Also, I have an FtM transgender student, who is one of my most active, engaged students. It’s becoming clear why girls are increasingly interested in becoming boys. If that helps you shed the burden of sitting there in complete silence, constantly worried about what people think about you, it’s not unreasonable to want it.
You can’t talk people into massively wanting something that doesn’t benefit them in some way. Instead of talking about moronic things like “social contagion”, we should instead discuss what’s actually going on. What is it that we are teaching girls about being female that they are so eager to reject? I don’t see the issue of “striving for perfection femininity” in American women over the age of 50. This is something that started around the early 2000s. So it’s relatively new and can be corrected.
The mega popular movie “Barbie”, for example, advances the idea of femininity that, if I believed it, would make me want to be male, too. I know better because I’m older and from another culture. But all the little girls whose moms took them to see it and who hear all these things from their mothers all the time don’t have a way to know that it’s all just empty posturing. They think it’s true and want to escape it by any means necessary. I can’t blame them for it because, God, it must suck so badly being this constantly aggrieved person.
Clarissa's Blog 
I do wonder where this came from—as one of those American women over 50, I grew up on “Free to be You and Me,” and similar messages that stressed that there were many ways to be a woman (or a man). It seemed like sexual identities were becoming broader, not narrower. Now it seems like a lot of “non-binary” people identify that way because the binaries of male/female have turned into extreme stereotypes, rather than a starting point. It used to be that transvestites could just enjoy dressing as women some of the time. Now if a guy wants to wear a skirt and nail polish, he’s also supposed to identify as female? What?
Some years ago I had a student, clearly AFAB, who identified as a man (let’s just say that visually this is not what anyone would have expected), and when they told me more about their family, which had extremely rigid, traditional views on gender roles, I thought, “Dear heaven, if those were my only options *I* would identify as male” (not a thing I’ve ever wanted to do, even at the stage where I enjoyed dressing androgynously pour épater la bourgeoisie). I rather thought that the student should move to a big city, join a consciousness-raising group, and let the family of origin go hang, at least for awhile. But somehow it was more acceptable to my student to stay a member of this family, which to me seemed terribly narrow and damaging, and re-define herself as a man, make them accept her as a son, rather than as a daughter who didn’t fit their ideas of what a woman should be.
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Right? I clearly remember that this was going in the right direction. You could be a masculine woman or a feminine man. It was finally not OK to tell boys who were shy and liked ballet, “what are you, a girl?” Male or female was not about what you liked to do or how you dressed. That was kind of great. Why did we give it all up in favor of the hoariest of stereotypes?
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I wonder if this relates back to those studies finding that the more equal in opportunity/safety/status men and women are in a given country, the greater the sexual dimorphism in things like career choice. So, given totally free choice, women seem to go *more* heavily for stereotypically female professions like teaching and nursing and childcare, not less. Why is that?
Like, do women really like those professions more, or is there some perverse reactionary need to *be more female* in the sexual marketplace to combat the gravitational pull of androgyny and interchangeability? In a world where you can “be anything” and the assumption that your birth sex means something permanent and unchangeable, do we now have to hold on more tightly to all the silly behavioral and cosmetic markers that signal it?
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