By Wilfred Reilly
Thursday,
March 14, 2024
We need
to talk about “trans kids.” In all likelihood, we are currently witnessing one
of the biggest medical scandals in modern history, and a tidal wave of regrets
and lawsuits will soon follow in its wake.
Over
the past few years, several moss-backed and socially disagreeable conservatives
and normie libs — including this very writer — have bemusedly noted that very
high percentages of high-school and college students have begun to describe
themselves as “transgender” or otherwise “queer.” Back in 2018, when Smilodon
roamed the Earth and Donald John Trump roamed the White House, a significant
study reported on by USA Today found that fully
3 percent of sampled ninth and eleventh graders “identified as transgender or
gender non-conforming – meaning they don’t always self-identify as the sex they
were assigned at birth.”
Several
years later, I noted that the percentage of trans- or
“enby”-identifying high-school students had risen still higher, within an
overall LGBTQ youth cohort of roughly 20 percent. This amazingly large latter
figure has been specifically noted by several other scholars: My
fellow political scientist Ryan Burge, after analyzing college-student
data, recently concluded that no American religious population has a rate of
LGBT youth identification below 15 percent (Muslims) — with 16 percent of young
Protestants, 17 percent of young Catholics, a surprising 22 percent of
practicing young Mormons, and 35 percent of young Jews claiming to be gay,
transgender, or bisexual.
To
some extent, it is hard to take figures like this entirely seriously. Teenagers
are painfully other-oriented, and they lie a lot. When I was 17, I strutted
around simultaneously trying to look like a tough athlete and wearing
glow-in-the-dark plastic bracelets of “rave candy.” Today, many of the kids
claiming to be “so bi and into, you know, sissy threesomes” are in fact awkward virgins: The rate of regular sexual
activity for high-school seniors, never all that high, fell to 21 percent by
the end of the lockdown-focused Covid-19 era. Much can be forgiven about the
antics of the youth, as they age upward into normalcy and Brooks Brothers and
paying taxes.
However,
there is one big difference between being a raver — or a
hip-hopper or goth or metalhead or “hippie
friggin’ scumbag” — in high school, and deciding that you are
transgender or
a eunuch during the same formative years. Simply put, no adults ever
went stone-crazy enough to try medicalizing the first set of phases. No parents
or doctors told wild goth girls that they actually were vampire princesses, and
then agreed to spring for oral surgery to extend their canine teeth into fangs,
or for upper-end tattoo artists to turn their eyeballs black or lips
permanently blood-red.
In
contrast, the widely recommended “affirmation” path for children who say that they identify
as transgender is very specifically medical.
Serious-whatever-else-you-think-of-them national organizations like Planned
Parenthood now offer testosterone prescriptions and a range
of other gender-bending services to teenage clients. The
only apparent requirement for accessing this “care” is that a patient be 16 or
older, and have the approval of any parent. At one day past 18, no external
approval at all is needed to access gender services.
Many,
many young teens are taking advantage of these options. While it has become
something of an upper-middle-class cliché to say that the actual drugging or
physical mutilation of minors “almost never happens,” this is empirically not
true. While prepping a recent speech presented at the GENSPECT conference on
gender medicine, I consulted both my own research tools and some of the
few quality published articles that are on point to
determine the actual number of minors who recently received major gender
interventions — defined as testosterone or other hormone prescriptions, puberty
blockers, or full-on “top surgery” (i.e., a voluntary double mastectomy).
The
17-and-under totals for receipt of prescription puberty blockers were: 633 in
2017, 759 in 2018, 897 in 2019, 1,101 in 2020, and 1,390 in 2021 (4,780 total).
For anabolic-hormone prescriptions, the equivalent totals were 1,905 in 2017,
2,391 in 2018, 3,036 in 2019, 3,163 in 2020, and 4,231 in 2021 (14,726 total).
Top surgeries were frankly rarer, but still — for a wholly voluntary procedure
performed on minor children — strikingly common. Here, there were 238
procedures performed in 2019, 256 in 2020, and 281 in 2021 (776 total).
More
striking than the total numbers involved, to me, was their mappable rate of
increase. The summed year-over-year increase rate, during only my five-year
window of analysis, was 119.6 percent for the use of puberty blockers and 122.1
percent for hormone use. Conservatively applying the rate for the last year
that I have on record to the next two, we would expect prescriptions for
puberty-blocking drugs to keep rising to above 2,000 in 2023, and for hormone
prescriptions to over 7,000 in 2023, with hundreds more mastectomies for teen
girls across the same two years. Our 2017–23 totals would then indicate tens of
thousands of minors were given some combination of puberty blockers, human sex
hormones, and top surgeries. As noteworthy as these figures are, recall that
the significant majority of “gender affirming care” is received by patients who
are over 18, although often not by much.
The
next line of response — the motte, if you will — after all of this is pointed
out is that the drugs and surgeries of today do not at first seem to be doing
permanent harm. Scholars including UC-San Francisco’s Jack Turban have
argued, using what initially seems to be a reasonable enough methodology, that
rates of reported dissatisfaction with gender transition among young
patients are often on the order of 1–3 percent. There is a higher
rate of regret for treatments like “Brazilian butt lifts,” the data at first seem to indicate.
But,
not so fast: There’s an elephant in the room. A major problem here is that most
studies of attitudes toward medical procedures rely on self-reporting of
reactions from people who are still in basically friendly contact with their
doctors. That is very likely the huge majority of former patients, when it
comes to knee operations or cataract surgeries or anything major that a GP
might decide to do herself. However, there is every logical reason to believe
that few “detransitioners” who feel themselves to have been harmed or mutilated
would remain in frequent touch with a gender clinic.
Perhaps
unsurprisingly, other methods of rounding up the detransitioners — such as
simply searching for “detransitioner” on one’s computer — turn up rather
different results. The single Reddit forum r/detrans, which bills itself as a safe
discussion space for formerly transgender-identified people, had 51,000 unique
members when I looked it up near the end of 2023. The large majority of these
people are not simply gawkers and onlookers — feminists curious about a
cultural phenomenon, for example.
The
forum conducted a well-done poll of all users in 2022, and found that 44.1
percent of all participants who responded had detransitioned — moving
away from trans identification and ceasing the use of interventions like
opposite-sex hormones. Another 11.7 percent were people who still identified as
trans or non-binary, but were seriously considering a detransition. Combined,
these totals add up to — to continue with the simple and rather frightening
math — 28,458 people. That is a lot of people.
And,
that number is likely just a warning sign, a storm-crow. Discontent with a
surgery or other serious medical procedure can take years to manifest, and the
majority of r/detrans users are almost certainly not among the
tens of thousands of people who were mentioned earlier in this essay — they’re
members of a smaller cohort who transitioned earlier. Reading through the
forum, I got the same inkling that I did while preparing the data set for my
book Hate Crime Hoax, watching the Yasmin Seweid and
Jussie Smollet narratives collapse (while mainstream media denied that any hoax
problem existed): the feeling that a major and troubling trend is taking place,
and statistical game-play can only hide it for so long.
Currently,
we are physically altering tens of thousands of young kids, because they say
something that few if any previous societies would have taken seriously — that
they are not, or are not supposed to be, the sex they are. We are doing
this despite a massive amount of evidence that, left to
their own devices, most of these vulnerable young people would pass through
gender dysphoria and simply go on to be gay or Prince — unburdened by
the lingering effects of taking pure testosterone as a young woman,
much less of surgery.
There
are two very distinct paths forward at this point: We can look at forums like
r/detrans, and notice which way the wind is obviously beginning to blow — or we
can carry on stumbling forward, and soon reap the whirlwind.
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