Gender Dysphoria diagnosis amongst children in England rises 50 fold in 10 years

[Justme56]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/24/children-who-think-they-are-wrong-gender-surges-50-fold/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/24/children-england-gender-dysphoria-diagnosis-rise

Less obfuscatory from the Guardian than I.expected, but still a certain amount of downplaying.

Almost 1.in 200 17 and 18 year old is mad.

Social contagion and social Media

I'd be interested to know what happened to number of referrals after 2021. Presumably they have the data.

How have they managed to ignore that it has been schools that pushed this?

It can't all be laid at the feet of social media. Must just be a massive coincidence that this huge rise in numbers coincided with ‘gender identity’ being presented as fact under the influence of groups like Gendered Intelligence, Stonewall, Mermaids et al. They all influenced the DfE and were allowed free rein in our schools.

Also covered in the Times

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/number-of-children-with-gender-dysphoria-rises-50-fold-in-a-decade-8q79bfwfj

Yes indeed: it wouldn't matter what infectious nonsense was on social media, if the state, and its organs, had not enthusiastically endorsed and enforced the nonsense. Those poor children.

Important thread from CFW:

"When she was Minister for Women & Equalities KemiBadenoch led a team pushing back on this harmful pseudoscience. Finally new draft RSHE guidance was produced that stopped the teaching of gender identity as fact in schools.

This draft RSHE guidance is sitting in limbo being considered by the Labour Government. Meanwhile a "Child Wellbeing and Schools Bill" is going through parliament. If the government is serious about child wellbeing - it should use the bill to action the draft Guidance."

https://x.com/CforWomenUK/status/1882716905603260688

Yep

I seem to recall Kemi Badenoch (when a minister) being called to account in this group for claiming that there was a social epidemic. I think 50X increase justifies this term.

Wonder whether she decided not to put Tories into this committee to show what the madness actually looks like and force Labour to do something. You can't blame the Tories for culture war rhetoric if there are none there ... I imagine she has better uses for MP's time and knows this group had intractable ideologues.

This has all been going on for so long now that I wonder how many "trans" children have been created (by parents and others). By "created" I mean children who now genuinely have severe gender(/sex) dysphoria who wouldn't have done if they hadn't been lied to at a much younger age.

By way of example - I have mentioned this before on here - I know a child who aged 6 expressed an interest in being the opposite sex, and was immediately (with much fanfare and attention) socially transitioned by their mother (even though said child would still refer to themselves as their true sex for many months). Now child is much older, they have grown up believing they are the opposite sex. It's now part of their identity, has been woven through their learning and development. You can bet they have extreme dysphoria now! (If I'd grown up believing I was male I'd have been extremely distressed on reaching puberty and finding out it wasn't true!)

We think of the direct social media influence on teens/younger, but a certain amount of parents will have been influenced by social media some years ago and projected it on to their (at the time) small children.

It's one of the most frustrating and distressing aspects of the whole thing. That by saying something is true, acting as if it were true, it affects the experience and understanding of the next generation such that it actually becomes (at least a little bit) true. A small child being told, essentially, "Ah, you're one of those born-in-the-wrong-body people" believes it, lives it. Then we end up with a load of kids with extreme dysphoria - who wouldn't have if they'd been told the truth at a much younger age - which bumps up the numbers and further legitimises it as a thing.

(Hope I'm making sense! Thinking of culture-bound syndromes.)

Society has actually created children with dysphoria. There'll be teens and tweens who would have accepted reality if they'd been told the truth when younger, but instead were lied to until it became part of their identity, their deepest understanding of the world and their place in it.

I am so angry at the idiots who did this.

Yes, all good points. It gets bedded in, and misinformation is self perpetuating.

Worryingly, the tendency to ascribe suicidality to 'trans' also risks being exacerbated by repetition. Which echoes what Prof Appleby said about the tropes on puberty blockers and suicide on his report.

There may also be a case for mental health being worsened by increasing focus on it, btw, and that applies across the board, especially for young people.

May be using the wrong terminology, but it is an example a moral panic in the age of social media.

This generation's version of Satanic abuse, Witch trials, mass hysteria etc.

Yes, and the Guardian hand waves it away by trying to say it's just a teeny weeny number really.

