The Egg Prime Directive is Bullshit

We transsexuals have an obligation to help each other.  Transition is hard, and there are certain things about it that only other trans people are able to help with.  That’s why community is so important.

That being said, we often don't know what to do with future transsexuals.  There are plenty of people out there who will be like us if they get the right information about what is possible.  

I am of course talking about eggs; people who are trans but don’t know it yet.  It is standard wisdom to treat these people delicately.  Their emotions around gender tend to be volatile, so asking them to confront their gender may make them panic or get defensive.  

This is why the standard advice about them is that we have to wait until they themselves learn that they are trans, and that we cannot intervene.  This is called the “Egg Prime Directive”.

I think the Egg Prime Directive is bullshit.

These eggs are not just people we can abandon; they are our future siblings.  We cannot let them stew in their own ignorance when it is in our power to help them understand themselves.  We have just as much of an obligation to future transsexuals as we do to current transsexuals.

Emptiness

It is easy to be ignorant about your own gender.  Society avoids talking about it whenever possible.  Most people that an egg will encounter are cis, and therefore, don't think about their gender any more than they have to.  In other words, eggs usually don't have anyone to talk about their feelings who would understand them, be sympathetic to them, and be able to give effective advice/support.

This makes it so that gender is often a site of deep schism or even a void for eggs. Many trans people will or have described their pre-transition existence as effectively a pantomime- not quite living, just hollowly performing half-considered expectations. 

This is why so many eggs come to believe that they are the only people in the world who feel what they are feeling.  Their dysphoria is- in a way- an emptiness as much as it is a site of pain and caused by ignorance. 

Unless they happen to find the few spaces where similar people happen to congregate, they are unlikely to come across people like them.  They instead remain ignorant of why they feel the way they do, how many other people there are who feel the same way, and what can be done to address these feelings.

We transsexuals know this feeling all too well.  Most of us were, at one point in our lives, deeply ignorant eggs, and this made us miserable at best.  However we dragged ourselves out of that (or were dragged out by others), we all agree that being left ignorant was awful, and that we never want to go back there.  

We all know that at any time, there are people steeped in that same ignorance, just as we were.  We also can’t agree on how to address it.

The way we imagine people coming to terms with their own gender is incomplete.  Most people will never crack if they don’t confront the fact that living as trans is a viable option.  In this way, transition is as much a social process as it is an individual one.  As a social species, we look to our peers for examples of how to live.  This is why trans communities are so crucial to eggs and the freshly cracked; they demonstrate what is possible.  

But, again, transsexuals can’t seem to agree how to address eggs. It’s a recurring problem and site of community debate, discourse, and crossfire.  The most common solution to this problem is the Egg Prime Directive.  It acknowledges that these eggs are trapped by their own ignorance.  However, proponents argue that the ignorance of eggs is self-reinforcing, meaning that addressing the root cause directly will cause the ignorance to grow rather than be addressed.  

Therefore, proponents of the Egg Prime Directive argue that we cannot help eggs directly.  Rather, they demand that we must wait until they realize that they are trans themselves.

There are several problems with this.  Most importantly, it misunderstands how people go from being eggs to living out as trans.  It makes the assumption that if eggs are given enough time, they will realize that they are trans, and will not require outside help to make that change.  

This is false, at least for the vast majority of people.  In my experience, most people won’t realize they are trans by first principles.  Hardly anyone knows they are trans from a young age, and is then able to act upon that.  Most of us need to be shown in detail that it is possible to live as a different gender and/or sex from that which we are assigned at birth, since society at large has no interest in making that clear to us.  

The large wave of trans people who came out from the early 2010s to the early 2020s was made possible because, more so than at any time in history, people were shown examples of trans people living dignified lives.  Eggs seeing this had living proof that they were not alone, and were given examples of what could be done to alleviate their suffering.  Their ignorance was not broken by internal deliberation on the nature of their identity, it was broken by outside examples of what is possible.