When I was age 13 to maybe 15 years old, I would pray every day, “God, please don’t let my boobs get any bigger. Please don’t let my boobs get any bigger.” I would whisper it repeatedly like some sort of exorcism chant. This is one of the only prayers that has ever been answered for me. Funny, sad, and true. I also had this strange notion that if I massaged my breasts until they hurt, they wouldn’t grow. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m pretty sure I just have the genetics for small breasts. I would wear sports bras and claim I didn’t need “regular” wired bras. I wasn’t really wrong. Who really needs boob cages? At the time, for me, however, it was more about not wanting to be perceived as having breasts or playing the feminine role that underwire breast cages symbolized for me. I did not want to be a woman!
If I was a teenager nowadays, some extremists (really starting to become the norm) might have labeled me transgender. Transgenderism was not “a thing” back then the way it is now. What I mean by that is that it just wasn’t a trendy thing to be back then. That statement will probably be interpreted by some as invalidation of the experiences of many transgender people. But the truth is usually hard for many to hear. Transgenderism and gender theory are social pressures intended to force people to validate transgenderism as a healthy, and natural way to live.
Lisa Littman is an American physician who began conducting research into the phenomenon of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. Here is her study. Most of those with Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria are teenage girls, autistic girls especially being overrepresented among them. Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is when someone has shown no signs of Gender Dysphoria their entire life and then suddenly “comes out” as transgender. Honestly, J. K. Rowling (author of Harry Potter) who has been verbally threatened and attacked, and criticized by what seems like most people for simply saying that "people who menstruate" are called women, has already taken the time to write a bit about this in a detailed, personal essay on her site. (By the way, the argument that not all women menstruate is stupid. True, not all women menstruate, but all people who menstruate are either women or girls. So why not say "women who menstruate" or better yet, "women and girls who menstruate"?) I’ll just quote Rowling here:
Most people probably aren’t aware—I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly—that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.
The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:
‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’
Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram, and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’
Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.
The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’
The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.
That was a huge chunk to quote, but Rowling puts it all together so well. I encourage you to read her entire essay on her website here. As Rowling pointed out, those who have tried, through research, to point out external influential trends on teens claiming to be trans have been shut down and threatened.
Transactivists do not want the truth to be known. In many, I would say most, if not all cases, identifying as transgender is at least a partial result of environmental influence. Like Rowling, I have wondered whether if maybe I had been born a decade or so later how I would have perceived my own resistance to our society’s concept of femininity. As I said before, transgender and gender identity were not “a thing” when I was younger.
For a little background of how I was when I was a child, when I was a little girl, I loved playing with cars, I also loved playing with Barbies because I liked the cute little clothes and I thought the Barbies were pretty. I never created relationships or talked with my toys, I just organized them. (I don’t think that I would intentionally buy my children Barbies if I ever have them unless the company drastically changed their appearance (as the company has gradually been doing), but the little Barbie grocery store that I had was my favorite.) It was my dream to become a cashier.
My favorite things were the monkey bars, playing store, playing with cars, jumping on my neighbors’ trampoline, and playing in weedy sagebrush land behind our yard. And while we kept our baby dolls in my room because my brothers were too embarrassed to keep them in theirs, I didn’t find the dolls interesting to play with at all. I remember looking at them trying to understand how they would be fun to others, and I just found no use for them. I loved wearing “skorts” (but not dresses most of the time), my favorite color was purple, I loved sparkles (still do), and I liked playing around with makeup. I felt outraged that long basketball shorts were not sold in the girls’ section and I had to buy them in the boys’ section.
I soaked in pretty things. I would sneak away and find moments to myself outside in isolation and listen to the beautiful quiet and look at the green wheat fields rolling like ocean waves. I loved to sing…all the time…on the toilet. I remember cutting and pasting pictures from magazines with my neighbor friend to create a “Girl Book”. The stuff we copied and pasted were practically all pink and “girly”. I was annoyed that no one ever bought me remote control cars as gifts, and that they only bought them for my younger brother, and that he never let me play with them. I was always better at fishing off the docks with sticks than my brothers and friends who were boys.
