Opinion
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(LifeSiteNews) – In this series I will attempt to show a comprehensive picture of the transgender phenomenon. This extraordinary movement emerged from the usual interactions of mass media, technology, the attention economy, and consumerism.

In a few short years it has secured an influence entirely disproportionate to the fraction of the population who reported themselves as “trans”  before the movement went viral.

How did this happen? To ask the question is to consider the many forces at play in the creation of this new culture.

Beginning with a study of the prevalence and description of an emergent trend, I will move to examine some of the influences and practices which have successfully established this sensationalist parallel culture.

I began this investigation with a sense of incredulity towards the claim of victimhood made by transgender activists. By the end, it was a claim I came to take much more seriously than the activists themselves.

A crime of unusual cruelty

On Monday, March 27, 2023, a young woman identifying as “transgender” shot and killed six people in an elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee.

The murder of three children and three adults by Audrey Hale is an unusually brutal and disturbing crime. The calculated murder of children is a monstrous act of exceptional cruelty.

At this stage, it appears that Head of School Katherine Koonce was executed upon investigating the shootings – presumably of the children, who included the daughter of the school pastor. Haillie Scruggs, age 9, died with her classmates Evelyn Dieckhaus and William Kinney.

Top row: Katherine Koonce, Mike Hill, Cynthia Peak. Bottom row: Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney.

Mike Hill, the school janitor, and substitute teacher Cynthia Peake also died at the hands of the young woman, who called herself “Aiden.” Hale had inscribed that name on the weapon she carried around the school as she scoured the building for people to kill.

The murders took place in an elementary school. The shooter was 28 years old. What would motivate someone to return to her childhood school to kill children and staff she did not know, and a principal whose authority she escaped over a decade ago?

The policing of victimhood

I have argued that this was a hate crime – an instance of violent normophobia, a coefficient of the ideological reprogramming of the West.

This is a climate which has changed beyond recognition within 30 years. Perhaps no single change has been so sudden, and so shocking, as that which was occasioned by the transgender trend.

An identity with an ideology, the many aspects of the transgender phenomenon combine into a culture with its own terminology and explanation of reality. Central to its success is the coronation of its followers with the privileged status of victim.

Attempts are already being made to include the murderer amongst the victims. I will treat this egregious gaming of the situation with the gravity it deserves later in the series.

I will first examine the transgender phenomenon, considering the cause of its meteoric rise to prominence and how it has secured its position in the foreground of Western culture. It has become many things – a trend, an industry, a career path, a means of personal emphasis, a signifier of enlightened attitudes. Its influence is undeniable, but its own progenitors are unmentionable.

Overall, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the transgender culture relies heavily on the concept of victimhood. Moreover, there is considerable evidence to suggest its extraordinary success is founded on its manufacture.

Towards a culture of transition

The numbers and words of this culture tell stories themselves. The increase in prevalence of the culture among young people and children is one. The growth of an industry to service them is another.

Finally, the transformation of language sympathetic to the culture is notable in the scientific literature which documents the phenomenon.

A study published in 2015 showed that

The overall meta-analytical prevalence for transsexualism was 4.6 in 100,000 individuals; 6.8 for trans women and 2.6 for trans men. Time analysis found an increase in reported prevalence over the last 50 years.

Much has changed in the last seven years. The words as well as the numbers have undergone a dramatic transformation. “Transsexual” is now outmoded. “Transgender” is the term for “transsexual plus ideology.”

Talk about ‘care’

A 2019 study in the United States showed considerable increase – an explosion – of the transgender culture among youth:

Transgender/Non-binary (TGNB) identification appears to be more common among younger age groups. By the Williams Institute’s estimates, TGNB prevalence among adults is highest in the 18–24 years old age group at 700 per 100,000 (0.7%), compared with 600 per 100,000 (0.6%) in those aged 25–64 and 500 per 100,000 (0.5%) in those aged 65 and older.

This study, titled Demographic and Temporal Trends in Transgender Identities and Gender Confirming Surgery, is an example of the growing power of the transgender culture to alter definitions according to its agenda. It made use of data from 2015 to 2016 collected by the Williams Institute of UCLA, whose more recent survey is detailed below.

Surgical removal of wombs, testicles, and penises, and attempts at “phalloplasty” and the creation of “neovaginas” are described as “Gender Confirming Surgery.”

The study claims that “systemic barriers continue to limit access to gender confirming care and perpetuate health disparities among TGNB [transgender/non-binary] individuals.”

