It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

It's not reasonably possible to rid ourselves of the internet, and in fact I think it's a net Good. The issue going forward is to consider and teach responsible internet use for not just young people, but everyone. Most of the shitty, intentionally hurtful things I see on the internet don't come from young folks, but from adults trying to inflict harm. People like that have always existed, and are the real problem in these cases.

I think OP is expressing concern that maybe young people aren't living there as much as you'd hope.

Most of these issues, and the extent to which they are issues, are in the eye of the beholder.

> Oh, and monocultures aren’t great.

Does being terminally online contribute more or less to this? I'm still not sure, but leaning towards more. People always parroted others, but now with social reach being so concentrated, it seems like everyone parrots from a smaller pool. The consequence/reward for expression are much more well defined in the online world as well.

What has changed is just that extremist groups have very successfully adopted the communication tools available to them for recruitment and engagement.

Not to be too Orwellian, but I’ve often wondered why nobody say, talks about removing gendered pronouns altogether in formal speech instead of adding 50 new ones for instance. People seem to only talk about adding new words and concepts.

You say 86, but that was just the number of children reported to the AAPC. I think it'd be reasonable to assume that there were many more cases that were not reported (due to varied levels of ingestion/concern) or were reported elsewhere and so not included in AAPC stats.

Some of what you call "Moral Panic" and "Pearl-Clutching" in regard to the whole tide pod thing was also what I'd call "Education". It informed both parents and children that this was occurring and why it was a bad idea. I think it's also safe to assume this helped prevent a few cases.

Young children were and still are the primary concern when it comes to ingesting household poisons, and there have been active efforts and ongoing campaigns for ages warning both parents and children about that particular danger (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Yuk), but what made the tide-pod challenge remarkable and newsworthy is that very few people would have expected that so many teenagers would be stupid enough to do something like that.

All that isn't to say that the media didn't jump at the chance to generate clicks by exploiting parent's fear and exaggerating the phenomenon, but it wasn't simply something invented to panic parents the way the D&D scare was, and it was just one of several stupid dangerous things children were doing around that time motivated by internet points and social media attention.

In the case of this "Not Tourette’s", while I'm sure it has been being reported elsewhere and perhaps even irresponsibly, the source is an academic paper and no matter the actual prevalence of this behavior it's absolutely appropriate for something like this to be reported and discussed in that setting. Even if this does turn out to be nothing but a blip in referrals that never amounts to a larger trend of great concern and the fad of kids pretending to have Tourette’s dies off quickly, that's perfectly fine.

What matters is that there are records and reports so that all available evidence can be collected, compared, and studied in the event that it isn't simply a non-issue that dies off on its own. In the meantime, because it is happening, it seems like a good thing for healthcare providers to be aware of what's been observed so far and that researchers can look into the "Why" behind it.

In a time when people didn't question their gender, many of them might have felt themselves to be alone in their feelings. They not only learned to suppress their feelings (to avoid ridicule or worse), they were unable to understand them because literature was oppressed. Much self-isolation, even tragedy ensued. In many "less civilized cultures" these differences were not an excuse for abuse, but were recognized, even exalted ... until the colonizers came along with their 'truths'.

Exploring, understanding and accepting ourselves is an important step, for -all- of us, not just the typicals. "To thine own self be true..."

Edit: Never stop making things better in terms of equality, but perhaps we shouldn’t celebrate cancel culture or people getting internet points for gender confusion.

(V. S. RAMACHANDRAN)

The author/researcher says he believes that is one of the main mechanisms of human learning (babies look at adults and imitate. Adults look at other adults and imitate. Subconsciously)

What you are describing sounds very similar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning

Before social media, there were movies that molded society. Bollywood and more recently K-dramas/K-pop have influenced an entire generation.

Often these were used for shaping a younger generation as a long term strategy for a desirable adult demographic. To a certain extent, it is happening in our American public school system. Everyone who comes through it are kind of identical. It may not be apparent to those who have never stepped out of the States, but it is obvious to those outside or have known other cultures.

