(LifeSiteNews) — More than five percent of American high-school students reportedly either identify as “transgender” or question their “gender identity,” according to a national survey published this month by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC).
The federal agency’s October 10 Morbid & Mortality Weekly Report says that the 2023 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) offers the “first nationally representative data” about students who identify as “transgender.” From a pool of more than 20,000 students in both public and private schools, it found that, as of 2023, “3.3% of U.S. high school students identified as transgender, and 2.2% identified as questioning.”
This, the report asserted, correlated with higher incidence of numerous personal ills, including “violence, poor mental health, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and unstable housing, and a lower prevalence of school connectedness” via bullying, suicide attempts, feelings of “sadness” and “hopelessness,” and avoiding school to avoid feeling “unsafe.”
READ: Biden admin submits rule to force all public schools to embrace LGBT ‘identities’
The CDC’s Kathleen Ethier, director of adolescent and school health, claimed that gender-confused youth have “poorer mental health and higher risk for suicide” due to being “stigmatized” and “made to feel unsafe” based on how “they identify around their gender,” in comments to the New York Times.
The takeaway, according to her, is that more affirmation of transgenderism is in order, with Ethier suggesting that schools should “create safe and supportive” environments for students to live out their gender confusion.
Many warn, however, that the proposed cure is actually the source of the problem.
In 2018, Brown University behavioral scientist Lisa Littman coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)” after finding that 87 percent of “transgender” teens she studied belonged to a friend group characterized by some degree of “social influence” on gender, such as other gender-confused teens; and that 63 percent of the teens had been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder or neurodevelopmental disability before declaring they were a different gender. Littman argued that youth susceptibility to gender confusion is in large part an effort to conform to one’s social circle.
Three years later, in her book Irreversible Damage, the Wall Street Journal’s Abigail Shrier reached similar conclusions. She found that “[c]oming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status,” but over time they often come to “bitterly regret what they have done to themselves.”
Reacting to the CDC’s latest findings, Mary Rice Hasson of the Catholic Person & Identity Project told Catholic News Agency that the “YRBS did not cross-reference transgender identification with other important questions, such as the new questions on ‘adverse childhood experiences’” or experiences of forced or early sexual activity. The survey’s “ideological bias” led to the conclusion that “stigma” is the culprit, even though “[o]ther research demonstrates that trans-identified youth suffer high rates of mental health issues that explain their suicidality.”
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures, including “reassignment” surgery, fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
So-called “gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”