When Hollywood actress Annette Bening declared, “To have a transgender kid has made me much more interesting,” she likely didn’t realize she was exposing a larger and darker truth about today’s cultural obsession with transgender-identifying children—or, indeed, about herself.
What stood out for me was when she said, "I think the greatest gift of my life is to have kids." My thought regarding this sentiment, which I share with her, is, "Then why advocate for a medical process that will jeopardize your child's fertility?"
What an incisive and beautifully written analysis! Thanks, Courage Coalition, for all you have done this year and all of the light you continue to shine on this scandal.
This is an amazing insight. I’d like to add. The physicians. What is their pathology. As a retired pediatrician, I was a colleague 25 years ago with another pediatrician who currently does gender medicine and is a known advocate. She was nuts (using the vernacular) 25 years ago. She was attention seeking and dominated all conversations. There is definitely psychopathology among the physicians. Savior complex?
We encountered so many nurses and social workers in the mental health system with my teen daughter who suddenly adopted the idea of transitioning as a part of severe mental health issues that hit in the early teen years who were clearly affirming and encouraging medicalization and transition because it made them feel excited, special, and like a hero. It was fun and entertaining for them and they got to feel superior to the "awful parents" telling them to stop, that they did not consent, and to please treat the anxiety and depression instead. There are some seriously self-absorbed, shallow people in these fields doing a lot of harm.
The question of what is wrong with the doctors and therapists who encourage transition is an important one. We will see it explored through the upcoming wave of malpractice litigation.
I can imagine class actions against hospital groups and clinics. I even foresee future human rights cases perhaps in international forums where a generation of maimed people seek reparations and large trust funds to cover the costs of their lifetime medical care.
Litigation may be the most important strategy to end this social contagion as quickly and humanely as possible.
It will be fascinating to see what happens when the Trump administration immediately reverses course on Title 9, insurance coverage for transition surgeries, and funding to schools and universities that promote gender ideology.
As others have noted, the key will be to enlist the support of moderate liberals by showing them the studies, the science, and how other rational countries have altered course based on evidence.
I am still amazed that parents like myself who want to protect their children's natural bodies and prevent self-harm are demonized and ostracized while parents who medicalize their kids are celebrated.
Parents who take pride in having a "trans kid" disturb me. "Whether consciously or not, they had turned their children into symbols of their own moral virtue, sacrificing their futures in the process."
As a psychologist who has long been concerned about how wokeness has invaded my field, I really appreciate this thoughtful and articulate essay. I hope it finds a broad readership.
Talk about saying the quiet part out loud! Her lack of awareness of how that would sound to anyone outside of the "progressive" bubble shows how completely out of touch she is. I have yet to see any mainstream news coverage even mention the large crowd that was on the pro-ban side of the courthouse. If the press mentioned us, then readers would want to see photos, and they would see what a diverse group we were: young and old, housewives and butch lesbians, gay guys, detransitioners, hippies and normies... I noticed that Pink News included a photo of the people on our side by mistake. Ha!
Yes, I think it was Lisa Selin Davis who said she tried to speak to journalists there, saying something like ‘look at this diverse crowd- wouldn’t that make a great story?’ Needless to say, her words fell on deaf ears.
Terrific work here, and I particularly appreciate the View from Skrmetti. The amount of information and insight gained from that one rally event is incalculable. Thanks to all who were able to attend and for bringing us the news. A question, also, if you have a link listing these studies, I would so appreciate having it to draw from for background information when trying to explain this to friends and neighbors who still don’t understand what is happening: “What makes this especially tragic is that most gender-dysphoric children—between 60% and 90%, according to 11 long-term studies—would naturally desist if left alone.”
For decades, since the 80’s, the number of self-identified people who engage in same-sex practices has on average been around 6% of the population in the US.
Around 6%, not 10%, not 1%.
the numbers vary from 1% to 10-12% depending on survey method, which can be either too intrusive or too anonymous. Consider just a center of the range, and use it for a start.
The tendency to self-identify as trans and live as trans in a lifetime has centered on around 0.3% of the population, consistent over decades. Trans has altered definitions gradually to take on transvestism, transsexualism, transgender, nonbinary, and other but, the most stable definition has centered on around 0.3% of the population since th 80’s
6% : 0.3% or roughly 95:5 as a ratio.
For every 95 adult lesbian or gay people you may encounter 5 trans in a population.
When you then read dysphorc children articles, what you begin to see is 95% of children “desist” or 90% “desist within the years of puberty - not even lifetime; these children reject trans and move towards gay straight or lesbian before adulthood, whereas most stable trans historically move towards it after adulthood.
