The Trans Trend Hasn't Ended. Why are You Celebrating?

Our collective critical thinking skills are dead.

TL;DR: A dataset represented with a colorful chart going viral online doesn’t mean “trans is over.” The study was flawed, and even perfect data showing a drop in non-binary identification wouldn’t prove that transgender identities are decreasing. We haven’t learned from our mistakes, we keep outsourcing our judgment to people in suits instead of doing the hard work of thinking for ourselves. And that’s exactly how we got into this mess in the first place.

Also, I’ve audiotaped myself reading the essay. Feel free to listen, or read or both.

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I regret to inform you that our collective critical thinking skills are dead.

A British academic named Erik Kaufmann went mega-viral on X for publishing data from FIRE which showed a steep drop-off in young people identifying as neither male nor female (which has been widely interpreted to refer to non-binary identities) with the added analysis of “trans identification is in free fall among young people.” Large accounts including Elon Musk and Matt Walsh retweeted the data set with celebratory statements proclaiming the end of transgenderism. Suddenly, every account from millions of followers, to thousands, to hundreds, to tens of followers began celebrating the end of trans.

Here’s the thing; they all jumped the gun and they were all wrong. Very wrong.

After the FIRE data was published on X, health and science journalist

Benjamin Ryan

looked into the dataset with a critical eye and found not only significant methodological flaws with the FIRE study and data collection mechanisms, but also, with the fundamental assumptions held by Kaufmann, from which the entirety of his analysis stemmed. I’ll link that piece here for those interested in a glimpse into exactly where Kaufmann went wrong in his analysis, as well as problems with the study itself:

No, the Data Hasn't Shown that 'Transgenderism Is Effectively Over,' as Matt Walsh Trumpeted

In this article, I won’t analyze the data or illuminate for my readers all of the analytical flaws I see from every direction; from the conservatives falsely proclaiming that trans is over and to the trans activists who also assume the data reflect a real phenomenon but claim that the sharp drop-off is due to increased societal anti-trans discrimination.

In this article, I will reflect on how both sides of the trans issue in an almost uniform fashion got this spectacularly wrong in exactly the same way. Both sides felt vindicated in the claims they have been making in this caustic trans culture war for years rather than engaging in critical thinking to determine whether an account on X with a profile pic of some guy in a suit was a reliable enough narrator to outsource their critical thinking to. Seeing this whole fiasco with Kaufmann’s tweet play out in real time yesterday reminded me of another fiasco which I saw play out over the course of my pre-teen, teen and young adult years; the trans trend itself.

Before I continue:

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Even before knowing anything about the intricacies of how the FIRE data was collected, as someone who used to be transgender for 12 years and who has since detransitioned and now spends an ungodly number of hours combing through trans discourse online and who reads gender studies for fun, and who is still young enough to understand youth culture around these issues— it was obvious to me that tons of people with big platforms online were wrong—even though those accounts hold opinions I otherwise tend to agree with. Spending a good half of my life being duped into so many postmodern lies is a real growth experience if one allows it to be.

Anyways, here was my response to the viral FIRE data set:

“Just because fewer youth are identifying as non-binary, it doesn’t mean transgender identities are decreasing in popularity. A whole generation has been swept up into a dangerous lie. Our work is nowhere near over.”

Though my main contention is that it is quite literally impossible to draw the conclusion that trans identities are in ‘free fall’ amongst youth based on this data set, the problem I want to highlight in this article, has very little to do with Kaufmann, or even the shoddy FIRE data set. It is a broader problem of our movement failing to learn from the mistakes of our past:

Watching everyone on social media pat themselves on the back for the memes and quips they post online, with their overinflated sense of importance about the veracity of the ‘hard work’ they’ve done to get us to the end of the trans craze (that is very much in full swing), I couldn’t help but to get Vietnam flashbacks from my 12 years of transgender identification. Starting from the age of 12 and as I grew up, I saw more and more adults buying the myths of gender ideology in the same exact way as they did yesterday with the overinflated claims made about FIRE’s dataset.

They saw confident experts, pretty graphics, and emotionally compelling narratives. And, they stopped asking questions. Sound familiar?

As I saw repost after repost proclaiming the end of trans on the basis of a graph and a one-liner from a profile picture of a dude wearing a suit, I couldn’t help but to remember myself as a confused 12 year old desperately consuming everything there was to learn online about the transgender topic.

