I have an early adolescent daughter. She and her friends are completely leaning into stereotypes. They love femininity and like mild male attention. They probably don’t love periods but they are quite happy to be developing adult female bodies.
These girls and their parents are the kind of people who run businesses and play and watch sports. They don’t spend much time on rumination. None of them is going ever to write a think-piece or a memoir.
There’s just a huge selection bias of gender non-conforming types into the commentary and policy class. Everyone else is busy making babies and money.
Regan I fully agree with you on this. I must have read Are You There God It's Me Margaret at least a dozen times and I was obsessed with and impatient about getting boobs and getting my period and becoming a woman. And all of my friends were too. I also remember writing letters to celebrity crushes when I was like 10, telling them a I was in college and drove a Jeep and just a bunch of made up lies that I hoped would entice them into writing back lol.
Also, people forget that girls don't just mature physically but also mentally before boys. We were always crushing on the boys and scheming ways to trick them into playing spin the bottle or kiss us, way before the boys even noticed we were alive. In elementary school by age 10 and 11 we were fully obsessed with boys and most of them did not seem to return that ardor or interest until about two years later. So I'm with you in this one 100%.
That said, I think discomfort with puberty and considering being trans or nonbinary is NOT just from one's body developing too rapidly but also the opposite. Jordan Peterson has an interview with a detransitioner and she pegs her issue to feeling too flat chested to ever make a good woman, so she started thinking maybe she'd make a better man. She talks about how distressed she was looking at the Kardashians and thinking she could never live up to such a curvy ideal.
Also I do think that the excitement about being alluring and a woman and attracting men must be a lot more scary and less exciting now that these 11 year olds have all seen every variety of totally extreme and violent porn. To me it was all so exciting and I couldn't wait to experience all of it, I was so impatient. I don't know how it wouldn't just be terrifying nowadays, knowing every boy you know has already watched 1000 hrs of extreme content prior to even having his first kiss.
These days those same boys don't have to use calculators to reinforce boob anxiety--they'll just show the zoomer/alpha girls in their class hardcore porn on their smartphones.
Which is a big reason why puberty is prob much more traumatic for girls today than it was in previous generations! Porn is EVERYWHERE today and that fundamentally distorts everyone's sexual image of themselves and each other.
When Regan and I were kids it was easier to explore your sexuality in an innocent adolescent way, because even though porn was available and widely consumed on everyone's home desktop, you didn't have easily accessible porn casually contaminating normal spaces and making even sheltered kids hyper-aware of weird fetishes; it was only the kids temperamentally predisposed to be into that stuff who would know about it.
This is incidentally why zoomers are so puritanical about movie sex scenes and are kind of prudish about PDA etc. compared to millennials...they developed those sensibilities to discourage weird kids from showing smartphone porn to their classmates.
I'm not sure the extent to which there is real disagreement here. Yes, teens may want boobs or a deeper voice or whatever but they want that because it's what's normal not as a thing in itself. I suspect that if you took a bunch of pre-pubescent kids and systematically lied to them and told them that young girls became men and boys grew boobs and became women they girls would be eager for their voices to deepen and the boys to grow breasts.
Evolution is deeply efficient and while there is a need to impose sexual attraction to the opposite sex there isn't any need to impose any attitude at all to your own body because that's entirely beyond your control in an evolutionary environment.
I think this ultimately supports (I believe credit goes to Ozzy?) the cis by default model. Truth is that for most people they don't put a huge amount of thought into gender identity at all.
Yes to the last line. This is why I oppose universalizing gender exploration-it’s a massive waste of energy for most people and I feel is pathological in many cases. But I think both girls and boys generally are excited to move to the next step and receive validation that they’re attractive etc. The Rowling experience is, as far as I know, far from the norm
Lots of things teens do are a "waste of time" from the POV of adults -- even those very people as adults. I think people in cultures with arranged marriage would point to all that time 'wasted' dating the sexy bad boy or hot entitled girl taking advantage to justify their practice.
