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.)
I just read part of the article. I had to stop when the writer started using "they" and "them" to describe Aiden. Journalists should not cave to that kind of stupidity (the stupidity of special pronouns).
When I was a kid I spent several of my adolescent years constantly saying "erp" from the side of my mouth. I realized later that I had a huge amount of emotional pressure inside me that I didn't feel I could express, so I simply vocalized. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I was the only one doing it.
However, the knowledge that adolescent girls in general are given to contagions explains a great deal about the trans fad.
Azeen Ghorayshi is a reporter who has written articles questioning trans, so this was a way to draw parallels. I skimmed the NYT article again, but after reading “Sleeping Beauties” by Suzanne O’Sullivan (which Eliza recommended), it’s clear this is a functional neurological disorder. The tik tok Tourette’s was also mentioned in the book.
I remember reading that article and thinking the exact same things. I couldn't decide if the person was trying to say everything to get people to think of trans identities as part of this phenomenon without having to take all the risks, including potentially discrediting the entire article, or if the author genuinely and truly believes "gender dysphoria" and trans identification are somehow different and none of this applies (see my comment below). No matter what the authors intentions were, there were definitely a lot of people in the comments who saw those parallels and made the connection. Unfortunately, it hasn't had any real or measurable effects on public policy or what doctors and Therapist are doing in practice, or even that much in public opinion.
I know I'm going a bit off topic here (although I think it's related to why that article got so close but not quite there) and I am probably opening a nasty can of worms by writing this, but I believe the worst thing that can happen for putting a stop to this madness is having Trump elected. Now that he is talking about how children shouldn't transition and men should not be competing in women's sports, etc. if he wins, being part of "the resistance" will mean going from one extreme to the next to "support" the "vulnerable trans children and adults" he is hurting. Change is not going to happen based on laws from one party. Many of his laws are getting held up or struck down in the courts because of legitimate constitutional issues and how they are written, and even then they only protect children until they are 18. If they are still steeped in the ideology and the belief that this is the right thing to do, turning 18 and being legally able to take this step is going to be an even more enticing way to prove how dedicated they are to The cause. This has to be dealt with through a massive change in public opinion and how the public understands this issue. As much as I dislike Biden, I think four more years of him will be better conditions for people on the left to feel it is safe to explore questioning ideology and the practices associated with it.
My decision is set that I can't support Trump, so I have to vote for Biden. But Biden is all in on the transgender thing. I question whether he even understands it, and I suspect he's got bad advisors. His Dept. of Justice has even started to sue doctors who won't give "affirmative" care. Given that Democrats keep saying that the government shouldn't come between women and their doctors, it is insane for Biden to be doing that. I am hoping that Biden wins and then dies (or resigns) and that Harris has better ideas on the issue.
Transgenderism is much more of a clear and urgent danger to Women, children, and society than potential abortion bans are. Both are very big deals, but only one of them has the potential to make huge, practically irreversible large-scale changes over just the next presidential term.
Besides… if you still trust the Democratic Party to protect abortion rights, after they’ve pissed away the chance to do just that in FIVE legislative trifectas since 1972—i.e., 10 years of having House and Senate majorities and the Presidency, at any point during which time a simple party-line vote could have codified Roe into federal law—then I don’t know what to tell you. It’ll just be Lucy and the football yet again.
.
I guess it also matters whether you’re voting in a swing state, or in one of the safe red or blue states where your presidential vote is largely symbolic either way.
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.
Yeah, I think you're right about this. Because if someone just IS trans, it doesn't matter if they figured it out during the extreme stress and social isolation of a pandemic, or while undergoing a psychotic breakdown, or whatever.
There is no such thing as a "real trans person". It's a man pretending to be a woman, or a woman pretending to be a man. Sex is binary and immutable. Personalities are endless.
Same for the "trans kids" that so many liberals agonize about. At worst, they're the unfortunate creation of irresponsible and ignorant parents aided and abetted by unethical professionals and "allies" of all kinds. Some might even be proto-gays or lesbians who have their future sexual orientation stolen from them. Unless they've been indoctrinated, most youth who claim to be gender dysphoric or have gender dysphoria will desist during adolescence. Many of them will find they are same-sex attracted, as I did.
