Hyper-gendering post transition

Trans people often go through a period of hyper-gendering in an attempt to suppress their trans side before they enter gender affirming care. I dealt with that in my last post, but some trans people go through a period of being hyper after they transition, too.

When this happens, the motives behind it are more complex, but if it becomes a thing in someone who transitions after going through puberty in their sex assigned as birth, it can turn into an extremely rocky road. I had to watch this happening with an AMAB friend, who made a successful transition only to go through an ultra tough patch because they went into a hyperfeminine phase.

Attachment theory

The sort of people we find ourselves attracted to and how our relationships work out depend to a very large extent on what psychologists call 'attachment'. If we have predictable, supportive parents and family, we most often grow up to be 'securely attached' and will be predictable and supportive of our partners. If we have unpredictable parents, we grow up to be 'anxiously attached' and our relationships can be dominated by us repeatedly seeking affirmation from partners, trespassing into being and clingy. If our parents are abusive, then we'll likely become 'avoidantly' attached.

Avoidant people have problems with relationships because the moment the emotional temperature rises, their childhood experiences teach them it's going to end in screaming and fists, which they want to avoid, so they come over as being buttoned down and cold. Putting on that persona makes them forbidding to approach, so reducing the chance of any accidental emotional overflow.

Needless to say, the combination of an anxiously attached person with an avoidant one works extremely badly, because the former is looking for more emotional validation while the avoidant is looking for less and it can spiral into disaster as the latter tries to escape the former.

There are degrees of each type of attachment and you can find mixes of any two in many personalities, but when someone goes through a period of hyper-gendering post transition it is driven as often by their attachment as by any desire to explore the possibilities of their new sex.

Watching a car crash

This is what happened with my friend, who was anxiously attached and strongly binary. While transition mostly fixed her gender dysphoria, it didn't do so entirely, because of all the residuals people who've gone through post-puberty transitions are so tediously familiar with.

However, one of the things which should have been dealt with during my friend's therapy was that part of her motivation for transition was she believed she would find relationships easier if she was a woman. Don't get me wrong, she would have transitioned anyway, but this motive was there.

I knew it was there because I'd known her a long time and we'd never had a discussion about any of her relationships which wasn't about how crazy her partners were for her and how they were always so demanding and intense it wore her out. I had a lot of time for her and still do, but this story of relationships being demanding and intense, coming as it did from someone who was demanding and intense made my whiskers twitch.

Either she'd managed never to have a relationship with anyone who wasn't as anxiously attached as she was, or she was projecting and I was listening to her rationalise the effect her own anxious attachment was having on every relationship she'd ever had. Which was quite a few, because they never lasted.

If anyone is thinking of the word 'narcissism' here, you are not wrong. Some narcissism can be life-enhancing, but a lot is not.

How gender identity and attachment type can interact

Post transition my friend went all in on hyperfemininity in the way she dressed and the way she behaved. Short skirts, five inch heels and plunging necklines didn't begin to describe it, but the defining factor was the moment anyone showed her the slightest bit of attention, she was on it and so much so we eventually had to have a rule that when went anywhere she would tone it down.

That happened after she made a couple of plays for me, prompting me to ask how she would explain it to my partner, who is also her confidante?

One of the issues with hyperfemininity in particular is people who live it often see their primary value in a romantic relationship as their sexuality. My friend turned her sexuality signals up to eleven and that, together with her anxious attachment made everything that hadn't worked about her previous relationships work even less well than it had. It could have worked had she found someone who was primarily securely attached but she never did, possibly because someone who wasn't ultra securely attached would have run away!

Since her previous relationships had been disastrous, the new normal was not great. She fell off the end of it into a pit of depression, but the experience left a lasting mark on her, which is one of the reasons why I feel if anyone reading this has ever been through a period of hypergendering, it's worth raising it in therapy. Explore why you went there and you'll maybe get an insight into otherwise hidden parts of your core personality, free from the fog of gender.

In general, we're a lot better becoming comfortable with who we are than we will be if we shoot for a stereotypical ideal. Gender affirming care will sort out a lot of important issues, but it won't fix non-gender related characteristics of our personalities. The more you understand yourself, the better your gender affirming care will be in the long term.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 08, 2025, 06:22:32 AMThe more you understand yourself, the better your gender affirming care will be in the long term.

