The New Homophobia | Opinion
Twitter, Tumblr and now TikTok. Which is how, suddenly, we have a massive uptick in trans- and "non-binary"-identifying youth.
Queer theorists insist that subverting the categorizations which have been imposed upon young people—for example, the sex they were "assigned" at birth—is the ultimate expression of autonomy, and further, the key to liberating society from a system devised largely, so they claim, by cisgender white men. (Never mind the scientific and cultural achievements of women and racial minorities.)This might not be a concern if, by adopting these new identities, young people were merely playing with the boundaries of normative gender expression—something that gays, lesbians, feminists, most liberals and even many conservatives would welcome two decades into the 21st century.
But many young boys do not stop at simply painting their fingernails and wearing dresses, and young girls do more than cut their hair short and play football.
With increasing frequency, these children are given drugs to block their puberty, cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgeries, all the while cheered on first by online communities, then the mainstream media and now the current presidential administration.In rare instances, medicalization is the proper path for gender-nonconforming youth, in particular those whose gender dysphoria—a "marked incongruence between one's experienced/expressed gender and their assigned gender, lasting at least 6 months," as the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5 defines it—originated very early in life, causes acute mental distress and shows no signs of ceasing without medical intervention.
