Making body dysmorphia great again
Kaylee McGhee White
Gender dysphoria used to be a rare mental illness that afflicted less than 0.01% of the population, mostly young boys and most of whom would go on to grow out of it. Now, more than 5% of young adults in the United States identify as a gender different than their sex, and the overwhelming majority of the new converts are young women.
New data from the International Journal of Transgender Health found that young girls are initiating transition treatments, such as puberty blockers and hormonal injections, up to seven times more than gender-confused boys. Several gender clinics have confirmed this trend, telling Reuters that they see female patients twice as often as male patients. Not more than 10 years ago, the exact opposite was true.
What’s behind this sudden switcheroo? Are girls really more likely than boys to be “born into the wrong body,” as activists put it?
Not at all. However, girls are more likely to feel uncomfortable in their bodies, struggle with body dysmorphia, and battle anxiety and depression at a young age. Many girls already believe their bodies are the problem. That’s why, when I was growing up, eating disorders were so common. The underlying anxieties have always been the same, but the way in which they’re expressing themselves has changed.
And that’s in large part thanks to the activists on social media and in the classroom who sell transgenderism as some sort of cure to the social awkwardness that girls feel during maturation. Instead of encouraging these young women to love themselves for who they are and what they’ve been given, gender ideologues are pressuring young women to repress their femininity and destroy their bodies. It is, in many ways, like telling an anorexic girl that the dysmorphic image she sees in the mirror is the correct one and that she’s right to hate and starve it.
Gender dysphoria is a legitimate mental struggle. But the vast majority of young adults caught up in the transgender movement do not have gender dysphoria. Rather, they’re victims of a social contagion — one that shows no sign of slowing down until it is stamped out thoroughly.