This connects to the theme of “trans is the new gay,” a simplistic paradigm which causes so many to fundamentally misunderstand what is happening. The story you tell yourself is this: you’ve been this way for as long as you remember, but you’ve been imprisoned by shame. You’ve hidden, confining your true self to “the closet.” But now, you’re brave. You will reveal how you have been all along to those around you. You are “coming out” into the light. The long hide is over.

This narrative makes sense for many gay people. Many have, as long as they’ve felt sexual attraction, felt it only or mostly for members of the same sex – and they feel ashamed. So, they hide.

But applying this narrative to the “trans” phenomenon can distort. There are a small number of people who have always thought that they are “really” or at least should have been the opposite sex. But very many have undergone a transformation of feelings, thoughts, and self-conceptions, a course of events which is obviously culturally-influenced. Clear cases of this are those with ROGD.

I am acquainted with a young woman like this. Growing up, her parents say, she was always happily a girl, doing girly things with other girls. She was not in any way what psychologists call “gender non-conforming.” But as a young adult, suffering from various real psychological problems, she decided she was “trans.” And so, she “came out,” following the now well-worn script, and of course demanding that all around her affirm her delusion. Did she “come out” from long being in the closet? It seems not! But, of course she spun the narrative that way.

Everyone wants to be a hero. It’s far more romantic than admitting you’ve been caught up in an absurd social contagion, and have given your mind over to junk philosophizings about “gender.”

But this narrative causes them to lose their own actual history; it gets re-written with what the script says should have happened. They will need help to recover the actual story of their life.