The Anguish of Girls with Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria

It’s been said, “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” This statement seems to be an apt description of the evil devastation which radical gender ideology brings into teen girls' lives every day. The question, in my mind is whether good Christian men will do something or nothing. This episode describes the anguish of one teen girl who was taken captive by radical gender identity thinking. We look today at her story and the lives of thousands like her.

As we continue our May series, Gloriously Feminine, today we examine the cataclysmic transformation of the transgender population since 2012. Until then, the transgender population was .02 percent (2 in 10,000), was almost entirely males, and consisted of those who experienced gender dysphoria from the age of 4. But since 2012, transgenderism has exploded among teen girls. This episode answers why? Let’s look at this experience through the eyes of a teen girl named Keira Bell.  She recounts: 

“I was a classic tomboy. I was accepted by the boys—I dressed in typically boy clothing and was athletic. I never had an issue with my gender; it wasn’t on my mind. Then puberty hit. A lot of teenagers, especially girls, have a hard time with puberty, but I didn’t know this. I thought I was the only one who hated how my hips and breasts were growing. Then my periods started, and they were disabling. Also, I could no longer pass as “one of the boys,” so lost my community of male friends. But I didn’t feel I really belonged with the girls either.”

“By the time I was 14, I was severely depressed. Around this time my mother asked if I wanted to be a boy, something that hadn’t even crossed my mind. I then found some websites about females transitioning to male. As I look back, I see how everything led me to conclude it would be best if I stopped becoming a woman. My thinking was that, if I took hormones, I’d grow taller and wouldn’t look much different from biological men.

“I began seeing a psychologist through the National Health Service, (in Great Britain). When I was 15—because I kept insisting that I wanted to be a boy—I was referred to the Gender Identity Development Service, at the Tavistock and Portman clinic in London. There, I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which is psychological distress because of a mismatch between your biological sex and your perceived gender identity. By the time I got to Tavistock, I was adamant that I needed to transition. It was the kind of brash assertion that’s typical of teenagers. What was really going on was that I was a girl insecure in my body who had experienced parental abandonment, felt alienated from my peers, and suffered from anxiety and depression.

“After a series of superficial conversations with social workers, I was put on puberty blockers at age 16. They were designed to stop my sexual maturation: The idea was that this would give me a “pause” to think about whether I wanted to continue to further gender transition. By the end of a year of this treatment, when I was presented with the option of moving on to testosterone, I jumped at it—I wanted to feel like a young man, not an old woman. I was eager for the shots to start, and the changes this would bring. At first, the testosterone gave me a big boost in confidence.

“Over the next couple of years, my voice deepened, my beard came in, and my fat redistributed. I continued to wear my breast binder every day, especially now that I was completely passing as male, but it was painful and obstructed my breathing. By the time I was 20, I was being treated at the adult clinic. The testosterone and the binder affected the appearance of my breasts, and I hated them even more. I also wanted to align my face and my body, so got a referral for a double mastectomy and had my breasts removed. But the further my transition went, the more I realized that I wasn’t a man, and never would be. We are told that when someone presents with gender dysphoria, this reflects a person’s “real” or “true” self, that the desire to change genders is set. But this was not the case for me. As I matured, I recognized that gender dysphoria was a SYMPTOM of my overall misery, not its CAUSE.

“Around the end of that first-year post-surgery, something started happening: My brain was maturing. I thought about how I’d gotten where I was and contemplated, “What makes me a man?” I started realizing how many flaws there had been in my thought process, and how they had interacted with claims about gender that are increasingly found in the larger culture and that have been adopted at Tavistock. I remembered my idea as a 14-year-old, that hormones and surgery would turn me into someone who appeared to be a man. Now, I was that person. But I recognized that I was very physically different from men. Living as a trans man helped me acknowledge that I was still a woman.

“Then there was the fact that no one really knew the long-term effects of the treatment. For instance, the puberty blockers and testosterone caused me to have to deal with vaginal atrophy, a thinning and fragility of the vaginal walls that normally occurs after menopause. I started feeling really bad about myself again. I decided to stop, cold turkey. When I was due for my next testosterone shot, I canceled the appointment. Five years after beginning my medical transition to becoming male, I began the process of de-transitioning.

