KiwiFarms Username 632879
kiwifarms.net
- Dołączono
- 18 Paź 2020
📚 Megathread Tranny Sideshows on Social Media - Any small-time spectacle on Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Dating Sites, and other social media.
- Twórca wątku Real Mayun
- Data rozpoczęcia
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🔎 Please read my article, How to Dox Anyone: A Liz Fong-Jones Story. (Xitter), (Substack).
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Rotter
kiwifarms.net
- Dołączono
- 23 Paź 2020
Katie Herzog likes to gently poke the troon hornet's nest aswell. Two or three days before the Ellen Page shit, she had an article out called; "Where have All the lesbians gone" (she's a lesbian herself). Her podcast with Jesse Singal is also worth a listen.
"https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-lesbians-gone-0a7
- Dołączono
- 10 Wrz 2016
Long time lurker of the thread..yadda yadda...
I just saw this monstrosity and it took me a moment to realize it's not a weird animal dick! I want to gouge my eyes out.
Apparently there is a method where the vagina gets stitched together to a "penis" or something....I really don't want to look further into it.
Sauce
I bet every man will envy that person. It's like the real thing. /sneed
- Dołączono
- 4 Gru 2018
Pretty sure it’s sun damage from UV rays that “unlocked” Jimmy’s moles. Estrogen is known to enhance sun sensitivity and estradiol actually warns users to be vigilant about UV exposure.
Since most men don’t give sunscreen (or any skin care) a second thought, there’s probably going to be a bunch of middle aged troons like Jimbo who in a few years are absolutely shocked when they get skin cancer.
- Dołączono
- 10 Wrz 2020
If there's one group of people I don't want hanging out with the guys it's 'ex-lesbians'
"Oh yeah that guy Elliot who scowls at all your jokes used to be a lesbian."
"Oh yeah that guy Elliot who scowls at all your jokes used to be a lesbian."
- Dołączono
- 3 Sty 2019
An except from this article about Keira Bell's situation if anyone is interested:
Reminds me of another case I read about (can't remember who) who reported that a single 30-minute discussion with a physician's assistant was enough to get her onto transition treatment and even top surgery. Fucking bonkers that this shit is allowed, let alone generally accepted.
Standing outside the High Court yesterday, Keira Bell said that she hoped the judgment marked the end of gender clinics “playing God with our bodies [by] experimenting on the young and vulnerable with untested, harmful drugs”.
With her deep masculine voice, facial hair and the loss of her breasts to a double mastectomy, Bell bears on her own body the scars of irreversible treatments she began at Tavistock’s GIDS (gender identity development service) clinic at the age of 16. This quiet, reserved young woman, now 23, took on the NHS and publicly funded activist groups such as Stonewall and Mermaids — which successfully lobbied for medical interventions in ever younger children — and won.
In particular, the court’s judgment on puberty-blocking drugs will reverberate around the world. Judges ruled that a 13-year-old was “highly unlikely” to have the competence to understand their effect on future fertility and sexual function, that they were “doubtful” that a 14 or 15-year-old could knowingly consent, and that these drugs were so “experimental” and “truly life-changing” that it was “appropriate” for doctors to seek a court order before prescribing them to a 16 or 17-year-old. In response, GIDS announced a moratorium on prescribing blockers and NHS England has declared that under-16s will not receive them without a court order.
Bell’s story echoes those of thousands of teenage girls who now make up 75 per cent of referrals to GIDS and gender clinics worldwide. As a little girl growing up in Letchworth, she was a classic tomboy who loved football, superheroes and TV wrestling. She hated dresses, preferring clothes from the boys’ range, and her friends were mainly male. “No one tried to change me and I didn’t feel any discomfort in my body,” she says. “Lots of adult women would say, ‘Oh, I was like that at your age.’”
Yet Bell’s home life was turbulent. Her “quite distant and very religious” Christian father left when she was four, leaving Bell and her sister with their mother, an alcoholic. “We didn’t speak about her problem, but we were both embarrassed and didn’t bring friends home.”
Then Bell started high school and “there was that parting of the ways you get at puberty”. Her male friends no longer wanted to know her, while she felt a growing pressure to be “feminine and girly and to fancy boys”. Feeling stuck in the middle, judged for her “butch” appearance and struggling with the realisation that she was attracted to girls, she grew socially awkward and isolated. By 14, increasingly anxious and depressed, she stopped going to school.
“I just stayed at home, locked in my room, playing video games,” she says. “And on the internet I read lesbian bloggers, but felt something else was wrong with me because I was so uncomfortable with my body and puberty and becoming a woman.” On YouTube she discovered US trans activists. “I thought, ‘That’s me. I need to do this, to medically transition to make myself better and live my life as I’m supposed to.’”
Bell asked friends to call her Quincy and use male pronouns, while secretly buying a breast binder to flatten her chest. Then at 16, when home life with her mother deteriorated, she begged to move in with her father and his new partner, who, seeing she was troubled, suggested she see a GP. She was referred to GIDS.
“I had a one-hour appointment and it was very general, surface-level stuff. ‘What is your preferred name? Do you want to transition?’ And a lot of stereotype talk about whether I played with boys’ toys, preferred boys’ clothes. There was no discussion about my sexuality.”
After three further equally superficial sessions, Bell was referred to the endocrinology department, which prescribed a year on puberty-blocking drugs. “It was briefly mentioned this might damage my fertility. They said I could freeze my eggs, but that isn’t available on the NHS and I couldn’t afford to go private. It seemed like a box-ticking exercise. Besides, I was a teenager; I couldn’t imagine wanting a baby.” She was told that blockers were fully reversible and would give her time to decide whether she wanted to proceed to male hormones.
