Free the Press: We Need Real Reporting on Trans

The Propaganda Ministry aimed further to control the content of news and editorial pages through directives … to regional or local papers. Detailed guidelines stated what stories could or could not be reported and how to report the news. Journalists or editors who failed to follow these instructions could be fired … Rather than suppressing news, the Nazi propaganda apparatus instead sought to tightly control its flow and interpretation and to deny access to alternative sources of news.” - The Press in the Third Reich, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Dear Liberal Main Stream Media (MSM),

I once believed in you. But you lost my respect when my son suddenly declared he was “transgender” 3 months into the pandemic.  After much searching, I found the diagnosis that perfectly described my son’s experience: “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” or ROGD.  Because if my son was born in the “wrong body”, then why had he spent 18 years acting like his body was a perfect fit? I searched in vain for balanced stories in MSM. I found nothing.

I did find The Trans Journalists Association Style Guide online. The Style Guide states, “it’s imperative for media outlets to get this [trans] coverage right.”  “Right”, according to the Trans Journalists Association means that news stories should be carefully controlled and manipulated to support the goals of transgender activism. There is no other reality permitted. Investigative journalism is not allowed unless conclusions match the “one truth”. Chilling.

From the Trans Journalists Association Style Guide:

• “coverage of transition-related care tends to focus on the potential risks of such care, especially when it comes to young people. Journalists should cover these stories with extra thoughtfulness and not overemphasize them. Activists and politicians often use this sort of coverage to justify denying lifesaving care to trans people.”

• “journalists should avoid descriptive language that suggests a trans person’s gender is superficial or that trans people are reinforcing gender stereotypes.”

• “it is overdone and unoriginal to emphasize the grief of cis family and partners.”

• “Don’t suggest trans and non-binary people are new or overemphasize trans youth.”

• “Additionally, many stories about trans youth focus on their bodies and medical care (i.e.puberty blockers, binders, hormones, etc.) and highlight the risks of transition-related care. This contributes to a hyper-focus on trans bodies and medical care.”

• “anti–trans rights groups and individuals push a fringe, radical agenda….Giving anti–trans groups a platform isn’t being unbiased, but rather giving fringe ideology outsized influence.”

• “When reporting on fringe groups and hate groups…use language like transphobic, anti-trans, etc.”

• “disinformation around so-called “rapid onset gender dysphoria” harms young trans people and fuels the far right’s attacks on trans children…There’s no evidence this is a real phenomenon at this time, and reporting otherwise is irresponsible.”

• ” Detransition” narratives often feature people who thought they were trans or experiencing gender dysphoria and later figured out they weren’t without medical treatment. These stories should not be used to question established medical standards that give trans people bodily autonomy…”

The Trans Journalists Association Style Guide is not really a style guide, is it? A style guide is “a set of standards for the writing and design of documents”. The Trans Journalists Association Style Guide dictates what news people should be permitted to hear and what the interpretation of that news should be. It is a propaganda guide for the “trans regime”.

I know you are using this “Style Guide” MSM.  You are silent about the explosion in “transgender” youth, the reality of ROGD, the risks of transition, and reports from detransitioners that they were manipulated into and harmed by a “trans identity”.  You are deliberately hiding news stories. You are misleading the American public.

Rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) does exist. Ten years ago, teens newly identifying as transgender were rare. But in 2015, parents and therapists started to notice clusters of “trans self-ID” within groups of friends-usually girls. These were young people with normal childhoods who “out of the blue” declared they were “trans” during or after puberty. Dr Lisa Littman was curious about this shift. She used standard methods to ask why these Adolescents and Young Adults (AYA) were suddenly “trans”. She found most had this in common: recent high social media/internet use and/or a group of friends who announced a “transgender” identity around the same time (Littman, 2018-19; Littman, 2020). Dr Littman gave a name to this phenomenon: ROGD for Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, also called Adolescent Onset Gender Dysphoria.

