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A veteran Vancouver teacher and counsellor has a warning for educators who are buying into what he sees as a pop psychology fad to over-diagnose gender dysphoria in young people.

Daryl Wakeham, who has taught for 13 year in public schools and 25 in private schools, says it’s dangerous for young people to start thinking they are transgendered when most are just sexually confused.

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Wakeham admits he’s succumbed to many other psychological fads that have come and gone in his decades in the B.C. school system. Many of them have led to tragic misdiagnoses of boys and girls and an over-reliance on pharmaceutical medications.

Wakeham is convinced the recent excitement about gender dysphoria is leading to another wrong-headed trend, which will be doing more harm than good to students, for whom it’s normal to struggle with gender and sexual identity.

Wakeham sent me this note without realizing that a prominent Toronto psychiatrist, Dr Susan Bradley, has recently written something along his lines in The National Post.