Is Transgenderism a Disease of Parents?
Being a kid is hard enough without having parents who want to compensate for their shortcomings by reengineering their kids.
Childhood is hard.
Not really breaking news, is it?
Everything is new, bodies and minds are developing and changing, virtually every aspect of their young life depends on others, this being especially true the younger the child. As the child grows and matures, more autonomy and independence are earned.
This progression is a constant battle between feelings and logic brought about external and internal transformations. Exposure to increasingly complicated social situations shape the mind while chemical and hormonal changes are shaping the body.
From birth to age eighteen, the normal human’s body will increase in size from inches and ounces to feet and pounds. On average, a child’s weight will increase 15 to 23 times their birthweight and from 3 to 3.5 times their birth length. In adolescence, kids often experience periods of rapid growth, making life even more awkward.
A massive growth spurt is a personal experience of mine – I received my first drivers license at 15, and on that license my height was listed at 5’-0” at a weight of 100 pounds. When I graduated, I was 6’-1” and 170 pounds. I went from a scrawny, introverted, socially awkward kid that no high school girl would even notice, to someone with a body for sports, the sports editor for the high school paper, a leading role in the Senior play, and somebody the girls noticed.
But adding over a foot in height and seventy pounds was painful and stressful. Outgrowing clothes, sometimes during the school year, and the pain of stretching bones and muscle – were nothing compared to the mental challenges a rapidly changing body wrought.
I had always been a good student, but due to my small stature, tended to fade into the background. As my mind began to expand in conjunction with my larger physical presence, teachers began to recognize my growing intellect and interest in knowledge. Coaches noticed my size and sought me out to join various teams, which I eventually did.
While I progressed physically, I had a tough time shaking the mental image I had of myself as an inferior, awkward kid and someone not worth other people’s time. Late in my sophomore year, I had an all-consuming crush on a girl in my class, but I felt so beneath her that I never could muster the courage to even ask her out.
To rectify that situation, I over-compensated. My junior and senior years were dominated by strong academic performance but in the process, I began to compensate for my own feelings of inferiority through arrogance and insolence. I sought to become one of the “cool kids”, and we proceeded to get wasted every weekend and do reckless things. We were all lucky we never got caught or hurt.
One might say I was born with a dick and by the time I reached seventeen, I WAS a dick - but I was also popular, so I was cool with it.
One would think that all this would have been a good thing, but it all combined to produce what was probably the worst case of Senioritis ever. I began to believe I was too cool for school and my final semester of High School was the worst of my academic career. With all my athletic opportunities ended by an injury, I began to think it just wasn’t worth my time and in a display of immaturity, almost put my prospects of getting into college at an end.
Thank God I was able to get in, even if it was on academic probation and I was able to get my mind right. Even then, it took the trauma of a low performance freshman year, then dropping out and working for a year, for me to get serious about college.
I don’t mean to make this about me, I just know my story (or worse) has been experienced by hundreds of thousands of kids over the years. Many kids face far worse, I probably had it better than a selfish and immature kid should have. The point is that just the physical changes are traumatic enough, but as I am an example, the mental changes are as bad or worse than the physical changes.
And these mental and physical transformations are even more dramatic and traumatic for girls.
I never questioned my gender or sexuality, nor did my parents ever try to tell me that my problems might just be because I should have been born a girl. My parents would have never considered it. They helped me understand why I was going through these changes and how to work through them. With the physical changes, it helped that I grew up on a farm and understood how plants and animals matured through their lifecycle. Understanding the mental and emotional transformations were much more difficult – but my parents and maternal grandparents were open and people with whom I could talk and confide. I can’t even imagine what might have happened to me or what my life would have been if not for family.
My point is that I was fortunate enough to have the familial support systems that helped me through the tough periods. My physical and mental changes and challenges were not assumed to need some extreme psychological, pharmaceutical, or medical intervention, they were recognized for what they were, the natural transformation of a child into a young adult.
But what happens to kids who don’t have those support systems, and instead have parents, teachers or other authority figures who want to supply the answers rather than help the child find them on their own?
It is no secret that during my time in school in the late 60’s and 70’s, parents had little to no understanding of homosexuality or any other psychological or physical expression of sexual orientation in kids.
Some parents are ashamed of this and are reacting, as I did in high school, by overcompensating.
Now, every normal childhood challenge is seen by these parents to need some immediate extreme intervention. If a little boy in kindergarten likes to play with dolls, he is immediately determined to be transgender and in need of puberty blockers and “gender” affirming surgeries later in life. If a little girl is a tomboy, she obviously needs to have gender reassignment surgery and have her breasts lopped off. These kids must be put on a program to teach them how to live as the sex opposite to that with which they were born.
But what if these situations are just a phase? What if the kids will grow out of that phase?
A couple of data points say they will. Historical studies show that on average, 80% of children change their minds and do not continue into adulthood as transgender. A survey done in 2018 and published in The Economist, seemed to indicate much of the wave of transgenderism, especially among teenage girls, is a process of “social and peer contagion” as the data showed that 87% of children came out as transgender after spending more time online, after “cluster outbreaks” of gender dysphoria in friend groups, or both. The study showed that “Most children who came out became more popular as a result.”
It certainly seems the transgender epidemic is more about the parents than it is the kids.
Being a kid is hard enough without having parents who want to compensate for their shortcomings by reengineering their kids.