[Gertie Keddle]

When Your Daughter Defies Biology
The burden of mothers whose children suffer from ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria.’
By Abigail Shrier
Jan. 6, 2019 3:00 p.m. ET
WSJ
Excerpt:

A reader contacted me under a pseudonym a few months ago. She turned out to be a prominent Southern lawyer with a problem she hoped I’d write about. Her college-age daughter had always been a “girly girl” and intellectually precocious, but had struggled with anxiety and depression. She liked boys and had boyfriends in high school, but also faced social challenges and often found herself on the outs with cliques.

The young woman went off to college—which began, as it often does these days, with an invitation to state her name, sexual orientation and “pronouns.” When her anxiety flared during her first semester, she and several of her friends decided their angst had a fashionable cause: “gender dysphoria.” Within a year, the lawyer’s daughter had begun a course of testosterone. Her real drug—the one that hooked her—was the promise of a new identity. A shaved head, boys’ clothes and a new name formed the baptismal waters of a female-to-male rebirth.

This is the phenomenon Brown University public-health researcher Lisa Littman has identified as “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” ROGD differs from traditional gender dysphoria, a psychological affliction that begins in early childhood and is characterized by a severe and persistent feeling that one was born the wrong sex. ROGD is a social contagion that comes on suddenly in adolescence, afflicting teens who’d never exhibited any confusion about their sex.

Like other social contagions, such as cutting and bulimia, ROGD overwhelmingly afflicts girls. But unlike other conditions, this one—though not necessarily its sufferers—gets full support from the medical community. The standard for dealing with teens who assert they are transgender is “affirmative care”—immediately granting the patient’s stated identity. There are, to be sure, a few dissenters. “This idea that what we’re supposed to do as therapists is to ‘affirm’? That’s not my job,” said psychotherapist Lisa Marchiano. “If I work with someone who’s really suicidal because his wife left him, I don’t call his wife up and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to come back.’ . . . We don’t treat suicide by giving people exactly what they want.”

But giving in to patients’ demands is exactly what most medical professionals do when faced with ROGD. Like fashionable and tragic misdiagnoses of the past, this one comes with irreversible physical trauma. “Top surgery,” a euphemism for double mastectomies. Infertility. Permanent rounding of facial features or squaring of the jawline. Bodily and facial hair that never goes away.

Planned Parenthood furnishes testosterone to young women on an “informed consent” basis, without requiring any psychological evaluation. Student health plans at 86 colleges—including those of nearly every Ivy League school—cover not only cross-sex hormones but surgery as well.

Article

WSJ has a paywall. Reddit has a thread with a copy of the article

[Censport]

Recently, I did an image search for "before and after feminism". Many, many cases of feminine girls who transformed into tattooed, pierced, slobs with shaved heads and hairy pits.

No wonder the birth rate among us honkies is dropping. ;)

Young people are naturally insecure, and girls especially so. Girls who are coddled and don't grow into women remain insecure. These girls go off to college and instead of becoming women, they become "womyn", and get the acceptance and affirmation they seek from very unhealthy people.

Rest in Peace, America. It was nice while it lasted.

[Taggart Transcontinental]

Rapid Onset? Does the rapidity of this onset also have to do with the exposure to a college campus?

[Gertie Keddle]

Taggart Transcontinental, on 13 January 2019 - 02:53 PM, said:

Rapid Onset? Does the rapidity of this onset also have to do with the exposure to a college campus?

Or other middle or high school kids, yeah. From what I have observed with the friends of my stepkids and my own kids, we went from anorexia to cutting to gender confusion as forms of adolescent girl angst.

[Wag-a-Muffin (D)]

I have a theory about this. I believe high school, college age youth is a time to rebel.
It used to be you rebelled by going against social norms to show the world your seriousness.
But as there are now (almost) no society rules, you have to go further and further out to make a statement.

(I don't know if I explained this very well, but it makes sense to me. Whereas kids in my generation could go bra-less, let their hair grow, or stop taking baths to protest--kids now have no "walls" to bounce off of. So they have bounce further into unexplored territory.
ie.] I will protest by changing my gender--my species--or finding some still frowned upon perversion for my rite of passage.)

