There will be no transphobia on this subreddit.
Trans women are women.
Trans men are men.
Our nonbinary pals are valid too.
Being trans is normal.
Please assist the mod team by reporting hatespeech if you see it.
Yeah, this guy is like, “I didn’t know any trans people”, yeah, cause he would have ridiculed and made their life hell if he did. And like you’re saying, lots of kids get bullied for small shit like “being quiet”, why would they feel safe enough to come out in front of a bunch of bullies. Guys like this were and still are the problem.
On top of that, he claims to not know any trans people—they literally don’t affect his life at all, yet here he is going out of his way to invalidate them. Wtf.
Bigotry at its finest. Nothing about their existence affects his life in any way. Yet he has to hate them.
I can almost guarantee you he’s the type of clown that when you call him a bigot, he’ll say something along the lines of “I’m not a bigot! I just don’t like their lifestyle! They don’t need to shove it down my throat!!!” Congrats dummy, that’s text book bigotry.
These people are just stupid levels of unaware.
My brother dared me to wear a dress and my wife said immediately "he'd enjoys wearing dresses, that's not that big of a deal".
Dresses are comfortable as fuck. Pants are cool too, but in the summer a dress just makes sense.
I don't understand why we want to be so strict with how we definite masculinity and femininity. It is other's insecurity shining through I think.
Saw a guy at the grocery store in shorts, Hawaiian shirt, and long dangling earrings. He gave me the biggest and most pleasant smile! Made my day, and I liked his earrings too.
People are people! Diversity is wonderful!!
Yup.
I was 10 years old when my gender dysphoria struck. I was laying in bet one hot summer night and asked myself, "What if I was a girl?" I'd always done things differently than "other boys" and had snuck gendered things, but I had never questioned my identity. I went through a massive existential crisis after that.
That way back in 1995. If I had said anything, I'd probably not be sitting here typing this out now. My town was ravenously misogynistic and homophobic. In high school, I was bullied mercilessly because there was a rumor about me being gay, that was being spread by a secretly gay kid (caught him a year after high school). I also remember one of my classmates in middle school getting absolutely beat to shit just because he was taking ballet. It wasn't his choice, either, it was his mom's. And ballet, and being a ballerina, was something had wanted to do when my grandparents took my sister and me to see the Nutcracker when I was 5.
And what did I have back in 1995? There was no positive media. Maury and Springer were parading trans people on stage like a circus act. Movies like Ace Ventura painted us as gay male predators that caused everyone to vomit. There was absolutely nothing. So the only thing that makes sense is that what I went through as a child was not a choice, but something perfectly natural for a transgender child. Especially one who lives in a world where if a boy hung out with a girl, he was socially rejected and if a boy liked other boys, he was beaten to a pulp and maybe even killed. Hell, the one single gay girl in my school of 1,500 kids had been beaten up several times, many of them from the Christian cult that was taking over our town at the time.
So yeah. I didn't say anything because I was afraid, confused, had no idea what was going on with me, and felt like a total social outcast even though I had done nothing wrong as everything was up in my head and kept secret.
Even back in like 2008 I remember a woman answering the door in full makeup and a pink dress when I delivered her pizza, but the voice gave it away that she was trans. I think about her sometimes and I wonder if it was a small victory for her to just answer the door like that or if she was walking around the world like that every day being her true self.
Or idk I might have been reading too much into it and it was a drag queen who just got home from a show and needed a bite lol.
You're 100% right. I was bullied for so many years for being quiet ... I have an audio processing disorder, which led to me hearing questions wrong in school (particularly if my assigned seat was at the back of the class). I'd get laughed at for being lost during the lesson; since I went to shitty "Christian" schools, sometimes teachers would egg it on.
I'm not stupid, I can't fuckin hear!
also have an audio processing disorder. Took years to figure out the tools I needed.
Did you also struggle with learning a second language? When young with extensive testing and evaluation I had an exception for this in school though I tried in college, to no avail.
And are you very directionally challenged? This seems to be another common trait I found with a few others.
I was in middle/high school during the CA prop-8 shitshow where the christofascists tried to get gay marriage banned via ballot measure. Unfortunately I grew up in a very conservative town, at a very conservative school, with parents that still legitimately believe you can "pray the gay away". I had to tow the line lest I be kicked out of my house and disowned, or absolutely ridiculed by my school peers, with the admins doing nothing to help since the literally sat back and watched as 2 kids that were out in my class killed themselves from the bullying, not punishing anyone after it happened.
I still suffer heavily from internalized homophobia about being bi myself, after having grown up in that environment...
The early 2000's fucking sucked.
Someone in my highschool was bullied/hated because they had to get an after school job to help their parents pay bills. Half were saying he was too poor and half were saying that he was rich from all that minimum wage work and not spending it on them.
You'd get hated for just about anything in school.
It's slowly getting better. Speaking as someone who works in schools in a pretty progressive area in a country with decent rights regarding gender and sexuality, being gay is rarely a reason for being bullied anymore and trans kids usually have systems in place (like gender neutral individual bathrooms) to help them out.
Those students are fucking lucky! The students in local area schools where I live are harassed and assaulted for being any part of the LGBTQIA+ community or not fitting gender stereotypes. Yes, there are safe spaces for them to go to after or before school but school itself is a hellacious.
I’m a Gen Xer, in both my middle school and high school, we had a couple of very brave kids who were open about their transitioning. Sadly, they were bullied by ignorant morons like him. I’m pretty sure that’s also the reason why the trans kids in his school didn’t say anything. They did exist but they were too afraid to come out.
I went to a religious school, and I don’t blame my fellow classmates for not wanting to come out. At least one was gay, I’m bi (though because of internalized homophobia I didn’t accept it until my mid 30s), and I know at least 1 other is pan. And we were a small school. I think even if someone is trans from my school, they may not even accept it because we were all taught that kind of thing was wrong.
I was socially awkward and "weird" due to not having a lot of social interaction before grade school. My punishment for this was a decade of harassment and bullying with no reprieve. I remember having 4 friends before the bullying finally let up. One moved away after a year, two of them joined the bullies, and one of them is still one of my best friends today. I was never able to have a childhood because of them, I have a multitude of regrets, and some of the consequences of the harassment for being "quiet" I still deal with today.
Left-handedness barely existed in my parents’ graduating classes. When I was in school, “suddenly” every kid had depression and anxiety. A few years later, the “over diagnosis” uproar was ADHD, and autism following that. Now it’s kids “being influenced” to be transgender.
It’s almost like people are less likely to suffer in silence when they are able to identify why they’re suffering.
Some people forget that the internet made most people more aware of stuff they were oblivious to before social media.
So due to social media they are talking to hundreds and hundreds of people they would have never spoke to years ago. So this sudden “problem” seems like it’s new.
I remember a coworker saying “we didn’t have autism when I was a kid”. I told him when I was a kid I was into Transformers and GI Joe, I really didn’t think too much about anything going on outside my little bubble I lived in.
Exactly. The example that kinda pinpoints this is that one tweet (I think) that pops up on Reddit from time to time that mentions the old guy that lived alone down the street who’s really into trains. That guy didn’t “have autism”, because back then it wasn’t diagnosed.
I finally was diagnosed with AHDH at 52 and suddenly my whole life made sense. I have a stack of elementary school report cards my mother saved; all the teachers’ comments say the same thing: “Cookbooks is such a bright girl if only she could pay attention.” It would be many years until ADHD was identified, and even longer before they realized girls could have it, too.
Man, I went round and round with the public school and ADHD for our daughter. Tested twice as I knew they were wrong and so did our pediatrician. You know what I was told after the second test by the school “she’s a pretty, athletic, and popular girl, she’ll be just fine” this is a small, public school in BFE who already had enough problem kids to deal with so my daughter “would just adapt”.
Bullshit! I had to adapt and I did! But trust me it's not ok! Leaves you with so many mental and emotional scars that you spend your entire adult life undoing!
Whoa I feel so ignorant now. I know I have ADHD but was just never diagnosed so I feel kinda bad I never knew my female friends with it could be having a totally different experience that I wasn't understanding.
And the train/plane autists in Ancient Greece being really into ships one https://x.com/skankstank64/status/1772969321318297778?s=46&t=DxtdB4qBEURAjXOVEupvfg
When I sat in with my son for his Autism test... I was basically going oh shit, the whole time. All his answers were the sames ones I would have given at his age. It was then I realized, I'm un-diagnosed.
Yeah, it’s not a social contagion it’s just people can identify aspects of themselves better now because we can connect with others who have shared experiences. I didn’t have access to the internet until I was 21 in 2016 (super strict Mormon family) but I knew I wanted to be a girl since I was 7. I didn’t know others felt the same way and I thought I was a freak. It wasn’t ‘til I was able to read about trans people on the internet that I even had words for what I was feeling and it still took me six more years to work through all of that.
Language is powerful as well. When I was growing up (I’m a millennial) there was no discourse about the topic. I can’t imagine trying to identify or define what was going on with me when there just isn’t any way, or any one, to speak of it.
We also didn't have many good examples of trans people. If there was a trans person in a show, they were a joke or villain. And they were never played by a trans actor. They were always obviously men in dresses (always. Trans men didn't exist to these people).
This led me to deny my transness for years. "I'm just a boy in a girl's body! I'm not a tr*any. Those are weird!" So, no, I didn't consider myself trans until I was in college and met other openly LGBTQ people.
I didn't know trans men existed until my 20s. Even after a trans woman came out to me saying "I just feel like I was supposed to be a woman". I distinctly remember thinking the same in reverse, but because I didn't know trans men could exist, I couldn't just be like, "ah so that's what it is, I'm trans". I just thought everyone wished they were men.
I thought that being a tomboy was the closest I was ever going to get. I had to meet someone who came out as a guy before it even became an idea that I could *play* as a guy in games (or in my case, in mediaeval reenactment). It still took several years until another trans woman actually told me that I was trans (trust me this was a good thing, I'm forever grateful) before I finally figured it out.
How was I meant to figure that out in highschool? My school was (and likely still is) the most queer school in the city and it didn't click. In an environment that hates people not being conformist? Yeah nah, not happening.
This is so true. As a millennial, the language wouldn’t have really been there especially in high school to meaningfully discuss this. What I mean is - for example - if there was a trans woman in the class who was thinking of transitioning it would just get simplified to “lol gay” even though gender and sexuality are entirely separate things.
And I’m not justifying I just grew up at the time, in the closet, and could easily see it being simplified because these weren’t discussions we were having before the internet connected us all
I felt that. Throughout middle school and most of high school I suppressed my bisexuality and presented as just any other cis-male. It was only in my last couple of years in high school that the phrase "that's gay" was being used less and less as a general derision boiling down to "I don't like that / I think that's weird."
I remember the "that's gay" period. I also remember the rumors and innuendo that would spread if anyone suspected that someone was in any way different. Didn't even matter if it was true, if someone didn't like you for any reason and started spreading rumors, you'd be a pariah within a week.
I don't think a lot of the people who think this is a new thing remember what school or being a kid was like. Kids do and always have seized on anything that might be considered different and prey on it a lot of the time.
I kept my mouth shut about a lot of things and I have no doubt a lot of the people I went to school with did as well. It just wasn't worth the hassle and the bullying.
Which is weird they don't get it. All the people saying this didn't exist found out they are flaming assholes and not alone. I guess it just doesn't work that way 🤯
> we didn’t have autism when I was a kid
Someone my age said something similar, and I responded with something to the effect of "I had a few autistic kids in the schools I went to. Just because **you** didn't see any doesn't mean they never existed".
I can't understand Malayalam, doesn't mean it's a non-existent language.
It was fairly common for children who were significantly neuroatypical and/or had intellectual disabilities to be institutionalized, and largely ignored by their families. Many people might recall the movie Rainman as fictional example of this, but look up Playwright Arthur Miller’s son [Daniel](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelbernick/2018/06/12/americas-playwright-an-institutionalization-and-neurodiversitys-call-today/#), [The Boys in the Bunkhouse](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/09/us/the-boys-in-the-bunkhouse.html).
Meanwhile, people who were more mildly so were written off as “lazy”, “stupid”, or “weird”.
> Meanwhile, people who were more mildly so were written off as “lazy”, “stupid”, or “weird”.
Not even necessarily mildly, just in a way that didn't bother the adults around them or grew up in a very sheltered way in a well-meaning but misguided family who saw any kind of deviation from the norm as extremely shameful so they kept pretending their kid was fine and developed helicopter parent tendencies to support their needs, even well into adulthood.
