Hi, all. For the last year, I’ve been putting together a timeline of key events in the history of youth gender medicine, from the 1998 Dutch paper to the first trans kids conference, from the debut of Jazz Jennings to the Cass Review, Sissy Boy papers, GIDS opening, first social transition guidelines for schools, 4thWaveNow, Title IX: key moments and developments in media, medicine, academia, pop culture, law, research etc. This will be a visual answer to the question: What the heck happened?!
I hope to have it properly formatted and published (and would like to have it as a fold-out in my forthcoming book) if I can find a designer to help. In the meantime, if you have ideas of significant moments and events that I should include, please email me or leave word in the comments! (It can be in other countries if it’s relevant—I have things from UK, Finland, Sweden, Netherlands etc.) Please talk amongst yourselves, too, about key moments in youth gender medicine history.
I wonder when they started to teach public school students that everyone has a gender identity? And then, when did they start informing children that they could literally become the opposite sex using drugs and surgery and that only bad people would not affirm that it was actually true. There must have been a day because I missed it and they got my daughter.
I believe a lot of this was pushed by the human Rights council, of you send me a message I can show you some of the timelines for their guidelines starting to penetrate the school system
Jesse Singal's article in The Atlantic was huge for me as a parent. But again, that may be more personal than broadly across the board: quite bizarre (and relieving) to have a respected national magazine delivered to my home that described what was happening my my household. And my first news of the online component.
Yes, and my view is that was the first and last in a lot of ways (not permanently). Katie H had publisher her detransition piece the year before (and me in NYT). What happened to Katie was terrible, but I think it was a small publication so didn't rattle the whole industry as Jesse's piece did!
In the 1990's, so-called therapists told young people, mainly girls and women, that their drug addiction, depression, suicidal thoughts and other mental issues were due to their having been ritually abused by family members of other people in authority, and they had repressed those memories. Accordingly, they bore no responsibility for their bad choices and mental issues. In the absence of any physical evidence of ritual sexual abuse, many innocent people, mainly men, were falsely accused of crimes. Families were broken apart,people lost their jobs, and some were prosecuted and even spent time in prison. Prominent entertainers and prosecutors aided and abetted this False Memory Craze. Now were are in the midst of the Gender Dysphoria Craze, in which young people, mainly girls, are being told by so-calld therapists and educators, among others, that their mental problems are due to their being boys trapped in girls' bodies, with puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and sex change surgery the cure for their dilemmas, at a cost in cash of course. In addition, boys and men can just claim to be girls or women and compete with them in sports and enter their locker rooms. Anyone who questions any of this is labeled "transphobic." The Trans Craze is just as pernicious as the False Memory Craze, perhaps even more so.
Please correct me if I’m missing something obvious, but what I’m not seeing in these timelines and essays and analysis is when pharma started to seriously advertise hormone therapy to men (the myth of low T) and women as a magical cure all for libido and perimenopause and menopause symptoms.
Look at when schools started using personal devices instead of text books. BYO devices particularly.
I reckon that's when the %&* hit the fan in my family.
Devices monitored heavily at home, less so at school, but more so on school- owned shared devices than privately owned personal devices.
Kids getting around the school firewalls in their personally owned device and looking up whatever they want.
Accessing porn. Boys following natural curiosity. (My brother hid a single Girly-mag under his mattress for years. Not only was it so difficult to get it painlessly, once he did overcome whatever embarrassment or conscience it took for him to get it, he only had the one. Material that even fit adults, was screened and vetted and regulated before publishing.)
Girls developing physically and being subject to popular aesthetics that are drummed into them. And anyone outside the airbrushed elite didn't fit in.
Boys' porn-fed (or Tate-fed) immature and misguided treatment of girls.
My daughter saying there was something wrong with her because she didn't feel like having sex... at 9.... like other kids were taking about!! Not hearing my calm explanation to not worry... that this was perfectly normal... etc. Instead the little neurodiverse, fact loving, voracious reader and bright spark finding a black and white written authority online giving other answers to mum.