“When I was seen at Tavistock clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my comorbidities, not just to affirm my naïve hope that EVERYTHING could be solved with hormones and surgery. At Tavistock, practitioners provide “gender affirmative care.” This means that when children and teens declare a desire to transition, their assertions are typically accepted as conclusive. Affirmative care is being adopted as a model in many places. But former Tavistock practitioners, themselves, have cited varied problems  suffered by the kids who sought help, such as sexual abuse, trauma, parental abandonment, homophobia in the family or at school, depression, anxiety, being on the autism spectrum, having ADHD. These profound issues, and how they might be tied up with feelings of dysphoria, have often been ignored in favor of making transition the all-purpose solution.

“Parents who are reluctant or even alarmed about starting their children on a medical transition may be warned, ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?’ I had suicidal thoughts as a teen. Suicidal thoughts indicate serious mental health problems that need assessment and proper care. When I told them at Tavistock about these thoughts, that became another reason to put me on hormones quickly to improve my well-being. But later, Tavistock released a secret internal study of a group of 44 patients who had started taking puberty blockers at ages 12 to 15. It said that this treatment had failed to improve the mental state of patients, having “no significant effect on their psychological function, thoughts of self-harm, or body image.” Additionally, of those 44 patients, 43 went on to cross-sex hormones. This suggests blocking puberty isn’t providing a pause. It is giving a push.” (Keira Bell, “My Story”)

TEEN GIRLS WHO HAVE RAPID- ONSET GENDER DYSPHORIA

A. The Situation: For the nearly one-hundred-year history of treating gender dysphoria, the term has referred to mostly little boys. But in the last decade, a period that corresponds to the explosion of social media influence upon teen girls, a completely different population has begun to lead all categories of those claiming to have the wrong bodies. Teen girls. This is a population that never before in history had gender dysphoria in any significant numbers. In fact, before 2007, there was no scientific literature extant on teen girls having gender dysphoria at all. However this group is NOW the leading population demographic claiming to have gender dysphoria—teen girls who showed zero indication of gender dysphoria as children. This new phenomenon, extensively researched by Brown University researcher, Lisa Littman, was coined rapid-onset gender dysphoria. It describes a sudden, dramatic spike in transgender identification among teen girls who had no childhood history of gender dysphoria at all. This dramatic spike in the West is seen in the UK’s national gender clinic which has seen a 4400% increase over the last decade in teen girls presenting for gender treatment That is an explosion!

B. The Causes of Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria: Why are so many teen girls today coming to psychologists and pediatricians claiming, “I know that I have the wrong body. I am a boy.”  In 2016, Dr. Lisa Littman, an ob-gyn turned public health researcher, who knew that the transgender population was only about .02%, noticed a statistical peculiarity in her hometown in Rhode Island. Eventually six adolescents, mostly girls, came out as transgender—all from the same friend group. She wondered, “Why would a psychological ailment, gender dysphoria, that had been almost exclusively the province of boys suddenly explode among teen girls?” She conducted extensive research that resulted in 256 detailed parent reports. Though radical gender ideologues would attempt to discredit her research by saying these families were anti-LGBTQ, 85% of the families were neither politically conservative nor Christians.  Investigative reporter, Abigail Shrier summarizes Dr. Littman’s findings:

“Two patterns stood out: First, the clear majority (65%) of the adolescent girls who had discovered transgender identity in adolescence—out of the blue—had done so after a period of prolonged social media immersion. Second, the prevalence of transgender identification within some of the girl’s friend groups was more than seventy times the expected rate…Transgender identification was sharply clustered in friend groups…The atypical nature of this dysphoria—occurring in adolescents with no childhood history of it nudged Dr. Littman to a hypothesis everyone else had overlooked: peer contagion.” 

Theoretically, the recent spike in trans identification could be explained by it being more socially acceptable. But this could not explain why transgender identification was sharply clustered in friend groups. What these statistics showed was a characteristic of teen girls that psychologists have always been aware of—the power of teen contagion. This term refers to the communication of behavior from one person to another through their social relationships. Teen girls being dissatisfied with the gender of their bodies is just another example of teen girls spreading their pain. This demographic has a long history of social contagion. We know that anorexia and bulimia spread this way. We also know that this demographic, teen girls, is in the midst of the worst mental health crisis on record, with the highest rates of anxiety, self-harm, and depression ever recorded. We know that the group of girls who fall into social contagion is the same high-anxiety, depressed group who struggle socially in adolescence and tend to hate their bodies. Add to these facts a school and social media environment in which girls can immediately gain popularity by coming out as trans, along with the delicious opportunity to rebel against your parents’ old-fashioned values and you have a formula for rapid-onset gender dysphoria.