One boy in my class at school and I were the strongest and could do the most chin-ups and flex hang the longest. I was very competitive, a little shy, extremely bossy, perfectionistic, had undiagnosed OCD (that I grew out of), also undiagnosed ADD, and was outraged that one of my teachers at school said that girls were more likely to be catty than to punch. I raised my hand and said that “I punch people”. I also was repeatedly told that I was ugly when I was angry because I was a girl, and that girls should be “sugar and spice and everything nice,” which enraged me. I felt hurt when my older second cousin spat on my mesh shoe because I was playing defense against him too well while playing basketball. It hurt because I was just playing a game and he took it as a personal offense that a little girl could play so well against him when he was twice my size.
Overall, I was definitely influenced by the culture to categorize things into “girl things” and “boy things” pretty intensely. Despite being a kid that mostly did my own thing regardless, by my pre-teens, I also started to believe that I wasn’t like other girls to the point that it was a pride thing to me. I looked down on “other girls”. The diminishing messages that I heard from boys infuriated me as a little girl. What I didn’t realize is that so many girls, if not most girls in our culture, have at some point said, “I’m not like other girls.” If most girls are claiming to not be like other girls, then maybe our concept of what girls are is pretty warped.
When I hit puberty, and started wearing “training bras” when I was almost 11, I felt extremely humiliated. When I got my period at 13, I sobbed and felt humiliated. When I was told that I was turning into a young woman, I felt infuriated and utterly humiliated. I remember my younger brother, whom I used to play with a lot, saying that I drastically changed around age 13. I wasn’t as playful and I hid myself. I don’t know how to describe it other than I was hiding myself. Modesty was preached to me and contributed to my hiding, and I saw it in practice by my mom. I remember feeling embarrassed to be living. I had a far from perfect home life like many or all, especially as a teen, so there were many factors that contributed to this, but the way women had been portrayed to me out in the community, at home, and especially in the Christian community we were in had a seriously negative impact on my understanding of who women were. I was being forced, so it felt, into joining the ranks of a disrespected, submissive, supposedly weak, and especially lower-ranked class of people: Women. Transwomen will never, ever, ever understand. Never.
Elle Palmer, who now has a Youtube channel, tells a similar story of a sudden change in how she felt and presented herself when she hit puberty. The difference in my story and hers is that she actually went the route of attempting to transition to being a man, though she claims that she had no signs of Gender Dysphoria before she began puberty. She talks about the constant sexualisation of women and girls which I also obviously experienced. No girl escapes it in their teens. Now in her 20’s, she has decided to detransition. Some things, like the depth of her voice, will never go back to the way they were before she transitioned. Luckily, she never went to the extent of some other unfortunate teenagers who claim to be trans, and she never had any surgeries. By the way, here is a link to her channel.
Elle is far from being the only detransitioner out there. More and more detransitioners are speaking out about having been deceived as teenagers into believing that transitioning is truly an option, and that it really is the healthy way to deal with their feelings. Most teenagers are especially vulnerable to the messages of the culture, and transitioning should not be offered as an option to teenagers when creating fake genitalia is an experimental Frankensteinian business, and no one can really change their whole makeup. Yes, I said “business”. It is a business that is increasingly being funded by taxpayers’ money. Again, the mutilation of teenage bodies are increasingly being funded by taxpayers’ money. It is so important to some that transactivists blocked a bill in Wyoming that sought to make Female Genital Mutilation illegal as some religious communities that still carry out the practice. Clearly, the care and safety of women tends to take a back seat.
Another children’s author, Rachel Rooney, was under attack for creating a children’s picture book called My Body Is Me, which transactivists described as “terrorism”. The book is an attempt to combat the current cultural message that you might have been born in the wrong body. The book says, “You’re born in your body, you don’t have a spare, so love it, hug it, treat it with care.” Rooney was surprised at the level of backlash she received as a result of publishing the book, which only seeks to encourage positive self-perception of one’s own body to children. The illustrations include children who are physically disabled and have sensory issues to try and encourage a healthy self-image amongst all children. If you’re interested in buying the book, you can purchase it here. I just did.
