How the Left Tries to Convince Kids That They're Transsexual

How they manipulate troubled kids

Back in January, I republished a piece called, What I Would Tell a Teenager Thinking of Transitioning Who Asked for My Advice About What He/She Should Do. Well yesterday, I read a piece by a young woman named Helena who was EXACTLY the type of person I wish could have read it BEFORE she started transitioning (thankfully, she didn’t go all the way). Her piece is called, By Any Other Name: The story of my transition and detransition, and what struck me about it was how perfectly it mirrored everything that was in my original column. Her problems didn’t go away because she transitioned. If anything, they got worse. Pumping large amounts of testosterone into her body? Big mistake. Her fantasies of what it was like to be a man? They turned out to be false. We could go on and on, but the most striking thing was also something I talked about in the opening of the first piece that I think so many people have blocked out or discounted:

We live in a world where it seems like everyone is encouraging any teenager thinking about transitioning to go through with it. If you are in that position, social media influencers will be telling you to go for it, psychologists in many states start with the presumption that you deserve “gender-affirming care,” your parents are being told that you’ll kill yourself if they tell you not to do it, communities of people online are cheering you on, and your friends at school are going out of their way to encourage you because they’re afraid of being accused of “transphobia” if they suggest that you should put on the brakes.

The truth is that an awful lot of people on the Left, including people in authority, are promoting, pushing, and trying to talk your kids into being trans. Fortunately, it’s pretty unlikely to work on the kids that are psychologically healthy, but there are a lot of teenagers that doesn’t describe. They’re struggling. They’re having a hard time and significant numbers of them are being convinced that becoming trans is the solution to their problems.

Of course, this is false.

What I wanted to do with this piece was give you some excerpts from Helena’s 14,000+-word piece showing you how transsexualism is promoted and pushed on kids today. Obviously, given the length of her column, there is a lot more in there and it’s excellent. In fact, I would strongly encourage you to read it.

Additionally, as you read these excerpts, I’d like to ask you if this is how our schools, psychologists, and society should be reacting to a troubled teenage girl who has decided, after being immersed in what she admits were weird subcultures on Tumblr, that she’s actually a guy. Let me know what you think in the comments section.

Now on to what Helena had to say:

...To add fuel to the fire, I went to my school guidance counselor and told her I was very depressed (true) because my parents wouldn’t accept me as trans (not so true). She completely affirmed my perception and told me how sorry she was that my parents weren’t more supportive. She looked online with me at the local children’s hospital gender clinic and said she would call to see how long their waiting list was. We also came up with a budget plan for how I would pay for testosterone using an informed consent clinic if I waited until I turned eighteen. In the meantime, she said I should talk to the school psychologist to help me deal with my family being so transphobic. I asked my mom if I could stop seeing the therapist I had been seeing occasionally and switch to the school psychologist. My mom, having no idea that the school was affirming me and helping me put together plans to transition behind her back, agreed.

 The psychologist was also very affirming, and again told me how sad it was that my parents weren’t supportive and that I was a real and valid boy. After years of self-harm, depression, and struggling with an eating disorder in silence, it felt nice to have all these adults suddenly take such an interest in my “mental health”. It was just further proof to me that being trans was my ticket to happiness, anybody who urged caution only wanted to hurt me and hold me back. The psychologist brought up the idea of a family session to work things out between me and my mom, and once I felt assured that she would take my side in the matter, I agreed. I hoped coming face to face with a psychologist would finally convince my mom to take the fact that I was transgender seriously. In our session, the therapist and I all but ganged up on my mom, telling her that I needed to transition to be happy, and that trans youth are at a high risk of suicide if they are not given “access” to hormones and surgeries. Predictably, my mom did not respond well, and we both left the session feeling bitter.

...Before long, my (trans) name was called and I looked up to see a tall, heavy woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a clipboard. As we walked back through the halls of the clinic, she introduced herself as a social worker and told me we would do a brief intake to understand what I was looking to get out of the services at Planned Parenthood. I told her that I had drove six hours all the way from my hometown, and I think she responded with some comment about how I must be so determined. When we arrived at our room, she motioned for me to sit and she began the intake process. This process consisted of a handful of basic questions...

...Typically, females beginning a masculinizing testosterone regimen are started on a relatively low dose and monitored for a few weeks or months, at which point the dose may be increased. Considering I hadn’t even had blood work, in hindsight this would have been the more responsible way to do it. That is not what happened in my case, though. When the nurse practitioner suggested a lower dose to start, I objected, saying I believed I had “higher estrogen than most AFABs” (people “assigned female at birth”), citing the size of my thighs and breasts as evidence. This was acceptable to the nurse practitioner, and she asked me what dose I would like to start at. Nervously, I said something along the lines of, “well what’s the highest we can go?” Most female transitioners I’ve known have told me they started at 25mg, or even less. Some of my FtM friends who are still on testosterone and look remarkably like natal males are only on 50mg. I was prescribed 100mg of testosterone, to be self-injected into my thigh muscle weekly, starting that very day.