With social media impacts, its effect is like an oil spill. Even if you can contain it, it will be messy, expensive and traumatic for years and years. This is a Faustian bargain we have made.

This happens to me as well, but usually I just kind of mutter 'damnit' under my breath or 'ugh'. Maybe shake my head a little.

In a lot of ways SAD feels like a form of PTSD where instead of a single extremely traumatic experience, or many extreme experiences(known as complex PTSD), it's a huge amount of slightly traumatic ones. So it's sort of like a flashback.

One of the things I've noticed is that when I'm on SSRIs and they're working(which has never been a long-lived state of affairs, unfortunately), this phenomenon is drastically reduced or even gone altogether.

I've also wondered if my ADHD somehow factors into it, but that I don't know.

I am wondering if you've tried EMDR after the event happens? So you have the thought that triggers the tic and then you'd focus intensely on the event and do the EMDR stuff. That may reduce the intensity of the past event and reprogram your nervous system to not trigger so intensely on it.

Assumed it wasn't just me who did this but glad to know there are others.

I don't see how it's at all convoluted. If anything, it's too reductive.

Taboos, traditions, etc., don't need to exist because of a reason that's explicit. Sometimes, they do, but that doesn't explain the taboos that don't make obvious sense. A taboo can be more or less a form of "cultural neuron" that doesn't have an explicit purpose but incidentally changes the balance of the system towards something that society at a given time may benefit from without even knowing it. A religion featuring more ornate hats than others may have more true believers, or perhaps the other way around for all we know. If that's at least plausible, if not true, that wouldn't necessarily mean a reverend at one point decided to declare a certain kind of hat wearing because of the "good of the church."

The inverse can also be true. Take for instance the taboo of sexism. Makes sense, right? Given modern western principles, why should culture allow for discrimination based on sex? On the other hand, there's evidence that many women, regardless of their political positions, actually appreciate men who are "benevolently sexist." It's a phenomenon compelling enough that even Psychology Today, a publication heavily biased against anything unflattering to women, has reported on it more than once. By making sexism a taboo, and far more taboo as of late, society has raised the bar for just how confident a man has to be to attract a woman. We really don't need a study to demonstrate that, on average, women are attracted to confidence. An effect of making sexism taboo is it changes the signal to noise ratio, allowing women to better identify which men they'll actually be attracted to. Maybe there were some people arguing against sexism with this in mind, but I imagine they are an extreme minority. Most anti-sexists probably weren't thinking along those lines.

At least that taboo makes some reasonable sense in isolation, and even the fashion of religious garb can be made sense of, but what about a taboo that makes no sense? What about merely making a mouth-noise that comes out sounding like "shit?"

It makes little explicit sense that saying the word "shit" be a faux pas. You can say poop, doodie, scat, dung, and even crap, but shit is considered a curse word. It's really pretty stupid.

Except I would argue that having any form of taboo can have a positive effect, even if it barely makes sense. By having cultural limits of any kind, it puts the society on the same page and creates a mindset where individuals try to at least maintain some level of basic class as a mindset. Personally, I like saying the word shit, but adding virtually any variable to a chaotic system can have effects that weren't explicitly predicted.

We just don't have enough people thinking about this as a SIR model on a social graph to spark the conversation. We literally lack the critical mass of people understanding the language. Without the language the thoughts don't exist.

I am sure a 100 years from now people will look back at us as completely insane to be letting social contagions spread around to children as random graphs on a network.

Your brain is an organ just like other organs. If it starts malfunctioning it can cause serious even life threatening problems.

    Plop plop
    Fizz fizz
    Oh how like Tourette's it is

Lake Bell asks the person to speak in their highest note and then their lowest note and then yodel for a couple of times. Then to asks her to just speak, and the voice that comes out much closer to what we associate with a 'normal' woman's voice.

