Social media link to girls' transgender rate needs study

           From the video What do DETRANSITIONED WOMEN think of SOCIAL MEDIA? on the              YouTube channel Pique Resilience Project

The impact of social media on all our lives is just beginning to be realised – as with the scrutiny the tech giants are facing from lawmakers in the United States and Europe. But of concern, too, is whether girls  in particular are being harmed by social media through bearing additional forms of social pressure, forms that are much stronger than that which young people have typically had to deal with.

A new first-person account of how a troubled British teenager was handled by the National Health Service highlights some startling UK statistics. Kiera Bell, who went through a transitioning programme from girl to boy, writes:

Notably, a growing wave of girls has been seeking treatment for gender dysphoria. In 2009-10, 77 children were referred to the [National Health Service’s] Gender Identity Development Service, 52% of whom were boys. That ratio started to reverse a few years later as the overall number of referrals soared. In England in 2018-19, 624 boys were referred and 1,740 girls, or 74% of the total. Over half of referrals were for those aged 14 or under; some were as young as 3 years old. The court noted the practitioners at the Tavistock did not put forward “any clinical explanation” for the dramatic rise in girls…

Kiera Bell after her court victory

The reference to the Tavistock centre needs explanation. Bell, who is from a broken family, came to believe she would be happier as a boy. She was referred to the Tavistock clinic. The clinic’s practitioners acceded to her demands with little counselling, a matter that led her to take it to court for a judicial review of her treatment while a teenager, especially relating to her ability to give informed consent over the serious actions taken that would affect her later life. All the way through she had wanted to transition, even having a double mastectomy as a 20-year-old.

However, there came a point where she knew that she had made a big mistake: “As I matured, I recognized that gender dysphoria was a symptom of my overall misery, not its cause.”

Bell, who has subsequently detransitioned, won her case against the clinic, with the judges ruling that youths under treatment at the centre could not meaningfully consent to the medical interventions recommended.

Last year, another set of figures were published in the United States by Abigail Shrier, who is concerned about the impact of social pressure on girls with regards their self-esteem. She writes:

In America and across the Western world, adolescents were reporting a sudden spike in gender dysphoria—the medical condition associated with the social designation “transgender.” Between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender surgeries for natal females in the United States quadrupled, with biological women suddenly accounting for—as we have seen—70 percent of all gender surgeries. In 2018, the UK reported a 4,400 percent rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatments. In Canada, Sweden, Finland, and the UK, clinicians and gender therapists began reporting a sudden and dramatic shift in the demographics of those presenting with gender dysphoria—from predominately preschool-aged boys to predominately adolescent girls.

Clusters of cases among friends, and the existence of trendy sites on Tumblr and Reddit, point to the need of all platforms to send a message about social media literacy to young people as Tumblr did in 2012 when there was a flareup of self-harm linked to material in posts it was hosting. That message is at “A New Policy Against Self-Harm Blogs”,  here and here .

Researchers are exploring the role of “social contagion” among young people. Findings will be of great value to parents who suffer when surprised by statements about sexuality arising from a child “out of the blue”. 

This is how Dr Lisa Littman, the Brown University researcher who introduced to this field of study the term “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”, describes how her work encapsulating social media is helping understand the unique and rapid phenomenon that we see in the transgender "explosion", in which greater social acceptance can only be just part of the underlying set of causes. Dr Littman said in an interview:

This research explores, through the reports of parents, a phenomenon whereby teens and young adults who did not exhibit childhood signs of gender issues appeared to suddenly identify as transgender. This new identification seemed to occur in the context of either belonging to a group of friends [in which] multiple—or even all—members became transgender-identified around the same time, or through immersion in social media, or both. The findings of the research support the hypotheses that what I have described could represent a new type of gender dysphoria (referred to as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria; that, for some teens and young adults, their gender dysphoria might represent a maladaptive coping mechanism; and that peer and social influences might contribute to the development of gender dysphoria. More research will need to be done to confirm or refute these hypotheses.