That blockers are a harmless “pause button” is highly contentious. The NHS recently changed its advice from stating they are “fully reversible” to saying that “little is known about the long-term side-effects” on a teenager’s body or brain.
These GnRH agonists release a form of the human hormone gonadotropin to stop testicles and ovaries from producing sex hormones. The most commonly used, Triptorelin, is licensed to treat advanced prostate cancer and endometriosis, “chemically castrate” male sex offenders and halt rare precocious puberty in children.
However, they have been increasingly used “off-label” to treat child gender dysphoria, and in 2010, under activist pressure, GIDS reduced the age of prescription from 15 to 10 years old. A very young child who proceeds from blockers to cross sex hormones — as almost 100 per cent do — will be infertile because sperm or eggs have had no chance to develop.
For Bell, puberty blockers threw her into instant menopause. “I couldn’t sleep or think. I had hot flushes, night sweats, brain fog, concentration issues. My bones ached and I felt less strong.” Moreover, while in this supposed thinking period before she committed to her full transition, she received no psychological counselling from GIDS, just brief catch-up sessions. “There was no discussion of my future, whether I was on the right path.” Nor were her underlying problems — anxiety, depression, social isolation and troubled home life — ever examined.
After 12 months, GIDS prescribed testosterone and Bell had her first injection at her GP’s surgery. Her voice deepened, facial hair began to grow and she “passed” as male at sixth-form college where no one knew her history. By now she was living alone in a youth hostel in Cambridgeshire, ever more isolated. “I still felt out of place, but I had something to latch on to. It felt like my life was progressing. Transition gave me a focus, took my mind off a lot of other things.”
At 20, sick of the discomfort of still binding her breasts, which she hated even more on her now masculine body, she underwent a double mastectomy on the NHS. “I wasn’t really briefed on how serious and extreme this was,” she says. “I found all my advice on how to heal more quickly online. You were given treatment, then they just left you to cope.” Taking testosterone caused painful vaginal atrophy, where the vaginal walls thin and dry out. “Doctors didn’t know what to do about it. We are guinea pigs.”
Once her “top surgery” was complete, and she decided not to proceed with a more complex, risky operation, which creates a non-functional penis from a sleeve of skin stripped from the forearm, Bell felt a sense of anticlimax. “I started to nit-pick about my appearance. I looked at my small hands and feet, my jawline, my short stature. I started asking what makes me a man. And I could never come up with an answer. I will always be a woman whatever changes in my body. I was invested in a fantasy.” Moreover, her other problems had not, as she had hoped, gone away.
Finally, “sick of being a medical experiment”, she stopped taking testosterone. While her periods returned and she found herself able to cry again, her deep voice and facial hair are irreversible. Now happily living with a female partner, she is coming to terms with her double mastectomy and “trying to accept my body for what it is”. However, she grew increasingly angry and troubled that online blogs spoke of transition only in glowing terms, promoting it to children, based, she says, “on lies and sex stereotypes”.
In particular, she felt that “butch” young lesbians like her were under intense online pressure to become trans men. “Gender is polarised: you have to look a certain way. You feel you have to fit in with expectations, even if that means using experimental drugs and surgery.”
Indeed, Bell is part of a 3,000 per cent spike in girls being referred to GIDS in the past decade, a phenomenon noted in every other western nation from Australia to Finland. So far, attempts to explain this have been denounced by the LGBT groups as bigotry. When Dr Lisa Littman of Brown University analysed “rapid onset gender dysphoria” among teenage girls, often clusters of friends, often same-sex attracted, with high exposure to online trans forums, her paper was removed from her college website. James Caspian, a psychotherapist, was told by Bath Spa University that he could not research a rise in trans people detransitioning because it was “not politically correct”.
Yesterday, High Court judges criticised GIDS for their own lack of research data, in particular failing to publish a 2011 study into the outcome of children who took blockers. (Early data so far released from that project “noted that there was no overall improvements in mood or psychological wellbeing” among recipients.) Judges also queried why the sharp rise in natal girls and children on the autistic spectrum has not been analysed, saying it was “surprising that such data was not collated … given the young age of the patient group, the experimental nature of the treatment and the profound impact that it has”.
Bell believes the LGBT community should stop trying to shut down academic inquiry and “accept that the trans experience is not a monolith”, that the reasons an adult male wishes to transition may not be the same as a legion of troubled 13-year-old girls with other psychological issues.
She launched her legal case because she felt she had made a “brash decision as a teenager, as a lot of teenagers do” and “couldn’t sit by while so many others made the same mistake”. Since it began she has since been contacted by many other young women with similar stories. She does not see restrictions on prescribing puberty-blocking drugs as an end in itself, but the beginning of a move towards proper, in-depth psychological counselling for gender-questioning young people.
“They need proper mental health support. I just wish someone had analysed my situation and the problems I had without changing my body. My body was fine.”
With her deep masculine voice, facial hair and the loss of her breasts to a double mastectomy, Bell bears on her own body the scars of irreversible treatments she began at Tavistock’s GIDS (gender identity development service) clinic at the age of 16. This quiet, reserved young woman, now 23, took on the NHS and publicly funded activist groups such as Stonewall and Mermaids — which successfully lobbied for medical interventions in ever younger children — and won.