I guess having to manually change tone to such extremes resets the body's ability to recover this incredibly specific learnt behavior, and the person momentarily reverts to a clean sample of their own voice.

I'm sure it varies for each individual, but for at least some gay men, some portion of their accent might be an affectation (even if it's largely subconscious).

A college girlfriend even chewed me out for assuming one of those guys was gay based on the voice, and insisted he was straight. I think he is out now.

It would be interesting to see a linguistic or otherwise academic study on those vocal features. I'm sure people have looked at it. Here's a Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_male_speech

But there are plenty of gay men such as myself who embrace more masculine traits; it's just that a long history of a homophobic society suppressed exposure of the public to "normal" gay dudes.

It doesn't help either that straight script writers wrote stereotype fem gay characters for laffs. But then in modern times a large portion gay men working in the industry are the fem type and therefore those are the characters they write or play.

Humans of all ages copy behavior they see in (social) media. Not every unusual behavior should be classified as mental illness.

> Definitely an interesting starting point for further research.

Maybe, but for psychology and sociology, not psychiatry and brain science.

https://old.reddit.com/r/thalassophobia/

There's a group allegedly devoted to trypophobia. I say allegedly because I refuse to click on the link:

https://old.reddit.com/r/trypophobia/

One of the cited papers is "Family, twin, and adoption studies of bipolar disorder". Link that gives only the abstract: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14601036/

I haven't dug into the paper yet, but there's a starting point.

Edit: The paper says "More recent (and rigorous) studies that have compared concordance rates specifically of bipolar disorder among MZ [monozygotic] and DZ [dizygotic] twin pairs are summarized in table 2." The table shows four studies that gave concordances of 0.00-0.08 for dizygotic twins, and 0.36-0.75 for monozygotic twins.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fakedisordercringe/

It's status as illness though, let alone mass-illness is dubious at best.

A large number of young people across different countries are affected, with considerable impact on health care systems and society as a whole. Since spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations such as local communities or school environments, spread via social media is no longer restricted to specific locations such as schools or towns.

Have you heard of "advertising"?

I'm sure some of the cases are genuine, but not all. And I'm not saying these girls aren't troubled or have other things going on that they need help with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_c...

I am wondering how they differentiate this specific extreme behaviour moving "socially," to other subtle behaviours which are copied and mirrored within small tight knit social groups - especially kids / teenagers? I found the 9:1 ratio of girls to boys intriguing, given the same or very similar mechanism might been a huge benefit to females in past ages where they might be married into a strange culture.

The state of affairs around transsexuality is horrifying. Critical discussion is basically not allowed on moral grounds and most people who "study" the topic (eg gender studies), care for said patients (eg gender clinics), etc are the same people who already adhere to that no-criticism-allowed agenda.

[0] https://news.sky.com/story/amp/nhs-gender-clinic-the-tavisto...

It's a tradeoff. At least we can all agree that adults have the right to transition under an Informed Consent model. Countries like the UK, without IC, are hellholes for trans medical care. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1eWIshUzr8

Of the less than 2% of detransitioners overall, the vast majority names reasons like social pressure, transitioning being too difficult, etc.

Dunno what numbers you are talking about, but the ones I know certainly underline gender dysphoria being a very real thing and not some sort of "social contagion", and my personal experience definitely aligns with this as well: I don't know a single trans person who seems to regret transitioning, but a whole number of trans people who are struggling with the constant hate they get, fuelled in part by this sort of rhetoric.

And since the article in one of the replies mentioned puberty blockers: They are 1. entirely reversible, 2. routinely prescribed to cis children for other medical reasons and 3. unlike these blockers, puberty is not reversible.

Can I change your mind, even if just a little bit? I don't know; but if you really want to change your mind, start looking closely into the "statistics" of the right. Their misrepresentations are often absurdly superficial. It's all a lie, and the parts that aren't, usually aren't that bad.

He would include in these groups people at all stages in their transitions, so those considering transitioning further could be informed and challenged by those who had gone the whole way with surgery and all.

