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More Teenage Girls Are Identifying as Trans, But the Media Doesn’t Want You to Know About It

By Maureen Collins posted on:
December 18, 2020

This is a story told in two news items: one you probably heard about and another you may not have seen.

The first story involves the actor “Elliot” Page who came out as transgender on Twitter. The announcement was met with much praise from celebrities. News outlets ran headlines describing Page, born a female, with masculine pronouns.

The second story is about a woman named Keira Bell who won a court case against the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. Bell claimed the NHS’s gender clinic rushed her into taking cross-sex hormones and undergoing a double mastectomy in order to begin to “transition” into a man—all when she was 16 years old.

Bell later regretted her decision and thought that doctors should have “challenged” her more on her claims that she was in the wrong body. A high court in the U.K. agreed.

Yet, headlines about Keira’s story seemed to focus on how the case angered transgender activists.

Why are news outlets taking Page’s personal story at face-value while challenging and even suppressing Bell’s story?

The answer scratches the surface of a disturbing epidemic among teenage girls that media and activists are determined to cover up.

Girls Are Altering Their Bodies & Facing Regret

Everyone who has experienced being a teenage girl in high school can relate to how awkward and difficult a time it can be. And on top of that, girls growing up today deal with a toxic social media culture telling them they must look and behave a certain way to be accepted.

It’s no wonder girls are in search of a refuge from the constant comparison and negativity they face online.

But a new book written by journalist Abigail Shrier says that many girls are misled and believe that the answer is “transitioning” into a male.

The book, Irreversible Damage, details the phenomenon first identified by Brown University researcher Lisa Littman. Littman invented the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria” to describe a rapid increase of teenagers—in particular, girls—with no previous history of gender dysphoria suddenly identifying as the opposite sex.

“[Girls] were coming out in very short periods of time in friend groups,” said Shrier, “And there was just no reason you would see a 70 times the expected prevalence rate within clusters of friends.”

There are three reasons this should sound the alarm.

1. Girls aren’t typically the population that experiences gender dysphoria.

“Gender dysphoria”—or the psychological condition of feeling uncomfortable with your biological sex—has traditionally been a male problem. Former Chief of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Dr. Paul McHugh, said that gender dysphoria was originally seen as “a rare issue of a few men.”

“We have a hundred-year diagnostic history of [gender dysphoria],” says Shrier, “and it always began in early childhood and was overwhelmingly male.” Now there is a massive increase of girls dominating the transgender category. A study found that the U.K. had a 4,000% increase in children identifying as the opposite sex within ten years—most of whom were girls!

2. This rapid increase in girls identifying as boys has all the makings of something called a “social contagion.”

This refers to a phenomenon where a group of people experience a psychological condition because they see and hear others experiencing that condition.

And teenage girls are historically a susceptible group to social contagions. It has been suggested that in the 1980s many high school and college-aged girls developed the eating disorder anorexia nervosa through social contagion. It is possible that the current uptick in girls with gender dysphoria is spread in a similar way—within friend groups of girls.

3. Many of these girls will regret this decision later in life

And many will go on to regret their decision to take testosterone or have their breasts removed—only to discover that many of the results of these interventions are irreversible.

Take Keira Bell for example. Today, Bell is a 23-year-old woman who will live with a decision she made at 16 for the rest of her life.

“I was allowed to run with this idea that I had, almost like a fantasy, as a teenager.... and it has affected me in the long run as an adult,” she said. "I'm very young. I've only just stepped into adulthood and I have to deal with this kind of burden or radical difference…"

Why the Media Doesn’t Want You to Know About This

There are many women just like Keira Bell—“detransitioners”—who regret the decision they made at a young age to alter their bodies. But perhaps you haven’t heard of them.

Stories of detransitoners are unlikely to appear in the news because those who share them are often faced with backlash from transgender activists. This is just one example of how the media is silencing those who speak out about what is happening to teenage girls.

Lisa Littman’s study, which first raised the issue of rapid onset gender dysphoria, was censored by Littman’s own university.

Not surprisingly, Abigail Shrier is also facing backlash for her book. Amazon refused to run ads for the book, which is currently on the site’s best-seller list. Target pulled the book from shelves after a single customer complained on Twitter.

There is something about this book that transgender activists don’t want people to know about.

Shrier’s book doesn’t even conclude that one can’t change their biological sex—it simply raises questions about a current phenomenon in teenage girls. And yet, even questioning transgenderism is seen as a threat to the movement.

Maybe this is because activists subconsciously know their movement rests on shaky logic. Unfortunately, it seems they are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of young girls for their cause.

Maureen Collins

Maureen Collins

Digital Cultivation Manager

Maureen Collins serves as the Digital Cultivation Manager at Alliance Defending Freedom.

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