Post-Modernism in action (out of the University and on the streets).
On Relativism.
On Safetyism.
The American University Madrassa System.
Woke Religion: A taxonomy.
What is a Woman?
Abigail Shirer.
What is Gender Dysphoria?
Dr. Littman: Adolescent girls and Peer Contagion.
Lupron: Pharma and the business of Gender Dysphoria.
Lupron: On Infertility.
Lupron: Chemical Castration turned pubertal “pause button”.
Hansel and Gretel
“St George in retirement” syndrome.
Victoria (Australia).
Mark Latham in NSW (Australia).
Dr. Toby Rogers and my thoughts on mass vaccination.
Detransitioning.
The story of Nathan Verhelst.
1. Introduction: “We don’t know yet.”
This is not a subject I particularly wanted to go deep into, but having watched What is a woman? yesterday (much more on that later), it brought up so many interconnected thoughts that I decided to tackle the subject and put this VERY long piece together.
It’s a very tough subject to get to understand, but if you are a parent of young kids and especially teenage girls, I encourage you to make the time.
So, let’s get going…
I bumped into an acquaintance about two months ago that I hadn’t seen in a while. I asked him where he had been, and he told he that they’d just had their first child 6 weeks earlier. I congratulated him and asked him the next obvious question:
Me: “What have you got, a boy or a girl?”
Him: “We don’t know yet.”
Realising that, after reading about it for many years, I had finally come in direct contact with trans-ideology in Sydney, Australia in April 2022, I looked at him, a little bit dazed from the shock but fully aware what had just happened and said:
Me: “Don’t do that.”
Him: “Ok, it’s a boy.”
It’s here. It’s been here for a while, I think.
Some of you probably have no idea what the “it” is and some of you understand perfectly and many of you I think sort of understand it but would struggle to explain it if you had to (trust me, I know the feeling).
What he meant was, “we won’t know what we have until our child chooses their gender.”
If you are new to this, you might want to sit down and take a moment to process this. This is going to be a long piece, and if you are new to this material, you will not be the same person at the end of this piece as you will have woken up from a deep sleep and there is no going back to sleep after that…I know the feeling!
When I first watched The Matrix, I loved it, but I now realise that all those years that I loved the movie, I was actually asleep, I wasn’t “red-pilled” on anything at all. Now I know what it means to wake up, its unpleasant, but it turns out I need to know what is true (or likely to be true), that’s just me. This is my favourite scene from The Matrix, I absolutely understand what Cypher (the guy about to eat the steak) is saying and feeling.
I don’t know when I started to pay attention to all of this, if I had to pick a starting point it was probably 5 years ago after I listened to Jordan Peterson for the very first time on Sam Harris’s podcast.
Harris would say that it was the worst podcast he ever did, while I thought it was one of the best podcasts I had ever listened to because for two hours the debated what “true” meant. I used to love Harris, he was peak rationalism and the poster child of modern atheism, I cannot stand the man anymore, he probably hasn’t changed much at all, most of the change has been in me. As for Peterson, I’ve spent a lot of time reading and listening to him and basically waking up to worlds of subjects and perspectives I was entirely ignorant of.
Peterson would often talk about Marxism, Neo-Marxism and Post-Modernism and I thought I knew a bit about the first and absolutely nothing about the second two. Post-Modernism then connected me with the likes of Gad Saad, who here in this clip talks a bit about Post-Modernism and his 2002 encounter with the girlfriend of one of his students.
2002, 20 years ago (!), is telling as to how long this solvent been brewing deep within the bowels of American universities and has broken through to now flood Western culture.
The journey also connected me with James Lindsay, who for me is the world expert on this subject matter and the one who has done the most to explaining the “coding” and the mechanics of these interwoven ideas and ideologies to an ignorant public. His website is a treasure trove of material that is accessible by the curious layman.
Anyway, I digress just a bit, but if you want to understand the back story to “We don’t know yet” you need to do some work, you need to understand whether the steak is real or fake.
If you would prefer to keep believing that the steak is real…do not read on.