Beautifully written, TanyaG. Is the following perhaps obversely linked to your friend's behavior: In mid-life, after my third failed marriage, I became a 'player.' Hypersexually flitting from one pair of captivating eyes to the next. I'm not sure what I was trying to do, but it sounds much like what motivated your friend. Thankfully, getting old and finally accepting my gender variance resolved these horribly destructive behaviors. But I left so much pain behind in the wake of those passing years, and not all of it my own. 

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 08, 2025, 11:09:34 AMI'm not sure what I was trying to do, but it sounds much like what motivated your friend.

A fun question is, 'What's the explanation I'd least like to have attached to why I did thing X?' That can be illuminating, because if the first answer you come up with may not be right, it'll often be close enough a short putt will get you to the real reason.

Having lots of relationships is neutral in itself unless it leaves one or both sides feeling bad about it. On the other hand, if someone is consistently suffering or inflicting emotional pain because of a consistent theme in the way they approach relationships, then there's a problem worth identifying.

When my friend suffered her head crash, she had no choice but to seek help. Sometimes you have to fall before you can see you need to pick yourself up?

Quote from: TanyaG on April 08, 2025, 12:29:00 PMif someone is consistently suffering or inflicting emotional pain because of a consistent theme in the way they approach relationships, then there's a problem worth identifying.

To the best of my knowledge, I never meant for my head (or my love) to hurt a hare's foot. It just so happens that 'I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body' is not all that bad of a pickup line. I'm just not sure what I wanted from the women who fell for that line. It wasn't conquest or even really sex. It was just something I never found. During those days, I had a recurring dream about a woman's face gazing at me. Her eyes were enchanting. And I kept searching for that look in other women's eyes. It wasn't until I joined Susan's Place, I realized the woman I was looking for was me.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 08, 2025, 12:29:00 PM'What's the explanation I'd least like to have attached to why I did thing X?'

Darn it, TanyaG! I've spent all day on a psychiatrist's couch (metaphorically speaking, I actually watered a bunch of pine trees) pondering the referenced quote. The explanation I most facilely rejected was that the feelings of these women meant little or nothing to me. But then, I remember being involved with three women at the same time and can no longer make that negative assertion with certainty. But I do remember believing my own feelings meant nothing to me. I loved the rush of romance, but dreaded commitment. I carefully tended the flower garden, while allowing the kitchen garden to go to weed. I console myself thusly: I was left more often than I did the leaving. But that's really not much to cling to, is it? Darn you, my friend. Thanks.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 08, 2025, 06:46:34 PMI loved the rush of romance, but dreaded commitment.

I can't see you've done anything many members of the human race haven't, but our relationships and how they turn out say as much about us as they do about the other person involved. The trouble looking back is we remember things that justify our actions (or paint us in a good light) and forget things that conflict, or don't.

That's why asking a loaded question like that one works, because it forces us to consider all the things we edited out to make the story stack up and read the way we want it to. If you've ever wondered why we keep making the same mistake over and over, the answer's in there, we often edit out the clues which would lead us to reach a conclusion we don't want to reach. That can prevent us seeing things which are right there, in glowing LED characters three feet high, burning our retinas.

I'm looking at biographies posted in introductions here and seeing the same story over and over. People get a hint they are trans at an early age, but have been strongly gendered 'the other way' and sometimes spend half a lifetime trying to live up to that gendering. Along the way they get into relationships which fit with the strength of the gendering they were brought up with, but which often fail because they can't live that gender role happily.

Quite a few AMAB (more than I'd expect, but its just my impression) join the military. Is that in an attempt to reinforce the gendering they were brought up in? Wherever you go in the world, more or less, the services are strongly masculine, to the extent of people denying women should serve in them.

At some point this breaks down for us and the dysphoria begins to overwhelm us. We go into therapy after many years, decades even, of misery, denial and outbreaks of everything from depression to bad behaviour and then we are faced with reconciling how we lived our previous lives with what we begin to realise we should have done.

