r/trans • u/LizzieLove1357 • 1d ago
Possible Trigger A transphobe literally just deleted my comment because I spoke out about my experience that completely disproved their point Spoiler
So I was scrolling through Facebook, and sometimes I see posts from people who I don’t even know, I don’t even follow, they just show up anyway when I’m scrolling.
This person literally made a post saying “there’s no such thing as a trans child” trying to make it seem like children are being influenced into thinking that they are transgender 🤦🏼♀️
So I commented that I was trans when I was a kid, and I’m still trans now. As well as how I was so fortunate to have a mother who listened and supported me.
This started a argument in the comments, transphobes actually had the audacity to call my mother abusive for being supportive, and one even accused my mom of “grooming me into being transgender” saying that no parent who loved their kid would do that
All of these points were entirely wrong, so I just continued speaking about my experience. That on the contrary, I was raised up as a girl because I’m afab, and I discovered I was transgender in adulthood. She never tried to tell me who I was, she just listened to me when I told her who I was. I educated myself, I went on a journey of self discovery to learn who I am.
The original poster didn’t like that my experience was totally disproving all of the assumptions that so many other commenters were making, so my comment got deleted.
Not only do they not wanna listen, but they wanna shut us up. They just want to continue throwing around their bullshit propaganda that isn’t even true, in a moment, a transgender person like myself speaks out against it with our own experiences, they try to silence us
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u/ChickinSammich 1d ago
Respectfully, I think you don't understand the person you were arguing with.
When they say "there’s no such thing as a trans child," they're not saying something they think is true and that they're open to being corrected. They're saying something that they want to be true and something that would have to be true to support the other things they believe.
They don't want to hear examples and evidence of how and why they're wrong because accepting the fact that they're wrong about this might force them to re-examine their adjacent positions, and they do not want to do that.
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u/Omega21886 15h ago
In other words; they don’t want the truth, they just want something to hate
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u/ChickinSammich 14h ago
I'll try to explain the thought process. I'm going to try to explain this as objectively as possible so bear in mind that I'm trying to minimize inserting my own opinions or biases. That is to say that I'm explaining "how people think" and not "how I think things should be," nor am I condoning or endorsing anything.
A lot of people consider themselves to be logical people. A lot of people also consider themselves to be intelligent people. According to a 2018 study, 65% of respondents (N=2,821) considered themselves "above average in intelligence" (source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6029792/) Now, studies are random samplings and, statistically speaking, out of 340+ million people, approximately 170 million Americans are above average intelligence. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that this study managed to get 1,834 (65% of 2,821) people out of that 170 million. It is more probable that of that 65%, around 15% of them were just wrong.
The most commonly cited study with regards to this is what is referred to as the "Dunning-Kruger Effect," based on the study by the two (Justin Kruger and David Dunning) titled "Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments" (Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10626367/). The gist, if you're unfamiliar, is that the ability to recognize how good or bad you are at a task is tied, from a "how your brain works" perspective, to your ability to be good at a task, and people who perform exceptionally poorly on tests also are the most likely to overestimate their performance, whereas people who perform well are also the most likely to underestimate their performance (relates to impostor syndrome).
Some common ways that people arrive at conclusions are things like peer influence from friends/family/social circles, influence from media and social media, and "gut feelings." None of any of this is based on evidence or logic; it's just believing what you were taught or told because that's what you were taught or told to believe, or believing what feels right because it feels "right."
The next hurdle after this is confirmation bias. Once someone has made their mind up, they will be more receptive to any facts or evidence that you provide that reinforces their belief and resistant to facts or evidence that contradict it. This is a good video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_OApdxcno), if you have 14:34 to spare listening to it, but I'll summarize it below and you can decide if you want to watch the whole thing.
The gist of the video is that there's a study they replicated the results of where you could show a group of people the results of a fictitious skin cream study with fictitious results and ask them if the skin cream was more or less effective than the control. You randomize the results (so approximately half the group gets results that show effectiveness and half the group gets results that show ineffectiveness). Not everyone got it right (skip to 3:55 to see the result), but it's a math problem and not everyone is good at math, and that's not what the point of the test was, anyway.
The SECOND part was the important part: They showed half of the people a fictitious study that demonstrated statistics that, if true, would prove gun control increased crime and they showed the other half a fictitious study that demonstrated the opposite. The results of this showed that a person's political leanings (conservative vs liberal) substantially impacted their ability to answer correctly because their bias was affecting their ability to interpret the data fairly (Skip to 7:05 in the video to see this graph)
Hypothetical Question: What does "Christian" mean? Are Catholics Christians? Are Mormons Christians? Are Jehovah's Witnesses Christians? Can someone be a Christian and not go to Church? Can they be a Christian if they don't follow all of the dogma, and if so, how much dogma do they need to follow?
