What Could Possibly Account for These Teen Girls with Gender Dysphoria?

A write-up of a new paper, over at Reality's Last Stand

A new article, “The mean age of gender dysphoria diagnosis is decreasing,” blipped by on my radar this week. Yeah, yeah, I thought, this is part of the shift from “It’s not happening,” to “It’s happening, but it’s good.” The paper acknowledges the sex-ratio flip from boys to girls, and that girls tend to come out younger than boys—the same change discussed in Mike Bailey and Suzanna Diaz’s retracted-for-ridiculous-reasons ROGD paper.

Then Colin Wright at Reality’s Last Stand asked me to write about it. And I found myself getting increasingly agitated as I did so—not just because of the continuing denial of the medical, mental health, media, educational and legal institutions that there’s a problem that needs addressing here, but because even social contagion theory doesn’t acknowledge what’s been happening for the last 15 years:

So much has changed concurrently with this demographic shift. ROGD occurs primarily in upper middle class, white families. These are the parents who in this era became likely to engage in “snowplow parenting,” in which parents try to protect kids from pain, rather than teaching them to navigate it. Thus, these kids may assume that “distress at puberty” is a problem that needs solving with medical intervention, rather than a completely normal reaction that needs accommodating with self-soothing techniques.

Meanwhile, kids as young as three years old are learning to “break the binary,” listening to books about kids with “girl brains” and boy bodies, and being told that there’s such a thing as gender identity and that everyone has one. What some of us call “gender identity ideology” has been taught to them. They’ve learned that gender is a feeling of maleness or femaleness inside them, rather than a system of roles, stereotypes and expectations imposed onto them because of their physical sex. In fact, they’ve looked at teaching tools like the “gender unicorn,” which doesn’t mention stereotypes at all.

I note that the medical narrative has changed drastically in that same time period, from “it’ll likely dissipate” to trans kids “know who they are,” and must be affirmed. “If they weren’t affirmed, we were told, these kids were at great risk for suicide. Over and over, parents were told they had to choose between a living trans child or a dead cis one.”

This is what I ultimately feel, and how I concluded the piece:

Contagion is accidental. This has been a concerted marketing effort from almost every liberal institution in America, coupled with a powerful censorship campaign. Together, these efforts prevent so many troubled kids from getting the help they need.

Please read the piece at RLS.