Yes! And I'm finding that even when I find liberal or centrist people who think there's something "off" happening with teenage girls and we need to be more cautious, they still believe there are people who are "true trans" or a doctor certified "medical gender dysphoria" that must transition, so of course and mental health issues they have are secondary, not causal. They assume there's a system that works and can sort this all out. *I* used to be that person until I learned firsthand there isn't any differential diagnosis or careful consideration happening and that the people involved in this are often shockingly ignorant of even the most basic facts about child and adolescent development, autism, and cognitive and behavioral psychology. As long as we believe there just IS trans and the mental health-gender dysphoria pathway can only go one way, the other points won't matter.
It is likely that those liberals and centrists do not know that most youth who are gender nonconforming or who have gender dysphoria will desist during adolescence and come to the realization they're gay.
Of course, today any claims to have gender dysphoria are so highly suspect as to be worthless. That's because so many of our institutions and social media enterprises are determined to educate our youth about the unscientific bundle of ideas called gender identity ideology that it is not an exaggeration to say kids are being trained how to present as gender dysphoric. This is a point that the hosts of the podcast "Gender: A Wider Lens" make frequently.
Trans activists have reinforced this by calling any attempt to look beyond bald assertions of trans identity into possible causes such as mental healthp problems or problems in the family of origin transphobic "gatekeeping."
Yes, absolutely right Eliza. Also, the lockdown hysteria and the trans explosion seem in and of themselves to have very similar qualities. They were both a kind of departure from reality on a mass scale. And both with the kind of fragility and anxiety that couldn’t tolerate dissent or open enquiry, or evidence that didn’t fit the narrative.
I just had a hair-raising experience which I want to share (if folks don’t mind). I have mentioned in the past a poetry editor who won’t take my poems because we disagree on the transgender issue. Last night, however, we were exchanging emails about something else and we resumed discussing the trans issue. In an effort to reach him, I said this:
“The standards of society must be based on reality. This is reality: (1) Human beings are physical creatures. (2) A man is a person with a male reproductive system. (3) A man who feels like a woman is a man who feels like a woman, and nothing more. Now, society SHOULD accept men who feel like women (and vice versa); but pretending that they are real women is a step too far. When you accept that trans women are real women, you are entering La La Land.”
Now, perhaps I shouldn’t have said “La La Land” — I said it because it made my point very well. In any event, he wrote back, disagreeing with (3) — and then he became vulgar and abusive, saying that I made him "sick to his stomach" and calling me names. We exchanged a few more notes in which I remained civil, and he continued to heap abuse on me, calling me names and using swear words and even making a threat. And then he sent an ugly limerick that he wrote about me! And this is a fellow who loves poetry and writes serious poetry himself!
This fellow is not trans, nor is he even gay. But he goes in for every liberal social issue that comes down the pike. But it still befuddles me why the trans issue means so much to him. I assumed that when I told him that "men who feel like women" should be accepted by society, he would be satisfied with that. But he wasn't. He insists on the pretense that they are real women.
I've been thinking about it, and all I can imagine is that he is a person who may have had some of his dreams crushed by the reality of life, and now he has extraordinary sympathy for trans people because he thinks being the opposite sex is their "dream" -- and he hates people like me because I am crushing their dreams. If that's not the reason he is so obsessed with the issue, I don't know what it is.
Of course, the huge irony is that trans people themselves know that they aren't real men and women. Every time a trans woman takes a leak, he has to handle his penis, which serves as a reminder of what he is. If he's had bottom surgery, he is reminded of what he is every time he dilates his fake vagina. He is also reminded of what he is every time he injects estrogen. What this means, of course, is that trans people are demanding that we (the public) believe in a fiction that EVEN THEY DON'T BELIEVE.
(Something just occurred to me. If trans people themselves know that they are not real men and women, insisting that other people believe it is a way to demonstrate to themselves that they are in control of the narrative, which is what they want. Either that, or they really do believe that "gender identity" is a meaningful thing, so meaningful that it should be the thing that defines people. Yet, all that "gender identity" means is "how you feel about yourself".)
This poetry editor, who is otherwise an intelligent fellow, is falling for all of that bullshit. I even gave him other examples (a white person imagining himself into being a black person, a human imagining himself into being a cat), but none of that phased him. But it was the fact that he became abusive in his emails that befuddles me so much. Why should a normal heterosexual man be so heavily invested in such ideas?
I have found that trans allies, who I assume run the gamut from liberal to progressive to radical, can be just as closed-minded and personally insulting when their beliefs are challenged as anyone in the MAGA cult.
