Cheated by adults: why the number of transgender teenagers is rapidly growing around the world

Network analyst Eis_gen drew attention to a characteristic trend in recent years around the world - a rapid increase in the number of transgender people among adolescents, and mainly among girls, who began to very often turn to medical specialists with their problems.

According to the results of annual surveys in America from 2006 to 2016, the number of students who consider themselves transgender grew almost 20 times (from 0.09% to 1.79%). Roughly the same is happening in New Zealand, Great Britain and Sweden. In the latter, the number of those wishing to change the sex of 13-17-year-old girls has grown 16 times, and a law has been passed there that lowered the age at which it is allowed to seek medical help without parental consent to 15 years, and from the age of 12 it is already possible to demand to change the gender legally, so that according to the documents, the girl would be considered a boy and vice versa.

At the same time, many experts are sure that hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgeries threaten adolescents with serious consequences, and now the Swedish society is fiercely discussing this problem. Already 14-year-old girls undergo double mastectomy, removing both breasts, often hastily, without serious psychiatric research. It turns out that many of them have mental problems - anxiety disorder, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism. The fact that some of them have already admitted that they regret changing their sex does not add optimism.

Scientists in a study published in the journal PLOS ONE (The Public Library of Science) through a survey found that the majority of girls (62.5%) had mental problems, and not related to gender identity, and for their parents the child's decision about it was a complete surprise that he was transgender. It is known that with an early form of gender dysphoria, girls prefer to play boyish games and dress like boys, but parents did not notice such signs for their children. In addition, it turned out that children, before declaring their transgenderness, spent a lot of time in online groups led by people who changed their gender and began to hate all non-transgender people, but reacted to any attempts to discuss this problem by adults as discrimination, hypnotically repeating spells and phrases common on the sites of the LGBT community.

The author of the article, Lisa Lipman, explains these facts by a special, previously undescribed condition - "rapidly developing gender dysphoria", which, unlike usual gender dysphoria, is associated with the fact that online communication with transgender people leads adolescents suffering from mental problems to the fact that they endure onto someone else's state, copying it inadequately. That is, in fact, this is an external influence on the psyche, which leads to the fact that adolescents begin to consider themselves transgender. In fact, this can be interpreted as "social and group contagiousness".

This article caused a scandal: transgender activists accused experts of biased and intolerant conclusions and demanded the magazine to cancel this article, so that as a result its author Lisa Lippman even lost her job as a consultant, and the editors of the magazine asked the author to amend the article. Fortunately, this did not change its meaning. The term “contagiousness” caused particular irritation among transgender people. True, several thousand people have already stood up for the expert, signing a petition in support of her.

The authors of another scientific article also argue that the increase in the number of adolescents with gender problems is associated with external influences. They compared the number of young people who go to clinics with their gender issues with the number of publications about transgender people in the media over the same period of time, and found out that these parameters are related.

The bars indicate the number of young people referred to these clinics at different times, and the number of publications per year on this issue is indicated by blue dots. High correlation is evident!

The author notes two factors that can increase the growth in the number of such adolescents. Firstly, it is the influence of information from social networks and the media, which pushes them to think that their problems are closely linked to the "wrong gender", which should be "corrected". Moreover, children with mental problems are especially sensitive to this effect. And secondly, it is the haste with which gender clinics begin treatment.

However, the author admits that real transgender people, in whom the development of body sex and the formation of sexual identity from birth went in different directions, have existed at all times.