Add that onto the fact that puberty is often a miserable experience, and you have an epidemic of child transition. These hyperbolic, oversimplified distortions of a complicated reality are neither healthy nor empowering, and hurt more than they help. Is it any surprise that teenagers (frequently autistic teenagers who take everything literally) want to transition when they're exposed to societal messages telling them "men are bad, men are dangerous to women, only men have power" and "you can change your gender if you want to"? Young boys will want to transition to escape the masculinity they're being told is harmful and toxic and while I can't speak with authority on the subject, I imagine young girls will want to transition to escape the violence they're being told is around every corner, in the eyes of every man who looks at them, and to access the power they're being told they're denied. Now this stuff is everywhere, online and off. I picked up these messages from the internet because I was a chronically online loner. I believed that my very existence was sinful. This was black-and-white thinking it’s one of the reasons why so many autistic people are transitioning.
(Literal thinking is common among autistic people, and I would be diagnosed with autism a few years later.) I believed, all the way down to my core, that all men were evil and all women were unimpeachably virtuous. I wasn't mentally mature enough to think critically about these ideas, or to take them as anything but literal fact. I was fourteen years old and had never been in a fight in my life or said a racist or misogynistic word to anyone, but I believed that the circumstances of my birth made me a monster. As a white man, I was directly responsible for all of the oppression experienced by women and people of color. This wasn't just "toxic masculinity"-I saw feminists saying all masculinity was toxic, that all men were rapists, all men were oppressors, all men should be killed. When I connected to the internet, I was inundated with messages about the violence of maleness. I had no friends in high school and spent a lot of time online, and I was exposed to the burgeoning social justice/woke movement before it entered the mainstream. This background made me vulnerable to the ideology of transgenderism. My suffering was only legible if I was a woman. These, I felt, weren’t the sorts of things that happened to men. I'd been bullied a lot in school by other boys, and a lot of that bullying involved sexual abuse–groping, inappropriate touching, striking my butt and genitals, and verbal harassment (wolf-whistling amd yelling sexual comments at me). The idea of testosterone poisoning made sense to me because maleness itself terrified me. I’d seen my mom assaulted when I was young, and I didn’t want to be like the man who’d done that to her. I was terrified of what testosterone was doing to me.