Bruce
Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept, Surrender,
and The Victims' Revolution. His novel The Alhambra
was published in 2017.
Their
number may not be legion yet, but it will be, and soon. They’re
the people, most of them extremely young, who were convinced
by parents, friends, teachers, school psychologists, online
“influencers,” psychotherapists, and/or doctors
that they were transgender — only to realize, after
subjecting themselves to puberty blockers, sex hormones, and
perhaps even radical surgery in the name of “gender
affirmation,” that they’d made a tragic mistake.
In the splendid new documentary Affirmation Generation,
directed by L. E. Dawes, we meet several such men and women.
One of them is a girl named Cat, who, after dreaming one night
that she was a boy, asked her parents to take her to a doctor.
He confirmed her transgender identity on her first visit and
put her on testosterone — “T” — on
her third.
At first, she enjoyed its effects: increased energy, a deeper
voice. But after a few months, she developed edema, gained
weight, and suffered heart palpitations. Soon enough, she
saw that sex change is a fantasy — and an unhealthy
one. “I don’t believe that anybody is born in
the wrong body,” she now says, lamenting that because
of so-called expert advice, “I thought I only had one
path that I could take.”
Then there’s Joel, who wanted to be a girl. He was even
luckier than Cat: his doctor prescribed estrogen — “E”
— on Day One. Soon, Joel was an internet influencer:
we see a video clip of him, lipsticked, bewigged, gushing
about the wonders of “E.” But the high didn’t
last long. A few months later, bearded and somber, he recalls
his recent suicide attempt and psych-ward stint.
Cat and Joel appear to be in their 20s; David is middle-aged.
In his youth, he started living as a woman not because he
thought he was a girl, but because his obvious homosexuality
had exposed him to ridicule. When he took “E,”
it gave him osteoporosis. Still, he wanted surgery —
for which, back then, it was necessary, or at least easier,
to go abroad. He’d already planned a Thailand trip for
this purpose when a post-op trans friend urged him to cancel.
“All of my life,” the friend said, “I thought
that if I could just become a woman I would find peace and
joy.” But no: “I’m more miserable now….
I think about taking my life every day.” So David dropped
the surgery — and stopped playing at being a woman.
“I realized,” he says, “that I didn’t
just live the lie. I was the lie.”
In 2011, only 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent of Americans thought
they’d been “born in the wrong body.” In
2019, 2 percent of American teenagers did so. By 2021, no
fewer than 9 percent of American teenagers in public school
identified as transgender. It used to be the case that this
condition — gender dysphoria — typically developed
over a period of many years, beginning in early childhood.
But the past decade or so has seen the rise of an entirely
new phenomenon, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), which
is plainly the result not of a deep-seated mental disorder
but of teens succumbing to a toxic trend.
Lisa Littman, the scientist who first identified and named
ROGD, is one of many professionals interviewed in Affirmation
Generation who’ve dealt with patients like Cat and Joel.
Unlike the lunatic pseudo-experts who appear on camera in
Matt Walsh’s recent must-see documentary, What Is a
Woman? — and who enthusiastically push “E”
and “T” and “top surgery” and “bottom
surgery” on naive young people — the real experts
in Affirmation Generation, who’ve dared to swim against
the tide, recognize all this as dangerous nonsense.
Among other things, they address crucial psychological aspects
of this foolishness that the pseudo-experts contrive to ignore.
For example, educator Sasha Ayad points out that many young
people who profess a transgender identity have never even
been in a relationship — which obviously raises questions
about their ability to understand in a remotely mature way
what they’re getting themselves into. Another psychological
factor that demands to be taken seriously, notes therapist
Stella O’Malley, is that a great many of these young
detransitioners felt, while living as the opposite sex, that
they were “constantly fighting against the onslaught
of nature.”
Then there’s the matter of the uniqueness — or
near-uniqueness — of the current protocols for dealing
with individuals who say they’re trans. Therapist Stephanie
Winn observes that the automatic affirmation of these patients’
self-diagnoses — on which the prevailing U.S. guidelines
insist — represents “a departure from the standards
of care for any other condition.” And psychoanalyst
Lisa Marchiano notes that the only modern precedent for treating
psychiatric problems with “physical intervention”
was the “pretty barbaric” lobotomy craze of the
1940s.