That’s where ratio of roughly 95:5 or so crops up again.
For every 95 dysphoria kids you will find they are quickly gay or lesbian, and the remaining 5 we don’t know.
Not all lesbians and gays are dysphoric kids. Not everyone comes out as a teenager. Yet, as all people proceed to adulthood they have a more ans more stable sexuality and identity.
This will likely become more solid if you see these kids over 10-20 year frames - gays and lesbians rarely become trans but “trans identified” fairly commonly desist (10%? 30%?) back to lesbian, gay, or straight.
From puberty to 60, 70 when identity is most stable and most fixed you will see convergence back to the 95:5 or so seen for 40 years prior to 2000’s when the categories of trans started being disrupted to “prove” there were more trans than through.
Foe every lifetime in a population, for every 95 gays and lesbians we encounter we may also see 5 trans.
Decades long data, and consistent with child dysphoria research.
Yes, you are a well-known and welcome name in our household. I am not on X, but Josie is. She follows your work closely and often alerts me when an article or thread goes up. Thank you so much for your smart, good work, and your steadfast courage.
If you ever want to publish on our substack give me a shout. I can’t promise anything but I can certainly pass anything up to leadership. I am the head writer here now.
I’ve seen parent after parent leave their child in “gender” distress instead of allowing him or her to be gay. They’d rather have a “broken” kid who they can shuttle through the medical system, always blaming their child’s neuroses instead of their bad parenting for the child’s lack of self-acceptance — rather than a gay one (or let’s be real, usually rather than a butch lesbian one, because this is happening so much more often to girls).
Using their children for virtue signaling. Hopefully, it will not be long before there is a reckoning, and with it, there will be massive lawsuits and years of therapy. This is such an unbelievable mess.
"Watching those parents, we couldn’t shake the feeling that many of them were acting out a role, one that had been written for them by a culture that rewards woke virtue signaling above all else."
In times when status is up for grabs people will gravitate to virtue signaling. A similar dynamic plays itself out on the right with abortion. Caring for the children, whether existing or unborn, is a way to self-confer the valued status of the virtuous. I'm not sure there's a good way to interrupt that dynamic.
I'm in pro of accusation: if instead of feeling more interesting and brave society will make them feel guilty and call them for what they are, bad parents (I'm talking about Transhausen by proxy) they will drop the show immediately. It's narcisimus. Same with men. As a fervour defender of free speech I don't think we should forbid men to cross dress (some feminist do). But if (besides not allowing them in women spaces and sports) everybody will call them "sir" they will drop it too. We are past compassion and empathy. The health of minors and women are at stake (women too; they are being raped in jail by men with tranvestic fetishism).
Yes, I am past the point t of looking for compromise because it isn’t something they are capable. They are incapable of having any conversation that isn’t me, me, all, all right now! They have no empathy for women placed in cells with violent men who are lying about being trans women. At the point where I am talking about only men clearly lying to be moved to a female prison, who wouldn’t want that, and they consistently say it is ok because the guards rape the women anyway, I’m out. It took about ten-fifteen of those to make me stop trying.
Now I have come to realize that even talking to liberals is a waste of time. I’ve moved to the talking to conservatives stage. Pleasing them to do something. It is in their political best interest to to do something as their base will cheer them on. It is political gold for anyone who takes up the cause. Nancy Mace is doing so. She is being criticized of using it for publicity. Of course she is, she is a politician getting her name out there. That is what she is supposed to be doing according to the rules of the game. She is using my anger and others to get what she wants. I don’t care because it gets me what I want. Violent and predatory men out of female only spaces. Prisons and locker rooms are my property. The rest is needed but aren’t what makes me enraged in the coldest way. They demanded all and were given it. The only answer women can now is, no, none.
Oh but they are not all liying. They are more sexual aggressors among "trans" population. Mary Harrington wrote about it. In "cis" inmates de % of sexual aggressors is 13-15% (Mary has statistics from different countries). In "trans" inmates the % is 45-55%.
It makes the case that forced sterilization should be held to be strictly illegal under the 14th amendment of the constitution. Parents who partially or completely subject their children to forced sterilization, as well as governmental groups, and medicinal individuals and institutions should be punished harshly, and judged by that fact in public view.
