Trans adults who say they always felt this way are lying
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull said:
“there aren't loads of children from the '60s, '70s, and '80s who were saying that, 'I'm this thing, but I couldn't do it.' There's retrospectively some sort of pornified AGP man that said, 'Oh, I've always felt like this.' Well, I don't believe them. I think that's a lie.”
The rise in referrals over recent decades is real and documented, and it is reasonable to ask why numbers have changed. Attributing the increase to social contagion or fabricated histories sounds like a sober historical observation.
Trans adults reporting lifelong gender incongruence are not a recent phenomenon: gender clinics documented exactly these histories throughout the mid-twentieth century, and Magnus Hirschfeld's institute was recording them a century ago. The reason so few people from the 1960s and 1970s spoke openly was not that they did not exist, but that there was no language, no pathway, and no safety, and being visibly trans in that era carried consequences that made silence the only realistic option. Lower visibility is not evidence of absence, and dismissing someone's account of their own inner life as a lie is not a historical argument, it is an accusation dressed as one. When adults describe knowing something about themselves for decades, the right response is to listen; the cost of refusing to is that real people are told their own lives did not happen.
Trans adults whose self-knowledge and life histories are publicly invalidated, and younger people who are told that adult trans lives are fabrications.