A Perfect Storm

How the Stars Aligned to Create the Environment Where Medical Transition Became as Common as Pierced Ears & As Easy to Get

Introduction: There are many theories about what caused the extreme spike in transgender identification and social and medical transition, and why the ideas behind it have taken over so many institutions in Western society. There are theories about conspiracies involving a few rich sociopaths, a theory that feminism brought this all about, a theory about how it’s all due to the internet and social media, and so on. The truth is that we will probably never be able to pinpoint the exact cause of the spike in transgender identification, and the belief system that has suddenly invaded many beloved institutions, convincing what seems like a majority of individuals that men are women, and that we must listen to young children, confused teens and vulnerable adults when they ask to be referred to as the opposite sex (or no sex or some heretofore unheard of sex), and to have their healthy bodies cosmetically altered in ways that will cause them to suffer serious health issues, lose their fertility and sexual function, and become lifelong medical patients.

No one theory about why this is happening is likely to fully answer the question: how did this happen? Instead, it’s more likely that this is a perfect storm with many contributing factors. Below, I will list ten such factors, but I am surely leaving out many more.

#1. Social media: It is true that social media and the internet generally enable ideas to spread quickly, particularly among young people, who spend inordinate amounts of time on the internet. It is also easy to glorify anything on the internet using short videos that make everything seem wonderful. The addiction to the stimuli of social media, and the convenient means of obtaining this information whenever and whereever you want makes the messaging way more effective and efficient than any other method of advertising to date. You can sell anything - particularly to young people - with social media. Notably, all of the messages in social media have been echoed on mainstream media.

My own daughter began her “gender journey” (a ridiculous way of describing a dangerous break from reality and disconnect from one’s body) by watching an inordinate amount of Youtube videos by “ftm” (female to male) transitioners, who glorified their transitions and their lives, and who were and still are very young and unaware of adult life. Many young people today learn about and are encouraged toward social and medical transition from the internet. Of course, these ideas are also spread in classrooms, college campuses, through government leaders, corporate sponsors, doctors and therapists, and wayward medical associations, but social media acts like an enzyme to spread these messages to as many people as possible in the quickest manner.

#2. Medical arrogance: We know there has always been a problem of medical arrogance. It’s what gave us such memorable man-made catastrophes as lobotomies and the Opioid crisis. Certainly, it takes a great deal of arrogance to think you can successfully turn a male into a female or vice-versa. It takes extreme arrogance to state that blocking puberty for years will have no repercussions, and that a lifetime of synthetic hormones is better than a lifetime of naturally occurring hormones. Can it be anything other than arrogant to fashion a man-made penis out of skin from a girl’s forearm or thigh, or to turn a penis inside out to create a faux vagina in a teenage male, assuming that will bring him as much sexual satisfaction or more than he already has, or that sexual pleasure itself is over-rated? The arrogance of doctors advising pregnant women that formula was more nutritious than breast-milk (an entire generation of women believed this and never breastfed their babies until as recently as the early 1980's) is only rivaled by the arrogance of telling teenage girls they will be happier without breasts altogether.

#3. Over-medicating: For many years, too many people have been taking medications for things like depression when the vast majority did not even suffer from true clinical depression. We’ve made it seem normal to be taking medications to “take the edge off” of living. We also give out medications to lose weight, to grow hair, to have an erection, and this is normalized and any potential side effects minimized to the point where we simply don’t hear about them. Further, ever since we started over-medicating the “troubling” kids with ADHD medications, we opened the door to the idea that medicating away problematic children and teens was not only acceptable but laudable. All of this paved the way for it to seem something other than shocking and bizarre to be giving healthy teens and young adults potent steroids or other hormones to allow them to release their “true, authentic selves” instead of ruminating over the difficulties of becoming a man or a woman. Rather than seeing puberty as a part of the many struggles that make life worth living and that give us life lessons on perseverance and perspective, we see nature as something to medicate away.

