Very well said. My 19 year old could care less about a study. He still wants to transition & harm his body. You are spot on about the forgotten group of 18-25 year olds.
This is an extremely good article. I did see those graphs and thought that if they were true then why isn’t my daughter home still? It’s been two years two months of no contact. Her idiotic girlfriend still calls her “my boyfriend” on her social media. They’re both 19. Yes, the 18-25 group has been failed horrendously. But my family and I always told my daughter that this was wrong. Always. And I don’t claim thinking skills or intellectual superiority- instead I always bear the Mussaf prayer in mind when I speak: “God, guard my tongue from evil and my lips from deceitful speech”. For me it’s my faith that keeps me sane now. Faith, not intellect. “Woe onto him that calls evil good and good evil” (Isaiah). May God help us 💔🌷. Our intellect is unreliable. This is precisely why He gave us boundaries. Because we sin. And because we’re stupid.
Even if the graphs were true, it doesn’t mean your daughter would come home by now. Trend lines can only tell us about group behaviors. Not about individual behaviors. On an individual level, people can be quite unpredictable.
Perfectly stated!! It's great to know you can see the flaws in the study... I've always had an eye for that as well so I tend to ignore "study data" when presented to me in any form other than me reading it myself. This isn't related, but the point is relevant... and I suspect there's something similar happening here...
So back in 2010 I questioned the Dept. of Education's stats on school violence because I was seeing something that contradicted their reports. They claimed incidents were decreasing. So I spent a year and collected my own data for incidents of school violence. It was already my life's work so it wasn't hard. I only documented verifiable incidents where I could find the city and school named. I based my list on the exact criteria the DOE used described in their summary. To my shock, I had 364 incidents in just one month and the DOE reported 2 incidents that same month. For a 5-year period, every month and every year was insanely sky high compared to what the DOE reported.
The actual incidents I collected suggested school violence was on the rise, drastically so. The DOE said it was rapidly declining to almost nothing. Over a 5-year period, the DOE reported numbers that were 200-18,000% lower than reality. That comma is not a typo. EIGHTEEN THOUSAND.
Then I found the fine print - they only sampled a few states. Like four states. Out of 50.
So I matched up the data and found that they just happened to sample the four states with the lowest incidents for EVERY single year studied. Amazing!
They completely manipulated the data. They didn't just choose a random sample size. They intentionally chose the states with the least amount of incidents to say "look, the problem is declining!"
I suspect this collection of data might be similarly manipulated. I haven't looked yet, this topic will suck me in and I'm on deadline right now :P
Anytime anyone comes out with a study proving or disproving something related to trans issues I'm naturally skeptical. I know the spaces you're talking about online. I don't participate, but they aren't slowing down.
And if anything, couldn't a decrease in non-binary identity suggest people are abandoning that safety net for a binary trans identity (it seems a lot of people come out as NB first, then identify as the opposite sex) but what does a drop in non-binary identification have to do with people who identify as trans? To me, it sounds like sleight of hand to put these two things together. I get that some people view NB as a trans identity, but it still seems like misdirection.
Like, "oh, the data show that fewer people are buying spatulas so that means fewer people are cooking spaghetti dinners" it just doesn't follow to me.
I'm far from celebrating because I see no end to it in my family nor in anyone's family that I know who has a trans identifying kid. And the lasting damage is profound even it were to end.
Thank you Maia. Well thought out as always. I hadn't seen the graph as I rarely look at X.
But as you've explained before, the messages we get on social media, usually through algorithms, can be so dangerous and divisive. And sometimes even years out of date but if we don't check out the truth or the back story we can get stirred up and perpetuate blatant lies by passing them on.
I'm so thankful for people like you, Sasha Ayad, Stella O'Malley and others for sustaining and highlighting that in-depth vision of the complexities of transgender ideology.
“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”
Absolutely true. Your point that this is the very same faulty reasoning—appealing to emotion, following social norms, and blindly trusting authority—that allows people to adopt faulty beliefs on gender is spot-on.
Coming from the neuroplastic symptoms world, I was also duped by people with medical authority explaining my symptoms with fancy scans of my body that appealed to my own fear. They were in fact correlates, and not evidence of causation (Dr. Sarno calls them “normal abnormalities,” or structural quirks seen in scans—like disc herniations—that are used as an explanation for chronic pain, despite people with no symptoms having these same quirks).
