Woke Progressives Encourage Teenage Gender Change

Woke Progressives Encourage Teenage Gender Change

– By Howard Sierer –

To remain relevant, woke progressives must continually find new identity-group victims of oppression. Once identified, all who consider themselves woke must jump on the bandwagon, no matter how far-fetched the claim, or risk being ostracized and shamed by true believers in the woke media.

Progressive’s latest craze and the most disturbing so far: gender change encouragement and counseling for teenagers without parental consent.

What the medical profession calls pediatric gender dysphoria – the feeling that one’s gender identity is different from one’s biological sex – has been rising at a rate that can’t be explained by either improved diagnosis or by increasing social acceptance.

Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” explores why, in the last decade, gender dysphoria has been transformed from a vanishingly rare affliction applying almost exclusively to boys and men to an epidemic among teenage girls. Shrier describes how her interviews with teenage girls follow a pattern:

“A girl never expresses any discomfort with her biological sex until puberty, when anxiety and depression descend. The girl struggles to make friends. She immerses in social media and discovers transgender gurus. Or her school holds an assembly celebrating gender journeys or hosts a Gay-Straight Alliance club pushing gender ideology. At first, she tries out a new name and pronouns. Her school encourages her to keep all this a secret from her parents. Then, she wants more.”

Dr. Lisa Littman, physician and assistant professor at Brown University, published a peer-reviewed paper addressing 256 teens and young adults with gender dysphoria – average age of 16.4 years. In it, she reports that 62.5% of these teens had been diagnosed previously with mental health disorders and that 86.7% explored gender dysphoria websites. Many belonged to friend groups in which one or more friends also experienced gender dysphoria.

Littman suggests that many children are adopting these identities due to social media consumption and peer influences rather than a stable and deeply felt sense of dysphoria.

All this is reminiscent of the widespread anorexia and cutting crazes of years past. But this one has irreversible consequences.

Shrier’s book was favorably reviewed by the widely-respected Times of London newspaper and The Economist magazine. Littman’s paper was approved by her professional peers. Nonetheless and true-to-form, LGBT activists have attacked both authors, claiming they are bigots who oppose the LGBT movement in general.

Kowtowing to woke progressive activists, Pres. Biden signed an executive order on June 15^th affirming federal support for gender transition including support for underage children. He parrots the activist line: “Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.” His administration claims use of puberty blockers and sex-change hormones is “evidence based.”

This finding is completely at odds with the Dutch Protocol also used by national health authorities in Sweden, the UK, France, Finland, Australia, and New Zealand, all of whom have years more gender transition experience and who require lengthy psychological prescreening of children before prescribing puberty-blocking drugs.

What the Dutch experts knew then, and what researchers know now with even greater confidence, is that minors seeking transition tend to have extraordinarily high rates of mental-health problems, including anxiety, depression, attention-deficit and eating disorders, and autism.

What adults choose to do to their bodies is one thing. But when government and public schools advocate and encourage underage children to make irreversible changes to their bodies and do so explicitly without parental knowledge or consent, it becomes a stunning and to my mind criminal form of child abuse.

This abuse sadly is not uncommon. Teachers in public schools have encouraged children to socially transition without notifying their parents, and in some states such as California, judges consider failure to affirm a child’s gender identity as grounds for stripping a parent of custody rights.

Consider this: in every state in the union, including California, parental approval is required for a minor to receive a tattoo. Plastic surgery on minors requires parental consent. Most of us would be rightly outraged if school assemblies were held celebrating the benefits of plastic surgery or if teachers sponsored a tattoo club.

Yet LGBT activist teachers and administrators believe they are doing a great service when they advocate “gender-affirming” care to their students without informing parents. When girls, especially those with other psychological issues, hear this at school, it adds a layer of authority to seeing gender change as the answer to their problems.

A century ago, “enlightened” governments forcibly took children – Australian Aboriginals, U.S. Native Americans, Canadian Inuit and European Roma – from their parents to “civilize” them. Those actions have been thoroughly discredited. So why is government-sponsored gender transition not considered to be far worse?

There is an inherent contradiction in the woke LGBT movement that, on the one hand, says people should be accepted as they are but argues for medical intervention on children to change who they are.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat suggests liberals are afraid to speak out because of the woke media backlash that “quickly surrounds anyone who argues skeptically about the rise in transgender identification or suggests that hormonal and surgical treatments are being overused, whether that person is a journalist, an author, an academic researcher, even a gender-dysphoria clinician.”

I agree with Douthat when he makes this prediction:

“Within not too long a span of time, not only conservatives but most liberals will recognize that we have been running an experiment on trans-identifying youth without good or certain evidence, inspired by ideological motives rather than scientific rigor, in a way that future generations will regard as a grave medical-political scandal.”