Who am I writing this for? If I had to pick one reader and one reader only, it would be a curious parent of a young child. You cannot fight that which you don’t see, you cannot defend your child from that which you do not understand.
2. Post-Modernism in action (out of the University and on the streets)
One of the points that stood out for me was when Matt Walsh, the presenter and interviewer, was talking to people on the street asking them what they thought if he told them that “he was a woman”, all the responses were different versions of the same answer:
“I don’t care…if it’s true to you…if it’s your truth.”
“If that’s your reality.”
“I don’t care. Whatever makes you happy.”
This would be a similar response today if you did the same thing in many Australian cities, certainly all Australian universities. Remember, America is an exporter of culture and we Aussies are big importers of that culture, in many ways we are America-Lite.
These answers from the public are the product of at least two estuaries coming together:
Relativism: where everything is relative, and nothing is true and grounded (that’s a post-modern estuary).
Safetyism as it plays out by prioritising Feelings over Facts: Western culture for decades has placed the safeguarding and preservation of feelings above the primacy and importance of facts. This, by the way, is another American export.
3. On Relativism
Relativism has well and truly gone mainstream. It’s a foundational pillar of Post-Modernism.
A fundamental change in human thought took place in the 1960s. This change is associated with several French Theorists who, while not quite household names, float at the edges of the popular imagination, among them Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. Taking a radically new conception of the world and our relationship to it, it revolutionized social philosophy and perhaps social everything. Over the decades, it has dramatically altered not only what and how we think but also how we think about thinking. Esoteric, academic, and seemingly removed from the realities of daily existence, this revolution has nevertheless had profound implications for how we interact with the world and with one another. At its heart is a radical worldview that came to be known as “postmodernism.”
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What, though, is postmodernism? The online Encyclopedia Britannica defines postmodernism as:
a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.
Walter Truett Anderson, writing in 1996, describes the four pillars of postmodernism:
1. The social construction of the concept of the self: Identity is constructed by many cultural forces and is not given to a person by tradition;
2. Relativism of moral and ethical discourse: Morality is not found but made. That is, morality is not based on cultural or religious tradition, nor is it the mandate of Heaven, but is constructed by dialogue and choice. This is relativism, not in the sense of being nonjudgmental, but in the sense of believing that all forms of morality are socially constructed cultural worldviews;
3. Deconstruction in art and culture: The focus is on endless playful improvisation and variations on themes and a mixing of “high” and “low” culture; and
4. Globalization: People see borders of all kinds as social constructions that can be crossed and reconstructed and are inclined to take their tribal norms less seriously.
I could go on and on, but I just want you to understand that what all these normal people are saying on the streets is “Relativism” in action, in the wild (not in a social studies university department) and that Relativism is a pillar of Post-Modernism, it’s an egg laid by a bigger, post-modernist chicken.
Twenge’s analyses suggest that there are two major generational changes that may be driving the rise of safetyism on campus since 2013. The first is that kids now grow up much more slowly. Activities that are commonly thought to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood are happening later—for example, having a job, driving a car, drinking alcohol, going out on a date, and having sex. Members of iGen wait longer to do these things— and then do less of them—than did members of previous generations. Instead of engaging in these activities (which usually involve interacting with other people face-to-face), teens today are spending much more time alone, interacting with screens. Of special importance, the combination of helicopter parenting, fears for children’s safety, and the allure of screens means that members of iGen spend much less time than previous generations did going out with friends while unsupervised by an adult.
The bottom line is that when members of iGen arrived on campus, beginning in the fall of 2013, they had accumulated less unsupervised time and fewer offline life experiences than had any previous generation. As Twenge puts it, “18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.” Most of these trends are showing up across social classes, races, and ethnicities. Members of iGen, therefore, may not (on average) be as ready for college as were eighteen-year-olds of previous generations. This might explain why college students are suddenly asking for more protection and adult intervention in their affairs and interpersonal conflicts.
The second major generational change is a rapid rise in rates of anxiety and depression. We created three graphs below using the same data that Twenge reports in iGen. The graphs are straightforward and tell a shocking story.