Something I’d like to thoroughly investigate is how we can parse these studies to more readily find flaws. This is something that is SO desperately needed in the study of psychophysiological illnesses that are being posed as structural by medical institutions. Do you have any pointers for me as I try to discern these study flaws on a general level and maybe even eventually brainstorm ways in which these false conclusions can be effectively vetted across disciplines in the future?
Step one, which you’ve figured out is to be aware of this flaw in human thinking. Step two is to probably use AI to figure out which critiques have been made about a given study. In the realm of the gender stuff, and as someone who works with families of little pre-teens who are still getting sucked into the gender stuff alongside their same-aged peers (and from my time inside of trans communities), it was clear to me that these researchers did not have a clue what they were talking about. So I did a cursory look into the findings (not even a deep look like Ben Ryan did), recognized a pattern and decided to comment on it.
Thanks for your reply! I was talking about making some kind of database with my friend for chronic pain/symptoms biomedical research (this friend is def not on board with sex realist stuff, but the idea remains). I like the idea of using AI.
Regardless of how it’s done, I’d really like for there to be a publicly accessible and easily legible system that could then be used to systematically fact-check new studies as they come out. In the very distant future, I’d like for there to be a renewed basis for evidence-based medicine so these studies never get published in the first place. Dreaming big!
It’s funny you say that, because I had a similar experience navigated the medical system for chronic pain. There would be proposals for intervention that blatantly contradicted themselves and a lack of answers to my questions that had me feeling like they didn’t know what they were talking about. I just was desperate, fearful, and didn’t know of another option. Plus, every medical professional was on board!
You cannot expect the person in pain to be the rational one in this situation, but alas…
I appreciate this assessment a lot and will check out Ben Ryan’s review. :))
I just read up on what was wrong with the study. This is complete manipulation!
So "transgender" wasn't even one of the options to choose from, and they decided "non-binary" was close enough to count as trans? So they came to the conclusion that trans identities are declining?
I bet 50-60% of the male/female responses came from trans people.
The only question that can determine if someone is trans or not is a question that forces the respondent to admit they are trans because some trans people will read the question "do you identify as trans" and say, "no, I AM male/female" and check male/female. Even then, a lot of trans people lie because they do not even feel like they are trans - they know the survey wants to know if they are trans and will skew the results on purpose (I've seen discussions about this, thanks Reddit!)
I propose that during these studies, determining if a person is trans or not should not come from self-reporting. It should be part of the intake form verified by a person who has a live conversation with each respondent to avoid the individual lying or playing semantics to get around admitting they are trans. That is the only way to ensure accuracy on that point. I don't trust any self-reporting surveys.
Even medical data is skewed because trans people have been selecting their preferred sex for over a decade.
I trust my eyes and what I see happening more than these studies.
It wasn’t just talked into existence, it has been so widely funded that an entire legal campaign across the West has legitimized it. It will be so much more difficult to get this out of our institutions than merely having civilized discussions.
But wasn't there a social engineering layer where people successfully retconned a consensus that didn't exist? "Oh, you're not a smell old TERF are you? Everybody except EXTREME right wing white nationalists knows TWAW."
I certainly found friends started randomly trotting out talking points about "the most marginalised community ever".
So now maybe it could work in reverse. If everybody says trans is over, maybe it is? And everybody will pretend it never was, or that they were never taken in by it.
I think that's the hope, at any rate.
However, as you say, there's still that well-funded campaign...
Yeah, belief in things that look 'official and expert' without a deeper look into methods is very boomer. I know it was too good to be true but I didn't want to dig at it.
I sent out my comment too soon and tried to edit it and accidentally deleted Heather Wilson’s comment on my post. Though I did manage to screenshot it before it disappeared. Sorry, Heather. If you see this can you link your @?
You’re certainly right that this isn’t over (definitely not in my household).
To be fair, though, no one can be an expert on all topics. You and I are both, in different ways, unfortunate experts on this particular topic, simply because it touched our lives and we had to. I have little expertise on thousands of other topics that don’t affect me - cancer, neurological diseases, vaccines, schizophrenia, prison conditions, etc., but would quickly acquire expertise if I were affected. Most of us have a few areas of expertise, and for the rest of the topics we may do a light survey of available writing, try to read both sides, see which experts seem most informed and trustworthy, and then pick a position.
