I don't know if it's as clear cut as this. I'm saying this as somebody who's had massive improvements to her mental health just days after getting on HRT, when there were no observable phenotypical changes at all that could have explained these as stress relief over my appearance being more aligned with societal gender expectations towards women. The benefits of HRT are pretty easily demonstrable, but even when you have personal lived experience with that, it's hard to say if the part of that that's not due to changes in pehnotype is because, in simplified terms, estrogen is just the only correct OS to run on my neurological hardware or if the drastically altered emotional state i'm in now allows me to more authentically live the social gender expression that i need to thrive. Because jesus fuck is that last part true for me. I couldn't exist anymore without the emotional depth i feel now. I've never been so close to other people, so able to feel for them, and that completely flipped the way i interact as a social animal. But even that can't be seperated from purely social phenomena. I had a lot of these changes already before i went on HRT, i spent more than one and a half years stripping myself of masculinity before i started HRT and i don't think these changes were lesser than the hormonal ones. It's baffling how much just wanting to be seen as a man alters behavior, and how much pressure it puts on ones' shoulders if you have to keep up the act of being a man when you actually aren't.
I'm the first to say "waitaminute" when some postmodernist entirely writes off the biological side of how men and women and anybody else interact, i know too well what a difference testosterone and estrogen make when it comes to human behavior. But at the same time, i know from personal lived experience that gender as a social construct goes so ridiculously deep that i can easily see how postmodernists arrive at that notion in the first place.
The only thing i can say for sure is that in the end, both the social and the biologcial side are much more fluid and volatile and much less set in stone than most cis people are comfortable admitting to. When people think transness is fake, they merely realize the fakeness of being cis and get scared from the fact that them being who they think they are is just something a bunch of hormones and societal norms built up, and that some barely definable part of their sense of self is the only difference between them and me.
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I don't know if it's as clear cut as this. I'm saying this as somebody who's had massive improvements to her mental health just days after getting on HRT, when there were no observable phenotypical changes at all that could have explained these as stress relief over my appearance being more aligned with societal gender expectations towards women. The benefits of HRT are pretty easily demonstrable, but even when you have personal lived experience with that, it's hard to say if the part of that that's not due to changes in pehnotype is because, in simplified terms, estrogen is just the only correct OS to run on my neurological hardware or if the drastically altered emotional state i'm in now allows me to more authentically live the social gender expression that i need to thrive. Because jesus fuck is that last part true for me. I couldn't exist anymore without the emotional depth i feel now. I've never been so close to other people, so able to feel for them, and that completely flipped the way i interact as a social animal. But even that can't be seperated from purely social phenomena. I had a lot of these changes already before i went on HRT, i spent more than one and a half years stripping myself of masculinity before i started HRT and i don't think these changes were lesser than the hormonal ones. It's baffling how much just wanting to be seen as a man alters behavior, and how much pressure it puts on ones' shoulders if you have to keep up the act of being a man when you actually aren't.
I'm the first to say "waitaminute" when some postmodernist entirely writes off the biological side of how men and women and anybody else interact, i know too well what a difference testosterone and estrogen make when it comes to human behavior. But at the same time, i know from personal lived experience that gender as a social construct goes so ridiculously deep that i can easily see how postmodernists arrive at that notion in the first place.
The only thing i can say for sure is that in the end, both the social and the biologcial side are much more fluid and volatile and much less set in stone than most cis people are comfortable admitting to. When people think transness is fake, they merely realize the fakeness of being cis and get scared from the fact that them being who they think they are is just something a bunch of hormones and societal norms built up, and that some barely definable part of their sense of self is the only difference between them and me.