In particular, the court’s judgment on puberty-blocking drugs will reverberate around the world. Judges ruled that a 13-year-old was “highly unlikely” to have the competence to understand their effect on future fertility and sexual function, that they were “doubtful” that a 14 or 15-year-old could knowingly consent, and that these drugs were so “experimental” and “truly life-changing” that it was “appropriate” for doctors to seek a court order before prescribing them to a 16 or 17-year-old. In response, GIDS announced a moratorium on prescribing blockers and NHS England has declared that under-16s will not receive them without a court order.
Bell’s story echoes those of thousands of teenage girls who now make up 75 per cent of referrals to GIDS and gender clinics worldwide. As a little girl growing up in Letchworth, she was a classic tomboy who loved football, superheroes and TV wrestling. She hated dresses, preferring clothes from the boys’ range, and her friends were mainly male. “No one tried to change me and I didn’t feel any discomfort in my body,” she says. “Lots of adult women would say, ‘Oh, I was like that at your age.’”
Yet Bell’s home life was turbulent. Her “quite distant and very religious” Christian father left when she was four, leaving Bell and her sister with their mother, an alcoholic. “We didn’t speak about her problem, but we were both embarrassed and didn’t bring friends home.”
Then Bell started high school and “there was that parting of the ways you get at puberty”. Her male friends no longer wanted to know her, while she felt a growing pressure to be “feminine and girly and to fancy boys”. Feeling stuck in the middle, judged for her “butch” appearance and struggling with the realisation that she was attracted to girls, she grew socially awkward and isolated. By 14, increasingly anxious and depressed, she stopped going to school.
“I just stayed at home, locked in my room, playing video games,” she says. “And on the internet I read lesbian bloggers, but felt something else was wrong with me because I was so uncomfortable with my body and puberty and becoming a woman.” On YouTube she discovered US trans activists. “I thought, ‘That’s me. I need to do this, to medically transition to make myself better and live my life as I’m supposed to.’”
Bell asked friends to call her Quincy and use male pronouns, while secretly buying a breast binder to flatten her chest. Then at 16, when home life with her mother deteriorated, she begged to move in with her father and his new partner, who, seeing she was troubled, suggested she see a GP. She was referred to GIDS.
“I had a one-hour appointment and it was very general, surface-level stuff. ‘What is your preferred name? Do you want to transition?’ And a lot of stereotype talk about whether I played with boys’ toys, preferred boys’ clothes. There was no discussion about my sexuality.”
After three further equally superficial sessions, Bell was referred to the endocrinology department, which prescribed a year on puberty-blocking drugs. “It was briefly mentioned this might damage my fertility. They said I could freeze my eggs, but that isn’t available on the NHS and I couldn’t afford to go private. It seemed like a box-ticking exercise. Besides, I was a teenager; I couldn’t imagine wanting a baby.” She was told that blockers were fully reversible and would give her time to decide whether she wanted to proceed to male hormones.
That blockers are a harmless “pause button” is highly contentious. The NHS recently changed its advice from stating they are “fully reversible” to saying that “little is known about the long-term side-effects” on a teenager’s body or brain.
These GnRH agonists release a form of the human hormone gonadotropin to stop testicles and ovaries from producing sex hormones. The most commonly used, Triptorelin, is licensed to treat advanced prostate cancer and endometriosis, “chemically castrate” male sex offenders and halt rare precocious puberty in children.
However, they have been increasingly used “off-label” to treat child gender dysphoria, and in 2010, under activist pressure, GIDS reduced the age of prescription from 15 to 10 years old. A very young child who proceeds from blockers to cross sex hormones — as almost 100 per cent do — will be infertile because sperm or eggs have had no chance to develop.
For Bell, puberty blockers threw her into instant menopause. “I couldn’t sleep or think. I had hot flushes, night sweats, brain fog, concentration issues. My bones ached and I felt less strong.” Moreover, while in this supposed thinking period before she committed to her full transition, she received no psychological counselling from GIDS, just brief catch-up sessions. “There was no discussion of my future, whether I was on the right path.” Nor were her underlying problems — anxiety, depression, social isolation and troubled home life — ever examined.
After 12 months, GIDS prescribed testosterone and Bell had her first injection at her GP’s surgery. Her voice deepened, facial hair began to grow and she “passed” as male at sixth-form college where no one knew her history. By now she was living alone in a youth hostel in Cambridgeshire, ever more isolated. “I still felt out of place, but I had something to latch on to. It felt like my life was progressing. Transition gave me a focus, took my mind off a lot of other things.”
At 20, sick of the discomfort of still binding her breasts, which she hated even more on her now masculine body, she underwent a double mastectomy on the NHS. “I wasn’t really briefed on how serious and extreme this was,” she says. “I found all my advice on how to heal more quickly online. You were given treatment, then they just left you to cope.” Taking testosterone caused painful vaginal atrophy, where the vaginal walls thin and dry out. “Doctors didn’t know what to do about it. We are guinea pigs.”
Once her “top surgery” was complete, and she decided not to proceed with a more complex, risky operation, which creates a non-functional penis from a sleeve of skin stripped from the forearm, Bell felt a sense of anticlimax. “I started to nit-pick about my appearance. I looked at my small hands and feet, my jawline, my short stature. I started asking what makes me a man. And I could never come up with an answer. I will always be a woman whatever changes in my body. I was invested in a fantasy.” Moreover, her other problems had not, as she had hoped, gone away.
Finally, “sick of being a medical experiment”, she stopped taking testosterone. While her periods returned and she found herself able to cry again, her deep voice and facial hair are irreversible. Now happily living with a female partner, she is coming to terms with her double mastectomy and “trying to accept my body for what it is”. However, she grew increasingly angry and troubled that online blogs spoke of transition only in glowing terms, promoting it to children, based, she says, “on lies and sex stereotypes”.
