Social justice liberals are dead set on making it casual for children to manipulate the physical and chemical biology of their bodies, so on Monday, the New York Times ran an op-ed insisting that transgenderism in minors is as old as time itself.
“They were not forced into transitioning by adults,” wrote Jules Gill-Peterson, relying on her deep well of experience in the field as a University of Pittsburgh English professor. She added, “And they were certainly not transitioning because it was trendy or socially popular. The high visibility of transgender youth in this country is quite recent, but transgender children themselves are not. Indeed, as far back as historians like me have found evidence of transgender people, we have found transgender children.”
Gill-Peterson writes with the tone professionalized by the weirdos who maintain that there is self-evidently nothing to be concerned about when it comes to loading children up with puberty-blocking hormones or even allowing them to decide whether irreversible, elective surgery is a good choice at the age of 15. It’s a tone so glib that it’s difficult to believe they don’t realize they’re talking aloud.
We can hear you!
And yes, Gill-Peterson did write cheerfully about a 15-year-old biological girl who wanted her breasts removed. “In 1973,” she recalled, “a doctor in upstate New York familiarized himself with trans medicine in order to offer hormones and, when the time was right, a referral for top surgery for a 15-year-old trans boy.”
Don’t you love a happy ending?
The social justice enthusiasm for everyone “living his truth” aside, the science on whether children benefit from trying to change their sex is, at best, mixed and, at worst, tragically grim. I document it all at great length in my book Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People.
A study released just last week by the England-based National Institute for Health and Care Excellence found “very low” evidence to suggest that puberty-blocking drugs in adolescents was helpful in correcting any feelings they had about their mental health or sense of well being.
Of the few scientific studies that otherwise exist about transgenderism, indications are that the people afflicted with gender dysphoria will be dealing with lifelong issues of severe depression and even physical ailment, regardless of whether they find it satisfying to identify with the opposite sex.
However, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that, well, maybe letting minors tinker with their bodies and their chemical makeup isn’t something that should cause us all to leap for joy.
The Atlantic, in 2018, published an extensive report on children experiencing gender dysphoria and found that youth clinicians in the United States were “reporting large upticks in new referrals” of transgender patients. One young girl profiled by the magazine was 14-year-old “Claire” (not her real name), who recalled having internalized feelings that she was male. She had pleaded for her parents to help her find hormone therapy, and she eventually asked them to support her in undergoing a double mastectomy to remove her breasts.
The feelings grew over the course of several years, but one day in late 2017, Claire looked in the mirror and realized that the changes she was making to her appearance, which by that point was considerably more masculine, weren’t helping her feelings of anxiety and depression. “I was still miserable, and I still hated myself,” she said.
With more consideration, she determined that, at their core, her feelings were driven by an inability to fit in with many of the girls she knew at school. But in time, she found some who shared her interests. “It was kind of sudden when I thought, ‘You know, maybe this isn’t the right answer—maybe it’s something else.’ But it took a while to actually set in that yes, I was definitely a girl.”
Transgender enthusiasts such as Jules Gill-Peterson should ask themselves: Did Claire need more affirmation, or did she need responsible adults?
