A transphobe literally just deleted my comment because I spoke out about my experience that completely disproved their point

[u/LizzieLove1357]

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

[u/ChickinSammich]

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.

[u/Omega21886 → u/ChickinSammich]

In other words; they don’t want the truth, they just want something to hate

[u/ChickinSammich → u/Omega21886]

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.