In particular, she felt that “butch” young lesbians like her were under intense online pressure to become trans men. “Gender is polarised: you have to look a certain way. You feel you have to fit in with expectations, even if that means using experimental drugs and surgery.”
Indeed, Bell is part of a 3,000 per cent spike in girls being referred to GIDS in the past decade, a phenomenon noted in every other western nation from Australia to Finland. So far, attempts to explain this have been denounced by the LGBT groups as bigotry. When Dr Lisa Littman of Brown University analysed “rapid onset gender dysphoria” among teenage girls, often clusters of friends, often same-sex attracted, with high exposure to online trans forums, her paper was removed from her college website. James Caspian, a psychotherapist, was told by Bath Spa University that he could not research a rise in trans people detransitioning because it was “not politically correct”.
Yesterday, High Court judges criticised GIDS for their own lack of research data, in particular failing to publish a 2011 study into the outcome of children who took blockers. (Early data so far released from that project “noted that there was no overall improvements in mood or psychological wellbeing” among recipients.) Judges also queried why the sharp rise in natal girls and children on the autistic spectrum has not been analysed, saying it was “surprising that such data was not collated … given the young age of the patient group, the experimental nature of the treatment and the profound impact that it has”.
Bell believes the LGBT community should stop trying to shut down academic inquiry and “accept that the trans experience is not a monolith”, that the reasons an adult male wishes to transition may not be the same as a legion of troubled 13-year-old girls with other psychological issues.
She launched her legal case because she felt she had made a “brash decision as a teenager, as a lot of teenagers do” and “couldn’t sit by while so many others made the same mistake”. Since it began she has since been contacted by many other young women with similar stories. She does not see restrictions on prescribing puberty-blocking drugs as an end in itself, but the beginning of a move towards proper, in-depth psychological counselling for gender-questioning young people.
“They need proper mental health support. I just wish someone had analysed my situation and the problems I had without changing my body. My body was fine.”
- Dołączono
- 31 Gru 2018
"I don't want to be caged in my unchangeable body"
*gets a big stupid text tattoo right across the chest*
*gets a big stupid text tattoo right across the chest*
- Dołączono
- 16 Sie 2019
This face is less "freedom" and more "hello darkness my old friend..."
The tattoo reads as sarcasm TBH, though I'm sure that's not how it's intended
- Dołączono
- 16 Sie 2019
I did not realize that Richard E. Grant had trooned out.
- Dołączono
- 3 Sty 2019
Found the other article. Link
A year ago, as a result of a blog post I wrote, I began offering consultations to parents of teens who had announced “out of the blue” that they were transgender. Each week, several new families made contact with me, and their stories are remarkably similar to one another. Most have 14 or 15-year-old daughters who are smart, quirky, and struggling socially. Many of these kids are on the autism spectrum. And they are often asking for medical interventions – hormones and surgery – that may render them sterile, affect their liver, or lead to high blood pressure, among other possible side effects.
The parents are bewildered and terrified, careful to let me know that they love their child and would support any interventions that were truly necessary. They speak to me of dealing with their fear for their child in terrible isolation, as friends and family blithely celebrate their child’s “bravery.”
I am overwhelmed by the sheer volume of parents who call me. I find it difficult to listen to their stories – each one so like the others. The desperation in their voices is palpable. They ask if they can fly to see me and bring their daughter. When I tell them I don’t do that, they ask if I can direct them to any therapist who won’t just affirm and greenlight their child for medical transition. Their voices are tremulous with relief at speaking with someone who doesn’t dismiss their concerns about unnecessary medical interventions. Each consultation lasts longer than the time I have allotted for it.
At times, I am able to offer advice that helps a family steer their child clear of drastic medical intervention of dubious benefit or necessity. But sometimes all I can do is stand helpless and witness the wreckage. Claire’s story was one of the latter.
Like many of the young people I hear about, Claire’s daughter Molly had had a series of complex medical and psychological challenges as an adolescent. Though profoundly gifted, the teenager struggled with autism, dyspraxia, and anxiety, all of which made school challenging. At 13, Molly developed anorexia, for which she was hospitalized twice. “There were years in there where I felt like my job was just to keep her alive,” Claire explained. Thanks in part to intensive psychotherapy, Molly had mostly recovered from the eating disorder by age 16, only to face new medical problems – she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Managing this condition required doctor visits and medications, some of which came with worrying side effects. It also added to Molly’s isolation and social struggles.
Despite her multiple challenges, Molly finished high school on time, and was accepted at her first-choice college. Claire and her husband Jeff felt relieved. But after graduation came a new diagnosis. On her 18th birthday, after spending much of the summer online, Molly told her parents that she was transgender.
This news came as a shock. According to Claire, Molly had never before expressed any concerns about gender. She had been a fairly typical little girl in terms of interests and play choices, and had dated several boys in high school. Nevertheless, Jeff and Claire didn’t object when Molly traded her long hair for a buzz cut. They even purchased a binder for her that would flatten her chest and make her look more male. Hoping that a therapist could help Molly clarify her feelings about gender, Claire and Jeff accompanied her to an intake appointment at a gender clinic. Claire was shocked by what happened there.
After a 30-minute consultation with a physician’s assistant, Molly was given an appointment for the following week to begin testosterone injections. There was no exploration of her other physical and mental health issues, and whether these may have influenced her belief that she was trans. There was also no caution expressed about how hormone treatment might affect Crohn’s disease. Molly simply had to sign a consent form stating that she identified as male and understood the risks associated with testosterone.