If laws against witchcraft are removed and/or witchcraft is destigmatized and then all the sudden there appears to be an explosion of witches, the explanation is probably not that hordes of people are adopting witchcraft.

I'll leave it to the reader to guess the simplest and most likely explanation.

Edit: the voting on this comment is crazy.. the number of HN users that feel sexualisation of children isn't bad is utterly shameful.

Only decades? You mean for all of history, where there are distinct roles mostly because of anatomy.

In fact, it was only in recent decades with birth control that was there even an option for most women to take a different role for extended periods.

I'll say the opposite is true, the last several decades did a great job and removed the notion of heterogenomativity. We are just going so far past that into the illogical now.

This is patently untrue. Since the 60s, western society has been increasingly accomodating to the non-gender-conforming. Especially with the rise of the internet, people who once felt isolated with whatever made them different were able to find others like themselves.

The thing is, many societies didn't care for a long time, and only in the 20th century repression really took off with the rise of ultra-fundamentalist religions. Now we're seeing the backlash against that and people obviously are way more free to be who they are once again - so neither a surprise nor an epidemic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)

Even this article doesn't really make any attempt to disprove a null hypothesis and we basically are required to take these people at their word that a) the behaviour expressed is not consistent with Tourette's and the patients don't actually have it, and b) the source of this is due to the YouTuber mentioned. There's no control group or anything to prove these two facts beyond the author's opinion.

Just imagine applying that same approach to addicts.

One is from the "gender is a social construct" post-modernist side, which views the very idea that people are either men or women with some suspicion, and leads to concepts such as gender fluidity, non-binary identities, and the idea that maybe young kids should not be gendered at all unless and until they chose to assume some gender.

The other current is much more conservative, and starts with the simple observation that some people experience extreme gender dysphoria that has only successfully been cured (or at least alleviated) by gender-affirming care (from gender expression to hormone treatments to top/bottom surgery to facial feminization/masculinization surgery and beyond). This current considers it much more clear that humans are generally either men or women, with relatively clear associated characteristics, and simply considers that some people happen to have the "wrong" characteristics. Rather than investigating the philosophical reasoning of why this might be happening and what it means for the concepts woman/man, it is much more concerned with the practical problem of how to make life better for people who feel like this.

My impression is that the second group is much much more prevalent, but also seen as problematic by the first group. The first group is much more extreme, and has much more "interesting" talking points, so it is significantly over-represented in online discussions and media.

If I say "For me it's a choice" then it undermines the people for whom it is not a choice. Because most of the audience in the bathroom stall aren't doing research to put together a comprehensive understanding of gender, they're just reading what in front of them for that day, and then leaving.

If I say gender can be learned, we can spend days bickering about what "learned" really means.

It's not fun. And I'm sorry that someone else said something you think is contradictory.

The reality is more nuanced—while certain gender roles are purely social constructs, other aspects of gender are hardwired.

My dad still uses language like "C'mon! Be a man and do {this thing}."

Personally, I believe when I'm old and crotchety the winds of society will leave my language at something like "C'mon! You should do {this thing}." and leave the gender out of it entirely.

Anedotally, the three people I knew before transition who later transitioned have all expressed some form of process "I was depressed and didn't understand why" -> "I had these thoughts but suppressed them because I felt they were weird / unacceptable" -> "I learned what transition is and the pieces fell into place".

Edit: over a period of many years, that's why they were late transitioners!

You know like, Quentin Tarantino isn't racist even though he said the N word, but if I'm walking down the street and a total stranger comes up to me and starts throwing the N word around, safe bet they're saying something dumb.

See my comment a few days ago about "The Internet is graffiti in a bathroom stall". I could probably have a calm good-faith conversation with any of you in real life about gender. But not on a web forum.

Always be wary of persons who sort your behavior into 'male' and 'female' categories.

Looking at the Hijra example, it looks like the Hijra demographics are around 0.5-1% of the population.

