A reader comments on the “Cult Of Transgender” thread:

To those who are skeptical of the authenticity of the published letter and this situation in general, let me assure you that it is real and true. When it comes to teens, transgender is the new anorexia — a life-threatening trend/fad which is endangering vulnerable kids. I do not have US figures, but in the UK there has been a 930% increase in referrals for children who believe they are transgender — and this increase was seen in only one year. http://www.transgendertrend.com/uk-news-930-rise-in-child-gender-identity-referrals/ There are many theories attempting to explain the increase; some of them include social contagion, homophobia (a girl who likes other girls needs to be “fixed” and turned into a boy so she is straight), the proliferation of pornography (porn causing boys to expect girls to perform sexually as they have seen in porn, girls escape this situation by becoming boys), girls not wanting to be treated as second class citizens so they “become male” hoping to be treated better, etc. My own daughter professes to be a boy. It is a nightmare. It came out of nowhere at age 15 — this is not a case of a girl who always wanted to be a boy, or always acted like a boy. This is a girl who was proud to be a girl until she developed physically and boys and men started treating her like a piece of meat and a second class citizen. The nightmare is that doctors and therapists are not allowed to question why she wants to be a boy. The “cult of trans” dictates that her word must be taken or they can lose their professional standing. SO they are ready to prescribe testosterone shots and a double mastectomy despite the fact that she is a minor. These physical “medical treatments” for her psychological problem are permanent and barbaric. It is against “ethics” for professionals to provide any other treatment. It is a mother’s nightmare. It is real. I do not mind if she is a lesbian, but I am absolutely against her desire to transition medically. It will not solve her problems. Her problems are in her mind and in a society that allows grown men to fetishize underage girls, and allows boys to demand any and every kind of pornogrpahic sex from girls. Please visit 4thwavenow.com and read for yourself what is happening rather than me going on and on (believe me, I could). There is so much ground to cover in this sinister cult, and the website author does a much better job than I can. Trans is a sinister cult that our children are falling for and we need everyone’s help to educate kids, teachers, school counselors, doctors, parents, and therapists about what is really going on.

Yes, do visit 4thwavenow.com. It’s like reading samizdat for the sane and ideologically uncowed. There, I found this link to a recent New York magazine piece by Jesse Singal, who writes about overwhelming number of gender dysphoric kids — 80 percent — who eventually resolve their disharmony by identifying with their birth sex. This is called “desistance.” Excerpt:

Desistance doesn’t even come up by name in the Guardian article, but it’s an absolutely vital concept. Anyone thinking or writing about trans kids, in fact, should be familiar with exactly what this body of research does and doesn’t say, and how it applies to the early, evolving science of helping kids with gender dysphoria feel better. Part of problem is that some people don’t accept the desistance findings at all — they argue that the studies demonstrating high levels of desistance in gender-dysphoric kids are fatally flawed, and further that the very concept of desistance itself is really just a pretense for allowing bigots to deny the reality of trans people’s identities. This is understandable, in light of the very real discrimination trans people face every day and past misdeeds committed by the mental-health Establishment, but it’s also unfortunate: We can’t have an intelligent, informed discussion about these tricky issues if we’re going to ignore what is, at the moment, a solid scientific consensus.

More:

Childhood gender dysphoria, in short, is complicated and deserves a nuanced public conversation. The increasingly popular belief that gender dysphoria must mean a child will identify as trans in the long run has the opposite effect: It renders a complicated subject simple; it makes it harder to ask the questions that need to be asked. That doesn’t help anyone.

Sane, balanced, reasonable, right? Singal doesn’t deny that gender dysphoria exists, but he says that to discuss what medical science does and does not tell us about it, we have to separate it from pro-trans ideology. You will not be surprised to discover that on trans and trans-positive sites, Singal was denounced as a bigot. 4thwavenow is on it.

UPDATE: Look at this comment from a reader:

I was an adolescent psychotherapist for the better part of the last decade, had to stop seeing the kids last year because I couldn’t in good conscience do what was being asked if me – to immediately validate all emergent identities without exploration. There was an explosion of trans expression right after Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time in 2014. Trans is absolute brainwashing, or brain stretching to the point where the brain strains and rips apart. After stewing and fretting about this bizarre and mystifying contagion for the past two years I’ve finally come to view the phenomenon as a kind of Trojan horse in which our kids are packed inside. The children are all absolutely confused, rightly terrified of being linked or in any way associated with beliefs that have been deemed toxic and contaminated – anything from the western tradition. They are desperate to rid themselves of the contagion of their own history. Being “queer” is the new salvation, it is the new blood in which the children are to be cleansed of the sins of their fathers; the youth are celebrated mightily for their embracing of any lifestyle that erodes the power of the individual to stand alone – that erodes the sacredness and sovereignty of our very humanity. Where I live their displays of adherence to the new dictate are ubiquitous. Firstly, the youth make themselves look deliberately ugly and or just strange, their appearance must function as a kind of constant disruption of the notion of any kind of underlying or essential order, they are walking, talking protestations. They must aggressify (that’s a made up word lol) their personas, as they have been taught any sort of coherence, or beauty is intricately linked to oppression and evil. As they do not wish to be seen as either of these things (in the new Queer world, original sin only exists exclusively outside of queer – to be queer is to be saved) so they embrace deformity, dissociate themselves from their biological imperatives, their inheritance, they literally sacrifice their biological future and potential to gain elevation in the new queer order. These are the new invaders, they are the ones protected and cheered for sacking the old order; their vanity is stoked daily by all media insuring they will continue with the ravaging of a world they were taught to consciously hate before they ever had chance to know it personally. The children are the sacrificial lambs, but they are too young to know what they have given up and have been made too intoxicated by unearned power bestowed upon them by whoever is most benefitting from their sacrifice. There are powerful people in the world today whose aim is much further than I in my lowly life can even imagine. It sounds crazy but to me the trans/queer collectivity is probably being enlisted to further destabilize the fidelity of our country which in the past has sought to strengthen itself through strengthening its individuals. That’s the old evil way though, if you can manage to help yourself you are now associated with the new sin of inherited and unearned competence. The powerful people are destroying institutions (however they can do it) that will interfere with their interest in seizing control of larger and larger swathes of territory. They don’t like strong religion because if makes people too self-sufficient, or as we used to say, “free”. This trans propaganda is so over the top and provides such a targeted destruction of our most basic foundational beliefs about reality, I can’t in good conscience see its current influence as anything less than a hostile takeover of the last bit of uncontested reality so many of us shared. Trans is not a liberation movement, the children are not made free. Those of us who see this terror for what it is will continue to be actively ostracized, our voices silenced. I was listening to a pretty widely viewed popular “anarchist atheist” podcast recently, and even this smart guy said he was astounded at how he was finding affinity more and more with Christians, rather than atheists. Why? He said the Christians offered him more freedom of movement than the God of the atheists – that being the state. Interesting. As an atheist I too have been finding myself inextricably draw to the truth of the cross.

My utter and total dependence upon the God of my childhood was unknown to me until recently.

UPDATE.2: This, from a regular reader who asked me to shield her name and alter this post slightly to protect her identity:

If your email security is any good, you probably can’t do attachments, but I’ve clipped on a photo of myself at 19, just for street cred ;). I wanted to share my experience, and say that while I find the trend toward hormone treatments for children alarming, I don’t find the trans “trend” at all surprising, or even alarming, in itself. If you can’t see the pic I attached [I could — RD], it shows me at nineteen, with my shaved head and wire-rimmed glasses, looking for all the world like a fourteen year old boy. I looked that way for most of the time I was at University. I dressed in mens’ jeans and the white Hanes T-shirts that come in packs of three. I was startled, but not really displeased, the first time a retail clerk referred to me as “sir”. It was so much cheaper/simpler than dealing with all the fussiness of “girl” clothing, and I felt that it kept me safe. I was fantastically emotionally immature, I was not ready for any kind of “relationship”. I did not want attention from men (or anyone else, really), and looking this way got me what I wanted– it exempted me from the college dating scene. At college, before I cut off my hair, I only got asked out by creeps. After: nobody ever asked me out, propositioned me, wolf-whistled at me, nothing… I had successfully made myself invisible to men. And it made my life simpler and safer. I was socially awkward, probably an aspie, never had a clue if people were lying to me or not, and knew, to the core of my being, that “sleep with whomever you please” sexual mores would lead to my being exploited and hurt. I didn’t want that, and I didn’t (at the time) belong to any church, so claiming religious exemption wasn’t an option. If I were using the modern trendy terms, I would have called myself asexual. If I had to guess, I’d say a lot of “trans” kids are doing the same thing, but now they have a convenient word for it, and (more importantly) legal protection. The modern dating scene, for a long time, has been absolutely toxic, especially if you are a girl. Opting out as a “normal” kid gets you branded a freak, and makes you a target for harassment. But opting out as “trans” or “alternate sexuality”– just think about it: nobody gets to argue with you! Suddenly, instead of being a freak who gets targeted for being a virgin and a prude, and getting completely ignored by the adults whose job it is to protect you, you have enthusiastic support from your school staff. It’s sad that we’ve come to this, but I think that it’s a cry for help. I know I was not the only socially-clueless girl who wanted an “out” from the predatory sexual customs of my peers. And if you don’t have a rock-solid religious community to back you up, what other options are there? There is no cheering section for people who don’t want to complicate their lives with sex. No moral support for those of us who, at sixteen, eighteen, twenty-three, weren’t ready yet. Nobody (outside of hardcore religious community), is out there rooting for people who want lifelong commitment without playing the “trying-on-shoes” game first. Of course kids are deciding they’re trans. What other options are there?

