As a preteen and teen, when you asked for something ill-advised because everyone else was doing it, you likely heard a parent admonish, “What if all of your friends were jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge? Would you do it too?”
It’s wise and timeless counsel about protecting yourself from peer pressure and staying out of trouble.
But it seems a number of activists today never heeded that warning.
It’s these adults, now fancying themselves experts in gender medicine and mental health, who are wreaking havoc on an entire generation, encouraging them to follow their feelings, and follow the crowd, even when they’re at risk of permanent and irreparable harm by doing so.
According to a new study about youth gender dysphoria, there are more teens than ever claiming that their biological sex does not meet their “gender identity” and that they are coming to this conclusion earlier and earlier.
The study author, Dr. Ching-Fang Sun, is a resident at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine in Roanoke, and her results, published Monday in the journal General Psychiatry, are shocking:
- Studying the health records of 42 million people between the ages of 4 to 65, a total of 66,078 had received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
- 80% of those were from the US.
- People assigned female at birth seek professional help at about age 11 on average (!), while those assigned male at birth seek help at about age 13 , the study reported.
- In 2017, the average age for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria was 31.49 . By 2021, that age had dropped to 26.27 .
- Researchers reported a “significantly increased” number of people diagnosed between 2017 and 2021.
Well why do you suppose that is? Could it be that this is a fad, driven by social media, that tells young people — particularly girls — that transgenderism is cool, far more common that it really is, and changing your gender is a snap?
“Our study demonstrated a climbing prevalence of gender dysphoria especially in those assigned female at birth,” Sun told UPI.
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“Assigned female at birth.” We used to call them girls.
Unfortunately, researchers spend more time discussing how we can help young people “affirm” their gender — through surgery and drugs — than whether these children will regret these decisions .
For instance, the Virginia Tech researchers suggest we’re seeing more girls than boys looking to change gender because young females who display tendencies traditionally seen as masculine are “more likely to be accepted by peers, even categorized as the leader of their class.”
“By comparison, gender non-congruent [males] are more likely to face bullying and rejection, which suggests effeminate characteristics are less tolerable in [males] than masculine characteristics” are in females.
So do more girls want to change because it’s more socially acceptable, or because they’re conflating how society treats them with gender dysphoria?
Advocates argue that we’re seeing more transgender people because a social stigma has lifted.
But how many confused teens or pre-teens who are gay or simply depressed now get caught up in the transgender marketing that blankets discussion boards and even beer commercials.
It’s telling that the Virginia Tech study estimated that for every 100,000 people, there are 155 who identify as transgender — with is much, much lower than the 600 out of 100,000 reported in a 2019 study.
I would posit that it’s even lower than that. There are people who legitimately deal with gender dysphoria, but the “sharp rise” in the past few years has more to do a societal fad rather than finding a vast group that was misdiagnosed in the past.
And the main reason is that we’re relying on the feelings of children, who are not fully mature nor able to rationally decide what they are.
The rest of the world is waking up to the dangers of lifelong medicalization of patients with “treatments” like surgery or hormones that inflicts irreversible damage to preteens and teens.
In England, Tavistock, the world’s largest pediatric gender clinic, was closed in the spring. The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) explained, “An independent review condemned the clinic as ‘not a safe or viable long-term option’ because its interventions are based on poor evidence and its model of care leaves young people ‘at considerable risk’ of poor mental health.”
The UK isn’t alone in reversing course on pediatric gender care; Sweden and Finland are also revisiting the gender affirmation treatment plan for gender dysphoric youth.
Bu the US, we’re left with so-called experts who lack the critical thinking skills necessary to discern that the uptick is fueled by what is clearly a social contagion.
Individual cases like that of Kayla Lovdahl highlight the risks of early gender-affirming care.
By age 12, Lovdahl was allegedly prescribed puberty blockers and testosterone, and at 13, she had her breasts removed in a double mastectomy.
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She is now suing Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and four individual doctors, seeking unspecified damages for causing “deep physical and emotional wounds and severe regret.”
From those in academia to mental health practitioners on the ground, there is a strong disincentive from questioning if this massive spike in “transgender youth” is due to peer influences and social media.
Radical activists have positioned themselves as the ultimate authorities on pediatric gender dysphoria and have ensured that anything less than affirmation is portrayed as malpractice and fueled by hate.
In March, these activists were able to force a retraction on technical grounds of a paper on gender dysphoria by one of the world’s largest academic publishers, Springer Nature, which publishes Nature magazine and Scientific American.
The paper found a large number of parents of gender dysphoric children said that their children suffered from long standing preexisting mental health issues.
The study also reported a large number of parents surveyed thought their children’s gender dysphoria resulted from social contagion.
The “gender affirming care” that dysphoric youth are being subjected to is cruelly marketed as compassion.
The so-called experts scare their parents, and claim that a refusal to accept and embrace their child’s dysphoria will lead to suicide.
As a result, there is no adult in the room, not in their personal lives or in healthcare policy, telling a growing number of kids that medicalizing their gender dysphoria is akin to waltzing off the Brooklyn Bridge.