The PA (physician assistant) also suggested that Molly schedule top surgery – a double mastectomy – within a few months. When Claire stated that she and Jeff wanted time to do research and consider alternatives before allowing Molly to begin taking testosterone or have surgery, the PA told her that their job as parents now was to support and affirm their ‘son.’ In front of Molly, he told Claire she ought to get her own therapist to deal with her issues so that she could be a better support person to ‘Max.’ When Claire and Jeff expressed concerns about Molly’s anxiety and isolation, the PA stated that these were likely a result of Molly being transgender, and would resolve once she began to transition.
Up until about ten years ago, gender dysphoria presenting for the first time in adolescence was virtually unknown in natal females. (There is a well-known type of gender dysphoria found in males that sometimes begins in adolescence.) In the prototypical form of female gender dysphoria, signs first appear in early childhood, usually between the ages of two and four. Such girls hate stereotypic femininity – such as Barbies and dresses – and embrace stereotypic masculinity–such as short hair, pants, and toy guns. For most young children whose gender dysphoria began well before puberty, feelings of discomfort with their natal sex resolve on their own, usually before adolescence. The exact proportion of childhood-onset cases whose gender dysphoria persists into adolescence and young adulthood has been estimated to be approximately 20%.
In the past decade, however, a new presentation of gender dysphoria has suddenly become widespread, in which teens or tweens come to identify as transgender “out of the blue,” without any childhood history of feeling uncomfortable with their sex. Experts have dubbed this presentation rapid onset gender dysphoria, and are beginning to study it.
“We think this is an entirely distinct phenomenon from childhood-onset gender dysphoria,” says Michael Bailey, PhD a leading researcher on sexuality and gender, and a psychology professor at Northwestern University. “Indeed, we think it didn’t exist until recently. It is a socially contagious phenomenon, reminiscent of the multiple personality disorder epidemic of the 1990s.”
Although not much is known at this time about ROGD, it appears likely that it may be a kind of social contagion in which young people – often teen girls – come to believe that they are transgender. Preliminary research indicates that young people who identify as trans “out of the blue” may have been influenced by social media sites that valorize being trans. In addition, researchers have observed a pattern of clusters of friends coming out together.
While transgender advocates have derided the notion that the sudden surge in trans identified teens – and natal female teens in particular – could be influenced by social contagion, the idea is not so far-fetched. Bulimia was virtually unknown until the 1970s, when British psychologist Gerald Russell first described the condition in a medical journal. Author Lee Daniel Kravetz interviewed Russell for his recent book Strange Contagion. According to Russell, “once it was described, and I take full responsibility for that with my paper, there was a common language for it. And knowledge spreads very quickly.” Scientists have been able to track bulimia’s transmission even into culturally remote enclaves following the introduction of Western media sources. It is estimated that bulimia has since affected 30 million people.
Others have noted that rapid onset gender dysphoria may share much in common with another social contagion that spread symptoms of mental distress which were iatrogenic – that is, created or reinforced by the process of receiving medical or mental health treatment. In the 1990s, some therapists unwittingly encouraged their patients to construct false narratives of having been sexually abused. These patients often became identified with their role as a victim, found themselves dependent on their therapist, and saw a decline in their functioning and overall mental well-being.
While many in the research community are gaining a growing awareness of rapid onset gender dysphoria and its contagious nature, clinical practice guidelines have not caught up with this newer understanding. Moreover, in recent years, advocacy on behalf of the transgender community has seen medical gatekeeping reduced so that, in many places in the US, young people like Molly can access medical transition without any diagnostic or assessment process.
This is concerning, because there is reason to suspect that those with rapid onset gender dysphoria are unlikely to benefit from medical transition, and may even be harmed by it. Studies indicate that teen girls with this type of dysphoria have much higher rates of serious mental health issues than those with the more common gender dysphoria that is first noticed in early childhood. The growing community of detransitioners – mostly young women in their 20s – suggests that loosening the standards for accessing medical transition hasn’t served everyone well.
In Molly’s case, Claire and her husband wanted to be tolerant and accepting of Molly’s exploration of gender, but were alarmed by the rush to medical intervention. As a medical professional with a research background, Claire was worried about the side effects of testosterone. Research quickly confirmed what she suspected – there are no studies on the long-term safety of testosterone in female bodied people, and little is known about how testosterone might affect Molly’s medical and mental health conditions. Furthermore, some of testosterone’s effects – such as a deepened voice and growth of facial hair – are permanent. Claire and Jeff were concerned enough by the lack of science supporting medical transition for someone in Molly’s situation that they asked their daughter to move slowly so that they could all do more research. At first, Molly agreed.
However, shortly after Molly started college, Claire could tell that all was not well. Molly communicated with her parents infrequently. When Claire managed to reach her, Molly was withdrawn and sullen. By October, Molly stopped responding to phone calls, and would only communicate by text. A week before Molly was due to come home for Thanksgiving, Claire and Jeff received a call that Molly had been admitted to a psychiatric ward after becoming erratic and violent in her dorm.
When Jeff and Claire arrived the next morning after driving through the night, they were distraught by what they found. Molly seemed like a different person than the kid they had dropped off just a few months before. When she saw her parents, she became agitated. “She kept repeating that she didn’t want to see us, that we were the reason she had been hospitalized because we didn’t support her transition,” explained Claire. Eventually, hospital staff asked Jeff and Claire to leave.
Claire believes that Molly’s aggression and volatility were a reaction to beginning testosterone injections, which had commenced two weeks prior to the hospitalization. Molly had also changed her name and gender designation at school. A gender-affirming therapist at her college counseling center had referred her to an informed consent clinic for the testosterone prescription.