Neurodiverse children being recognised by peers as different (at the point of life when children move out of parallel play)...
Unable to defend themselves/ advocate/ name their feelings/ manage their distressing feelings in front of peers who are socially figuring out where they fit in the pecking order.
Finding kinship with others who enjoy drawing, reading, artwork... also finding self esteem in being good (sometimes VERY good) at reading, drawing, art and music.
Then doing more of that online.... and THEN the online world explodes open in a wonderful exciting and fascinating game of colours and facts and games. With 'safe' nameless people who share easily without speaking. Following complex'rules' and fitting everything confusing about humans into categories to make sense of it all. And online categories are wild and wonderful.
The problem with any of that is the same for any child.... the internet is not like a toyshop of merely pretty colours and happy games and interesting people like mum n dad n bro n sis. It's not a mirror of the child's paradigm. It's not overseen by licenses or retail regulations.
It's marketing, can be completely unregulated. Or vice/ grooming. Gambling. Attention seeking. That's pretty much underlying everything they'll find online.
And most parents either can't be bothered or are incapable of doing what it takes/ expending the enormous effort to learn, research, decide on and operate anything effective enough for their kids to not get around the blocks to their access to the pretty, happy, lively, interesting moving lights online.
Alongside it all, advertising. There's not a lot of marketing that isn't freely available to a prolific, unavoidable degree- with or without a firewall.
And we know what marketing is. Selling anxiety first, pressuring a solution second.
Fair game.
Game on!
AT SCHOOL
That's what I'd be interested in knowing:
*When on the timeline were kids given PC'S instead of text books as standard?
And when were these changed from school devices to BYO devices?
Absolutely - an astute doctor I know once commented that if you look at the history of psychology there was a period in the 1950’s or 1960’s where a big group of behavioral psychologists moved into advertising.
In our kids school.....around 2013-2015. But that was me noticing just in my kids' year groups. Maybe they just weren't old enough, and it had occurred already in higher grades.
A truant officer visited a home of a straight A student because she missed 21 days of school. She missed because the family didn't want their daughter exposed to gender identity discussions.
In Canada the affirmation approach came on very subtly and then grew and grew in a way that is difficult for me to pinpoint major events. That said, Alberta's premier Smith's bold announcement that the province will be restricting gender medicine for youth was huge. It was the first time any major elected official in Canada went against the medical affirmation model. New Brunswick's social transition policy for schools was also really big, followed by Saskatchewan's.
As far as I understand it, Canada imported the Dutch protocol before it was even officially called that, starting in the late 1990s. But that's not necessarily the same as the affirmative model that took over once CAMH shut (and of course started before).
Is there a record of the first time a child was removed from their parents and/or gender affirmation was used against one parent by another in custody hearings?
I know of a child removed by affirming parents around 2005, I think. I don't know when the first case of the opposite happening is. I have chronicled multiple instances of it but it would be great to know.
Lisa, I have nothing to contribute that you don’t already know, but I just want to chime in with others here in appreciation for the work you are doing. Color me grateful.
Lisa, I have no doubt there is a way to do this, and it would be great (although all additions should also be subject to your approval.) Get some technical buddies or some neurodivergent kids helping. It also would be SO great if this timeline could be animated (um, Nina Paley?) in one of its forms. Maybe you could get a grant for a project like that now that the Cass Review is actually being discussed on NPR. Times changing, money might open up to fund better ways of communicating these facts.
Wow, Boston Children's Hospital has had a long involvement with this issue. I remember their years of covering up for the pedophile Melvin Levine and Rabbi Leavitt. I think the groundwork for the blossoming of modren transgenderism was laid as far back as the Seventies with the promotion of the "transgressive" ideology promoted by people like Pat/rick Rice Califia and the gay s&m movement and the particular vein of misogyny reflected in Drag Culture.
Agree with others below. Jazz Jennings show debuted in 2015: National Graphic magazine cover. There were many documentaries pushing and normalizing the notion that children are born trans around 2014-2017. Changes in the DSM criteria. Firing of Dr. Kenneth Zucker. The first time Chloe Cole testified; the Heritage Foundation events that brought in feminists, detransitioners and doctors; release of key books. When HRC came out with their “safe schools” program, Fl Board of Medicine hearings (2022), first detransitioner lawsuit in the US; Keira bell lawsuit.