From what I learned about the infamous Dylan Mulvaney on the podcast "Blocked and Reported," he started off as a mediocre theater fag (since I'm gay I get to say that) whose career went nowhere. He then tried nonbinary to no great acclaim. Only then did he rebrand himself as a trans woman. There followed a series of cringeworthy (some might say misogynistic)videos in which he drew upon the shallowest girly girl stereotypes to keep his credulous followers updated on the status of his phony transition. It would have been too over the top even for Vaudeville in its heyday. The foregoing purely opinion and is not intended as a statement of fact.
We (society) do exclude gender dysphoria from the list of mental health issues that spiked around the time of Covid for one reason: we have exceptionalized this phenomenon in every way.
This is the only mental health issue treated by altering the body's appearance, including lopping off healthy body parts and adding faux ones, as well as chemical alterations with severe side effects. This is the only mental health issue that we are supposed to celebrate, calling those with it "stunningly brave." This is the only mental health issue that is not a mental health issue, except when we want to cover the chemical and surgical body modifications with insurance, public or private. This is the only mental health issue where we teach children and teens about it, and encourage them to have it (and then celebrate it). This is the only mental health issue where will rely exclusively on self-diagnosis, rather than a list of somewhat objectively observable symptoms. This is the only mental health issue where 3 and 4-year-olds are said to be mature enough to self-diagnose. This is the only mental health issue where we are not to question the self-diagnosis of the patient at all, but are instead to simply agree and go along with anything and everything the patient says. We treat gender dysphoria so differently than any other mental health issue, so we cannot possibly believe it has anything in common with other mental health issues.
In terms of self-diagnosis, people would be smart to stick to diagnosing their hunger, their headaches, and if they're a little older, their back aches. For everything else, see a doctor. (Well, except for gender dysphoria, as most doctors are now trained to ask the patient what the diagnosis is -- "You feel like a boy? Oh, let me prescribe some testosterone for you!")
That is the 64K question. How could it be answered in an evidence based way? How can we move beyond speculation and ham- handed "it's just like left handedness" analogies?
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.)
I just read part of the article. I had to stop when the writer started using "they" and "them" to describe Aiden. Journalists should not cave to that kind of stupidity (the stupidity of special pronouns).
When I was a kid I spent several of my adolescent years constantly saying "erp" from the side of my mouth. I realized later that I had a huge amount of emotional pressure inside me that I didn't feel I could express, so I simply vocalized. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I was the only one doing it.
However, the knowledge that adolescent girls in general are given to contagions explains a great deal about the trans fad.
Azeen Ghorayshi is a reporter who has written articles questioning trans, so this was a way to draw parallels. I skimmed the NYT article again, but after reading “Sleeping Beauties” by Suzanne O’Sullivan (which Eliza recommended), it’s clear this is a functional neurological disorder. The tik tok Tourette’s was also mentioned in the book.
Thank You 🖤
I remember reading that article and thinking the exact same things. I couldn't decide if the person was trying to say everything to get people to think of trans identities as part of this phenomenon without having to take all the risks, including potentially discrediting the entire article, or if the author genuinely and truly believes "gender dysphoria" and trans identification are somehow different and none of this applies (see my comment below). No matter what the authors intentions were, there were definitely a lot of people in the comments who saw those parallels and made the connection. Unfortunately, it hasn't had any real or measurable effects on public policy or what doctors and Therapist are doing in practice, or even that much in public opinion.
I know I'm going a bit off topic here (although I think it's related to why that article got so close but not quite there) and I am probably opening a nasty can of worms by writing this, but I believe the worst thing that can happen for putting a stop to this madness is having Trump elected. Now that he is talking about how children shouldn't transition and men should not be competing in women's sports, etc. if he wins, being part of "the resistance" will mean going from one extreme to the next to "support" the "vulnerable trans children and adults" he is hurting. Change is not going to happen based on laws from one party. Many of his laws are getting held up or struck down in the courts because of legitimate constitutional issues and how they are written, and even then they only protect children until they are 18. If they are still steeped in the ideology and the belief that this is the right thing to do, turning 18 and being legally able to take this step is going to be an even more enticing way to prove how dedicated they are to The cause. This has to be dealt with through a massive change in public opinion and how the public understands this issue. As much as I dislike Biden, I think four more years of him will be better conditions for people on the left to feel it is safe to explore questioning ideology and the practices associated with it.
I think we're screwed either way. Look at Biden's HHS secretary.
I can't vote for Biden and his "team" that will do away with the sex category of female and replace it with the fantasy of "gender identity".