The rest of Molly’s story is not a happy one. At the end of her freshman year, she had top surgery, paid for by student health insurance. She moved back home over the summer so that her parents could help during her recovery. By this time, Molly’s voice had deepened, facial hair had grown in, and she passed as male full-time. Molly had become Max.
In spite of having transitioned, Max did not blossom into his “authentic self.” In fact, his mental health worsened. He was more anxious and isolated than ever and rarely left the house, spending most of his time online. He told his mother that he feared people would know he was trans and try to harm him were he to go out in public. When Claire tried to reassure him by offering to accompany him, Max often refused, expressing a lack of trust for Claire and her motives because, in Max’s words, Claire was a “transphobe.” “I feel as though my child has been taught to be paranoid about me,” Claire told me.
By the end of that summer, Max had yet another diagnosis to contend with. He began experiencing symptoms of interstitial cystitis, a painful and often debilitating condition that affects the bladder. Claire was not able to find any discussion in the medical literature about testosterone use and interstitial cystitis, but she did find online accounts of trans men suffering from worsening IC symptoms after going on testosterone. Claire pointed out that we just don’t know enough about how these medications affect people long-term. “I would say these gender doctors are experimenting on people,” Claire told me, “but when you experiment, you keep data and track outcomes.”
When Claire and I last spoke, Max was still living at home. Between his anxiety and his symptoms of IC, he had been unable to return to college. The only times he left the house were to see his therapist or attend a trans support group.
Claire agrees. “Molly’s belief that she was trans was a maladaptive coping mechanism she used to deal with her anxiety and other issues,” she said. “That belief was reinforced by her peers online and at college, by the therapist at school, and the providers at the gender clinic. These people not only encouraged her to believe that she was trans, but also that she needed to transition medically or risk being unhappy and suicidal. And once she had transitioned, there was an online community encouraging her to believe that the world would hate her because she is trans. They have sealed her in a cave, and I fear there may be no way back.”
Claire’s story is not unique. The spiking numbers of teens seeking gender reassignment throughout the developed world have some experts concerned that we are seeing another widespread contagion. In the UK, Australia, and US, the number of teens seeking treatment has soared. The website 4thwavenow, which describes itself as “a community of parents and friends skeptical of the transgender child/teen trend,” gets around 60,000 views per month, and the comments section is filled with hundreds of stories every bit as harrowing as Claire’s.
What will it take for this contagion to be seen for what it is, so that its most damaging effects can be prevented? Recently, one mom told me that I was her only hope. She surely deserves better than that.
Claire’s story has been used with permission. Names and all identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.
The parents are bewildered and terrified, careful to let me know that they love their child and would support any interventions that were truly necessary. They speak to me of dealing with their fear for their child in terrible isolation, as friends and family blithely celebrate their child’s “bravery.”
I am overwhelmed by the sheer volume of parents who call me. I find it difficult to listen to their stories – each one so like the others. The desperation in their voices is palpable. They ask if they can fly to see me and bring their daughter. When I tell them I don’t do that, they ask if I can direct them to any therapist who won’t just affirm and greenlight their child for medical transition. Their voices are tremulous with relief at speaking with someone who doesn’t dismiss their concerns about unnecessary medical interventions. Each consultation lasts longer than the time I have allotted for it.
At times, I am able to offer advice that helps a family steer their child clear of drastic medical intervention of dubious benefit or necessity. But sometimes all I can do is stand helpless and witness the wreckage. Claire’s story was one of the latter.
Like many of the young people I hear about, Claire’s daughter Molly had had a series of complex medical and psychological challenges as an adolescent. Though profoundly gifted, the teenager struggled with autism, dyspraxia, and anxiety, all of which made school challenging. At 13, Molly developed anorexia, for which she was hospitalized twice. “There were years in there where I felt like my job was just to keep her alive,” Claire explained. Thanks in part to intensive psychotherapy, Molly had mostly recovered from the eating disorder by age 16, only to face new medical problems – she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Managing this condition required doctor visits and medications, some of which came with worrying side effects. It also added to Molly’s isolation and social struggles.
Despite her multiple challenges, Molly finished high school on time, and was accepted at her first-choice college. Claire and her husband Jeff felt relieved. But after graduation came a new diagnosis. On her 18th birthday, after spending much of the summer online, Molly told her parents that she was transgender.
This news came as a shock. According to Claire, Molly had never before expressed any concerns about gender. She had been a fairly typical little girl in terms of interests and play choices, and had dated several boys in high school. Nevertheless, Jeff and Claire didn’t object when Molly traded her long hair for a buzz cut. They even purchased a binder for her that would flatten her chest and make her look more male. Hoping that a therapist could help Molly clarify her feelings about gender, Claire and Jeff accompanied her to an intake appointment at a gender clinic. Claire was shocked by what happened there.
After a 30-minute consultation with a physician’s assistant, Molly was given an appointment for the following week to begin testosterone injections. There was no exploration of her other physical and mental health issues, and whether these may have influenced her belief that she was trans. There was also no caution expressed about how hormone treatment might affect Crohn’s disease. Molly simply had to sign a consent form stating that she identified as male and understood the risks associated with testosterone.
The PA (physician assistant) also suggested that Molly schedule top surgery – a double mastectomy – within a few months. When Claire stated that she and Jeff wanted time to do research and consider alternatives before allowing Molly to begin taking testosterone or have surgery, the PA told her that their job as parents now was to support and affirm their ‘son.’ In front of Molly, he told Claire she ought to get her own therapist to deal with her issues so that she could be a better support person to ‘Max.’ When Claire and Jeff expressed concerns about Molly’s anxiety and isolation, the PA stated that these were likely a result of Molly being transgender, and would resolve once she began to transition.