#4. No discomfort: Similarly to the above idea, in recent years, we seem to have developed the idea that kids and teens should never be emotionally uncomfortable for even a second. Movies like Parental Guidance give us a little glimpse of this notion, where the parents have a “never say no” policy toward their children that the grandparents find irritating because it doesn’t really work. If we never say no to our kids, then when they ask us to pretend they are the opposite sex and “really mean it,” we have to go along. When they ask for medications and surgeries to turn their bodies into something that aligns with their feelings, we just have to go along with that too.

#5. Parents Who Already Transitioned their Kids & Some Adult Transitioners & Doctors: Here, I’m not talking about a concept or event as much as a motive. It is the parents who have already socially and medically transitioned their own children that will fight the hardest to normalize transition for young people. After all, if these parents are wrong, they have committed grave harms against their children, whether or not they meant to do harm. It would be very difficult for these parents to admit their mistakes.

Similarly, although less ferociously, those who’ve done this to themselves as adults don’t want to feel mistaken, and want to normalize what they have done. What better way to normalize medical transition than to have it be a normal right of passage for a substantial proportion of young people? This legitimizes trans identities and assuages doubts about the choices that have been made. As will be further discussed below, by stating that children and teens are “trans” and must be socially and medically transitioned due to an innate state of being, we are equating being “trans” with being homosexual. Homosexuality has, for the most part (although there is certainly a backlash and a continuing underlying disdain for homosexuality in many parts of modern society) been accepted as a normal variation of sexual orientations, and something that cannot be changed, and that must be accepted. Trans activists piggy-back on this idea. These trans activists are a small, but vocal, percentage of adult transitioners, as most adults who have made these choices have a more rational and reasonable attitude toward their own transitions.

Doctors too are motivated to normalize these treatments if they have already applied them to dozens or hundreds of their own patients. Who would want to face up to such a mistake?

It should be noted that doctors who pioneered the Dutch Protocol (discussed further below) had some compassionate motives, even though they were woefully mistaken. They noted that adult transitioners were not doing well, and part of the challenges facing those adults was failure to adequately pass as the opposite sex (mostly the men transitioning to women). Puberty blockers do make it easier to pass (ignoring genitals) as none of the secondary sex characteristics have taken place. And living socially as your preferred sex from an earlier age also helps with passing. Thus, the idea was to pave the way for a happy transitioned adulthood by removing many of the physical and social impediments to passing. Of course, this ignored many facts, such as: the inability to know which of these young teens might ultimately be able to live a reasonably happy life without transition; the now longer-term use of harmful chemicals on their young bodies; the total obliteration of sexual function and guaranteed sterility, where many of these pre-teens have never kissed anyone, much less had an orgasm; and even the assumption that failure to pass was the biggest reason adult transsexuals weren’t doing well.

#6. Greed/Money/Power: Drug companies are obviously making a killing on synthetic hormones, hormone blockers and related medications used for medical transition. Surgeons likewise stand to gain much. In fact, in a speech at Vanderbilt University, someone actually stated how much was earned for each double mastectomy and other procedures. A surgeon advertising on TikTok is raking in the dough by performing double mastectomies on teen girls, using catchy slogans like “yeat the teets.” In addition to Big Pharma and doctors and hospitals, there are other businesses that stand to gain from proliferation of medical and social transition. For instance, there are companies that make binders and packers and other similar products. Further, many companies, large and small, jump on the rainbow-strewn bandwagon to improve their public relations. While Starbucks isn’t selling hormones or surgeries, they do benefit from being known as “queer friendly,” which includes glorification of medical transition.

Further, it’s not always just about money. For politicians, there are votes to be had. For entertainers, being seen as doing the right thing brings fame, popularity and jobs (back to money). Social currency certainly has value, whether it is represented in “likes’ on social media, visits to the movie theatre to see one’s movies, or readership of a book or newspaper (again, indirectly related to money). Journalism suffers from this more than most industries. Thus, many people and entities benefit from jumping on the “trans” wagon, whether in money or approval ratings.