Except if we knew now what we knew then, we'd have done it another way, right? That's the catch and that's why I wonder if most of the people who get caught in the loop I've described above take so long to accept they are trans. The more highly gendered your upbringing is, the more highly gendered your friends are likely to be, the less easy it is to accept you are with a differnt team, the longer it takes to break down.

For some I'm beginning to understand, it never will. They just end up miserable their entire lives without ever really knowing why.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 08, 2025, 06:22:32 AMHyper-gendering post transition

In general, we're a lot better becoming comfortable with who we are than we will be if we shoot for a stereotypical ideal. Gender affirming care will sort out a lot of important issues, but it won't fix non-gender related characteristics of our personalities. The more you understand yourself, the better your gender affirming care will be in the long term.

This is the best summation.  Reality is okay, if you take it to the level you and your circle can handle.

TanyaG, please don't share anything I've said with Ginny. Hope springs eternal. But about 'good-bye'. I've long lived by the mantra that everyone has a right to say 'good-bye.' And everyone has an equal responsibility to hear the word when it is said. Even if it's said in silence. During the past two years, I have heard so many good-byes. Most of them said in silence. I'm not seeking affirmation, merely assurance. In your personal opinion, is the journey worth the silence? In your professional opinion, should I keep screaming, or accept the silence? I try so hard in my posts to be facile and witty. I am so tired of trying. I am stronger for being here; but I am not strong. I am not seeking advice. But I have said so many words to you I never said to anyone else. So I thought I would say a few more. Hope springs eternal.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 09, 2025, 07:38:37 PMIn your personal opinion, is the journey worth the silence? In your professional opinion, should I keep screaming, or accept the silence?

If you're asking the question, 'Are the highs and lows of the journey toward acknowledging we are trans worth accepting we must live long periods where we can't or don't tell others who we are?' then I think the journey is inevitable. If we were born knowing we were trans, we wouldn't need to make the journey of discovery in the first place.

For most of us, the length of time we spend on the journey depends on the product of all forces pushing us to be normative and how much we need, or feel compelled to obey them.

In therapy, I'd reframe your question and ask you, 'What was it kept you silent and what were the reasons you stayed silent for so long?' Those reasons will all be valid, but understanding them will give you a mirror to see your own attitudes toward being trans, which at one time were prejudices against being trans. See those clearly and you can take steps to dismantle the scripts behind them.

I'll not share anything you said with Ginny, but if your question is instead, 'Is it right to allow a relationship to end without telling the other person why?' I'd reframe that too. 'At the time any of your relationships ended, could you have told your partner why?' For many of us the answer to that question is no. We can't tell our partner why because we don't know the answer ourselves.

Many people here have had such a long twilight period between suspecting they were trans and accepting they were trans they've had time for multiple relationships.

For some, the twilight lasts forty or fifty years. I'd add it's an error to assume all relationships trans people have that fail will fail because they are trans. In some cases it will be so, but in others it will be other aspects of their character or their partner's character and relationships have failed for the same reasons they'd have failed for anyone. Look at the story of my friend: the major component in her relationships failing, both before and after transition was her anxious attachment.

Should you keep screaming? My question would be, 'What are you screaming about?'

It isn't the emotions, it's what you do with them and while screaming in itself is okay for expressing emotions, if you keep on screaming and don't deal with the emotions, then you're going to end up doing a lot of screaming to no particular end. Sure, it'll provide a brief safety valve, but if you keep operating the safety valve without doing anything about the pressure of steam making you open it, then whatever's generating the steam is your problem.

For trans people dysphoria is the steam. It's a symptom, not a cause and that's partly why it's so hard to spot we're trans. We experience the dysphoria, operate whatever safety valve we've come to depend on, the dysphoria lessens, we sigh with relief as things return to normal, but then the pressure builds again and we rinse and repeat. It's so easy to be distracted by the dysphoria some people are missing the underlying cause for half a lifetime.

We have a strong motive for going no further than operating the valve. If we seriously consider we are trans, then we are going to have to upend our lives and those of others and it's too much to contemplate as a package. Some other trans people don't miss the underlying cause, they are aware of it, but instead deal with it by denying it and tolerating the dysphoria as best they can.

