It's also valuable in interpreting trends in society to have "insider information", especially from those who can report on how young people are responding to the gender diversity campaign that is being mounted in Western societies by small groups whose efforts are fanned by a mass media that is either uncaring about the social implications or fully captured by a newly fashionable storyline.
Clearly, the colour, the glam, and the edginess of transgenderism has filled the imagination of young people, and one young (mid-twenties) woman has just gone on record to describe in detail how all this has become an attractive talking point for teenagers. The tragic consequences, as highlighted in the British court case of girl-to-boy transitioner Kiera Bell (more about this later in this post), include a life that is beset with regret and depression.
This American woman became part of a "community" of fans on Twitter that attracted a lot of young teens. She relates how when interest in the latest news on what was the focus of the community died down it was not long before LGBTQ+ sexual orientation came up for discussion:
Every time the discussion in the feeds died down to where there was just no new [community] stuff [...] to talk about, all the conversation slowly but surely shifted back to sexual orientation and gender. From fan-ships of perfect LGB couples to ‘Hey, I drew this person but as a trans-female!’, to even forgoing pretending to talk about their interests and just discussing their own gender and sex presentation with their other online friends, it became quickly very clear to me that A. I no longer really belonged here, and B. Every single one of these kids was obsessed. Every. Single. One.
And the worst part is, not all of them are even remotely candidates for what we might call ‘prone’ to gender dysphoria or anything else. They’ve just learned it’s cool to have a gender identity, and they’re parroting everything they’re hearing everywhere else. [My emphasis - BS]
The writer then gives two examples of exchanges during dead news days for the comunity:
The first one went like this: Person A (OP) posted something along the lines of “I’ve decided to test (note the word ‘test’) if I’m gender fluid. I’d like everyone to call me (opposite sex pronouns) for a while. Immediately, many comments with affirmation and specifically addressing OP as opposite sex emerged. OP reacted with glee.
The second instance, and the one that really broke me: Person B posts repeated questions about female gender orientation. Asks what it means if they are a tomboy and if that counts as a gender presentation. Is told no. Continues (in a series of posts, that because I followed this person I saw all of) to ask more and more questions including things like ‘what if I’m comfortable being female but I like masculine things and sometimes feel drawn to masculinity?
What does that mean?’ I didn’t see a whole lot of replies to this person, but today, they posted that they are now identifying as a “Demigirl” with the appropriate flag. I had to look this one up [see here].
[...] you’ll learn that a ‘Demigirl’ is a female who ‘mostly’ identifies with being a woman, but not completely, and is partially gender-fluid as a result. You’ll also learn that the official ‘flag’ for this hybrid identity was scribbled out by some person on reddit only about a month ago. A month.
So, less than a year ago probably someone came up with this idea, a month ago they made a flag, and less than a day ago a young girl on the internet adopted this as ‘proof’ that their slight attachment to masculine stereotypes fits them in on the gender-identity board! Praise and affirmation followed.
Now to the cry from the heart! Our rapporteur identifies why the stakes are high in this matter:
Still don’t think the gender craze is coming for your kids? Do your kids interact at all in fan groups? Do they talk to people online? Do they go to public school? All it takes now is a half-day of questioning to find your perfect gender flag, and you’re good to go.
Forget trying to turn off their phones, if parents aren’t talking to their children right now about what sex (and gender) really are and how varied and multifaceted they can be while still existing in a binary then they might as well be handing them over to the gender-packaging factory to receive their stripes.
The instant someone says “I don’t always adhere to stereotypes” a million voices are waiting to tell them which of 364,000 identities they can fit into to be special and cool just like everyone else. If they don’t have a response for that, it’s over. Period.
Another insight from this writer is that she, herself, as a girl was usually more interested in what the boys were doing than what her sisters were absorbed with. However, her mother had told her that she had been the same when growing up:
I’m a happy adult female now, and I was never truly gender-questioning. I just thought, for a while, that boys had more fun than I did, so I wanted to be one. But that, in and of itself, is a thought that’s deep enough for modern gender activists to insist I be transitioned immediately and put on life-altering hormones, never given a chance to grow up or grow out of questioning, but affirmed [...] instantly!
If I, like that young girl online, had been handed a ‘gender-affirming’ flag and an identity that ‘made sense’ out of why I was different from my peers, I might have jumped at it, especially without the presence of a wise older person to tell me I wasn’t anything different than what she’d been as a child. This is the problem, this is why this kind of thing is so dangerous and toxic and wrong.