Studies of mental illness have long shown that girls have higher rates of depression and anxiety than boys do.12 The differences are small or nonexistent before puberty, but they increase at the start of puberty. The gap between adolescent girls and boys was fairly steady in the early 2000s, but beginning around 2011, it widened as the rate for girls grew rapidly. By 2016, as you can see in Figure 7.1, roughly one out of every five girls reported symptoms that met the criteria for having experienced a major depressive episode in the previous year. The rate for boys went up, too, but more slowly (from 4.5% in 2011 to 6.4% in 2016).
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In Sum
The national rise in adolescent anxiety and depression that began around 2011 is our second explanatory thread.
The generation born between 1995 and 2012, called iGen (or sometimes Gen Z), is very different from the Millennials, the generation that preceded it. According to Jean Twenge, an expert in the study of generational differences, one difference is that iGen is growing up more slowly. On average, eighteen-year-olds today have spent less time unsupervised and have hit fewer developmental milestones on the path to autonomy (such as getting a job or a driver’s license), compared with eighteen-year-olds in previous generations.
A second difference is that iGen has far higher rates of anxiety and depression. The increases for girls and young women are generally much larger than for boys and young men. The increases do not just reflect changing definitions or standards; they show up in rising hospital admission rates of self-harm and in rising suicide rates. The suicide rate of adolescent boys is still higher than that of girls, but the suicide rate of adolescent girls has doubled since 2007.
According to Twenge, the primary cause of the increase in mental illness is frequent use of smartphones and other electronic devices. Less than two hours a day seems to have no deleterious effects, but adolescents who spend several hours a day interacting with screens, particularly if they start in their early teen years or younger, have worse mental health outcomes than do adolescents who use these devices less and who spend more time in face-to-face social interaction.
Girls may be suffering more than boys because they are more adversely affected by social comparisons (especially based on digitally enhanced beauty), by signals that they are being left out, and by relational aggression, all of which became easier to enact and harder to escape when adolescents acquired smartphones and social media.
iGen’s arrival at college coincides exactly with the arrival and intensification of the culture of safetyism from 2013 to 2017. Members of iGen may be especially attracted to the overprotection offered by the culture of safetyism on many campuses because of students’ higher levels of anxiety and depression. Both depression and anxiety cause changes in cognition, including a tendency to see the world as more dangerous and hostile than it really is.
This theme of teenage girls will pop up later, it’s not only a teenage girl problem but it’s biased that way for further.
5. The American University Madrassa System
You might be wondering, where does all this come from, can we blame those French thinkers? Is Foucault to blame? No, not really.
It’s the American University that has whipped up this dish, and it all really started to take shape and form in the early nineties, so about 40 years ago. The second generation “thinkers” then were building on Neo-Marxist and Post-Modern ideas sourced from the 60s and 70s, but those ideas would not have had the influence they have today without a second and third generation of thinkers and professors in American Universities that have ended up influencing a generation that has then gone out into the world and redesigned that world along those ideas. We are all paying the price today.
The right way to think about the American University as a generator and propagator of these ideas is the way that you already think about The Madras as a potentially indoctrinating breeding ground for Islamic Extremism.
There is no easy way to say this but Yale, Stanford Harvard and a long list of other “prestigious” universities have become (or at the most generous “include”) Madrassas of dangerous indoctrination pumping out brainwashed graduates that are disconnected from what is true and disconnected from reality…they have “their” reality, “their” truth.
Remember, what comes out of the American Madrassa gets exported to the rest of the world, with Australia (America-Lite) being a primary importer.
The first major American story that that rang the warning bell about what was happening in American Madrassa’s was the Evergreen story of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying.
