In what has been widely called an apparent awakening by the New York Times, the typically far-left paper appeared to stray from the leftist plantation in publishing a report about teenagers who have been harmed by who have been irreversibly harmed by transgender surgery and gender-altering hormones, Breitbart News reported.
The New York Times interviewed a woman, Grace Powell, who, as a teenager of only 12 or 13, found transgender propaganda online. She then believed that the feelings she had as a teenager, which many teens experience, made her feel uncomfortable as a female, which led her to suffer from depression. She was not a popular student in school, and she was often bullied.
After availing herself of the trans propaganda she found, Grace believed that she was born in the wrong body. Moreover, she also read that if someone felt as she did and did not transition, it would lead them to suicide, which the Times noted is a narrative pushed by trans activists and their protagonists.
When Grace turned 17, she told her parents that she believed she was not a female but a male. She was then sent to a “gender specialist to make sure she was serious,” the Times reported. It was after seeing that “specialist” that she began taking gender hormones when she was a senior in high school. Before going to Sarah Lawrence College the fall after she graduated, she received a double mastectomy. When she went to college, she changed her name to Grayson, and she had a male roommate on a men’s floor in a college dormitory.
Despite speaking to numerous therapists and doctors, not one ever asked her about her chronic depression, or why she wanted to transition to a male, Powell admitted. She said that nobody ever asked about her sexual orientation or any trauma she may have had. Had she been asked, Powell, now 23, would have told them she had been sexually abused as a child.
“I wish there had been more open conversations,” she told the Times. “But I was told there was one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you. What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell said. “It’s a mess.”
The Times admitted that “Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.” The article also admitted that children are “a new and growing group of patients” in the transgender world.
That ideology being pushed by progressives has had a shocking impact. According to Spectrum News, the number of teens identifying as transgender doubled in five years, jumping from 0.7% in 2017 to 1.3% in 2022. Social contagion has apparently had a significant impact on that jump.
The New York Post reported in 2023 that according to a psychiatrist who dealt with gender transition treatments for over ten years, “four out of five” children who question their gender eventually grow out of it and accept their gender, so long as no medical interventions are implemented. That is what makes Powell’s case so egregious. Dr. Riittakertu Kaltiala, Finland’s leading expert on pediatric gender medicine and chief psychiatrist at its largest gender clinic, said 12 separate studies support that claim.
The Times report said that most transgender adults have “had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria” for most of their lives and are happy with their transitions. However, according to clinicians, the growing group of children going to clinics seeking transitions is a new phenomenon.
Laura Edwards-Leeper, founding psychologist at the first gender clinic in the US, told the Times that when her practice began in 2007, most of her patients had dealt with gender dysphoria for their entire lives, and she believed sex changes made sense for a majority of them.
“But that is just not the case anymore,” she said. “The population has changed drastically.”
Most of her patients today, however, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria, she continued.
“The population has changed drastically,” Edwards-Leeper said. “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”
It is almost as if this is being done deliberately, although to what end, nobody seems to know.
Along with the increase in those believing they are in the wrong body, there has been an uptick in so-called “detransitioners,” who complain that only conservative media outlets seem interested in reporting what they are going through. They complained that nobody seemed to listen when they changed their minds, at least on the political left.
“I was always a liberal Democrat. Now I feel politically homeless, said one woman whose son came out trans, started hormone therapy, but then changed his mind.
Trans activists have taken to shaming parents who are opposed to trans “therapy,” asking parents, “Do you want a dead son or a living daughter?” Any parent worth the title would, of course, say they want their children to live. By making such decisions life and death, these pro-trans activists appear to be trying to press parents’ conscience.
In one case, a woman named Kathleen was the parent of a 15-year-old son who one day suddenly told his parents he was trans. When they sought out a doctor to assess if their son had ADHD, he instead referred their son to someone who specialized not only in ADHD but also “gender,” the Times reported.
Kathleen rightly assumed the doctor would actually examine her son or conduct an evaluation or assessment; instead, the meeting with the specialist occurred as follows:
“In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen told the Times.
Trans activists, many of whom work in the medical profession, tend to give parents a choice–allow their child to transition, or they will commit suicide. The activists claim there are “studies” that show a correlation between allowing children to transition and a lower risk of suicide.
“But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive,” the New York Times reported.
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