It’s not crazy to hazard that some of the more-strongly-stigmatized things on the list above have incidence that’s 10x or even 100x what is readily apparent, just like the number of trans folk in the population is wildly greater than the median American would have guessed in the year 1980.
There’s an alternative explanation: trans is mostly a social contagion and the incidence actually went up by 10x or 100x, rather than always being there but you never noticed it.
‘Social contagion’ here being a metonym for all environmental factors, I think… For example, face-swapping apps: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-lucy-sante-became-the-person-she-feared This is an environmental effect which basically could not have existed until about 10 years ago at best. (What were you going to do in 2014, when face-swapping ML didn’t exist? Hunt down a surviving oil portrait artist and pay them hundreds or thousands of dollars to paint you as if you were a woman, for no particular reason you’re willing to admit to consciously?)
There’s an alternative explanation: trans is mostly a social contagion and the incidence actually went up by 10x or 100x, rather than always being there but you never noticed it.
‘Social contagion’ here being a metonym for all environmental factors, I think… For example, face-swapping apps: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-lucy-sante-became-the-person-she-feared This is an environmental effect which basically could not have existed until about 10 years ago at best. (What were you going to do in 2014, when face-swapping ML didn’t exist? Hunt down a surviving oil portrait artist and pay them hundreds or thousands of dollars to paint you as if you were a woman, for no particular reason you’re willing to admit to consciously?)