So Heather thinks that no one talked about it because it simply hadn’t occurred to anyone rather than being afraid?
Or is Heather saying she preferred it when they suffered in silence?
I think Heather is saying that it’s either a fad, or a deliberate corruption spread by Those People. Either way, it’s not real and trans people are either evil or stupid, and Life Was Better before we had this evil and/or stupidity in it.
Heather is stupid.
“I didn’t see it therefore it never existed” is the most insane fucking logic to me
And stupid when obviously the only question one would need to ask in this context is “are there trans people over 30?” And the answer is “absolutely fucking yes”
Agreed, yet it’s one of the most common logical fallacies.
My dad’s best friend from high school transitioned…I can’t remember when I first met him (used to be “her”), but it had to be sometime in the late 90s/early 2000s, and I was just a teenager. He had fully transitioned by that point. I remember thinking that made sense. It was before the culture war types discovered trans people and decided they were the literal devils. To me it sounded simple–as a kid Tracy always felt like she was a boy. So when she could afford it, she got surgery to fix her body to match what her brain was, since that’s easier and less risky than changing your brain to match your body. It sounded to me like getting a prosthetic if you’re born without a limb or something. Or getting an amputation if you’re born with an extra limb. Like, you were born with something wrong with your body and you fixed it, not a big deal.
It wasn’t until much much later that I realized how rare Tracy was for that time period…not just because the kind of biological mistake he fixed is statistically rare (which I understood as a kid), but because the vast, vast majority of people born that way hide it (which I did not understand). I also didn’t really have a concept of “gender” as a different thing than “sex” at that point…I don’t think the vocabulary for that really existed except maybe in a few academic circles. So to me, she was a she until she transitioned, then she became he. She had a problem, now he doesn’t.
It also confused the fuck out of me when people started saying hateful shit about trans people. Like, no, I know a trans person, he’s cool as hell, we went kayaking together.
So when she could afford it, she got surgery to fix her body to match what her brain was, since that’s easier and less risky than changing your brain to match your body.
Just a small point. If we had any medical/scientifically validated method to “change her brain to match her body”, Conservatives would be railing non-stop to only allow that instead of allowing/promoting what we currently know as gender transition. It would still be wrong because it would literally be brainwashing.
The counterpoint would be that this happens to millions of people undergoing psychiatric care every day for other reasons. “Better living through chemistry” allows us to treat various conditions, even relatively harmless ones, through alterations in brain chemistry. Brainwashing, as it were. And that’s relatively accepted practice today.
I think a lot of people would jump at the opportunity if there was a magic pill that would just suddenly make you feel comfortable in the skin you’re in. Gender dysphoria is not a pleasant condition to experience, and the only solution we have available right now is to transition into what feels more comfortable. But it’ll likely be a long while (likely not within our lifetimes) that discrimination against trans people will come to an end, so the alternative to dysphoria is social stigmatization that causes other negative medical states anyways.
There’s a reason trans people have such a high rate of suicide. If the medical community were to decide that a pill that cures gender dysphoria was a more reliable intervention than living with all of the baggage that comes with being trans, I don’t doubt that many/most would prefer that approach.
I was born in the early 90s and there was an AFAB person who very early on insisted they were actually a boy. I do remember thinking it was weird when I was a kid but the more they presented masculine the more it became “That’s just the way they are” and I accepted it.
They were masculine presenting as early as 4th grade if I remember correctly. They were a beacon of light in high school for other queer people who hadn’t figured themselves out yet. And they were super nice and friendly so everyone liked them.
They waited until our first year of college before asking us to refer them with he/him pronouns. It just made sense. I had a better understanding of gender and its spectrum by this point so it I remember thinking “finally.”
Unfortunately he was in a car accident not too long after, and passed away. The world is sincerely lesser from his passing.
My daughter goes to school with a transboy. I suspected he was trans from his behavior, haircut, etc. the first time when he and my daughter were at a pool party together when they were 9 years old. I’m so glad we live in an era where it’s more comfortable (although there’s still a long way to go) for someone like him to be who they really are.