Naturally, as a confused kid who came across transgender forums in 2011/2012 and latched on years before kids my age would do the same, whenever I saw some doctor in a lab coat proclaiming that if other confused kids with gender issues aren’t allowed to socially and medically transition, that they were doomed to suicide—I believed them. I believed them because I was a kid, and because kids are impressionable.

But, much to my surprise, within just a few years, every adult around me (except for my parents it seemed, much to my chagrin at the time) began to believe the same things too. And as this happened, the transgender trend exploded.

For most of my sentient years on Earth, the trans topic has been directly relevant to my life and I saw this whole thing go from relative obscurity into the zeitgeist of my generation.

Now that I no longer believe in any of it and think I was sold a lie which has ultimately hijacked my youth, my generation and has harmed us in mind and in body. I use the insights I have gleaned from these unfortunate experiences to help parents to help their kids navigate these issues. And from this vantage point, I see significant problems with the discourse of almost everyone who speaks out on these issues from a political standpoint.

Both “sides” are still playing the same game. They are using emotion, outrage, and tribal belonging to replace evidence and reasoning. The words they use have changed; the methods of their thinking haven’t.

I have lost all of my trust in the reliability of academics and political commentators alike, and I am shocked as to why so many gender criticals who laud themselves on their allegedly robust critical thinking skills, keep falling into the very same trap as do the trans activists whose faulty ideology they mock, whose believers they chastise on the basis of a perceived lack of intelligence.

Here’s a little wake-up call for those of you who are 40 and older reading my blog:

Simply knowing that men cannot become women and that women cannot become men does not alone make you a critical thinker. All it means is that you were not presented with the false belief that sex can be changed in your most impressionable developmental period. Do not become overconfident in your ability to reason simply because you never believed the lie. Not having ever believed in bad ideas does not mean your ideas, or anyone else’s ideas are inherently good. You always have to evaluate popular narratives with your own brain, with your own discernment and with your own intellect.

Because it was only after my generation was subjected to the harms of gender affirmation culture and medicine, and only after some of us spoke up, did thousands of adults begin to listen.

It’s not as if those adults didn’t witness the transgender tipping point themselves with Laverne Cox on TIME Magazine, the coming out of Bruce Jenner and his subsequent transformation into Caitlyn, and the fully televised indoctrination-to-castration journey of Jazz Jennings starting in the 2000’s with his Barbara Walters special and into the show which followed him into every medical appointment as he was chemically and then physically castrated.

It wasn’t until we saw him years later struggling with his mental health and 100 pounds overweight that any major voices decided to beg the question of whether this was a good idea to do this to him in the first place, and more so on the basis of his apparent unhappiness than upon any critical thinking skills, which had we used earlier, may have prevented this outcome.

And this is the same pattern we’re seeing again: people wait until there’s a visible casualty before daring to question the narrative that created the harm.

This trans phenomenon took ahold of so many people, including so many well-intentioned adults who had no ill-will, including among parents whose kids’ distress made them so distressed that they sought out a doctor over their kid’s gender confusion and believed the false dichotomy of “dead kid or a trans kid” when in retrospect, they did not actually have to believe these were the only two options. My parents certainly didn’t…

And they believed these things simply because they trusted institutions with obvious profit motives because they were taught to trust them, and because they lacked critical thinking skills because they were not taught them in the first place.

People can only be so profoundly duped when their emotions are manipulated to such an extent that even the most illogical ideas seem like the truth. If you have critical thinking skills, you at least stand a chance of protecting yourself from emotional manipulation when your emotions are already heightened. This is something we must be aware of.

Emotional manipulation is the oldest trick in the book. And yet it keeps working, generation after generation, because we still confuse empathy with conceptual accuracy.

What truly pains me in so much of this discourse is how everyone seems to be hell-bent on simplifying what is actually an incredibly complex phenomenon because it makes them feel better about their inability to tolerate the type of complexity that our kids really need to be navigated back to health and to reality.

I have lost a lot of hope seeing advocate after advocate washing their hands of responsibility because they managed to advocate for a law that bans pseudoscientific transgender practices done on vulnerable young people under 18— while totally ignoring the fact that the 18-25 year old age group is by far more vulnerable to being exploited by unethical medical practitioners than minors are, simply by virtue of the fact that young adults aren’t protected by any legislation despite being so psychiatrically complex and immature that they stand no chance of making informed decisions in the cultural backdrop of gender ideological misinformation…. to even know that their doctors are lying to them.

