Exploring the impact of Transgenderism on girls

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Hi everybody. Following on from a recent thread (I believe two days ago, so early April 2019) I just wanted you to be aware of some resources and discussions that are current regarding transgenderism.

First, and above all, people who currently identify themselves as trans or non-binary are as equal and precious in the sight of God as any other person. They are worthy of our care and respect as a child of God and as our sibling in Christ, however they identify.

What I would particularly like to discuss and bring to your attention is the huge increase, particularly in the past five years, of girls and young women who have decided to identify as trans men or non-binary. The dominant narrative in the media is that this identity is the “true” one and the permanent one. Discussion of social contagion (when ideas spread through social contact) has been aggressively shut down and attacked. Therefore I thought you might be interested to hear from four young women who all identified in this manner for a number of years and have now detransitioned.

They are not religious and identity as left-wing politically. What is very interesting is hearing about their experiences and their thoughts on why so many young women are not wanting to identify as female. Here is their website and blog https://www.piqueresproject.com/

I also was particularly interested in a recent post by Helena on the power and influence of the website Tumblr. She explains how ideas and theories which develop on Tumblr don’t surface onto mainstream channels such as Twitter until 3 year after they have initially emerged. As parents and older adults, especially those understandably not active on social media sites, we can be totally ignorant and unaware of the enormous impact these sites can have on vulnerable young people.

This is a new phenomenon, where literally hundreds of thousands of young children and girls from the age of say, 10 upward, gather everyday online (for hours) trying to understand life and their experiences.

What is particularly new in this modern era of social media is that the ideas that emerge from this platform now carry equal weight in society as any other. We have a pure online democracy. All ideas are equal and there is no older, wiser body that these ideas have to encounter and prove themselves as valid to.

There is also a strong narrative in the young that to even question someone’s ideas you are being aggressive and not accepting. My purpose is to purely raise awareness, and showcase the voices of the actual young women so we can listen and also hear a different narrative to the dominant ones. FYI by sharing their experiences, their points of view may be contrary to Catholic teaching, but they are not Catholic, or religious as I already stated. I see this purely as information gathering so that we can have a greater understanding of what is happening in our culture, that we may be completely unaware of. They have also been posting on YouTube as Danger Ramen, if you would like to watch and hear their very intelligent and lucid round table discussions.

Here is Helena’s blog post HOME
 
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I hope some of you read the blog post and comment, or are interested in why this ideology is having a big impact on girls and women.
 
Thanks for posting. I will read Helena’s blog article this evening and I’m pretty sure I’ll join the discussion here. It relates to other thoughts and recent reading of mine.
 
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joyfulandactive said:
Discussion of social contagion (when ideas spread through social contact) has been aggressively shut down and attacked.
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Usually, the people who don’t listen to reason are doing so because they don’t care about what is true. They care about social status, popularity and all that kind of stuff. A few people who value what is real may come around by having heard a reasonable argument about a particular subject for the first time, but a lot of people just want to go along with whatever is popular. It’s sort of a ‘I’m desperate to be liked’ sort of thing Imo.

I’m not sure that adults today fully grasp what’s going on with kids and social media. I don’t. My first instinct when reading the blog is to say that it just sounds like the same old stuff kids have always been doing. We used to call it peer pressure.

But there is certainly a difference between peer pressure and social contagion. The latter is peer pressure on steroids, with an instantaneous global reach. Or maybe it’s entirely different, Idk.

The ‘first responders’ to this type of phenomenon are like these four girls who got sucked in, made it out, and are among the first to talk about it.
 
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Thanks for sharing this. I’ve had limited interaction with tumblr in the past but did recognise that it was the echo chamber where the dumbest ideas about gender were being developed. It’s good to read an insider’s perspective
 
Thank you everyone for your responses. I would really like to discuss it here for so many reasons. As a parent who is 50 I did not grow up online and with the saturated social media that our children, teens and young adults do today. Other than being on a couple of online forums I don’t use social media so I am a very far outside the loop of knowing what is going on and current with young people and what is influencing them.