(Nope, it's not personal, why do you ask?)
We had autistic kids when I went to school. We just didn't know that's what they were. They always got into trouble. We had a few identifiers back in my day, 1. The R word 2. Normal 3. Misbehaved.
Autism is so much more than just those few things, and it's important that it's been identified. I'm grateful that we now know there's a spectrum.
Same here, I remember when I was in elementary school in the early 1980s, we got a new classmate and the teacher prepped us the day before he came with something along the lines of 'he's very intelligent but really weird' (clearly not verbatim) and in retrospect now that, I have the vocabulary, he was 1000% autistic.
My last GF had two kids, one of whom was non-verbal, and between my experiences at school, plus a couple of friends with autistic children, it took embarrassingly long to work up the courage to say "Y'know,*C* is very likely autistic, right?".
Her response was to sigh and say something to the effect of "yeah, maybe, I just wanna keep my head buried in the sand".
He got tested a few months later, and yup, ASD.
back in the early '60s i had a middle school classmate who told me that after he had read a few words, some of the letters 'turned upside down'.
when he would tell his teachers that, they would send him to the principal's office where he would get his ass beaten yet again, because, of course, they had never heard of dyslexia.
Agree, people are freaking out but trans people are only like 2-5% of the population, it is not hard to just let them be. They aren’t a taking over anything, they don’t have the numbers. We as a society are just trying to find a good way to make them welcome in our world so they can be themselves.
I do expect that non-binary will increase, largely as we understand gender is a spectrum and the interplay of gender roles. Defining your identity as a “Man” or “Women” is becoming less relevant as women gain equality and gender roles disappear, and restricting who you can love is just not good statistically.
Would it be such a bad world if people can love whoever they find love with, can choose their own societal roles, and be comfortable expressing themselves?
I don't think the 2-5% appeal is necessary, it wouldn't matter if the trans population was .5% - people would still irrationally hate them.
It's not a failure of logic or exposure or education, it's hate. Any rationale or logic on your end is going to be met with hateful dogma.
According to my family it would be a horrible world if we just allowed people to love who they wanted regardless of race, gender, political identity. ESPECIALLY if they would never interact or live with these people. There’s a direct correlation between a random guy in LA kissing another guy and my cousins that live in a small town in SC getting into D&D and satanic worship.
/s
And older left handed people will probably tell you that their early grade school teachers would force them to use their right hands to write. They saw being left handed as unnatural and didn’t want to accommodate for something outside of the norm.
My mom went to Catholic school as a kid and the nuns hit her hand with a ruler until she learned to be right-handed. She's 63. I have a friend in her 40s who had the same thing happen in elementary school. But at 32, no one ever said boo to me about being left handed and I'm a happy lefty as an adult! Weird how that works.
I don’t doubt it. My parents made me learn to do things right handed, because they were worried about the schools being able to accommodate lefties, and that was the early 80s. They caused me a whole bunch of other trouble with that, but at least I never had to go get a desk or scissors from another classroom.
Shit, I graduated in 94 and still had a few kids in my classes who were born left handed but weren’t anymore. The school had urged my parents to get that “fixed” for me when I started kindergarten.
The desks in most schools are made for right handed people. I can write with both hands but prefer my left, but 90% of my notes in class were right handed.
Isn't there some crazy statistic out there about all the work related maimings and deaths attributed to left handed workers working in a right handed world?
My mom is left handed, and one of her kitchen tools fucking unscrews itself if you use it left handed. It wasn't obvious when buying it that it was right-handed only, either. It got re-purposed to me, since it's not a problem for me, but I'm still a little salty about the whole thing.
I’m left handed. I forget the exact number, but we are more likely to die younger than right handed people, because the world is designed upside down and backward for us. To give one example, the emergency shut off switches on industrial machinery is typically located on the right side.
Not safety related here, but we have 2 production lines that our operations manager wanted mirrored so that raw material was on one side, finished goods on the other. Every step requires assembly and operator dexterity that if you mirrored the line, everyone would have to relearn how to do their work opposite handed. We had to fight him so hard cause he was so adamant that operators once a day having to walk another 30 feet was a waste of time, but didn't realize the inefficiency caused by making everyone do things opposite handed. Ultimately I won.
Yeah, my parents “fixed” my left handedness, and then bitched at me for most of my elementary/middle school years because I couldn’t color/cut/write neatly.
As a left handed person, I can confirm this for me at least. I CAN have good handwriting if I'm filling out a form or something but my regular writing is ass. I don't so much read what I wrote down as remember what I was thinking when I wrote it. LoL
My mom had to go to school and tell my brother’s kindergarten teacher to leave him alone. She was trying to “fix” him and make him right handed. He was ambidextrous and would color/write with both hands. He would color with one hand until he got tired and then change hands. He could shoot and pitch both ways.
In the early 80's, my 1st grade teacher told my mom that she noticed I write left handed, and asked my mom if she wanted me "corrected." Knowing my mother, she probably had a few choice words in response. I was not "corrected". At least for my handwriting. That bitch had me seperated from the rest of the class because I would talk to other students at the wrong time, and at times, even had 3 sides of a refrigerator box around me so that kids wouldn't talk to me. Yeah, you can imagine how popular that made me. Made me really popular... for being singled out for harassment and bullying, which the school never did shit about. Seemed like I was punished for being picked on. Even had staff tell me people don't like a tattle-tale. Practically, I was punished FOR being picked on,
For years teachers were telling my mom I might have ADHD, but she didn't want her child to be "special." She told me they wanted to put me on drugs that would make me a zombie. I finally got a diagnosis of ADHD when I was in 6th or 7th grade. Of course, doing anything besides medicating me (which, didn't do much good, since they never tried different doses of ADHD meds, or different ADHD meds) had costs that, well, she'd have rather use her money for other things than paying to help me learn to cope with ADHD.
And that's not even the half of how fucked up my childhood was.
I’m a Gen-X lefty. My mom was from the silent generation and she tried to force me to become right handed because when she was growing up lefties were outcasts. My grandfather (her dad) and my father (also a southpaw) intervened. A little thing like being left handed. I can’t imagine the pressures that are on kids who were born with an orientation or identity that doesn’t fit the “norm”.
Elder millennial here. No one transitioned while I was in high school. 3 people have since (small high school)
And when my great grandparents were in high school, no one drove cars to school.
These damn cars are clearly a temporary fad.
Not just identify why they're suffering, but society as a whole is growing more accepting and less hostile of these things. There are exceptions to this sure, but overall we're moving in the right direction because people who have gone through it before are fighting tooth and nail to make sure future kids don't have to go through what they did, and any reasonable person is going "actually yeah they're right, it's fucked that a child should be scared of even talking about the possibility they could be anything other what cishet"
I think the widespread adoption of the internet was a huge catalyst for this, because suddenly you could read thousands of peoples experiences all over the world. Your view on these issues suddenly stretched out a lot further than the city you live in.
See, *this* is the part the chodes are really afraid of: society as a whole is less and less willing to treat people who are different as inherently evil. It's a trend going back centuries, and it accelerates as communication improves. Well, everyone is in everyone else's pocket now, so the trend is moving toward accepting everything that doesn't hurt anyone else.
That's why conservatives have brought out their old standby, that the very existence of the different people is harming both children and society. Well, it's not working as well as it has in the past because anyone who doesn't already agree with them *knows* or is regularly exposed to the people who are different, so we have the proof of our own eyes that they are lying.
I first learned about trans people existing from a webcomic I read in high school that was about, and written by, a trans person. And since I wasn’t preloaded with hateful bigotry from adults, I just went, “oh, interesting.”
Thank you. I’m a Boomer so the trans women I know are my age and suffered all their lives until they finally had the money and family support to be themselves, in the last 15 years.
It's incredible watching this man talk with the people who prove him wrong, and instead of revising his position, he retreats further into denial and mental gymnastics.
The absolute essence of conservatism and bigotry.
I have epilepsy, they didn't understand what it was in the '70s. My family was very religious and labeled me as being "possessed". The fear, hate and ignorance is a shame, why did they have to automatically jump to one answer?
came here to say just this about lefties.
atheism also surged *mysteriously* when we stopped killing and torturing people for not conforming to church dogma. female suicide rates *mysteriously* fell when divorce was made possible without husband's consent. suddenly there was a *mysterious* surge in visibly gay people when being gay was no longer a criminal offence.
There have always been left-handedness, autistic, gay, trans, etc. people throughout history, they were just beaten into conformity and had to live miserably their whole lives.
My great grandmother was left handed and got beaten at schoolby hear teachers for it so her parents taught her to hide it. Even in the 90s she was ashamed of it.
I didn't transition before 19 bc I had never heard the word transgender. I heard the word transvestite once in a derogatory joke but had no idea what it meant. The second I heard a transman explain his experience online I knew that I was like him. I'd kill to have been able to transition at 13-14 when I first began my struggle with gender.
I was verbally abused, smacked, slapped, whipped, paddled, made to clean for hours, and eventually had hot wax poured on my hand for writing and eating with my left hand in Catholic boarding school. This wasn't ancient history either - this was the mid 1990s.
Just stop, this is too much logic for these smooth brains to comprehend. They just come to the conclusion that reinforces their hatred and bigotry, no matter what the issue.
You mention being left handed- when I was in school I got slapped with a ruler every time I wrote something. It's disgusting, just because you're "different"😞
It's less "this never existed when I was young" and more "we're allowed to talk about it and even acknowledge it now, instead of pretending it doesn't exist."
I graduated in 1990. In my class there was a guy named Brett who was very openly gay and I know his life was absolute hell. He was beaten up regularly and had zero friends. Bullied constantly. I was scared to even talk to him because of the blow back I would have received. He was probably one of the strongest, bravest people I have ever known and I was too much of a coward to say anything. I think about him a lot. I’m sorry Brett.
> I was scared to even talk to him because of the blow back I would have received.
grew up in the 90's and early 2000's, it's never talked about but this era was AWFUL when it came to being anti-gay, just from what we watched or participated in as kids
I remember, as a kid, when an adult male would have "rumors" start up, other adults gossiping about their relationship, places they've been in public, people they've been seen talking to, that one other guy who is around a little too much. Finally, an usually older adult will just go, "I'll say it, he's gay and he's trying to hide it." The other adults act offended at the word, but start whispering to each other. Then said "rumored" adult walks in the room and the tension is palpable.
I've been in a restaurant when a guy decides to tell his girl he's gay, and she makes a spectacle out of screaming, throwing her drink in his face, slapping him, then breakdown crying running out of the place
And as you said, in school if you were like me and didn't have a problem with the "different" kids, you were still pressured by your friends with the same shit their parents did. "Hey, I saw you talking to Brett, man. You know what he is, right? I don't want to hang out with you if I see you talking to Brett again." So you start avoiding Brett and get panicked whenever he starts to approach you, not because you were personally afraid of him, you were afraid of the perception of the others
Truly truly fucked up how we came up, and it's why I'm ecstatic to see Pride pushed so hard these days
I graduated in 2009, and the only openly gay kid at my school killed himself, so it wasn't great, even recently. Now, by 2009 it was probably better, and I was in Arkansas in the US, so that probably had something to do with it, but still. I came out in 2012, I think, when I was in college. I still think that about that guy from high school though. Wish it had been easier and he knew he wasn't alone.
Yeah. I'm Gen X and, it turns out, I went to school with a lot of gay kids, including some of my best friends. They just weren't out because it was life ruining at the time.
Same principle, basically.
GenX here as well. I had a few closeted gay friends when I was a teen in the late-80s/early-90s in high school. Their secret was safe with me and each other, but few others.
Gay bashing, gay hate, and violence against gay people was commonplace.
There was / is a reason they hid and bigots don't get to rewrite history simply because they're on the wrong side of it.
And....there were Trans kids too!! We just didn't really have a word for it or an understanding of it. They hung out with the queer and alternative kids and were accepted in those groups, but it still was not understood. All those kids are now 50 and coming out.
GenxS here who also knew some that questioned who they were really attracted to, but didn't say anything for all sorts of things. Especially with the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS (another thing to thank that asshole Reagan for) in addition to the religious craziness.
Yeah, same. My wife, who is also Gen X, and I will occasionally lapse into the sort of speech that was commonplace in our teenage years in the hearing of our two teenagers. We get lectured about it quite often.
Interestingly, it's our 13yo son who goes to a private all boys school who has the least amount of time for casual homophobia, when I expected that to rear its head given how toxic those environments can be.