The link above takes you to a wonderful pdf that has a taxonomy (a scheme of classification) for all the “woke religions”, the spirits as I like to think of them, that are swirling the planet today. What is wonderful about this table is how it lays out the same underlying “chassis” and scaffolding for all these different spirits, from climate change to racism etc. Here is the Trans-Ideology framework:
1. Original Sin: What happened in the past to make things so terrible today
● Sex or gender spectrum reduced to just two sexes and genders
2. Guilty Devils: The people who made things so terrible
● People who view sex as biologically determined
● Opponents of legal requirements to use trans pronouns
● TERFs
● Opponents of allowing trans women athletes to compete with biological women athletes
3. Myths: Creation story
● Trans women or trans men are identical to biological women or biological men
● Violence against trans people is on the rise, disproportionate, and due to being trans
4. Sacred Victims: People who continue to be harmed by original sin
● Trans people
● Nonbinary people
5. The Elect: Those chosen to make things right
● Trans activists
● GLAAD
● HRC
● ACLU
6. Supernatural Beliefs: Beliefs beyond scientific understanding or known laws of nature
● Puberty blockers and surgery can change your biological sex
● A person can immediately change their sex simply by identifying as the opposite sex, or as non-binary
7. Taboo Facts: Things forbidden to say
● Social acceptance of trans people is increasing
● Trans kids and kids with gender dysphoria often benefit from parental involvement
● Trans activism can hurt trans and gender-dysphoric children
● Many children who think they’re trans have gender dysphoria
● Many de-transitioners say they wish there had been more obstacles to changing their sex
● Gender dysphoria is sometimes correlated with mental health problems
● There is little evidence that transitioning reduces the risk of suicide
8. Taboo Speech: Words that trigger anger among the elect
● Sex heavily influences gender
● Gender dysphoria is real
● “De-transitioners”
9. Purifying Rituals: Acts perceived to make people innocent of guilt and responsibility
● Announcing one’s pronouns
● Educating people about trans
10. Purifying Speech: Words people use to be perceived as virtuous
● “Cis-”
● “Speech is violence”
● “Silence is violence”
● “Trans women are women”
7. What is a Woman?
I watched What Is A Woman? yesterday, that is the first and best place to start, it was useful even for someone who’s paid quite a bit of attention to this subject, but if you are new to the subject matter, it’s a perfect crash course.
You need to subscribe to The Daily Wire to watch this documentary, but trust me it’s worth doing, even if only for 1 month and then cancel. There is no better education on the subject than this documentary at the moment.
If you did nothing but listen to Scott Newgent, who is featured in the doco, you will get your monies worth.
Scott was booted off Twitter but seems to be back on now, you can find him here.
Issues of gender dysphoria confusion that activists use to encourage sex-change operations on children not old enough to vote or drink.
Transgender (biologically male) athletes’ destruction of girls’ sports and the denial of opportunities for elite female athletes — particularly the case of NCAA women’s swimming champion Lia Thomas.
The Pronoun Police and the Left’s attempts to use character assassination and censorship to advance a radical agenda.
Absurd claims about “birthing persons” and that “having a penis doesn’t make one male” — along with other lies and doublespeak used to mainstream radical gender theory.
The disturbing case of male-registered sex offender Darren Merager, who claims to be female and who is accused of terrorizing under-aged girls by walking around the women’s locker room in a Los Angeles spa with an erect penis.
The three great casualties of this radical movement:
Women, whose identities are being appropriated and erased by activists who shun science and biology.
Children, who are, at best, being indoctrinated to believe lies about basic facts and, at worst, guided into harmful, irreversible medical “transition” procedures.
I got my first deep dive into trans-ideology when I listened to Peterson interview Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage.
Peterson admitted in the beginning of the interview that he was afraid of doing the podcast as he was worried that YouTube might cancel his account (and its 5m+ subscribers). Thankfully he did the podcast and his channel is still with us. It is a stunning interview and insight into how far this dangerous trans-ideology has infected the government-medical-pharma establishments. Some comments to the podcast:
When i was growing up in the 90's it was all the rage to diagnose children with ADD. Then well-meaning parents would immediately dose them with large quantities of prescription ritalin or adderrall. I was one of those children who got used to a strong stimulant 7 days a week with breakfast from age 7 onward. Let's just say things didn't go well for me later on in life. Now we're handing out hormones and irreversible surgery like halloween candy. What could go wrong?