Ultimately, I guess I suspect that teens just need to spend a certain amount of time defining their own identity and if they do that by exploring their relationship to gender norms rather than to their favorite bands or style or whatever it's probably slightly more beneficial (in that a deeper understanding of unconscious gendered assumptions is a bit more useful than a deeper understanding of how soulful Kurt Cobain's lyrics are).
--
Regarding the Rowling experience, I suspect that most people feel a mixture of excitement and trepidation as they do with any major life change and what gets emphasized is as much about your later attitude as anything else. No different than getting married (when it works out you tend to remember how romantic and special it felt when it doesn't you tend to focus on your feelings of apprehension and doubt).
Indeed, I actually tend to think it's relatively helpful to share the fears and concerns cis adults had about the whole process even if on net they liked the changes. I actually tend to suspect that (both in marriage and puberty) it's the impression that it's not normal to have worries or mixed feelings which contributes to at least a certain kind of person getting in their own head about it -- at least given we can't practically go back to the world where there isn't a question about how to identify/whether to marry.
That's fair, but in the spaces I'm in I feel that there's a tendency to exaggerate the anxiety related to puberty which is used as a way to argue against youth transition. I think there are reasonable arguments against making youth medical transition too easy to access, but I find Katie's concern much more realistic than Rowling's.
But in general, I don't know that I agree that "it's relatively helpful to share the fears and concerns cis adults had about the whole process even if on net they liked the changes" - my experience of getting my period was that I pretended to be slightly "nervous" and "overwhelmed" about it because it felt like the adults around me expected that when I was actually just straightforwardly excited to join the club. For me the anxiety was always around the choices I was making which related to attracting the opposite sex - like I remember being nervous about telling my mom I wanted to start shaving or buying makeup etc. not around the physical changes.
Still thinking about your point re teens needing time to define their identity, regardless of the particular manifestation of that... not sure my intuition goes in the same direction but will reflect on it
I don't think the issue is adults teaching that the anxieties they had are a normal part of puberty. What the message increasingly is, is that these anxieties are what society has inflicted upon teenage girls. It's one thing to hear that everyone goes through this phase and it's a part of growing up, and another entirely to hear that this is what they do to us; this is how they destroy girls' self esteem. I expect the latter to cause anxiety that might otherwise not have been an issue in a way I don't for the former.
Was it somehow harmful because you weren't as anxious as you felt adults expected you to be? My sense is that we do this alot to children -- some fraction of kids have certain kinds of worries and we then make it seem like that's usual. But is it really an issue if the kids who don't feel that way get to feel brave or whatever?
I mean my parents got divorced and I never once worried it was my fault. So I got to roll my eyes a bunch at my parents constantly reassuring me it wasn't and it would be normal if I worried about that but it wasn't true. That just feels like the normal way parenting and growing up works.
--
Regarding using anxiety as a way of arguing against youth transitioning, I'm not sure I follow the argument. After all, the number of children who are interested in actual medical transition is extremely small [1] and for all I know Rowling style anxiety might be very common in that group. So if even a couple percent of women have that kind of experience it's still completely compatible with a significant fraction of the group seeking such treatment being so motivated.
Ultimately, it's really hard to say anything about the group of people who seek to transition except by studying them directly. I hope some good difference in difference studies will be done to predict life satisfaction based on natural experiments in the availability of treatment but I fear it's very difficult to trust any studies here in the current environment and the best we can do is push for pre-registered collaborations here.
--
1: All the kids insisting they are non-binary or whatever feels about as worrying as the fact that my wife found David Bowie's indeterminate sex hot and would sometimes want to flatten her breasts at a club. It's just fashion and if they can roll their eyes and say their parents just don't understand all the better.
I am glad to see a woman writing about what most socially calibrated people experienced without vile, but understanding.
Only recently has the social narrative been to protect children from the awkward, embarrassing and sometimes cruel stage of life known as puberty.
