It’s no secret that transitioning to something you are not is a fad.
By this I do not mean that nobody experiences genuine dysphorias that require treatment, and I freely admit that my experience and education are insufficient to the task of developing treatment plans for people who are genuinely suffering from what appears to me to be a serious mental health problem. Dancing around a bit more to cover myself, I will also emphasize that calling dysphoria a mental illness is not a slam or slander: mental health problems run in my family and they are serious conditions that need treatment.
Unfortunately, the science of treating mental illness is not especially good, and the treatments themselves have at times been cruel, destructive, and sometimes downright evil. Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz invented the Frontal Lobotomy and won the Nobel Prize for doing so. Countless people, including children who were deemed too disruptive, suffered from permanent damage to their brains because of a fad.
…
That’s a lot of preface to the point I now want to make: the current transing fad is due to a social contagion and the treatments being used are barbaric. Transitioning to something else is a “thing;” it allows people to gain attention and sympathy. It gives people an explanation for why things aren’t going as they like. It elevates social standing. It helps people create a community of people who share something with you.
And it’s incredibly destructive. People who are suffering are getting quack treatments. Sometimes they’re suffering something serious and real, in which case the treatment should be intense and appropriate to the condition; other times it is the result of a teenage phase and should be seen as a teen experimenting with Goth culture. Instead, we are medicalizing the problem and literally sterilizing children and surgically altering their bodies. For profit.