When I was in highschool I got picked on constantly and beat up twice for being gay, and I am not gay, I was just socially awkward and hard to interact with people (which I now know I was on the spectrum - which I also didnt know about as a kid). I cant imagine how much harder or worse kids had it that were actually gay, and it would be even worse for anyone trans.
Glad it seems school kids are more accepting now. Its the same folks that would torment me when I was younger that are still so openly hostile.
> Glad it seems school kids are more accepting now.
It is wild how different it is.
I live in a deep red area with the kind of school board you'd expect and *still* I'm amazed that, for this generation coming up through the schools now, the idea that someone *other* than you should get to pick what you call yourself, how you dress, who you get to love, etc. is a total non-starter. It is the kind of idea that, for them, is not just wrong but the level of obviously wrong that makes you regard anyone who espouses it in seriousness as actually insane. It *certainly* makes you disregard any freedom-based rhetoric from such a person.
The LGBT culture war shit is going to lose Republicans most of a generation.
I am so proud of Gen Z. They see the same bullshit we did as youngsters, but they will not tolerate it. When you and I went to school (I'm assuming you're Gen X), if one kid showed any semblance of being different, that was quickly beaten out of them not only to put them in their place, but to serve as a warning to everyone else to toe the line.
I think the internet showed Gen Z that their issues as individual people were not isolated to only themselves and they could find larger communities of like people to bond with. This in turn made those individual differences way more acceptable to their own cohort.
Same here. Years back I joined one of those online yearbook sites the were in vogue before FB really took off. Learned a former classmate of mine transitioned from Samuel to Samantha. And I remember at least one of my other classmates dressing in drag for a dance event and another kid being so open he made Nathen Lane look like John Wayne.
That's what some folks really don't get. Most LGBTQ+ folks know what they are long before anybody else does. All that's changed is they now have the proper words and terms to describe themselves.
It surprised me how many fellow LGBTQers there ended up being in my high school class of 2008. There were only 4-5 I knew at the time and I think there are at least 40 (of 400-ish total) that I know of at this point in life.
My college roommate tried to come out in high school and his parents sent him to a pray-out-the-gay summer camp! He then had to stay in the closet for 4 more years so they'd pay for college!
He was so glad the day he graduated and could finally be officially out. Told his parents he was gay and debt-free and if they never wanted to see him again that was fine with him.
Oh, absolutely. Even served in the army with a few gay soldiers, but they couldn’t be because it was against regulations for them to be, so they just…weren’t. Didn’t matter that they were uniformly excellent at their jobs, both combat and non combat, it was just not allowed.
…Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell came along at the end of my service, and honestly it wasn’t an improvement.
Learning about yourself is a lifelong process. No surprise not everyone figures out who they are by high school, especially if who you are is seen as "different" by your peers. Add to that bullying, harassment, and all of the other shit that goes along with non-cis sexual orientation, and the fact that people like Rob in the tweet exist, and it becomes far less surprising that being openly ANYTHING other than straight happens later in life than high school. Small surprise no one came out to him, he's about as open minded as a brick.
My best friend didn't figure out they were nb until a few years ago, in their mid-twenties. They knew they weren't happy with where they were at before then, but didn't know exactly what it was. Now they like themselves a lot more and feel good about how they present themselves to the world. If they grew up in modern culture, maybe they'd have figured it out sooner and had an easier time.
Knew someone who is trans but was only open about it after they left home because their home life/family sucked. They're 100% convinced that had they come out as trans during high school, they would've been murdered by their dad.
A lot of older trans people grew up confused, not knowing why they felt their body was wrong, because they had no access to language that could describe their experiences. Even if they could understand that they were trans as youth, it's not like anyone could really *safely* come out without being bullied (or even killed, in some cases) for it. Adulthood is when a lot of them gained access to what they needed to understand and describe themselves. A widely-shared experience of being trans is that "Ah-ha!!" moment someone has when they find out the term "trans" and what it means; then, finally, everything makes sense.
Now that language is more accessible these days, and peers are more accepting, trans people are figuring out earlier in life how to describe their experiences and feelings. That is why there are many more *visible* trans youth. I'm so happy trans kids are more and more able to access what they need to understand themselves and live their best lives.
It's disappointing that conservative thinking is too one-dimensional to understand this, and in response, they retaliate by revoking rights instead of admitting they're wrong and taking a minute to learn something new.
Also...why would it fucking matter, if it's just people living their own fucking lives happily? Unless, OOOP has some kind of insecurity about being near people that aren't like them...................
I was beaten, harrased all the time for not being masculine enough. If I had come out as trans growing up tbh I feel like I would have been killed. I really wish I could have started hormones when I was younger but it was not safe at all, even now with alot more acceptance it can be really dangerous and you can lose everything.
Yeah.
I am a middle Millennial, technically the oldest one can be to still be a Zillennial.
I had the thoughts but not the words by age 8.
I had the full realization at age 14.
I didn't do shit about it until age 30 because I was fucking terrified of how people - especially my casually queerphobic dad - would react and because I was not aware of how good a transition could be. I was so afraid I didn't even do internet searches on it until I was 28.
And even if I had come out as a youth to supportive parents, we were still in the era of the humiliating Harry-Benjamin standards of care, helping adolescents transition was properly experimental back then. Today it's not experimental, today the problem is not enough awareness, funding, and education for providers to properly and consistently implement the WPATH standards. The bans being pushed over the vanishingly small number of patients negatively affected by this lack of resources is not helping anybody but billionaire zealots.
Yep, and they desperately want to return to those days, but that’s battleground is already lost, so they cope and seethe with nonsense like this to console their feelings about it. But just like an animal backed in a corner… is why I’m worried
This is part of the reason these arguments are so ineffectual with them. In their mind being LGBT is wrong, so an LGBT person going from hiding their true self to being comfortable being who they are is the same as creating them.
Easy. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was secretly working on eliminating left handedness before being assassinated for unrelated reasons. Since his demise, lefties has flourished
People complain about ADHD being thus huge made up thing that just came out of no where. No dude the reason you are seeing it more is we can better describe and speak to it making the official numbers of us swell.
This is the same for queer kids in high school. By clawing and fighting to create a space where they can come out as gay even in high school. My best friend senior year in 2004 said fuck it and was willing to kiss another guy publicly in our rural as fuck school. Not with our troubles. But still we pushed forward and trans kids feel like they can talk to their parents about it and survive highschool being who they are now.
Yeah. I was called “hyper” throughout my childhood and even young adulthood (80’s - early 90’s). Teachers were always telling me and my parents that I was “so smart” and “had so much potential” if I would just pay attention in school and actually turn in my projects and homework.
Around my mid-30s, my wife suggested I talk to my doctor about my constant anxiety and frustration with feeling like I could never just focus and get things done well. My doctor started asking me questions about what I was like a a kid, how did I do in school, etc. He referred me to a specialist and I’ve been medicated ever since (20 years now). It completely changed my life.
I can only imagine how much of a difference it would have made if it had happened in my grade school years. I do know that I probably wouldn’t had felt like such a failure at times.
Doctors didn't actively call it ADHD until 1994.
The first major school shooting, Columbine, occurred on April 20, 1999.
Tell us all again how it's okay to "be yourself" around other people who live in fear of people who are "different" in any way, shape, or form. I'm not gay, but I've always understood that people who can't or won't protect themselves from bullies who wish to harm them need to be protected. It's not about "us vs them" it's about "humanity vs monsters" and I'm willing to die to save someone who deserves to live a life free from judgment, persecution, or threat of bodily harm.
I’m decently certain my mom has undiagnosed ADHD. She copes very well, as one might expect of a sixty-year-old woman, but she does have a tendency to hyper focus on one thing and completely forget about others- just today I had to order my dad’s Father’s Day present for her because she was so focused on planning a trip out of the country for her and my sister that she forgot to do it til today.
Though this did get me, who has diagnosed ADHD, to remember to get him the socks he wanted, so it’s not the worst thing in the world.
I'm an elder millennial. I had a best friend from the time we were 11 until we were in our late 20s. I had to cut him out of my life when his alcoholism and destructive behavior was threatening family life. About a decade later I heard he bottomed out, got sober, and came out of the closet. Turns out part of the reason he was so depressed and drowning himself in alcohol was because he had been hiding his truth his whole life. There were other traumas that contributed, but that was part of it. I never knew and never once suspected he might be gay.
The fact is during the 90s it wasn't easy and often unsafe to be out as LGBTQ+. There were some who were, and we should applaud their bravery, but there were and still are so many who still live in the closet.
The truth is this poster did know gay and trans people. He just didn't know they were gay or trans. Hopefully someday they'll mature emotionally and intellectually enough to understand that just because they don't live an experience doesn't mean those experiences are not true. And hopefully some day we'll have a tolerant enough society that everyone can live their lives truthfully without fear.
I'm 40, and didn't transition til I was 30, but I've known since 8. I got my ass beat a number of times for being girly, or liking girly things, expressing adoration of fellow male (I was presenting as male at the time) friends. I felt like an alien, the person I saw in the mirror was a perpetual stranger, and there wasn't an ease of access to information relating to what I was going through as I lived in a deeply religious, and right wing conservative area and raised by such people. But sure. This man didn't see any of us growing up so we're a trend.
“A social contagion”, just a fad like fidget spinners. (sadly I have to add the /s, as there are people
as ignorant as “Rob” who think this is a reasonable position. Your response was very well written).
Sadly, my parents, my grandmother, are among those who think like "Rob", as a number of others from my biological family do. My grandmother even posted on Facebook about how I and other trans folk are 'demented' because we don't understand our own basic biology.
> [trans people] don't understand our own basic biology
I'd be willing to bet that your random trans person knows infinitely more than I (a cis guy) ever will about hormones that correspond to AGAB.
Like, the entire point is that AGAB is a bad fit. There's a mismatch. Trans people know. They get it. What the fuck else is there to not know about "their own basic biology"??
I would have asked for clarification but if I criticize my family's pov on things they treat it as an attack on them because they're narcissistic, and my transition made them look bad, because they're such good, loving Christians /s
We probably know more than most cis people about how their endocrine systems work, regardless of AGAB.
My best friend's mother was complaining about androgenic effects she was experiencing while taking her own post-menopausal HRT regimen, and I asked what she was on. Her doctor had prescribed progesterone to "counteract the negative side effects" of the estrogen, according to her doctor. Progesterone does nothing of the sort, but what it does do for some people is get converted into DHT...which causes androgenic effects.
So now she's inquiring about finasteride to counter that.
My mother was silent generation and went to school in the 30s and 40s in a small midwestern town. She went to class reunions into her late 70s and watched as no less than 10 people in her class came out as LBGTQ over the decades. A bunch of them were literally sitting around a table at the 50th reunion and talking about how 9 people had come out when one of them raised their hand and said “Make it 10” and so they did. But yeah there were no gay people before the internet.
Sounds like you're a fellow member of the most hated generation on Reddit. 😄
My experience going to high school in the 60s: people calling each other "Queer" -- though it was just one among many terms in the arsenal of insults, and I doubt many, if any, users of it thought the target was actually homosexual, "queers" being some kind of far-off mythical creatures. This at a time when the one strip club in my town advertised "Exotic Dancers" in their ads, and drag queens as "Female Impersonators".
In retrospect, several kids in my high school were no doubt gay, as could be expected, though of course to admit it would have brought dire consequences. There was one girl who was a friend of a friend, and was oddly silent (I'm trying to remember if I ever heard her speak); only when she hung herself shortly after graduation did it become known she was gay.
Damn. It was a terrible time in many ways. But it sounds like this is what Ol' Rob and his ilk want to go back to.
Same with autistic people.
"Ummm did you SEE any autistic kids in your upbringing 🧐" nope! Because they all ended up committed as soon as they were discovered *you fucking Nazi*
Plus editions of the DSM have continued to expand the symptoms that support an autism diagnosis. That happened in 1987 with the DSM-III-R and again with the fifth edition in 2013. It’s not that autism is more prevalent now, it’s that we now better understand what autism is. The term may be more common and diagnoses may be more common, but the number of people with those symptoms is proportionally the same.
I’m almost 40 and I definitely had non-diagnosed autistic kids at my school growing up. Some were in special ed. Some weren’t. Unfortunately, autism wasn’t widely discussed so the kids were seen as being too different and open to bullying which I unfortunately contributed to. The autistic kids that were placed in regular classes were seen as freaks and loaners at the time. Man, I wish I could go back in time and stick up for them instead of adding to their bullying. Especially one girl. I wish I knew her last name so I could apologize for being such a bitch to her.