My decision is set that I can't support Trump, so I have to vote for Biden. But Biden is all in on the transgender thing. I question whether he even understands it, and I suspect he's got bad advisors. His Dept. of Justice has even started to sue doctors who won't give "affirmative" care. Given that Democrats keep saying that the government shouldn't come between women and their doctors, it is insane for Biden to be doing that. I am hoping that Biden wins and then dies (or resigns) and that Harris has better ideas on the issue.
"My decision is set that I can't support Trump, so I have to vote for Biden"
Nonsense. Just don't cast a vote for president, or write in J. K. Rowling or Kara Dansky or whomever.
No. Whatever Biden may be, he is better than Adolf Trump. I am not a one-issue voter. Biden is still 100% in favor of abortion, which I support.
Transgenderism is much more of a clear and urgent danger to Women, children, and society than potential abortion bans are. Both are very big deals, but only one of them has the potential to make huge, practically irreversible large-scale changes over just the next presidential term.
Besides… if you still trust the Democratic Party to protect abortion rights, after they’ve pissed away the chance to do just that in FIVE legislative trifectas since 1972—i.e., 10 years of having House and Senate majorities and the Presidency, at any point during which time a simple party-line vote could have codified Roe into federal law—then I don’t know what to tell you. It’ll just be Lucy and the football yet again.
.
I guess it also matters whether you’re voting in a swing state, or in one of the safe red or blue states where your presidential vote is largely symbolic either way.
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.
Yeah, I think you're right about this. Because if someone just IS trans, it doesn't matter if they figured it out during the extreme stress and social isolation of a pandemic, or while undergoing a psychotic breakdown, or whatever.
There is no such thing as a "real trans person". It's a man pretending to be a woman, or a woman pretending to be a man. Sex is binary and immutable. Personalities are endless.
Same for the "trans kids" that so many liberals agonize about. At worst, they're the unfortunate creation of irresponsible and ignorant parents aided and abetted by unethical professionals and "allies" of all kinds. Some might even be proto-gays or lesbians who have their future sexual orientation stolen from them. Unless they've been indoctrinated, most youth who claim to be gender dysphoric or have gender dysphoria will desist during adolescence. Many of them will find they are same-sex attracted, as I did.
Yes! And I'm finding that even when I find liberal or centrist people who think there's something "off" happening with teenage girls and we need to be more cautious, they still believe there are people who are "true trans" or a doctor certified "medical gender dysphoria" that must transition, so of course and mental health issues they have are secondary, not causal. They assume there's a system that works and can sort this all out. *I* used to be that person until I learned firsthand there isn't any differential diagnosis or careful consideration happening and that the people involved in this are often shockingly ignorant of even the most basic facts about child and adolescent development, autism, and cognitive and behavioral psychology. As long as we believe there just IS trans and the mental health-gender dysphoria pathway can only go one way, the other points won't matter.
It is likely that those liberals and centrists do not know that most youth who are gender nonconforming or who have gender dysphoria will desist during adolescence and come to the realization they're gay.
Of course, today any claims to have gender dysphoria are so highly suspect as to be worthless. That's because so many of our institutions and social media enterprises are determined to educate our youth about the unscientific bundle of ideas called gender identity ideology that it is not an exaggeration to say kids are being trained how to present as gender dysphoric. This is a point that the hosts of the podcast "Gender: A Wider Lens" make frequently.
Trans activists have reinforced this by calling any attempt to look beyond bald assertions of trans identity into possible causes such as mental healthp problems or problems in the family of origin transphobic "gatekeeping."
Yes, absolutely right Eliza. Also, the lockdown hysteria and the trans explosion seem in and of themselves to have very similar qualities. They were both a kind of departure from reality on a mass scale. And both with the kind of fragility and anxiety that couldn’t tolerate dissent or open enquiry, or evidence that didn’t fit the narrative.
I just had a hair-raising experience which I want to share (if folks don’t mind). I have mentioned in the past a poetry editor who won’t take my poems because we disagree on the transgender issue. Last night, however, we were exchanging emails about something else and we resumed discussing the trans issue. In an effort to reach him, I said this:
“The standards of society must be based on reality. This is reality: (1) Human beings are physical creatures. (2) A man is a person with a male reproductive system. (3) A man who feels like a woman is a man who feels like a woman, and nothing more. Now, society SHOULD accept men who feel like women (and vice versa); but pretending that they are real women is a step too far. When you accept that trans women are real women, you are entering La La Land.”
