There is no corrections process for opinion pieces in the New York Times. Their official corrections page directs readers to the letters section in the event that information in an opinion column is false. This lack of accountability for opinion writers who spread misinformation has led to controversy before, as when the NYT published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton that repeated false claims about rioting in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. Cotton used this misinformation to argue for military violence to quell protests. Misinformation has also frequently featured in the opinion columns of Bret Stephens, who has misled readers about the science behind climate change and whether masking reduced transmission of COVID 19. Stephens most egregious falsehoods have occasionally led to small corrections, such as the time the NYT removed a link to a eugenicist in a column arguing that Jewish people are smarter than other ethnic and racial groups. However, most of the time Stephens is allowed to lie and mislead readers under the banner of ideological diversity in opinion writing at the NYT.
Today, the NYT Opinion section continues its practice of allowing its opinion writers to present false and misleading claims as true with an over 4500-word opinion essay by staff writer Pamela Paul, endorsing the discredited, pseudoscientific theory of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” to argue against gender-affirming care for youth. Again, this is not a news story, it’s a longform presentation of a writer’s opinions on transgender people, who she believes are largely illegitimate and should be discouraged from transitioning rather than affirmed.
Will readers understand Paul’s work is not bound by the same requirements to limit herself to accurate, balanced, factual information that the news reporters at the NYT must uphold? Probably not.
Paul’s column includes many of the trappings of a real news story, which is likely to lead readers to a false confidence that what she says is true and that the links she represents as sources for her information are legit. However, reading the column with a journalistic eye it’s clear that Paul repeatedly presents her opinions as facts and includes links that fail to back her claims. This would never fly in the news section of the paper, but in opinion this sort of sleezy misleading behavior is allowed.
For example, in more than one place Paul claims that “transgender activists” have had a negative impact on the debate over trans issues, but without providing any information about which activists she means or what, exactly they’re supposed to have done. “Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria,” Paul writes in one entirely unsourced claim. “Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism,” goes another. These are just Paul’s opinions about what “transgender activists” are like and what they do, but they’re not clearly presented as opinion, placed as they are in the middle of paragraphs dense with links suggesting a legitimate, well-researched piece.
And, oh, those links. Whoo. Boy.
While it can be difficult to ascribe intent to the sort of shoddy, ideologically inflected opinion writing Paul trades in, there are multiple places in the column where we can state unequivocally that her intent in this piece is to mislead. Again and again, Paul uses hyperlinks to suggest her opinions are backed up by real evidence, and again and again if you actually follow the link it either fails to support or actively undermines Paul’s claim.
This false-link problem is found throughout the story, but we’ll highlight just a few examples of now.
In the screenshot below, Paul is discussing “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” the theory that a new form of gender-dysphoria arose in recent years, leading people to transition who didn’t need to and would be harmed by doing so. Legitimate research has been undertaken to explore whether this ROGD phenomenon actually exists, but every single attempt to find evidence for it in data about transgender people or trans youth has failed. The only studies that claim to have found evidence for it have been online surveys of parental attitudes from anti-trans websites, with all other studies showing no evidence that this phenomenon exists.
Here’s how Paul summarizes this field:
This paragraph claims many researchers are have provided evidence that ROGD exists, although professional associations say there’s a lack of quality research. It is filled with links, suggesting Paul’s sources support this view.
The first link, on “some controversy” goes to a retracted paper by researcher Michael Bailey. The authors failed to secure informed consent from survey participants as the journal’s ethics policy required.
The second link, on “tween and teenage girls” goes to a Reuters story about the tiny number of trans boys have accessed top surgery (under 300 per year in the US), which mentions an increase in referrals to gender clinics for transgender boys.
The third link, on “professional associations” goes to a statement by the Coalition for the Advancement and Application of Psychological Science which says, in part, “There are no sound empirical studies of ROGD and it has not been subjected to rigorous peer-review processes that are standard for clinical science.”
The fourth, fifth, and sixth links are on “several” “researchers” and “have documented.” Link 4 goes to the website of Lisa Littman, one of two fringe researchers pushing the theory of ROGD. Link 5 goes to the same retracted paper from the first link, in its eventual home at a journal with a less stringent ethical policy. Link 6 goes to a study of 100 detransitioners by… Lisa Littman.
None of the links support Paul’s claims in the way a reader would expect a linked citation to do, except the link on “professional associations” which undermines her entire thrust. Some of the links intentionally mislead the audience, presenting two researchers as “several” and reusing the same retracted paper in two spots.
The whole column is like this. Factual claims are supported by links to activist organizations that agree with Paul. Few include anything resembling evidence that her claims are true.
The dodgy links aren’t all. Paul also repeatedly quotes anti-trans activists as if they were reputable, impartial sources. For example, at one point she focuses on Stephanie Winn, a therapist who works with parents who hope to stop their children from being trans. Winn once winkingly encouraged parents to stick their children with needles, among other humiliating “thought experiments,” all of which had the sole goal of coercing the child to stop identifying as trans. Paul presents Winn’s story in a flattering, and deeply misleading, way.
Describing anti-trans activists as merely concerned question-askers and trans people as activists has become par for the course among propagandists pushing anti-trans views, but Paul is particularly egregious in her repeated promotion of some of the most toxic activists, including one (a transgender man) who trades in antisemitic conspiracy theories for Genspect.
These are just a smattering of the bad-faith tactics Paul employs to try and give her opinions more legitimacy than they deserve. In a 4500+ word story, as you might imagine, it’s impossible to go over every instance, but I encourage readers who want to investigate this for themselves to follow the links in any of Paul’s paragraphs and decide for themselves whether Paul’s claims are adequately backed up by the citations Paul includes.