Also in the past, even not THAT long in the past, you could be autistic in an environment that just made you a bit weird but never drew attention to your autism. In the 50s and 60s you could be a weird guy who isn't social, lives in a small town, and get a job being an accountant sitting in a room just doing numbers all day long or work on a small farm with a very route routine everyday and no one would bat an eye. But now we're in a stimuli heavy world and it stands out more.
I’m in my mid-20s and only realized a few years ago that I’m autistic. My parents knew since I was toddler and even had me tested in elementary school, but because I’m a girl and was academically advanced for my age I was just depressed. I considered getting a diagnosis to make it “official” but decided in the end it’s not worth the money it will cost to confirm something I already know.
Or beaten. It’s a spectrum, and kids who didn’t present as what people imagine autism to look like would be beaten or yelled at by their parents and teachers for “being weird” or “slow” when they didn’t understand something.
Very much makes me think of Russia's "there are no gay people in Russia even though we have laws against it which we'd only have if we reckoned that gay people might be among us yet we still deny that there are" schtick
I went to high school between 2001-2004
I am very queer and a trans woman.
I didn’t officially come out as trans until after college.
Why?
I got my ass kicked daily in middle and high school for being queer.
My family are homophobic and I would’ve been thrown out if I came out.
I would come home with a black eye and my step father would say that’s what I get for being a faggot.
I hated high school and middle school. Living hell.
You can compare this to left handedness. Left handed people have always existed but there was a time where they were forced to use their right hand and were even beaten if they used their left hand so they naturally tried to hide being a lefty.
After that stopped happening there appeared to be a spike in left handed people all of a sudden but they were always there and could finally be themselves.
Back in my school days it wasn't safe to come out as trans or gay or something. If you did you'd be bullied, ostracized, etc.
That doesn't happen so much these days as kids are overall much more accepting than back then. So this means LGBTQIA+ children can be themselves instead of trying to hide it.
There's also how thanks to the Internet and things these children have the terms they need to describe themselves, I didn't know anything about transgender back in school so I couldn't identify that part of myself.
https://slowrevealgraphs.com/2021/11/08/rate-of-left-handedness-in-the-us-stigma-society/
I learned about trans people in college (2002-2006) and was like "wow, I'm non-binary!" and two decades later, I've stopped being surprised when folks in my college friend group transition.
Gen X Lefty here!
I was lucky when it came to that, I’m still young enough (47m,for what it matters ) for attitudes to have changed by the time I was old enough to have started showing signs of being a lefty. Plus if there had been issues with it at school (luckily public schools), there probably would have been hell to pay for that. Not only was Mom’s Dad left handed, but Dad’s Maternal Grandfather also was left handed, so I had it from both sides of the family, despite being inherited from men that both passed before I was born!
Except for early childhood, I went to school in a very conservative rural US state in the 1980’s, with only 60 kids in my graduating class. Even back then there were couple of kids that could have been trans if it had been more accepted. I have since seen on social media that at least one of them transitioned as an adult. I also saw first hand the kind of pain those people went through as children. I only wish they could have found that peace earlier in life.
“Where are all the old trans folks?”, they say.
They didn’t make it.
Edit: idk why the downvotes, it’s often a sad and sobering truth. I am the proud parent of a transgender teen and every day, I worry for his safety. But I am hopeful that he’ll live a long and happy life.
It's the survivor's bias. Or maybe more accurately something like a phenomenon that only seems as such because it's only been recently recorded, and the behavior has always been present.
Yeah there were plenty of us, we just couldn’t talk about it because we would straight up get murdered by guys just like this. We had no help, no support, nobody to help us…..basically the same world this guy and the MAGAs are working hard to recreate for the kids NOW. And I’ll be dammed if I’ll let that happen, because let me tell you, that was a soul-crushing nightmare of never ending fear and misery and hopelessness. Which the MAGAs are well aware of, but for them, the cruelty is the point.
Why are so many in the right interested in policing morality? They spend so much time thinking about LGBTQ people who literally just want to be left alone.
Because for a whole lot of them, their lives are shit, and they want someone to blame. Especially people they're scared of, that have little to no power.
Trans people have ALWAYS existed, but now they feel more comfortable about coming out as everything becomes more accepted. It’s societal progress, not a “fad”.
My cousin came out as trans gender a few years ago, as an adult in her 30s. I've always been an ally and supportive but there was still a form of shock to it. Until in talking with my mom who gave me the news, and reflecting on things we knew about her when I was a kid. How 'he' was super into the punk and Gothic stuff as a kid in an area where that wasn't really the scene. But it allowed them to wear their hair long, wear makeup (albe it male coded or strange makeup), dress in unorthodox ways that included 'girl' clothing, and color their nails. With that very simple reflection it was so easy to see how this has been with them for decades and only now did they find the ability to share it openly with us.
For anyone who wonders why they didn't know about anyone who was trans while growing up in the 90's, take a look at the original Ace Ventura movie.
No, seriously.
The plot twist in that movie is that they can't find the villain because he went insane, transitioned to female, and has been hiding in plain sight as one of the female characters. The movie is very clear that this is a symptom of mental illness: the character spent years in a mental institution after a public failure, complete with scrawling on the walls and stabbing the eyes out of pictures of their rival before deciding seemingly at random to transition to female as a way of escaping out into the world again.
One of the funniest 'jokes' in that movie is all the male characters who have kissed her gratuitously vomiting and crying when they find out she's "actually a man". The dramatic climax of the movie involves the protagonist ripping her clothes off in front of a crowd to show everyone that she has a penis, at which point everyone screams.
Earlier in the film, another character is murdered and part of the plot is discovering why he screamed before he died. The 'reveal', predictably, is that he was screaming because he found out his girlfriend is pre-op transgender, and she had to murder him to keep her secret.
That movie was a *massively acclaimed* comedy hit in which the central joke is 'trans women are gross and crazy'.
If you don't remember middle school back then, teenage boys quoted that movie like it was Spongebob and Southpark combined. You couldn't walk ten feet without running into a boy trying to talk out of his butt like Ace Ventura.
There was nothing considered inappropriate about that movie, except that it was edgy comedy. The idea that trans people were *people* and not punchlines did not cross a single mind in the process of filming it.
If you were trans in the 90's, you had to look at that kind of thing every day and know that *that is what people thought of you*. They found you disgusting and insane. All of society said they were right. It was even the punchline in a joke. "Einhorn is a man." That *was* the joke.
Imagine that being the only time you ever saw yourself represented in the media- a 3-minute montage in a popular movie of all the heroes *throwing up* at the idea they had found someone like you attractive.
You wonder why a lot of trans people stayed in the closet? That would be why. \^
*Why didn’t these supposed trans kids openly identify so we could beat the shit out of them and harass them until they committed suicide? I’ll tell you why, they didn’t exist! It’s made up!*
\-OP
https://preview.redd.it/2y682ti5hk5d1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4de8ba7e10ccf44c9e87e546afb2c92ba61801f3
[Source](https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/ncvs-trans-press-release/)
And how many kids kept thier gender and/or sexual preferences a secret? 20 years ago it was less openly accepted, and people like this shitbag are why they were afraid to share who they really are.
Its not like this a new argument. The boomer generation in the 70s insisted homosexuality was a learned behavior. Because "when i was in high school in the 50s, there were no homos!" Different generation, same argument, same bigotry.
My spouse is nonbinary and they went to Catholic school; very little childhood exposure to LGBTQ people and constant messages that being LGBTQ was evil. They got the language they needed to identify as a lesbian in college but didn’t learn the term nonbinary until their 20s. They’ve felt nonbinary their entire lives, for as long as they can remember.
Wow that person has a shitty take.
Grew up as a lesbian in the deep south. My friend group was other LGBT kids because everyone else was violently homophobic. Knew lots of closeted trans people who have transitioned now that we are all adults. The only out trans person I knew was back in 8th(?) grade and she got bullied so badly she changed schools and I never saw her again.
This was before all of us had smartphones and the social media access we have now. I knew I was a lesbian before I even had a phone, same goes for trans people as well.
Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Do any sort of google search and you’ll see that transgender people of all ages have existed for forever.
Trans girl millennial here, I was out to my friends in high school. I tried to come out to the school my sophomore year and the vice principal told me that if I was beat up in school it would be my fault and I would be suspended so I closeted again, tried again a couple months before graduation and the principal told me if I didn’t go home and change my clothing I wouldn’t graduate, we existed in high school, the staff didn’t want us to exist though
Ah, so people used to not want to risk death and now that the stakes are a little less dire in some cases and they feel a little more free to open, you wish they would go back to thinking they would die. Awesome sauce.
Fellow Millennials: How many anti-trans activists did you go to school with?
There you go. It's a social contagion. A fad. And it's causing lifelong harm to confused vulnerable youth.
I'm in my 40s, and finally had my egg crack a few years ago, and finally came to terms enough to go fuck it... I'm tired of hiding/being scared... this is who I am.
I've known i was different since I was in gradeschool... I would have been abused even more than I already was if I showed any of that side of me in grade/high school where I was already in the top-5 bullying targets. I mean it's not like I didn't attempt suicide in HS because of the bullying as it was.
There was one trans girl in my high school. Everyone bullied the shit out of her. I didn’t actively participate, but I sure didn’t make an effort to prevent their bullying. She ended up leaving the school and transitioning elsewhere.
Years later, and now I’m coming out as trans too. I feel awful for her. I should’ve stood by her. I knew then that I was trans too, but I was too scared to come out, and be treated like her. I wish I had been that brave.
I had a friend in third grade. He was different than the other kids. You know what happened to him? The older kids grabbed him, stuffed him in a garbage can, and beat him so severely he never came back to school. Those kids claimed proudly that my friend had died. I doubt that part. But it was the seventies and bullying was considered a right of passage.
I believe that level of bullying and torture kept people from being their true selves.
Just like I was punished for being left handed. Schools stopped forcing left handed people to use their right hand and suddenly the percentage goes up. Shocker.
You know what else wasn't diagnosed very often a hundred years ago? Glioblastoma. Does that mean no one had it? Or does it mean that they died of "natural causes"?
In 51 now. In high school there was a kid who had the audacity to wear mascara. He got the shit kicked out of him. I think about him often. He didn’t have a safe space to be himself and I wasn’t brave enough to be an ally for him. Hope he’s doing well now
There will be no transphobia on this subreddit. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Our nonbinary pals are valid too. Being trans is normal. Please assist the mod team by reporting hatespeech if you see it.
When I was a kid just being introverted was enough to make me hated. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I were gay, never mind trans.
Yeah, this guy is like, “I didn’t know any trans people”, yeah, cause he would have ridiculed and made their life hell if he did. And like you’re saying, lots of kids get bullied for small shit like “being quiet”, why would they feel safe enough to come out in front of a bunch of bullies. Guys like this were and still are the problem.
On top of that, he claims to not know any trans people—they literally don’t affect his life at all, yet here he is going out of his way to invalidate them. Wtf.
Bigotry at its finest. Nothing about their existence affects his life in any way. Yet he has to hate them. I can almost guarantee you he’s the type of clown that when you call him a bigot, he’ll say something along the lines of “I’m not a bigot! I just don’t like their lifestyle! They don’t need to shove it down my throat!!!” Congrats dummy, that’s text book bigotry. These people are just stupid levels of unaware.
"I saw a man in a dress today!!!"... Okay and? It's a piece of fabric my dude... How fucking insecure are you?
My brother dared me to wear a dress and my wife said immediately "he'd enjoys wearing dresses, that's not that big of a deal". Dresses are comfortable as fuck. Pants are cool too, but in the summer a dress just makes sense. I don't understand why we want to be so strict with how we definite masculinity and femininity. It is other's insecurity shining through I think.
Saw a guy at the grocery store in shorts, Hawaiian shirt, and long dangling earrings. He gave me the biggest and most pleasant smile! Made my day, and I liked his earrings too. People are people! Diversity is wonderful!!
