Teens think that cross-sex hormones are a harmless way to express themselves.
My son is not suffering from gender dysphoria or body distress. Yet, he has an idea stuck in his mind… that he wants to be a woman. His reasoning? He just does, and he doesn’t want to squeeze into a stereotypical gender box.
Oh, and also, he feels more female than male because he likes rom-coms and lesbian porn. Pretty logical and makes perfect sense, right?
As part of this desire to be a woman, my son looks forward to the experience of taking hormones similar to the way someone wanting to experience acid or mushrooms in my day.
He is not even worried about the harm it will cause his body.
I viewed recreational drugs the same way when I was a teen, which makes me wonder – does assuming another “gender identity” give you bravery like how alcohol and weed did for me?
There have always been teen subcultures. Emo and Goth used to be popular. You could show your sullen teenage rebellion through your clothes, your attitude, and through partaking in recreational drugs like weed. You would just dye your hair black and write some poetry.
It was a way to stand out, to separate yourself from the horde of normal, societally repressed conforming kids. You could be different and special.
Your parents might complain that you’d have trouble finding a job or getting ahead but, in the end it was all pretty harmless. Everyone eventually moved past that phase, and onward to their adult lives.
Today, the primary mode of teen expression and rebellion is Trans. And the recreational drugs aren’t weed and alcohol – they are cross-sex hormones. And they are as easy to obtain as a dime bag was for me. You can just shop online, or go to a college campus clinic or Planned Parenthood.
Take some Testosterone, and be confident and masculine! Take some estrogen and — boom! you have permission to let those societal expectations of manliness waft away, and to be your sensitive self. You can be someone else. You can try these feelings on for size, just like getting high or drunk.
Unlike weed though, today’s recreational drugs are openly marketed to young people under the pretense that they are somehow life-saving for trans youth. Is it lifesaving for my kid who claims Trans because he wants to. Is it lifesaving to amputate healthy sex organs to make yourself look non-binary?
The drug companies and gender clinics are thrilled to continue on this path – there are plenty of profits to be made from mercurial and autistic, nerdy teens who get to buy their drugs with a stamp of approval from society.
Coming out socially as trans is the gateway drug to this fad — what comes next makes you a medical patient for life.
As a result, today’s kids have fully bought into this idea of changing their body to match their identity instead of accepting themselves. They believe they can literally become the opposite sex by taking hormones.
And, despite diagnoses of autism, or ADHD, despite vast numbers of people raising concerns about young people’s ability to have informed consent for life altering “treatments”, doctors will affirm and give drugs to kids like mine, even absent any history of any childhood gender confusion.
These unnecessary drugs and procedures are recreational — representations of rebellion and/or desperate attempts for lonely, socially awkward teens to stand out from the crowd.
For my socially awkward son, transgender got him into a social circle he wouldn’t have been invited to otherwise. He was love-bombed and finally had the attention he was seeking. He even got a girlfriend and considered himself to be in a lesbian relationship.
I find this to be nothing but bullying vulnerable kids and lying about a promise of a better life. Plus adding in drugs that are known to harm the brain, heart, bones, immune system, sexual function and well, of course, fertility.
Kids will experiment. It’s up to adults and society to create boundaries and safe-guarding precautions to protect kids as they pass through the various development stages of their mind and body.
The recreational drugs of the past were infinitely less harmful than the cross-sex hormones of today, yet we had rules in place to protect our teens from them.
Today we encourage and even celebrate our vulnerable teens dabbling in life-altering substances.
How did we get here, and what are we going to do to stop this?
Originally published at https://pitt.substack.com/p/cross-sex-hormones-todays-recreational reproduced by kind permission.
