Opinion
There may be more faddish creatures than teenage girls, but if there are, marketers are yet to find them.
Teenagers, as David Cole has written, are “tiny-brained, feebleminded followers who rarely think things through and have not yet grasped notions like “consequences.” Throw a little mental illness, or a few bottles of prescription “behavioral control” drugs, into that mix, and you don’t just get a monster, but a moronic and highly impressionable monster”.
Teenage girls, doubly so, given girls’ innate tendency to “agreeableness” — that is, conformity, restraint from speaking out, and a desperate desire to be liked as part of the group.
So, is it any wonder that the transgenderism fad has so disproportionately snared girls?
Much media attention has focussed on creepy, middle-aged male fetishists, and mediocre adolescent male chancers who’ve figured out that putting on a dress and some lippy is a magic key to not just the girls’ sports trophies, but their locker rooms as well (the majority of male transgenders remain sexually fixated on women). But the bigger story the media have mostly avoided is just what a disaster the transgender fad is for girls.
Female-to-male trannies used to be vanishingly rare. Not any more. Just ten years ago, girls referred to the infamous Tavistock gender clinic in the UK numbered in the dozens. In 2022, there were nearly 4,000 every year — double the year before.
If that sounds like a fad, that’s because it is. It’s notable, for instance, that outbreaks of girls identifying as “trans” occur in clusters: that is, one or two girls in a given social circle jump on the bandwagon, and the rest quickly join in. It’s like fidget spinners or the “ice bucket challenge”, but with mutilation and sterility.
(And if you think no teen girl would jump on a fad that results in lifelong health consequences, even death, I give you: anorexia, corsets, or the Regency-era “muslin disease”, a wave of pneumonia resulting from the fad for wearing dampened muslin dresses.)
Thankfully, of course, even teenage girls grow something resembling a brain eventually, and grow out of fads. Transgenderism is no different in that respect.
The researchers concluded, “Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development.”
In other words, most of the children in the study who were feeling gender dysphoric in their awkward teenage years had shaken that off and adjusted by early adulthood, and their dysphoria was associated with bad self-esteem and mental-health problems.
The only problem is that, by then, the dire health consequences are permanent.
This is fully at odds with the policy pushing its way through American schools and medical institutions: Kids who declare themselves transgender, no matter the age, need to be “affirmed,” an idea that sometimes leads to children taking hormone blockers or getting surgery to attempt gender transition.
For boys, as the tragic case of Jaz Jennings shows, the permanent effects of a childhood fad include infertility and a lifelong inability to achieve orgasm. Girls who have “transitioned” will not only be infertile, but have surgically removed their breasts. Bone density and growth problems are lifelong for both sexes.
It’s a waste of time trying to explain all this to teenagers.
Practitioners believe telling a 14-year-old about possible fertility consequences is like talking to a “blank wall.”
A child psychologist said it’s “out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them.”
In which case, isn’t it beholden on the adults to shield children from the worst consequences of their own faddish stupidity? Yet, the same nanny-staters who want to ban anyone born after 2000 from ever being allowed to buy cigarettes, are dangerously gung-ho to let children mutilate and sterilise themselves.
We’ve gotten to a place where anyone who doesn’t jump at the chance to “affirm” a child in his or her quest to change genders is a transphobe or worse.
When Gov. Ron DeSantis banned such medical interventions for Florida kids, headlines like Rolling Stone’s “Ron DeSantis Just Took Two Big Steps to Make Trans Lives Illegal” were common.
Reuters noted the law “escalates a Republican political strategy to pursue bills restricting transgender rights.”
New York Post
If “transgender rights” means the rights of creepy activists and greedy medicos to prey on impressionable children and drug and mutilate them into lifelong, crippled eunuch-hood, then you’re darn tootin’.
Anything less is a shameful abrogation of adult responsibility to protect young lives under our care from the consequences they are simply, biologically, unable to even grasp.