The tragedy is that we still pretend this problem stops at 18, as if waking up on a birthday magically grants cognitive maturity or protection from manipulation. As if the practices of pediatric gender medicine didn’t begin because the trans experiments on the adults overwhelmingly failed to improve their lives in any measurable way. And, so the case was made before our very eyes, on international TV, that intervening earlier will ensure better outcomes.

So many people ask me and themselves how the hell we got here to the point that everyone, and every institution would violently defend such a brutal lie as this.

My answer to them is always that most of the adults were asleep at the wheel.

This transgender topic was no one’s priority until it touched their families or their own kids. When it was someone else’s kid getting harmed, many adults privately disagreed but were too worried about offending anyone to state their opinions.

Yes, the gender doctors are the criminals, but our decade of silence was their most incredible accomplice. Everyone waited for someone braver to speak up first.

This fiasco with everyone going gaga over some bad data that falsely claimed the trans trend was basically over, reminded me that not only was my generation (Z) swept up into the trans lie, but that our parents’ generation (X) was too. Our parents’ generation totally enabled it all through their lack of discernment, through their outsourcing of critical thought to men and women in lab coats or in suits who tell them things on the internet (or in doctor’s offices), through their fear of upsetting us with the truth, through their fear of saying “no,” and most importantly, through their fear of acting in a way that would make them be seen as socially unpopular.

Though Gen X can say that their hands were tied by cancel culture, let us not forget that culture comes not from god, but from us. And, it is only in a society of perfect Ashe conformists who merely think themselves to be free, wherein cancel culture could even stand a chance of becoming the zeitgeist in such a way as to gut our institutions one by one. It is only in a culture that considers bluntness to be rude, that the human urge to tribally divide could manifest in this thing we call “cancel culture.”

It is my hope and my prayer, that this FIRE data fiasco is something we learn from.

Because clearly, we have learned so very little about the primitive flaws our advanced Western societies are prone to, from the tens of thousands of young people whose bodies are permanently altered, damaged and disfigured on the basis of a lie which no one seemed to notice until it hit their family, even as it played out on national TV before our very eyes— beginning almost two decades ago.

We didn’t actually need hindsight. We just needed courage. But courage is harder to come by than either celebration or outrage performed online for cheap virality.

We needed to stop seeing what we wanted to see, and choose to see the truth no matter how viscerally uncomfortable it makes us.

If you want to not repeat the mistakes of the past, you must understand that making truth claims while being ruled entirely by your emotions is a recipe for disaster.

Yes, those of us whose lives have been touched by this issue in some way or another want the harm to end—but just badly wanting something that happens to show up on a graph with a one-liner claiming that out of nowhere, our desired outcome has been achieved, does not mean we have actually achieved our desired outcome.

Now, I am 26 and I consult with parents whose kids found themselves in the same situation as I did for 12 years of my life, struggling with what appears to be their gender, but what we now know to be hundreds of other possible things refracted through the framework of gender.

Though I come into every session with a family with the sole aim of gathering enough information of theirs to combine with my 12 years of insider perspectives, so we can collaboratively strategize about how to navigate their unique challenges, I can’t help but to be consistently reminded of one thing that my own family dynamic has taught me; that just because our intentions are good, it does not mean we are insulated from the cognitive traps to which our human-ness inherently predispose us.

Good intentions are not enough to create good outcomes. Bad outcomes are not always a reflection of bad intentions. Bad outcomes are sometimes rather a result of well-intentioned strategies built without the fullness of all available information.

And, that our decision-making is largely dictated by our human emotions. These emotions so strongly drive us that they make us capable of believing almost anything that anyone says, if that thing confirms our pre-existing opinions or desires, and especially, if the person telling us the thing has some credentials and is pictured in a fancy suit.

Until we all understand that removing gender ideology out of our institutions while changing the culture enough to change the outcomes of young people, is a battle which we will be in for the next several decades, we will continue to run a movement on another set of false premises.

Until we all understand that there are no quick fixes here (either on an institutional level or on a family level), we will continue to set our movement and the health of our young people back through magical thinking.

If we actually want to win this war waged against reality, we mustn’t continue to repeat the mistakes of the past. We must start thinking like adults again. We must think slowly, carefully, critically and humbly. Most importantly, we must stop mistaking cheap dopamine spikes for truth.

Let’s not celebrate yet. Now is the time for action.

Do you have a kid navigating gender confusion and trans identification?

If so, I offer parent coaching sessions to help you figure out how to best navigate your specific child’s situation, in a compassionate and practical way.

If this is of interest, please DM me.

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