I believe this was the first formal gender service in the country, and this was a description in Pediatrics, the journal of the AAP, of the first cohort of kids through that gender service (also included kids transitioned before the gender service was officially formed, I believe.) I wasn't aware of the article you cited .It was earlier, but probably much less influential than something in Pediatrics. It may be that my viewpoint is skewed. I'm a pediatric nurse practitioner, and I was in New England at the time, and heard Spack speak at a local conference just prior to this publication.
Also the person writing badfacts.substack.com has been covering a lot of the history? Oh I see someone has referenced it below too (unyielding bicyclist is the author).
For consideration: increase in referrals to gender clinics/GIDS as it relates to Haidt’s mental health declines caused by social media in 2012; Bruce Jenner’s transition and woman of the year award; COVID/online school (probably multiple angles to this—more kids online all the time, social isolation, school indoctrination, parents finding out about school indoctrination. . .
Did I miss anyone mentioning John Money's experiments, such as with David Reimer and his twin brother?
And Kaitlyn Jenner on The View and magazine covers (not "youth" but it surely changed the attitude around this subject - making it heroic to transition).
And how about when the Harry Benjamin Institute was re-branded as WPATH?
So many historical events led to the "affirmation model" and mass mutilation and sterilization of youth that my mind is going blank.
There was a wave of film and theatre featuring transgender characters as protagonists in the 90's, including:
-1992, The Crying Game
-1992, Orlando
-1993, M Butterfly (film, based on Broadway show of 1988)
-1994, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
-1995, To Wong Foo...
-1997, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
-1999, Todo sobre mi madre
-1999, Boys Don't Cry
I saw all of these in the theater (including the Broadway show). They were very important movies for a certain set, which included a lot of young people (yes, I was young once). I don't think we can overstate the importance of fashionable art in preparing the ground for the social movement that was to come.
Even though the beginning was decades prior to C19; the school systems (teachers’ unions & state & federal government) had ample time (at least a year and a half) to introduce all sorts of fun books, activities, lesson plans, policies, & staff devolvement (I mean development; my bad) without any outside knowledge/oversight at all.
I’ve often wondered if the widespread adoption of smartphones by tweens and teens, as a phenomenon unto itself, is worth looking up? There must be a graph somewhere. I’d wager to guess that the uptick in trans identifying youth lagged only a few years behind. Correlation? Causation?
Probably echoing much of the above but if I were you I would take some of the graphs Jon Haidt uses in The Anxious Generation and overlay them with graphs of the rise in gender, gender questioning, medical caren etc. Its uncanny how they map so well onto one another. We wouldnt or rather couldnt be here as fast or at all without the like button and other factors Haidt lays out.
At Haidts After Babel substack there are loads of graphs. Also Jeane Twenge is another substack with good graphs. Maybe reach out to them.
Also, its important to understand the ideology and when it jumped the tracks into the mainstream. Obviously the internet pushed it but postmodern critical theory and ITS timeline informs the medical timeline in important ways too. Yascha Mounks book "the identity synthesis" is a good overview. But also Cynical Theories by James Lindsey and Helen Plukrose.
Timelines are great because you start to see what was in the air when the pioneering medical professionals mainstreamed this stuff. Its ideological, not medical. Thats the whole point.
I wonder when they started to teach public school students that everyone has a gender identity? And then, when did they start informing children that they could literally become the opposite sex using drugs and surgery and that only bad people would not affirm that it was actually true. There must have been a day because I missed it and they got my daughter.
I believe a lot of this was pushed by the human Rights council, of you send me a message I can show you some of the timelines for their guidelines starting to penetrate the school system
Jesse Singal's article in The Atlantic was huge for me as a parent. But again, that may be more personal than broadly across the board: quite bizarre (and relieving) to have a respected national magazine delivered to my home that described what was happening my my household. And my first news of the online component.