That works variously well, but in my experience is liable to lead to a difficult compromise, because to suvive denial of something as core to your persona, you must rationalise why you're denying it and doing so turns your daily experience into an increasingly unstable proposition. People who do it (many of us do to at least some extent) end up juggling a cocktail of dysphoria, denial and rationalisation that can and has led to what are often described as 'nervous breakdowns' where they basically regress.

My answer to 'Should I keep on screaming?' - for me - is no, because of those paras above. But we can find ourselves in a situation where say we're on our second marriage with two young dependent children where the choice is invidious and where screaming (as in operating the safety valve) may be the least worst solution for a time.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 10, 2025, 02:44:33 AMShould you keep screaming? My question would be, 'What are you screaming about?'

Your words were beautifully written and touched my heart. I am on this journey and there is no turning back. I refuse to go back. A few days ago, I sent my three more or less accepting sisters a link to a paper by Dr. Anne Vitale--The Gender Variant Phenomenon. You're probably familiar with Dr. Vitale and the paper referenced. She captured the essence of my experience with such insight and compassion her words brought me to tears and I thought, perhaps, if my sisters read Dr. Vitale's words they would finally understand what I've been trying to tell them for almost two years. So, I 'screamed' at them to finally hear me. None of my sisters responded with so much as 'I'll take a look at it.' In fact, as of this moment, there's been no response at all. Bringing the people I love along with me on this journey is exhausting. And I'm about to stop trying.   

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 10, 2025, 10:56:39 AMBringing the people I love along with me on this journey is exhausting. And I'm about to stop trying.   

There is a difference between dragging someone along with you because you want them there, and allowing them to join you because they want to be there. Be mindful of that.
 

Quote from: Lori Dee on April 10, 2025, 11:03:32 AMThere is a difference between dragging someone along with you because you want them there, and allowing them to join you because they want to be there. Be mindful of that.

Thanks, Lori. My one brother and two other sisters have made it clear they do not support me in my transition. I'm fine with that. If I'm hearing you correctly, you're suggesting I get on with my life and leave the door open to those who choose to enter my world. I like that idea. If I take your advice, tomorrow might be much less stressful today. Thanks again.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 10, 2025, 11:25:02 AMThanks, Lori. My one brother and two other sisters have made it clear they do not support me in my transition. I'm fine with that. If I'm hearing you correctly, you're suggesting I get on with my life and leave the door open to those who choose to enter my world. I like that idea. If I take your advice, tomorrow might be much less stressful today. Thanks again.

Yes, it is your path to walk, not anyone else's. Let them know that they can come with you, but there is no pressure to do so. Some people will never understand, so if they choose not to come along, that is their choice, not yours.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 10, 2025, 11:25:02 AMMy one brother and two other sisters have made it clear they do not support me in my transition. I'm fine with that. If I'm hearing you correctly, you're suggesting I get on with my life and leave the door open to those who choose to enter my world

We can't make others decide the way we would decide and if they've made it clear they're not offering support, that has to be respected. As Lori, says, all you can do is leave the door open and continue your journey.  Otherwise, your life will forever be in their hands.

Nothing you are doing harms them in any way, so you've nothing to apologise for and no reason to look back.

I'm not sure if this'll help, Mrs Oliphant, but a friend tells this story about how he rang to tell me he was a closet bisexual and my response was, 'Thanks for letting me know, what's the reason for the phone call?"

He speaks at public events and he's good at it, usually has the audience begging him to stop telling jokes so they can draw breath, but he says I was the only person who he told early on who didn't reassess the value of his friendship based on his newly-declared sexuality. When he asked why I was cool with it, I told him I had no idea about the sexuality of 99% of the people I knew, so why should I care about his any more than theirs?

I've learned to think like that, some people naturally think like that, but most people don't. They see normativity as a zero-sum game in which if they're associated with someone who doesn't fit their view of normal, they lose somehow. Thinking like that runs deep and is hard to shift, but it's common.

I believe we have a definite duty of care toward those in intimate relationships which we began after we knew we were trans if we didn't tell them before the relationship began. We also stand to gain by doing a degree of supportive psychotherapy to others who want to support us, but are struggling. We owe none at all to those who reject us, whether kin or not, because the rejection is their decision.