#7. Social Justice Movement: When you want to be one of the good ones, you nod along as a good ally to the trans movement - without considering whether this is actually doing any good. It feels good to be on the “right side of history” (even though, of course, history will reveal the truth about social and medical transition, and will not look favorably upon it). Teachers, therapists, friends, doctors, anyone who might meet someone who is potentially “trans,” might want to become a hero in that person’s life. One small example in my daughter’s life is a teacher in whom my daughter confided her “trans identity.” He was quick to support her in this notion and to go along with the demonization of her parents for their failure to affirm her male identity or give her synthetic hormones and a double mastectomy for her 16th birthday. I’m certain he thought he was being supportive, helpful and just a little heroic.

Further, even for those who are not trying to self-aggrandize, there is a desire to avoid the mistakes of the past, such as how society treated gay people as recently as 30 years ago. It was not good. Of course, it takes a minute or two to realize that there is a huge qualitative difference between accepting that some people are same-sex attracted, on the one hand, and promoting the rejection and destruction of healthy bodies and denial of biology of vulnerable children, teens and young adults, along with the usurpation of women’s rights, safety and fairness by trans-identified males, on the other hand.

More generally, the social justice movement calls into question every notion we take for granted as being part of the oppressive patriarchy. This means we can’t even take for granted the fact that men are men and women are women. This apparently is a patriarchal notion meant to somehow oppress women, children and, most of all, “trans” people, who were never meant to live in their intact bodies. Confusion over the word “gender” plays its part, because most people agree that gender norms, gender roles and stereotypes can be oppressive. However, the arguments about this are either deliberately or ignorantly confused with “sex,” which is, of course, a biological fact rather than a societally-created notion. In fact, every society, from small villages in Africa or South America to large cities in Europe or the United States, and every type of society in between, all recognize “males” and “females.” Just as importantly, a “man” in a small African village would be recognized as a “man” in New York City, just as a “woman” in New York City would still be seen as a “woman” in an Aboriginal tribe in Australia. Yet somehow the social justice movement would have people believe that the very notion of a “woman” or a “man” is an oppressive patriarchal plot meant to keep us down!

#8. Mindlessness: Echoed in most of the above ideas is a troubling phenomenon. So many people these days seem unable to hold a subtle thought or analyze anything or recognize illogical ideas. Lack of intellectual integrity or efforts to really consider whether something is right (a.k.a. intellectual laziness) contributes its share to the extreme increase in medical transition. Of course this is aided and abetted by addiction to technology and attention-shortening social media, but lack of deep thought was a problem long before such technology showed up.

In short, this ideology is pushed, not just be those who want it to happen, but also by those who don’t think long enough to want to stop it. You may know that quote “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” (Often attributed to Edmund Burke, it’s not clear who actually said it). Whether people are doing nothing out of laziness, willful ignorance, confusion or any other similar idea, simply nodding along as all this is happening makes it very easy for things to get out of control, and for many thousands of young people to be harmed. Years from now, when people are looking back on this era with disgust and disbelief, many will think “I would never have agreed with those ideas” and “I would have spoken out against this.” Yet it is difficult to know what your reaction to such a phenomenon will be until you are in the situation. Unfortunately, too many people are just too apathetic or mentally lazy to speak out and they just nod along with what are actually absurd destructive notions. It is true that many people fail to speak out because they know they will be ostracized or punished in some way if they do (fired, ousted from programs, demoted, etc.), but lack of deep thought is yet another culprit.