It can suck for everyone. It is not a competition, it is a shared experience. Live through it, come out the other side and have a good laugh about it.
And for fuck sakes, don't let your insecurities be projected on children for the sake of your own ego. Let children go through it, as rough as it can be, it is growing up.
thing is an 18yo born in 2006 is legitimately about as mature as a 13yo born in 1992...the decline is MASSIVE and employers/college professors have written about this a lot ever since the covid era
it seems a gradual decline with a huge drop in kids born around 2002...hot take but I actually think 9/11 and the war on terror had an epigenetic impact on mothers of that era and that might explain zoomer anxiety
Just apply this heuristic to your own experiences and you will see it fits...zoomers born after 9/11 are a lot less agentic and capable when you adjust for age.
Weird...I was also diagnosed with it (each of the distinct times I went to a psychiatrist) and also had a history of doing well on test scores. I find if I have a deadline and pressure I tend to pull through. I guess we should keep in mind these metrics are averages, not destiny for individuals.
I probably had some thoughts about what it would be like (sexually) to be a woman when I was enduring puberty and quite curious. But I was curious about everything. Somehow, during puberty and after I was always solidly male and extremely appreciative of that fact. Not just comfortable, actively appreciative and relieved I wasn't born a girl. I'm not sure I can pinpoint the specific reason exactly, even learning that the female orgasm is a lot more intense (and can be experienced without a refractory period) didn't deter me from thanking God I wasn't a woman.
It's an interesting question though. What percentage of males in the past eras had these kinds of inclinations? I'll concede to having those thoughts+thoughts of homosexuality and what it would be like running through my head at one point. I think this was early on in puberty.
💯 this.
I have an early adolescent daughter. She and her friends are completely leaning into stereotypes. They love femininity and like mild male attention. They probably don’t love periods but they are quite happy to be developing adult female bodies.
These girls and their parents are the kind of people who run businesses and play and watch sports. They don’t spend much time on rumination. None of them is going ever to write a think-piece or a memoir.
There’s just a huge selection bias of gender non-conforming types into the commentary and policy class. Everyone else is busy making babies and money.
reporting for duty in the role of disagreeable normie commentator
Regan I fully agree with you on this. I must have read Are You There God It's Me Margaret at least a dozen times and I was obsessed with and impatient about getting boobs and getting my period and becoming a woman. And all of my friends were too. I also remember writing letters to celebrity crushes when I was like 10, telling them a I was in college and drove a Jeep and just a bunch of made up lies that I hoped would entice them into writing back lol.
Also, people forget that girls don't just mature physically but also mentally before boys. We were always crushing on the boys and scheming ways to trick them into playing spin the bottle or kiss us, way before the boys even noticed we were alive. In elementary school by age 10 and 11 we were fully obsessed with boys and most of them did not seem to return that ardor or interest until about two years later. So I'm with you in this one 100%.
That said, I think discomfort with puberty and considering being trans or nonbinary is NOT just from one's body developing too rapidly but also the opposite. Jordan Peterson has an interview with a detransitioner and she pegs her issue to feeling too flat chested to ever make a good woman, so she started thinking maybe she'd make a better man. She talks about how distressed she was looking at the Kardashians and thinking she could never live up to such a curvy ideal.
Also I do think that the excitement about being alluring and a woman and attracting men must be a lot more scary and less exciting now that these 11 year olds have all seen every variety of totally extreme and violent porn. To me it was all so exciting and I couldn't wait to experience all of it, I was so impatient. I don't know how it wouldn't just be terrifying nowadays, knowing every boy you know has already watched 1000 hrs of extreme content prior to even having his first kiss.
These days those same boys don't have to use calculators to reinforce boob anxiety--they'll just show the zoomer/alpha girls in their class hardcore porn on their smartphones.
Which is a big reason why puberty is prob much more traumatic for girls today than it was in previous generations! Porn is EVERYWHERE today and that fundamentally distorts everyone's sexual image of themselves and each other.