Yes, and my view is that was the first and last in a lot of ways (not permanently). Katie H had publisher her detransition piece the year before (and me in NYT). What happened to Katie was terrible, but I think it was a small publication so didn't rattle the whole industry as Jesse's piece did!
I'm curious how/when/if the change in terminology from "transsexual" to "transgender" influenced the acceptance of the concept of "trans kids."
Unyielding Bicyclist’s history posts on this have been fascinating to read, from a lawyers pov
In the 1990's, so-called therapists told young people, mainly girls and women, that their drug addiction, depression, suicidal thoughts and other mental issues were due to their having been ritually abused by family members of other people in authority, and they had repressed those memories. Accordingly, they bore no responsibility for their bad choices and mental issues. In the absence of any physical evidence of ritual sexual abuse, many innocent people, mainly men, were falsely accused of crimes. Families were broken apart,people lost their jobs, and some were prosecuted and even spent time in prison. Prominent entertainers and prosecutors aided and abetted this False Memory Craze. Now were are in the midst of the Gender Dysphoria Craze, in which young people, mainly girls, are being told by so-calld therapists and educators, among others, that their mental problems are due to their being boys trapped in girls' bodies, with puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and sex change surgery the cure for their dilemmas, at a cost in cash of course. In addition, boys and men can just claim to be girls or women and compete with them in sports and enter their locker rooms. Anyone who questions any of this is labeled "transphobic." The Trans Craze is just as pernicious as the False Memory Craze, perhaps even more so.
Please correct me if I’m missing something obvious, but what I’m not seeing in these timelines and essays and analysis is when pharma started to seriously advertise hormone therapy to men (the myth of low T) and women as a magical cure all for libido and perimenopause and menopause symptoms.
Apparently they were marketing T to butch lesbians outside lesbian bars in the 80's.
Look at when schools started using personal devices instead of text books. BYO devices particularly.
I reckon that's when the %&* hit the fan in my family.
Devices monitored heavily at home, less so at school, but more so on school- owned shared devices than privately owned personal devices.
Kids getting around the school firewalls in their personally owned device and looking up whatever they want.
Accessing porn. Boys following natural curiosity. (My brother hid a single Girly-mag under his mattress for years. Not only was it so difficult to get it painlessly, once he did overcome whatever embarrassment or conscience it took for him to get it, he only had the one. Material that even fit adults, was screened and vetted and regulated before publishing.)
Girls developing physically and being subject to popular aesthetics that are drummed into them. And anyone outside the airbrushed elite didn't fit in.
Boys' porn-fed (or Tate-fed) immature and misguided treatment of girls.
My daughter saying there was something wrong with her because she didn't feel like having sex... at 9.... like other kids were taking about!! Not hearing my calm explanation to not worry... that this was perfectly normal... etc. Instead the little neurodiverse, fact loving, voracious reader and bright spark finding a black and white written authority online giving other answers to mum.
Neurodiverse children being recognised by peers as different (at the point of life when children move out of parallel play)...
Unable to defend themselves/ advocate/ name their feelings/ manage their distressing feelings in front of peers who are socially figuring out where they fit in the pecking order.
Finding kinship with others who enjoy drawing, reading, artwork... also finding self esteem in being good (sometimes VERY good) at reading, drawing, art and music.
Then doing more of that online.... and THEN the online world explodes open in a wonderful exciting and fascinating game of colours and facts and games. With 'safe' nameless people who share easily without speaking. Following complex'rules' and fitting everything confusing about humans into categories to make sense of it all. And online categories are wild and wonderful.
The problem with any of that is the same for any child.... the internet is not like a toyshop of merely pretty colours and happy games and interesting people like mum n dad n bro n sis. It's not a mirror of the child's paradigm. It's not overseen by licenses or retail regulations.
It's marketing, can be completely unregulated. Or vice/ grooming. Gambling. Attention seeking. That's pretty much underlying everything they'll find online.
And most parents either can't be bothered or are incapable of doing what it takes/ expending the enormous effort to learn, research, decide on and operate anything effective enough for their kids to not get around the blocks to their access to the pretty, happy, lively, interesting moving lights online.