Again, “gender confirming care” refers to

  • access to sterilizing hormones
  • access to therapists of dubious integrity
  • access to doctors willing to perform surgical procedures

“Gender confirming care” is a business. It supplies therapy, hormones, drugs, and surgery to a rapidly expanding market.

A youth culture industry

Demand continues to grow for this access. It is growing most rapidly among the young. As the 2019 study explained:

Evidence supports that TGNB [transgender non-binary] people begin to identify as TGNB when they are at a relatively young age. According to USTS results, by age 20, 94% of respondents began to feel that their gender was different from the sex assigned at birth. (Demographic and temporal trends in transgender identities and gender confirming surgery)

A 2016 study done in Minneapolis high schools showed “exceptionally high rates of TGNB [transgender non-binary] identities, as high as 2,700 per 100,000”:

Data came from the 2016 Minnesota Student Survey, which consisted of [80,929] students in ninth and 11th grade

Of these children, it was the younger cohort – of 14- to 15-year-olds – which showed the highest prevalence. Also, there were twice as many girls as boys who considered themselves to be a different “gender.” See the table for reference here, taken from Health and Care Utilization of Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Youth: A Population-Based Study, which was conducted in 2016 and published in 2017.

How have these numbers changed? Between 2016 and 2022 the number of U.S. youths attached to the transgender culture almost doubled.

The most recent national U.S. survey, conducted by the Williams Institute at the University of California, says:

Youth ages 13 to 17 comprise a larger share of the transgender-identified population than we previously estimated, currently comprising about 18% of the transgender-identified population in the U.S., up from 10% previously (How many adults and youth are transgender in the United States?” – June 2022)

In the United Kingdom, a 2022 report showed “skyrocketing” rates of child referrals to one gender clinic alone.

According to the most recent data released by the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the U.K.’s Tavistock Centre, child and adolescent referrals have doubled compared to the previous year.

GIDS now estimates 5,000+ children and adolescents sought gender-related services in 2021-2022, a 112% increase from 2020-2021.

Note: Prevalence is over twice as high in girls than in boys. However, figures are distorted by a policy of not reporting referrals by sex from 2018-19.

A proven strategy

Why does it matter that medical professionals use the vocabulary chosen by the transgender culture?

A formerly marginal tendency has come to such prominence that it has succeeded in altering the description of itself and that of reality to suit its own agenda.

It is a proven strategy to occasion wider social acceptance. A cascade of effects was witnessed in favor of homosexual activists, whose disruption of the American Psychiatric Association’s annual conference in 1970 and 1971 removed the definition of homosexuality as a deviant sexual disorder from the diagnostic manual, DSM-II.

As Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality notes, “the most significant catalyst for diagnostic change was gay activism.”

This proved that the opinions of people with a categorized disorder have the power to redefine medical practice – and social reality.

Yet the effects of this pressure on psychiatrists – in person – was not limited to the changing of a medical dictionary definition. This change opened the door to the rainbow agenda, which has as a result rapidly colonized our culture. As the author shows:

The result in many countries eventually led to…(1) the repeal of sodomy laws that criminalized homosexuality; (2) the enactment of laws protecting the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in society and the workplace; (3) the ability of LGBT personnel to serve openly in the military; (4) marriage equality and civil unions in an ever growing number of countries; (5) the facilitation of gay parents’ adoption rights; (6) the easing of gay spouses’ rights of inheritance; and (7) an ever increasing number of religious denominations that would allow openly gay people to serve as clergy (Drescher, Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality Behavioral Sciences, 2015)

To make these changes is to redirect the energies of an entire culture.

Most importantly, in medicine, psychiatry, and other mental health professions, removing the diagnosis from the DSM led to an important shift from asking questions about “what causes homosexuality?” and “how can we treat it?” to focusing instead on the health and mental health needs of LGBT patient populations.

The conclusion of the above study, which notes the transition of homosexuality from a psychiatric disorder to an international cult whose banner adorns the offices of state, indicates the power and potential of the transgender culture. It too has put its own words into the mouths of medical doctors, and its members are now visible at every level of society.

How has the transgender culture grown so quickly, and how has it changed so much?

In the next part of this series, I will examine how this formerly marginal tendency has come to such prominence that it has succeeded in altering the description of itself and that of reality to suit its own agenda.

It shares with the rainbow agenda, whose strategies and reach it has so far mimicked, a deep-seated aversion to any investigation of its means of reproduction. We shall see precisely why this is the case.

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