[Dean Adam Smithee]

Censport, on 13 January 2019 - 11:54 AM, said:

Recently, I did an image search for "before and after feminism". Many, many cases of feminine girls who transformed into tattooed, pierced, slobs with shaved heads and hairy pits.

No wonder the birth rate among us honkies is dropping. ;)

Young people are naturally insecure, and girls especially so. Girls who are coddled and don't grow into women remain insecure. These girls go off to college and instead of becoming women, they become "womyn", and get the acceptance and affirmation they seek from very unhealthy people.

Rest in Peace, America. It was nice while it lasted.

:yeahthat:

Democracy, as the Greeks learned, has a shelf life of about ~170 years. USA was never MEANT to be a Democracy ("A Republic, if you can keep it." per Benjamin F.) Well, we couldn't. And here we are.

[Noclevermoniker]

Wag-a-Muffin (D), on 13 January 2019 - 06:02 PM, said:

I have a theory about this. I believe high school, college age youth is a time to rebel.
It used to be you rebelled by going against social norms to show the world your seriousness.
But as there are now (almost) no society rules, you have to go further and further out to make a statement.

(I don't know if I explained this very well, but it makes sense to me. Whereas kids in my generation could go bra-less, let their hair grow, or stop taking baths to protest--kids now have no "walls" to bounce off of. So they have bounce further into unexplored territory.
ie.] I will protest by changing my gender--my species--or finding some still frowned upon perversion for my rite of passage.)

I think you’re right. With every kid being special, it now takes extremes to be “more specialer”.

[Coach]

Dean Adam Smithee, on 13 January 2019 - 06:06 PM, said:

:yeahthat:

Democracy, as the Greeks learned, has a shelf life of about ~170 years. USA was never MEANT to be a Democracy ("A Republic, if you can keep it." per Benjamin F.) Well, we couldn't. And here we are.

The span of Hebrew history as told in the Old Testament tells the same story over and over. God always stepped in to set things right. He will again.

[Ladybird]

Wag-a-Muffin (D), on 13 January 2019 - 06:02 PM, said:

I have a theory about this. I believe high school, college age youth is a time to rebel.
It used to be you rebelled by going against social norms to show the world your seriousness.
But as there are now (almost) no society rules, you have to go further and further out to make a statement.

(I don't know if I explained this very well, but it makes sense to me. Whereas kids in my generation could go bra-less, let their hair grow, or stop taking baths to protest--kids now have no "walls" to bounce off of. So they have bounce further into unexplored territory.
ie.] I will protest by changing my gender--my species--or finding some still frowned upon perversion for my rite of passage.)

Maybe it will go full circle with kids listening to Perry Como, boys wearing argyle sweaters, and girls wearing poodle skirts to rebel against their weirdo parents.

[Dean Adam Smithee]

Coach, on 14 January 2019 - 01:18 PM, said:

The span of Hebrew history as told in the Old Testament tells the same story over and over. God always stepped in to set things right. He will again.

I think I need to start building an ark. (But *I* will leave out the pairs of mice and cockroaches). Or, maybe the Mrs and I need to just walk away and I don't let her look back and get turned into a pillar of salt.

The Almighty definitely has a way of setting things straight; I just don't want to be caught in the crossfire. Arthur C. Clarke retire to Sri Lanka. He might have known a thing or two.

A great movie quote, can't remember the film: "When Britain legalized homosexuality, I left before it became mandatory" It's not far off, we live in a society where gays are MORE equal.

Best cartoon I've ever seen way, back in the '70s, in of all places a certain Men's Magazine that starts with an 'H': Streetcorner prophet holding a sign that says, "Jesus is coming soon. And, boy, is he pissed"

This post has been edited by Dean Adam Smithee: 14 January 2019 - 06:38 PM

[Wag-a-Muffin (D)]

Ladybird, on 14 January 2019 - 02:00 PM, said:

Maybe it will go full circle with kids listening to Perry Como, boys wearing argyle sweaters, and girls wearing poodle skirts to rebel against their weirdo parents.

That would be awesome!