Quote from: TanyaG on April 10, 2025, 01:08:32 PMWe owe none at all to those who reject us, whether kin or not, because the rejection is their decision.

I needed to hear that. Also, I've been ruminating about a question you asked in an earlier post: why do so many people like me enlist in the military. I didn't assume the question was rhetorical, but I didn't have an answer until I thought for a time about who I was when I was seventeen. I didn't join the Marine Corps to prove my manliness or validate my virility or because I thought it was macho; I enlisted because I found the order, discipline, and camaraderie so alluring. If someone asked me who I was, I had an answer: I was a marine.

Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 10, 2025, 03:34:41 PMI had an answer: I was a marine.

That makes good sense because I've not come across anyone who has joined the armed forces because they were trying to escape themselves, though I can see why someone might.

Why am I transgender?

Someone asked this recently and it's a great question. It's also a great way of introducing different theories about why trans people exist at all.

Many psychosocial arguments bog down over what's called 'nature versus nurture' because so much of us is the product of those two things. Yet every time I think about nature vs nurture, I can't help recalling the arguments around the fight for gay rights, where the gay movement came within a whisker of defeat by conservatives. Infighting between those who claimed they were born gay and the rest, split the movement and diluted its message.

So it is with the transgender movement. Some of us believe being trans is a genetic or biological trait we were born with, putting them on the 'nature' side of the argument. Others tend to the 'nurture' side of the argument, which is that something, somewhere along the way, made us trans. Most haven't thought about it at all, because we're too busy dealing with the social and psychological fallout of being trans.

So if you've wondered why you're trans, here's a skeleton to help pick through your own, unique case. Good luck with it!

Nature

One way of summing up the nature arguments is that trans people were born in the wrong body. Underlying the nature argument is an assumption that gender and sex are the same and upbringing has nothing to do with our conflict. Instead, we were born with a female brain in a male body, or a male brain in a female one.

The theory of transsexuality was based on this assumption and the idea that if you altered the sex specific characteristics of someone's body to match their gender identity, it would be a fix. Transsexuality was deprecated during the 1990s and replaced by transgender theory because the latter is more inclusive, but transsexuality works well for trans people who are binary.

In recent times, neuroscientists have flirted with the idea of 'female' brains and 'male' brains, which has been popular with binary trans people for obvious reasons, and then there's the elephant in the room, which is sex hormones, aka what I call oestrogen but many readers call estrogen, and testosterone. Surely, if there are only two sex hormones and women produce estrogen and men testosterone, then there are only two genders?

That would be okay if there were only two sex hormones, but E and T aren't the only players, and second, people with testes naturally produce estrogen from fat and last time I checked, one of the byproducts of breaking down female sex hormones is testosterone, which is why women always have measurable levels of it. You can't even use a minimum level of either hormone to establish if someone is male or female because of postmenopausal women, natural variability and last but not least because of a condition called Congenital Androgen Insensitivity, where you can have sky high levels of T but appear female because your body isn't responsive to sex hormones.

Which leads us to the minefield of intersex, about which entire textbooks have been written and which some binary people would prefer to forget. Things are somewhat better than they were, but the pressure to take quick decisions at birth and bring intersex people up in a binary gender based on those decisions has left a trail of devastation because many of those choices have turned out to be wrong.

The message is nature never makes anything binary in the same way five out of six people are right handed, one in six are left handed and a few are ambidextrous. Nature always has an insurance policy.

Nurture

The nurture view is gender and sex assigned at birth are different (read the widely adopted WHO definitions here) and aren't necessarily aligned in all people. In even using the word transgender, we are aligning themselves with the concept that we aren't born with a gender identity, but instead that we develop one.

While gender usually aligns with the sex we were assigned at birth, sometimes it either doesn't, or can't.

Childhood development

To understand 'nurture' theory, we need to understand a bit about childhood development.

When we're born, many parts of us, both physical and mental, are so underdeveloped we are helpless. We can't crawl, we can't sit up, we can't feed ourselves and our eyesight is so poor we can't even see well enough to learn to smile back when someone smiles at us. Smiling takes at least six weeks.

At birth, we are assigned a sex, but have no concept of being male or female, or any other sex. Very early on we learn from experience who cares for us most and because they're crucial to our survival and usually around, we learn from them before we learn from anyone else.

