Transgender Is the New Black

Once it became trendy to become transgender more and more children wanted to try it out. We should have seen it coming. Being transgender is a belief so why would it not be possible to inculcate the belief in vulnerable children. Call it indoctrination; call it brainwashing. To solve the problem with medical treatment is an abomination.

Take a confused young person and offer him or her attention and recognition, even hero status in the struggle against bigotry, and he or she might decide to be transgender.  

Currently, the culture is caught up in the mania about the transgendered. Studies about how children are manipulated into accepting this belief are slim. We know that there is no biological basis for this belief, but we do not know about brain functioning. We have only recently discovered that people suffering from bodily dysmorphia— a man who is convinced that his left leg is longer than his right leg and who demands that it be amputated—do have a brain condition.

The evidence for psychological manipulation has not been established. Yet, one recalls, for the record, Ethan Watters’ book, Crazy Like Us. Watters does not address transgenderism, but he reports a number of mental health epidemics that have been produced by media attention. One day there was no anorexia in Hong Kong. The next day there was an epidemic. What changed? The media decided to raise awareness of the problem… and ended up producing more of it.

One suspects that something similar is happening with transgenderism. The Heat St. blog (via Maggie’s Farm) reports on the work of an Australian psychiatrist:

One of Australia’s top experts on gender has raised concerns that children and teens are overdiagnosed as transgender.

Adolescents are “trying out being transgender” to stand out or gain attention from their peers, psychiatrist Stephen Stathis told the Courier Mail last week. “One said to me, ‘Dr. Steve … I want to be transgender, it’s the new black,” he recalled.

Overdiagnosis is not the issue here. The issue is children who decide they want to be transgender because they gain certain sociocultural benefits. But the issue ought also to be children who decide or are brainwashed into thinking that they are really the opposite sex… because they are confused or traumatized or are suffering from an underlying psychological condition. Science has demonstrated that there is no biological basis for the belief that he is really she or she is really he. Why then are we offering “treatment” to these children?

The Heat St. blog continues:

In an interview last month, Stathis said that up to three-fourths of young patients who “present with gender variant interests and behaviors, or are gender diverse” will outgrow the feelings and don’t need treatment.

“You might get a six- or seven-year-old girl wanting to dress as a boy,” he said. “She may even say she wants to be a boy. When she hits puberty, she says, ‘No, I’m just a girl who likes to do boy things.”

Previous research has shown that upwards of 75% of children who declare themselves to be transgender change their minds. A large number of those who undergo treatment—if you want to call it that—for the condition end up regretting it.

In an article in the Brisbane Courier Mail Stathis explains the psychological underpinnings of some cases:

Psychiatrist Dr Stephen Stathis, who runs a gender clinic, said he had seen girls who had been sexually abused and wanted to identify as transgender.

The girls say, ‘If only I had been a male I wouldn’t have been abused’,’’ Dr Stathis said.

Become a male and you will never again be abused. Surely, there are other psychological formulas that produce this condition. It is good that Stathis offers us one.

Ought we not to be skeptical when children are convinced that they really belong to the opposite sex. When children or adults insist that they know for a fact that something is real when we know it is not, we consider them to be suffering from a psychiatric problem.

What about those children who fulfill the criteria for the diagnosis. Now they are subjected to irreversible hormone treatment and to surgical intervention. In other so-called civilized countries this has become standard and acceptable treatment for this psychiatric condition. 

Does anyone know the long term effects of these treatments, of deranging the body’s hormones and mutilating someone’s body?

Why are we afraid to call this child abuse?