There's a number of flaws with the "thesis" (to put it charitably):
- Not every trans person experiences gender dysphoria
- Trans people have existed historically and widespread non-binary gender identities have been observed in indigenous societies prior to modern pollution
- There are men who take estrogen for health benefits and they generally don't report gender dysphoria or desire to transition
- Men with low testosterone levels generally don't report gender dysphoria or desire to transition
- There's no literature whatsoever suggesting any link between hormone levels or other endocrinologic factors and gender dysphoria or the desire to transition
- Being openly trans was practically illegal and subject to mockery, harrassment and violence until fairly recently, even more so than being an openly gay man was
- Due to the "underground" nature of trans identities, many elder trans people lacked the language or concepts to express their identity, instead landing on more socially acceptable identities (e.g. gay men or lesbians) or adopted labels like "transvestite" whereas young people are more likely to embrace identities under the queer, trans and non-binary umbrella
- While society and the law has become a lot more accepting of queer and trans identities, access to mental health and medical care like hormone treatments and surgery is often gatekept to "protect" people seeking it (with the implication being that they are likely wrong about thinking they need it) and a diagnosis of "gender dysphoria" is usually one of the most reliable ways to gain access to these even when it doesn't accurately describe the person's experience ("autogynophilia" is the mirror version of this where "gender euphoria" specifically for trans women when allowed to express themselves as women is medicalized and framed as a sexual fetish to delegtimize it)
For the record, I'm not trans but I know and have spoken to trans people in my personal life and have read a lot about it from "both sides".
Your arguments would be more effective if you provided respected sources for each. As a passerby, some don't pass my smell test, but I'm always willing to learn.
Providing good sources requires substantial effort, and doing so seems to have limited, if any, persuasive power. This isn't Wikipedia. If you're genuinely willing to learn you can look things up for yourself.
(note that people demanding sources like this are often selective about what they demand them for...)
Why should I have to do this if what OP said was also provided without context? What is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. The null hypothesis is that no, there is no link between these two phenomena. What I'm providing are just alternative explanations, some of which should literally be common knowledge (spend 2 seconds looking into how Pride parades started and you have all the resources you need).
If you're more inclined to believe technobabble than sociological explanations when you don't understand the facts behind either, that's a bias you might want to investigate further.
EDIT: FWIW most of the medical claims I made are the null hypothesis: I can't demonstrate that there is no literature suggesting a link between "natural" hormone levels and gender dysphoria but the claim could be dismissed by showing literature that demonstrates it.
The closest you can find is the hogwash pseudoscience of "rapid onset gender dysphoria" but that's arguing for a social contagion and it's citing the subjective experiences of parents of trans people and thus defines "onset" as "when the parent found out" (and "rapid" because this is usually close to an open social or even medical transition). To make this even more meaningless, it gathered those reports from a forum specifically for parents who dislike that their kid identifies as trans, i.e. who likely gave the kid no reason to come out to them while they could avoid doing so and thus would likely have been the last person to find out rather than being trusted with this information early on. Again, I don't need to cite sources for this. You can literally look up the "study" and you don't need a degree in sociology to understand the obvious bias and shoddy controls that went into it.
If you don't believe that trans people existed before the 1980s, I suggest you look into the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, whose research on gender and sexuality fell victim to one of the first book burnings of the Nazis.
If you don't believe there are indigeneous communities with non-binary gender roles, you can literally google that.
If you don't believe people who would have chosen to identify as "trans" had they been born later used and continue to use other terms to describe themselves, there are literally people doing this and saying so, publicly and openly.
By insisting that I give you a thoroughly sourced thesis paper in response to an equally unsourced claim, you're shifting the burden of proof. And you're doing so without pointing out which specific claim you want sourced, what kind of source you'd find acceptable and why you can't do this yourself.
You'd think "correlation does not equal causation" was widely understood enough that I just need to say "piracy prevented global warming" and people would know what I mean but let me reiterate: you can't just say "X happened and Y also happened around the same time, so X likely caused Y" unless you can demonstrate not only that X and Y happened around the same time but also that X directly contributes to Y.
Of course you don't have to. As a reader, the chain went -
OP1 - Here is my unpopular opinion.
OP2 - May or may not be right.
OP3 - Here is a big list of reasons why you're wrong.
The first two didn't provide any sources either, admittedly, but they didn't really make any statements of fact.
I didn't ask to pick on you or because I have some political motive(honestly, I have no idea or opinion on whether OP1 was right), only because it was the first post presented as definitive in the chain.
As OP2, my problem with OP3 is that none of that evidence really refutes OP1, which is why I said that the connection is hard to prove, or disprove. There could still be an environmental cause for some of the increase. But because gender is socially constructed, the effects of social change obviously can’t be discounted.
Honestly I think we should take OP1’s thesis seriously, but not as proven. And as usual cut down on pollutants for the wildlife it does affect.
This is most of the reason why it's become so controversial in recent years, because law and policy are being implemented based on this, rather than the previous, medicalized understanding.
The distinction being dysphoria includes distress, while incongruence does not? This seems like an arguable difference in scope of whether "trans" includes people who aren't distressed about gender incongruence.
The current consensus amongst medical professionals is that gender dysphoria is not requisite for being trans. This was not the case in the fairly recent past.
There is also "gender euphoria" which may be experienced by people who do not/did not experience dysphoria.
I'm not sure whether from a clinical standpoint distress about incongruance is the same as dysphoria.
There are a lot of people who would have failed to meet previous diagnostic criteria but nonetheless are happy to have received gender affirming medical care. I think the best we can do is provide people with bodily autonomy on an informed consent basis.
Layman here. They're just doing this to distance trans from gender dysphoria, making it a "legitimate" thing as opposed to a "condition" like gender dysphoria, because the latter implies treatment.
Side note. Why does Android keep auto-correcting dysphoria as dysphagia. Wtf is dysphagia anyways?
Did you reply to the wrong comment by mistake? None of the accounts in this thread (except one that got flagged to death) are new, and my account is the oldest one in this reply chain.
- Not every trans person experiences gender dysphoria
- Trans people have existed historically and widespread non-binary gender identities have been observed in indigenous societies prior to modern pollution
- There are men who take estrogen for health benefits and they generally don't report gender dysphoria or desire to transition
- Men with low testosterone levels generally don't report gender dysphoria or desire to transition
- There's no literature whatsoever suggesting any link between hormone levels or other endocrinologic factors and gender dysphoria or the desire to transition
- Being openly trans was practically illegal and subject to mockery, harrassment and violence until fairly recently, even more so than being an openly gay man was
- Due to the "underground" nature of trans identities, many elder trans people lacked the language or concepts to express their identity, instead landing on more socially acceptable identities (e.g. gay men or lesbians) or adopted labels like "transvestite" whereas young people are more likely to embrace identities under the queer, trans and non-binary umbrella
- While society and the law has become a lot more accepting of queer and trans identities, access to mental health and medical care like hormone treatments and surgery is often gatekept to "protect" people seeking it (with the implication being that they are likely wrong about thinking they need it) and a diagnosis of "gender dysphoria" is usually one of the most reliable ways to gain access to these even when it doesn't accurately describe the person's experience ("autogynophilia" is the mirror version of this where "gender euphoria" specifically for trans women when allowed to express themselves as women is medicalized and framed as a sexual fetish to delegtimize it)
For the record, I'm not trans but I know and have spoken to trans people in my personal life and have read a lot about it from "both sides".