In this case, we were duped. Bad actors went to great lengths to ensure that opposing points of view were almost impossible to find. “Experts” weren’t, they were all propagandists with the same view. Social media was manipulated to make it appear that there was societal consensus on this. Manipulation of language and sound reasoning based on unsound but unspoken premises (that one’s sense of gender is inborn) fooled a lot of people.
So yes, I once believed the lie that transgender people “know” from the time they are very young that they are the opposite sex, and there must be some biology-based reason for this. It was on the cover of Time magazine, and I never had reason to doubt that what people said was true. There were certain things in the back of my mind that didn’t quite make sense, but I didn’t yet understand that was because I was being lied to.
But now that I know more, I can no longer trust outside sources on this topic, and I agree with you that we have to carefully evaluate what we read.
My gut tells me that “nonbinary” was a short-term trend that served the goal of creating confusion and getting additional people to identify as a form of transgender and join the “tribe”, but when it became obvious that it wasn’t fact-based and became a liability to the movement, they dropped it. Because it wasn’t what the activists really cared about, it was just a tool.
But what the activists really care about is indulging a sexual fetish for males to be seen as women and invade women’s privacy and force women to pretend to acknowledge them as women. In this sense, the indoctrinated teenage girls and young kids caught up in this are also just pawns, but they are far more important pawns because they are used to prop up the lie that people are born this way and it’s not just a male sexual fetish.
So while nonbinary identities are dropping because the powerful activists aren’t pushing that narrative anymore, they are never going to stop pushing the trans narrative.
I’m not sure what we were supposed to do earlier, or when we should have intervened. Yes, we wait for casualties before labeling an ideology toxic and intervening in people’s lives. That’s because intervention itself can cause harm, and we value people’s freedom to make choices for themselves. Even bad choices or unhealthy choices or choices not founded in reality. And yes, even when someone is 18-25. If you are old enough to join the military, you are old enough to make your own medical decisions.
In hindsight, I completely agree that the social and political support for trans make it appealing for many kids and young adults who are looking for an identity or a way to make meaning and sense out of their experiences, and that this is a huge problem. But I’m not sure how we could or should have foreseen that when trans people were rare and heavily stigmatized. We might have had negative reactions to what they were doing, but was it our place to say anything? I still don’t think it was.
I definitely agree that the GC community fails hard when it just insists “obviously people can’t change sex, end of story”. That’s not the end of the story. I think the current trans obsession with “trans women are women” is the same as when the gay community went through “born this way”—e.g. they still feel illegitimate so they are acting hysterical. But if and when they ever gain some real legitimacy, I think that will settle down. What they seem to want is to have access to medical transition and social acceptance as their sex of choice. If—and I hope this doesn’t happen—trans women ever get female-passing bodies and unquestioned access to women’s spaces and social recognition as women, they may well be willing to admit that they didn’t in fact change sex as a matter of abstract science. Then where will the GC people be?
I’m involved in this issue now because I see the parallels between trans and other unhealthy coping strategies masquerading as identities, like anorexia and some forms of mental illness. If your subjective feeling of well-being depends on controlling the mental state of another person, let alone everyone in the world, this is not a good thing. But somehow that is what trans became, and trans became a good thing. I think we need to address this at a deeper social level: why are kids flocking to trans identities? They aren’t sick or crazy. They are looking for some kind of stability and meaning in their life. We need to find healthy alternatives to promote (mental patient is NOT one of them) and ways to decrease the appeal of trans. I am hopeful that recent legislation and cultural shifts will have a negative impact on the viability of the trans identity as a solution for the identity struggles of youth in secular modernity, whatever the studies are saying today.
But I reiterate, what should we have done? I don’t want kids to be sucked into trans as a coping mechanism, especially not autistic or gay kids. But I also don’t want to tell adults they can’t make choices for themselves. A lot of adults make stupid choices I don’t approve of. But then, they would say the same about me.
Very well said. My 19 year old could care less about a study. He still wants to transition & harm his body. You are spot on about the forgotten group of 18-25 year olds.
100%
This is an extremely good article. I did see those graphs and thought that if they were true then why isn’t my daughter home still? It’s been two years two months of no contact. Her idiotic girlfriend still calls her “my boyfriend” on her social media. They’re both 19. Yes, the 18-25 group has been failed horrendously. But my family and I always told my daughter that this was wrong. Always. And I don’t claim thinking skills or intellectual superiority- instead I always bear the Mussaf prayer in mind when I speak: “God, guard my tongue from evil and my lips from deceitful speech”. For me it’s my faith that keeps me sane now. Faith, not intellect. “Woe onto him that calls evil good and good evil” (Isaiah). May God help us 💔🌷. Our intellect is unreliable. This is precisely why He gave us boundaries. Because we sin. And because we’re stupid.