I had a trans classmate in high school. We weren’t friends, he was a real jerk for the first two years I knew him, until he socially transitioned between sophomore and junior year. He mellowed out a lot after that, but we still never really made friends.
I’m now in music education and have encountered multiple trans students. The one that sticks out to me the most is the kid whose parents didn’t accept him as trans, because he told us we had to deadname him and misgender him any time his parents were around, which, unfortunately, included when he was on stage during a bit of a show he was in in which part of the production was everybody getting introduced during one of the songs. I know he really appreciated us accepting him and having his back like that, but I hated that we had to do that.
That super sucks about your friend. So unfair that he finally felt comfortable with his identity, and then crashed straight into /c/fuckcars.
I graduated in '89. Queer as a $3 bill always was, but you didn’t say that shit in high school back then. Just being gay was dangerous enough, can’t imagine how being trans would have gone over.
If you did try to be who you were, you ended up ostracized at best, dead in a ditch at worst. I chose the lunch tray route, but outside of school…
'89 here as well. If people think gay folk have it bad now, friends and neighbors, I can tell stories.
Gay rights jumped 900% in relatively few years. It’s why the conservatives are shitting themselves. Now they’re told they have to, at least, tolerate the people they used to hate. Can’t stomach it.
In 1999 my boyfriend wouldn’t hold my hand or show any affection outside the house for fear. Gays now don’t even know what the pride rallies are for
Graduated 03… Didn’t know trans was a thing. Nobody spoke about it. The concept of “transsexuals” was limited to trans women and them basically only in the concept of riddicule so had no idea trans men could exist…
I had no words for what I was. No community. Just a sense of being isolated from every other person with thoughts that made me sound crazy even to myself. I hosted a bunch of desires I knew would make me end up more alienated and alone than I already was if I even tried to voice them.
Funnily enough I also snapped and tried to beat a bully with a hockeystick. I was a gentle kid who wanted to hurt no one and because I was locked inside myself everybody took a turn treating me like shit because I was quiet. Thankfully my teachers got it. My parents were not even phoned, the teachers just acted like it was any other day of the week. I owe those folks a lot.
Schools always did this.
Never expelling the bullies, always expelling the kid that was bullied to their breaking point when they retaliated.
I am convinced that the people who choose to be teachers (and especially principals) also tend to be the kind of people who like and relate to bullies.
In general a lot of them seen to enjoy bullying as a method of “correcting” other people to align with your will. A method some of them seem to feel they are unjustly restrained from utilizing fully.
The way I see it, positions of power attract those who want to use and abuse that power. But the position of teacher also attracts lots of wonderful people. What you end up with depends on the school and their hiring practices, which in 90s and before was probably not that oriented toward the well being of the children.
Not all schools. Neither of the two I attended in Australia punished me when I snapped
Heather is, unfortunately, very typical. It didn’t happen in her world so therefore it wasn’t really a “thing”
I’m always surprised at how people can’t seem to imagine a world that isn’t a mirror image of their reality.
There was a trans girl in my high school in the 90s. She was lucky in a way because she was also drop-dead gorgeous, so even a lot of the asshole bigot kids who knew she was trans didn’t say anything in case other kids would make fun of them for having a crush on her.
There was a trans girl in my school in the late 90s and she was a total scheming bitch who tried to get my girlfriend to dump me.
I have very vivid memories of the one out trans person I knew back then lol
Not being aware of something existing doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You are not the center of the world. Jesus christ.
I finished school in the 90s. We had a guy in our class who was very not straight. Although we were sometimes nice to him we also bullied him and I still feel guilty about it to this day. Last I heard he identified as a female but that was second hand info 15 years ago. I have no idea what happened to him/her. I wish I could apologise but have no way to even contact them or know where to start.
Absolutely true. No one (well, very few, even the obvious ones) was even openly gay before the 2000s
People who weren’t around as at least a teen before 2000s have no clue how silent anyone was on being gay. It just about never was discussed
It was not a safe thing to admit. Being trans would be significantly worse for them I’m sure
The original question is just groomer-accusing trash, probably by someone who indoctrinates children religiously and are scared another group “with an agenda” might get to them first
Yep. Nobody was out in the 90s. None. The one goth kid that wore a tiny bit of eyeliner was a big fucking deal and he was straight (had a big tiddy goth gf).
