The Transgender Menace – The American Spectator

A message to Americans: you may not be interested in transgenderism, but transgenderism is interested in you — especially if you have school-age children or grandchildren.

You may not fully realize it, but, when it comes to this subject, you inhabit an entirely different society than you did twenty years ago. Published in the year 1994, the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) included several pages on gender identity disorder, a malady whose sufferers think they’re “a woman trapped in a man’s body” — or vice versa — and that is comparable to anorexia (skinny people thinking they’re fat) or body integrity identity disorder (people wanting their limbs amputated). The fifth edition (DSM-5), issued nineteen years later, eschews the word “disorder,” referring instead to “gender dysphoria,” which it defines as “clinically significant distress or impairment related to gender incongruence.”

Behind this revision lies an ideological sea change that is well-nigh unprecedented in human history. Today, the major medical and psychiatric organizations, the leading government officials in blue states and large cities, and almost everyone in America’s mainstream media and cultural establishment no longer view a man who says he’s a woman as someone suffering from a mental disorder. Rather, in accordance with the relatively new and reality-defying creed known as transgender ideology, he’s understood to be experiencing a thoroughly valid personal truth: namely, that he has a “gender identity” different from his biological sex — the sex, as one is now supposed to say, that was mistakenly “assigned at birth.” As the current slogan has it, “trans women are women” — yes, even if they still have penises. Only if a person’s trans identity causes “distress” or “impairment” is it, in the year 2022, a matter for psychiatry to address.[1]

DSM-IV stated that there were no reliable statistics on the prevalence of gender identity disorder, but it noted that “roughly 1 per 30,000 adult males and 1 per 100,000 adult females seek sex-reassignment surgery.” In other words, as of the year 1994, the number of people claiming to have a gender identity at odds with their biological sex was vanishingly small. Note that the book referred to “adults”: at the time, the idea of performing such surgery on minors was unheard of.

In the almost three decades since, this entire picture has been transformed. The number of people identifying as trans has exploded. Today, most are young people. In 2017, the number of medically insured American children aged six to seventeen with new diagnoses of gender dysphoria was 15,172; that number rose to 18,321 in 2018; 21,375 in 2019; 24,847 in 2020; and 42,167 in 2021. Whereas most self-identified transgender individuals used to be biological males, most are now biological females, as documented in books such as Helen Joyce’s Trans and Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage. Whereas the tiny number of adults who used to present themselves for “sex reassignment” treatment could recall feeling since childhood that they’d been born in the wrong body, many trans minors today don’t — hence the newly identified syndrome called rapid-onset gender dysphoria. Moreover, at least three-quarters of the children who are deciding today that they’re trans already have other psychiatric issues, one of the most prevalent being autism.

In any event, the scale of this phenomenon is staggering. “A quarter of the girls in my daughter’s class,” wrote one anonymous mother recently — I’ll call her Parent A — “identify as transgender. Seven out of 28.”[2] Another mother — Parent B — reported that at her daughter’s small school, “all the girls were either bi, trans, or lesbian.” It couldn’t be more obvious that these kids aren’t really experiencing gender dysphoria in the usual sense but have, in fact, been caught up in a toxic charade; yet, people in power who should know better continue to pretend otherwise. The number of children who’ve fallen for this charade should perhaps not be a great surprise. Years ago, anxious teenagers engaged in self-harm or became anorexic. Today they claim to be trans.

What’s different today is that while doctors used to do their best to keep patients from cutting themselves or losing too much weight, nowadays they parrot trans ideology — and act on it. Why? Some are in it for the money. Others, knowing that they might lose their licenses if they challenge this new orthodoxy, are too cowardly to stand up to it. And many of the doctors involved in the gender industry actually buy trans ideology’s premise that personal conviction, on this front anyway, trumps objective medical fact. Many, indeed, are themselves trans, and they are activists — crusaders for transitioning — as much as they are doctors. (This isn’t the first time, by the way, that many American physicians have gone along with a calamitous trend: between 1949 and 1952, at least fifty thousand lobotomies were performed in the U.S. because they were thought to ameliorate reduce some psychiatric mental disorders; in reality, they were a nightmare, replacing anxiety with almost total mental incapacity.)

One reason why transgenderism caught on is that teachers and school administrators have been a special target of trans activists, who have persuaded a great many of them that transgenderism is common among young children and that it’s a major part of a teacher’s job to help such children discover and announce the truth about themselves. In many school systems, teachers are expected to refer confused children to a school counselor or psychologist — who, in turn, will almost always affirm those children’s declared identity and set them on a path that will involve encounters with psychiatrists, endocrinologists, and probably surgeons. “My daughter’s trans identity,” recalls Parent A, “started when the school taught a module on ‘identity’ during which they told a group of 11-year-olds that, if you feel uncomfortable in your body, it means you are transgender. My daughter had just had her first period two months prior to this class. Of course she was feeling uncomfortable in her body. She went home, looked up ‘transgender’ on Tiktok, and that was it. She was now trans.”

That teacher’s irresponsible statement is par for the course nowadays. Over a period of decades in the late twentieth century, it increasingly became considered acceptable for boys to play with dolls and for girls to play with toy cars; moreover, if a boy was effeminate or a girl was a tomboy, it was understood that he or she might grow up to be gay. Now, however, children who violate traditional stereotypes often are told that they’re trans. Last April, Christopher F. Rufo wrote at City Journal about a 277-page guidebook explaining to teachers in Evanston, Illinois, how to teach gender to children from pre-kindergarten through third grade. One passage instructed teachers to tell pupils: “When we show whether we feel like a boy or a girl or some of each, we are expressing our GENDER IDENTITY…. There are also children who feel like a girl AND a boy; or like neither a boy OR a girl. We can call these children TRANSGENDER…. Your identity is for YOU to decide!”

Evanston isn’t an outlier. As Parent A puts it, more and more American schools — at every level in every part of the country — are engaged in the “non-stop celebration of LGBTQI+ identities,” exposing children to “a relentless stream of identity flags and rainbows” and celebrating “[t]ransgender ‘heroes’ like Jazz Jennings,” who in 2007, at age six, made a famous appearance on ABC’s 20/20 and who, now twenty-two, has been the star of a TLC reality show since 2015. Moreover, while mainstream media outlets, almost without exception, push transgender ideology on adults, the social media platforms on which many youngsters spend several hours every day extol boys and girls who identify as the opposite sex — or as “nonbinary,” or as members of some other newly invented gender category, the number of which seems to mount by the week. The trans propaganda aimed at children routinely whitewashes the finality and gruesomeness of the surgical intervention involved — mastectomies, for example, are called as “top surgery,” while hysterectomies and penectomies (penis removals) are “bottom surgery.”

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Why all this celebration of transgenderism? Because trans activists — whose stratagem it was, many years ago, to create the acronym “LGBT” and its numerous variations (such as “LGBTQI+”), thereby yoking transgenderism to the entirely…