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The Youth ‘Trans’ Epidemic
Phoenix Children’s Hospital has now confirmed on their Twitter feed that their standard treatment for gender dysphoria is “gender-affirming care.” This is strictly bad news for Arizona’s troubled or gender-curious adolescents.
The wildly expanding world of transgender services has generated its own euphemisms, so a translation is in order. “Gender-affirming care” means that when any adolescent professes doubt or confusion about their gender, the only acceptable response is to agree that the child’s feelings are reality-based and immutable. Therefore, they must be encouraged to advance into treatment (more on that later).
Critics of this approach, even those simply urging caution, are ridiculed and threatened with professional sanctions.
Teenage females are the largest and fastest-growing demographic for “transitioning.” Yet anyone who has raised, lived with, or been a teenage girl knows that they’re notoriously subject to mood swings and temporary infatuations.
Many adolescents today live in an Internet/social milieu that works to encourage transgenderism. Internet quizzes ask “are you sure” you’re not trans.
Coming out as trans is seen as courageous. It is rewarded with admiration and respect. It can be seductive for teens with self-esteem issues and limited ability to foresee long-term consequences.
But the gender-affirming care model is unique in believing the feelings of a teenager alone justify life-altering medical and surgical treatments. There are no tests of any kind available to confirm or deny the diagnosis. If the youngster reports they feel like the other sex, then they are transsexual. Period.
Gender dysphoria, feeling psychological discomfort with your biological sex, clearly exists. Some transgendered adults who made the considered decision to transform once maturity had been reached are living productive, satisfying lives.
Rare individuals who have been clearly gender dysphoric from birth seem to have a legitimate if ill-defined psychological disorder which can be ameliorated by passing as the opposite sex.
But these examples have no relation to the waves of transgendered teens now occurring. In her meticulously researched book Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier recounts interviewing hundreds of parents with essentially the same story.
They thought they were raising a bright, well-adjusted daughter with normal emotional riffs. Then, suddenly, supported by her authority figures, she comes out as “trans.”
By the time they realize what happened, the deed is done, often medications have been prescribed and the parents are out of the decision-making loop. If they don’t fully cooperate, they can lose custody of their child.
The result of this approach has been a huge leap in the incidence of transsexualism. Until recently, about 0.3% of Americans identified as transgender. Among today’s youth, that number is 1.8% and climbing.
In 2007 there was one American “comprehensive pediatric gender clinic.” Now there are 60.
It’s not logically possible that an identifiable, biologically-based condition would undergo such an enormous increase spontaneously. Yet patients continue to pour in from school clinics and pediatricians’ offices.
But what about those treatments? Once on the track, younger patients (i.e., some grade schoolers) are given puberty blockers which delay the effects of sex hormones, essentially causing an arrested development.
Later in high school, patients are given the hormones of the opposite gender, most commonly testosterone for girls, followed by mastectomy and other surgeries to remove unwanted organs, implant facsimile organs, and produce desired cosmetic results.
These ministrations are depicted as benign and reversible but they are neither. At a minimum, they permanently terminate key functions like fertility and breastfeeding. Complications of organ transplants like the phallus can produce grotesque results. The medical ethics of sacrificing a body function for aesthetic or psychological purposes is questionable at best.
The human toll of this departure from normal scientific standards of care is now coming into view. According to a 2022 study by the National Institutes of Health, “Suicidality Among Transgender Youth,” 56% of transgender youth reported a previous suicide attempt and 86% reported suicidal thoughts.
We are in the throes of an epidemic, not a viral but a social one. PCH and the other group-thinking experts serve us poorly by promoting this faddish, non-medical behavior. They should review the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm.
Published in Culture, Healthcare
Where the hell are the parents? A parent should be able to stop this. Move the family to another state. If a court overrules you, go postal and purify.
A lot are on board with it. (Transgenderism by proxy is definitely a thing.) Others are too weak to stand up to their own children. Some parents fear rejection. Some fear the power of the woke authorities.
In any case, we’re doomed.
Mr Patterson is exactly correct.
I’ve treated scores if not hundreds of these patients. Not one of them has been free of serious psychiatric illness.
The cure for “gender dysphoria” is to go through puberty and become an adult of the correct biological sex (not gender; sex)
For an example of someone who is making a difference, see today’s Daily Signal podcast on Chris Elston, “Billboard Chris”.https://ricochet.com/podcast/daily-signal/billboard-chris-children-cannot-consent-to-puberty-blockers/
If the parents are on board with it, there is not much one can do. I can pray for those whose parents are on board with this. Vengence is the Lord’s. He is more effective with it anyway.
