Reuters wrote a story bringing up the glaringly obvious: not only is the transgender craze an extremely recent phenomenon–the sudden discovery that people come in a hundred different gender variations occurred just recently–but it is also remarkably imbalanced. John wrote about this last week.
Over the past few years children identifying as transgender didn’t just explode in number, but there was also a huge shift in just who was most likely to experience gender dysphoria.
Should we worry about it?
Yes, of course we should! It clearly is the result of a social contagion. Obviously. It is ridiculous to believe otherwise. If gender dysphoria were a purely physical phenomenon there would be no reason for the incidence to explode in this fashion, nor for the demographic of the sufferers to change so drastically.
Adolescents assigned female at birth account for a significant majority of minors receiving gender-affirming care, including top surgery, fueling debate about the influence of peer groups and social media https://t.co/mGylXDZCQL via @specialreports pic.twitter.com/cv2UiksRKT
— Reuters (@Reuters) November 18, 2022
Until recently the majority of patients who suffered from gender dysphoria–and the number was very small–were boys, or as the current lingo goes, people “assigned male at birth.” That corresponds with the very limited evidence we have from history and literature. Perhaps that is related to some developmental issue in the womb, or…who knows why?
We do know that biologically all fetuses develop along female lines and it isn’t until the Y chromosome triggers testosterone that sexual differentiation takes place. Perhaps that is related? I don’t know, and as far as I can tell nobody else knows for sure either.
The predominance of patients assigned female at birth is a reversal from the past. For years, when very few minors sought gender care, those assigned male at birth accounted for the majority. But about 15 years ago, that began to change as care became more accessible and the overall number of patients started climbing, according to studies and interviews with gender-care specialists.
For example, at Amsterdam University Medical Center’s gender clinic, a pioneer in adolescent gender care, the proportions flipped. From 1989 to 2005, 59% of its adolescent patients were assigned male at birth, the Dutch clinic reported in a 2015 study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Since 2016, about 75% of the clinic’s patients have been youths who were assigned female at birth.
Such a dramatic shift in both the number of children seeking so-called “gender affirming care”–the increase in numbers is in the hundreds or now thousands of percent depending upon who counts and how rapidly the trend grows–and the dramatic shift in the demographics shows that a social contagion is afoot.
In October, researchers at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine published a paper showing a 389% increase in gender-affirming chest surgeries performed nationally from 2016 to 2019 on patients under age 18. The total of 1,130 procedures during the period, nearly all of them for chest masculinization, represents a weighted estimate based on records from more than 2,000 U.S. medical facilities. Likewise, at least 776 chest masculinization surgeries were performed on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis over the past three years, according to U.S. insurance claims analyzed for Reuters by health technology company Komodo Health Inc. This is probably an undercount because it does not include procedures paid for out of pocket.
What is shocking news is not that a social contagion exists–anybody paying attention intuitively knows this is a fact–but that some cultural institutions within the mainstream media and even the medical community are finally willing to stand up and admit it. Until recently anybody publishing a story like this would be cancelled as a hater. Now, at least, the question can be asked: is going down this path wise?
Europeans, who pioneered and pushed “gender affirming care,” are pulling back and reevaluating. In the US we are full steam ahead, and it is frightening.
Reuters begins its article with a personalized story of a patient, and one anecdote stands out. It concerns how a young girl was lured into getting “top surgery,” where the child’s breasts are removed.
One day during his junior year of high school, Kulovitz, then 16, was scrolling on his phone when the TikTok account of a Miami surgeon who offered to “yeet the teets” of young transgender people popped up. In videos with hip-hop music playing in the background, Dr Sidhbh Gallagher provided detailed information about top surgery to remove or modify breasts and displayed photos of her satisfied gender-diverse patients, most of them young people, with shirts off to show the results of the doctor’s work. “Come to Miami to see me and the rest of the De Titty Committee,” she said in one of the videos.
The poor girl did, and her mother shelled out $10,000 to have the procedure done. As the doctor put it, she was “de tittied.”
A doctor advertising surgery for $10 grand a pop, on TikTok. To vulnerable children. Sick.
Dr Sidhbh Gallagher has performed mastectomies on healthy 13-year-olds and celebrates the "gender euphoria" in her office. pic.twitter.com/qZJP0Jgmaz
— Libby Emmons (@libbyemmons) September 3, 2022
TikTok is a major driver of the social contagion. Thanks China!
Adolescents who feel uncomfortable in their bodies–which includes almost every adolescent on the planet–find communities on TikTok that essentially condition them to associate their discomfort with gender dysphoria. They find support, companionship, and eventually “solutions” to their problems.
