6 thoughts on “Gender Dysphoria Among Youth”

  1. As somebody wrote recently, possibly on this site, this seems like teenagers, primarily teenage girls, not so subtly pressuring each other into this, like they used to do (and probably still do) with anorexia. It is the same sort of thing that causes young people to “come out of the closet” in a very pubic way, only to walk down the aisle with a member of the opposite sex three years later.

    Maybe we need to be just a little less supportive of these things. It doesn’t have to be antagonistic, but instead of saying “That’s wonderful!,” we might reply “Really? Have you thought all this through?” Of course they have, but you might cause them to give it yet another think.

  2. Social media is amplifying in the youth culture a phenomenon that is real but what everyone seems to forget is extremely rare. I support parental involvement in these decisions. If the child cannot get parental support they must either seek legal emancipation or wait until they are a legal adult. Clinics and schools should never operate behind a parent’s back on such a key issue.

  3. Many years ago, in the days of Tubgirl and Lemon Party, there was a “Body Modification e-zine” that was even worse, because it was by and for people who were obsessed with lopping off their own body parts, such as using a pair of dykes to cut off their fingers, joint by joint, or split their tongue or nether regions in half with a scalpel.

    And in prior DSM manuals, gender dysphoria was a category of body dysphoria, right along with people who wanted to be amputees, and who went around to hospitals trying to convince doctors to cut their legs off.

    Yet the idea of getting your bits lopped off went mainstream, when it should’ve just landed people in a mental hospital as a danger to themselves and others, as such people also try to convince other vulnerable and confused people to do the same thing.

  4. Meh, we’ve been here before. We’ve already started heading into what could easily be called Crazy Years. The late 60s, the 1920s, around 1850, we periodically go through times when what seemed absurd but a generation before become more widely adopted by broader society, if only for a short while. Ceci n’est pas un pipe. Eventually everyone comes around to a “WTF was I thinking?” moment, but the damage will have been done.

    Things will be absurd and weird for a while, then will be the hangover, which always sucks (the 1970s, the 1930s, 1860s in U.S., 1870 in Europe, &c.), we’ll probably have a nasty war, and eventually things will start getting better. Like Moties, we seem to be locked into cycles of creation and destruction that we can’t rise above, even if we’re supposedly better as a civilization.

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