When Regan and I were kids it was easier to explore your sexuality in an innocent adolescent way, because even though porn was available and widely consumed on everyone's home desktop, you didn't have easily accessible porn casually contaminating normal spaces and making even sheltered kids hyper-aware of weird fetishes; it was only the kids temperamentally predisposed to be into that stuff who would know about it.
This is incidentally why zoomers are so puritanical about movie sex scenes and are kind of prudish about PDA etc. compared to millennials...they developed those sensibilities to discourage weird kids from showing smartphone porn to their classmates.
I'm not sure the extent to which there is real disagreement here. Yes, teens may want boobs or a deeper voice or whatever but they want that because it's what's normal not as a thing in itself. I suspect that if you took a bunch of pre-pubescent kids and systematically lied to them and told them that young girls became men and boys grew boobs and became women they girls would be eager for their voices to deepen and the boys to grow breasts.
Evolution is deeply efficient and while there is a need to impose sexual attraction to the opposite sex there isn't any need to impose any attitude at all to your own body because that's entirely beyond your control in an evolutionary environment.
I think this ultimately supports (I believe credit goes to Ozzy?) the cis by default model. Truth is that for most people they don't put a huge amount of thought into gender identity at all.
Yes to the last line. This is why I oppose universalizing gender exploration-it’s a massive waste of energy for most people and I feel is pathological in many cases. But I think both girls and boys generally are excited to move to the next step and receive validation that they’re attractive etc. The Rowling experience is, as far as I know, far from the norm
Lots of things teens do are a "waste of time" from the POV of adults -- even those very people as adults. I think people in cultures with arranged marriage would point to all that time 'wasted' dating the sexy bad boy or hot entitled girl taking advantage to justify their practice.
Ultimately, I guess I suspect that teens just need to spend a certain amount of time defining their own identity and if they do that by exploring their relationship to gender norms rather than to their favorite bands or style or whatever it's probably slightly more beneficial (in that a deeper understanding of unconscious gendered assumptions is a bit more useful than a deeper understanding of how soulful Kurt Cobain's lyrics are).
--
Regarding the Rowling experience, I suspect that most people feel a mixture of excitement and trepidation as they do with any major life change and what gets emphasized is as much about your later attitude as anything else. No different than getting married (when it works out you tend to remember how romantic and special it felt when it doesn't you tend to focus on your feelings of apprehension and doubt).
Indeed, I actually tend to think it's relatively helpful to share the fears and concerns cis adults had about the whole process even if on net they liked the changes. I actually tend to suspect that (both in marriage and puberty) it's the impression that it's not normal to have worries or mixed feelings which contributes to at least a certain kind of person getting in their own head about it -- at least given we can't practically go back to the world where there isn't a question about how to identify/whether to marry.
That's fair, but in the spaces I'm in I feel that there's a tendency to exaggerate the anxiety related to puberty which is used as a way to argue against youth transition. I think there are reasonable arguments against making youth medical transition too easy to access, but I find Katie's concern much more realistic than Rowling's.
But in general, I don't know that I agree that "it's relatively helpful to share the fears and concerns cis adults had about the whole process even if on net they liked the changes" - my experience of getting my period was that I pretended to be slightly "nervous" and "overwhelmed" about it because it felt like the adults around me expected that when I was actually just straightforwardly excited to join the club. For me the anxiety was always around the choices I was making which related to attracting the opposite sex - like I remember being nervous about telling my mom I wanted to start shaving or buying makeup etc. not around the physical changes.
Still thinking about your point re teens needing time to define their identity, regardless of the particular manifestation of that... not sure my intuition goes in the same direction but will reflect on it
I don't think the issue is adults teaching that the anxieties they had are a normal part of puberty. What the message increasingly is, is that these anxieties are what society has inflicted upon teenage girls. It's one thing to hear that everyone goes through this phase and it's a part of growing up, and another entirely to hear that this is what they do to us; this is how they destroy girls' self esteem. I expect the latter to cause anxiety that might otherwise not have been an issue in a way I don't for the former.