...Within a month, I moved into the campus LGBT house due to issues with the roommate and the three other people who lived there with me were my entire social circle. We mostly sat around smoking weed and drinking, and my academic performance plummeted. I was also advised to financially emancipate myself by one of the campus gender studies professors who was “helping” me navigate being “disowned” by my parents, which just created financial issues for me down the line that added to the stress.

...I was checked into the hospital psychiatric ward that night and remained for seven days. There, no inquiry was made into my high testosterone dosage or whether it might have been having an impact on my behavior. Instead, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, depression, and acute psychosis, for which I was prescribed four separate psychiatric medications. Upon my discharge, I dutifully took my prescribed medications and even felt validated by my being prescribed an “anti-psychotic”. I was thankful that I had finally been diagnosed as severely mentally ill and given strong medications that would fix my faulty brain chemistry and allow me to live a better life. For the next few weeks, I was to attend a thrice-weekly outpatient group therapy program that was three hours a day. In this intensive group therapy, we talked about mindfulness and how to manage the demands of work while living with “mental illness”, but deeper psychological work was absent, and once again the fact that I was a young biological female on a supraphysiological dosage of synthetic testosterone remained completely unaddressed. Throughout every experience in any mental health treatment during my trans identification, my testosterone treatment was never identified as a potential source of mental health symptoms, and my desire to be a “boy” was never questioned as possibly a result of pre-existing emotional issues.

...I started skipping testosterone injections because they made me so anxious, so I was only injecting once or twice a month. With this, my “episodes” dramatically decreased. I remember browsing trans subreddits in hopes I would get some answers for what to do if transitioning wasn’t improving my mental health. There were many posts asking this question, and by far the most common answer was to “just keep going” and that one day, when you passed well enough, it would all be worth it.

...Instead, I silently berated myself and catastrophized internally until I mustered the courage to tell my very pro-LGBT therapist: being trans had been a massive mistake. I remember her response clear as day: “But you always tell me about your terrible dysphoria!” “I know, but I… I don’t think that’s what it is” I replied, and started to tell her my still developing thoughts on how I had developed the “dysphoria” after finding out about gender identities online as a teenager, when I had been struggling with so many other emotional issues for a long time, and that in retrospect I must have gotten carried away, thinking that being trans was the explanation and solution for all of my problems. She wasn’t really hearing me and questioned the things I said from the angle of “you’re trying to talk yourself out of being trans because transphobia is making you hate yourself.” Ironic that nobody ever questioned my desire to be trans that way.

...I told Jamie that I was regretting my transition and questioning my trans identity in general, and predictably she was extremely upset. She reacted in anger, saying I must be confused and, like my therapist, accusing me of having these thoughts due to some underlying psychological issue, like only an insane person would ever regret being trans. She was not being uniquely harsh here; this is a common occurrence in the trans community.

Do you have kids? Well, be aware that this is going to be pushed on them, too – and yes, the system, from the school to the therapists, to the weird little subcultures online, are going to be trying to convince your kid that all the problems they have are a result of being the “wrong” gender. That may sound so incredible that it’s hard to believe, except you just read a description of it, and according to Helena…

I found out about “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD), which is a term coined by researcher Lisa Littman. It describes certain patterns parents have reported that preceded the sudden declaration by their adolescent children that they are transgender, most notably in adolescents who showed no pronounced gender incongruence in childhood. I read her study, and I just about ticked every box.

Pre-existing mental health issues, check. A friend group where multiple people began identifying as trans around the same time, check. Decline in mental health and parent-child relationship since identifying as trans, check. Expressing distrust/dislike of non-transgender people and spending less time around non-transgender friends, check. Isolating self from family, check. Only trusting information about gender from pro-transgender sources, check. Increased social media use directly preceding the identification as trans, check.

I was in shock. This was… me! Perhaps more importantly, this was… EVERYONE! All of those young biological females I had been friends with online and offline who identified as trans also fit this exact description.

This issue needs to be addressed not just culturally, it needs to be addressed in schools and even with therapists and doctors. The standard presumption all the way across the line when a person comes to them saying, “I want to transition” should be, “That’s probably a really bad idea and there are lots and lots of reasons why.” If that person is under 18, it shouldn’t go any farther than that. If we’re talking about an adult, then an adult is going to do what an adult is going to do, but responsible, professional, compassionate human beings should not be encouraging people down a path that we know leads to misery, loneliness, physical mutilation, and often suicide. We don’t encourage people to be depressed, tell them to lean into their schizophrenia, or try to convince paranoid patients that there really are people after them, and we shouldn’t be encouraging this type of mental illness either.

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