Lines like “Would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter?” have been used to coerce any parent who expressed any doubts about these notions. These lines have been effective at shutting down many parents from their thinking selves for the obvious reason that this is a parent’s worst nightmare. Of course, the actual studies render this question meaningless because these medical interventions have never been shown to prevent suicide, but the truth about this has been obscured by media and by unscrupulous medical professionals. The lie that only 1% of people who transition ever regret it, and that’s mostly because of societal disapproval, also keeps people from questioning these treatments. People who might question the tremendous increase in these treatments are assured that regret is basically non-existent (ie. that almost no children, teens or vulnerable adults would ever believe they were “trans” if that were not true), and that the only regret comes from a transphobic unsupportive society. Again, the actual studies do not bear out this claim, and we are currently living in an environment that, if anything, puts “trans” individuals up on a pedestal as brave souls. Recent studies seem to show a current regret rate of close to 30%, which is a pretty high percentage given the motive anyone who has transitioned has to convince themself that they didn’t make a disastrous decision. At best, we have no idea what the rate of detransition is because studies on this topic tend to be shut down. But these lies about suicide and regret help keep the average person from questioning transition. One has to actually read the studies to know these are lies, and your average person is not motivated to do this, and will rely on the so-called “experts.”

#9. History of Homosexuality & of Transition: I am not a historian, and do not purport to be an expert on the history of transition, but there are a few historical factors that stick out and may help explain what paved the way to normalizing body hatred, destruction of healthy bodies, and destruction of women’s rights. One important historical factor is the gay rights movement. Starting in the 1960s, there were a growing number of charities developed to fight the good fight for gay rights. Those charities were triumphant over the years in gaining rights, up until gay marriage became legal in the United Kingdom in March, 2014, and in every state in the United States in June, 2015. At that point, homosexuals had the same rights as heterosexuals, which was exactly the noble goal of the gay rights movement. Unfortunately, rather than downsize and stay relevant as watchdogs, concerning themselves with long-term goals of maintaining their existing rights or specialized issues such as caring for elderly gay men with HIV, many gay charities, such as Stonewall and GLAAD, instead pivoted completely. They “re-branded” themselves to stay relevant, broadening their constituency with the LGBTQII+ acronym, and focusing on “transgender rights” as their main concern. They were infused with money (think Pritzkers and other such wealthy benefactors) for “trans” rights, and they gained much momentum with new demands.

They demanded and obtained insurance coverage for medical transition (including voice training, laser hair removal, facial feminization, body contouring, etc. - despite the fact that similar cosmetic procedures would never be covered for anyone else desiring such services). They fought for the right of minors to receive puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as well as surgeries such as mastectomies and vaginoplasties. They fought to allow children to socially transition at school behind their parents’ backs, somehow justifying this because parents became dangerous. They also fought for men to be able to enter women’s private spaces, to take women’s accolades, and to compete in women’s sports. For the most part, they stopped caring about gay issues at all, completely abandoning lesbians, particularly if they insisted on having events for females only - calling such events “transphobic.” That a majority of the teens being transitioned would otherwise grow up to be gay adults is another way in which gay charities completely abandoned the interests of their constituents.

There is a complicated history to medical transition itself that starts in 1930's Germany with medical experimentation involving surgeries to transform individuals to appear as if they were the opposite sex. I believe the first medical transitions, which were only in adults, were meant to accommodate gender non-conforming people who wanted desperately to fit into society, and to accommodate a society that wanted everyone to fit in. There was no thought of “gender identity,” but instead a difficult path to gender conformity.

The first famous medical transition was Christine Jorgensen in 1952. Medical transition after Christine Jorgensen was still quite rare, but did increase, in large part because of both Jorgensen and refinement of synthetic hormones, allowing for opposite-sex appearance in many ways without any surgery at all. With these changes in the medical pathway came greater ease of transition, making it more “popular.” Harry Benjamin was Jorgensene’s doctor in the United States (he did not operate on Jorgensen, whose surgery was performed in Europe). Benjamin became famous by association with Jorgensen, receiving letters from approximately 500 people around the world after Jorgensen’s story became known. Some of these patients were lesbians who wanted to live freely with the women they loved. Others were men who wanted to look like women, either because they were gay and, like the lesbians, wanted to live freely with the men they loved, or because they were “turned on” by the idea of themselves as women (a.k.a. autogynephilic).