Endocrinologist William Malone sums up the medical downside
of “E” and “T.” Males on “E”
can develop (among many other side effects) blood clots, strokes,
gallstones; “T” can give females heart disease,
high blood pressure, breast cancer. To prescribe such toxic
substances to self-diagnosed kids, charges Malone, is nothing
less than a scandal — especially given that nowadays
anywhere between 65 percent and 98 percent of those who think
that they’re transgender in their youth will change
their minds in adulthood.
Professional cheerleaders for transition routinely assert
that trans-identifying kids who aren’t instantly put
on the conveyor belt — puberty blockers, hormones, surgery
— are suicide risks; this claim, as the real experts
demonstrate, is baseless. Many if not most of the cheerleaders,
as it happens, have financial motives for drawing new customers
to the transgender clinics: rich doctors get even richer;
Big Pharma gets even bigger. So eager are they, in fact, to
feed kids into the transgender pipeline that they deliberately
ignore the pre-existing complaints – such as ADHD, PTSD,
anorexia, and autism (fully 48 percent of supposedly trans
kids are “on the spectrum”) — that likely
explain those kids’ readiness to clutch on to transgenderism
as a life raft.
The experts in Affirmation Generation also discuss the role
of the U.S. as, increasingly, an outlier in its approach to
the treatment of purported transgenderism: whereas most other
Western countries affirm a “watchful waiting”
approach — i.e., give young people time to change their
minds before you do anything extreme to their bodies —
America is “digging in its heels” on the need
for fast, radical, and irreversible action.
Then there’s the almost universally misunderstood gay
angle. Many people who haven’t examined this aspect
of the subject carefully enough think that the transgender
movement is an extension of the gay rights movement, a further
step on the road away from heteronormativity. On the contrary,
the trans campaign is, quite simply, a new front in the old
war on homosexuality.
Gratifyingly, the real experts in Affirmation Generation get
it. “The trans rights movement,” maintains Winn,
“has co-opted the gay rights movement.” Joey Brite,
a lesbian, accuses transgender advocates of “transing
the gay away.” They’re both absolutely correct.
Statistics suggest that the overwhelming majority of young
people who transition will, in Marciano’s words, “eventually
desist . . . and be lesbian or gay.” Which means that
doctors are “destroying the sexual function of gay kids.”
Which, of course, is nothing less than criminal.
David, the older detransitioner interviewed in the film, has
strong feelings about this calamitous state of affairs. Young
gays who are pushed into embracing trans ideology, he says,
need to be told in no uncertain terms: “You can just
be gay — and it’s okay!” Of the 60 percent
of self-identified trans people who end up detransitioning
(the rate after four years is 30 percent), nearly a quarter
grasp that they went through the whole process because they’d
been unable to deal with being gay.
One of the saddest facts in this documentary crammed with
sad facts is that detransitioners, once they see the error
of their ways, don’t just have to deal with the trauma
of having mutilated their bodies forever. They also have to
deal, in many if not most cases, with mass rejection. People
who applauded them for boarding the trans bandwagon now demonize
them for jumping off. Friends become enemies. Even doctors
turn their backs. “People don’t want to know that
they exist,” says Marciano. (It makes sense: the first
impulse of ideologues, when confronted with realities that
challenge their dogma, is to try to ignore them.)
Affirmation Generation is several important things
at once: a sympathetic portrait of brave and articulate detransitioners;
a cogent corrective to the lies told by the transgender movement;
and a powerful indictment of a range of irresponsible professionals
— from teachers who’ve betrayed their pupils’
trust to doctors who’ve betrayed the Hippocratic Oath.
Who’s responsible for this documentary? The closing
credits, in which you expect an answer to that question, tell
us only that the film was “produced and directed by
lifelong, West Coast, liberal Democrats in the entertainment
industry.” Why no names? Because “to take credit
for this passion project would, at the very least, risk our
careers.”
Which left me feeling two ways at once. One, I greatly admired
the anonymous people who took the time out from their successful
careers to make this first-rate film. Two, I was frustrated.
I’ve put my name on any number of books and articles
in which I’ve presented arguments — on this issue
and many others — that have closed professional doors
to me. If more people had been open about sharing my views,
the stigma of dissenting from orthodoxy might have been significantly
diminished.
Yes, documentaries like this one are necessary in the struggle
to quash the madness of transgenderism. But it’s vital,
too, for the creators of gutsy works like this to stand up
and be counted.
by
Bruce Bawer:
Amazon
Disappears Two Books on Islam
You
Before Me
Stop
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Paul
Auster: Man in the Dark
Karl
Ove Knaaugaard's The Morning Star
Gender
Narcissism
History of World's Most Liberal City
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