Dr Littman's study suggested that vulnerable teens might “catch” a gender identity from social media and peers.  Dr Riittakerttu Kaltiala, director of the Department of Adolescent Psychiatry in Tampere University, Finland and helping youth with gender dysphoria since 2011, agreed. In an interview on Gender A Wider Lens, Ep 62, she recalls:

“2015 [was] a starting point…we started to see new kinds of young people contacting our service…young people who had quite a short history of gender dysphoria” and also “in a certain school, for example, all of a sudden you have half a dozen…who start having severe feelings of gender dysphoria…and we also noticed that [they]…were exchanging experiences of their feelings [and] also their [gender service] assessments”.  

Dr Kaltiala then describes her reaction in 2018 to Dr Littman’s research:

“I have to agree that ..this is valid because it seems to be happening…Adolescents are very suggestible to peer group influences and also searching for confirmation [of] their ideas in the peer group. It’s the very nature of adolescence because this is how the identity develop[s] during adolescent years. They exchange ideas and they kind of share identities in the peer groups and this gives them [a] feeling of power and strength against some other groups and identities…This has always been there so why wouldn’t it be there also concerning feelings about one’s gender and gender identity?”.

The US gender clinicians declared: this is transphobic—a thought terminating cliche. They attacked the methodology and the messenger but offered no data.  Wouldn’t the ethical response be to prove Dr Littman wrong? To immediately research this new, mostly female population with NO history of pre-pubertal dysphoria?  To ask new patients and their parents a few simple questions about prior history, peer groups and social media use? You can’t ask how long AYA have been “transgender” because the internet coaches them to recite: “I have always been trans”.  But certainly, you can ask when they first “realized” it or when they requested new pronouns or how many “trans” friends they have or when their friends announced new identities?

Good material for you here MSM. Why is “trans” identification spreading like wildfire? Why the 30-40 fold increase in “trans” adolescents? Why has North America gone from a single pediatric gender clinic in 2007 to 270+ clinics in 2022?  Why do 10-20+% of kids in white middle class liberal high schools identify as “transgender”? Did you see that in your teen years? Why does the US gender clinicians’ reaction to sudden, high numbers of self-identified “trans” AYA most resemble that of cigarette companies confronted with the link between smoking and lung cancer?

Exponential growth in less than a decade IS significant. This is a social epidemic.  Social media is providing AYA with pre-made “trans” identities and everyone celebrates when they try them on. Doctors then make the ROGD identity permanent with drugs and surgery. And who is most drawn to a prepackaged identity? AYA with trauma, social awkwardness, autism traits, or a general inability to cope with their own emotions.  The gender identity framework gives these vulnerable teens a step-by-step guide on how to self-harm.  

And you MSM. Stop limiting your transgender reporting to a rosy fantasy.  Start acting like you are a FREE press. Start asking gender specialists how they know this isn’t just normal peer influenced identity exploration? Ask them if homosexual adolescents might be prone to mistake their same sex attraction for an opposite sex identity? Ask them how they can diagnose an “endocrine disorder” to obtain insurance reimbursement when there is nothing wrong with these bodies? Ask them if they might possibly be sterilizing large numbers of gays, lesbians and other AYA struggling with an unhappy adolescence?

Look beyond the obvious.  Talk to gender clinic workers who have left gender medicine in the past 10 years to distance themselves from a system that they felt was harmful.  Talk to non-gender clinicians who have been cowed into silence. Talk to therapists brave enough to offer exploratory, supportive therapy to hurting AYA.  They are out there.  Talk to them.

Then spend a week on the internet pretending you are a lonely adolescent.  Start with TikTok or Instagram.  Imagine searching transgender because at school everyone is asking your pronouns and your friends are all declaring they are “trans” and you are a little uncomfortable with your changing body or your same sex attraction.  See how easy it is to get sucked in.  Next, join the 300,000+ in trans communities on Reddit (MtF or FtM). Ask: Am I trans? Then tell your new Reddit friends that sometimes you doubt you really are trans.  Do they goad you on with the slogan: “If you think you’re trans then you are trans”. Finally, watch some porn: violent porn, sissy hypno porn, hentai and imagine your 14-year-old self being confronted with these disturbing images. Addictive? Mind-bending? Absolutely soul destroying?

