Headline A transgender psychologist has helped hundreds of teens transition. But rising numbers have her concerned
This is VERY long. You need to read the full thing yourself. But here's part of the beginning
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BERKELEY—
Day after day, emails pour into Erica Anderson’s inbox from parents struggling to support their teenagers coming out as transgender.
“He’s been depressed and anxious since the pandemic began, and over the past few days he has shared with me that he’s pretty sure he’s trans,” said one message about a 17-year-old.
“I am very worried that my child is being pressured into wanting to take [puberty] blockers, ‘because that is the next step,’ ” said another. “We are supportive and have helped them to socially transition, but the medical part somehow for her at 13 does not seem right.”
“How do we decide whether an adolescent in the throes of so much turmoil can make such a medically consequential, irreversible decision?” another said about a 15-year-old’s pleas for testosterone injections.
The parents come to Anderson, 71, in part because she herself is transgender. Anderson also stands out because she is one of the few clinical psychologists specializing in transgender youth to publicly question the sharp rise in adolescents coming out as trans or nonbinary.
She has helped hundreds of teens transition. But she has also come to believe that some children identifying as trans are falling under the influence of their peers and social media and that some clinicians are failing to subject minors to rigorous mental health evaluations before recommending hormones or surgeries.
“I think it’s gone too far,” said Anderson, who until recently led the U.S. professional society at the forefront of transgender care. “For a while, we were all happy that society was becoming more accepting and more families than ever were embracing children that were gender variant. Now it’s got to the point where there are kids presenting at clinics whose parents say, ‘This just doesn’t make sense.’ ”
Her skepticism — and her willingness to speak directly to the public — puts her at the center of America’s culture war over trans kids.
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The first U.S. gender clinic dedicated to youth opened in Massachusetts in 2007. Today there are more than 60.
In 2017, federal health researchers surveyed high school students in 19 school districts and found that 1.8% identified as transgender — 2½ times the best estimate made five years earlier.
Clearly, the decline in social stigma has allowed more teens to come out.
Anderson, though, began to wonder whether that was the full story. About 2016, when she began working with the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at UC San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital, she noticed a growing group of transgender youth: adolescents who had not appeared to question their gender much, or at all, before puberty.
Some drifted from one identity to the other: gender-questioning, trans, nonbinary, gay. And many of their cases were complicated by anxiety, depression, autism, bipolar disorder or other mental health conditions that predated their desire to transition.
“A fair number of kids are getting into it because it’s trendy,” she told the Washington Post in 2018. “I think in our haste to be supportive, we’re missing that element.”
At the same time, she was careful not to overstate her point.
“I can assure you, transgender identity is not something one catches,” she said in an interview the following year after being elected the first transgender president of the U.S. arm of the World Professional Assn. for Transgender Health, or WPATH.
Continues: www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-04-12/a-transgender-psychologist-reckons-with-how-to-support-a-new-generation-of-trans-teens
It's pretty long, but very worth reading