There are also a lot of parents who would rather have a special "trans teen" whose problems are all caused by other people's "transphobia" than an angst-ridden, messy, struggling behaviorally difficult, often straight, extra emotionally intense and/or sensitive teenage girl going through normal (although perhaps elevated) adolescent dysregulation and distress. There's not much sympathy in the world for these girls. They are routinely mocked, looked down on, or ignored. Let them find the gender nonsense online and their parents can run with it and turn those struggles that don't get much sympathy and might even be seen as embarrassing into something special, supported, and respected.
Take this girl's very sensitive mental health struggles being made very public by her father, including some very specific troubling behaviors. How much sympathy would the family and girl get for these struggles and behaviors without the trans identity to go with it?
I was so troubled reading it for so many reasons. One of the things that really upsets me is I know all too well that when a girl is struggling that "messy" way, she is looked down on, dismissed, and judged by friends and family and the entire mental health system because she is so emotionally dysregulated and difficult to treat and challenging in her behavior. And her parents will be judged harshly by everyone - friends, family, and professionals again - for what they did wrong to cause this without understanding that many adolescent girls really, really struggle with the physical, emotional, and social changes of puberty even in the most loving, stable, supportive, and functional families. There should be sympathy and actual good support. But would anyone care about this child and her struggles in the same way without the trans identity? Would the parents be seen as heroes and advocates fighting for their child without the identity? These girls and their families also deserve sensitivity, support, and quality care. It's not surprising that a good chunk of them will take on this identity. Walk into any adolescent inpatient program and see how many of the girls are identifying this way now
What stood out for me was when she said, "I think the greatest gift of my life is to have kids." My thought regarding this sentiment, which I share with her, is, "Then why advocate for a medical process that will jeopardize your child's fertility?"
that was the stand out line for me too: how dare she deny others this gift before they can truly know and decide.
gender non-conformity needs normalizing and acceptance, not medicization.
Yes, reminds me of “Rachel” Levine.
What an incisive and beautifully written analysis! Thanks, Courage Coalition, for all you have done this year and all of the light you continue to shine on this scandal.
This is an amazing insight. I’d like to add. The physicians. What is their pathology. As a retired pediatrician, I was a colleague 25 years ago with another pediatrician who currently does gender medicine and is a known advocate. She was nuts (using the vernacular) 25 years ago. She was attention seeking and dominated all conversations. There is definitely psychopathology among the physicians. Savior complex?
We encountered so many nurses and social workers in the mental health system with my teen daughter who suddenly adopted the idea of transitioning as a part of severe mental health issues that hit in the early teen years who were clearly affirming and encouraging medicalization and transition because it made them feel excited, special, and like a hero. It was fun and entertaining for them and they got to feel superior to the "awful parents" telling them to stop, that they did not consent, and to please treat the anxiety and depression instead. There are some seriously self-absorbed, shallow people in these fields doing a lot of harm.
I am so sad about this and so ashamed. Even tho I never was involved in this directly.
I see this as well
The question of what is wrong with the doctors and therapists who encourage transition is an important one. We will see it explored through the upcoming wave of malpractice litigation.
I can imagine class actions against hospital groups and clinics. I even foresee future human rights cases perhaps in international forums where a generation of maimed people seek reparations and large trust funds to cover the costs of their lifetime medical care.
Litigation may be the most important strategy to end this social contagion as quickly and humanely as possible.
It will be fascinating to see what happens when the Trump administration immediately reverses course on Title 9, insurance coverage for transition surgeries, and funding to schools and universities that promote gender ideology.
As others have noted, the key will be to enlist the support of moderate liberals by showing them the studies, the science, and how other rational countries have altered course based on evidence.
Alice we think alike. This only stops when the doctors stop doing it.
I am still amazed that parents like myself who want to protect their children's natural bodies and prevent self-harm are demonized and ostracized while parents who medicalize their kids are celebrated.
Parents who take pride in having a "trans kid" disturb me. "Whether consciously or not, they had turned their children into symbols of their own moral virtue, sacrificing their futures in the process."
As a psychologist who has long been concerned about how wokeness has invaded my field, I really appreciate this thoughtful and articulate essay. I hope it finds a broad readership.
Talk about saying the quiet part out loud! Her lack of awareness of how that would sound to anyone outside of the "progressive" bubble shows how completely out of touch she is. I have yet to see any mainstream news coverage even mention the large crowd that was on the pro-ban side of the courthouse. If the press mentioned us, then readers would want to see photos, and they would see what a diverse group we were: young and old, housewives and butch lesbians, gay guys, detransitioners, hippies and normies... I noticed that Pink News included a photo of the people on our side by mistake. Ha!
