WSJ: Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria Is ‘Social Contagion’. By Thomas Williams.
The medical community is far too unconditionally affirmative in its treatment of rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), a Wall Street Journal op-ed argued Sunday, making ROGD an anomaly among social contagions.
Unlike traditional gender dysphoria, a “psychological affliction that begins in early childhood and is characterized by a severe and persistent feeling that one was born the wrong sex,” writes Abigail Shrier, ROGD is “a social contagion that comes on suddenly in adolescence, afflicting teens who’d never exhibited any confusion about their sex.”
Unlike other social contagions, such as cutting and bulimia, ROGD gets “full support from the medical community” instead of the treatment such contagions deserve, she contends.
“The standard for dealing with teens who assert they are transgender is ‘affirmative care’ — immediately granting the patient’s stated identity,” Ms. Shrier writes, when the role of therapists should be to assist their patients in overcoming their unhealthy urges rather than pandering to them.
Gender dysphoria has now become “a fashionable cause,” and clinics routinely give girls testosterone with few questions asked, and with little thought to the sometimes permanent damage that such treatment brings about.
“Planned Parenthood furnishes testosterone to young women on an ‘informed consent’ basis, without requiring any psychological evaluation,” Shrier notes. “Student health plans at 86 colleges — including those of nearly every Ivy League school — cover not only cross-sex hormones but surgery as well.”
Parents who question the wisdom of yielding to their children’s desire to change genders often run up against a wall of contrary public opinion with very little scientific evidence to back it up.
“Nearly every force in society is aligned against these parents,” Shrier says. “Churches scramble to rewrite their liturgies for greater ‘inclusiveness.’ Therapists and psychiatrists undermine parental authority with immediate affirmation of teens’ self-diagnoses. Campus counselors happily refer students to clinics that dispense hormones on the first visit.”
Moreover, parents have a lot to lose by resisting the societal trend. Last February, the parents of a 17-year-old girl lost custody of their daughter for opposing her wish for transgender medical treatments.
Madness. Society is indeed run by people behaving like angry children. Political correctness is ruining lives on an ever greater scale. It’s not, to use one of their favorite words, sustainable.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