These are the people teaching your kids pic.twitter.com/bkWbLJDaLn
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 25, 2022
Kids who might have been goths a generation ago are now being groomed into transgenderism and a medicalization of their teenage angst. A goth kid grows out of it; a child who has been sterilized and mutilated? Not so much.
Thousands of children who, like Kulovitz, were assigned female at birth have sought gender-affirming care in recent years. And for reasons not well-understood, they significantly outnumber those assigned male at birth who seek treatment.
As Reuters reported in October, a growing number of the children receiving care at the 100-plus gender clinics across the United States are opting for medical interventions – puberty-blocking drugs, hormones and, less often, surgery. And they are doing so even though strong scientific evidence of the long-term safety and efficacy of these treatments for children is scant.
That has led to a split among gender-care specialists: those who urge caution to ensure that only adolescents deemed well-suited to treatment after thorough evaluation receive it, and those who believe that delays in treatment unnecessarily prolong a child’s distress and put them at risk of self-harm.
The outsized proportion of adolescents seeking treatment to transition from female to male has sparked parallel concerns. Professionals in the gender-care community agree that treatment of all transgender children should be supportive and affirming. The question, for some, is whether peer groups and online media may be influencing some of these patients to pursue medical transition, with potentially irreversible side effects, at a time in their lives when their identities are often in flux.
When conservatives started asking these questions a few years back we were vilified. We screamed from the rooftops that children were being sacrificed on the alter of political correctness, and we were called haters and worse. We are still called “stochastic terrorists” and accused of wishing murder upon children. The Left is determined to silence us.
Yet it is the doctors and activists who advertise on TikTok and groom young kids–often young girls–into mutilating and sterilizing themselves who are committing grave crimes.
Where were these experts who are now raising red flags when the trend could and should have been nipped in the bud? They were quiet, or even egged on the lynch mobs going after Libs of TikTok, Christopher Rufo, Matt Walsh, and all the rest of us who have been fighting this abominable trend for years?
Detransitioner who was approved for cross-sex hormones after just 2 counseling sessions blasts doctors for transitioning minors.
"My issue with this is that they're allowing these things to happen to children… They can't make these decisions, they're children!" pic.twitter.com/0B6SoTNyaF
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 28, 2022
They are not as culpable as the groomers, but they are not without blood on their hands. And in the face of atrocities being perpetrated on children they are still whispering, not shouting from the rooftops. Their tentative foray into “questioning” the trend isn’t brave; it is cowardly.
“There’s been an explosion in the gender-expansive model,” said Dr Michelle Forcier, a professor of pediatrics at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School who has specialized in the care of transgender and gender-diverse patients. “Folks may feel freer and safer to express and take on a more diverse identity because the social conversation has been put out there.” For these patients, she said, “the moral and ethical thing to do is to give them a list of options that might help them achieve their gender goals.”
But other gender-care providers and some parents are skeptical. In interviews with Reuters, they expressed worry that some adolescents assigned female at birth may be dealing with significant mental health issues in addition to questions about their gender identity, or may be seeking to transition as a refuge in a culture of internalized misogyny, body hatred and early sexualization of girls.
“Girls have a harder time with the physical and emotional changes that come with the onset of puberty,” said Dr Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist, transgender woman and former board member of WPATH. “And I think there is an element of truth that males have it better in many quarters of society than females.”
For all children, experts say, adolescence is a search for identity, when they try on various personas, appearances and interests and move beyond family to seek validation from peers. Anderson, who treats transgender and gender-questioning youth in her private practice in Berkeley, California, said she’s concerned that medically transitioning has become the default choice for too many girls who are uncomfortable with their bodies, struggling to fit in socially or dealing with mental health issues.
“Kids do try things on and not everything sticks. They experiment,” she said. “I do not believe that we have an obligation to accept at face value everything a young person says to us.”
Anderson and other clinicians say the danger is that adolescents receive medical treatment, do not experience relief from their distress, and perhaps end up regretting the irreversible results of hormone therapy and top surgery.
A diagnosis of gender dysphoria for any pre-adolescent or adolescent child seems to me to be the height of irresponsibility. Nobody–literally nobody–has a fully formed sense of themselves as a teenager, for manifold reasons. We are young, inexperienced, irrational, flooded with hormones, our bodies are changing literally by the day, and we are awakening to sexuality and confused by it.
In the midst of all that chaos we all experience some level of dysphoria. A young man experiencing his first erection and a young girl experiencing her first period will experience a shock, and it takes months and years to fully adjust to being sexual animals. Every parent who has raised a teenager knows how traumatic it is for all concerned.
Medicalizing adolescent angst is not only empirically wrong, it is immoral. It is literally profiting off of children’s pain and confusion that naturally occurs while growing up.
People who do that are ghouls. Any doctor who advertises a service by encouraging a young girl to “yeet your teets” should have her license yanked.
