It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

My point is that they share a source and are siblings, but one is not the parent of the other. Being transgender is not about the medical or social transition, it is about how the person identifies.

I appreciated this thoughtful response (rebuttal) to OP. I agree with your concept of "back in the 00s you'd never have a teacher scold a child for using wrong-sex clothes/toys because we'd largely gotten rid of the concept". This dovetails into one of the paradox's of the trans-adjacent ideology that I haven't been able to square in my own head, which is that transitioning genders is predicated on strong gender norms existing in a society. In other words, it seems less accepting to be a male and exhibit feminine traits (and by the way, we are in fact acknowledging traditional societal ideas of gender roles now, rather than moving beyond them).

A freaky thing that this paper doesn’t mention is that in some cases these tics have gotten so extreme, that one patient began having almost constant seizures and became wheelchair-bound. Imagine being “infected” by watching a video on TikTok! It sounds like a horror movie.

From The Guardian: “Over the next few weeks, Wacek noticed that she was having tics. “They were just little noises,” she says. “Nothing to write home about.” She would scrunch up her nose, or huff. The tics escalated from sounds into words and phrases. Then the motor tics kicked in. “I started punching walls and throwing myself at things,” she says. By July, Wacek was having seizures. She had to stop work. “Being a chef with seizures is not safe at all,” she says. Her GP referred her to a neurologist, who diagnosed her with functional neurological syndrome (FND). People with FND have a neurological condition that cannot be medically explained, but can be extremely debilitating. “In a general neurological clinic, around 30% of the conditions we see are not fully explainable,” says Dr Jeremy Stern, a neurologist with the charity Tourettes Action. In Wacek’s case, FND manifested in verbal and motor tics, not dissimilar from how Tourette syndrome appears to lay people, although the two conditions are distinct. Wacek has up to 20 seizures a day and currently has to use a wheelchair.”

Source: https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2021/nov/16/the-unknown-is...

> Let's first be clear that gender dysphoria is a real thing

To be clear, the pain someone is feeling is real but the "reality" of a condition is a bit of an unclear concept. We can't really address this until we try to control for the gendered expectations of the sufferer, their surroundings, and any observers. Suzie Green of Mermaids has said that some of their motivation in transing their son as a toddler was his father's discomfort with some of the toys he was playing with and the homosexual connotations. Likely if the boy had tolerant and unbiased parents he'd be happy as a man, and thus it's unlikely he truly had "gender dysphoria" unless you count whatever his parents conditioned into him.

> and transitioning has been a very real solution for many people

Again, hard to say given that the decision probably was not made in isolation from heavily gendered expectations. There's reason to think that removing those expectations would have made them at least as happy, if not more.

> Transitioning is [...] treatment, and not [...] an assault on anyone's cultural, religious or political beliefs.

For an adult it's a personal choice and we should have pretty wide latitude in things that only impact us. It becomes a societal and political issue when it's brought into schools, or when males are given access to women's spaces and opportunities.

> And if it really is happening more to girls than boys, maybe consider if cultural sexism might cause some women to not want to identify as such anymore. Especially in the face of issues like rape, bodily autonomy, but also acceptable jobs and behaviours. Maybe we should be more tolerant of cross-dressing.

Errr, that's the wrong takeaway. If a woman wasn't going to get promoted then her putting on pants won't help, and if she was going to get abused it wouldn't trick her attacker. We should work to remove or mitigate those problems so she doesn't feel the need to hide her true self.

If a woman is thought to be able to avoid rape by dressing like a man and/or having surgeries to reduce her sexual attractiveness then women will be thought to be asking for it ("How was she dressed? Did she still have her breasts?") for not doing those things.

This sucks as someone who has had movement disorders(essential tremor, tics) for decades. It also sucks because the covid booster, like a flu shot years ago(only one, I get them every year) caused a dramatic worsening of my tics for a few months.

I didn't realize the whole 'covid tic hysteria' was even a thing until I googled 'covid vaccine tics' after personally experiencing a dramatic worsening of symptoms.