I was a tomboy, wanted to be cool like the boys.. if this was happening at that time I would have been so confused. I am a woman, when I went through puberty, I realized that I am a woman that likes boxing and sports and feminine but not the strict feminine stereotype. I am married to a man and have children, and I feel whole. I am so happy that this was not happening when I was a child.
My sister, who had depression and anxiety, also blamed gender for her personal problems. First, she said she was gay, then she started dressing more masculine and asking for teachers to refer to her with male pronouns. She was also very active in following troubled trans youths and young adults on social media, taking in all of the community’s struggles and internalizing them as her own.
My son had gender dysphoria for EIGHT years. He is 11 now and finally comfortable being his biological gender. Jordan, your body of work was majorly instrumental in helping me understand his issues, seeing the truth in it, and helping him through it. I'd love to one day tell you our story!
This is a section from the podcast where Shrier is talking about Gender Dysphoria and how it has changed from basically being a diagnosis in very young boys (for all of its history) to very recently becoming a diagnosis mainly in teenage girls.
Well, I actually asked a bunch of you know, I interviewed I conducted nearly 200 interviews for the book and I actually asked a lot of scientists once I had some numbers, what do you call this? What is it when we have 100 year diagnostic history of gender dysphoria and it always afflicted boys and men. OK, and now for the very first time in the last decade, there has been a giant surge in a different population claiming to be gender dysphoria. It has shifted from from onset in young boys and to teenage girls with no childhood history. And it's shifted from men to women. So I asked them, when you have a demographic jump and all of a sudden they are as these teenage girls now the leading demographic.
So these are girls who, as a population, experienced virtually no gender dysphoria throughout history. Suddenly being the leading demographic. I would ask them, what do you call that? Is there a scientific term for this? And they would almost all say, yes, an epidemic.
Said another way, it is a psychological contagion and teenage girls especially are prone to that phenomenon.
JP: You talk about the former about the occurrences at the. Mental Health Institute in ACAM in Toronto.
AS: Yes, that's right, I mean, you had, you know, Ken Zucker truly a giant in the field of gender dysphoria who actually oversaw the authoring of the definition of gender dysphoria. He was fired.
JP: Right, let's talk about Ken Zucker for a moment or two. So as you said, he occupied a very a prestigious position in the world of transgender treatment and I think was universally regarded as the most outstanding and most objective scientist working in this field. I've spoken to him about it on some occasions, not publicly ever. And he struck me as a dedicated clinician and researcher and he advocates, advocated for and still advocates for, as far as I know, wait and see treatment method based on the presupposition that most children with gender dysphoria who evince an interest in transforming their body to that of the other sex, should be encouraged to wait, because if a waiting technique, it's not a technique even, I suppose. If waiting is, with sufficient patience, most of the children who manifest these concerns desist, I think it's 70 to 80 percent of them, a certain percentage fairly high, come to the conclusion that they're gay. And it's perhaps the case that that's driving some of their early gender dysphoria, confusion about their identity. And Zucker was fired from CAMH and also pilloried in a variety of newspapers and other publications as a consequence of what was essentially his mainstream stance.
Now, I believe and I haven't followed this up recently, but I believe that he was engaged in a number of court battles with the publications that had gone after him. And I believe that he won his legal cases.
AS: He did. They had to apologize and then they settled with him. I mean, what they really wronged him. I mean, that's what happens when professionals speak out on this issue. And of course, when I say speak out, all they're expressing is concern that there is an overdiagnosis here. You're seeing young teenage girls who do not seem to have typical gender dysphoria, nonetheless, be immediately fast tracked towards transition.