I agree that much of it is just very intense, toxic peer pressure but unfortunately the outcomes can be much more serious. In the case of these four women it was highly influential in how they perceived themselves, to the point they took hormones and were radically considering permanent physical changes. I also love the comment from 1Lord1Faith who describes them as getting out alive ready to tell us their tale and I think it’s very, very important to listen because some of this stuff I was unaware of. Tumblr does seem to be populated with very young pre-teens and teens so it’s like Middle School never ends. We need to take it seriously though because the outcomes can be extremely serious.

A number of them also said they were exposed to pornography against their will too young and it distorted their view of relationships and themselves (something we fear is happening and here is their testimony).

I am so impressed with their ability to express themselves. They have really suffered a pattern of initial alienation because they can’t identify with being a stereotypical girl, then being embraced by the transgender “community” which rejected them as soon as they began to question and consider detransitioning.
 
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Thanks for the interesting link. Everywhere now, there is growing opposition to gender fluid ideology, whose proponents continue their aggressive push to introduce and embed it into legislation and school curricula.

It’s particularly interesting to see individuals and groups of entirely different socio-political persuasion coming together to confront this evil - for example: https://handsacrosstheaislewomen.com/
 
Thank you Finn. I think that so many conflicting issues and interests have been affected by transgender concepts, ideology and ideas. For a start, what is the definition of “gender”? We don’t seem to have one, or everyone is working from different concepts. However we know what a biological woman is and many women are becoming very concerned worldwide at the attempt to create a definition of woman that doesn’t include biology. The policy repercussions are very concerning and women of all backgrounds, religions and politics want to talk about this and are being aggressively shutdown, demonized and being called offensive names for having an opinion.
 
I’ve said this on another thread—I’ve seen kids de-transition.
But the one girl played at being a boy for five or six years. Which meant all those years wasted that she should have been learning to step into the role of an adult woman, learning how to date and relate to males in a normal fashion.
Not to mention the anguish her parents went through.
But thanks be to God she never took hormones…
 
It seems the effect of social media and the internet generally is to heavily stereotype women in particular online, with lots of images of physically beautiful women who are objectified and heavily sexualized. Young teens and women growing up don’t always identify with that, or find it appealing and they look around for alternative ways to be female and don’t always find them. They can sometimes be rejected by their peer group or have interests that are different and now with gender ideology they can literally think “maybe I’m not a woman, if this is the only way to be a woman”. I doubt she was playing, most likely she was struggling to find her identity.
 
Fair enough—“playing at” probably wasn’t the best phraseology.
But she had bought the LGBT activist party line hook-line-and-sinker.
But in a very real way, this gender bending is a teenage subculture. You got your jocks, your goths and your LGBT, and a lot of them are in it for the attention or else, as you said, they are working out subconscious conflict through their identity.
 
I agree that there are lots of different aspects to what is falling under a transgender umbrella. For example what most of these young girls are experiencing and why is not the same as a 40 yr man who decides he wants to live as a woman and identify as a woman.

Also as a devout Catholic I want to be honest about how we might also have responsibility for not accepting children who don’t fit neatly into expectations of typical behaviors for boys and girls. Studies have shown that right-wing religious parents are more likely to accept a transgender child than a gay child. Many non-gender conforming teens will grow up into gay adults. If we don’t want these children to take hormones and have surgery how can we make sure we are welcoming and accepting of them as they are? In Iran gay men are forced to have surgery to appear female.
 
Interesting and worrisome article about Tumblr culture, but out of my league – or universe. I don’t know what to say, but I’ll hang around and read…

I totally agree with your opening statement:
joyfulandactive said:
First, and above all, people who currently identify themselves as trans or non-binary are as equal and precious in the sight of God as any other person. They are worthy of our care and respect as a child of God and as our sibling in Christ, however they identify.
Click to expand...
That should be the starting point for any discussion of troubled youth or young adults.
 
