Excuse me for being captain obvious and the redundancy of this comment but this is my field in nursing and I'm kind of on one at the moment!

It's not exactly common for orthopaedic surgery to be performed without a wealth of medical justifications where the preoperative physical damage is tangibly observable and backed up by concrete and uncontested biological research data. It's almost always a last resort and many consultants will refuse to go down the surgical route until less invasive procedures such as physiotherapy, pain relief and steroid injections have been attempted. You can't ever really "change your mind" about having arthritis or have it go away by itself so orthopaedic surgery can be risky, can sometimes fail, can sometimes worsen an issue but is rarely "unnecessary". They can come back with this argument when top surgery is able to make the same claims. When medical justification for top surgery has progressed past the stage of "the patient asked for it".

I would imagine also that orthopedic surgery doesn't quite carry the same punch in terms of a direct and intimate link to personal identity and sense of self as well as how one is going to be constantly and perpetually perceived by strangers on the most fundamental level.

Overall I rate this tweet a 2/10.

But I'm honestly kinda scared I won't pass as a guy again, I'm 5'1 never got body / facial hair always had more femine facial features / structure and now I have tits and hips.

This is thinking in trans terms. Cis people don't "pass" as the sex they are, they just are, regardless of what they look like physically. You might find that it is more effort to be physically masculine but that is entirely different from being male and from reading your post unlikely to be something you'd feel happy with. When you remove yourself from the trans thinkbox you begin to realise that there is no rulebook that says you have to be a certain way to be male or female. You just are and you don't need to justify it to yourself or to anyone else.

Let's be honest... they would if they could. I would have. When I identified trans I'd have stopped at nothing to gain access to every form of treatment available as soon as it was available. I was a teenager and I knew what I wanted and I wanted it now 🙄

Part of being trans is a hyper-awareness of an ever ticking clock pushing your body away in the opposite direction to where you want it to go. It can fully override the processes for considered and rational contemplation. There's no time to consider that you might be wrong!

I can thank 1990's NHS gatekeeping for preventing me from getting too far down the medical pathway over the several years I was under the gender clinic but you can bet I and the other trans teens I associated with through Mermaids didn't lament daily at how slow and "cruel" the offical NHS process was and we all joined in on protests to remove the 2 year social transition "real life test" roadblock they had. Those of us less well off were insanely jealous of the few who could afford to go private and get their hormones prescribed day one. (I still remember the Dr's name that they all went to - Russell Reid. We called him "Uncle Russell" because he understood us and would prescribe HRT on the first meeting - for a private consultation fee of course. I'm fairly sure he was struck off for malpractice due to this a couple of years later.)

I've seen studies with that number ranging from anything between 0.5% to 87%. The ones with the high figures are often the ones that did not give the children access to hrt and affirmative treatment so if we wanted to also play around with numbers we could argue a correlation between affirmation and persistence and conclude that medical transition is preventing gender dysphoria from easing over time.

Basically what I'm saying is that when you data is not consistently repeatable you can use your numbers to say whatever you want.

What gets me most about the type of argument in this image though is the hypocrisy and utter tone deafness when appealing to empathy. They're claiming detransition at 2% as justification to ignore the harm causes to that demographic since it's such a minority. Does the trans movement want to die on that hill? If that were a just stance then we could equally disregard any and all needs of trans people that cause conflict or controversy with other groups since they're such a minor proportion of the overall population therefore statistically they don't matter.

Exactly this. Nobody born male will have the lived experience of a female puberty, to be perceived by peers and adults dramatically differently as their body changes (in a way they didn't ask for or instigated themselves with medication), to learn about the implications of half a lifetime of menstruation right as it is ravaging their body for the first time, the threat of pregnancy overlooking intimate experimentation, growing up on the opposite end of male defaultism etc etc

I think many AMAB who claim to know or to empathise with womanhood are often referring specifically to the way they are treated by others compared to how they used to be treated when they presented male. This is absolutely part of a female experience but its doesn't carry any of the weight of the culmulation of a life lived building up to that point. There is significant and vital context missing that is biologically impossible to have experienced (and socially impossible as well unless your parents literally transitioned you from something like age 3 or younger) so you'll never really see a full picture of what "Womanhood" actually is.

This is entirely true in the opposite direction for AFAB and Manhood as well. More importantly it's also entirely true for a non-trans person to never truly know the experience of a trans person (Transhood?) which is a (true) statement often made by the trans community yet it is disingenuous to claim access to someone else's experience while also denying them access to your own. Lack of lived experience is simply an unfortunate limitation of what can be achieved through transition and should be acknowledged as such.

As others have said, try to disengage. Most of this stuff is restricted to online and doesn't necessarily reflect the real world too well.

