School Has Seventeen Children Changing Gender...Teacher Says Vulnerable Children Being Tricked Into Believing They Are The Wrong Sex

Of course she's afraid to identify herself because her career...her entire life...could be destroyed by speaking the truth.

   I'll just remind us all again of the existence of mass sociogenic illness, aka epidemic hysteria.

   Such mass hysteria is an amazing phenomenon, and no doubt. But the far more amazing phenomenon is the reaction of: everyone else / the adults / the culture at large to it. I'm far more concerned about the fact that the cultural/political/academic left has been able to terrify/brainwash basically the entire cultural superstructure--everybody except dedicated conservatives--into some combination of believing this tale and pretending to believe it. And also of course: I don't know which is more alarming: that you can (so easily!) terrify people into believing things, that you can terrify them into pretending to believe things, or that these two phenomena blend into each other...

   This is obviously insane. Everyone should be able to see that. Instead of admitting it, the left deploys a particularly vicious version of its favorite weapon: the mass, rabid, spittle-flecked accusation of bigotry. The weaponization of such accusations is an important phenomenon in its own right, obviously.

   I've seen some shit, man. I'm, like, the only person who seems to remember the Satanic Panic... Some day somebody needs to explain to me how that abject insanity got crammed down the memory hole. This is largely the same type of phenomenon...but more widespread and destructive. It's utterly mad, it's right in front of our eyes, and basically no one will admit it. Especially no one in academia. You know...the place where the passion for truth allegedly burns brightest... Ever heard of it?

   (Another instructive aspect of all this: the only people who have been allowed to speak up are radical feminists with competing claims of oppression...)

   One of the most interesting--and no longer in any way surprising--things in that story is that many kids who are imagining themselves transgendered are doing so because they find it less frightening than coming out as gay. This aspect of the thing is, obviously, important. I tend not to lean on the arguments from the left for various reasons of principle...but the older, saner left had an extremely easy way of making sense of much of this. Gender--in the real, actual, old-school sense of 'gender'--i.e. masculinity, femininity and androgyny--is a rather odd thing that's correlated with but distinct from sex. Gender is a set of characteristic behavioral inclinations. As old-school feminists recognized: gender and sex are separable. Males (men and boys) can be feminine; females (women and girls) can be masculine. There's nothing magical about modes of dress that make them necessarily attached to people's chromosomes. Long ago women basically adopted "men's" clothing styles. Eventually, one would expect some men to adopt women's, I suppose. (Also: being forbidden, it naturally becomes sexualized.) The transgenderism fad is mostly just people playing around with the other gender--males "exploring" femininity, females "exploring" masculinity. 

   Oh and, of course, one other very important thing: added to this unremarkable phenomenon is a thermonuclear political/philosophical confusion: basically that being masculine makes you a man / being feminine makes you a woman. That's to say: a completely botching of the sex/gender distinction and a repudiation of old-school feminist insights. The older recognition that gender is separable from sex gets rejected in favor of a new view, according to which there is an even stronger association between sex and gender than even the most conservative culture has ever believed: basically, sex is defined in terms of gender. If you're masculine, then you're necessarily a man; if you're feminine, then you're necessarily a woman. It's never stated this baldly because that's so crazy...but the outright contradiction is confused by something like merely definitional confusion: the pretense that 'man' and 'woman' are gender terms, and the largely intentional obfuscation of the sex/gender distinction. Oh and: the introduction of the pseudoconcept gender identity... 

   Instead of the older, better ideas--you don't have to be the gender normally correlated with your sex, and you don't have to be heterosexual--transgender ideology has basically (a) taken two huge leaps backwards and (b) added a cluster of confusions, contradictions and fantasies. The leading idea under this nonsense is something like: maleness and masculinity (and femaleness and femininity) must remain correlated...so let's just re-define maleness as masculinity and femaleness as femininity. You prefer to be masculine? Voila! Yera man! You prefer to be feminine? Voila! Yera woman! Oh and: you gotta be straight...so if you're tempted to not be...just change your gender, which changes your sex by definition. Voila! Yer straight! Gay no more!

   (Again, the whole discussion takes place under the previously-mentioned terminological smokescreen: the pretense that 'man' and 'woman' are gender terms...)

   The fact that, on top of everything else it's done crazy here, the left is basically giving up everything its ever done right in this vicinity...astonishing.

   But I avoid all those arguments because I also think that the left has to learn to accept arguments other than outflanking arguments from its left. It's got to learn that some arguments from its right are sound--and, even more importantly--that some entirely non-political criticisms are sound. Sometimes its just saying false things, and needs to stop doing so.

Addendum/quote:

   For everyone’s sake, I believe that surgery – which is irreversible – should only ever be a last resort. We should always begin by working to help the mind fit better with the body before we start altering the body to fit the mind.
   Yet in today’s NHS, professionals are enabling hundreds – possibly thousands – of teenagers to have major surgery to change their gender.
   It is being done, almost unchallenged, in the name of transgender rights. But in 20 years’ time, I believe we will look back on this folly as one of the darkest periods in the history of modern medicine.
   We will question why we failed to challenge their belief that they were born in the ‘wrong’ bodies.
   We will ask why we so readily ignored the clanging alarm bells that many were autistic, or had mental health problems.
   What we are faced with today is extremely worrying. While 17 children are transitioning in one secondary school, be in no doubt – it is almost certainly being repeated in other schools. What is happening is this: we are bringing up a generation of children who have quite complex mental health issues.
   Identifying as trans can feel like a way to explain that suffering. Rather than understanding where it might be coming from – feeling lonely or isolated, being bullied, having an autistic spectrum disorder or struggling with any number of issues from sexuality to abuse to self-harm – we are allowing them to change sex.
   It’s a lazy and damaging solution and one which NHS professionals, teachers, politicians and the law are all too eager to embrace to signal their progressive views.
   In 2015, I published a prize- winning but controversial paper examining whether therapy could replace some patients’ perceived need for surgery.
   Personally, I believe that as a society we should celebrate gender variance. Some of my patients have been able to live creatively with the mismatch between their mind and body. Where that isn’t possible – and where a patient is obviously suffering – we should always do something about it.
   Yet the debate on this issue has been silenced by transgender activists who label as ‘transphobic’ anyone who dares to challenge their dogma.
   This blind adherence to ideology has real, dangerous consequences.
   In my field, for example, many psychotherapists are now afraid to properly question a patient who identifies as trans: afraid to explore their past, ask questions of their sexuality, or look into their mental health. They won’t go there, for fear of being struck off.
   One major problem in today’s blinkered reality is that, if you don’t ‘affirm’ a patient’s claim to be transgender, you can run the risk of being accused of practising ‘conversion therapy’. [Emphasis mine]

Also: emphasis true.