In examining the standard tropes that characterize so many trans early childhood origin narratives - TECONs for short - I think it's important to distinguish between the TECONs told by people who were transed by their parents as children, and the TECONs of people who've transitioned of their own volition later in life and who tell TECONSs that clearly involve huge whoppers that are the result of wishful thinking and retconning.

A classic feature of the TECON told by Jazz Jennings is that at age two Jazz asked, "When is the good fairy going to come to change my penis into a vagina?" Which is clearly total bullshit invented and told to Jazz by Jazz's family, most likely overbearing mum Jeannette, a classic case of Munchasen's by proxy and "living through your child" if there ever was one. Jazz has been so abused, and fed so much horseshit, since before Jazz could talk that it's going to take years of therapy - and distance from Jazz's toxic family of origin - for Jazz to figure out what was done to Jazz growing up.

So even though Jazz's TECON - along with Jazz's entire life and sense of self - are based on sexist stereotypes - and Jazz's story is used to indoctrinate thousands of other kids into embracing sex stereotypes and gender ideology - Jazz can't be held responsible. Adults made the choice to fill Jazz's head with sexist stereotypes and sex-change fantasies from the get-go. Jazz had no choice in the matter.

By contrast, those who jump aboard the trans train of their own volition later in life tend to come up with their own TECONs, so I think it's fair to hold them responsible for the stereotyping and dishonesty inherent to their accounts. And I think it's reasonable to call many of them out for their obvious retconning, particularly when they are public figures and they've done their retconning when they were already full-grown adults well past 25 or 30.

People in their teens and 20s, particularly their early 20s are still undergoing brain development, coming to terms with their childhoods, and figuring themselves out - so I'd cut them some slack. A great deal of slack in many cases. But people who come out as "trans" and retcon their childhoods later are fair game, especially if they go trans in order to make themselves famous & important like the grasping obvious climber Abigail Thorne, formerly Oliver, of Philosophy Tube - or coz they already are celebrities and their new claimed identities are clearly engineered to help them gain more social currency and prestige, like Caitlyn Jenner, Eddie Izzard or Jan Morris of yesteryear

El Page, age 34, is a good example. When El first publicly declared El's self to be a man, El said El had known since getting & liking a short haircut at age 9 that EL was actually a boy. More recently, El has started telling an entirely different version of what happened in El's childhood. Now the story is that El knew El was a boy when El was a toddler - in other words, when El was just learning to walk, which for most kids is around 12 months-old. In the new, more heavily retconned version of growing up trans, El at a year-old was even more precocious that Jazz Jennings supposedly was at two. Coz now El says that as a toddler boy, El not only had already learned to read and write, but El was actually writing love letters and signing them "Jason."

El Page's radically revised account of how El came to know El is really male makes sense given the political context. El's story of "knowing at 9" is politically "problematic" because age 9 is a little too old for El's story to be effective in advancing the notion that trans people are "born trans" and almost always "just know" who they are from the moment they first start developing consciousness and a sense of self. Moreover, if El didn't realize that El was a male until El was 9, then the tale of how El's transness came into being can't be used to debunk the theory put forward by Lisa Littmann, Abigail Shrier and many other "evil transphobes" - which posits that a lot of girls/women like El identifying as trans today are doing so partly in response to issues that came to the fore at or during puberty, or when puberty was fast approaching on the horizon, which most likely was the case for El at age 9. I'd bet good money that debunking the theory of sudden-onset "gender dysphoria" triggered by female puberty is part of the political agenda that El Page - with the assistance of the team of managers, lawyers, stylists, public relations specialists, image consultants and "LGBTQ" experts and advocates who are surely advising El - has set her sights on.