I see much greater cultural receptivity to the first idea, and yet I also see fantasy, socialization, and escape from contingent gender norms playing a large role in why people want to transition.
I’m not quite sure what you’re pointing at, but suffice it to say, the dialogue around this is skewed by history: recognition of trans people as a distinct group (in the West) was pretty much driven by the psychiatric system, and controlled by gatekeepers who basically had veto authority over whether you’d get access to support, hormones and surgery. These gatekeepers used their own personal aesthetics to filter patients, often in very blatant ways (“could I see myself being attracted to this person if they were presenting en femme”, as an example); their theories and inside jargon also became the basis for what they told patients was going on with them, and what they felt constituted evidence of that.
The trans communities with seniority and connections mostly date back to this. They used to have nearly absolute power to shape the dialogue; that changed by and by, with the internet as a resource for gathering and talking, but the fingerprints of that period are still all over trans communities on and offline. There’s a generation gap effect; on one side you get mostly trans folks who remember those days directly and are much more likely to conceive of their identity in such terms, and on the other side you have a big scattering of various ideas about and attitudes to transition, facilitated imperfectly by medical practitioners who take a more pragmatic, nuanced line about the issue.
I’m not quite sure what you’re pointing at, but suffice it to say, the dialogue around this is skewed by history: recognition of trans people as a distinct group (in the West) was pretty much driven by the psychiatric system, and controlled by gatekeepers who basically had veto authority over whether you’d get access to support, hormones and surgery. These gatekeepers used their own personal aesthetics to filter patients, often in very blatant ways (“could I see myself being attracted to this person if they were presenting en femme”, as an example); their theories and inside jargon also became the basis for what they told patients was going on with them, and what they felt constituted evidence of that.
The trans communities with seniority and connections mostly date back to this. They used to have nearly absolute power to shape the dialogue; that changed by and by, with the internet as a resource for gathering and talking, but the fingerprints of that period are still all over trans communities on and offline. There’s a generation gap effect; on one side you get mostly trans folks who remember those days directly and are much more likely to conceive of their identity in such terms, and on the other side you have a big scattering of various ideas about and attitudes to transition, facilitated imperfectly by medical practitioners who take a more pragmatic, nuanced line about the issue.