Here is Zucker supporting Shrier’s work;
“In Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier provides a thought-provoking examination of a new clinical phenomenon mainly affecting adolescent females—what some have termed rapid-onset gender dysphoria—that has, at lightning speed, swept across North America and parts of Western Europe and Scandinavia. In so doing, Shrier does not shy away from the politics that pervade the field of gender dysphoria. It is a book that will be of great interest to parents, the general public, and mental health clinicians.” - KENNETH J. ZUCKER, PH.D., adolescent and child psychologist and chair of the DSM-5 Work Group on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders
In a nutshell, it used to be young boys, who mostly grew out of the confusion (no chemicals, no surgery) and those that didn’t were discovered mostly that they were gay, which left you with a very small population (stats on this later) that were genuine, long term, gender dysphoric and candidates for intervention. But today, in the space of a decade or so, the “phenomenon” has flipped to mainly teenage girls who are being fast-tracked into chemical intervention (chemical castration, more on this later and radical surgery).
I am reminded by Jung’s truism: We don’t have ideas, ideas have us.
9. What is Gender Dysphoria?
From Shrier and Irreversible Damage;
Gender dysphoria—formerly known as “gender identity disorder”—is characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex. It typically begins in early childhood—ages two to four—though it may grow more severe in adolescence. But in most cases—nearly 70 percent—childhood gender dysphoria resolves. Historically, it afflicted a tiny sliver of the population (roughly .01 percent) and almost exclusively boys. Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all.
In the last decade that has changed, and dramatically. The Western world has seen a sudden surge of adolescents claiming to have gender dysphoria and self-identifying as “transgender.” For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those so identifying—they constitute the majority.
Why? What happened? How did an age group that had always been the minority of those afflicted (adolescents) come to form the majority? Perhaps more significantly—why did the sex ratio flip: from overwhelmingly boys, to majority adolescent girls?
Note: 0.01 percent is 1 in 10,000. This is actually very optimistic, as Dr. Miriam Grossman, one of the few sane people in What is a woman? says that the incidence is between 1 in 30,000 to 1 in 110,000.
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But the phenomenon sweeping teenage girls is different. It originates not in traditional gender dysphoria but in videos found on the internet. It represents mimicry inspired by internet gurus, a pledge taken with girlfriends—hands and breath held, eyes squeezed shut. For these girls, trans identification offers freedom from anxiety’s relentless pursuit; it satisfies the deepest need for acceptance, the thrill of transgression, the seductive lilt of belonging.
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Some small proportion of the population will always be transgender. But perhaps the current craze will not always lure troubled young girls with no history of gender dysphoria, enlisting them in a lifetime of hormone dependency and disfiguring surgeries. If this is a social contagion, society—perhaps—can arrest it.
No adolescent should pay this high a price for having been, briefly, a follower.
I happen to have met a man who transitioned to a woman.
Around 2015 I had some business dealings with the owner of a business, Daniel. It was a brief interaction, and we didn’t end up working together. A few years later I heard that he had transitioned to Savannah. I have also had the pleasure of meeting his wife, Julie. I no doubt that Daniel was the 1 in tens of thousands and that medical intervention was a blessing and possibly a necessity for him.
I cannot begin to imagine the torment of the condition, feeling trapped in someone else’s body, the suicidal ideation that would come with it, the terror of being found out, the social prejudice if it became public. The issue is not whether 1 in 30,000 is the real deal, we know it is, the question is what are all the others? Where have they come from and how are we manufacturing gender dysphoria on scale?
Anyone looking at the subject matter honestly can conclude that the diagnosis has been expended and weaponised beyond any reasonable cost/benefit calculation and that the “standard of care” has been changed without any sound medical basis or long term studies (sound familiar?).
10. Dr. Littman: Adolescent girls and Peer Contagion
From Irreversible Damage:
Dr. Littman is often accused by her attackers of being “right-wing” or assumed to be a religious Christian. Both characterizations are wrong to the point of being absurd: Dr. Littman has never voted Republican. For years, she and her husband Michael were members of a progressive Humanistic Jewish Congregation. But her truest religion, the one in which she has perfect faith—is Family.
“Was it fun raising kids?” I ask her.
“Oh my God, yes. It was everything,” she says.
The thread of family alienation that ran through the transgender sites and the parent reports troubled Dr. Littman and spurred her interest in the topic. Even after all the hate she has received, the attacks on her reputation, the loss of a job she loved, it’s this worry over families splitting apart that sustains her research interest in this topic. “To see kids turning on their parents… I found that very heartbreaking,” she said. “It’s kind of my worst nightmare.”