Up until about ten years ago, gender dysphoria presenting for the first time in adolescence was virtually unknown in natal females. (There is a well-known type of gender dysphoria found in males that sometimes begins in adolescence.) In the prototypical form of female gender dysphoria, signs first appear in early childhood, usually between the ages of two and four. Such girls hate stereotypic femininity – such as Barbies and dresses – and embrace stereotypic masculinity–such as short hair, pants, and toy guns. For most young children whose gender dysphoria began well before puberty, feelings of discomfort with their natal sex resolve on their own, usually before adolescence. The exact proportion of childhood-onset cases whose gender dysphoria persists into adolescence and young adulthood has been estimated to be approximately 20%.
In the past decade, however, a new presentation of gender dysphoria has suddenly become widespread, in which teens or tweens come to identify as transgender “out of the blue,” without any childhood history of feeling uncomfortable with their sex. Experts have dubbed this presentation rapid onset gender dysphoria, and are beginning to study it.
“We think this is an entirely distinct phenomenon from childhood-onset gender dysphoria,” says Michael Bailey, PhD a leading researcher on sexuality and gender, and a psychology professor at Northwestern University. “Indeed, we think it didn’t exist until recently. It is a socially contagious phenomenon, reminiscent of the multiple personality disorder epidemic of the 1990s.”
Although not much is known at this time about ROGD, it appears likely that it may be a kind of social contagion in which young people – often teen girls – come to believe that they are transgender. Preliminary research indicates that young people who identify as trans “out of the blue” may have been influenced by social media sites that valorize being trans. In addition, researchers have observed a pattern of clusters of friends coming out together.
While transgender advocates have derided the notion that the sudden surge in trans identified teens – and natal female teens in particular – could be influenced by social contagion, the idea is not so far-fetched. Bulimia was virtually unknown until the 1970s, when British psychologist Gerald Russell first described the condition in a medical journal. Author Lee Daniel Kravetz interviewed Russell for his recent book Strange Contagion. According to Russell, “once it was described, and I take full responsibility for that with my paper, there was a common language for it. And knowledge spreads very quickly.” Scientists have been able to track bulimia’s transmission even into culturally remote enclaves following the introduction of Western media sources. It is estimated that bulimia has since affected 30 million people.
Others have noted that rapid onset gender dysphoria may share much in common with another social contagion that spread symptoms of mental distress which were iatrogenic – that is, created or reinforced by the process of receiving medical or mental health treatment. In the 1990s, some therapists unwittingly encouraged their patients to construct false narratives of having been sexually abused. These patients often became identified with their role as a victim, found themselves dependent on their therapist, and saw a decline in their functioning and overall mental well-being.
While many in the research community are gaining a growing awareness of rapid onset gender dysphoria and its contagious nature, clinical practice guidelines have not caught up with this newer understanding. Moreover, in recent years, advocacy on behalf of the transgender community has seen medical gatekeeping reduced so that, in many places in the US, young people like Molly can access medical transition without any diagnostic or assessment process.
This is concerning, because there is reason to suspect that those with rapid onset gender dysphoria are unlikely to benefit from medical transition, and may even be harmed by it. Studies indicate that teen girls with this type of dysphoria have much higher rates of serious mental health issues than those with the more common gender dysphoria that is first noticed in early childhood. The growing community of detransitioners – mostly young women in their 20s – suggests that loosening the standards for accessing medical transition hasn’t served everyone well.
In Molly’s case, Claire and her husband wanted to be tolerant and accepting of Molly’s exploration of gender, but were alarmed by the rush to medical intervention. As a medical professional with a research background, Claire was worried about the side effects of testosterone. Research quickly confirmed what she suspected – there are no studies on the long-term safety of testosterone in female bodied people, and little is known about how testosterone might affect Molly’s medical and mental health conditions. Furthermore, some of testosterone’s effects – such as a deepened voice and growth of facial hair – are permanent. Claire and Jeff were concerned enough by the lack of science supporting medical transition for someone in Molly’s situation that they asked their daughter to move slowly so that they could all do more research. At first, Molly agreed.
However, shortly after Molly started college, Claire could tell that all was not well. Molly communicated with her parents infrequently. When Claire managed to reach her, Molly was withdrawn and sullen. By October, Molly stopped responding to phone calls, and would only communicate by text. A week before Molly was due to come home for Thanksgiving, Claire and Jeff received a call that Molly had been admitted to a psychiatric ward after becoming erratic and violent in her dorm.
When Jeff and Claire arrived the next morning after driving through the night, they were distraught by what they found. Molly seemed like a different person than the kid they had dropped off just a few months before. When she saw her parents, she became agitated. “She kept repeating that she didn’t want to see us, that we were the reason she had been hospitalized because we didn’t support her transition,” explained Claire. Eventually, hospital staff asked Jeff and Claire to leave.
Claire believes that Molly’s aggression and volatility were a reaction to beginning testosterone injections, which had commenced two weeks prior to the hospitalization. Molly had also changed her name and gender designation at school. A gender-affirming therapist at her college counseling center had referred her to an informed consent clinic for the testosterone prescription.
The rest of Molly’s story is not a happy one. At the end of her freshman year, she had top surgery, paid for by student health insurance. She moved back home over the summer so that her parents could help during her recovery. By this time, Molly’s voice had deepened, facial hair had grown in, and she passed as male full-time. Molly had become Max.
