you for participating and pushing back on the B.S.
Second: I've read that part of what might be going on is that kids were stuck indoors, weren't able to socialize as much, and as a result, didn't experience the ... enormous pressure that is the expectations of their peers. Peer pressure. So they got to grow a little into who they really thought they were. I've also read that there indeed has been a large rise in young females who are finding themselves somewhere between lesbian, nonbinary, transgender. This showed up in a Gallup study that was written-up in WaPo maybe a year-or-two back?
Also, I read that if you look at gender identification across generations, you can see a steady increase in LGBTQ identification as we go from Silent->Boomer->X->Millennial->Zoomer.
Thanks! I've been commenting on Kevin's blog for over twenty years now ^-^
And yeah; one thing about being online is... Alot of trans and gender variant people have escaped here since the beginning. And 2020 is an inflection point where basically, everyone was pushed into this space where your body didn't limit what identities you could experience being.
I know, but it's only recently that you've been out as transitioning. Live well!
Well, or maybe I just didn't notice?
Why do I have to care about them? I don’t. Cut off whatever you want. Mental illness is a whole different thing from sexual orientation. Men who want to have sex with men have nothing in common with people who want to cut off their penis or breasts to feel complete. And good for those who want to transition. Do all you want. Back and forth. Up and down. In and out. Transition away!
Trumps storm troopers can pick them out of the crowd. Everyone can. They are going to end up in camps with the illegals. Oh well. Sorry.
Ahh, yes, the out bigot. The one who's completely denying all of gay rights history and modern culture to be a bigot.
In the real world, trans people have been involved in every successful bid or riot for gay rights. It was a butch lesbian - who was being harassed by police who started the resistance at Stonewall. Just months before, trans women rioted (and failed) in San Francisco. But this time, a trans woman threw (or dumped) the first bricks at stonewall. Drag culture has been a central part of queer culture forever - because it's the violation of assigned gender roles at the core of homosexuality. Of course they'd be intertwined with transgender people.
'Oh well'. Yes, 'oh well' to your rights.
Ah, the "we can always tell" crowd. Believe it or not, most strangers don't know I'm trans. Many people I see on a regular basis don't know I'm trans. Doesn't matter if they see me with clothes or without, or whether they see my ID or not. And I by no means transitioned at a young age.
A lot of us are preparing for Trump's reign of terror. We've always been here, and we'll be here after he's gone.
+1
Only time I get sir'd is when I'm in moto gear. Which happens to most women on motorcycles.
Anecdatum—A good friend came out as trans during the pandemic. She explicitly stated it was because lockdown meant she didn’t feel obligated to perform gender in a particular way every day. Given the freedom and space to explore further it became much easier for her to figure out her identity.
Awareness of the medical tech to make that happen may be a factor too, and maybe it has gone down in price (and more people are aware of that too)?
I met a guy a few years ago who planned to get surgery for it, and it seemed like he thought of it as a novel option for him, although still expensive.
If you called just the 2020 datapoint an outlier, you could pretty much draw a straight line through the rest of the points. If so, I'd say that's just a sign of ongoing social acceptance of trans people, particularly since "gender non-conforming" is included and it's pretty easy to decide that you don't want to 100% conform with your birth-gender.
Beyond that, my money would be on the pandemic. I've seen a number of people who saw the work-from-home period break them away from the need to present a certain way, giving them room to experiment. Sometimes it's just "yeah, having to wear makeup every day *does* suck", other times it's "I like presenting as a man". Good for them either way.
You've missed the most obvious explanation: 2020 is Trump, 2021 is Biden.
It's objectively safer to come out as trans in a country under Biden than Trump, the same way it's safer for ANY minority under Biden than Trump.
People were stuck at home in 2020-2021 with little to do except ponder their lives.
So many people are lost, drowning in the sexist BS underpinning so-called gender identity theory. If you leave sexism at the door, males and females are free to be whoever they are without any need to assign one of the dozens (hundreds?) of new “genders” to describe their personality.
Why reify sexist stereotypes like this?
Be progressive, and abandon gender identity theory like the stinky, unnecessary baggage that it is.
It's all signaling, trying to show how cool and hip you are. Almost none of it grounded in reality:
https://default.blog/p/lesbians-who-only-date-men