The Harry Benjamin Foundation was created in the 1960's, but was de-funded in around 1967. The Johns Hopkins University Gender Clinic, with which the Harry Benjamin Foundation had been associated in the 1960's, along with a couple of other clinics, was shut down in around 1979, due to lack of evidence for the benefit of medical transition. Still, some people persisted with the idea of transition, creating the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (“HBIGD”) in 1979. Notably, HBIGD was re-named WPATH in 2006 - another re-branding moment. WPATH stands for World Professional Assocation for Transgender Health - which sounds like a legitimate medical organization. As has been in the news (not mainstream media) lately, the WPATH files indicate that WPATH is anything but a true professional organization, filled with trans activists pushing an agenda, rather than protecting patients’ health, but I won’t get into that here.

In around 2012, WPATH published its 7th edition of “Standards of Care” (the first 6 were created under HBIGD). This edition was a major shift from considering medical transition a treatment for a severe mental disorder (“Gender Identity Disorder”) to a treatment for a metaphysical condition that involved a discomfort with one’s body (“gender dysphoria”) as a result of its mismatch with one’s “gender identity.” Similarly, in 2013, the DSM-V, the 5th version of the diagnostic manual for mental illness, changed “Gender Identity Disorder” to “Gender Dysphoria” in an effort to destigmatize medical transition. All this “behind the scenes” work was laying the foundation for the normalization of transition. Nowadays, even “gender dysphoria” is considered by some activists to be too stigmatizing. Instead, activists propose using the term “gender incongruence” to describe the mismatch between one’s “sex assigned at birth” and one’s “gender identity,” the latter of which is given a circular definition of one’s sense of one’s gender. What “gender” means in that context is a mystery, but these notions have become popularized as fixtures in our culture, with terms like “gender identity” and “sex assigned at birth” commonly used by mainstream media.

It should be noted that the likely origin of the term “sex assigned at birth” is the experiments by John Money, who was associated with Harry Benjamin in the 1960's. John Money proposed that anyone could be raised as the opposite sex as long as they were socialized as such, purporting that this was a solution to the “problem” of children suffering from intersex conditions where there actual sex was ambiguous or just difficult to mimic (e.g. if a “normal” penis was too difficult to create for a male, he could be given a pseudo-vagina and raised female). They would assign such a child a sex, and raise the child as that sex. John Money’s experiments were of questionable success, with some famous failures such as Bruce nee Brenda nee David Reimer, who committed suicide as an adult after some troubling interventions by Money.

Despite its ups and downs and studies that showed those who transitioned overall had poor outcomes (with notable exceptions), many doctors persisted in these treatments. The advent of the use of puberty blockers like Lupron were a huge boon to the transition “industry,” allowing children to undergo transition without ever gaining the secondary sex characteristics natural for their sex. These drugs were previously used for many things, from precocious puberty (where it really was a pause button), to chemical castration of male sex offenders, to increasing the survival rate of men with advanced prostate cancer, to helping women with large fibroids. These drugs have had many known serious side effects, including bone density problems and pain, and have been controversial even when used for diagnosable medical issues. However, those problems have been ignored by those who wanted to use them for medical transition.

As noted in discussing some doctors’ motives for transitioning young people, there was a belief that starting transition at an early age would help both social and physical transition. Using puberty blockers, the Dutch brought about the famous “Dutch Protocol.” Their first experiments involved 70 children, with follow-up for 55, one of whom died from a botched vaginoplasty. This experimentation started in around the late 1980s. Despite some very questionable short-term follow-up, this experiment was considered a success and the “trans child” was born. Before that, children who suffered gender dysphoria (distress over their sexed bodies) would have had to wait for adulthood for any medical interventions, and most psychologists advocated for watchful waiting. This tactic paid off because around 80% of gender dysphoric children accepted their natal sex by adulthood without any intervention at all. By contrast, about 96% of all children put on puberty blockers go on to cross-sex hormones and/or surgeries to appear as and live as the opposite sex.

