By Steve Sailer
04/12/2021
As I’ve often pointed out, the news media insists that everything it reports on be a trend even if it’s just interesting: e.g., “Why Are Women Increasingly Falling in Love with Death Row Murderers?” In reality, nobody knows whether women are increasingly falling in love with Death Row murderers, but the topic is simply interesting, as Tracey Ullman has been pointing out for the last quarter of a century. It would be perfectly reasonable to write about the reasons women fall in love with Death Row murderers without contending that it’s a growing trend, but you are only supposed to write about increasing phenomena.
Thus, if I were a normal journalist, I’d entitle this something like: “Why Are Journalists Increasingly Framing Everything As an Upward Trend?” But, in truth, I don’t know that this media practice is rising in frequency. It seems pretty common as far back as I can remember.
But there’s one thing that is not a trend. From The New York Times opinion section:
Transgender Childhood Is Not a ‘Trend’
As far back as historians have found evidence of transgender people, they’ve found transgender children.By Jules Gill-Peterson
Ms. Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of “Histories of the Transgender Child.”
If you can’t trust a professor of English for a valid grasp of statistics, who can you trust?
April 5, 2021
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. …
If there were a few of a thing in the past and there are many of a thing in the present, that can’t possibly be described as a “trend” because of reasons.
In the Arkansas state legislature, Joseph Backholm, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, appeared in front of a House committee reviewing legislation that would ban gender-affirming health care for transgender youth. (The bill was vetoed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Monday.) Mr. Backholm’s argument in favor of the bill opened with the premise that “the recent increase in those claiming to be transgender can only be described as astronomical” and framed transgender identity as a “cultural phenomenon” of 21st-century teenagers.
The idea that transgender youth are new and poorly understood, and therefore should be treated with intense caution and scrutiny, is reinforced by many opponents of trans children’s access to health care and sports. Perhaps the most literal example is Lisa Littman’s coining of the phrase “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), for a supposed condition in which children “suddenly” become transgender because of peer influence and experience gender dysphoria without any warning — to their parents, that is.
Of course, parents can’t possibly be aware of the true gender of their children. What do parents know about their children’s preferences in toys, clothes, cartoons, activities, and the like? Do children demand that their parents provide them with gender specific accoutrements? I mean, if I ever had any children, I’d raise them in a completely gender neutral fashion. I’m sure that they’d play equally enthusiastically with whatever purportedly gender-specific toy I chose to give them. Are you saying that I’d be a bad parent and cause my children to cry on Christmas morning by not catering to their gender-stereotypical demands?
ROGD is not a formal mental health diagnosis, and the journal that published Dr. Littman’s article issued a correction and an apology after an outpouring of criticism from doctors and advocates.
It’s almost as if M-to-F ex-men are the Navy SEALs of the Woke, who are man-for-man the highest IQ and most aggressive hit-men of Wokeness.
Yet the term is still widely cited by right-wing media and was also offered without context by Mr. Backholm in his testimony to the Arkansas House.
These lines from Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,”
Which I reviewed here in “Poison, Mutilate, and Sterilize.”
capture the tenor of the skepticism floating around online: “Three decades ago, these girls might have hankered for liposuction while their physical forms wasted away. Two decades ago, today’s trans-identified teens might have ‘discovered’ a repressed memory of childhood trauma. Today’s diagnostic craze isn’t demonic possession — it’s ‘gender dysphoria.’”
But Ms. Shrier’s claim is not supported by the fact that children like Val have lived transgender lives long before, not to mention during, each of the time periods that she invokes when girls would have supposedly sought out a different path than transition. Transgender children from every region in the country and many different backgrounds have been able to transition as far back as medical opportunities have been available.
A 17-year-old girl grew up in a small town in Missouri in the early 1940s and went to see her family doctor for advice. In 1969, a 15-year-old trans girl moved from rural Ohio to Columbus to live with her sister and find a doctor who could provide gender-affirming care. Around the same time in Los Angeles, a teenager started hormones, changed her name and enrolled in a new school as a girl. And in 1973, 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.
Proof that this is not a trend!!!!
How can you claim that adolescent girls with smartphones who suddenly decide, like most of their online friends, that therefore they are boys, are vulnerable to fads?
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.