Dig a little deeper.  Ask yourself if it is normal for 40,000 young women to be pleading for money on GoFundMe to purchase a double mastectomy to remove their healthy breasts (euphemistically called “Top Surgery”). Be curious about the 19,000 requests for radical rearrangement of healthy genitals under “Bottom Surgery”. Phone some of these surgeons and ask them how many “gender affirming surgeries” they were doing 10 years ago? Ask yourself why trans language requires euphemisms for serious hard-core therapy with toxic drugs and invasive surgeries.  

Finally, research the trajectory of transition and detransition. Talk to some transgender adults about what life is like after 10-20 years of high dose cross sex hormones. Ask them when that post transition euphoria wears off. Discover that regret is common. Read Dr Littman’s new article on detransition. Listen to the truth from detransitioners (see below).

Maybe you could even talk to some parents of ROGD kids. Parents who love their child so much that they refuse to give up on them. Parents who are surrounded by a society that blindly affirms a social contagion. Parents who are brave enough to say to their child: everything you need to be whole is already within you.

Convince me you are the FREE press.  Report about this social contagion. Make the mental well-being of troubled AYA your primary goal.  Stop protecting the political views of adults so fragile their identity requires external scaffolding. Ditch the Style Guide, MSM. My child’s future depends on it.

Sources:

• Anderson, L. (2015, Aug 22). Exiles in their own flesh: A psychotherapist speaks out. 4thwavenow.com. https://4thwavenow.com/2015/08/22/exiles-in-their-own-flesh-a-psychotherapist-speaks/

• Littman, L (2018-9). Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0214157

• Littman, L (2020). The Use of Methodologies in Littman (2018) Is Consistent with the Use of Methodologies in Other Studies Contributing to the Field of Gender Dysphoria Research: Response to Restar (2019) Arch Sex Behav., 49(1)66-77. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-020-01631-z?noAccess=true

• Littman, L. (2021). Individuals Treated for Gender Dysphoria with Medical and/or Surgical Transition Who Subsequently Detransitioned: A Survey of 100 Detransitioners Arch Sex Behav., 50(8), 3353-3369. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-02163-w

• McCall, B et al (2021, April 26). Transgender Teens: Is the Tide Starting to Turn?https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/949842#vp_2

• O’Malley, S. and Ayad, S. (Hosts). (2022, February 11). 62-Pioneers Series: Adolescent Identity with Riittakerttu Kaltiala [Audio podcast episode]. In Gender: A Wider Lens Podcast. https://gender-a-wider-lens.captivate.fm/episode/62-pioneers-series-adolescent-identity-with-riittakerttu-kaltiala

Detransitioners Speak Out:

1. Gender Mapper: Girls Just Want to Have Fun, https://www.gendermapper.org/

2. Detrans Subreddit

3. An Open Letter, https://genspect.org/an-open-letter/

4.  My Story of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, Helena Kerschner,

5. A Letter to My 15-Year-Old Gender-Questioning Self  , https://genspect.org/a-letter-to-my-15-year-old-gender-questioning-self/

6. A grand conspiracy to tell the truth: An interview https://4thwavenow.com/2019/02/27/a-grand-conspiracy-to-tell-the-truth-an-interview-with-4thwavenow-founder-her-daughter-chiara-of-the-pique-resilience-project/

7. Detransition Q&A: Pique Resilience Project, http://www.piqueresproject.com/newsfeed/detransition-qa-1

8. Post Trans, https://post-trans.com/Detransition-English

9. Damaged by Gender: A Detrans Story, with Garrett,

10. O’Malley, S. and Ayad, S. (Hosts). (2021, October 15). 45- Helena Part 1: Social Justice, Fandoms & FtM Gay Boys [Audio podcast episode]. In Gender: A Wider Lens Podcast. https://gender-a-wider-lens.captivate.fm/episode/45-helena-part-1-social-justice-fandoms-ftm-gay-boys