“I Identify As A Helicopter”
And other trans myths.
Deep diving into the Facebook comments of an article related to a trans people, I obviously find a lot of transphobic comments rife with misunderstanding and ignorance. The one comment I see the most is ‘if this bloke can identify as a lady, I identify as a helicopter’, or some other inanimate object like a kitchen spatula. Is there any truth to this? The correct answer is no and it’s yet again another invalidation of trans and non-binary people worldwide.
Why can’t I identify as a helicopter? Well, the short response is you can — if it doesn’t impede on others’ well-being. Yet, openly identifying as a helicopter when others suffer genuine dysphoria, lack of bodily autonomy, lack of human rights and genuine discontent, can impede on their well-being and trivialises normal people’s daily lives.
To add, there is nothing that can be done with helicopter dysphoria. One cannot add a propeller or a jet engine to the human body, nor take petrol as a form of hormones. One can, however, provide basic hormonal treatment and surgery to those choosing to change their gender and their body. This trivialisation of the human body also makes laws, such as third gender markers on passports, harder to pass through parliament, as it makes any physical transformation an absolute joke to the cis big-wigs that run the country that have no primary understanding to trans issues.
Another fake ideology is ‘you’ll regret it and want to change your body back’. Ugh. I have personally known someone to de-transition and there’s a lot more to this discussion than that which is trivialised by cis-centred media.
The detransition myth is primarily used to stop trans children from transitioning early on in life — a form of moralistic threat that prevents them from getting hormone blockers before puberty. Puberty is truly demoralising and traumatising for trans people and is the time in which the real dysphoria comes to light. Hating their bodies more and more, trans kids are more likely to self-harm or commit suicide, with 1 in 4 attempting suicide before the age of 18 and 9 out of 10 considering it (Stonewall Stats 2019).
There’s one thing we must admit here — we are holding trans kids’ bodies hostage with this myth. Other myths such as the ‘I identify as a helicopter’, in invalidating trans people, also holds them mentally hostage, making them question themselves and their decision constantly, every day, before, during and after transition. This mental strain and doubt are enough to force anyone to either reconsider, change, or detransition, despite personal loss and trauma.
Detransitioning is extremely unlikely, with under 1% of 3,398 trans people detransitioning after treatment (Stonewall 2016–17). Of course, this 1% is the only thing we can see in modern media and is used as bait against the thousands of success stories of happy trans individuals. In the last week, over 20 articles from major sites including Sky News, BBC and The Telegraph have reported on cases of detransitioning or detransitioned individuals — one article in 2019 claiming ‘Hundreds of transgender youths who had gender reassignment surgery wish they hadn’t and want to transition back’ (Daily Mail, Oct 2019). This ‘hundreds’ is just simply not accurate if one actually reads the statistics coming out — and the lack of successful stories reported is minimal.
When it does happen, however, it’s usually not how people think. It wasn’t ‘I was a girl, then a boy and now I want to be a girl again’ like some flip-flopping, undedicated and stupid person. Trans identities are valid no matter the process and are usually conflicted due to society. From individual studies on those that detransition, it is usually because of societal pressures or lack of satisfaction with surgery results.
This dissatisfaction can come from any hormonal, medical, cosmetic or physical surgery human beings get. To put this into ‘cis-reality’, cis women who get boob jobs and liposuction and continue to do so after multiple attempts, can still find insecurity in their bodies and decide to ‘undo’ it. It’s not that their journeys are invalid or that they never wanted larger breasts in the first place, or that boob jobs should from now on be banned because one woman says it ruined her life, it’s usually because of dodgy surgeries that cause more pain, leaking or otherwise, as well as now unwanted attention or pressures that society now put on them. Creating a hyper-focus around women who get surgeries ‘undone’ also completely invalidates the stories of genuine success and happiness.
Ultimately, saying that ‘you’ll regret it’ or ‘I identify as a helicopter’ completely invalidates real people with real life needs, prevents their voices from being heard and prevents laws to pass that would create a better world for them to live and thrive in.
Further reading:
https://www.stonewall.org.uk/about-us/news/dispelling-myths-around-detransition