Yes, I think it was Lisa Selin Davis who said she tried to speak to journalists there, saying something like ‘look at this diverse crowd- wouldn’t that make a great story?’ Needless to say, her words fell on deaf ears.
Terrific work here, and I particularly appreciate the View from Skrmetti. The amount of information and insight gained from that one rally event is incalculable. Thanks to all who were able to attend and for bringing us the news. A question, also, if you have a link listing these studies, I would so appreciate having it to draw from for background information when trying to explain this to friends and neighbors who still don’t understand what is happening: “What makes this especially tragic is that most gender-dysphoric children—between 60% and 90%, according to 11 long-term studies—would naturally desist if left alone.”
There are two key numbers to think of.
For decades, since the 80’s, the number of self-identified people who engage in same-sex practices has on average been around 6% of the population in the US.
Around 6%, not 10%, not 1%.
the numbers vary from 1% to 10-12% depending on survey method, which can be either too intrusive or too anonymous. Consider just a center of the range, and use it for a start.
The tendency to self-identify as trans and live as trans in a lifetime has centered on around 0.3% of the population, consistent over decades. Trans has altered definitions gradually to take on transvestism, transsexualism, transgender, nonbinary, and other but, the most stable definition has centered on around 0.3% of the population since th 80’s
6% : 0.3% or roughly 95:5 as a ratio.
For every 95 adult lesbian or gay people you may encounter 5 trans in a population.
When you then read dysphorc children articles, what you begin to see is 95% of children “desist” or 90% “desist within the years of puberty - not even lifetime; these children reject trans and move towards gay straight or lesbian before adulthood, whereas most stable trans historically move towards it after adulthood.
That’s where ratio of roughly 95:5 or so crops up again.
For every 95 dysphoria kids you will find they are quickly gay or lesbian, and the remaining 5 we don’t know.
Not all lesbians and gays are dysphoric kids. Not everyone comes out as a teenager. Yet, as all people proceed to adulthood they have a more ans more stable sexuality and identity.
This will likely become more solid if you see these kids over 10-20 year frames - gays and lesbians rarely become trans but “trans identified” fairly commonly desist (10%? 30%?) back to lesbian, gay, or straight.
From puberty to 60, 70 when identity is most stable and most fixed you will see convergence back to the 95:5 or so seen for 40 years prior to 2000’s when the categories of trans started being disrupted to “prove” there were more trans than through.
Foe every lifetime in a population, for every 95 gays and lesbians we encounter we may also see 5 trans.
Decades long data, and consistent with child dysphoria research.
https://x.com/Psychgirl211/status/1830280563908894828?t=W4C3-MBPWqO_VudzQSvA_g&s=19
My article above touches on this.
This is a terrific article. Thanks for sharing it.
Thank you Susan. I've written a number over on X.
Yes, you are a well-known and welcome name in our household. I am not on X, but Josie is. She follows your work closely and often alerts me when an article or thread goes up. Thank you so much for your smart, good work, and your steadfast courage.
If you ever want to publish on our substack give me a shout. I can’t promise anything but I can certainly pass anything up to leadership. I am the head writer here now.
Hi LeAnne.
Thank you.
That would be great!
I’ve seen parent after parent leave their child in “gender” distress instead of allowing him or her to be gay. They’d rather have a “broken” kid who they can shuttle through the medical system, always blaming their child’s neuroses instead of their bad parenting for the child’s lack of self-acceptance — rather than a gay one (or let’s be real, usually rather than a butch lesbian one, because this is happening so much more often to girls).
Well said
Using their children for virtue signaling. Hopefully, it will not be long before there is a reckoning, and with it, there will be massive lawsuits and years of therapy. This is such an unbelievable mess.
Yes, I am waiting for the first child/young adult to speak out and say he/she was “transed” by a parent.
"Watching those parents, we couldn’t shake the feeling that many of them were acting out a role, one that had been written for them by a culture that rewards woke virtue signaling above all else."
In times when status is up for grabs people will gravitate to virtue signaling. A similar dynamic plays itself out on the right with abortion. Caring for the children, whether existing or unborn, is a way to self-confer the valued status of the virtuous. I'm not sure there's a good way to interrupt that dynamic.
I'm in pro of accusation: if instead of feeling more interesting and brave society will make them feel guilty and call them for what they are, bad parents (I'm talking about Transhausen by proxy) they will drop the show immediately. It's narcisimus. Same with men. As a fervour defender of free speech I don't think we should forbid men to cross dress (some feminist do). But if (besides not allowing them in women spaces and sports) everybody will call them "sir" they will drop it too. We are past compassion and empathy. The health of minors and women are at stake (women too; they are being raped in jail by men with tranvestic fetishism).