In the latest polls [0], the proportion of Gen Z that identify as transgender is over 2%.

Is there repression/stigma in South Asia keeping some people in the closet? Is the culture difference having an effect on gender dysphoria? Is there a gender dysphoria "contagious" effect? I don't know, but those are interesting questions.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-tick...

Are there actual people who "learned" to have something Tourette's-like? Yes.

If you don't distinguish between the two, then Tourette's is absolutely overrepresented.

Denying that this can be the case for gender dysmorphia is neither reasoned nor logical and can absolutely lead to harm.

There has to be a way to respect and help people without turning off our brains.

You should do some reading on how gender affirming therapy and treatment works, because it is absolutely not standard to pursue treatment immediately without any process or consultation.

Whether transition is the right option is absolutely explored, it's just explored in a way that allows the patient to come to a decision rather than a doctor making the gatekeeping whether this person is "really transgendered".

In the case of gender dysphoria, the obvious comparison would be, compared to a society where one can subvert gender norms and be accepted without changing one's identity. The emergence of trans movement has created a space where gender-nonconforming people can find more acceptance, but it comes with own set of norms and requirements.

One of which is that one must change their identity and, in many cases, conform to the norms of your newly chosen identity (certainly not everyone in the trans community enforces identity-based gender norms, but that's also true of general society when it comes to sex-based norms. In my experience, they're both about as bad as each other. I've lost count of the number of times people have told me that I must be a certain way or have had certain experiences because of my gender identity).

I don't understand this. The core problem with gender dysphoria is that you feel significant discomfort with your biological sex. If it were possible to legitimately "re-educate" oneself to not feel this discomfort, that would be considerably cheaper, less invasive and less problematic overall than trying to change one's sex. All surgery carries risk of death after all, and lifetime of hormone therapy is annoying to say the least.

Being bald is not just a feeling of discomfort with having no hair, it has real consequences. Baldness is generally considered to be less attractive, and attractiveness impacts career and dating prospects, for instance.

Being impotent also has real-world consequences. It impacts dating and also impacts your ability to conceive.

Arguably, being trans also has real-world consequences as well, so if a solution became available that could eliminate the gender dysphoria without changing your sex, I would be very surprised if plenty of trans people wouldn't choose that option, and not just because of social stigma.

The resistance to such a solution comes from two understandable directions: a) terrible gay conversion therapy that doesn't actually work, and b) the (mistaken) notion of mind-body dualism that many people internalize over their lives, that their identity, their mind, is separate from their body and has more primacy.

This is quite clear to me and I do not think gender dysphoria - which is a DSM-5 diagnosis [1] - is the correct term to use. Compared to previous years or decades (or centuries) there is a markedly higher percentage of children/young adults who "self-identify as 'trans'", often clustered and in waves. This did not use to be so but that does not mean similar phenomena did not occur, they just did not get a diagnosis attached to them. It is highly probable (and feed for a dissertation if there is a university which would accept such a politically charged project) that the same character types who now "self-identify as 'trans'" were those who would style themselves as "goth" or "emo" or (in the late 80's and 90's) "metrosexual" or any other androgynous style. The difference is that these earlier style figures did not come with a diagnosis nor were they adopted by any mainstream political movement and as such were taken less seriously. You could be a goth just like you could be a metalhead or a prep and be part of your in-crowd by just wearing the right clothes (and, for some crowds, make-up) and listening to the right bands. It was accepted as a way for children and young adults to "belong" without coming with much baggage.

[1] https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphori...

Transitioning is 100x harder. The nonconformity is obvious. The antagonism directed at transitioning people is unavoidable, strong and potentially deadly - violent and lethal attacks on trans people are becoming much more common every year. Compulsory sterilization for people legally transitioning is still mandated in many countries and was only abolished in progressive countries in the last few years.

No, nobody is doing any of this because it's "cool".

When you showcase suicides on TV you also have upticks in suicides. Same goes for mass shootings, copycat murderers, and even political protests.