But what takes many of these teens from doubts about their femininity to certainty that they need to stop being women is the pervasive presence of online trans social media influencers who can’t wait to tell troubled teens that coming out as trans and starting a course of testosterone will cure all of their problems. For example, consider the twenty-nine-year-old Canadian female-to-male trans apologist, Chase Ross. Her wildly successful YouTube channel, “UppercaseCHASE1,” has garnered more than ten million viewers in the last ten years. There are more than a dozen social media sites and online forums that facilitate the discovery of trans identity, today. They are all popular hubs for sharing and documenting a physical transformation, seething over transphobia—especially that of parents and churches, celebrating the superpowers conferred by testosterone, offering tips for procuring a prescription of it, and commiserating about how hard it is to be trans.

C. Minimizing Gender Dysphoria Among Our Daughters:

1. BUILD YOUR DAUGHTER’S CONFIDENCE IN THE BIBLICAL VIEW OF FEMININITY. 

Rapid-onset gender dysphoria is, at its core, a teen girl’s rejection of her femininity. The physiological, psychological, hormonal, and social dynamics of beginning puberty are traumatic. But what sets apart a girl who has ROGD is blaming her feminine body for these problems. Christian daughters are especially vulnerable to rejecting their own femininity when they see their parents’ and church’s understanding of femininity as oppressive and outdated. Whether or not she decides her gender identity is trans, she will reject the biblical view of femininity if she believes what she is hearing from most of the social media. I identified and answered six common myths heard on the social media that undermine confidence in the Biblical view of gender 3 weeks ago in the first episode of this May series. That was, S3 E# 19 5/1/22.

2. HELP HER TEAR DOWN HER GENDER STEREOTYPES.

A basic tenet of transgender ideology is, “If you think you might be trans, you are.” In today’s world, a young woman deemed insufficiently feminine by her peers, will be asked outright, “Are you trans?  It is likely that nearly every teen girl has reasons to doubt her femininity. It is vital to help her tear down gender stereotypes that might lead her to reject her womanhood by understanding God’s enormous creativity: he has fashioned a diverse population of women, no two of whom are alike. Having feminine curves makes a girl no more feminine than having a lean, athletic body. Enjoying rough housing with the boys more than talking with the girls does not lower a girl’s femininity quotient. The characteristics of godly womanhood identified in Scripture are real and not to be undermined. Nevertheless, the diversity of God’s design ensures the overlap of the bell-shaped curves that describe masculine and feminine characteristics. Most men are taller than most women, but that doesn’t make a tall woman less feminine. Boys, generally, run faster than girls but that does not mean that a fast girl is somehow a boy! The alternative to being a girly girl is NOT identifying as trans; it is celebrating God’s marvelous creativity, knowing that God perfectly fashioned a girl’s body to match his purpose for her. 

3. REQUIRE ONLINE ACCOUNTABILITY TO YOU.

Private bedroom access to online connection is a formula for disaster. It is a good idea for parents to require their kids to leave their phones in the kitchen for recharging overnight and to have the policy of “immediate seizure and investigation.” Having a smart phone is a privilege that should only be granted on the condition that parents can request to see what they are viewing at any moment. Be an Internet snoop; ask to see what site they are on without warning and give appropriated punishments for visiting destructive sites. Don’t be intimidated by the, you don’t trust me argument. Be aware that there are social media sites and online forums that facilitate the discovery of a trans identity on YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and DeviantArt.

4. CULTIVATE GRACE IN EVERY GENDER IDENTITY DISCUSSION

In guiding your child into a wholesome biblical view of themselves and God’s gender design of them, be intentional, not passive. But listen to what your child is thinking and feeling considerably more than you speak. Girls who identify as trans are troubled. Opening up about their own feelings is the place you would love to get to in a perfect world; but it is way too personal to start there. Better to ask, “what do you think about those who identify as transgender?” “How do you think your gay or trans friends want to be treated?” “Why do you think kids are confused about their gender?” “What do you think of the Bible’s view of gender roles?”

Rapid-onset gender dysphoria is real; it is harming teen girls in our own families, churches, and communities. The assault upon God’s image, his design of humans as male and female differently to complete each other, is coming in like a flood—a ten thousand percent increase in teen girls identifying as trans over the last decade. Isaiah, the prophet wrote, When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him (Isaiah: 59:19). Will you be a part of that standard?