Kinda galling talking to my brother and realising he's already written his own son off due to his gender.

The fact that "testosterone made him do it" is being projected onto a four year old boy is proof of how ridiculous the demonisation of a simple sex hormone has become. The lie is taking on a life of its own, free from any sort of scientific rationality.

Biological essentialism of gender is a complete load of balls, if you'll excuse me for that.

@Tattie Ugh. You're so right. Boys that age aren't producing testosterone in any amount that can be called a "spike" at all. And fuck demonizing/blaming testosterone for the poor behaviour of some people. Sexism and toxic masculinity are at fault. Sexism cuts both ways.

@Tattie at the edges of the right-on class maybe. Don’t ever remember it being particularly prevalent.

I am sympathetic to parents because I think you do have to come to terms with the limits of your control. You send your boy off to preschool and he's coming back smashing up all his toys. That's real.

But it's not biologically ordained, and you have the responsibility to counter the messages he's internalising from society at large. To set positive examples of adult behaviour, to maintain clear rules of what is acceptable and what isn't.

@Tattie If you are not a parent, your opinions on the difference between boys and girls is uninformed and will almost undoubtedly sound childishly naive to parents, especially cis parents.

(On top of that, you’re wrong: all humans of all ages produce and have testosterone.)

I know the differences are not hormonal but honestly you’re missing the forest for the trees here.

Cis people have education school level understanding of gender. “Boys and girls act differently so it’s testosterone!” is dumb but you are pedantically missing the point being made : boys and girls act differently. To any parent this is observable fact and just saying “your reason is wrong haha!” is not contributing to any form of helpful conversation. It’s just pedantic squabbling.

Again, especially when if they do a basic google search they will see your point is easy to dismiss as factually incorrect.

@Tattie *headdesk* at your brother and that book's author both.

> a complete load of balls
Ovary nice.

@Bel_tamtu @Tattie My extended human acquaintances include a set of fraternal twins. Sweet and mild, since the day they were born. And then, when they went to a daytime pre-school child-care facility, so the parents could return to working full time, the boy instantly acquired worrying behavioral problems at home. From the other boys thrown together in the toddler pits.

The parents, of course, rationalized it away, because the alternative was to pull an entire income, which they could not.

@Tattie Somehow two of my children (one of each gender) managed to pick up on the "boys are more aggressive than girls" by that age even though neither went to preschool. It's annoying, really.

unrelated to you asking @Tattie but having felt important to weigh in on the discussion, socialization for me came when i'd already atrophied from a very christian and insular neighborhood. that being said, after taking the hormone for some years, and getting on blockers a little later--blockers tended to give me a fixation on listening to other people rather than just the small voice in my head telling me how to feel about the external world. i'm not sure whether i'm constructing the idea of empathy, but there is some externality that comes with blockers?? i guess? part of it might have been related to the social atrophy, and that expulsion and consistent admonishment from nearly an entire neighborhood gave me a lot of social anxiety, which is why i think me reaching out to listen to people other than myself is an anomaly with my own interpersonal conflict. i attribute that to going on blockers because around the time that their affects began to impact my body was around the time i quieted myself to more or less take in more of the rest of the world, rather than the world i grew up in.

@bedhead fascinating! I see in this how hormonal changes can be a powerful anchor for personal transformation. Your experience of society growing up left you with a constant anxiety about social interaction, and when your emotional landscape changed due to blockers you were able to leave this anxiety in the past and step into a new way of being. Have I understood that correctly?
@valentine

@bedhead fascinating! I see in this how hormonal changes can be a powerful anchor for personal transformation. Your experience of society growing up left you with a constant anxiety about social interaction, and when your emotional landscape changed due to blockers you were able to leave this anxiety in the past and step into a new way of being. Have I understood that correctly?
@valentine

you understood correct! i even swapped cities and felt very isolated, but after being on blockers, i decided to reach out to a coworker who became my best friend in the whole world, i went out to places by myself to engage with the idea of feeling the agency to go out without anybody else (take yourself out on dates whatnot), i went to my best friend's apartment all the time to hang out. later on i went to parties and actually felt free to be myself while also limiting my expressivity (listening more than speaking).

@bedhead I am so happy for you! ️ My own transition has similarly felt like stepping into a new me, and it has been so joyful, so transformational.
@valentine

eleven years later, and i'm still learning new things about myself in both practice and in form: curvature i didn't have, new habits granted from regular affirmation of my transness. i've recently begun to actually dig into being in a larger trans community locally, and that's brought tons of solace and grace and comraderie too. the individualist sociocultural dynamic of living more north in the US left its trans spaces a little clique-oriented, and as a socially-atrophied trans lady, fitting into those spaces of trans people that have lived their entire lives in society was difficult but altogether okay. but moving to the south has taught me that trans people here collectivize and have a shared understanding of interconnectedness that is pretty amazing.

i guess some of this is a ramble about my surroundings (been on a weird kick of wanting to feel more grounded to the world under my feet than the one in my head), but i guess it also is an observation that environment has tons to do with how you respond to your hormonal treatment, and that no one roadmap is the only path on that route to transness.

eleven years later, and i'm still learning new things about myself in both practice and in form: curvature i didn't have, new habits granted from regular affirmation of my transness. i've recently begun to actually dig into being in a larger trans community locally, and that's brought tons of solace and grace and comraderie too. the individualist sociocultural dynamic of living more north in the US left its trans spaces a little clique-oriented, and as a socially-atrophied trans lady, fitting into those spaces of trans people that have lived their entire lives in society was difficult but altogether okay. but moving to the south has taught me that trans people here collectivize and have a shared understanding of interconnectedness that is pretty amazing.

i guess some of this is a ramble about my surroundings (been on a weird kick of wanting to feel more grounded to the world under my feet than the one in my head), but i guess it also is an observation that environment has tons to do with how you respond to your hormonal treatment, and that no one roadmap is the only path on that route to transness.

@log it's such a tough one, isn't it? Because as well as the realities of child-rearing, kids do need to start socialising with their peers at some point. There's no easy answers to societal problems.
@Bel_tamtu

@Colman @Tattie My parents raised me and my siblings pretty gender neutrally. I think there's a decent chance they would have done that even if I hadn't been nonbinary. I'm not even sure how much of that was because I was nonbinary. It doesn't help that nonbinary wasn't a concept any of us had then.

@Tattie @Bel_tamtu Especially when societal problems can beget further societal problems, in a spiral that cycles vicious one way, and virtuous the other. The departure from Bowley's Law circa 1980 has hollowed out the working class, and its children paid a price. Now the grandchildren are paying the same price and more.