trans kids [word vomit]

i guess reading about trans kids hurts so much because like… that would’ve been me. at six or seven, when i was sobbing at the thought of having to wear pink? at twelve or thirteen, when i was so deeply ashamed of my period and would’ve given anything in the world to get rid of it, when i was purposefully cutting my hair and experimenting with my clothes to try and pass as a boy in public, fantasing about someone calling me ‘him’? that would’ve been me. like, maybe it goes deeper than “playing with barbies or trucks”. maybe the trauma of girl children and gay children is deeper than that. i didn’t know i was gay until i was almost seventeen years old. i could’ve been on hormones for years. i could’ve had top surgery. if i had been born ten years later and my parents had been informed enough to notice the patterns in my behaviour, if medical intervention had been a real option, i would’ve been living as a boy before i knew so many basic fundemental truths about myself, such as that i love women and that being a woman doesn’t have to involve getting fucked and owned by a man, and that i can’t protect myself from the seeming inevitability of male violence by transitioning because trans men experience male violence too. it was never just “oh, but i like cars”. but, you know, whatever. it’s not wrong to conclude that trans identity in children is about more than toys or stereotypes of whatever. mostly i think it’s about the complex trauma of being female, gay, or gender nonconforming, which is more than any child even has the language to explain, nevermind the years of processing it takes to get to a point of understanding what happened to you and why you want to escape from it. innate gender just isn’t real. gender being something internal that children experience just can’t be real. if it is, it means we’re all destined for one of two societal roles, that those of us (like me) who eventually settled for the oppressed role that we were assigned are actually where we belong in the social order. because if gender isn’t stereotypes, if it isn’t the dress or the car, and it isn’t exploitation and domination, then what is it? what are these kids experiencing? why is it markedly similar, if not literally identical, to the kind of pain that non-trans gay and gnc children experienced growing up? why does nobody care about that pain when it isn’t funnelling millions of dollars into the pockets of gender specialists — why does nobody give a shit about the experiences of people like me unless we can be easily categorized as being the opposite sex, because that honestly doesn’t really challenge gender or heterosexuality or any other dominant instution, since transgenderism in children is literally just diagnosing their discomfort with these instutions as an anomaly and a medical issue? right? because these kids are going to be on blockers and hrt. which is the other thing. kids at six and seven aren’t being medically treated, but they will be, at ten, or eleven. is that enough time to unpack everything? are they old enough to understand what gender is, and what life can be like as their assigned gender, ie, taking into account the complexities of being gay or gnc? in fact, are these kids who are so woke and so understanding of being gender being told, actually, that gender is an exploitative social construct that’s totally arbitrary and doesn’t mean anything? or are they being told gender is the core of their personality? or are they being told gender is the roadmap of their life? in conclusion i think trans people mindlessly support paediatric transition because they’re jealous of children who have the ability to postpone puberty, because people who transition as children pass better. i don’t think it’s about the well-being of these kids, about evidence that transitioning them is necessary, about the terror of those of us who were trans kids but never pursued anything medical and turned out to be happy and proud gay adults. which is the thing. trans people look at trans kids and see their past selves. reidentified and detransitioned people look at trans kids and see our past selves. the kids who end up happy with their transition are lauded and praised. ones who end up with irreversible health problems, unwanted physical changes, and more sexuality issues than they started with are collateral damage. regardless of what the ratio is between these two groups, it’s always going to be that way.  so i guess all i can say is that it was less than one hundred years ago when alan turing was famously forced to submit to injections of estrogen as a direct punishment for being in a homosexual relationship, a conviction which led to his eventual suicide. and i guess what i mean by that is maybe it’s still the case that sometimes being ignored and forgotten is a small price to pay for the luxury of staying hidden from the prying eyes of a hostile medical establishment.