The life of Kiera Bell has shown what a dangerous situation society gets into by not giving more attention to how young people's attitudes are being shaped by propaganda - the correct word in the context (see here). Bell transitioned to male but has detransitioned, and took to court the British clinic that had handled her case. She has given an account of her circumstances here. When she was little...
I was accepted by the boys—I dressed in typically boy clothing and was athletic. I never had an issue with my gender; it wasn’t on my mind.
Then puberty hit, and everything changed for the worse. A lot of teenagers, especially girls, have a hard time with puberty, but I didn’t know this. I thought I was the only one who hated how my hips and breasts were growing. Then my periods started, and they were disabling. I was often in pain and drained of energy.
Also, I could no longer pass as “one of the boys,” so lost my community of male friends. But I didn’t feel I really belonged with the girls either. My mother’s alcoholism had gotten so bad that I didn’t want to bring friends home. Eventually, I had no friends to invite. I became more alienated and solitary. I had been moving a lot too, and I had to start over at different schools, which compounded my problems.
By the time I was 14, I was severely depressed and had given up: I stopped going to school; I stopped going outside. I just stayed in my room, avoiding my mother, playing video games, getting lost in my favorite music, and surfing the internet.
Something else was happening: I became attracted to girls. I had never had a positive association with the term “lesbian” or the idea that two girls could be in a relationship. This made me wonder if there was something inherently wrong with me. Around this time, out of the blue, my mother asked if I wanted to be a boy, something that hadn’t even crossed my mind. I then found some websites about females transitioning to male. Shortly after, I moved in with my father and his then-partner. She asked me the same question my mother had. I told her that I thought I was a boy and that I wanted to become one.
As I look back, I see how everything led me to conclude it would be best if I stopped becoming a woman. My thinking was that, if I took hormones, I’d grow taller and wouldn’t look much different from biological men.
When she went to the clinic that she took to court she was sure she wanted to be a boy:
It was the kind of brash assertion that’s typical of teenagers. What was really going on was that I was a girl insecure in my body who had experienced parental abandonment, felt alienated from my peers, suffered from anxiety and depression, and struggled with my sexual orientation.
After a series of superficial conversations with social workers, I was put on puberty blockers at age 16. A year later, I was receiving testosterone shots. When 20, I had a double mastectomy. By then, I appeared to have a more masculine build, as well as a man’s voice, a man’s beard, and a man’s name: Quincy, after Quincy Jones.
But the further my transition went, the more I realized that I wasn’t a man, and never would be. We are told these days that when someone presents with gender dysphoria, this reflects a person’s “real” or “true” self, that the desire to change genders is set. But this was not the case for me. As I matured, I recognized that gender dysphoria was a symptom of my overall misery, not its cause.
Five years after beginning my medical transition to becoming male, I began the process of detransitioning. A lot of trans men talk about how you can’t cry with a high dose of testosterone in your body, and this affected me too: I couldn’t release my emotions. One of the first signs that I was becoming Keira again was that—thankfully, at last—I was able to cry. And I had a lot to cry about.
The consequences of what happened to me have been profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently changed voice, facial hair. When I was seen at the Tavistock clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body.
But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my naïve hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery. [My emphasis - BS]
And that is why Kiera took the clinic to court - and won, with the judges ruling that children under the age of 16 considering gender reassignment are unlikely to be mature enough to give informed consent to be prescribed puberty-blocking drugs. In response to a higher court last week overturning that ruling because it foresaw a complicated arrangement for establishing protection for young people:
Bell said she planned to seek leave to appeal to the supreme court, adding: “A global conversation has begun and has been shaped by this case. There is more to be done. It is a fantasy and deeply concerning that any doctor could believe a 10-year-old could consent to the loss of their fertility.”
The parent, author and columnist, Rod Dreher, comments:
Parents need to wake up, and wake up fast. There is an entire world of activists and allies devoted to convincing your child that he or she is something other than what they are, in terms of sex and gender. They are constantly trying to undermine your kid. You probably have no idea what it’s like.
You might recall me telling you about meeting a Catholic father in Slovenia this summer, a man whose 12-year-old daughter is locked in a profound depression because some older teens from the US that she met online convinced her that she has to choose her gender identity quickly, before puberty really sets in.
The girl is obsessed with this idea, doesn’t want to go to school, is struggling with eating, and so forth. This family is sitting in Slovenia, but the Internet made it possible for these ghouls in Oregon to colonize the child’s mind.
The message that comes through forcefully from all this is that parents must be constantly talking to their children about this topic because it is running hot on the platforms where young people congregate, and - don't forget - in many classrooms, too. Parents have to work hard to counter those two influences.
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