Psychologists who study peer influence ask what it is about teenage girls that makes them so susceptible to peer contagion and so good at spreading it. Many believe it has something to do with the way girls tend to socialize. “When we listen to girls versus boys talk to each other, girls are much more likely to reply with statements that are validating and supportive than questioning,” Amanda Rose, professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, told me. “they’re willing to suspend reality to get into their friends’ worlds more. For this reason, adolescent girls are more likely to take on, for instance, the depression their friends are going through and become depressed themselves.”
This female tendency to meet our friends where they are and share in their pain can be a productive and valuable social skill. Co-rumination (excessive discussion of a hardship) “does make the relationship between girls stronger,” Professor Rose told me.
But it also leads friends to take on each other’s ailments. Teenage girls spread psychic illness because of features natural to their modes of friendship: co-rumination; excessive reassurance seeking; and negative feedback seeking, in which someone maintains a feeling of control by angling for confirmation of her low self-concept from others. It isn’t hard to see why the 24/7 forum of social media intensifies and increases the incidence of each. Dr. Littman developed a survey to explore her hunch that gender dysphoria might be one more peer contagion to have hit adolescent girls.
According to the DSM-5, gender dysphoria in children is a condition defined by the presence of at least six of the following symptoms:
1. A strong desire to be of the other gender or an insistence that one is the other gender
2. A strong preference for cross-dressing or simulating [other gender] attire
3. A strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasy play
4. A strong preference for the toys, games, or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender
5. A strong preference for playmates of the other gender
6. A strong rejection of toys, games and activities typically associated with birth sex
7. A strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy
8. A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics that match one’s experienced gender
These are not the sorts of things a small child can easily conceal from parents; five are readily observable behaviors and preferences.
Dr. Littman created a ninety-question survey consisting of multiple choice Likert-type (scale-of-agreement based) and open-ended questions. Data were collected anonymously from 256 parents whose kids had not met the criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood, but had suddenly identified as transgender in adolescence. Among Dr. Littman’s findings (in her own words, lightly edited):
Over 80 percent of the adolescents were natal females, with a mean age of 16.4 years.
Most were living at home with parents at the time of their transgender announcement.
The vast majority had had zero indicators of childhood gender dysphoria (in addition to universally failing to meet the six-criteria requirement for child-onset gender dysphoria).
Almost a third of the adolescents did not seem at all gender dysphoric, according to parents, prior to the adolescents’ announcement of being trans.
A majority had had one or more psychiatric diagnosis and almost half were engaging in self-harm prior to the onset of the gender dysphoria.
Forty-one percent had expressed a non-heterosexual sexual orientation before identifying as transgender.
Nearly half (47.4 percent) had been formally assessed as academically gifted.
Nearly 70 percent of the teenagers belonged to a peer group in which at least one friend had also come out as transgender. In some groups, the majority of the friends had done so.
Over 65 percent of teens had increased their social media use and time spent online immediately prior to their announcement of transgender identity.
Among parents who knew their children’s social status, over 60 percent said the announcement brought a popularity boost.
Over 90 percent of the parents surveyed were white.
More than 70 percent of the parents had earned bachelor’s or graduate degrees.
Over 85 percent of parents reported supporting the right of gay couples to marry.
Over 88 percent of parents surveyed reported being supportive of transgender rights.
Nearly 64 percent of parents had been called “transphobic” or “bigoted” by their children for such reasons as: disagreeing with the child about the child’s self-assessment of being transgender, recommending that the child take more time to figure out if the child’s feelings of gender dysphoria persisted, calling their child by the wrong pronouns, telling their child that hormones or surgeries were unlikely to help, calling their child by his or her birth name, or recommending that the child work on other underlying mental health issues before undergoing medical transition.
Fewer than 13 percent of the parents believed that their adolescents’ mental health had improved after transgender identification. Over 47 percent reported that mental health had worsened.