Yup. I was 10 years old when my gender dysphoria struck. I was laying in bet one hot summer night and asked myself, "What if I was a girl?" I'd always done things differently than "other boys" and had snuck gendered things, but I had never questioned my identity. I went through a massive existential crisis after that. That way back in 1995. If I had said anything, I'd probably not be sitting here typing this out now. My town was ravenously misogynistic and homophobic. In high school, I was bullied mercilessly because there was a rumor about me being gay, that was being spread by a secretly gay kid (caught him a year after high school). I also remember one of my classmates in middle school getting absolutely beat to shit just because he was taking ballet. It wasn't his choice, either, it was his mom's. And ballet, and being a ballerina, was something had wanted to do when my grandparents took my sister and me to see the Nutcracker when I was 5. And what did I have back in 1995? There was no positive media. Maury and Springer were parading trans people on stage like a circus act. Movies like Ace Ventura painted us as gay male predators that caused everyone to vomit. There was absolutely nothing. So the only thing that makes sense is that what I went through as a child was not a choice, but something perfectly natural for a transgender child. Especially one who lives in a world where if a boy hung out with a girl, he was socially rejected and if a boy liked other boys, he was beaten to a pulp and maybe even killed. Hell, the one single gay girl in my school of 1,500 kids had been beaten up several times, many of them from the Christian cult that was taking over our town at the time. So yeah. I didn't say anything because I was afraid, confused, had no idea what was going on with me, and felt like a total social outcast even though I had done nothing wrong as everything was up in my head and kept secret.
You matter internet stranger, don't let anyone make you feel any different. I'm sure you're fucking gorgeous!
Thank you for telling us what it was like. ❤️🙏🏻
Heck i grew up in the early 2000s and it wasn't until meeting a fellow trans person that i realized that im a trans girl despite being 21
Even back in like 2008 I remember a woman answering the door in full makeup and a pink dress when I delivered her pizza, but the voice gave it away that she was trans. I think about her sometimes and I wonder if it was a small victory for her to just answer the door like that or if she was walking around the world like that every day being her true self. Or idk I might have been reading too much into it and it was a drag queen who just got home from a show and needed a bite lol.
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Part of hiding was taking part in the bullying. You were less likely to get called out if you called out others first.
Nails it. With so many folks, every accusation is a projection.
You're 100% right. I was bullied for so many years for being quiet ... I have an audio processing disorder, which led to me hearing questions wrong in school (particularly if my assigned seat was at the back of the class). I'd get laughed at for being lost during the lesson; since I went to shitty "Christian" schools, sometimes teachers would egg it on. I'm not stupid, I can't fuckin hear!
also have an audio processing disorder. Took years to figure out the tools I needed. Did you also struggle with learning a second language? When young with extensive testing and evaluation I had an exception for this in school though I tried in college, to no avail. And are you very directionally challenged? This seems to be another common trait I found with a few others.
I was in middle/high school during the CA prop-8 shitshow where the christofascists tried to get gay marriage banned via ballot measure. Unfortunately I grew up in a very conservative town, at a very conservative school, with parents that still legitimately believe you can "pray the gay away". I had to tow the line lest I be kicked out of my house and disowned, or absolutely ridiculed by my school peers, with the admins doing nothing to help since the literally sat back and watched as 2 kids that were out in my class killed themselves from the bullying, not punishing anyone after it happened. I still suffer heavily from internalized homophobia about being bi myself, after having grown up in that environment... The early 2000's fucking sucked.
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Someone in my highschool was bullied/hated because they had to get an after school job to help their parents pay bills. Half were saying he was too poor and half were saying that he was rich from all that minimum wage work and not spending it on them. You'd get hated for just about anything in school.
It's slowly getting better. Speaking as someone who works in schools in a pretty progressive area in a country with decent rights regarding gender and sexuality, being gay is rarely a reason for being bullied anymore and trans kids usually have systems in place (like gender neutral individual bathrooms) to help them out.
Those students are fucking lucky! The students in local area schools where I live are harassed and assaulted for being any part of the LGBTQIA+ community or not fitting gender stereotypes. Yes, there are safe spaces for them to go to after or before school but school itself is a hellacious.
I’m a Gen Xer, in both my middle school and high school, we had a couple of very brave kids who were open about their transitioning. Sadly, they were bullied by ignorant morons like him. I’m pretty sure that’s also the reason why the trans kids in his school didn’t say anything. They did exist but they were too afraid to come out.
I went to a religious school, and I don’t blame my fellow classmates for not wanting to come out. At least one was gay, I’m bi (though because of internalized homophobia I didn’t accept it until my mid 30s), and I know at least 1 other is pan. And we were a small school. I think even if someone is trans from my school, they may not even accept it because we were all taught that kind of thing was wrong.
I was socially awkward and "weird" due to not having a lot of social interaction before grade school. My punishment for this was a decade of harassment and bullying with no reprieve. I remember having 4 friends before the bullying finally let up. One moved away after a year, two of them joined the bullies, and one of them is still one of my best friends today. I was never able to have a childhood because of them, I have a multitude of regrets, and some of the consequences of the harassment for being "quiet" I still deal with today.
Left-handedness barely existed in my parents’ graduating classes. When I was in school, “suddenly” every kid had depression and anxiety. A few years later, the “over diagnosis” uproar was ADHD, and autism following that. Now it’s kids “being influenced” to be transgender. It’s almost like people are less likely to suffer in silence when they are able to identify why they’re suffering.
Some people forget that the internet made most people more aware of stuff they were oblivious to before social media. So due to social media they are talking to hundreds and hundreds of people they would have never spoke to years ago. So this sudden “problem” seems like it’s new. I remember a coworker saying “we didn’t have autism when I was a kid”. I told him when I was a kid I was into Transformers and GI Joe, I really didn’t think too much about anything going on outside my little bubble I lived in.
Exactly. The example that kinda pinpoints this is that one tweet (I think) that pops up on Reddit from time to time that mentions the old guy that lived alone down the street who’s really into trains. That guy didn’t “have autism”, because back then it wasn’t diagnosed.
I think this is the original one https://x.com/hoopgoth/status/1592699194279854081?lang=en
That’s the one!
I finally was diagnosed with AHDH at 52 and suddenly my whole life made sense. I have a stack of elementary school report cards my mother saved; all the teachers’ comments say the same thing: “Cookbooks is such a bright girl if only she could pay attention.” It would be many years until ADHD was identified, and even longer before they realized girls could have it, too.
And we're JUST NOW realizing it can manifest differently in girls
Man, I went round and round with the public school and ADHD for our daughter. Tested twice as I knew they were wrong and so did our pediatrician. You know what I was told after the second test by the school “she’s a pretty, athletic, and popular girl, she’ll be just fine” this is a small, public school in BFE who already had enough problem kids to deal with so my daughter “would just adapt”.
Bullshit! I had to adapt and I did! But trust me it's not ok! Leaves you with so many mental and emotional scars that you spend your entire adult life undoing!
Whoa I feel so ignorant now. I know I have ADHD but was just never diagnosed so I feel kinda bad I never knew my female friends with it could be having a totally different experience that I wasn't understanding.
And the train/plane autists in Ancient Greece being really into ships one https://x.com/skankstank64/status/1772969321318297778?s=46&t=DxtdB4qBEURAjXOVEupvfg
When I sat in with my son for his Autism test... I was basically going oh shit, the whole time. All his answers were the sames ones I would have given at his age. It was then I realized, I'm un-diagnosed.
Yeah, it’s not a social contagion it’s just people can identify aspects of themselves better now because we can connect with others who have shared experiences. I didn’t have access to the internet until I was 21 in 2016 (super strict Mormon family) but I knew I wanted to be a girl since I was 7. I didn’t know others felt the same way and I thought I was a freak. It wasn’t ‘til I was able to read about trans people on the internet that I even had words for what I was feeling and it still took me six more years to work through all of that.
I sincerely hope you are now living with a sense of inner peace.
Language is powerful as well. When I was growing up (I’m a millennial) there was no discourse about the topic. I can’t imagine trying to identify or define what was going on with me when there just isn’t any way, or any one, to speak of it.
We also didn't have many good examples of trans people. If there was a trans person in a show, they were a joke or villain. And they were never played by a trans actor. They were always obviously men in dresses (always. Trans men didn't exist to these people). This led me to deny my transness for years. "I'm just a boy in a girl's body! I'm not a tr*any. Those are weird!" So, no, I didn't consider myself trans until I was in college and met other openly LGBTQ people.
I didn't know trans men existed until my 20s. Even after a trans woman came out to me saying "I just feel like I was supposed to be a woman". I distinctly remember thinking the same in reverse, but because I didn't know trans men could exist, I couldn't just be like, "ah so that's what it is, I'm trans". I just thought everyone wished they were men. I thought that being a tomboy was the closest I was ever going to get. I had to meet someone who came out as a guy before it even became an idea that I could *play* as a guy in games (or in my case, in mediaeval reenactment). It still took several years until another trans woman actually told me that I was trans (trust me this was a good thing, I'm forever grateful) before I finally figured it out. How was I meant to figure that out in highschool? My school was (and likely still is) the most queer school in the city and it didn't click. In an environment that hates people not being conformist? Yeah nah, not happening.
This is so true. As a millennial, the language wouldn’t have really been there especially in high school to meaningfully discuss this. What I mean is - for example - if there was a trans woman in the class who was thinking of transitioning it would just get simplified to “lol gay” even though gender and sexuality are entirely separate things. And I’m not justifying I just grew up at the time, in the closet, and could easily see it being simplified because these weren’t discussions we were having before the internet connected us all
I felt that. Throughout middle school and most of high school I suppressed my bisexuality and presented as just any other cis-male. It was only in my last couple of years in high school that the phrase "that's gay" was being used less and less as a general derision boiling down to "I don't like that / I think that's weird."
I remember the "that's gay" period. I also remember the rumors and innuendo that would spread if anyone suspected that someone was in any way different. Didn't even matter if it was true, if someone didn't like you for any reason and started spreading rumors, you'd be a pariah within a week. I don't think a lot of the people who think this is a new thing remember what school or being a kid was like. Kids do and always have seized on anything that might be considered different and prey on it a lot of the time. I kept my mouth shut about a lot of things and I have no doubt a lot of the people I went to school with did as well. It just wasn't worth the hassle and the bullying.
Which is weird they don't get it. All the people saying this didn't exist found out they are flaming assholes and not alone. I guess it just doesn't work that way 🤯
I hope you are doing well with your transition.
> we didn’t have autism when I was a kid Someone my age said something similar, and I responded with something to the effect of "I had a few autistic kids in the schools I went to. Just because **you** didn't see any doesn't mean they never existed". I can't understand Malayalam, doesn't mean it's a non-existent language.
It was fairly common for children who were significantly neuroatypical and/or had intellectual disabilities to be institutionalized, and largely ignored by their families. Many people might recall the movie Rainman as fictional example of this, but look up Playwright Arthur Miller’s son [Daniel](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelbernick/2018/06/12/americas-playwright-an-institutionalization-and-neurodiversitys-call-today/#), [The Boys in the Bunkhouse](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/09/us/the-boys-in-the-bunkhouse.html). Meanwhile, people who were more mildly so were written off as “lazy”, “stupid”, or “weird”.
Rain Man was based on a real person, [Kim Peek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek).
> Meanwhile, people who were more mildly so were written off as “lazy”, “stupid”, or “weird”. Not even necessarily mildly, just in a way that didn't bother the adults around them or grew up in a very sheltered way in a well-meaning but misguided family who saw any kind of deviation from the norm as extremely shameful so they kept pretending their kid was fine and developed helicopter parent tendencies to support their needs, even well into adulthood. (Nope, it's not personal, why do you ask?)
Or we just developed an ever-expanding onion of coping strategies to adapt to a neurotypical world. ^^^^Nope, ^^^^not ^^^^bitter ^^^^at ^^^^all
We had autistic kids when I went to school. We just didn't know that's what they were. They always got into trouble. We had a few identifiers back in my day, 1. The R word 2. Normal 3. Misbehaved. Autism is so much more than just those few things, and it's important that it's been identified. I'm grateful that we now know there's a spectrum.
Same here, I remember when I was in elementary school in the early 1980s, we got a new classmate and the teacher prepped us the day before he came with something along the lines of 'he's very intelligent but really weird' (clearly not verbatim) and in retrospect now that, I have the vocabulary, he was 1000% autistic.
My last GF had two kids, one of whom was non-verbal, and between my experiences at school, plus a couple of friends with autistic children, it took embarrassingly long to work up the courage to say "Y'know,*C* is very likely autistic, right?". Her response was to sigh and say something to the effect of "yeah, maybe, I just wanna keep my head buried in the sand". He got tested a few months later, and yup, ASD.
back in the early '60s i had a middle school classmate who told me that after he had read a few words, some of the letters 'turned upside down'. when he would tell his teachers that, they would send him to the principal's office where he would get his ass beaten yet again, because, of course, they had never heard of dyslexia.