Great point - victimhood narratives beget themselves
Was it somehow harmful because you weren't as anxious as you felt adults expected you to be? My sense is that we do this alot to children -- some fraction of kids have certain kinds of worries and we then make it seem like that's usual. But is it really an issue if the kids who don't feel that way get to feel brave or whatever?
I mean my parents got divorced and I never once worried it was my fault. So I got to roll my eyes a bunch at my parents constantly reassuring me it wasn't and it would be normal if I worried about that but it wasn't true. That just feels like the normal way parenting and growing up works.
--
Regarding using anxiety as a way of arguing against youth transitioning, I'm not sure I follow the argument. After all, the number of children who are interested in actual medical transition is extremely small [1] and for all I know Rowling style anxiety might be very common in that group. So if even a couple percent of women have that kind of experience it's still completely compatible with a significant fraction of the group seeking such treatment being so motivated.
Ultimately, it's really hard to say anything about the group of people who seek to transition except by studying them directly. I hope some good difference in difference studies will be done to predict life satisfaction based on natural experiments in the availability of treatment but I fear it's very difficult to trust any studies here in the current environment and the best we can do is push for pre-registered collaborations here.
--
1: All the kids insisting they are non-binary or whatever feels about as worrying as the fact that my wife found David Bowie's indeterminate sex hot and would sometimes want to flatten her breasts at a club. It's just fashion and if they can roll their eyes and say their parents just don't understand all the better.
I am glad to see a woman writing about what most socially calibrated people experienced without vile, but understanding.
Only recently has the social narrative been to protect children from the awkward, embarrassing and sometimes cruel stage of life known as puberty.
It can suck for everyone. It is not a competition, it is a shared experience. Live through it, come out the other side and have a good laugh about it.
And for fuck sakes, don't let your insecurities be projected on children for the sake of your own ego. Let children go through it, as rough as it can be, it is growing up.
One of the saddest things my wife has told me is that she wished I was around as a teenager to tell her she was beautiful.
>>Teenage girls are vulnerable and easy to manipulate
Ha, try picking up 18 / 19 year old chicks, see how "vulnerable" and "easy to manipulate" they are. Get back to us.
Lots of guys want them, few get them...
but the guys who do get them find them trivial to manipulate
Also, I was talking about 13 yr olds! (which is the age I was when I went to Egypt)
thing is an 18yo born in 2006 is legitimately about as mature as a 13yo born in 1992...the decline is MASSIVE and employers/college professors have written about this a lot ever since the covid era
it seems a gradual decline with a huge drop in kids born around 2002...hot take but I actually think 9/11 and the war on terror had an epigenetic impact on mothers of that era and that might explain zoomer anxiety
Just apply this heuristic to your own experiences and you will see it fits...zoomers born after 9/11 are a lot less agentic and capable when you adjust for age.
at least you know how old I am now
ya it was ez to find
but guessing a girl is *specifically two years older* than she really is always produces the funniest results
Same...I suppose that makes me a retard.
Weird...I was also diagnosed with it (each of the distinct times I went to a psychiatrist) and also had a history of doing well on test scores. I find if I have a deadline and pressure I tend to pull through. I guess we should keep in mind these metrics are averages, not destiny for individuals.
I probably had some thoughts about what it would be like (sexually) to be a woman when I was enduring puberty and quite curious. But I was curious about everything. Somehow, during puberty and after I was always solidly male and extremely appreciative of that fact. Not just comfortable, actively appreciative and relieved I wasn't born a girl. I'm not sure I can pinpoint the specific reason exactly, even learning that the female orgasm is a lot more intense (and can be experienced without a refractory period) didn't deter me from thanking God I wasn't a woman.
It's an interesting question though. What percentage of males in the past eras had these kinds of inclinations? I'll concede to having those thoughts+thoughts of homosexuality and what it would be like running through my head at one point. I think this was early on in puberty.