Alongside it all, advertising. There's not a lot of marketing that isn't freely available to a prolific, unavoidable degree- with or without a firewall.
And we know what marketing is. Selling anxiety first, pressuring a solution second.
Fair game.
Game on!
AT SCHOOL
That's what I'd be interested in knowing:
*When on the timeline were kids given PC'S instead of text books as standard?
And when were these changed from school devices to BYO devices?
I'd love to see where that fits in the pattern.
Great project
Absolutely - an astute doctor I know once commented that if you look at the history of psychology there was a period in the 1950’s or 1960’s where a big group of behavioral psychologists moved into advertising.
2011 given pc's is what I saw.
In our kids school.....around 2013-2015. But that was me noticing just in my kids' year groups. Maybe they just weren't old enough, and it had occurred already in higher grades.
A truant officer visited a home of a straight A student because she missed 21 days of school. She missed because the family didn't want their daughter exposed to gender identity discussions.
Send those people to me! Curious what happened there...
In Canada the affirmation approach came on very subtly and then grew and grew in a way that is difficult for me to pinpoint major events. That said, Alberta's premier Smith's bold announcement that the province will be restricting gender medicine for youth was huge. It was the first time any major elected official in Canada went against the medical affirmation model. New Brunswick's social transition policy for schools was also really big, followed by Saskatchewan's.
As far as I understand it, Canada imported the Dutch protocol before it was even officially called that, starting in the late 1990s. But that's not necessarily the same as the affirmative model that took over once CAMH shut (and of course started before).
Oh, and of course Ken Zucker's infamous dismissal from CAMH. But I'm afraid no one really paid that much attention to it at the time.
Is there a record of the first time a child was removed from their parents and/or gender affirmation was used against one parent by another in custody hearings?
I know of a child removed by affirming parents around 2005, I think. I don't know when the first case of the opposite happening is. I have chronicled multiple instances of it but it would be great to know.
If the first instance is difficult to track down, then total number as of this date etc. may be eye opening to many people.
Lisa, I have nothing to contribute that you don’t already know, but I just want to chime in with others here in appreciation for the work you are doing. Color me grateful.
All I can say is kudos to you. And I promise to buy your book.
AAP policy statement. The Spack paper about Boston Children’s GeMS clinic.
Which Spack paper? This one? https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19359700903165381
I've got the AAP statement! I wish I could make the timeline interactive so people could add things!
Lisa, I have no doubt there is a way to do this, and it would be great (although all additions should also be subject to your approval.) Get some technical buddies or some neurodivergent kids helping. It also would be SO great if this timeline could be animated (um, Nina Paley?) in one of its forms. Maybe you could get a grant for a project like that now that the Cass Review is actually being discussed on NPR. Times changing, money might open up to fund better ways of communicating these facts.
Wow, Boston Children's Hospital has had a long involvement with this issue. I remember their years of covering up for the pedophile Melvin Levine and Rabbi Leavitt. I think the groundwork for the blossoming of modren transgenderism was laid as far back as the Seventies with the promotion of the "transgressive" ideology promoted by people like Pat/rick Rice Califia and the gay s&m movement and the particular vein of misogyny reflected in Drag Culture.
Agree with others below. Jazz Jennings show debuted in 2015: National Graphic magazine cover. There were many documentaries pushing and normalizing the notion that children are born trans around 2014-2017. Changes in the DSM criteria. Firing of Dr. Kenneth Zucker. The first time Chloe Cole testified; the Heritage Foundation events that brought in feminists, detransitioners and doctors; release of key books. When HRC came out with their “safe schools” program, Fl Board of Medicine hearings (2022), first detransitioner lawsuit in the US; Keira bell lawsuit.
I’ll email more if I think of any!
Hi Lisa
Well done doing this.
JL on the Glinner Update will have lots of stuff:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/
Also Transgender Trend:
https://www.transgendertrend.com/
Could also have a scroll through my own substack 😊
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/
Best of luck with it
Dusty
Email sent.