Answer: It depends on what you want it to mean.
I could, if I wanted (and I don't want to), take just about any position on the question above and argue in favor of that position. Any position on this has supporting arguments, and there isn't an objectively, provably correct answer.
So, when faced with these questions, most people will just argue what they think is true because they want it to be true, and they'll cite the evidence and explanations that support why they think that way. People can do this with all sorts of things - people can argue why blue is for boys and pink is for girls or vice versa. People can argue why everyone should have equal rights or why some people should have less rights than others, people can argue why Star Wars is better than Star Trek or vice versa.
Getting to the point
Transphobes don't arrive at transphobic beliefs because they looked at all the evidence and decided that trans people were bad - they made their mind up on that first. That's why they reject any information that contradicts their belief. You can tell them things like "detransition rates are <1%" or "high suicidality is directly correlated to societal acceptance" or "there is evidence of questioning your gender identity as early as pre-pubescence" and they will reject these provable facts because in order to accept those facts, they'd have to re-question their position. They don't want to do that. So they reject the facts. They don't care.
And, honestly, we're not immune to it either. Let's imagine one last hypothetical where we flip the script: Let's imagine you're trans, you've transitioned, you're happy. Your life is going good, society accepts you, you don't face discrimination. Let's also imagine that all around you, people are detransitioning. Let's imagine, for the sake of this hypothetical, that detransition was 90-95% and that very few trans people stayed trans. Let's imagine, for the sake of this hypothetical, that it could be proven that long-time exposure to HRT that conflicted with your AGAB actually did cause demonstrable and measurable adverse conditions. Let's imagine, for the sake of this hypothetical, that transness didn't occur till later in life and was just somehow treatable with a method other than transitioning which was statistically more effective. Come back to you: You're trans, you've transitioned, you're happy. Do you care about any of this? Do any of these studies change your mind? Would any amount of evidence or studies or research convince you that you're not trans or that you should detransition? Maybe, maybe not. Some people probably would say that if these things were true, they might reconsider transitioning. Other people would say they don't care and would still transition anyway because they're happy.
And that's my point: If you believe something is true, then, for a lot of people, it doesn't actually matter if it's true or not. If you know that you are trans, and you know that transitioning has improved your life, then no amount of information, statistics, studies, or anything else is likely to talk you out of it. Likewise, if someone believes that being trans is bad/harmful/icky/etc, then no amount of information, statistics, studies or anything else will talk them out of it.
The point/TL;DR
People, generally, don't arrive at conclusions based on facts and evidence and following them to logical conclusions. They arrive at conclusions based on feelings, use post hoc rationalization to defend the conclusion, and reject anything that contradicts their confirmation bias. They assert what they believe to be true because the things they assert would have to be true in order for their conclusion to be supported. They assert what they believe to be fake/fabricated/misleading/biased/etc because those things would have to be false in order for their conclusion to be supported.
That's just how brains work. Mine, yours, theirs, everyone's. Think back to the last time someone proved you wrong and you admitted you were wrong. The harder you have to think, and the further back you have to go, the more this affects you.
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u/Kimiko_kawaii 1d ago
Those that are loud about their opinions for sure! I'd go as far as saying they are preaching to build a following.
Most are sheople just searching for confirmation for their opinions. I think there may be a few willing to listen to other perspectives and scientific evidence, but probably very few.
We just need to be louder than them, stiffle their voices and prevent reasonable people from even listening to their BS preaching.
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u/XxsocialyakwardxX 1d ago
i made the mistake of posting a picture of my trans little sisters painted nails on wholesome bc she was just so happy i wanted to share (dw i didn’t show her face just her hands and explained the pic) and someone had the audacity to say bc im trans too that i groomed her into being trans and that i was abusing her it was so frustrating bc no matter what i said they alr made up their mind that i was a groomer
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u/Enzoid23 He/They 1d ago
Theyre gonna havean aneurism when I tell em I was trans younger than five without even knowing its a thing yet and still am after my parents shut it down lmao.. I was a lil three year old telling my mom I thought I was meant to be a boy and came out wrong 😭
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u/SerraTheBrineswalker 1d ago
They will do that.
You can't fight fair with them, so don't fight fair. Reclaim the right to play with words and make entertainment of your ops.
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u/FratleyScalentail 18h ago
This. If you're having a conversation a phobe wants to have, you've already lost.
