About that mass egg-cracking event
Over the last few years, media consumers have been treated to a run of feel-good, human-interest stories about people discovering their “true selves” during the Covid-19 pandemic — from high-profile celebrities such as Elliot Page and Dylan Mulvaney, who both came out as transgender in 2020, to ordinary adolescents and young adults.
In the United Kingdom, the Independent described the relationship between pandemic lockdowns and transgender revelations as “a mass egg-cracking event without precedent in history” — before cautioning readers not to draw the wrong conclusions about potential social contagion.
But a new report casts these stories in a rather different light. New healthcare data reveals a “surge” in mental health diagnoses, with patients seeking help for symptoms related to stress, anxiety and depression. Adolescents and young adults have been especially hard hit. Although the report did not track gender dysphoria diagnoses among adults, diagnoses rose by 133% among children and adolescents between 2019 and 2023. Other mental health conditions, such as eating disorders, spiked too. The researchers note that, “[a]lthough the peak of the pandemic is over, it seems to be having a persistent impact on people’s mental well-being, exhibited by the continued uptick in depression and anxiety.”
To what extent is the increase in gender dysphoria diagnoses detachable from these other trends? Do we blame stress, uncertainty, and isolation for the emergence of new depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, while crediting social acceptance and awareness-raising for the simultaneous spike in gender dysphoria diagnoses?
Reminds me VERY strongly of this article from the NY Times last year (gift access, no paywall) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/health/tiktok-tics-gender-tourettes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.0U0.VAIz.n7evcejIKuon&smid=url-share
in which the authors describe a wave of spurious, self-diagnosed 'conditions' in young people sucked into the social-media bubble...but then go ahead and mention a PRECISELY PARALLEL spike in trans/nb identities IN THE SAME GROUP OF YOUNG PEOPLE, writing about that part as though it could just automatically be assumed to be real, rather than the obvious Occam's-razor conclusion that trans is just another "Tik Tok tic" (except with 999,999 times the dark funding and institutional coercion of the others).
I've read this article several times, whenever I've shared it out on different platforms, and I still genuinely can't tell whether the authors wrote about trans in such an ingenuous way /1/ as an end run around the censors ("hint hunt nudge nudge", WANTING readers to see the obvious parallels but just not explicitly acknowledging them), or /2/ because the authors themselves have been indoctrinated into the trans cult too.
(also quick reminder, if you're American. to check your public library to see whether library card holders have free access to the NYT. Many libraries do—outside the NY tri-state area of course—including ALL public libraries in the state of California.)
Often I find myself thinking that we need to zero in on one single point being argued in the debates over this issue and forget all the rest for now. That single point of focus: dismantling the ridiculous notion that all mental health comorbidities are caused by gender dysphoria and societal "transphobia" and that it can NEVER go the other way, where mental health issues and various pressures of society (like Covid lockdowns) can cause distress that can present itself as social or body-based distress expressed through gender or a desire to escape the distress through transition.
Honestly, I don't think we are going to get very far with any other part of this debate, no matter how legitimate (women's safe spaces and sports, whether children can consent to medical treatments, whether there's a social contagion or a thing called ROGD and if boys can have it, etc) until we force this one issue to the top and tackle it. As long as we have doctors, therapists, lawmakers, parents, and the general public being told and uncritically accepting the idea that "gender dysphoria" and the desire to transition are ONLY causes and NEVER symptoms of mental health problems, we are not going to get far on anything else. And even though I think most people, whether deeply in this ideology or only casually supporting this because that's what the other members of their political party believe, have subconsciously absorbed this message that causality only goes one way, I like to believe that if we really thoughtfully and consciously started focusing the message on the problem with thinking this is only a one-way causality - and how anti-scientific and harmful it is to look at it this way - we could actually start shifting the conversation and getting more nuance and better treatment, especially for the teenage girls. I especially would like to start routinely having journalist try to force doctors and therapists to go on the record saying that this causality goes in only one direction with 100% of patients and that they are so certain of this that they never need to consider the other possibility in any patient they look at. My guess is that few would be willing to take the legal liability of doing that (they will either try to invade the question, which is telling in itself, I have to go on record saying there are cases where it goes the other way) and that will be its own "egg cracking," or in other words, a breaking of the spell and stranglehold this single narrative of one-way causality has held over the professions.