I'm really looking forward to this.
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/129/3/418/31724/Children-and-Adolescents-With-Gender-Identity?redirectedFrom=fulltext
I believe this was the first formal gender service in the country, and this was a description in Pediatrics, the journal of the AAP, of the first cohort of kids through that gender service (also included kids transitioned before the gender service was officially formed, I believe.) I wasn't aware of the article you cited .It was earlier, but probably much less influential than something in Pediatrics. It may be that my viewpoint is skewed. I'm a pediatric nurse practitioner, and I was in New England at the time, and heard Spack speak at a local conference just prior to this publication.
https://karger.com/hde/article/56/5/285/157895/The-Gender-Affirmative-Model-What-We-Know-and-What
Also the person writing badfacts.substack.com has been covering a lot of the history? Oh I see someone has referenced it below too (unyielding bicyclist is the author).
For consideration: increase in referrals to gender clinics/GIDS as it relates to Haidt’s mental health declines caused by social media in 2012; Bruce Jenner’s transition and woman of the year award; COVID/online school (probably multiple angles to this—more kids online all the time, social isolation, school indoctrination, parents finding out about school indoctrination. . .
Did I miss anyone mentioning John Money's experiments, such as with David Reimer and his twin brother?
And Kaitlyn Jenner on The View and magazine covers (not "youth" but it surely changed the attitude around this subject - making it heroic to transition).
And how about when the Harry Benjamin Institute was re-branded as WPATH?
So many historical events led to the "affirmation model" and mass mutilation and sterilization of youth that my mind is going blank.
There was a wave of film and theatre featuring transgender characters as protagonists in the 90's, including:
-1992, The Crying Game
-1992, Orlando
-1993, M Butterfly (film, based on Broadway show of 1988)
-1994, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
-1995, To Wong Foo...
-1997, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
-1999, Todo sobre mi madre
-1999, Boys Don't Cry
I saw all of these in the theater (including the Broadway show). They were very important movies for a certain set, which included a lot of young people (yes, I was young once). I don't think we can overstate the importance of fashionable art in preparing the ground for the social movement that was to come.
Always follow the money
Even though the beginning was decades prior to C19; the school systems (teachers’ unions & state & federal government) had ample time (at least a year and a half) to introduce all sorts of fun books, activities, lesson plans, policies, & staff devolvement (I mean development; my bad) without any outside knowledge/oversight at all.
I’ve often wondered if the widespread adoption of smartphones by tweens and teens, as a phenomenon unto itself, is worth looking up? There must be a graph somewhere. I’d wager to guess that the uptick in trans identifying youth lagged only a few years behind. Correlation? Causation?
If you haven't already, check out Malcolm Richard Clark's Substack, The Secret Gender Files. A lot of it is about adults, but there's some re: kids, e.g. https://malcolmrichardclark.substack.com/p/how-did-an-8-year-old-girl-end-up, and https://malcolmrichardclark.substack.com/p/drag-story-hour-the-dark-origins.
Probably echoing much of the above but if I were you I would take some of the graphs Jon Haidt uses in The Anxious Generation and overlay them with graphs of the rise in gender, gender questioning, medical caren etc. Its uncanny how they map so well onto one another. We wouldnt or rather couldnt be here as fast or at all without the like button and other factors Haidt lays out.
At Haidts After Babel substack there are loads of graphs. Also Jeane Twenge is another substack with good graphs. Maybe reach out to them.
Also, its important to understand the ideology and when it jumped the tracks into the mainstream. Obviously the internet pushed it but postmodern critical theory and ITS timeline informs the medical timeline in important ways too. Yascha Mounks book "the identity synthesis" is a good overview. But also Cynical Theories by James Lindsey and Helen Plukrose.
Timelines are great because you start to see what was in the air when the pioneering medical professionals mainstreamed this stuff. Its ideological, not medical. Thats the whole point.
June 2007 First iPhone available from Apple
DeviantART 2000, Youtube 2005, Wattpad 2006, Tumblr 2007, Instagram 2010, TikTok 2017