Yes, I am past the point t of looking for compromise because it isn’t something they are capable. They are incapable of having any conversation that isn’t me, me, all, all right now! They have no empathy for women placed in cells with violent men who are lying about being trans women. At the point where I am talking about only men clearly lying to be moved to a female prison, who wouldn’t want that, and they consistently say it is ok because the guards rape the women anyway, I’m out. It took about ten-fifteen of those to make me stop trying.
Now I have come to realize that even talking to liberals is a waste of time. I’ve moved to the talking to conservatives stage. Pleasing them to do something. It is in their political best interest to to do something as their base will cheer them on. It is political gold for anyone who takes up the cause. Nancy Mace is doing so. She is being criticized of using it for publicity. Of course she is, she is a politician getting her name out there. That is what she is supposed to be doing according to the rules of the game. She is using my anger and others to get what she wants. I don’t care because it gets me what I want. Violent and predatory men out of female only spaces. Prisons and locker rooms are my property. The rest is needed but aren’t what makes me enraged in the coldest way. They demanded all and were given it. The only answer women can now is, no, none.
Oh but they are not all liying. They are more sexual aggressors among "trans" population. Mary Harrington wrote about it. In "cis" inmates de % of sexual aggressors is 13-15% (Mary has statistics from different countries). In "trans" inmates the % is 45-55%.
https://www.maryharrington.co.uk/p/how-many-sex-offenders?utm_medium=android&nthPub=361
About 70-80% of "trans woman" are autogynophile: heterosexual men with a fetish about imagine themselves as a women. It's a paraphilia, and paraphilias tend to go in cluster. Here there is a paper about it https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7879474_Transvestic_Fetishism_in_the_General_Population
Well-put piece, really appreciated it.
It makes the case that forced sterilization should be held to be strictly illegal under the 14th amendment of the constitution. Parents who partially or completely subject their children to forced sterilization, as well as governmental groups, and medicinal individuals and institutions should be punished harshly, and judged by that fact in public view.
Thank you for this fantastic though heart-rending post.
“If we are to break this cycle, we must start by rejecting the idea that having a trans child makes a parent interesting, virtuous, or brave.”
I don’t know what the mix is …
But I do know firsthand, via my wife & adult NB child, that:
1.”Be kind (but not to the real victims of GI) virtuosity”, as has been rammed &/or insinuated into many people’s minds via TRA capture
+
2.The natural parental inclination to “bravely” (though imho misguidedly) support one’s child in distress
are together more than sufficient, with no need for selfish/performative “interestingness”.
There are also a lot of parents who would rather have a special "trans teen" whose problems are all caused by other people's "transphobia" than an angst-ridden, messy, struggling behaviorally difficult, often straight, extra emotionally intense and/or sensitive teenage girl going through normal (although perhaps elevated) adolescent dysregulation and distress. There's not much sympathy in the world for these girls. They are routinely mocked, looked down on, or ignored. Let them find the gender nonsense online and their parents can run with it and turn those struggles that don't get much sympathy and might even be seen as embarrassing into something special, supported, and respected.
Take this girl's very sensitive mental health struggles being made very public by her father, including some very specific troubling behaviors. How much sympathy would the family and girl get for these struggles and behaviors without the trans identity to go with it?
https://www.wnct.com/news/north-carolina/for-transgender-youth-in-crisis-hospitals-sometimes-compound-the-trauma/
That news story was so troubling and sad.
I was so troubled reading it for so many reasons. One of the things that really upsets me is I know all too well that when a girl is struggling that "messy" way, she is looked down on, dismissed, and judged by friends and family and the entire mental health system because she is so emotionally dysregulated and difficult to treat and challenging in her behavior. And her parents will be judged harshly by everyone - friends, family, and professionals again - for what they did wrong to cause this without understanding that many adolescent girls really, really struggle with the physical, emotional, and social changes of puberty even in the most loving, stable, supportive, and functional families. There should be sympathy and actual good support. But would anyone care about this child and her struggles in the same way without the trans identity? Would the parents be seen as heroes and advocates fighting for their child without the identity? These girls and their families also deserve sensitivity, support, and quality care. It's not surprising that a good chunk of them will take on this identity. Walk into any adolescent inpatient program and see how many of the girls are identifying this way now
....let alone dragging your child to a protest and using them as a Political banner.
How many parents from the non woke side brought their children I wonder.