lesbian-lizards:

80% of this article by anti-abortion activist Jonathon Van Maren was lifted from a Times article (behind paywall) by
journalist
Janice Turner. Instead of giving a conservative website more clicks just
read the section he copy/pasted or pay for the original article.

Recently the NHS was called upon by the Equality and Human Rights
Commission to preserve the fertility of young trans people by banking
their sperm and eggs. Unreported was the bleak truth: if children take
the puberty-blocking drug Lupron then proceed to cross-sex hormones they
won’t have any fertility to preserve. Their gametes can’t mature enough
to bank. Indeed if your natal puberty is blocked you may never orgasm
or feel sexual desire. Imagine the outcry if, say, disabled children
were effectively neutered at 11.

But where is the ethical debate and long-term research into how
Lupron — a prostate cancer drug used “off label” on children — affects
brain development at puberty? Or into the impact of massive, lifelong
doses of testosterone on young natal women’s health? Or into where this
enormous surge in children diagnosed with gender dysphoria (ie feeling
they are in the wrong sex body) is coming from? In particular, why are
1,806 of the 2,509 adolescents (72 per cent) referred in 2017-18 to the
Tavistock NHS gender identity service girls?

Such is the power of the trans lobby to damage academic careers
with accusations of transphobia that few dare challenge new orthodoxies.
Which makes research published this week in the peer-reviewed science
journal Plos One by Lisa Littman of Brown University remarkable. As a
public health expert, she addressed the rise in teenage girls with
gender dysphoria like any other medical outbreak. This condition affects
only 0.7 per cent of the population, so why were clinicians reporting
clusters of trans cases in many high schools?

She questioned 250 parents whose teenagers (83 per cent girls)
had shown no signs of gender dysphoria as children. The vast majority
(63 per cent) had pre-existing mental health problems including serious
psychiatric disorders; half self-harmed; half had suffered a traumatic
event such as death of a parent/sibling, family divorce or sexual abuse.
(One previously happy 16-year-old was raped and a few months later
declared herself trans.) Such “coming out” invariably occurred after
binge-consumption of online trans forums on Reddit or Tumblr. Many girls
did so in tandem with peers: one parent reports how her 14-year-old
daughter and three friends chose male names and announced they were
trans boys.

This, says Dr Littman, has direct parallels with other “peer
contagions” in teenage girl cliques such as bullying, drug use and
anorexia. In person and on chatrooms, anorexic girls egg each other on
to avoid doctors’ efforts to make them eat and compete to be the
thinnest. “If similar mechanisms are at work in the context of gender
dysphoria,” she notes, “this greatly complicates evaluation and
treatment.”

Online trans activists, she notes, encourage young people to
interpret their vaguest dissatisfactions as signs they are trans. Do you
feel an outsider? Are you awkward in your body? One parent wrote: “I
believe my child experienced what many kids feel on the cusp of puberty —
uncomfortableness!” But the online world insisted she was in the wrong
body. Such forums advised young people to edit their childhoods to
persuade clinicians they had always felt trans to gain treatment. One
girl who went through early puberty felt fat because she’d grown
breasts: when she discovered that hating your breasts is a sign of being
transgender she edited the text of her diary.

There are strong comparisons here, says Dr Littman, with “false
memory syndrome”, a now-debunked theory among 1990s psychotherapists
that ordinary problems, like struggling to form relationships, meant a
person was repressing childhood abuse. In the course of therapy these
wholly imaginary incidents were “recovered”.

In publishing this report, Dr Littman imperils her reputation.
Trans groups will ask what the hell a parent knows about a child’s inner
thoughts, or dismiss her respondents as bigots. (In fact more than 80
per cent support gay marriage and trans rights.) They will claim these
kids are just realising their true trans identity, although the vast
majority were reportedly less happy and stable after they “came out”.
They will do anything but admit that what Dr Littman has termed “rapid
onset gender dysphoria” among girls is a social contagion, because this
undermines their key ideological principle, that gender is not
constructed but innate.

The trans movement is mainly led by trans women, who never
experienced the maelstrom of female puberty, its intense but fleeting
certainties. Some transitioned late after fathering children. What do
they care about the fertility of troubled girls? Meanwhile LGBT groups
such as Stonewall lobby to expedite hormones and surgery, rather than
urge diagnostic caution.

The vast majority of these cases involve lesbians, whose same-sex
attractions are seldom clarified until late teens. By then they will be
compelled towards blockers, testosterone and double mastectomies, with
ovaries, as one endocrinologist put it, like “shrivelled raisins”. In
this medicalised iteration of conversion therapy, these young lesbians
will be transformed into heterosexual men. It’s time we stopped making
it up as we go along.

Bombshell study exposes transgenderism as an extremely dangerous “peer contagion”