Even if the graphs were true, it doesn’t mean your daughter would come home by now. Trend lines can only tell us about group behaviors. Not about individual behaviors. On an individual level, people can be quite unpredictable.
Exactly Maia
Perfectly stated!! It's great to know you can see the flaws in the study... I've always had an eye for that as well so I tend to ignore "study data" when presented to me in any form other than me reading it myself. This isn't related, but the point is relevant... and I suspect there's something similar happening here...
So back in 2010 I questioned the Dept. of Education's stats on school violence because I was seeing something that contradicted their reports. They claimed incidents were decreasing. So I spent a year and collected my own data for incidents of school violence. It was already my life's work so it wasn't hard. I only documented verifiable incidents where I could find the city and school named. I based my list on the exact criteria the DOE used described in their summary. To my shock, I had 364 incidents in just one month and the DOE reported 2 incidents that same month. For a 5-year period, every month and every year was insanely sky high compared to what the DOE reported.
The actual incidents I collected suggested school violence was on the rise, drastically so. The DOE said it was rapidly declining to almost nothing. Over a 5-year period, the DOE reported numbers that were 200-18,000% lower than reality. That comma is not a typo. EIGHTEEN THOUSAND.
Then I found the fine print - they only sampled a few states. Like four states. Out of 50.
So I matched up the data and found that they just happened to sample the four states with the lowest incidents for EVERY single year studied. Amazing!
They completely manipulated the data. They didn't just choose a random sample size. They intentionally chose the states with the least amount of incidents to say "look, the problem is declining!"
I suspect this collection of data might be similarly manipulated. I haven't looked yet, this topic will suck me in and I'm on deadline right now :P
Anytime anyone comes out with a study proving or disproving something related to trans issues I'm naturally skeptical. I know the spaces you're talking about online. I don't participate, but they aren't slowing down.
And if anything, couldn't a decrease in non-binary identity suggest people are abandoning that safety net for a binary trans identity (it seems a lot of people come out as NB first, then identify as the opposite sex) but what does a drop in non-binary identification have to do with people who identify as trans? To me, it sounds like sleight of hand to put these two things together. I get that some people view NB as a trans identity, but it still seems like misdirection.
Like, "oh, the data show that fewer people are buying spatulas so that means fewer people are cooking spaghetti dinners" it just doesn't follow to me.
This is actually a really funny analogy
I'm far from celebrating because I see no end to it in my family nor in anyone's family that I know who has a trans identifying kid. And the lasting damage is profound even it were to end.
So many people forget the obvious fact that something with such permanent consequences will not go away easily
I would love to see you interviewed in a Benjamin Ryan piece.
That would be awesome. His analysis has been quite good thus far.
Thank you Maia. Well thought out as always. I hadn't seen the graph as I rarely look at X.
But as you've explained before, the messages we get on social media, usually through algorithms, can be so dangerous and divisive. And sometimes even years out of date but if we don't check out the truth or the back story we can get stirred up and perpetuate blatant lies by passing them on.
I'm so thankful for people like you, Sasha Ayad, Stella O'Malley and others for sustaining and highlighting that in-depth vision of the complexities of transgender ideology.
Thank you so much for reading
Thanks for stating the obvious that people have missed. We are creating separate cultures where people are fractured and isolated.
Precisely!
“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”
Absolutely true. Your point that this is the very same faulty reasoning—appealing to emotion, following social norms, and blindly trusting authority—that allows people to adopt faulty beliefs on gender is spot-on.
Coming from the neuroplastic symptoms world, I was also duped by people with medical authority explaining my symptoms with fancy scans of my body that appealed to my own fear. They were in fact correlates, and not evidence of causation (Dr. Sarno calls them “normal abnormalities,” or structural quirks seen in scans—like disc herniations—that are used as an explanation for chronic pain, despite people with no symptoms having these same quirks).
Something I’d like to thoroughly investigate is how we can parse these studies to more readily find flaws. This is something that is SO desperately needed in the study of psychophysiological illnesses that are being posed as structural by medical institutions. Do you have any pointers for me as I try to discern these study flaws on a general level and maybe even eventually brainstorm ways in which these false conclusions can be effectively vetted across disciplines in the future?