I used to have a link to the "Boxer Ceiling" album, it was a collection of twitter screenshots from (presumably) gen Z transmen and enbies decrying gay men as "disgusting, evil, f***ots who are obsessed with genitals and deserve the 80s to come back". It was truly vile and seemed motivated by no more than the fact that gay men would routinely reject sexual advances from female bodied individuals. More and more examples were added every day and there were about 4000 collected quotes before Google deleted the album and its backup. (apparently collecting evidence of hate against your group constitutes hate against the groups perpetrating it, but whatever). But yeah I got obsessed with this album and used to doom scroll it all the time allowing it to live rent free in my head and to feel truly hated for my sexuality in ways I'd never really experienced before because it was coming form people who fronted themselves as progressive and should presumably know better. Since it's been taken away I don't really think about that stuff anymore and I never really encounter any kind of homophobia like that outside of the Internet. It's out there but it's not quite concentrated all in once place in quite the same way.

Online is full of awful people with awful takes but the benefit it has over real life is that you can just turn them off. If you can, try and have a dry period of no media that involves social politics. Focus on a neutral hobby and real world friends.

I also don't want to sound dismissive of your concerns and I can assure you it hasn't gone unnoticed what is happening to Lesbian spaces and communities and it is very upsetting. At the end of the day, being homosexual is about finding and having a partner that you love and being able to live freely able to express that openly with them. Once you get there, that's something nobody can take away from you.

I'm sure this is a universal phenomenon but I've never seen it so prevalent as with discussions about transgenderism. Untruths get told, either deliberately or by misinterpretation but then get repeated so often by so many people without checking that they actually begin to replace the truth even when the truth is right there.

I see this so often in trans spaces it's why I block all trans content I see because it frustrates me to see blatent and easily verifiable untruths be championed with such blind passion but you still see stuff leak out into wider spaces a lot. Some recent examples of things I've seen repeated a lot on more mainstream subs (no opinions either way on the people mentioned here, I just don't like misinformation):

JK Rowling is a supporter and friend of Matt Walsh (she is on record denouncing him as an enemy of women and of her)

Jordan Peterson refuses to call trans people by the pronouns they are presenting as (he is on video being asked this very question and saying he would call a trans woman student "she")

Marsha P Johnson was a transwoman who started Stonewall (she is on record saying she wasn't there until several hours after it started, bonus points, there is an easily found video of her a few years before her death when she is out of drag saying she is a boy not a girl and that transsexuals are different from drag queens)

Trans people are the most likely group to be murdered (accounting for relative population size, murder of trans people occurs approximately 3 times less frequently compared to the general population making them statistically one of the safest groups in terms of homicide).

The most upsetting are the lies spread about detransitioners and this subreddit. That we're all just pretending to have gone through transition so we can be hateful. I don't even think 90% of it is malicious it's just repeated often enough that people believe it without ever coming here to check.

"A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on."

EDIT: The Johnson one upsets me honestly. There was an lgbt subreddit where someone said some bigoted gay men were claiming that Johnson was a gay male drag queen and not a trans woman. I replied with nothing except a link to the video of Johnson herself saying this and the mods banned me citing hate speech.

I can appreciate this point of view. Trans, detrans, whatever your identity or feelings towards gender... post surgery misgivings brought about by feeling the loss of something that's always physically been a part of you are not always going to be insignificant.

I was a shy and effeminate gay boy as a young teen. I remember as my trans feelings became stronger I began to watch and study girls my age so as to learn and mimic behavioural patterns and body language. It was a common topic of discussion in my trans social spaces to give one another tips on how to do this. How to dress, how to talk, how to walk, how to act, how to react.

This was all in pursuit of becoming our True Selves. How was I so blind to the irony of that? How did I not understand how absurd a concept it is to need practice in being yourself? It was all so unnatural and so exhausting to maintain.

And everyone could see it. It was never transphobia or bullying or shaming that got me. It was people being polite. Far too polite, far too supportive, far too careful. I wonder if anyone else can relate to those so subtle tells? Receiving those overly warm, encouraging yet ever so unnatural smiles from strangers. The ones that scream "I'm unsure of the protocol in this situation but I'm wanting to show my best that I'm a good ally!". Or the way that people almost visibly build up towards it when they're about to use your name or pronoun in a sentence. Like they're anticipating how wrong it's going to feel in their mouth and it's throwing off their natural flow.

(I know someone who uses a wheelchair and hearing the way she describes how people interact with her when she's in it compared to when she's out of it feels so very familiar!)

So everything about me was inauthentic. Everything about the way people interacted with me was inauthentic.

I struggled for years fooling myself it would get better. When I went back to being a shy and effeminate gay boy it was nice to be treated as a human again. It might not have been the life I wanted but at least it was real and I've since come around to embrace it as well as understanding that this is who I am because it just is, I don't have to learn it.

Why do I see that line EVERYWHERE as a retort? "You are confusing sex and gender". No you weren't! There is nothing in what you said that was in any way related to mixing the two up.

It just seems to be thrown around as the go to line even when it makes zero sense contextually.

Also why are transmen using spaces for lesbian women? Isn't that a concept they've dedicated their lives to identifying out of and away from? Has seeing spaces for straight dudes to talk about women been a little too real and raised a few too many uncomfortable questions?