In spite of having transitioned, Max did not blossom into his “authentic self.” In fact, his mental health worsened. He was more anxious and isolated than ever and rarely left the house, spending most of his time online. He told his mother that he feared people would know he was trans and try to harm him were he to go out in public. When Claire tried to reassure him by offering to accompany him, Max often refused, expressing a lack of trust for Claire and her motives because, in Max’s words, Claire was a “transphobe.” “I feel as though my child has been taught to be paranoid about me,” Claire told me.
By the end of that summer, Max had yet another diagnosis to contend with. He began experiencing symptoms of interstitial cystitis, a painful and often debilitating condition that affects the bladder. Claire was not able to find any discussion in the medical literature about testosterone use and interstitial cystitis, but she did find online accounts of trans men suffering from worsening IC symptoms after going on testosterone. Claire pointed out that we just don’t know enough about how these medications affect people long-term. “I would say these gender doctors are experimenting on people,” Claire told me, “but when you experiment, you keep data and track outcomes.”
When Claire and I last spoke, Max was still living at home. Between his anxiety and his symptoms of IC, he had been unable to return to college. The only times he left the house were to see his therapist or attend a trans support group.
Claire agrees. “Molly’s belief that she was trans was a maladaptive coping mechanism she used to deal with her anxiety and other issues,” she said. “That belief was reinforced by her peers online and at college, by the therapist at school, and the providers at the gender clinic. These people not only encouraged her to believe that she was trans, but also that she needed to transition medically or risk being unhappy and suicidal. And once she had transitioned, there was an online community encouraging her to believe that the world would hate her because she is trans. They have sealed her in a cave, and I fear there may be no way back.”
Claire’s story is not unique. The spiking numbers of teens seeking gender reassignment throughout the developed world have some experts concerned that we are seeing another widespread contagion. In the UK, Australia, and US, the number of teens seeking treatment has soared. The website 4thwavenow, which describes itself as “a community of parents and friends skeptical of the transgender child/teen trend,” gets around 60,000 views per month, and the comments section is filled with hundreds of stories every bit as harrowing as Claire’s.
What will it take for this contagion to be seen for what it is, so that its most damaging effects can be prevented? Recently, one mom told me that I was her only hope. She surely deserves better than that.
Claire’s story has been used with permission. Names and all identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.
- Dołączono
- 27 Lut 2015
- Dołączono
- 31 Sty 2015
But if you swipe left you are transphobic.
Garbage.Theory
kiwifarms.net
- Dołączono
- 24 Lis 2020
Random question. Which nipples are illegal? This person used to have breasts, now they don’t, and nips out is fine. Can trans women show their nips without getting their pics taken down? Is it just if they’re on the end of breasts? How about fat guys?
it’s too early for me to be this confused.
Captain Fitzbattleaxe
kiwifarms.net
- Dołączono
- 11 Wrz 2019
There's one thing I do not understand. Surely those scar are just as dysphoric inducing as a pair of tits. The scars are essentially just a big sign that you were born a woman, right? I mean point me to the cis man with those scars.
And yet, transmen have no problem with publicly showing them off. Or even take pride in them. Even though those scars are just as much of a tell of their sex as their breast were. So why does one remove body dysphoria but the other causes it.
- Dołączono
- 10 Wrz 2020
Transing the mentally ill, the last acceptable eugenics.
- Dołączono
- 20 Kwi 2020
It probably helps "relieve" their dysphoria because it lets them stop binding (which causes rib and lung damage, is super uncomfortable, and can cause spinal problems) but still have a flat chest (irrespective of the state of the chest, which is mangled to hell). When it's covered or partially covered, it could conceivably be a male chest (think, tanktops with really deep sleeves that would expose a binder, wearing open collared shirts where a binder would stick out, etc.). The pride of scars is a massive cope, and showing them off publicly is likely due to "trans pride" and the mistaken belief that they can claim they realistically got the scars from anywhere (I've seen posts where ftms suggest claiming DI scars are the result of an accident, a fight, a shark attack, etc. - the most realistic excuses are typically stuff like lung or heart surgeries and gynecomastia but these still imply relatively serious health issues).
Add to that the fact that almost nobody (boomers likely out of politeness, millenials out of wokeness) would point out their scars, and they may think their scarring is not so bad after all even if it is quite clockable. Ftms are probably the worst when it comes to hugboxing (which says a lot), as even the most non-passing woman would get a dozen comments about how good they look with a hundred bro's, dude's, and man's thrown in.
- Dołączono
- 14 Sie 2017
The FTM hugboxing is wild. I wonder if some of it is mean girl ‘I’m gonna tell this ugly girl she looks hot’ behavior.
They also don’t realize that in liberal areas people are getting better and better at clocking FTMs. They’ll still call you he to be polite but they know.
- Dołączono
- 15 Cze 2017
This is inaccurate and the number is way overinflated. The well-known "gender dysphoria" which starts in early childhood is being a tomboy, these girls don't identify as troons. The girls who grew up troon aren't 20% of all tomboys ever, they're 20% of the tomboys with parents who pathologized them enough to enlist them into the troon study, after the start of the troon pandemic. And the remaining 80% still grew up normal despite the Jeannettes and Wendylous. Far fewer tomboys in general population troon out, and ever fewer would troon out in a healthier culture.
So she transitioned into a total cunt.
1. To troons (male and female), a woman is a cocksleeve. Since scars are unattractive to CISHET MEN, they don't cause dysphoria.
2. It's social contagion and those are the rules. Women with tits are despised, scarred potatoes are valorized, so tits need to go.
- Dołączono
- 16 Mar 2019