Trans People are Canonically Magical!

Malcolm and Simone have an in-depth discussion analyzing the rapid rise in transgender individuals. They review and debate various theories like endocrine disruptors, social contagion, female puberty discomfort, autogynephilia fetishism, and more. The hosts discuss why certain explanations are seen as offensive, while concluding that personal transitions should be respected. They also posit their own idea that it serves as an identity "reset" that improves mental health.

Simone: [00:00:00]

Malcolm, hello.

Malcolm: Hello. So, Today, we well, we're going to talk about what like, just sort of a discussion between us, because this is a topic we've been diving into more recently due to our engagement with the trans vexing community and other trans communities online, is what is really causing transness. And the reason we titled this study trans people are magical is there is an approved answer to this question.

It is that they were born with the wrong soul. And that they were actually born with the soul of someone of a different gender. The problem is we don't really believe in souls. And even if I did, I'd be almost certain that gender just isn't that important to like our core identity, like our soul.

And I, And this is why we went with the title, Trans People Are Magical, because any sort of scientific explanation you try to give, or any evidence based explanation you try to give for what is going on socially for recent trends within the trans [00:01:00] community and people who identify as trans, is considered transphobic.

In part, I don't know, because you're quantifying it. We can talk about why all the explanations are considered offensive. Individually, they have reasons they're considered offensive, but collectively, it's almost like a topic we're not allowed to talk about or investigate, when it seems to me Like, it should be really important that the number of trans people has increased something like 400 percent in the last decade, but the that the trends in who is transitioning has changed really dramatically, where it used to be predominantly male to female, and now it's predominantly female to male of this young age range.

And these, I think, could point to something.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm: So first, before we get any further in this, Our larger stake on gender transition is that there are likely people transitioning for every one of the reasons we're going to mention. The question is what is causing these statistical trends?

Are some of these reasons more important than other [00:02:00] reasons? Are they all just contributory reasons? Is there like one core reason? That's a really interesting question to me. We could say we just don't have the data to know right now because people are afraid to collect the data because you have your, Oh,

Simone: people collect data, but only for a very specific set of answers.

It's already

Malcolm: pre approved. And the thing that really upsets me about the trans data when I go over it is you can see by the date of publication, it will begin to trend towards showing the pre approved answer.

So a great example of this would be brain structures. If you look at the earlier studies on trans people that were using like fMRI data and stuff like that they would usually say or the ones that I'm familiar with would say, The trans people's brains actually are more similar to the gender they were assigned at birth than the gender they were identifying with, whereas in later studies, the opposite is being said, like studies that were done more recently.

And [00:03:00] unfortunately, knowing the pressures that happened within academia, that makes me now doubt both of those studies. I'm like, Oh, I just wish I could know what the real answer is.

It looks like I misspoke here going through the recent research, even on Wikipedia, which is where there's a studies came from, that I had put on the screen. , even the more recent research shows that, trans individuals brains are more similar to the gender, they were assigned at birth to the gender. They identify ways. And this makes perfect sense. If you think about it. You don't when you're walking around, see people, randomly at least at the rates that we see trans people in the population. Get organs of a different gender. You know, you don't see men walking around with the skin of a woman , or, or the arms of a woman. In fact, the only place where I'm really familiar with this happening is either in intersex individuals or in individuals. , Women specifically who were born with male facial hair. And this happens at much [00:04:00] lower rates than transness happens within the population, but could explain a proportion of individuals who are born trans So if 5% of us young adults are identifying as trans and about 1.5% of the population is born intersex. That means that this wrong brain hypothesis would only explain about 30% of the community. Assuming that this phenomenon appears at about the same rate that genitals get switched up. But. I again that seems unlikely to me because genitals seemed like really unique why they would get switched up but we don't see other organs getting switched up at this rate so i would say that's probably an overestimation of the amount of the community that can be explained by the wrong brain

hypothesis.

Oh, and I suppose this was obvious to us when we were recording this didn't point it out. You can't just say, well, they're transitioning because they have gender dysphoria. That's like saying, well, he's depressed. Because he has depression. It's like, yeah, but like, are you not at all curious as to where this depression is coming from, what could be motivating it? What neurological phenomenon could be related to [00:05:00] it? Why there's this huge increase in depression ? These are questions that we would be asking if we were talking about. Any other mental condition that wasn't tied to identity, but in the world of identity politics, anything that can be tied to an individual's identity becomes unquestionable. And that's under. Studyable. And that is sort of. That's what makes it exciting to us?

Malcolm: So we can go through. We're just going to index all of the potential things. Okay. So first one, this is the one that we talk about most on this channel because I think it's really interesting.

And it's also interesting to me that it was ever flagged as an offensive potential answer, but I know exactly why it was flagged as a potential offensive potential answer. Okay. Let me

Simone: guess first then, but tell me.

Malcolm: It's turning the frogs gay. Endocrine disruptors. Oh. We know endocrine disruptors are much more common now than they used to be.

We know that fetuses exposed to endocrine disruptors have lower when they're born as males, have lower endogenital distance. Which basically means that they're [00:06:00] not fully gender differentiated. We know that if you look at them seven years after they're born, they show play behavior much more similar to women.

This to me if it's an actual biological change that's happening in the population due to a pollutant it's weird to me that this is seen as a transphobic explanation, but I think the core reason it's seeing is because it would be like, these people aren't faking it. This is not a social

Simone: contagion.

It's real. It's physical. It's biological.

Malcolm: Yes. And the increased rates of this stuff in our water. We correlate with the explosion of the trans population, and we see males changing generally.

Simone: Again, it's not just in our water. A lot of it has to do with the containers we're eating out of,