They're just politically and historically uneducated which results in an incoherent worldview. I passed through a phase like this myself when I was in the process of rejecting liberalism but my head was still swimming with red scare nonsense, which left me politically confused, wanting an idealistic equal and empathetic society but not yet understanding that these "authoritarian" aspects would (and are and were, historically) necessary to defend it. Part of that was because I had not yet understood the full extent of the barbarity of liberalism, even though I understood it in part. Parenti has a famous quote from one of his lectures that went something to the effect of, "If there was no NATO, there would've been no need for a Warsaw Pact. If there was no CIA, there would've been no need for a KGB." I think people in this stage of moving left (whether or not they eventually become communists) don't have a grasp on the enormity of the attacks, subversion, and siege levied against socialist states that can only be defended against with structures that are unfortunately capable of grave abuses. In the same lecture, Parenti uses the example of the Nicaraguan revolution, saying something like (not an exact quote), "They discovered a very terrible thing. They discovered they needed a secret police. They discovered they needed Instruments of coercion, and these instruments are capable of very serious crimes." Finally, though I don't necessarily see it in OOP, there can often be an element of racism as well. The Soviets and PRC will be seen as "authoritarian" while Cuba will be seen as okay, despite Cuba (until recently? I haven't kept up with the reforms over the past couple of decades) being a Marxist-Leninist state more or less identical to Soviet governance. This is exactly the goal of the red scare(s). It's not to outright prevent everyone from moving leftward, they'll never achieve that, but those that do so have been deliberately maleducated so that they do not align with the actually existing (and therefore working, and therefore threatening) socialist projects.

tl;dr, political and historical maleducation makes people say some stupid shit.

I think they just spoof numbers anyway. I got a scam call that was spoofing my own number. I was half tempted to pick it up just to ask if they even realized.

I read your whole post and I really appreciate your critique! Perhaps I was too careless with my language, as I greatly admire Hirschfeld's work, and this comment will certainly get me off my ass to read the 1,500 pages of Homosexuality of Men & Women spread across the 3 rather imposing tomes that have been sitting on my desk for an embarrassingly long time. My issue isn't with Hirschfeld's work but rather with the terms in their modern form which have been almost completely stripped of all the detail you relayed.

I guess to attempt to explain myself a little more clearly, it took me several years into my transition before I stumbled across Hirschfeld for the first time. I suppose I was so caught up in actually transitioning that I didn't think to investigate the history of it all. When I first started transitioning in the early 2010s, the term "transsexual" was still in popular use but had been completely deformed into a very rigid and binary transmedicalist definition (at least in the circles where I was coming to self awareness), which obviously adversely affected the way I thought of transness and my own discomfort with slotting myself into such a binary. It's that kind experience that I view as the baggage that comes from these terms, though I did not mean to lay that at the feet of Hirschfeld. As I said somewhere else in the comments, this is still a half-baked thought and I have a bad tendency to be rather careless with my language sometimes, so I appreciate the correction!

Discovering that Hirschfeld had a century before effectively endorsed the concept of an infinite spectrum of diversity in human sex, sexuality, and gender was a big part in getting me out of the aforementioned funk, so thank you for sharing all this! Who knew that cracking your egg on 420chan's /cd/ would be so bad for you!

If you want to bend the definition to include orchiectomies then gender-bendy people have been doing those in religious rituals across all sorts of cultures since the Bronze Age or even earlier. Those people must've been fucking gnarly to just tank that kind of pain without modern opiods or anesthesia. Our trans ancestors were of a different breed, I can't even imagine.

Anyway, always glad to share trans history! Truly, we have always been here, and I desperately wish more people knew that.

Yeah I guess I should've added that I don't really see a fix for this problem, it's just something I've noticed. For better or for worse, nonbinary is the term for third and beyond genders, at least at legal level in the US. We're kind of stuck with it unless a drastic change in the culture happens or something along those lines. The real time to have solidified other terms was roughly the period between 1870-1930 when the medical terminology and categories were being worked out. Queer people would've had to have organized a unified front and hammered this stuff out, but the community basically didn't exist or was extremely fragmented at that point. Ironically these medical terms, particulary for trans people, are what helped trans people discover that there were others like them and gave them language to rally around. So I'm not saying it's all bad, and I've certainly benefitted tremendously from gender affirming care. It's just an unfortunate historical consequence that I don't see people talk about is all.

Same here, just vibes, but I don't live in a very queer area at all. I haven't even had an IRL queer friend honestly. 1% seems silly low, but I do think we're still somewhat rare, for lack of a better term, so 1 in 20 feels like a rough upper bound to me. But again, just vibes.

[HRT] is a recent development right?