Thanks for this ❤️
Step one, which you’ve figured out is to be aware of this flaw in human thinking. Step two is to probably use AI to figure out which critiques have been made about a given study. In the realm of the gender stuff, and as someone who works with families of little pre-teens who are still getting sucked into the gender stuff alongside their same-aged peers (and from my time inside of trans communities), it was clear to me that these researchers did not have a clue what they were talking about. So I did a cursory look into the findings (not even a deep look like Ben Ryan did), recognized a pattern and decided to comment on it.
Thanks for your reply! I was talking about making some kind of database with my friend for chronic pain/symptoms biomedical research (this friend is def not on board with sex realist stuff, but the idea remains). I like the idea of using AI.
Regardless of how it’s done, I’d really like for there to be a publicly accessible and easily legible system that could then be used to systematically fact-check new studies as they come out. In the very distant future, I’d like for there to be a renewed basis for evidence-based medicine so these studies never get published in the first place. Dreaming big!
It’s funny you say that, because I had a similar experience navigated the medical system for chronic pain. There would be proposals for intervention that blatantly contradicted themselves and a lack of answers to my questions that had me feeling like they didn’t know what they were talking about. I just was desperate, fearful, and didn’t know of another option. Plus, every medical professional was on board!
You cannot expect the person in pain to be the rational one in this situation, but alas…
I appreciate this assessment a lot and will check out Ben Ryan’s review. :))
I just read up on what was wrong with the study. This is complete manipulation!
So "transgender" wasn't even one of the options to choose from, and they decided "non-binary" was close enough to count as trans? So they came to the conclusion that trans identities are declining?
I bet 50-60% of the male/female responses came from trans people.
The only question that can determine if someone is trans or not is a question that forces the respondent to admit they are trans because some trans people will read the question "do you identify as trans" and say, "no, I AM male/female" and check male/female. Even then, a lot of trans people lie because they do not even feel like they are trans - they know the survey wants to know if they are trans and will skew the results on purpose (I've seen discussions about this, thanks Reddit!)
I propose that during these studies, determining if a person is trans or not should not come from self-reporting. It should be part of the intake form verified by a person who has a live conversation with each respondent to avoid the individual lying or playing semantics to get around admitting they are trans. That is the only way to ensure accuracy on that point. I don't trust any self-reporting surveys.
Even medical data is skewed because trans people have been selecting their preferred sex for over a decade.
I trust my eyes and what I see happening more than these studies.
Exactly
Maybe we all hope that we can talk this thing out of existence, the way it was talked into existence?
I agree, though. That stats are maybe indicative that something is happening, but not what.
It wasn’t just talked into existence, it has been so widely funded that an entire legal campaign across the West has legitimized it. It will be so much more difficult to get this out of our institutions than merely having civilized discussions.
Well yes, OK.
But wasn't there a social engineering layer where people successfully retconned a consensus that didn't exist? "Oh, you're not a smell old TERF are you? Everybody except EXTREME right wing white nationalists knows TWAW."
I certainly found friends started randomly trotting out talking points about "the most marginalised community ever".
So now maybe it could work in reverse. If everybody says trans is over, maybe it is? And everybody will pretend it never was, or that they were never taken in by it.
I think that's the hope, at any rate.
However, as you say, there's still that well-funded campaign...
Me: sees chart and is mollified and ignores the nagging feeling there's more to the story.
Maia: you did a boomer.
Me: I did a boomer?
Maia: yes.
Me: Shit.
A boomer? 😂
Yeah, belief in things that look 'official and expert' without a deeper look into methods is very boomer. I know it was too good to be true but I didn't want to dig at it.
Your self-awareness is refreshing. Where did your generation get this tendency from?
Thanks for fleshing this out. I've been skeptical of this chart since I saw it and the conclusions people make about it.
What made you skeptical? I’m curious
I sent out my comment too soon and tried to edit it and accidentally deleted Heather Wilson’s comment on my post. Though I did manage to screenshot it before it disappeared. Sorry, Heather. If you see this can you link your @?
You’re certainly right that this isn’t over (definitely not in my household).