When the 101 dalmatians movie was released, there was also an uptick in demand for dalmatians.

I fail to see how this means it's ok to fabricate diseases to downplay the effect that mass media has on people.

I find it interesting that the mainstream is being biased towards believing in natural determinism instead of nurture and environmental influence.

Operating based on a sampling of women I know - Im going to perform an experiment - I have some clothes of mine that I (Male with a capital M) no longer wear and Im going to give them to some Female friends for their own use.

We'll see what happens but I bet Im going to be met with confusing expressions and laughed at - at best.

Men and women do not dress differently on the count of societal pressures but rather express themselves differently on the count of different imperatives. You can slice it 6 different ways but outside of a small minority of people with non-standard gender ideals, the vast majority of women want to "be pretty" in whatever way that means to them and the vast majority of men want to "look like a man" for their various reasons and in whatever way that means to them.

I realize this is a terribly "incorrect" thing to say these days but at the same time its among the most pervasive ideals I can think of - right up there with the understanding that water is wet. Out side of groups where the word "Patriarchy" is thrown around, men are men and women are women and neither would have it any other way. This isn't due to societal pressure to conform either. This is prevailing behavior of both genders at work.

I personally do not understand why a minority of people choosing alternative, non-birth gender roles needs to be cast into some movement where everyones gender is in question. Im not sure I know anyone who has ever so much as questioned the "baggage" their bio-gender is supposedly saddled with. According to modern psychiatry (which for the purposes of this conversation we'll assume is valid since we all agree Sociopathy and Eating Disorders are real things too), the DSM-5 includes Gender Dysphoria. Psychiatry considers that a real thing right next to some other things I think we can all agree are real.

> History shows us that almost all expressions of gender are fluid.

politely said: CITATION PLEASE

Isn't societal baggage also a perception issue? Take 10 people with all the same physical traits and the same social situation and you will get 10 different perspectives.

Why should I accept there is _any_ baggage as a fact? It may just appear so for a massive amount of people, and _that_ could be fluid.

Have you ever been a parent? Because males and females are different, and the sexual pressures on them are immensely different too, for both social and physical reasons. Similarly, sexual risk (to anyone, but especially children) is incredibly lopsided and comes almost entirely from males.

If you ignore sexual differences in other children you will let your children be mistreated, if you ignore sexual differences in adults you will get them molested.

> It was always an unsustainable system that was only allowed to flourish because a powerful minority wanted it to.

Pretty much all women know and are cautious, if not fearful, of male violence. They fought for women's sex-based rights because of obvious need. This isn't men putting women in purdah, these are protections they've achieved for themselves. Most men can see the extra work women have to do for safety reasons. The need for women's spaces is far from a minority opinion.

> Like are you a boy that relates primarily to women? Well you either endure being separated from them for a ton of meaningful developmental activities or you become transgender.

If you truly empathized with women you'd realized that your size and strength and biology makes you a risk that another woman wouldn't be and you'd socialize with women in mixed-sex areas and activities where your presence wasn't an undue burden.

> I think there are plenty of people who would be fine with their biological sex if it didn't come with so much societal baggage.

It's the physical baggage people are wrongly trying to ignore.

This doesn't explain the disproportionate rise in teenage girls seeking treatment at gender clinics though.

Here's a fascinating essay by a detransitioner on how she began thinking of herself first as 'non-binary' and later as male, and ended up being prescribed testosterone medication for this: https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name. She goes into quite some detail about how being exposed to gender identity ideology on Tumblr over a period of years was what influenced her to transition.

Other detransitioners have described similar online influences. It seems likely that this is at least one of the factors causing such an increase, and may well explain why the rise in referrals to gender clinics are so skewed toward female teenagers, who are the primary demographic of sites like Tumblr, and who are particularly vulnerable to social contagions.

Explained (aka semi-solid empirical experiments - where are those?) or imagined (aka ideological beliefs, much like the right)?