Any multiplication of cases like that is highly suspect, and it's not like there were thousands of gender-dysphoric children who just weren't getting diagnosed until recently - we'd have noticed them!

I say this as someone who had 'gender dysphoria' as a child - I know it may not be an actual condition, which is why I put it in inverted commas. I never knew another child with the same thing. I was a complete little oddball, in other words

In retrospect, my childhood would have been a lot happier if I had been 'diagnosed' [see above for disclaimer] but ONLY if diagnosis resulted in being supported as an unhappy little girl, and guided towards being a happier little girl who would grow up to be a strong confident woman.
Not an unhappy little boy who had had the misfortune to be born in a girl's body.

The value of defining something as 'gender dysphoria' and offering 'treatment' depends on whether it starts from the position that the child is correct in believing they are 'in the wrong body', or from the position that no child is born in the wrong body, and the child's problems originate elsewhere.
Like life-limiting gender stereotyping, for instance.

MarieDeGournay I was similar. I was a tomboy, I knew I was a girl, but I preferred all the stuff that boys were supposed to do/wear/be interested in, and only played with boys, and other tomboys. I was disgusted by the stereotyped expectations placed on girls - but at the same time, society did have the "tomboy" option. No one thought tomboys were boys - they were girls who opted out of girly stuff and that was fine. I got some pressure from my mum to wear dresses etc but nothing major.

At one point maybe aged around 11 I realised that I had at some level been expecting to wake up and find I was a boy, and that in fact, facing up to reality, that wasn't going to happen. It was distressing, but not in a way that needed to be fixed with hormones and surgery. Just in a way that meant I had to grow up and accept it because that is what maturity involves. Just like tween/teens may be unhappy about the shape of their nose, or realising they are gay, or their disability, or their height... these things can't all be waved away or "identified" out of, you learn to grow with them and work with what you have.

I grew up as a probably typically awkward teen but eventually found my way to being happy to be a woman. Turned out to be straight, and had boyfriends and eventually DC. But today I would have probably been asked if I wanted to be a boy and said yes, and that would have triggered the whole shitshow and I'd have been a "gender dysphoria" statistic and on a medical pathway.

And how many more women are there out there just like you, @WhatterySquash ?

"Fahsands of 'em!" 😀Filling kids' heads with this nonsense is a disgrace.

Absolutely - because to be an oddball kind of girl and feel restricted by sexist "girl" gender stereotypes and expectations is hardly surprising. Girls have felt that through the millennia - some were able to escape the restrictions in various ways, but it never made them not female.

What happened in the last 10 years? Trans became cool. Social media and social contagion are important in defining and propagating the definition of what's cool. But since those are the main conduits, it could all change in a heartbeat. Plus, it means if the right sort of propaganda was fed into those conduits trans could become uncool too. If there are detransitioners with regrets now, it's going to become a Katy-bar-the-door stampede once the prime motivation of swanning around being cool to the gills is gone.

Its already happened. The uncooling of trans started I'd say two or three years ago, at least.

Leaving it to now the most vulnerable and mixed up to chase what is already a fading trend.

I am in a context where the number of 18-21 year olds with some sort of trans/NB identity is in the region of 1 in 30. Up from nil just three or four years ago.

Yes, that was the wave. If you look to the generation just below, be interesting to see how it's playing out.

I expect there will be a bump in these identities, and that will be the generation who came of age as teens in around 2015-2022. Upper age now, early twenties.

These were children who were told by the authoritative voice of the BBC there were 100 genders, who were shown 'Butterfly ' and Jazz Jennings, who were told by the NHS that blockers are reversible. Who were dazzled by Progress Pride flags, Juno Dawson's pornographic YA fiction, and Mermaids turbocharged with huge donations. When Stonewall was sneering and jeering 'no debate' at feminists.

Those days are well gone.

Most young people will move past the 'gender identity' phase as they get older. The unfortunates who have been sold medical 'transition' may not be able to.

@ArabellaScott
I expect there will be a bump in these identities, and that will be the generation who came of age as teens in around 2015-2022. Upper age now, early twenties.

I think there will be a (hopefully much smaller) bump in the half-generation below, of those who were small children during those years, set on a social transition to medical pathway by their parents during that time. The support that they will require is likely to be different from those who "transed" in their teens.