Special to WorldTribune, August 24, 2022
Commentary by Mike Scruggs
There is a social contagion of insane evil sweeping the United States, Canada, and much of the Western world, and it is inflicting irreversible harm on thousands of teenage girls and devastating their families.
In 2007, there was only one pediatric gender clinic in America. Today there are over 300. Clinical gender dysphoria (confusion) is real, but in the past it was largely confined to young boys beginning at ages two to four. This occurred in only one in ten thousand young boys and resolved itself without clinical treatment in over 70 percent of cases.
Today, gender dysphoria appears almost exclusively among teenage girls, a full two percent of teenage girls nationwide, most typically those having social adjustment problems common among teenagers. According to science and social journalist and author, Abigail Shrier, it typically occurs among groups of friends in the same school classrooms. The prevalence of this social contagion may reach 15 to 20 percent or higher in some of the most vulnerable social and cultural school settings.
Social media platforms are significant channels of contagion, where trans activists, often not trans themselves, push the idea that starting a course of testosterone will solve their problems. Dr. Lisa Littman of Brown University has termed the recent spike in transgender identification “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” an indication of mass social delusion.
What may be most important is that our increasingly woke culture now celebrates transgender change and ideology. It most often occurs in middle class families who consider themselves politically progressive and tolerant. However, when actually confronted with a daughter’s transgender announcement, the parents are often bewildered and emotionally devastated by it. It is usually accompanied by political radicalism in the teenage girls. They often become involved in Black Lives Matter or Antifa. This culture pushes them to pharmacological and surgical treatments that they later regret, many of them resulting in irreversible disfiguring surgeries and irreversible infertility. Attempted and actual suicide is especially common among these girls. Thousands have changed their minds and are desperately seeking to reverse the consequences of foolish decisions made in a sick culture of gender ideology gone mad.
Abigail Shrier is the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, published in December 2020. She has an AB from Columbia, a B.Ph. from Oxford University in England, and a JD from Yale Law School. She has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Federalist, and the New York Post. Several of her lectures and interviews can be found on YouTube. I strongly recommend the YouTube video of her presentation at Hillsdale College on May 12, 2021: “Science, the Transgender Phenomenon, and the Young:” and an interview by Jordan B. Peterson on July 23, 2022, “Breaking Down the Transgender Epidemic.”
Besides being extraordinarily bright and an extremely thorough researcher, Abigail Shrier is a kind and compassionate person. But she is outraged by the cruel harm to young girls being done by widespread and powerful transgender ideology. The gods of the woke media, educational, and compliant megacorporate political culture are striking back at her with the usual cancel-culture defamations and harassment. But her courage persists.
The driving force behind this socially destructive phenomenon is not so much the unfortunate young girls, but leftist political activists and fearful compliant media, educational, and medical professions. The morally defective but politically and socially “correct” trend is unchallenged gender affirmation. The diagnosis of a “true gender” separate from genetically endowed chromosomal and physiological gender, is either left to the young and immature sufferer, of whom more than 70 percent may change their mind in a few years; or imposed upon them by suggestion and coaching by indoctrinated zealots or thoughtless or intimidated conformers to social fashion. The thoughtless and intimidated category includes many healthcare and medical institutions, conforming to political and economic pressure rather than research and reason. Follow the money!
In California and the state of Washington, gender-changing testosterone treatments by hospitals, clinics, and Planned Parenthood are available without even a note from the parents. In Oregon, a 15-year-old can undergo elective “top surgery”—double mastectomy—without parental permission. The trans-coach in these cases is often one or more of their school-teachers, trained by transgender activists. The next step is to get them to a doctor or therapist who practices “gender affirmative care.” Shrier remarked in her Hilldale College lecture in 2021 that parents who have their children in such “gender-affirming” schools should “Get your kid out of that school!” Such schools also tend to give praise and status for announcing discovered genders.
Puberty blocking pharmacology is usually the next step, although natural puberty is generally what helps children outgrow gender confusion. The FDA, by the way, has never approved any drug to block puberty. Unless stopped quickly, blocking puberty followed by cross-sex hormones result in infertility and weakened bone density. Nor is there any evidence that these measures improve mental health. Gender transition is not safe, without serious downsides, nor easily reversible.