Dr. Littman never suggested that gender dysphoria doesn’t exist or that these girls didn’t have it. What she hypothesized was that these adolescents’ gender dysphoria had an atypical etiology, that is, a set of causes that differed from the classic diagnosis. Unlike traditional gender dysphoria, this one seemed encouraged and intensified by friends and social media.
But what part of this, exactly, was contagious? Dr. Littman hypothesized three things (again, I have lightly edited her words):
the belief that non-specific symptoms should be perceived as gender dysphoria and that their presence is proof of being transgender
the belief that the only path to happiness is transition
the belief that anyone who disagrees with the self-assessment of being transgender or opposes the plan for transition is transphobic, abusive, and should be cut off
She theorized that the drive to transition might represent a “maladaptive coping mechanism” for dealing with legitimate stressors and strong emotions. She considered the possibility that this atypical strain of gender dysphoria might itself constitute a form of intentional self-harm. She stated expressly that her analysis did not imply that no adolescents would benefit from transition. Instead, she concluded merely that “not all [adolescents] presenting at these vulnerable ages are correct in their self-assessment of the cause of their symptoms.”
Never before had gender dysphoria sufferers “come out” as trans based on the encouragement of friends or following self-saturation in social media. Never before had identification as “transgender” preceded the experience of gender dysphoria itself.
Two weeks after Dr. Littman’s study was published, in response to activist outcry, PLoS One announced it would conduct a post-publication review of her paper and that a “correction” would be forthcoming. Dr. Littman was subjected to a battery of revision. “A lot of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream happened along the way,” she told me. “It was pretty stressful.” In March 2019, seven months after the initial publication, PLoS One issued Littman’s “correction.”
None of her results had changed.
To be continued…
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I listened to the WSJ author on JRE when her book came out. I have two nieces who confided in their older sister that they did not know what gender they are : ( One cried when trying on bras with her older sister. (Not that bras are super fun to buy) I cannot imagine growing up in such a psychologically manipulative time. It is doing such harm to these kids. I listen to Bret often and am a fan. Thank you for posting the riot videos - I can’t imagine being subjected to that. Our next generations are going to cause massive issues. Oh yeah… they have already. Your article was fantastic. I’ve seen portrayals of this they/them situation on shows and it’s just strange to me. But I’m a Gen Xer. I walked in to a hospital locker room recently and there was a man washing his hands. I literally jumped and said am I in the right place? “Yep, hi I’m Jordan!” I was seriously thinking I got lost some how. Strange times.
You’ve undertaken a monumental task and a critically important one for humanity’s future survival. I don’t think I’m overstating things.
While I haven’t personally experienced this in my life, I have a brood of young grandchildren and my concern grows daily for what they will likely be exposed to. I’m hoarding all the facts I can now in case this phenomena rears it’s ugly head in their lives. Looking forward to the 2nd half. Thank you!
I listened to the WSJ author on JRE when her book came out. I have two nieces who confided in their older sister that they did not know what gender they are : ( One cried when trying on bras with her older sister. (Not that bras are super fun to buy) I cannot imagine growing up in such a psychologically manipulative time. It is doing such harm to these kids. I listen to Bret often and am a fan. Thank you for posting the riot videos - I can’t imagine being subjected to that. Our next generations are going to cause massive issues. Oh yeah… they have already. Your article was fantastic. I’ve seen portrayals of this they/them situation on shows and it’s just strange to me. But I’m a Gen Xer. I walked in to a hospital locker room recently and there was a man washing his hands. I literally jumped and said am I in the right place? “Yep, hi I’m Jordan!” I was seriously thinking I got lost some how. Strange times.
You’ve undertaken a monumental task and a critically important one for humanity’s future survival. I don’t think I’m overstating things.
While I haven’t personally experienced this in my life, I have a brood of young grandchildren and my concern grows daily for what they will likely be exposed to. I’m hoarding all the facts I can now in case this phenomena rears it’s ugly head in their lives. Looking forward to the 2nd half. Thank you!