> And by and large, with some exceptions that get consistently magnified by those with an agenda, it is not something you can just do on a whim, and generally requires a lot of counselling and a lot of effort to pursue hormonal or surgical changes.

And yet every other week I see a talkshow on public TV discussing this. Prominently hosting a person that thinks the rules in place are faaaar to rigid, while most sane people would agree they are fine and problems lie in other areas. For example, while I agree that in many cases physiological "modifications" might be the most economic solution putting this solely to the purview of the individual might a) incur follow-up costs on society (here, these things are not self-paid) and b) raises the question why we don't amputate the legs of those who think they have one too many. The latter thing is something, which I would really like explained once by someone.

Please do not make this a partisan issue. Some of us have been following the sexually regressive trend of calling our children's bodies defective and broken because they don't match the viewers' sexual stereotypes for quite a while now, and there was pretty widespread consensus across political and religious ideologies that our kids didn't need surgery to be okay.

> It is a moral panic, and it causes real harm to kids who need genuine mental health support who are instead being dismissed as being part of a trend.

That's circular. They need help because they're caught in a trend which ignores the actual issues in their lives (bullying, divorce, academics, etc) and provides a one-size-fits-all solution of body modification.

> All rises in incidents of transgenderism are easily explained by a more tolerant society accepting it. The same appeared when we stopped pathologizing left-handedness - all the kids didn't suddenly become left-handed, but the ones that were felt comfortable no longer hiding it.

This sounds compelling but is not accurate. Left-handedness is a testable "condition" whereas transgender is some adults' interpretation of how people and their genitals should look based on how they act, especially with regard to things the observer thinks of as sexualized, such as who plays with dolls. Society was getting more tolerant, back in the 00s you'd never have a teacher scold a child for using wrong-sex toys because we'd largely gotten rid of the concept. Now it's back and we're telling children their actions and desires are wrong, BUT we've got a surgical solution!

Fifteen years ago a boy could have worn a dress to elementary and wouldn't have socially risked anything worse than if they wore the wrong brand. Now they risk their teachers "helping" them make huge life decisions they can't even comprehend, and telling them to keep the discussions secret from their parents. That's a lot less accepting than it used to be.

> with some exceptions that get consistently magnified by those with an agenda, it is not something you can just do on a whim, and generally requires a lot of counselling and a lot of effort to pursue hormonal or surgical changes.

This isn't true, the fast track (affirmative care) is the only one allowed in most schools and clinics and by WPATH guidelines. Very rarely do teachers, counsellors, therapists, or health care providers pause to help children with preexisting issues before literally telling them that they're born incorrectly and offering solutions - even if those solutions (drugs and surgery) aren't always immediate.

> There are incidents of detransitioning and those that regret it. Those rates are lower than those that regret knee replacements.

This is not correct. There are no proper studies that follow medical transitioners long enough to usefully make that claim. The studies that exist have egregious failures such as not accounting for dropouts or controlling for comorbidities. And knee surgery is widely known to be almost ineffective for many people, making it an exceptionally misleading comparison.

I think you are repeating talking points from John Oliver. If trans identifying people were evenly distributed among the population then it would appear a natural phenomenon. Unfortunately in some cases this is not true. Groups of young girls are coming out as trans together. Trans youth are clustered by social circle, not randomly distributed. Being trans is a legitimate identity but it is false to say that every single person who announces that they are trans is in fact trans.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/24/an-explosion...

The guardian is right wing?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/05/10-per-cent-...

This was from 2015, the actual numbers are now over 25% today. Hence why the first article from days ago is so concerned with the huge increase.

>"all the kids" are not suddenly becoming trans - the incident rates in society are still extremely small.

Perhaps nothing is wrong. LGBT rates pre world war 2 was a fraction of a percent. Perhaps society has always been >25% but socially people couldnt admit to it?

>Happy to answer any other questions if needed.

What's the association between LGBT and "Commie"? There is one.