Interesting and informative, thank you for sharing. I’ve suspected that something along these lines was a better explanation than AGP and it’s useful to have a detailed/complete version written down.
I think there are two things I should mention though? First, this falls into a broader class of origin theories for transness along the lines of “person has a certain social role, wants a different social role, develops an identity capable of making the journey between those roles, and because gender is complicated adopting that identity may involve taking on a different gender.” This characterization is too broad to be useful for tasks like prediction (relies too much on internality, so less useful externally), but I think it’s basically correct in all cases and gives us the correct sort of path-dependence and prevalance among relative outcasts and age dynamics. It’s also useful as a depathologizing tool: it seems to me, and I could be misreading, that you’re treating the desire to be loved in a certain way as pathological, and I do not think this is a correct way to understand your desires.
The other thing is that this theory must somehow be incomplete for some of the same reasons that AGP must be complete. Namely, as a ~completely cisgender man, I have felt this:
Then, for path-dependent reasons, they sometimes just happen exposed to the concept of transgenderism, specifically in a way that makes it seem like a privileged or socially encouraged strategy for getting the love and acceptance they’ve been deprived of.
(by “this” I mean the yearning to be loved/desired in the way women often are and to be socially championed and treated as inherently deserving of help in the way women often are) pretty strongly for most of my life, and I remember explicitly identifying these as things that trans women might hope to get by transitioning, and I remember encountering transness as an idea and realizing that my social circles were unusually progressive and would likely accept any gender exploration I did. But I had, and still have, no desire to transition.
Maybe the difference here is just age, maybe you were 14 and I was 15 and that extra couple of months of life meant that your self-concept of gender was more fluid than mine, but this seems wrong to me. Of course everything is path-dependent, and if your experiences had been different at 14 maybe this particular ball wouldn’t have started rolling and your identity might be very different today, and the same is true for me. But things are not different, your ball started rolling and mine didn’t. So I suspect that womanhood was appealing to you for reasons other than just solving all of your problems, I don’t think identity-formation is best understood as a problem-solving exercise, and I suspect that (being clearly unusually good at productive introspection) yo may be able to identify the thing that happened for you and not for me, prior to these motivating factors. (Incidentally, if you do identify it I’d love to be informed of that, since I am somewhat less good at introspection and so have not been able to do so.)
Somewhere around 10% of men would rather be a woman. However, many fewer wish to transition, as it’s costly, difficult, and might not even get them the love and attention they desire (assuming this is the primary motivation).
I see 5% here, with another 7% who say they don’t know? Perhaps we’re looking in different places. In any case, maybe it would have been more precise to say that I have no desire to be a woman despite sharing these experiences and motivations, so I suspect something is missing in this explanation. Good clarification.
Interesting and informative, thank you for sharing. I’ve suspected that something along these lines was a better explanation than AGP and it’s useful to have a detailed/complete version written down.
I think there are two things I should mention though? First, this falls into a broader class of origin theories for transness along the lines of “person has a certain social role, wants a different social role, develops an identity capable of making the journey between those roles, and because gender is complicated adopting that identity may involve taking on a different gender.” This characterization is too broad to be useful for tasks like prediction (relies too much on internality, so less useful externally), but I think it’s basically correct in all cases and gives us the correct sort of path-dependence and prevalance among relative outcasts and age dynamics. It’s also useful as a depathologizing tool: it seems to me, and I could be misreading, that you’re treating the desire to be loved in a certain way as pathological, and I do not think this is a correct way to understand your desires.
The other thing is that this theory must somehow be incomplete for some of the same reasons that AGP must be complete. Namely, as a ~completely cisgender man, I have felt this:
(by “this” I mean the yearning to be loved/desired in the way women often are and to be socially championed and treated as inherently deserving of help in the way women often are) pretty strongly for most of my life, and I remember explicitly identifying these as things that trans women might hope to get by transitioning, and I remember encountering transness as an idea and realizing that my social circles were unusually progressive and would likely accept any gender exploration I did. But I had, and still have, no desire to transition.
Maybe the difference here is just age, maybe you were 14 and I was 15 and that extra couple of months of life meant that your self-concept of gender was more fluid than mine, but this seems wrong to me. Of course everything is path-dependent, and if your experiences had been different at 14 maybe this particular ball wouldn’t have started rolling and your identity might be very different today, and the same is true for me. But things are not different, your ball started rolling and mine didn’t. So I suspect that womanhood was appealing to you for reasons other than just solving all of your problems, I don’t think identity-formation is best understood as a problem-solving exercise, and I suspect that (being clearly unusually good at productive introspection) yo may be able to identify the thing that happened for you and not for me, prior to these motivating factors. (Incidentally, if you do identify it I’d love to be informed of that, since I am somewhat less good at introspection and so have not been able to do so.)
Somewhere around 10% of men would rather be a woman. However, many fewer wish to transition, as it’s costly, difficult, and might not even get them the love and attention they desire (assuming this is the primary motivation).
I see 5% here, with another 7% who say they don’t know? Perhaps we’re looking in different places. In any case, maybe it would have been more precise to say that I have no desire to be a woman despite sharing these experiences and motivations, so I suspect something is missing in this explanation. Good clarification.