UPDATE.3: This just in:

I tried to write this letter a few times. Each time I found myself ranting. So at the expense of that, I’ll keep it simple.

To begin, I just completed my teaching licensing program which required a year and a half of student teaching in a large, metropolitan school district—per metrics, one of the worst in the country. So I knew there would be challenges but one of the largest challenges I faced centered around the issues of transgenderism.

First, it is not so much a cult as it is a fad. Many of the self-identifying trans students I had would have been social outcasts when I went to high school. Instead, they are now seen as ‘cool’ and ‘brave’ by their peers, other teachers, and the administration. This seemingly creates a self-perpetuating social system where being trans is a means for social acceptance. So the kid that could be on the outside looking in, the ‘loner’, was now running with the cool crowd. How many of these students were serious gender dysphoric of simply using the identity of bring trans to be seen as cool? I don’t know. But what I do know is that at this age, kids want to be seen as part of the group and they ‘try’ on various identities until one ‘sticks’—per cognitive psychology. So, at the root of this fad, is a message of social atomization. Which tracks with the macro social movements where we see large segments of society being atomized and removed from associations that once provided self-identity and meaning (Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” comes to mind). Thus, for many students who would be socially isolated and left without ‘meaning’, the identity of trans provides a social status and self-meaning—for better or worse (mostly the later).

Second, one letter you posted called on teachers to help end this fad. They cannot and many will not. They cannot because, I’ll speak for what I experienced in my district, the district central office has unilaterally institutionalized LBGQT+ to the point of where you either accept it or you do not have your contract re-upped. For example, the principle at the high school I was at, tried to quash the avalanche of LBQGT+ propaganda being posited by the teachers (which I’ll get to in a second) and the students. He wouldn’t allow posters to be hung in the school nor symbols that would perpetuate their messages. I never heard his reasons for doing so. But for doing so, in addition to some of his personal views he aired during staff meetings, he was mandated by the district to attend sensitivity training multiple times. He had to be brainwashed, in other words. Most likely it was a simple choice: attend or else we’ll begin termination hearings. Central office, sensing that there were others who held his view, brought in the director of the state flagship university’s gender studies department to instruct us during a school staff meeting about how being transphobic was the new racism and that we need to start using genderless pronouns. Apparently he/she, him/her, etc. are transphobic. Instead we were ‘encouraged’ to use the following nonsense: ze, zie, hir, hirs, etc. While a few of us remained healthfully skeptical of this nonsense, you had to go along if you didn’t want to be blackballed for the rest of your career. And I had to be very selective of the teachers who I spoke to about this. At times, it felt like those of us not aboard the trans train were operating like an underground cabal. If we were caught, we’d be brought before the administration and be publicly decapitated and our careers would be ruined. So we were a small-tight-knit group among a sea of other teachers who were front-line cheerleading this trans stuff. See, many teachers, at least in urban districts like this one, are left of Bernie. The Right has abandoned education and the results are obvious. (Tangentially: we need to re-think and reform our university schools of education—the real hotbeds of true and open socialist pedagogues.) So no, you will not be able to get teachers to support any push-back on trans issues in school. Many students report microagressions to their “ally” teachers who serve as the go-between, bypassing administration, and going straight to central office. That is, many teachers are the ones actively working to create trans-friendly school atmospheres–either by their own preaching or rooting out unbelievers and skeptics.

Having seen all this, it’s sickening and it’s one of the main reasons why I decided to find employment in a district I knew wasn’t as openly LBGTQ+.

Just to show you how bad things have become in education, any whiff of this email attached to me would be the end of my days in public education. But I had to share with you what’s really going on in schools.

Back in 2002, I interviewed a Catholic seminarian who came home from his first year at seminary and told his devout parents about all the gay sex going on all around him. He said his own parents refused to believe him. They could not accept that such a thing could possibly be true, therefore it wasn’t true. But, of course, it was.