Thread by @LeorSapir

The claim that "gender affirming" puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries are "medically necessary" and (or rather because) "life-saving" doesn't stand up to minimal scrutiny.

A 🧵

According to a common claim, 41% of "transgender youth" are at serious risk of suicide if not socially and medically "affirmed." We all know the mantra: "you can either have a live son or a dead daughter."

The Human Rights Campaign: "More than half of transgender male teens who participated in the survey reported attempting suicide in their lifetime, while 29.9 percent of transgender female teens said they attempted suicide."

hrc.org/news/new-study…

If activists are right that "trans kids" have always existed and the skyrocketing numbers of trans self-ID and gender dysphoria diagnosis are purely because of growing social acceptance, we should expect to see, under a more hostile/non-GAC society,...

alarming levels of teen suicide or serious suicidal attempt. Anything less than serious attempt (e.g., self-harm as cry for help/attention) would presumably not be enough to justify the risks/costs of GAC.

According to data published recently by Reuters and collected by Komodo Health, there were 142,882 new diagnoses of youth gender dysphoria added between 2017 and 2021. Because this is based on insurance claims, it's probably an undercount. Let's assume 150,000.

The number of diagnoses has grown by 20% every year since 2017, and 80% between 2020-2021 (Komodo). There is no reason to assume that the numbers have maxed out. Indeed, 2.1% of Gen Z now self-ID as trans (Gallup), and if even half are dysphoric, that means 630k.

41% of 630,000 = 258,300. That means roughly 260k of Gen Z who have experienced serious suicidal attempt or have committed suicide during their teen years, all on account of "unaffirmed" gender identity. Since this cohort reached adolescence about a decade ago,...

and since trans activists assume that levels of trans-ID among Gen Z reveal the "normal" state of things under an accepting society, we can extrapolate and say that we'd expect to see 260k teen suicides per decade under a non-GAC regime--all due to "unaffirmed" gender.

According to CDC data, between 2000 and 2010, within the age cohort of 15-19, there were 13 suicides per 100k among males (per year) and 4 suicides per 100k among females. Assuming this age group totaled 20m, this averages to 2,600 male suicides and 800 female suicides per year.

In other words, the number of relevant suicidal events before GAC became widely available is roughly ONE EIGHTH (3.4k/yr vs. 26k/yr) what we would expect to see if trans activists were right about the natural occurrence of transgender ID and the "life saving" necessity of GAC.

And this is assuming, to repeat, that every single teen suicide or serious attempted suicide before GAC was because of unaffirmed gender identity--a wildly implausible assumption.

So how do we make sense of such a senseless mantra as "affirm or suicide"? Let's take a step back and apply some common sense--something sorely lacking in much of our scientific community at the moment.

Gender dysphoria and transgender identity give teenagers in a state of confusion or distress a mental schema to make sense of what they're experiencing. For most (if not all) these kids, we are not observing, but rather creating, their "solution" to what is a natural problem.

Step one: set the expectation that feeling very uncomfortable in one's body is a unique experience, something that only you, oh precious child, and a few other magical "gender creative" kids, are experiencing.

Step two: inform said teens that, fortunately, this a "problem" with a technological "solution."

Step three: emphasize to them that no one should have to go through this, and that they have a "right," a claim of justice, not to go through it.

An Ivy League grad from a prominent political family might experience severe anxiety/depression at the prospect of not becoming US president. The thought might even make him suicidal.

The rest of us go about our business unconcerned that we'll never end up in the White House.

The Greek philosophers (and Rousseau, of all people) understood this point well: the key to happiness is to bring your desires ("needs") within the scope of what you can reasonably satisfy. Happiness as well as freedom meant the taming of human desire.

The modern conception of freedom after Hobbes is based on the unleashing of desire and the redefining of justice ("rights") to mean the limitless pursuit of its satisfaction. Freedom = joyless pursuit of joy. Technological progress is both the expression and engine of this idea.

If you tell teens who fear puberty and don't want to be sexually objectified that they can technologically opt-out of the experience, and then you put (or threaten to put) their gender drugs out of reach, you are creating the very distress you are trying to resolve.

To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, you are mistaking the doing of your own hands as the work of nature, and then appealing to "nature" ("trans kids are born that way") as justification for your doing. This is not "gender ideology." It's simple, and all too predictable, human folly.

I encourage fact checkers to check my math and assumptions.

Fact-checking myself: the Reuters number was 121,882, not 142,882. That said, rounding up to 150 is still reasonable, and none of this affects the basic conclusion.