Depends on how you define recent. The earliest studies on the effects of "cross-sex" hormones happened over a century ago. I think there was some stuff done before him, but the big name in that area was an Austrian doctor named Eugen Steinach. In the early 1900s/1910s he experimented with implanting rats and guinea pigs with ovaries (into males) and testes (into females) and observed the corresponding physical and behavior changes. Sex hormones had not been isolated at this point, so it was only understood that these sex organs contained what they termed "glandular juices" which was having these effects. In 1923 he produced Der Steinachfilm (trans. The Steinach Film) which, along with a 68 page pamphlet published in 1920, popularized his discoveries to the lay public. These results were interpreted in some crank ways, like the belief among some people, including Steinach himself, that homosexuality could be "cured" by giving gay men a testicular implant to boost their "male glandular juices" (testosterone), but the trans implications were picked up by other people.^[Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, (Random House, 2014), 173-175.] Apparently a trans woman read about these developments and wanted the prodecure for herself, quoting from Gay Berlin with editted pronouns,

The pamphlet was mentioned by one young [woman] who wrote [sexologist Magnus] Hirschfeld in 1920—a rare surviving letter preserved at the Kinsey Institute—explaining that [she] was "more woman than man." This correspondent also described that [she] had just had the chance to read about "the book about artificial rejuvenation and sex change," a clear reference to Steinach. The promise of hormone therapy inspired [her] to write Hirschfeld: "[W]ould it not perhaps be possible to remove my testicles and in their place insert an ovary, and then in this fashion I could become a complete woman. . . . I trust you completely Herr Dr., and perhaps I could serve science as an important experiment." Included in this missive was a small photograph of [the woman in women's clothing].^[Ibid., 175]

There are other reports of people receiving a very primitive version of HRT around this time as well. In 1916 a 36 year old person known only as "Herr. A" in the historical record approached a Berlin doctor named Max Marcuse about an orchiectomy and hormone treatment. Marcuse denied the request for surgery on the grounds that he deemed the patient mentally ill, but gave them an unspecified "ovarian preparation" which seemed to calm their distress. One of the first surgical sex reassignments was undertaken in stages over the course of 1920-1921 on a 23 year old military officer. They received an orchiectomy, a primitive sort of vulvoplasty while keeping the penis intact, and an implanted ovary for hormone treatment. Though this person later requested the reversal of some of these surgical procedures and then lived out the rest of their life as a man.^[Ibid., 176-177]

According to Julian Gill-Peterson, synthetic hormones were available in the United States by the mid-1930s, though trans people's access to them were obviously extremely difficult, if not impossible, though not for a lack of trying. Gill-Peterson relates a story of a trans man known to us only as "Bernard" who was well read in the sexological developments of the time and attempted to convince doctors at John Hopkins Hospital that he was actually intersex and needed surgery and hormones to "correct" his supposed birth defect. Unfortunately he was ultimately unsuccessful, though he did manage to fool the first doctor he saw, but that doctor sought a second opinion and Bernard's ploy was seen through by the second one.^[Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 83-85.] So that all said, the most primitive forms of HRT have been around for just over a century now, and synthetic HRT has been possible but not nessicarily available since roughly the middle last century. I don't have any citation for this but I remember hearing way back in the day that spironolactone was originally prescribed as a blood pressure medication for men in the 1950s until they all started growing breasts because of its anti-androgen effects. So the past 70 or 80 years have mostly been about increasing access moreso than novel developments in HRT.

Oh no, I shouldn't have said anything, you might be waiting a long time because I'm lazy as hell

I also don't feel like it's a fully cooked up thought so I am hesitant to share but the tl;dr is basically that it's very hard not to notice that in pretty much every other culture in human history that the people we would today call transgender were integrated into society (because some cultures rejected us, but a lot did not) were given names/roles that were grounded within their culture, typically related to religion. This has been the "natural" state of trans people for most of our history until we get to what could very broadly be described as "Western culture" and the scientific revolution. Starting in the mid/late 1800s, medical scientists began probing the concepts of human sex, sexuality, and gender identity, and began studying queer people as medical subjects. Skipping over a LOT of history here, but eventually we arrive at terms like homosexuality and transvestite (which then is replaced by transsexual, which then much later is (mostly) replaced with transgender). These originated as medical diagnoses, which come with the implication of very strict and rigid boundaries like most other scientific terminology. Because of a tremendous amount of reasons I'm sure, but chief among them the lack of organization among the queer community before this transpired, these terms became identity terms. The baggage I'm referring to is that identity is very nebulous, and even fluid, and these terms are not. There were some attempts to create culturally grounded terms (see: Uranian, Eonism, and to a lesser extent Trans-sensible for examples, I have been meaning to make a trans mega about these), but they never caught on. So we end up with terminology that feels clunky and awkward for the role they're filling. For an example of a "culturally grounded" term, think lesbian or sapphic! If anyone passing by doesn't know, lesbian derives from the name for the Agean island of Lesbos, where the extremely gay poet Sappho lived, from which we get the term sapphic. For genders outside man and woman, it gets real bad (in my opinion at least). Nonbinary is a fucking awful term because it's just a negation of the binary gender system (which is made up, which is a whole other can of worms because gender was invented in an attempt to save binary sex from conceptual collapse, see Histories of the Transgender Child by Julian Gill-Peterson), and it just sound awful (though "enby" ain't that bad). In the words of sexologist Dr. Havelock Ellis, these terms "... even if acceptable as a descriptive term, still remains one of those hybrid Greco-Latin compounds which it is best to avoid." (I'll give a real citation if I make this a real post but he said it in Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies, page 28.)

I guess I'll split off from that run-on paragraph to conclude that the other problem with all this is that transgender is actually a fantastic term for the phenomenon itself, but we're unfortunately in a situation where that is also the term for the "Western" expression of it, which makes applying that term to other cultures and times problematic to varying extents. Anyway, I guess that's not so much of a tl;dr but it's my unorganized, half-baked thoughts on the matter. Some day I'll sign up for a few trans megas and yap in a much more coherent way about all this.

maia is a detrans grifter