Oct 1, 2018 04:38 AM
https://www.forbes.com/sites/julianvigo/...b424e338f2
EXCERPT: . . . I am even more concerned by how technology is being offered up as the panacea to what are social and cultural problems. Take for instance the fact that girls in the United Kingdom are increasingly identifying as boys with a five-fold increase of referrals of females to the country’s only gender clinic for children. Even today, The Sun has questioned if changing gender today is the new anorexia with an increase in recent weeks of UK papers publishing stories on this very problem. Similarly, in the US over the past month since Lisa Littman’s study on rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) which evidences for the first time that gender dysphoria is now a social contagion, people are growing concerned that perhaps we are using medicine and technology for what are social problems.
Almost one year ago, the NHS published a document on the “Worrying rise in reports of self-harm among teenage girls in UK” and last month we learned that one-fifth of fourteen-year-olds in the UK self have self harmed. Not necessarily unrelated, we also learned that one in three girls in British secondary schools are sexually harassed and one quarter of these girls have been touched in a sexual nature with even female teachers now reporting sexual harassment.
While there is genuine concern for female children who identify as “transgender boys,” there has been virtually no connecting the dots between why these girls might reject their bodies and the social pressures for which most every female going through adolescence has, at one point or another, thought she would like to be the opposite sex. From the unwanted sexual harassment [...] to [...] how the female child is unable to face the increasingly misogynist present, we are seeing gender being collapsed with the corporeal sex. Yet, gender is a fiction—it’s not real. Gender is a social discourse that tells boys that they have to be tough and not cry, that tells girls that they should be docile and pretty. Gender is what set women back, fundamentally, as for most of human history the lives and bodies of females have been supremely controlled by men. This is why gender is such a dangerous concept as it is essentially inseparable from stereotype.
So the question being asked today by many is this: why are we using technology to “cure” what are largely social and cultural problems? While gender dysphoria is a real clinical condition, in recent years we are witnessing an explosion of those who identify as transgender with every gender identity cocktail being positioned as “transgender” with a specific focus to medicalize children just before they go into puberty. This is also a deeply troubling proposition today as the growing consensus among specialists is that girls who are autistic are disproportionately trans-identified. And of equal worry is that conterminous to this boost to medicalize children is the push to de-medicalize adults who identify as transgender....
MORE: https://www.forbes.com/sites/julianvigo/...b424e338f2
EXCERPT: . . . I am even more concerned by how technology is being offered up as the panacea to what are social and cultural problems. Take for instance the fact that girls in the United Kingdom are increasingly identifying as boys with a five-fold increase of referrals of females to the country’s only gender clinic for children. Even today, The Sun has questioned if changing gender today is the new anorexia with an increase in recent weeks of UK papers publishing stories on this very problem. Similarly, in the US over the past month since Lisa Littman’s study on rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) which evidences for the first time that gender dysphoria is now a social contagion, people are growing concerned that perhaps we are using medicine and technology for what are social problems.
Almost one year ago, the NHS published a document on the “Worrying rise in reports of self-harm among teenage girls in UK” and last month we learned that one-fifth of fourteen-year-olds in the UK self have self harmed. Not necessarily unrelated, we also learned that one in three girls in British secondary schools are sexually harassed and one quarter of these girls have been touched in a sexual nature with even female teachers now reporting sexual harassment.
While there is genuine concern for female children who identify as “transgender boys,” there has been virtually no connecting the dots between why these girls might reject their bodies and the social pressures for which most every female going through adolescence has, at one point or another, thought she would like to be the opposite sex. From the unwanted sexual harassment [...] to [...] how the female child is unable to face the increasingly misogynist present, we are seeing gender being collapsed with the corporeal sex. Yet, gender is a fiction—it’s not real. Gender is a social discourse that tells boys that they have to be tough and not cry, that tells girls that they should be docile and pretty. Gender is what set women back, fundamentally, as for most of human history the lives and bodies of females have been supremely controlled by men. This is why gender is such a dangerous concept as it is essentially inseparable from stereotype.
So the question being asked today by many is this: why are we using technology to “cure” what are largely social and cultural problems? While gender dysphoria is a real clinical condition, in recent years we are witnessing an explosion of those who identify as transgender with every gender identity cocktail being positioned as “transgender” with a specific focus to medicalize children just before they go into puberty. This is also a deeply troubling proposition today as the growing consensus among specialists is that girls who are autistic are disproportionately trans-identified. And of equal worry is that conterminous to this boost to medicalize children is the push to de-medicalize adults who identify as transgender....
MORE: https://www.forbes.com/sites/julianvigo/...b424e338f2
