In a picture:

There are two narratives that have become popular among people critical of the trans community, and they have some surface-level similarity that I think might prevent people from noticing how different they really are. Briefly, both claim that there is a social trend of people taking on transgender identities, but they differ a lot in how they describe the nature of this trend. I think there’s some serious issues with both narratives, but I think it’s worth writing an article that clearly distinguishes them before writing a response to either of them.

According to the transtrender narrative, there are a lot of normal girls who pick up transgender identities in order to get attention, but who aren’t gender dysphoric and aren’t seriously transitioning. People talking about “transtrenders” are usually mainly worried about them making “true trans people” look silly. They do sometimes worry about “transtrenders” engaging in medical transition, but in these cases, they generally consider regret to be inevitable.

The ROGD narrative is different. Here, the idea still starts with relatively-normal girls who are in social groups that encourage taking on a trans identity. In the ROGD narrative, they’re also said to have a lot of mental health issues that they expect transition to fix. In addition, the followup is different: ROGDs start following the script that would be expected of trans men, discarding feminine behavior and putting a lot of energy into transition.

The ROGD narrative isn’t worried about whether the trans community looks silly, but is instead worried about people ending up with expectations that transition will solve problems that it really doesn’t solve, that people who didn’t need transition will undergo medical interventions, and that the trans community might encourage suicide or self-harm.

In the above, I presented the narratives as being completely separate, but it can be far more continuous than that. There’s nothing contradictory in seeing these things as a continuum, as a progression, or as whatever else one might mix together.

Since the ROGD narrative is clearly the most alarming one, it’s also the one I intend to write a response to first. But that’ll have to wait until a later post.