So far, so good, but at this stage we're a like a computer without an operating system, uncritically absorbing every experience, and intensely narcissistic because our world is tiny and from our point of view, entirely focussed on fulfilling our needs. Our greatest exposure is to our parents, or carers, so if they have traditional gendered roles, our early concept of femininity will be biased towards our mother's traits and our concept of masculinity biased toward our father's.

To use the computer metaphor, the first building blocks of our operating system will be the values and behaviours of our parents, whether we like them or not. They are all we know, so what they do and think is what we learn and their values go in earliest and deepest.

This is why therapists are so obsessed with in our childhoods, even though we rarely remember much detail. What we do remember can be highly significant and sometimes, that's why we remember it, but it may be symbolic, because much childhood thinking is more magical than logical.

If we have wider family, their values and those of neighbours are the next we come across, and as we grow older, so our social circle widens and the influence of our parents, while still important, becomes diluted, although it remains highly influential. The attitudes and behaviours of our playmates and school friends begin to shape us and we learn the importance of conforming (what social scientists call 'normativity') and pack dynamics.

In an earlier post I went through why it doesn't pay to stand out in any way at school, unless you are making a play to be pack leader and even then, popularity usually means being ultra conforming, while being bullied is usually the result of being different.

Plasticisty

No baby arrives with a concept of being feminine in its head, or masculine, instead we learn them by example as we grow up. During our first few years, we learn boys and girls are different, without any concept of sexuality, because that develops in our teens. Through the whole period during which gender and sexuality are programmed into our operating system, our brains are what is called 'plastic', a state which lasts into our early twenties. After that, the brain is less so.

For most, gender identity is baked in before the end of our brain's plastic phase and is consistent with sex assigned as birth, but the 'nurture' theory allows it to be baked in either way, or not at all.

What do I mean by 'baked in either way'? Your brain can exit the plastic phase with the firmware set to match your sex assigned at birth, to match another sex, or with the variables unset.

There's a book which explores some of these concepts very deeply. It's called Gender by Soft Assembly, but it's written by an analyst and tough going even if you've a background in the field. It isn't specifically about being trans, but I can't think of another work which maps out how the maze of all the different social forces acting upon us to program gender.

Normativity

Ultimately the single most powerful forces acting to program gender are example and normativity. We want to be like people who are like us, so we copy the codes in the operating system they use. Repeated execution of the code makes it feel like nature wrote it, but you can easily make a case that none of the traits and ways of thinking intrinsic to masculinity or femininity need be linked to being assigned male at birth of female at birth. Nature provides numerous examples of species which do the opposite of what we do.

The nurture theory of trans suggests that somewhere in the complex process of programming our gender through example, we begin to follow a different example to the normative one because the alternative aligns more closely with our sense of self.

No smoking gun

Despite having had fifty years to read the literature and life stories of trans people and in the process of digging into what makes me and other trans people tick, I've yet to find a common thread which explains what made us as we are. My bioscience background screams at me that there's no smoking gun because our learning of gender is so complex that tiny stimuli at crucial moments may have made all the difference in some of us, while having no impact at all in others.

If that's right there's no common cause and it also explains why most of us haven't the faintest clue why we're trans, just that we are. If there is a clue, in the vast majority of us it will have faded to the point of undetectability and so much of the rest of our character will be predicated on it that even if we could pinpoint it we couldn't change it without the risk of destroying our entire personality. Think of your own battle with dysphoria and you'll get a window into the epic scale of the forces involved. Fancy going in there again? I thought not.

I've found that a powerful tool when I tell people why being trans isn't an optional part of me, or some phase I'm going through. If others get even a glimmer of understanding of how core trans is to our everday experience, it affects them.

Room for everyone

So, while 'nature' aka transsexualism and a belief we were born in the wrong body is a shorthand that works for some, 'nurture' is equally viable and more inclusive. In my mind there's room for both and who knows, one day we may find the answer spans both theories.