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I generally find it easy to talk to my teens and their friends but I am definitely going to be sure to keep my eye out in every context for any teen that seems to not “fit” so easily in to the group. These four girls all describe times at high school when they had no friends, their only friends were online. Let’s be sure to be friendly and accepting of all kids and not judge their clothes, behaviors and interests. We can be driving them into the arms of a harmful ideology. I like to think I am nonjudgmental but I will really ask God to help me always keep an open heart and mind. A lot of these kids are very lonely and isolated, they need love and friendship.
 
What these girls experienced they describe as ROGD: Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. This is when someone has never expressed any discomfort with their sex identity and suddenly develops Gender Dysphoria. This phenomenon and the current recent large increase in young teenage girls particularly identifying as transgender, inspired physician and researcher Lisa Littman to create the term after her clinical observations. She hypothesized that it could be a “social coping mechanism” for other disorders such as depression and anxiety caused by adolescent trauma.

Her paper on the subject was to be published by Brown University in August 2018, but a huge backlash from transgender activists who refuse to accept that ROGD exists meant that Brown removed a press release on the paper. The concept of ROGD is still highly controversial amongst activists because it flies in the face of the narrative that trans people have a consistent and permanent gender dysphoria that can only be helped by medical intervention. The fact that Dr. Littman discusses the influence of social media and the possibility of social contagion of trans identity in her paper is considered outrageous and “transphobic” by some trans activists.

However, the four young women mentioned above in a round table discussion all agreed that Dr. Littman described their own experience perfectly and ROGD was an accurate diagnosis.
 
I have to say that the reaction to transgender identities in recent years has been quite uniformed. Transgender people have existed in a nearly underground existence for years, centuries really. Those who did transition in decades past often had to completely cut ties with both their family and friends and even start from the bottom again with their careers. Tumbler, Facebook, and the like have not created a phenomena of transgender people, it has mainly helped break a cultural taboo.

I have to ask, are you willing to consider that transition to an opposite gender role is crucial to the existence of a good number of people? Transition to a certain gender role does not in itself require surgery.
 
There have definitely been people who have assumed the gender role of the opposite sex in different societies throughout history. Sometimes in an open socially sanctioned way and sometimes in a hidden, secretive way when it would not be accepted, for whatever reason. In terms of numbers of people that is still open to discussion and debate. Also there has been a naughty tendency for some trans gender activists in their enthusiasm to claim gay people as transgender. At Stonewall for example Marsha Johnson always identified as a black gay man who liked to cross dress. He identified himself as such just two weeks before Stonewall but still some people want to claim him as trans. The same for Storme’ DeLarverie , she always identified as a butch lesbian of color, but again some activists want to “trans” her.

Wanting to live in the role of the opposite gender is possible without needing the recourse of radical surgery. Much of the time it says more about the stereotyping of men and women into roles and the inflexibility of the surrounding society.

What I been discussing on this thread is a particular surge of young women identifying as transmen or non-binary. This is definitely a new development. Until extremely recently there were very few people presenting themselves as trans or with Body Dysmorphia at all. Women of any age were extremely rare. It was usually mature men who decided to live as women and the very occasional child who had Body Dysmorphia from childhood. Large groups of pre-teen and teenage girls claiming to be trans across the Western world is an extremely recent phenomenon (5-10 years old) correlating strongly with social media and 24/7 access to the internet.
 
Thank you for bringing this topic to my attention. This subject riles up my inner Catholic Feminist who just wants to teach young women that they are beautiful and strong. That they have dignity. That the historical treatment of women does not reflect God’s plan for us, we were made for great things. That modern culture continues to warp what women are but you don’t have to accept it. That when the going gets tough, we help eachother not leave womanhood behind. That it doesn’t have to look a certain way. That many of us grew up hating our bodies and ourselves, but it doesn’t have to be that way and it gets better. I want so much better than this for my daughters and all daughters.
 
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From my own observation, I thing ROGD in girls comes from the same root as cutting and anorexia. A girl hits a road bump on the way to growing up, and her inner turmoil expresses itself in these self-destructive behaviors.
There’s a bit of self-punishment in it, a bit of avoidance of growing up, a great deal of fear, a wish to distance herself from herself (which she hates).
 
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