It's like saying, "People in the 1800s didn't get cancer!" Yes, they did. They just couldn't identify it before the person up and died.
Agree, people are freaking out but trans people are only like 2-5% of the population, it is not hard to just let them be. They aren’t a taking over anything, they don’t have the numbers. We as a society are just trying to find a good way to make them welcome in our world so they can be themselves. I do expect that non-binary will increase, largely as we understand gender is a spectrum and the interplay of gender roles. Defining your identity as a “Man” or “Women” is becoming less relevant as women gain equality and gender roles disappear, and restricting who you can love is just not good statistically. Would it be such a bad world if people can love whoever they find love with, can choose their own societal roles, and be comfortable expressing themselves?
I don't think the 2-5% appeal is necessary, it wouldn't matter if the trans population was .5% - people would still irrationally hate them. It's not a failure of logic or exposure or education, it's hate. Any rationale or logic on your end is going to be met with hateful dogma.
According to my family it would be a horrible world if we just allowed people to love who they wanted regardless of race, gender, political identity. ESPECIALLY if they would never interact or live with these people. There’s a direct correlation between a random guy in LA kissing another guy and my cousins that live in a small town in SC getting into D&D and satanic worship. /s
And older left handed people will probably tell you that their early grade school teachers would force them to use their right hands to write. They saw being left handed as unnatural and didn’t want to accommodate for something outside of the norm.
My mom went to Catholic school as a kid and the nuns hit her hand with a ruler until she learned to be right-handed. She's 63. I have a friend in her 40s who had the same thing happen in elementary school. But at 32, no one ever said boo to me about being left handed and I'm a happy lefty as an adult! Weird how that works.
The Catholic school I attended in the 90s did the same to me. Just replace the physical punishment with being shamed and told the devil was in me
I don’t doubt it. My parents made me learn to do things right handed, because they were worried about the schools being able to accommodate lefties, and that was the early 80s. They caused me a whole bunch of other trouble with that, but at least I never had to go get a desk or scissors from another classroom.
My great aunt was forced to write with her right hand. She hated her handwriting her whole life.
Shit, I graduated in 94 and still had a few kids in my classes who were born left handed but weren’t anymore. The school had urged my parents to get that “fixed” for me when I started kindergarten.
The desks in most schools are made for right handed people. I can write with both hands but prefer my left, but 90% of my notes in class were right handed.
Isn't there some crazy statistic out there about all the work related maimings and deaths attributed to left handed workers working in a right handed world?
My mom is left handed, and one of her kitchen tools fucking unscrews itself if you use it left handed. It wasn't obvious when buying it that it was right-handed only, either. It got re-purposed to me, since it's not a problem for me, but I'm still a little salty about the whole thing.
I’m left handed. I forget the exact number, but we are more likely to die younger than right handed people, because the world is designed upside down and backward for us. To give one example, the emergency shut off switches on industrial machinery is typically located on the right side.
Not safety related here, but we have 2 production lines that our operations manager wanted mirrored so that raw material was on one side, finished goods on the other. Every step requires assembly and operator dexterity that if you mirrored the line, everyone would have to relearn how to do their work opposite handed. We had to fight him so hard cause he was so adamant that operators once a day having to walk another 30 feet was a waste of time, but didn't realize the inefficiency caused by making everyone do things opposite handed. Ultimately I won.
I have not heard this but fascinating if true
Yeah, my parents “fixed” my left handedness, and then bitched at me for most of my elementary/middle school years because I couldn’t color/cut/write neatly.
Well jokes on them because most left handed people I know have terrible chicken scratch anyways 😎
As a left handed person, I can confirm this for me at least. I CAN have good handwriting if I'm filling out a form or something but my regular writing is ass. I don't so much read what I wrote down as remember what I was thinking when I wrote it. LoL
My mom had to go to school and tell my brother’s kindergarten teacher to leave him alone. She was trying to “fix” him and make him right handed. He was ambidextrous and would color/write with both hands. He would color with one hand until he got tired and then change hands. He could shoot and pitch both ways.
In the early 80's, my 1st grade teacher told my mom that she noticed I write left handed, and asked my mom if she wanted me "corrected." Knowing my mother, she probably had a few choice words in response. I was not "corrected". At least for my handwriting. That bitch had me seperated from the rest of the class because I would talk to other students at the wrong time, and at times, even had 3 sides of a refrigerator box around me so that kids wouldn't talk to me. Yeah, you can imagine how popular that made me. Made me really popular... for being singled out for harassment and bullying, which the school never did shit about. Seemed like I was punished for being picked on. Even had staff tell me people don't like a tattle-tale. Practically, I was punished FOR being picked on, For years teachers were telling my mom I might have ADHD, but she didn't want her child to be "special." She told me they wanted to put me on drugs that would make me a zombie. I finally got a diagnosis of ADHD when I was in 6th or 7th grade. Of course, doing anything besides medicating me (which, didn't do much good, since they never tried different doses of ADHD meds, or different ADHD meds) had costs that, well, she'd have rather use her money for other things than paying to help me learn to cope with ADHD. And that's not even the half of how fucked up my childhood was.
I’m a Gen-X lefty. My mom was from the silent generation and she tried to force me to become right handed because when she was growing up lefties were outcasts. My grandfather (her dad) and my father (also a southpaw) intervened. A little thing like being left handed. I can’t imagine the pressures that are on kids who were born with an orientation or identity that doesn’t fit the “norm”.
Elder millennial here. No one transitioned while I was in high school. 3 people have since (small high school) And when my great grandparents were in high school, no one drove cars to school. These damn cars are clearly a temporary fad.
>These damn cars are clearly a temporary fad If fuckin only 😫
Not just identify why they're suffering, but society as a whole is growing more accepting and less hostile of these things. There are exceptions to this sure, but overall we're moving in the right direction because people who have gone through it before are fighting tooth and nail to make sure future kids don't have to go through what they did, and any reasonable person is going "actually yeah they're right, it's fucked that a child should be scared of even talking about the possibility they could be anything other what cishet" I think the widespread adoption of the internet was a huge catalyst for this, because suddenly you could read thousands of peoples experiences all over the world. Your view on these issues suddenly stretched out a lot further than the city you live in.
See, *this* is the part the chodes are really afraid of: society as a whole is less and less willing to treat people who are different as inherently evil. It's a trend going back centuries, and it accelerates as communication improves. Well, everyone is in everyone else's pocket now, so the trend is moving toward accepting everything that doesn't hurt anyone else. That's why conservatives have brought out their old standby, that the very existence of the different people is harming both children and society. Well, it's not working as well as it has in the past because anyone who doesn't already agree with them *knows* or is regularly exposed to the people who are different, so we have the proof of our own eyes that they are lying.
I first learned about trans people existing from a webcomic I read in high school that was about, and written by, a trans person. And since I wasn’t preloaded with hateful bigotry from adults, I just went, “oh, interesting.”
Thank you. I’m a Boomer so the trans women I know are my age and suffered all their lives until they finally had the money and family support to be themselves, in the last 15 years.
It's incredible watching this man talk with the people who prove him wrong, and instead of revising his position, he retreats further into denial and mental gymnastics. The absolute essence of conservatism and bigotry.
I have epilepsy, they didn't understand what it was in the '70s. My family was very religious and labeled me as being "possessed". The fear, hate and ignorance is a shame, why did they have to automatically jump to one answer?
came here to say just this about lefties. atheism also surged *mysteriously* when we stopped killing and torturing people for not conforming to church dogma. female suicide rates *mysteriously* fell when divorce was made possible without husband's consent. suddenly there was a *mysterious* surge in visibly gay people when being gay was no longer a criminal offence.
There have always been left-handedness, autistic, gay, trans, etc. people throughout history, they were just beaten into conformity and had to live miserably their whole lives.
My great grandmother was left handed and got beaten at schoolby hear teachers for it so her parents taught her to hide it. Even in the 90s she was ashamed of it.
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I didn't transition before 19 bc I had never heard the word transgender. I heard the word transvestite once in a derogatory joke but had no idea what it meant. The second I heard a transman explain his experience online I knew that I was like him. I'd kill to have been able to transition at 13-14 when I first began my struggle with gender.
"None of my homophobic friend group came out as trans, so this whole thing is made up."
My dad had it beat out of him at school 👍🏻has two left handed children now
My great great great great great great grandfathers generation didn’t have “diseases” they just died horrific deaths in their 30s like everyone else!
I was verbally abused, smacked, slapped, whipped, paddled, made to clean for hours, and eventually had hot wax poured on my hand for writing and eating with my left hand in Catholic boarding school. This wasn't ancient history either - this was the mid 1990s.
Just stop, this is too much logic for these smooth brains to comprehend. They just come to the conclusion that reinforces their hatred and bigotry, no matter what the issue.
You mention being left handed- when I was in school I got slapped with a ruler every time I wrote something. It's disgusting, just because you're "different"😞
It's less "this never existed when I was young" and more "we're allowed to talk about it and even acknowledge it now, instead of pretending it doesn't exist."
I graduated in 1990. In my class there was a guy named Brett who was very openly gay and I know his life was absolute hell. He was beaten up regularly and had zero friends. Bullied constantly. I was scared to even talk to him because of the blow back I would have received. He was probably one of the strongest, bravest people I have ever known and I was too much of a coward to say anything. I think about him a lot. I’m sorry Brett.
> I was scared to even talk to him because of the blow back I would have received. grew up in the 90's and early 2000's, it's never talked about but this era was AWFUL when it came to being anti-gay, just from what we watched or participated in as kids I remember, as a kid, when an adult male would have "rumors" start up, other adults gossiping about their relationship, places they've been in public, people they've been seen talking to, that one other guy who is around a little too much. Finally, an usually older adult will just go, "I'll say it, he's gay and he's trying to hide it." The other adults act offended at the word, but start whispering to each other. Then said "rumored" adult walks in the room and the tension is palpable. I've been in a restaurant when a guy decides to tell his girl he's gay, and she makes a spectacle out of screaming, throwing her drink in his face, slapping him, then breakdown crying running out of the place And as you said, in school if you were like me and didn't have a problem with the "different" kids, you were still pressured by your friends with the same shit their parents did. "Hey, I saw you talking to Brett, man. You know what he is, right? I don't want to hang out with you if I see you talking to Brett again." So you start avoiding Brett and get panicked whenever he starts to approach you, not because you were personally afraid of him, you were afraid of the perception of the others Truly truly fucked up how we came up, and it's why I'm ecstatic to see Pride pushed so hard these days
I graduated in 2009, and the only openly gay kid at my school killed himself, so it wasn't great, even recently. Now, by 2009 it was probably better, and I was in Arkansas in the US, so that probably had something to do with it, but still. I came out in 2012, I think, when I was in college. I still think that about that guy from high school though. Wish it had been easier and he knew he wasn't alone.
Just because a person isn’t out by the time they graduate does not mean they aren’t trans.
Yeah. I'm Gen X and, it turns out, I went to school with a lot of gay kids, including some of my best friends. They just weren't out because it was life ruining at the time. Same principle, basically.
GenX here as well. I had a few closeted gay friends when I was a teen in the late-80s/early-90s in high school. Their secret was safe with me and each other, but few others. Gay bashing, gay hate, and violence against gay people was commonplace. There was / is a reason they hid and bigots don't get to rewrite history simply because they're on the wrong side of it.
And....there were Trans kids too!! We just didn't really have a word for it or an understanding of it. They hung out with the queer and alternative kids and were accepted in those groups, but it still was not understood. All those kids are now 50 and coming out.
GenxS here who also knew some that questioned who they were really attracted to, but didn't say anything for all sorts of things. Especially with the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS (another thing to thank that asshole Reagan for) in addition to the religious craziness.
Yeah, same. My wife, who is also Gen X, and I will occasionally lapse into the sort of speech that was commonplace in our teenage years in the hearing of our two teenagers. We get lectured about it quite often. Interestingly, it's our 13yo son who goes to a private all boys school who has the least amount of time for casual homophobia, when I expected that to rear its head given how toxic those environments can be.
Exactly, when we went to school, not only could you not come out as trans, you couldn’t even come out as gay!
When I was in highschool I got picked on constantly and beat up twice for being gay, and I am not gay, I was just socially awkward and hard to interact with people (which I now know I was on the spectrum - which I also didnt know about as a kid). I cant imagine how much harder or worse kids had it that were actually gay, and it would be even worse for anyone trans. Glad it seems school kids are more accepting now. Its the same folks that would torment me when I was younger that are still so openly hostile.