Seeing as encouraging a healthy self-perception in children is considered terrorism these days, then I think as a culture we’ve gone in a seriously wrong direction. You will never be able to convince me that children having a healthy self-perception is transphobia, nor is it just as healthy to be uncomfortable in your own body as it is to be comfortable in it. It is always more ideal for a child to accept their body than it is for them to identify as transgender. Always. Always. Always. There are states making it illegal for “conversion therapy” of transgender people, placing it on the level of conversion therapy for homosexuals. Apparently, it’s hateful to try and address the discord between one’s mind and the rest of one’s body through psychological means before slicing off one’s genitals, forearm, and thigh flesh (google phalloplasty) in an attempt to change oneself.
The concept of being above one’s body to the point that one can completely change it is utterly sad. It’s tied to the concept of believing that human beings are above the natural world and that we can do whatever we want to it. We are part of the world, and it deserves our respect. But if we are part of the world and we do not respect it, how can we respect ourselves? I respect the wild forest of hair on my legs that doesn’t grow in an OCD pattern, just like I respect and prefer the sporadically placed trees in a forest. We are not above the world of Earth.
If I had grown up in a more liberal home and been born a decade later, would I have considered myself trans? I don’t know. All I know is that at this point, the gender identity movement has propelled me to stand up for women more than ever, especially when you see transactivists trampling all over women repeatedly, in just about every area of life, making it quite clear that the rights and safety of women do not matter to them. When transactivists try to reduce transgender rights down to “please let us pee”, they are trying to distract you from the fact that transwomen and transmen are winning in women’s sports because they are men; transwomen are assaulting women in women’s prisons; transwomen are being reported in the news as simply “women” when they murder, rape, assault, groom little girls, etc. etc. giving the false idea that violence by women is particularly on the rise; our stats and data about all sorts of things are being skewed by the inaccurate labeling of a person’s sex; in some places they are keeping men’s bathrooms as is and turning women’s bathrooms into gender neutral bathrooms; women’s rape relief shelters are being defunded because they refuse to let men who claim to be women into their shelters; many transwomen are trying to force lesbians to have sex with them, etc, etc, etc. For a bitter laugh, read these altered lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody, written by a Radical Feminist lesbian who is sick of transgender bullshit.
The word female is not sufficient enough to describe women. Female is used in reference to females of just about every species out there. Woman is a word specifically meant to refer to us humans who are adult, human, and female. We deserve our own word, don’t we? We’re not even allowed to use it anymore according to more and more people. I will not sit silently while women are threatened into silence and submission because some transgenders are hailed as brave because they decided to dye their hair pink instead of just embracing the fact that they’re a man who likes pink, which would have been a hell of a lot braver.
To claim to be transgender rather than a woman with a complex personality and a capability of feelings along the whole spectrum of human emotions unlike the strict feminine or masculine stereotypes, would feel like a betrayal of myself and women as a whole, and I would feel like I was letting those people promoting the misogyny of the stereotype win. I won’t let them. I will fight to the death on this issue. I am not transgender. Even until a couple of years ago, in my mid-twenties, I used to sometimes say that I wished there weren’t men and there weren’t women, and that people just didn’t have a sex or sexual intercourse. I am not non-binary, and I'm not non-binary just because I stopped shaving my legs. My hair is normal and natural, and I grew it when I became a woman. It is normal pattern of hair growth for women of my race, so though it defies our cultural standards, it’s very feminine. I do not have a gender identity. I am not androgynous. I am not gender nonconforming. Gender is a made-up construct. I am simply a woman. I am not asexual. I have just been traumatized by the constant objectification of women and shallowness of many.
Nobody is non-binary. It doesn’t even make any sense. But if what “non-binary” people are trying to say is that as a human being they are more than a stereotype, then I am totally with them. I have more self-respect as a woman than to betray who I am and my womanhood. I have more healthy pride in my being than to call myself “non-binary” because I don’t fit a stereotype. As a woman, I am tired of being continuously disrespected, oversexualized and objectified and treated as less than human.
It’s been a process throughout my 20’s to get to a place where I can call myself a woman without cringing a little inside. For this reason, I have to fight for women. I have to. I have no choice but to fight for woman against the false notion that any of us are born in the wrong body. We are not born wrong. I am not born wrong. Women have been betrayed too often throughout history, and I will not offer you an apology for refusing to betray them once again!
