If you think you could be convinced by anyone that you're not living out your true gender identity, I have news for you... Most people, children too, are not having those thoughts unless there's actually a journey waiting for them.
And FYI, I've seen it happen with one of my own family members - someone who so far as I can tell isn't 'a man in a woman's body', but rather just someone who never fit in and was always a bit of a social outcast.
Their struggle was never their bloody gender, it was their struggle to find a way to fit into the world.
And that's what a lot of transitioning actually is. Because human psychology works such that when we're not fitting in, when we feel insecure and out of place, a subconscious pressure emerges to reinvent ourselves due to the current formula not working for us.
It's offensive to me that you'd make such claims whilst clearly so naive about it.
While you may think they are being affected by certain kinds of messaging, you also have to interrogate that you yourself are being affected by other kinds of messaging, shaping your view on how gender functions.
This is the exact same reasoning behind anti-gay laws around the world: That telling people it's OK to be gay will cause them to somehow "choose" to be gay, which to anyone who is actually either straight or gay is completely absurd - they couldn't change that aspect of themselves even if they wanted to.
This isn’t an actual risk to anybody, and I can’t believe I have to say that.
Go read some threads on the detrans subreddit.
Can you explain what you mean with trans ideology? because AFAIK 'ideology' means a collection of beliefs or philosophies, and I don't really understand how that applies to a physiological condition, like it does in the case of religion.
Look, it's cool to be trans, no problem. These women I know are good people and net contributors to society. But they are off the ideological deep-end, and would happily spend 3 hours at the family BBQ lecturing an impressionable 13 year old about how those weird body feelings are very likely gender dismorphia. They're just as drunk on their flavor of delusional social media as any other religious nut is crazy about God.
But identity as a whole is a very murky thing - if you ask me it's largely an adaptive abstraction that our minds invent.
The purpose of said adaption is to adopt a role which functions within the tribe/society for purposes of survival.
I think we way over-simplify the whole thing by making it about gender and gender roles.
And it's that over-simplification that I would label as the ideology. Because that's what ideologies do: they take the complex ambiguities of the world and try to cram them into a simplistic box.