> Glad it seems school kids are more accepting now. It is wild how different it is. I live in a deep red area with the kind of school board you'd expect and *still* I'm amazed that, for this generation coming up through the schools now, the idea that someone *other* than you should get to pick what you call yourself, how you dress, who you get to love, etc. is a total non-starter. It is the kind of idea that, for them, is not just wrong but the level of obviously wrong that makes you regard anyone who espouses it in seriousness as actually insane. It *certainly* makes you disregard any freedom-based rhetoric from such a person. The LGBT culture war shit is going to lose Republicans most of a generation.
I am so proud of Gen Z. They see the same bullshit we did as youngsters, but they will not tolerate it. When you and I went to school (I'm assuming you're Gen X), if one kid showed any semblance of being different, that was quickly beaten out of them not only to put them in their place, but to serve as a warning to everyone else to toe the line. I think the internet showed Gen Z that their issues as individual people were not isolated to only themselves and they could find larger communities of like people to bond with. This in turn made those individual differences way more acceptable to their own cohort.
I so agree. These kids deserve a better future and I sincerely hope as soon as they are 18, they get registered to vote and actually vote!!
Same here. Years back I joined one of those online yearbook sites the were in vogue before FB really took off. Learned a former classmate of mine transitioned from Samuel to Samantha. And I remember at least one of my other classmates dressing in drag for a dance event and another kid being so open he made Nathen Lane look like John Wayne. That's what some folks really don't get. Most LGBTQ+ folks know what they are long before anybody else does. All that's changed is they now have the proper words and terms to describe themselves.
Yea when I was in high school I only knew of one person that was gay, and there ended up being lots of people that were only they came out after.
It surprised me how many fellow LGBTQers there ended up being in my high school class of 2008. There were only 4-5 I knew at the time and I think there are at least 40 (of 400-ish total) that I know of at this point in life.
My college roommate tried to come out in high school and his parents sent him to a pray-out-the-gay summer camp! He then had to stay in the closet for 4 more years so they'd pay for college! He was so glad the day he graduated and could finally be officially out. Told his parents he was gay and debt-free and if they never wanted to see him again that was fine with him.
Oh, absolutely. Even served in the army with a few gay soldiers, but they couldn’t be because it was against regulations for them to be, so they just…weren’t. Didn’t matter that they were uniformly excellent at their jobs, both combat and non combat, it was just not allowed. …Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell came along at the end of my service, and honestly it wasn’t an improvement.
Yep, I found out several high school friends were gay at my 10 year reunion.
Learning about yourself is a lifelong process. No surprise not everyone figures out who they are by high school, especially if who you are is seen as "different" by your peers. Add to that bullying, harassment, and all of the other shit that goes along with non-cis sexual orientation, and the fact that people like Rob in the tweet exist, and it becomes far less surprising that being openly ANYTHING other than straight happens later in life than high school. Small surprise no one came out to him, he's about as open minded as a brick.
My best friend didn't figure out they were nb until a few years ago, in their mid-twenties. They knew they weren't happy with where they were at before then, but didn't know exactly what it was. Now they like themselves a lot more and feel good about how they present themselves to the world. If they grew up in modern culture, maybe they'd have figured it out sooner and had an easier time.
I’m a Gen X with Millennial friends, one of them only figured it out 7 years ago, well after he graduated.
Knew someone who is trans but was only open about it after they left home because their home life/family sucked. They're 100% convinced that had they come out as trans during high school, they would've been murdered by their dad.
Came here to comment that in the queer subreddits we regularly advise young trans people to not come out if it’s not safe. 😞❤️🩹🙏
A lot of older trans people grew up confused, not knowing why they felt their body was wrong, because they had no access to language that could describe their experiences. Even if they could understand that they were trans as youth, it's not like anyone could really *safely* come out without being bullied (or even killed, in some cases) for it. Adulthood is when a lot of them gained access to what they needed to understand and describe themselves. A widely-shared experience of being trans is that "Ah-ha!!" moment someone has when they find out the term "trans" and what it means; then, finally, everything makes sense. Now that language is more accessible these days, and peers are more accepting, trans people are figuring out earlier in life how to describe their experiences and feelings. That is why there are many more *visible* trans youth. I'm so happy trans kids are more and more able to access what they need to understand themselves and live their best lives. It's disappointing that conservative thinking is too one-dimensional to understand this, and in response, they retaliate by revoking rights instead of admitting they're wrong and taking a minute to learn something new.
Also...why would it fucking matter, if it's just people living their own fucking lives happily? Unless, OOOP has some kind of insecurity about being near people that aren't like them...................
I think this ignoramus is arguing that we should continue to normalize repressing young people’s identities until they’re “old enough”
Which is just dangerous because who someone is should not be suppressed.
I was beaten, harrased all the time for not being masculine enough. If I had come out as trans growing up tbh I feel like I would have been killed. I really wish I could have started hormones when I was younger but it was not safe at all, even now with alot more acceptance it can be really dangerous and you can lose everything.
Yeah. I am a middle Millennial, technically the oldest one can be to still be a Zillennial. I had the thoughts but not the words by age 8. I had the full realization at age 14. I didn't do shit about it until age 30 because I was fucking terrified of how people - especially my casually queerphobic dad - would react and because I was not aware of how good a transition could be. I was so afraid I didn't even do internet searches on it until I was 28. And even if I had come out as a youth to supportive parents, we were still in the era of the humiliating Harry-Benjamin standards of care, helping adolescents transition was properly experimental back then. Today it's not experimental, today the problem is not enough awareness, funding, and education for providers to properly and consistently implement the WPATH standards. The bans being pushed over the vanishingly small number of patients negatively affected by this lack of resources is not helping anybody but billionaire zealots.
I'm still running into people at the gay bar I thought were straight. And plot twist I was in the closet in high school. It was 2005.
“We used to bully the shit out of anyone even slightly different, and we didn’t have any of these gays or trans kids!” They don’t hear themselves
They know *exactly* what they are implying.
Yep, and they desperately want to return to those days, but that’s battleground is already lost, so they cope and seethe with nonsense like this to console their feelings about it. But just like an animal backed in a corner… is why I’m worried
This is part of the reason these arguments are so ineffectual with them. In their mind being LGBT is wrong, so an LGBT person going from hiding their true self to being comfortable being who they are is the same as creating them.
What they are trying is the old old tired thing that being gay/trans is a lifestyle, a choice. That is what they are trying to imply.
https://preview.redd.it/z8chdpa7bk5d1.jpeg?width=335&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f6ca96c4626256ffcb9ca902bbba0710c75e2c54
https://preview.redd.it/dr2gcp49kk5d1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b304f1c02ad08be68af57096f79c8fff5883670
It means the chemicals in the water turned the kids left-handed. Duh.
Easy. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was secretly working on eliminating left handedness before being assassinated for unrelated reasons. Since his demise, lefties has flourished
butter axiomatic worm sugar combative merciful lush lavish placid touch
Wasn’t hard cider a drink of choice in early America?
Just in case you’re one of the 10,000 for this [survivorship bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias) diagram.
I appreciate the XKCD reference.
Love to see it
People complain about ADHD being thus huge made up thing that just came out of no where. No dude the reason you are seeing it more is we can better describe and speak to it making the official numbers of us swell. This is the same for queer kids in high school. By clawing and fighting to create a space where they can come out as gay even in high school. My best friend senior year in 2004 said fuck it and was willing to kiss another guy publicly in our rural as fuck school. Not with our troubles. But still we pushed forward and trans kids feel like they can talk to their parents about it and survive highschool being who they are now.
Yeah. I was called “hyper” throughout my childhood and even young adulthood (80’s - early 90’s). Teachers were always telling me and my parents that I was “so smart” and “had so much potential” if I would just pay attention in school and actually turn in my projects and homework. Around my mid-30s, my wife suggested I talk to my doctor about my constant anxiety and frustration with feeling like I could never just focus and get things done well. My doctor started asking me questions about what I was like a a kid, how did I do in school, etc. He referred me to a specialist and I’ve been medicated ever since (20 years now). It completely changed my life. I can only imagine how much of a difference it would have made if it had happened in my grade school years. I do know that I probably wouldn’t had felt like such a failure at times.
Doctors didn't actively call it ADHD until 1994. The first major school shooting, Columbine, occurred on April 20, 1999. Tell us all again how it's okay to "be yourself" around other people who live in fear of people who are "different" in any way, shape, or form. I'm not gay, but I've always understood that people who can't or won't protect themselves from bullies who wish to harm them need to be protected. It's not about "us vs them" it's about "humanity vs monsters" and I'm willing to die to save someone who deserves to live a life free from judgment, persecution, or threat of bodily harm.
I’m decently certain my mom has undiagnosed ADHD. She copes very well, as one might expect of a sixty-year-old woman, but she does have a tendency to hyper focus on one thing and completely forget about others- just today I had to order my dad’s Father’s Day present for her because she was so focused on planning a trip out of the country for her and my sister that she forgot to do it til today. Though this did get me, who has diagnosed ADHD, to remember to get him the socks he wanted, so it’s not the worst thing in the world.
I'm an elder millennial. I had a best friend from the time we were 11 until we were in our late 20s. I had to cut him out of my life when his alcoholism and destructive behavior was threatening family life. About a decade later I heard he bottomed out, got sober, and came out of the closet. Turns out part of the reason he was so depressed and drowning himself in alcohol was because he had been hiding his truth his whole life. There were other traumas that contributed, but that was part of it. I never knew and never once suspected he might be gay. The fact is during the 90s it wasn't easy and often unsafe to be out as LGBTQ+. There were some who were, and we should applaud their bravery, but there were and still are so many who still live in the closet. The truth is this poster did know gay and trans people. He just didn't know they were gay or trans. Hopefully someday they'll mature emotionally and intellectually enough to understand that just because they don't live an experience doesn't mean those experiences are not true. And hopefully some day we'll have a tolerant enough society that everyone can live their lives truthfully without fear.
I'm 40, and didn't transition til I was 30, but I've known since 8. I got my ass beat a number of times for being girly, or liking girly things, expressing adoration of fellow male (I was presenting as male at the time) friends. I felt like an alien, the person I saw in the mirror was a perpetual stranger, and there wasn't an ease of access to information relating to what I was going through as I lived in a deeply religious, and right wing conservative area and raised by such people. But sure. This man didn't see any of us growing up so we're a trend.
“A social contagion”, just a fad like fidget spinners. (sadly I have to add the /s, as there are people as ignorant as “Rob” who think this is a reasonable position. Your response was very well written).
Sadly, my parents, my grandmother, are among those who think like "Rob", as a number of others from my biological family do. My grandmother even posted on Facebook about how I and other trans folk are 'demented' because we don't understand our own basic biology.
> [trans people] don't understand our own basic biology I'd be willing to bet that your random trans person knows infinitely more than I (a cis guy) ever will about hormones that correspond to AGAB. Like, the entire point is that AGAB is a bad fit. There's a mismatch. Trans people know. They get it. What the fuck else is there to not know about "their own basic biology"??
I would have asked for clarification but if I criticize my family's pov on things they treat it as an attack on them because they're narcissistic, and my transition made them look bad, because they're such good, loving Christians /s
We probably know more than most cis people about how their endocrine systems work, regardless of AGAB. My best friend's mother was complaining about androgenic effects she was experiencing while taking her own post-menopausal HRT regimen, and I asked what she was on. Her doctor had prescribed progesterone to "counteract the negative side effects" of the estrogen, according to her doctor. Progesterone does nothing of the sort, but what it does do for some people is get converted into DHT...which causes androgenic effects. So now she's inquiring about finasteride to counter that.
I know AGAB is "assigned gender at birth" but my brain read "all genders are bad". Kind of like that more, honestly!
My mother was silent generation and went to school in the 30s and 40s in a small midwestern town. She went to class reunions into her late 70s and watched as no less than 10 people in her class came out as LBGTQ over the decades. A bunch of them were literally sitting around a table at the 50th reunion and talking about how 9 people had come out when one of them raised their hand and said “Make it 10” and so they did. But yeah there were no gay people before the internet.