To be fair, though, no one can be an expert on all topics. You and I are both, in different ways, unfortunate experts on this particular topic, simply because it touched our lives and we had to. I have little expertise on thousands of other topics that don’t affect me - cancer, neurological diseases, vaccines, schizophrenia, prison conditions, etc., but would quickly acquire expertise if I were affected. Most of us have a few areas of expertise, and for the rest of the topics we may do a light survey of available writing, try to read both sides, see which experts seem most informed and trustworthy, and then pick a position.
In this case, we were duped. Bad actors went to great lengths to ensure that opposing points of view were almost impossible to find. “Experts” weren’t, they were all propagandists with the same view. Social media was manipulated to make it appear that there was societal consensus on this. Manipulation of language and sound reasoning based on unsound but unspoken premises (that one’s sense of gender is inborn) fooled a lot of people.
So yes, I once believed the lie that transgender people “know” from the time they are very young that they are the opposite sex, and there must be some biology-based reason for this. It was on the cover of Time magazine, and I never had reason to doubt that what people said was true. There were certain things in the back of my mind that didn’t quite make sense, but I didn’t yet understand that was because I was being lied to.
But now that I know more, I can no longer trust outside sources on this topic, and I agree with you that we have to carefully evaluate what we read.
My gut tells me that “nonbinary” was a short-term trend that served the goal of creating confusion and getting additional people to identify as a form of transgender and join the “tribe”, but when it became obvious that it wasn’t fact-based and became a liability to the movement, they dropped it. Because it wasn’t what the activists really cared about, it was just a tool.
But what the activists really care about is indulging a sexual fetish for males to be seen as women and invade women’s privacy and force women to pretend to acknowledge them as women. In this sense, the indoctrinated teenage girls and young kids caught up in this are also just pawns, but they are far more important pawns because they are used to prop up the lie that people are born this way and it’s not just a male sexual fetish.
So while nonbinary identities are dropping because the powerful activists aren’t pushing that narrative anymore, they are never going to stop pushing the trans narrative.
Yep💔
At best, it’s only napping. Thank you, Maia for all that you’re doing.
So much information.,I believe we must stay vigilant. Like keep asking the question, what is a woman. Adult human female!
I’m not sure what we were supposed to do earlier, or when we should have intervened. Yes, we wait for casualties before labeling an ideology toxic and intervening in people’s lives. That’s because intervention itself can cause harm, and we value people’s freedom to make choices for themselves. Even bad choices or unhealthy choices or choices not founded in reality. And yes, even when someone is 18-25. If you are old enough to join the military, you are old enough to make your own medical decisions.
In hindsight, I completely agree that the social and political support for trans make it appealing for many kids and young adults who are looking for an identity or a way to make meaning and sense out of their experiences, and that this is a huge problem. But I’m not sure how we could or should have foreseen that when trans people were rare and heavily stigmatized. We might have had negative reactions to what they were doing, but was it our place to say anything? I still don’t think it was.
I definitely agree that the GC community fails hard when it just insists “obviously people can’t change sex, end of story”. That’s not the end of the story. I think the current trans obsession with “trans women are women” is the same as when the gay community went through “born this way”—e.g. they still feel illegitimate so they are acting hysterical. But if and when they ever gain some real legitimacy, I think that will settle down. What they seem to want is to have access to medical transition and social acceptance as their sex of choice. If—and I hope this doesn’t happen—trans women ever get female-passing bodies and unquestioned access to women’s spaces and social recognition as women, they may well be willing to admit that they didn’t in fact change sex as a matter of abstract science. Then where will the GC people be?
I’m involved in this issue now because I see the parallels between trans and other unhealthy coping strategies masquerading as identities, like anorexia and some forms of mental illness. If your subjective feeling of well-being depends on controlling the mental state of another person, let alone everyone in the world, this is not a good thing. But somehow that is what trans became, and trans became a good thing. I think we need to address this at a deeper social level: why are kids flocking to trans identities? They aren’t sick or crazy. They are looking for some kind of stability and meaning in their life. We need to find healthy alternatives to promote (mental patient is NOT one of them) and ways to decrease the appeal of trans. I am hopeful that recent legislation and cultural shifts will have a negative impact on the viability of the trans identity as a solution for the identity struggles of youth in secular modernity, whatever the studies are saying today.
But I reiterate, what should we have done? I don’t want kids to be sucked into trans as a coping mechanism, especially not autistic or gay kids. But I also don’t want to tell adults they can’t make choices for themselves. A lot of adults make stupid choices I don’t approve of. But then, they would say the same about me.