However, even if you are a strong believer in 'nature' being the root of you being trans, be aware when you are accepted into a gender affirming care pathway today, you are entering a world in which sex assigned at birth and gender are regarded as different things by almost all the professionals you meet. In a pathway which as many non-binary people are engaging as people whose gender identity is either male, or female, the binary model underlying transsexualism is no longer appropriate for everyone.

Putting 'trans' before 'gender' leaves you free to anchor your gender where it best fits, or even to abandon the concept as irrelevant to you.

The 'nature' argument has practical uses, just like the 'nurture' one. Lived trans experience involves contact with people who feel they've 'lost something' by having to accept and deal with us. That 'loss' might be discomfort at not knowing how to behave around us, or it might be a feeling of responsibility in a parent who feels they're responsible for 'making us' trans.

This sense of loss is particularly difficult for parents, who've usually brought us up as they did because they thought it was the best way, only to find themselves confronted with a child who isn't normative. Accepting a transgender child is a challenge for all, but the more conservative parents are, the more the challenge scales.

Conservative people tend to have 'zero sum' thinking and can often see a gain in happiness which isn't consistent with their values as a loss in happiness (or even disrespect or an insult) for them. Many interpret our trans-ness as a reflection on them, or as a failure by them, instead of a benefit for us. In that frame, our gain is their loss.

Deploying the nature argument is a tempting way of dealing with zero-sum, because it absolves everyone involved, especially family, of any degree of responsibility. They feel relieved and if they love you still, it might be enough to tip them into acceptance, though it usually won't because their problem lies in accepting your change of gender identity, not accepting the whys or wherefores.

But I'd deploy the argument in a snap if I was confident it would work, because it's a cheap win.

The nature argument can also help us deal with our own doubts about our trans-ness, which, by definition, almost all of us have or have had because they are one of the drivers of dysphoria. Most of us spend a period of months, years or decades moving between a place where we suspect we are trans, which is characterised by doubt, disbelief and denial, to one where we accept we are trans, characterised by resolution and action.

In the space between us suspecting and accepting, the nature argument can help kill doubt and reduce dysphoria. We've seen it can let others off the hook, but it can be a powerful weapon if you aren't good at dealing with uncertainty.

Be aware it can also be a form of denial in itself. The more we deny, the more vehement we become in defence of our denial, the less tolerant we become of others and the more likely we will be to make mistakes because denial shuts down courses of action we might have optioned had we been able to consider them.

The 'transsexuality' phase of care foundered on that very rock, which proved a huge learning point for all the carers involved.

As I wrote in my last post, there's no smoking gun to explain why we're trans and there possibly never will be. The nurture theory of gender identity doesn't explain everything, nor does the nature theory, but elements of each can be extremely useful in understanding why we are the way we are, why modern gender affirming care relies on the definitions it does, and for explaining how we are to others.

You could describe both the nature and the nurture theory as ideologies, but that's close to gaslighting because an ideal is central to any ideology and neither theory expresses or even hints at an ideal.

Instead we're looking at toolkits which we're using to try and fix an engine some madman built with a combination of metric and AF threads, or, if you're older, Whitworth and AF, several of which I've had the misfortune to own. Which tool we use depends on which bolt we're trying to undo and I'm minded not to approach a piece of delicate machinery my well-being depends upon using the wrong socket set when I own both!

I don't disagree with a word you said, TanyaG. And all those words helped me understand myself better. I've always been a 'nature' advocate (due in no small part to my revulsion regarding John Money). So, you offered me the first cogent argument for 'nurture.' That being said, is it possible there is also a mystical/spiritual component to sex and gender? I ask because when my wife was pregnant with our daughter and before we had a determinative ultrasound, my wife passed out while we were waiting in line to rent a VHS movie (that's how old I am). I revived her using Boy Scout first aid techniques, but she was out for several minutes. I was so worried about our baby. That night, I dreamt I took the infant that would someday be called 'Hannah' from my wife's womb and we visited and played together. I thought I was playing with my son but was embarrassed (not for me, but for him) because he didn't have a penis. In my dream, he told me I needed to return him to the womb. So I did. My daughter is the most beautiful woman in the world and she has strong masc tendencies (she never wears a dress and often has a hammer or a rifle in her hands). I don't know. Anecdotes can be used to justify anything and are not amenable to replicable research. But that doesn't make them untrue.