In the United Kingdom, the number of young girls seeking treatment for gender dysphoria increased by 4,400 percent in the last ten years ending in 2020 . Fortunately, the UK High Court of Justice has driven a stake into much of the nonsense. In the case of Keira Bell, the Court was horrified to find that a 15-year-old girl had been allowed to consent to a process eliminating her future fertility and sexual function and the surgical removal of her breasts. The British medical and therapy protocols up to that time were identical to U.S. protocols regarding gender affirmation and gender change. Several years later she and “A,” the mother of a 15-year-old girl sued the Clinic. On December 1, 2020, the British Court ruled for Keira Bell and Mother A and against the clinic.
Yet the finding of the UK Court has had little influence on social, medical, and political outlooks in the United States. The Biden Administration and apparently the overwhelming majority of Democrat politicians have adopted transgender ideology as policy, supported by its Deep State bureaucracy, media, academia, and corporate and institutional funding support. The political and social climate has resulted in a suppression of research, reasonable analysis, and truth. Public trust of the medical, counseling, and teaching fields is being severely damaged. Lies and bullying flow like a river from this insane pit of darkness.
Shrier points out transgender ideology’s close kinship to Critical Race Theory (CRT). The main objective in both seems to be chaos leading to national dissolution and rebuilding as a totalitarian state controlling every human activity. It should be obvious that both are anti-family. They are both also radically secularized enemies of Christianity, religious Judaism, and any religious or political thinking not based on total secular power and control. Like their kin and offspring in Black Lives Matter and Antifa, they are anti-free speech. Transgender ideology also seems to embrace the CRT anti-merit principles of social justice and CRT-defined values of “diversity,” equity,” and “inclusiveness” best understood through their vicious cancel-culture. Their real values appear to radical change, destruction, and control.
The social contagion aspect of transgender ideology is remarkably similar to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and 1693, where more than 200 people were accused of witchcraft, 30 innocent people were convicted, and 20 died, 19 by hanging, and one by torture. Several other unjust deaths in prison resulted. The social contagion began with a group of young girls accusing adults of witchcraft but was driven by a parent’s mental illness, contentious community relationships, expanding social contagion, and ignorant and fearful zealotry.
One woman in the audience at the Hillsdale lecture and question and answer session related a brief personal account of her church becoming involved in misguided transgender oriented affirmation of children who should have been given loving Biblical counsel instead of being affirmed in a lie. She gave her own advice to the audience, which showed its solid approval. If you find this sort of transgender affirmation going on in your church, “Get out of that church.” One man simply categorized transgender ideology as “pure evil,” another as “satanic.”
In order to stop irresponsible transgender activists from seducing and then quenching the health and hopes of young girls and women, and even piteously disfiguring them, we are going to have to speak up and stop their ideological indoctrination in schools and other venues. We must defeat political candidates on all levels, who want to impose transgender madness on children and American culture. We must defeat the deceptively named “Equality” Act in Congress that would attempt to erase biology and genetics and impose unisex sports, restrooms, and transgender ideology on a free people. The Democrats have become so corrupt they can’t even name a bill without making it an outrageous lie.
Some positive Federal legislation, however, is in progress. In July, Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced a bill in Congress prohibiting gender-changing surgery, puberty blockers, hormones, and other devices for minors, making such “gender affirmation care” for minors a felony punishable with 25 years in prison and heavy fines. Greene is a woman who is not afraid to speak her mind and stand up for what is right and against what is wrong. However, only 14 Republicans have so far signed on as co-sponsors.
Our country is under domestic attack from radical Neo-Marxists whose policies are based on fear, selfishness, lies, and absolute control. They are without moral scruples and have a heavy advantage in money and media support. They are already very near imposing a long-lasting epoch of darkness on our families and freedom. Republicans may think they are going to sweep the 2022 elections because of high inflation and Biden economic and military failures, but they are dangerously mistaken. Unless they can also show the American people they have the steadfast and tireless will and formidable enduring courage to defeat in detail issues like transgender ideology, Critical Race Theory, political corruption, and unlimited foreign cheap labor, welfare, and votes, they may fail, and the darkness will be heavy. We must remember that the greater dimension of our battle for truth and harmony with God and nature is a spiritual battle, and therein lies our greatest strength and hope.
Psalm 121:1-3 ESV
“ I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.”
Mike Scruggs is a columnist and author of "The Un-Civil War: Shattering the Historical Myths" and "Lessons from the Vietnam War: Truths the Media Never Told You"