Abigail Shrier, the author of Irreversible Damage suggested that professionals who did not agree with “gender affirming treatment” were in danger of board complaints. One strength that Ms. Shrier had was that as a lawyer, she cannot be shut up so quickly.
There is a huge need for Red State Legislatures to move aggressively. Now.
I am deeply concerned and appalled at this trend in our current culture. First of all, it did not evolve naturally. It’s being programmed (by who I don’t know). Personally I think it is child abuse and a genuine attempt at reducing the global population. Women who transition to men have little interest in giving birth and go through hormone treatments to stop this. Men who transition to women cannot have children – they don’t have the plumbing but either way – this puts a halt on natural family creation.
The slippery slope started years ago. It’s an attempt at an anti-creation – the opposite of all that is natural. Our poor children – young kids and teens who should be enjoying being kids – are being pushed into this perverted line of thinking on social media and even in education – and it is worldwide. Every parent should be aware and the cell phone and computer, and schools are the drivers of these messages.
Medical professionals no longer take the Hippocratic oath.
This is the most vacuous, stupid, unnecessary, and utterly ridiculous issue — and yet one that is proving to be profoundly important. Thanks for posting about it; more people need to be up in arms about this unfolding tragedy.
Abigail Shrier’s book is indeed excellent. I’d also recommend Trans by Helen Joyce. Same topic, but a different approach. (For those who want to be equipped to talk about the science of human sexual biology, consider T, Carole Hooven’s book on testosterone, here.)
We are at a strange moment when something so patently, laughably absurd is nonetheless injuring countless young people, mostly young women — with the unconscionable support of almost every institution, medical and otherwise. I think history will record this as a dark and inexplicable public hysteria.
I have sympathy for parents dealing with this. I know such parents. Everywhere they turn, they are being told that they are endangering their child if they don’t “affirm” the child’s fantasy. They find essentially no support. If they’re single, they risk losing custody of their own children to a complicit ex-spouse who is willing to go along with this nonsense.
California’s decision to become a willing participant in this elective butchery, even over the objection of parents, is an example of how deeply the rot has infected our elite culture.
Having said all that, I do think the tide is slowly turning. Twitter, which is hostile to critics of the trans movement, is nonetheless flooded with parents and victims of the trans movement who are speaking up loudly. I think we are nearing a tipping point, and a public backlash against this madness.
Ah, but of course that isn’t evidence that trans kids are suicidal, it is evidence that people who face opposition to transitioning are suicidal.
These kids think that there is something wrong with them and that they are in the wrong body.
They are right about the first part.
There are people who think that our growth from birth to adult is in the realm of the divine, and there are people who believe that it is in the realm of science.
Of the science-minded, I can only say that they wouldn’t know science if it snuck up behind them and bit off their genitals.
Adulthood, mental and physical, is achieved by the soup of hormones that our bodies create. It is not remotely scientific to assume you can mess with this and know what results will accrue.
If an outside agent gathered up children and messed with their hormones as part of a controlled experiment to see what would happen, he would be stopped and the specter of Nazi eugenics would be raised.
Luckily for those who would pervert growth, there are willing children asking to be manipulated so that they can become…something. Not what is advertised though.
This era will be looked at like the Lobotomy era of Psychiatry
We also need to know at what rate people who go through the “transition” process is. I thought I heard some preliminary indicators that the suicide rate post-transition was similar to the pre-transition rate, suggesting that the “wrong body” issue isn’t the real problem.
The problem is that something is wrong. This is generally the case when people seek medical or mental help.
For some reason, though, this is the only malady where the patient gets to choose the diagnosis and then opt for the most radical of medical interventions.
I think it’s important to view the “trans” issue as at least two distinct populations. One is people who really do have something wrong, psychologically or physiologically, and who are seeking some kind of release. That’s one extreme, and the one almost everyone on the pro-transition side is implicitly referencing as justification for medical intervention.
At the other extreme is the population that most concerns me, and that I think makes up the largest and fastest growing segment of the “trans” community. This is the foolish children, mostly girls, caught up in the fad, the social contagion, of the gender diversity movement. I think these people generally suffer no psychological problems not typical of adolescent girls. They’re victims of peer pressure, social media, and a nihilistic/narcissistic gender-activist movement obsessed with subverting cultural sexual norms.
In my opinion, this latter group needs intervention in the form of responsible parenting, isolation from social media, and a transition to a school environment (private, or home) that doesn’t reinforce this absurdity.