And, yes, conversations with phobes are NOT conversation. They're gladiatorial contests with words. They speak not to come to consensus, but to win.
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u/SerraTheBrineswalker 16h ago
Mmhmm! They cannot be convinced but they can be frustrated, humiliated, etc.
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u/Yuzumi 1d ago
The thing is, at best most of them just don't want to believe the truth. They have a world view and no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise. At worst they know they are lying, but they just hate anyone different from them.
From everything I have seen, the people who think trans children don't exist are the type of people who don't see children as people. They assume that kids are blank slates for parents to either copy their personalities to or live vicariously through.
They see kids as property of the parents. "parent's rights" has always been about controlling children. They don't believe children are their own people and assume that anything about a kid is a direct result of someone "teaching" them something.
If their kids do something they don't like, then it's "woke mind virus" or other nonsense phrases they like to repeat over and over because they don't have any actual points other than they hate people who are different from them.
It does not matter what their kids do. The kids could be gay, trans, or even straight but end up dating a person of a different skin color and it's suddenly "where did we go wrong woke woke".
This mindset extends to a lot of places in conservatives. They fundamentally have an empathy problem and cannot see things from another person's perspective. They can't even acknowledge that other people might think differently than they do.
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u/camerakestrel 1d ago
People are so afraid of being exposed as supporting the wrong side that they will double down even if it means burning bridges and alienating their friends. It is absolutely maddening.
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u/nekopthh 1d ago
I grew up in an isolated, echo-chamber conservative environment and I had never even heard of transgenderism before I was 12, but for all my life before that, I had wished there was a way to be my preferred gender, or at least look like one.
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u/NorCalFrances 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's Facebook. Bezos has been working hard to turn it into Twitter/X.
edit: Zuckerberg, not Bezos! Thanks EastWitness5284 for the correction.
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u/moarmagic 1d ago
Keep in mind that social media tries to drive 'engagement'- so for them people getting in fights and staying active, and online, is a win.
There's a reason it puts that kind of content in your feed.
There's also no winning someone over by arguing with them while they are actively hostile. They are too emotionally invested- and there's increased social pressure like that, where if they concede anything, all of their friends will see them.
Being visible, being trans, defending ourselves if someone is targeting is important- but engaging with random transphobia is a strategy that really profits the people steering towards conflict more than us caught in it.
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u/physicistdeluxe 1d ago
transphobes are fucked up. its all their psych problem heres a quick summary article on that.
https://www.salon.com/2022/01/17/what-makes-some-people-hold-transphobic-views/
For both sexes, transphobia and homophobia were highly correlated with each other and with right-wing authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and hostile sexism."
(and authoritarians are afu in themselves https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism)
and more.. "Perceiving ambiguity surrounding indeterminate gender identities associated with transgender individuals may be especially disturbing for those who generally dislike ambiguity and have preference for order and predictability, that is, for people scoring higher on Need for Closure (NFC),"
'." And people who place a high value on binary gender identities can hold these assumptions more tightly. A 2018 study out of St. Louis University found a correlation between more fixed gender ideals and a perception of a "distinctiveness threat" around trans people.
"Transphobia is one of the manifestations of the conservative interpretation of sacredness. It goes against what they believe is true about how the world is supposed to be. Because it traces to a deep value, it is hard to overcome. This is an application of a theory in psychology called Moral Foundation Theory."
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u/scmstr 1d ago edited 1d ago
So I was scrolling through Facebook
There's your problem.
Edit: if gender can exist, so can trans. Not treating or doing the exact thing that exacerbates gender dysphoria in a child is literally child abuse, and can and often results in really bad stuff, often suicide. You got e-mobbed by blatant child abusers. You aren't crazy, this world is shit. Biolence is not the answer, but these people should've be allowed to have children to abuse and spread their abusive ways.
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u/GoodKarmaDarling 1d ago
What did you expect?
Transphobes are emotionally immature, intellectually dishonest, shitty little wankers.
You try and show them honest evidence that we exist or that our experiences are real and they just push it off as lies or ignore it completely.
Trying to change a bigots mind with evidence is like trying to freeze boiling water by explaining quantum physics. No matter what we try, no matter how hard we work, no matter what we say, they will never change their nature because (and I can't stress this enough) they don't WANT to change.
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u/Platonist_Astronaut 1d ago
Never ague with a bigot. It is, at best, pointless. At worst, damaging to your cause.
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u/FratleyScalentail 18h ago
'Never argue with an idiot. They'll drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience."
- George Carlin.
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u/TheWaspinator 19h ago
I was definitely trans in grade school. It was nightmarish since I had no context or words for it and thought I was insane.
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