Now, perhaps I shouldn’t have said “La La Land” — I said it because it made my point very well. In any event, he wrote back, disagreeing with (3) — and then he became vulgar and abusive, saying that I made him "sick to his stomach" and calling me names. We exchanged a few more notes in which I remained civil, and he continued to heap abuse on me, calling me names and using swear words and even making a threat. And then he sent an ugly limerick that he wrote about me! And this is a fellow who loves poetry and writes serious poetry himself!
This fellow is not trans, nor is he even gay. But he goes in for every liberal social issue that comes down the pike. But it still befuddles me why the trans issue means so much to him. I assumed that when I told him that "men who feel like women" should be accepted by society, he would be satisfied with that. But he wasn't. He insists on the pretense that they are real women.
I've been thinking about it, and all I can imagine is that he is a person who may have had some of his dreams crushed by the reality of life, and now he has extraordinary sympathy for trans people because he thinks being the opposite sex is their "dream" -- and he hates people like me because I am crushing their dreams. If that's not the reason he is so obsessed with the issue, I don't know what it is.
Of course, the huge irony is that trans people themselves know that they aren't real men and women. Every time a trans woman takes a leak, he has to handle his penis, which serves as a reminder of what he is. If he's had bottom surgery, he is reminded of what he is every time he dilates his fake vagina. He is also reminded of what he is every time he injects estrogen. What this means, of course, is that trans people are demanding that we (the public) believe in a fiction that EVEN THEY DON'T BELIEVE.
(Something just occurred to me. If trans people themselves know that they are not real men and women, insisting that other people believe it is a way to demonstrate to themselves that they are in control of the narrative, which is what they want. Either that, or they really do believe that "gender identity" is a meaningful thing, so meaningful that it should be the thing that defines people. Yet, all that "gender identity" means is "how you feel about yourself".)
This poetry editor, who is otherwise an intelligent fellow, is falling for all of that bullshit. I even gave him other examples (a white person imagining himself into being a black person, a human imagining himself into being a cat), but none of that phased him. But it was the fact that he became abusive in his emails that befuddles me so much. Why should a normal heterosexual man be so heavily invested in such ideas?
I have found that trans allies, who I assume run the gamut from liberal to progressive to radical, can be just as closed-minded and personally insulting when their beliefs are challenged as anyone in the MAGA cult.
I have a theory that traumatic backgrounds can play a role in the urge to protect the special trans soul from the mean nasty world.
From what I learned about the infamous Dylan Mulvaney on the podcast "Blocked and Reported," he started off as a mediocre theater fag (since I'm gay I get to say that) whose career went nowhere. He then tried nonbinary to no great acclaim. Only then did he rebrand himself as a trans woman. There followed a series of cringeworthy (some might say misogynistic)videos in which he drew upon the shallowest girly girl stereotypes to keep his credulous followers updated on the status of his phony transition. It would have been too over the top even for Vaudeville in its heyday. The foregoing purely opinion and is not intended as a statement of fact.
We (society) do exclude gender dysphoria from the list of mental health issues that spiked around the time of Covid for one reason: we have exceptionalized this phenomenon in every way.
This is the only mental health issue treated by altering the body's appearance, including lopping off healthy body parts and adding faux ones, as well as chemical alterations with severe side effects. This is the only mental health issue that we are supposed to celebrate, calling those with it "stunningly brave." This is the only mental health issue that is not a mental health issue, except when we want to cover the chemical and surgical body modifications with insurance, public or private. This is the only mental health issue where we teach children and teens about it, and encourage them to have it (and then celebrate it). This is the only mental health issue where will rely exclusively on self-diagnosis, rather than a list of somewhat objectively observable symptoms. This is the only mental health issue where 3 and 4-year-olds are said to be mature enough to self-diagnose. This is the only mental health issue where we are not to question the self-diagnosis of the patient at all, but are instead to simply agree and go along with anything and everything the patient says. We treat gender dysphoria so differently than any other mental health issue, so we cannot possibly believe it has anything in common with other mental health issues.
In terms of self-diagnosis, people would be smart to stick to diagnosing their hunger, their headaches, and if they're a little older, their back aches. For everything else, see a doctor. (Well, except for gender dysphoria, as most doctors are now trained to ask the patient what the diagnosis is -- "You feel like a boy? Oh, let me prescribe some testosterone for you!")
That is the 64K question. How could it be answered in an evidence based way? How can we move beyond speculation and ham- handed "it's just like left handedness" analogies?
Here’s a direct link to the study
https://risk.lexisnexis.com/about-us/press-room/press-release/20240515-mental-health-data