Trigger avoidance may explain what is happening

Why are so many people transgender now? Here is one theory.

Starting with the most basic cause, late-stage capitalism fueled by automation leaves a deep fear of being left out as the wealth gap grows unchecked. Under stress, people abandon hope for community and become hyper-competitive, like that sudden shift when on a sinking ship the incentive to save everyone is abandoned and selfishness is the only viable incentive. Those holding on to a sense of community or equality are sacrificed. This shift is gradual though, unlike the sinking ship analogy. We can see what kind of people are the winners and what kind are the losers in the system.

Under these economic conditions, parenting appears to have become more competitive, and thus more colonizing in the sense that parents track and shape the mind of the offspring more diligently than before, trying to form the children into the kind of people who are the winners. A few generations ago, manners and other behaviors were the focus of parental control; and by contrast, today’s kids have more freedom to wear any clothes, listen to any music, or spend time as they choose, and in general have more freedom of tastes and behavior. But now the kind of control exerted has shifted to intelligence and other traits that would make a child successful in a late-capitalist world. I am sensing that we are controlling more what the children are rather than what they do. I remember my shock the first time I saw a teacher take the backpack of a middle school student and rummage through it, without asking and without any suspicion of wrongdoing, but just in order to teach the student how to organize and use their personal things. To me it was a flagrant violation of privacy, which would not have been done when I was in middle school. More generally, it feels that there is much less room for any kind of private life, based on how I see schools handling conflicts, and how parents talk about their children’s development milestones. It is not enough to simply refrain from rule-breaking; kids now have to also demonstrate publicly the thinking and other internal traits that are considered beneficial.

I am also seeing a loss of individualism in the sense that your unique self is no longer a value; only group identity is valued. People say now “I identify as..” and list their groups, as if the person herself is nothing more than an exemplar of the intersection of groups. Something about this feels like the soul is being negated; if you are not following the winning formula, you are nothing. In the last ten years or so I have seen people list their “identities” as if they are credentials on a resume. I wish I could explain better how this all feels connected, and about the irony that hyper-individualistic competition and mind-colonization go hand in hand with ones uniqueness being negated.

The crux of the theory is here: Growing up with ones soul being routinely negated is traumatizing. If your name is Sam, being addressed as “Sam” becomes a trigger word for the whole violation of the mind. Likewise, words associated with who you are being pressured to be, even including and “he” or “she”, and appearances and other markers can all be triggers. We want to avoid triggers to stay regulated, so one way to avoid them is to change “Sam” and “he” to something else, and change the clothes, the look, the hair color, the breasts, and so on. People may start “identifying as” something other than what they actually are in a doomed attempt to find the lost soul. It is doomed because identity will never be found in a group, only in your actual identity – the unique self that is yours alone.

The internet monetization models that feed addictions make a social contagion possible, such that people find out that all these methods of trigger avoidance are “working” for other people. Without that tool, people may independently find many different ways to avoid triggers, but with the contagion, they are more likely to coalesce on this one set of methods.

That trend – coalescing on changing ones name, pronouns, and body characteristics – has become a movement that is challenging global culture, and being in the movement shelters the individual further from facing their triggers. People then stand up for each other and collectively create norms and policies that force all of us to “recognize” the new names and pronouns, and in doing so we are collectively sheltering each other from facing those source triggers. Personally I don’t mind if someone changes their name or pronouns, and I can call them whatever they want. I’ve changed my name twice, and see in retrospect that it was partially trigger avoidance. What concerns me is the level of urgency by the army of co-sheltering trigger avoiders: it has become an inquisition, as if to call someone the wrong thing is an insult, a violation, or act of oppression.

In “recognizing” the desired vocabulary, we are not recognizing anything that is real though; in the extreme we are suspending critical thought in order to comply, like in the Emperor’s New Clothes. In that story, saying what you actually saw with your own eyes was considered hurtful. In some circles, the rules are so exceedingly dogmatic that one is walking on eggshells when saying anything. It does not allow for language to be loose or culturally flexible with respect to dialects and variance in ways of thinking.

I am wondering if my theory ultimately leads to the scary conclusion that millions of people are now transgender because joining that particular army gives them more collective power to prevent themselves from being triggered (that is, having their soul-negating school days evoked). They may not be transgender on account of being born or raised with gender-nonconforming traits, but only due to choosing it as a strategy. If that is true, then they would naturally want to ever increase the complexity of the rules for engaging with them, as the Emperor did, such that they can always find someone else to blame for not “respecting” them sufficiently. As an example, some extreme online influencers are demanding that for “basic respect,” others must inquire of their pronouns on a daily basis in case they change; such a demand presents an unwinnable situation for anyone who is actually trying to respect them.

In my mind, if any of this is true, then there are big problems:

• Being triggered can be part of a path to growth. If you are successful at avoiding all triggers, you may never heal from the original trauma.
• Those children that were denied a private life may grow up to be adults that cannot separate their public and private lives, and may tend to externalize everything – that is, they drag everyone else into things that should be private.
• The concept of “identity” as strictly group-identity may be suppressing recognition of individual uniqueness.
• Language policing is inherently ethnocentric. Attempting to coerce others to change not only their word choices, but basic parts of speech, is a barrier to communication, when we should be trying to bridge cultures, languages, and dialects. We should be listening to the meaning behind what people say, not erecting a wall the moment they say the “wrong” word.
• If unchecked capitalism creates a loser class of those who do not have the right competitive personal characteristics, that system is broken; we should not be buying into it when raising the next generation.
• People should be allowed to have any name and any gender traits, and that should not need to matter in public life. Undue focus on those qualities and labels should not bog down getting on with education, the workplace, or anything else.