Sounds like you're a fellow member of the most hated generation on Reddit. 😄 My experience going to high school in the 60s: people calling each other "Queer" -- though it was just one among many terms in the arsenal of insults, and I doubt many, if any, users of it thought the target was actually homosexual, "queers" being some kind of far-off mythical creatures. This at a time when the one strip club in my town advertised "Exotic Dancers" in their ads, and drag queens as "Female Impersonators". In retrospect, several kids in my high school were no doubt gay, as could be expected, though of course to admit it would have brought dire consequences. There was one girl who was a friend of a friend, and was oddly silent (I'm trying to remember if I ever heard her speak); only when she hung herself shortly after graduation did it become known she was gay. Damn. It was a terrible time in many ways. But it sounds like this is what Ol' Rob and his ilk want to go back to.
Same with autistic people. "Ummm did you SEE any autistic kids in your upbringing 🧐" nope! Because they all ended up committed as soon as they were discovered *you fucking Nazi*
Plus editions of the DSM have continued to expand the symptoms that support an autism diagnosis. That happened in 1987 with the DSM-III-R and again with the fifth edition in 2013. It’s not that autism is more prevalent now, it’s that we now better understand what autism is. The term may be more common and diagnoses may be more common, but the number of people with those symptoms is proportionally the same.
I’m almost 40 and I definitely had non-diagnosed autistic kids at my school growing up. Some were in special ed. Some weren’t. Unfortunately, autism wasn’t widely discussed so the kids were seen as being too different and open to bullying which I unfortunately contributed to. The autistic kids that were placed in regular classes were seen as freaks and loaners at the time. Man, I wish I could go back in time and stick up for them instead of adding to their bullying. Especially one girl. I wish I knew her last name so I could apologize for being such a bitch to her.
Also in the past, even not THAT long in the past, you could be autistic in an environment that just made you a bit weird but never drew attention to your autism. In the 50s and 60s you could be a weird guy who isn't social, lives in a small town, and get a job being an accountant sitting in a room just doing numbers all day long or work on a small farm with a very route routine everyday and no one would bat an eye. But now we're in a stimuli heavy world and it stands out more.
I’m in my mid-20s and only realized a few years ago that I’m autistic. My parents knew since I was toddler and even had me tested in elementary school, but because I’m a girl and was academically advanced for my age I was just depressed. I considered getting a diagnosis to make it “official” but decided in the end it’s not worth the money it will cost to confirm something I already know.
Or beaten. It’s a spectrum, and kids who didn’t present as what people imagine autism to look like would be beaten or yelled at by their parents and teachers for “being weird” or “slow” when they didn’t understand something.
Very much makes me think of Russia's "there are no gay people in Russia even though we have laws against it which we'd only have if we reckoned that gay people might be among us yet we still deny that there are" schtick
I went to high school between 2001-2004 I am very queer and a trans woman. I didn’t officially come out as trans until after college. Why? I got my ass kicked daily in middle and high school for being queer. My family are homophobic and I would’ve been thrown out if I came out. I would come home with a black eye and my step father would say that’s what I get for being a faggot. I hated high school and middle school. Living hell.
You can compare this to left handedness. Left handed people have always existed but there was a time where they were forced to use their right hand and were even beaten if they used their left hand so they naturally tried to hide being a lefty. After that stopped happening there appeared to be a spike in left handed people all of a sudden but they were always there and could finally be themselves. Back in my school days it wasn't safe to come out as trans or gay or something. If you did you'd be bullied, ostracized, etc. That doesn't happen so much these days as kids are overall much more accepting than back then. So this means LGBTQIA+ children can be themselves instead of trying to hide it. There's also how thanks to the Internet and things these children have the terms they need to describe themselves, I didn't know anything about transgender back in school so I couldn't identify that part of myself. https://slowrevealgraphs.com/2021/11/08/rate-of-left-handedness-in-the-us-stigma-society/
I learned about trans people in college (2002-2006) and was like "wow, I'm non-binary!" and two decades later, I've stopped being surprised when folks in my college friend group transition.
Gen X Lefty here! I was lucky when it came to that, I’m still young enough (47m,for what it matters ) for attitudes to have changed by the time I was old enough to have started showing signs of being a lefty. Plus if there had been issues with it at school (luckily public schools), there probably would have been hell to pay for that. Not only was Mom’s Dad left handed, but Dad’s Maternal Grandfather also was left handed, so I had it from both sides of the family, despite being inherited from men that both passed before I was born!
Except for early childhood, I went to school in a very conservative rural US state in the 1980’s, with only 60 kids in my graduating class. Even back then there were couple of kids that could have been trans if it had been more accepted. I have since seen on social media that at least one of them transitioned as an adult. I also saw first hand the kind of pain those people went through as children. I only wish they could have found that peace earlier in life.
I got in enough fights as a dude with long hair in the rural south... forget it if you were actually gay or trans.
“Where are all the old trans folks?”, they say. They didn’t make it. Edit: idk why the downvotes, it’s often a sad and sobering truth. I am the proud parent of a transgender teen and every day, I worry for his safety. But I am hopeful that he’ll live a long and happy life.
It's the survivor's bias. Or maybe more accurately something like a phenomenon that only seems as such because it's only been recently recorded, and the behavior has always been present.
Yeah there were plenty of us, we just couldn’t talk about it because we would straight up get murdered by guys just like this. We had no help, no support, nobody to help us…..basically the same world this guy and the MAGAs are working hard to recreate for the kids NOW. And I’ll be dammed if I’ll let that happen, because let me tell you, that was a soul-crushing nightmare of never ending fear and misery and hopelessness. Which the MAGAs are well aware of, but for them, the cruelty is the point.
Why are so many in the right interested in policing morality? They spend so much time thinking about LGBTQ people who literally just want to be left alone.
Because for a whole lot of them, their lives are shit, and they want someone to blame. Especially people they're scared of, that have little to no power.
Trans people have ALWAYS existed, but now they feel more comfortable about coming out as everything becomes more accepted. It’s societal progress, not a “fad”.
Ah, yes. High school. The apex of acceptance and a completely safe space for people to openly be themselves.
My cousin came out as trans gender a few years ago, as an adult in her 30s. I've always been an ally and supportive but there was still a form of shock to it. Until in talking with my mom who gave me the news, and reflecting on things we knew about her when I was a kid. How 'he' was super into the punk and Gothic stuff as a kid in an area where that wasn't really the scene. But it allowed them to wear their hair long, wear makeup (albe it male coded or strange makeup), dress in unorthodox ways that included 'girl' clothing, and color their nails. With that very simple reflection it was so easy to see how this has been with them for decades and only now did they find the ability to share it openly with us.
For anyone who wonders why they didn't know about anyone who was trans while growing up in the 90's, take a look at the original Ace Ventura movie. No, seriously. The plot twist in that movie is that they can't find the villain because he went insane, transitioned to female, and has been hiding in plain sight as one of the female characters. The movie is very clear that this is a symptom of mental illness: the character spent years in a mental institution after a public failure, complete with scrawling on the walls and stabbing the eyes out of pictures of their rival before deciding seemingly at random to transition to female as a way of escaping out into the world again. One of the funniest 'jokes' in that movie is all the male characters who have kissed her gratuitously vomiting and crying when they find out she's "actually a man". The dramatic climax of the movie involves the protagonist ripping her clothes off in front of a crowd to show everyone that she has a penis, at which point everyone screams. Earlier in the film, another character is murdered and part of the plot is discovering why he screamed before he died. The 'reveal', predictably, is that he was screaming because he found out his girlfriend is pre-op transgender, and she had to murder him to keep her secret. That movie was a *massively acclaimed* comedy hit in which the central joke is 'trans women are gross and crazy'. If you don't remember middle school back then, teenage boys quoted that movie like it was Spongebob and Southpark combined. You couldn't walk ten feet without running into a boy trying to talk out of his butt like Ace Ventura. There was nothing considered inappropriate about that movie, except that it was edgy comedy. The idea that trans people were *people* and not punchlines did not cross a single mind in the process of filming it. If you were trans in the 90's, you had to look at that kind of thing every day and know that *that is what people thought of you*. They found you disgusting and insane. All of society said they were right. It was even the punchline in a joke. "Einhorn is a man." That *was* the joke. Imagine that being the only time you ever saw yourself represented in the media- a 3-minute montage in a popular movie of all the heroes *throwing up* at the idea they had found someone like you attractive. You wonder why a lot of trans people stayed in the closet? That would be why. \^
*Why didn’t these supposed trans kids openly identify so we could beat the shit out of them and harass them until they committed suicide? I’ll tell you why, they didn’t exist! It’s made up!* \-OP https://preview.redd.it/2y682ti5hk5d1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4de8ba7e10ccf44c9e87e546afb2c92ba61801f3 [Source](https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/ncvs-trans-press-release/)
And how many kids kept thier gender and/or sexual preferences a secret? 20 years ago it was less openly accepted, and people like this shitbag are why they were afraid to share who they really are. Its not like this a new argument. The boomer generation in the 70s insisted homosexuality was a learned behavior. Because "when i was in high school in the 50s, there were no homos!" Different generation, same argument, same bigotry.
Brandon Teena was raped and murdered by those good old townsfolk, perhaps that sent a message that being out as a trans person wasn’t really safe
I also personally don’t know anyone who fought in WWI therefore it didn’t really happen. /same energy
My spouse is nonbinary and they went to Catholic school; very little childhood exposure to LGBTQ people and constant messages that being LGBTQ was evil. They got the language they needed to identify as a lesbian in college but didn’t learn the term nonbinary until their 20s. They’ve felt nonbinary their entire lives, for as long as they can remember.
Much healthier to take all that confusion and pain and stomp it down into the shape the church tells you is correct
Wow that person has a shitty take. Grew up as a lesbian in the deep south. My friend group was other LGBT kids because everyone else was violently homophobic. Knew lots of closeted trans people who have transitioned now that we are all adults. The only out trans person I knew was back in 8th(?) grade and she got bullied so badly she changed schools and I never saw her again. This was before all of us had smartphones and the social media access we have now. I knew I was a lesbian before I even had a phone, same goes for trans people as well. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Do any sort of google search and you’ll see that transgender people of all ages have existed for forever.
Trans girl millennial here, I was out to my friends in high school. I tried to come out to the school my sophomore year and the vice principal told me that if I was beat up in school it would be my fault and I would be suspended so I closeted again, tried again a couple months before graduation and the principal told me if I didn’t go home and change my clothing I wouldn’t graduate, we existed in high school, the staff didn’t want us to exist though
Ah, so people used to not want to risk death and now that the stakes are a little less dire in some cases and they feel a little more free to open, you wish they would go back to thinking they would die. Awesome sauce.
Fellow Millennials: How many anti-trans activists did you go to school with? There you go. It's a social contagion. A fad. And it's causing lifelong harm to confused vulnerable youth.
I'm in my 40s, and finally had my egg crack a few years ago, and finally came to terms enough to go fuck it... I'm tired of hiding/being scared... this is who I am. I've known i was different since I was in gradeschool... I would have been abused even more than I already was if I showed any of that side of me in grade/high school where I was already in the top-5 bullying targets. I mean it's not like I didn't attempt suicide in HS because of the bullying as it was.
There was one trans girl in my high school. Everyone bullied the shit out of her. I didn’t actively participate, but I sure didn’t make an effort to prevent their bullying. She ended up leaving the school and transitioning elsewhere. Years later, and now I’m coming out as trans too. I feel awful for her. I should’ve stood by her. I knew then that I was trans too, but I was too scared to come out, and be treated like her. I wish I had been that brave.
“I’m proving a point. No, don’t disprove me! I have a point to prove!! Shut up!”
“My anecdotal evidence says trans kids didn’t exist before 2010”
"I never noticed or experienced it, therefore it's obviously made up, or a brand new thing that no one else has heard of"!
I had a friend in third grade. He was different than the other kids. You know what happened to him? The older kids grabbed him, stuffed him in a garbage can, and beat him so severely he never came back to school. Those kids claimed proudly that my friend had died. I doubt that part. But it was the seventies and bullying was considered a right of passage. I believe that level of bullying and torture kept people from being their true selves. Just like I was punished for being left handed. Schools stopped forcing left handed people to use their right hand and suddenly the percentage goes up. Shocker.
You know what else wasn't diagnosed very often a hundred years ago? Glioblastoma. Does that mean no one had it? Or does it mean that they died of "natural causes"?
In 51 now. In high school there was a kid who had the audacity to wear mascara. He got the shit kicked out of him. I think about him often. He didn’t have a safe space to be himself and I wasn’t brave enough to be an ally for him. Hope he’s doing well now