Yes, there are. But I'm not getting over it.

Nor should you. You're too incisive. I responded to an aside of yours some weeks ago with a detailed post but it was deeply buried so maybe you never read it. I link it below. For present purposes: -- Yes, of course some people are trans. Always have been and always will be. The historical and anthropological record is quite clear about that. -- BUT until very recently, the only way boys could "transition" to girls (as opposed to simply living as girls) was by cutting their balls off. It was crude and dangerous, but it accomplished the job, as it were (although castrated males were not deemed women -- this is important -- and no one pretended they were. They were properly termed eunuchs. Sometimes they assumed theatrical female roles -- e.g., the castrati of baroque opera -- but people did not think of them as actual women. Certainly no state or corporate coercion required people to pretend the eunuchs were actual women.) Now we have the medical technology to permit boys to "transition" in ways that are far safer (although we don't yet know enough to understand the long term effects of regular injections of powerful hormones.) -- Thus your analogy with boys "identifying as gay" breaks down. To "identify as gay" you do not have to DO anything to your body. That was once often the case with being trans as well -- you simply started living as a female (that's my understanding of the Amerind berdache when it became obvious a boy was not cut out to be a warrior/hunter; boys growing up in the hereditary world of the Kabuki were told they needed to "live as women" when it became clear they were better suited to the female "onnagata" roles than the heroic male "aragato". ) But now to be accepted as fully trans, a young person is pushed/ pulled into mutilating his or her body. It isn't enough to wear a dress, put on make-up, and get your friends to call you by a girl's name (examples from the article SCOTUSbaby linked.) You have to mutilate your body. -- You yourself have written eloquently of how we backed ourselves into a corner (I believe those were the words you used) by acquiescing in the politically useful fag fiction -- "we're born this way."(politically useful to the fags). No, we're not. Predispositions? Sure. Iron never-the-twain-shall-meet "orientations"? Nope. So why is it many boys should be able to go through a stage of life (evident in many cultures) where they fooled around with each other and/or had older mentors/lovers and then settled down to lives as good husbands and fathers? You have written -- presumably approvingly -- about societies in which that was the norm --e.g. Renaissance Florence; pre-18th century Britain). -- Similarly, why aren't boys any more allowed to fool around with gender roles without all this social pressure to "transition?" Gender is fascinating; frats doing drag shows and all that was once part of life -- gave guys a chance to experiment. Now we've made it a kind of substitute religion. Please think more carefully about the implications of the trans mania that is sweeping the Anglophone world. It is related in ways I haven't yet fully figured out with the fatwa on any form of intergenerational male contact. As I wrote three years ago, we got gay liberation wrong with disastrous consequences. We can't afford to get this one wrong. There is far more going on here than simply letting boys "be who they want to be" or not as the case may be. SR (Boychat.org link) Responding to Pharmakon on the trans issue.