For those “pioneering parents” who have transitioned their small children, there is a separate charity called Mermaids. Famously, its former leader, Susie Green, took her 16-year-old son frm the UK to Thailand for “bottom surgery” (a.k.a. castration and penile inversion), shortly before Thailand changed its laws to no longer allow such surgeries for those under 18-years-old. Jazz Jennings was the American poster-child for medical transition in the early 2000s, with a tv show and a book popularlizing child social transition and teen medical transition. Oprah Winfrey had trans kids on her show at some point in the 2000s, bringing more popularity and normalization to the phenomenon of the “trans child.”

#10. Trump: In November, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. One might have thought that this would have slowed down medical transition, particularly for children, because now a Republican was in power. That was not the case. Trump’s legacy is a troublesome one, including his mishandling of the Covid-19 epidemic, and his actions that caused an insurrection and ultimately made a large segment of this country’s citizens doubt the integrity of our voting system. For purposes of this essay, however, the relevance of Donald Trump is that he made people understandably afraid of reversals in laws and policies with respect to things like gay rights and reproductive freedom. Gay marriage and other gay rights fully weathered the storm of Donald Trump. Reproductive rights ultimately took a big hit through the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

As for medical transition, Trump gave those who were looking to increase so-called “trans rights” just the enemy they needed to justify all of their claims of persecution and then to justify all of their demands. Trump’s presidency helped create a polarized environment in which anyone who did not support every demand the “vulnerable” trans activists sought was demonized by the left and by the Democratic Party. Those on the left who wanted to act with caution in terms of medical experimentation, and who were concerned about women’s rights, safety and fairness, were ostracized by their own party.

The fight was on to allow all medical transition to be fully covered by health insurance and Medicaid, to allow trans-women to enter all women’s spaces and compete in women’s sports and take women’s accolades. The fight was on to allow children as young as pre-schoolers to be treated in all respects as the opposite sex if they so desired, protecting pre-teens against going through the “wrong” puberty - the one they naturally would enter without medical intervention, and assuring teenagers they could receive synthetic cross-sex hormones and surgeries at the earliest opportunity. The right for pre-schoolers to be read stories by men in drag was suddenly sacred and anyone who disagreed was against the First Amendment, pro-Trump and not a true Democrat.

In short, the polarization of our politics made it difficult to speak out against any of these so-called rights without being called a “right-wing extremist” and/or an irrational, transphobic MAGA-loving moron. I know many people still think Trump is a viable presidential candidate and will disagree with my very brief analysis of his presidency, but that is irrelevant to the point being made here. The point is that Trump not only enabled trans activists to quickly silence opposition from the left, but he played a part in convincing those opposed to his politics that their own doubts should be squashed lest they accidentally support an evil Republican agenda.

Whenever laws were passed to protect minors from risky medical interventions with known and unknown side effects on the grounds that there was no evidence-base for such treatments, these laws were said to be promoted by Republicans who were turning these poor kids into pawns in a political chess game. It was inconceivable that anyone proposing this legislation might have any actual concern for the well-being of these minors - which totally ignored the fact that many of the people testifying on behalf of these laws were detransitioners sounding the alarm. News media made clear that all of these laws were just attempts to satisfy only a Republican base (when in fact many Democrats are clamoring for protection for these vulnerable individuals), and to keep Republicans in power. In short, the election of Donald Trump gave trans activists the perfect foil they needed to legitimize their fight at the exact right time.

Conclusion: Many factors had to come together to create a perfect storm, with an ensuing hurricane of social and medical transition raining down on young vulnerable individuals in First World countries throughout the world. The above ten factors are probably just the tip of the iceberg, but they go a long way in at least setting out just how many different social, historical and political factors had to converge for medical transition to become so popularized. This author can only hope that, once people begin to wake up to the absurdity of the notions involved in the glorification, popularization and normalization of social and medical transition of young vulnerable individuals, and the elimination of women’s spaces and women’s sports, the storm will clear as quickly as it came, lifting away the chaos and destruction that has been so ferociously foisted upon us. As always, if you disagree with any of these points, or believe there are other factors to add to this storm, you are invited to place your respectful thoughts in the comments.