There is literally no such thing as a ‘trans’ person. It’s medically and scientifically unproven. Political correctness is having a massive toll on these kids and everyone is too cowardly to stop it.
A citation could be useful. I suspect that good data on this is difficult to generate, .
> There is literally no such thing as a ‘trans’ person.
This is a pretty difficult statement to contend with, because we need to unpack what you mean by `trans`. I've met transgender people, they certainly do exist, but if you're claiming that those people are not really transgender but just gay men dressing up as women and being performative, we'd have to dig deep into Judith Butler literature to find some common language.
[1] https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/few-transgender-ch...
Did you used to identify as trans?
I occasionally chat with a person I know IRL about the potential destructiveness of a politicised approach to trans issues, and they're in education too. Used to self-harm, actually, and noticed that a lot of (mostly FTM) trans kids fit into the same demographic that they did as a kid.
I'm on the spectrum and had some pretty serious mental health issues myself as a teenager, so I see a different side to the same coin (mainly emotionally dysregulated MTFs).
On the flip side, Gender Dysphoria is 100% real and transitioning is an incredibly helpful medical option for those who happened to be born this way.
It's an incredibly hairy issue, and I don't think simply dismissing it as a "cult" is the right way to deal with it.
I understand the temptation to label something you don't believe in as a cult, and you can for sure observe some of the traits you'd expect in cults in some of the trans discourse online. Overall though it's too reductive; transsexualism has not been dreamed up by a cult leader, it's something recorded and observed for thousands of years.
The recent explosion in the discourse warrants more thoughtful and careful interrogation, and less casual dismissal.
There is historical evidence of cross-dressing, and of people (mostly men) being prescribed different societal roles that were apparently based on being effeminate. As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that such people were treated as if they were actually the opposite sex, as gender activists these days propose.
OP however was less nuanced and more reductive.
I got the impression that it is only a handful of individuals who are doing this, for example that guy who recently had a large cloud services provider shut down a website that exposed his unsavoury activities in this space.
Except it is. There's no research that show significant rates of desistence in the relevant population, which is children who want to transition. Rates of persistence are high in this population. Rates of regret are low, and are far lower than many other common forms of surgery.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S188898912...
We have decades of research on this. Rates of desistence are low. Rates of regret are low, and are lower than most other forms of medical care.
Edit: Even the submitted article admits that on one side you have medical opinion and science saying PBs are safe and reversible, but that you have Republican politicians saying they're harmful. It doesn't present any evidence that PBs are harmful. I notice that you haven't either.
And anti-trans campaigners can't, because their position is incoherent. PBs are apparently so dangerous we can't give them to children, but children who've had them are still so powerful we can't allow them to compete in sports because they'd win everything.
That's not to say that self-diagnoses of Gender Dysphoria should be taken at face value, or that it's always in the best interest to send a young person down the path of transitioning, but at the same time there is a population for which transitioning can greatly improve quality of life.
Honestly, if society DID care about their well-being, it wouldn't allow puberty blockers, hormones, or surgeries.
Let's say you're correct about even 90% of cases (I don't think it would be quite this high, but let's just assume). What then about the 10% where transitioning really helps them deal with life? Do we just make their life miserable?
To be honest with you, I wouldn't suspect if this is where we end up in 20 years' time when the pendulum swings the other way, but either way it's not an ideal situation.
That doesn't really map onto the recent idea of 'non-binary', where one's sex is supposed to be entirely ignored, and the idea of someone being a 'non-binary man' or a 'non-binary woman' is generally considered wrong or even offensive to believers of this ideology.