You’re going too far. There were definitely plenty of kids out in the 90s. Not as many as today, but maybe one or two per school, depending on the school.
Being “out” as in everyone knew it publicly, or just some rumors going on and maybe their closest friends actually being in on it?
In my highschool of 600 people in the 2000s i am not aware if a single person that was officially out. Instead for most of the people you’d suspect it, it later became official.
Yup. There was a guy in our class that was pretty obvious but he maintained he was straight. He even dated a few girls. While I don’t think we (his closest friends) would’ve ostracized him, we definitely would’ve made every convo about his gayness and teased him for it. “removed” and “homo” were still very common slurs in the late 90s. That’s enough to stay in the closet. If anyone came out as trans I’m sure it would’ve been just as bad.
Using removed as just a general insult took me a long time to break out of. It was rampant in the 80s and 90s. But it was reflective of what people thought: gay=bad choice. Aids made that even worse
So while using it as a slur for your friends wasn’t gay bashing it was basically saying your friend was as lame as a gay person is, which people looked down on
Thankfully in my mid teens I got the chance to work with gay people and I realized any negative way of thinking or treating them was way off base and ignorant. I was never that bad at all but I had the general unease that people back then had. The. You just realize there’s nothing special about them. Just people being attracted to people
I used to have a group of kids follow me home throwing rocks at me every day for like a week. No adult did anything about it. So eventually, I picked up a rock and threw it back and hitting one of them in the face.
I was punished by the school, even though this didn’t even happen at school. I was punished by my parents. The bullies were not punished ever, and they never stopped.
To everyone who went to school before the heliocentric model was introduced, do you remember anyone talking about how they thought the Earth may not be the center of the galaxy? No… Me neither.
If all someone knew were vortices and the ethereal plane, it would take quite a while to explain Newton’s new take through Calculus. Have you seen the thickness of his publications? Also, they’re in Latin so the insider language factor is quite challenging.
Graduated near 2000 and yes I remember several and several more who waited until after they graduated to come out about it.
I think most people who “dont remember” are people from groups that it wouldn’t be kosher to come out around. I also image racist people didn’t have a lot of nonwhite friend’s go figure.
I’ve always wanted to tell this kind of story in fiction:
Someone goes 90% of the path down a ‘Joker’ story - they’re mistreated and abandoned by society, unable to live, much less achieve their dreams, basically because of their lot in life. They’ve caused extreme, grievous harm that could genuinely be categorized as self-defense. Then, just as they’re planning some final, very climactic action with some strong weaponry to remove someone that makes them feel unsafe, someone DOES hear them out - and saves them from the path of becoming a full anti-hero, establishing in a large venue of society that every “heinous” action of his was a necessary act for human sanity, and could have been avoided by countless people in their path. Those who wronged him receive due punishment, and the cruelty he’s been exposed to is revealed to society at large.
Granted, that kind of thing does sound like a hero power fantasy; but when 90% of the anime I see these days is trash isekai “I’m overpowered in this alternate world” type of stuff, it feels like a fantasy we want to have these days.
A story where the protagonist is swayed from violence to gain revenge is desperately needed
Media really promotes violence and revenge as proper things to do
The real power fantasy is being able to help people. Because that’s the worst sort of helplessness, seeing bad shit happen and knowing deep in your heart that there’s very little you can do about it.
Even if we explore fantasy, something I like playing into is revealing that we are not always “the main character” of the world - the person initiating action. Sometimes it’s extremely hard for this non-Joker character I’m depicting to realize that they are not an “anti-hero who’s going to slice apart the corrupt strings of the world”, he’s just a victim of injustice - someone who shouldn’t have had these things happen to them, but also has no individual path to follow for correction. They didn’t do anything wrong, nor is there anything for them to do as a follow-up.
I’ve met people that seem like they need help to put their life in a good, working state, but their mind is preoccupied with the idea of what they can do to help others, even if, when it comes down to it, they’re not so capable of that just yet. It might internally be a way of pushing further social connections and making themselves feel valued. It could also be an attempt to follow off the many hero fantasies we see in fiction.