Other trans writers will also pull out different threads. We’ll link to some of them below as they come out:
-
Erin Reed: Debunked: Misleading NYT Anti-Trans Article By Pamela Paul Relies On Pseudoscience
-
Jules Gill-Peterson: Detransition is a Mythology
Opinion writing, when backed by rigorous sourcing, can be a powerful and persuasive mode of public discourse. Many opinion writers, for the NYT and elsewhere, maintain the highest standards in the evidence and sourcing they present while making a persuasive case. However, what Paul is doing here undermines and brings into question the entire form. If opinion writers aren’t held to the same standards of evidence and citation as other writers, it devalues the entire field. Even more concerningly, if readers are unaware that NYT Opinion isn’t being held to the same basic ethical standards as other reporters of including legitimate sourcing for their claims it allows unscrupulous actors to misinform the public while cloaked in the legitimacy of the NYT.
I’d say you wrote this rebuttal a bit too soon. Perhaps take a few more days and dive into more of the details of the Paul piece. For instance, the detransitioners quoted and photographed in the essay. Are they fraudulent? Freaks whose numbers are so microscopic they oughtn’t be publicized? How should they be addressed, if at all?
I’ve written extensively about detransitioners in the past, which was the main reason I didn’t focus on them here.
Generally speaking, we don’t normally remove access to a medical treatment because it’s not 100 percent effective, and the idea that we would in this case is bizarre. There’s nothing fraudulent or invalid about people who detransition, but there’s also no reason their experiences should impact other people’s necessary treatments any more than surgical complications for a small number of patients result in removing access to a needed surgery, or a small number of people allergic to a drug results in no one being able to get that drug.
Drug allergies can be life threatening, and that’s far more serious than the harm detransitioners are claiming, so it’s honestly mystifying why anyone thinks their experiences should result in the removal of care. If there were numbers showing an unusually low success rate it would be another story, but all the data goes the other way, showing gender-affirming treatments are remarkably successful and patients are very satisfied with them, more so than many other treatments, in fact.
The detransition argument is less about whether gender affirming care can be effective, it’s whether we can properly assess patients. When there are no empirical measure of gender dysphoria there should be the utmost care put into diagnosis, eliminating differential diagnoses and other causes of dysphoria.
And, if there’s evidence of widespread misdiagnosis or transition regret, I will update my understanding and my perspective. The evidence we currently have is that misdiagnosis and regret is less common than comparable procedures.
All failed surgeries should be considered, no matter the surgery. Spinal fusions are a cash cow for the medical industry, performed unnecessarily all the time to line the surgeons’ pockets. So look at what is going wrong there, and here, with sex change surgery.
THIS
Is there any reason to believe that the utmost care is not being put into diagnosis? There are certainly claims to that effect, but those claims are often coming from people who characterise gender affirming care as immediately giving hormones to children within five minutes of meeting them.
The gender affirming model has arisen as an effective alternative to previous models such as conversion therapy and watchful waiting. Contrary to what the opinion piece, and many other sources claim, it’s not about immediately concluding the patient is trans – it’s about giving the patient the freedom to explore their gender in a nonjudgmental way without prejudice or preference for an end result.
We should certainly listen to detransitioners, and one possibility we should be considering, is that improving the understanding and application of the gender affirming model might reduce the number of people who end up detransitioning.
There is extensive data on detransitioners. They represent a small percentage of those who receive gender-affirming care.
"Look! Some people detransition! We have to stop gender-affirming care!" is literally equivalent to "the small number of cis people who transition when they shouldn’t have matter more than the much larger number of trans people who transitioned because they needed it."
It’s not so much stop gender affirming care as stop treating detransitioners like pariahs. Treat them with respect and consider what went wrong so that gender affirming care can be approved. And yes, the far left does treat them like pariahs.
The detransitioners "treated like pariahs" are specifically those who chose to use their stories as "evidence" for bans on gender related medical care. It is a repeat of the story of "ex-gays", who were also "treated like pariahs" – not for a fluid change in sexual orientation (nobody made Jan Clausen a pariah for all I know) but for agitation against gay rights.
Just as there are ex-ex-gays, there are also ex-detransitioners telling how they were pulled into that particular group. A prominent figure among them is Ky Schevers. https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/02/detransition-movement-star-ex-gay-explained.html
I’m quite sure you would have no qualms with a pro transgender opinion column regardless of how well the facts were vetted.
This is the very definition of prejudice. You have pre-judged me, based on my identity as a transgender person.
Journalism matters to me. Truth matters to me. How dare you suggest that my identity is more salient than my professionalism?
100%
Thanks for an excellent corrective to Pamela Paul’s misleading column. I’m also distressed by the number of positive comments reacting to her piece on the NYT site.
A brilliant corrective to Ms. Paul’s characteristically shoddy work. She is equally un reliable on many other subjects. “Don’t say queer! “ was another horrendous column. The strength of her convictions is only matched by the purity of her ignorance.
Thanks for this! One of the things we found annoying (in addition to all these) was the story of the Christian kid who transitioned because she didn’t want to be gay. Rather than blaming the homophobia of the church or of the conservative parents, we somehow blame people who tried to help the kid.
Another problem with this article is that it cites a BitChute video as a source.
BitChute is the Wild West of video platforms. Unlike YouTube it’s absolutely unregulated and the vast majority of its most active users are conspiracy theorists/antisemites/racists/bigots. Many of the comments on videos I’ve seen contain the N-word and other bigoted slurs.
Thank you for this clear-headed piece. I expressed my dismay about Paul’s opinion piece (posing as journalism) in the NYT comment section and questioned her motives in, again, taking on–with a highly critical eye–an LGBT-related topic about which she clearly knows little. Your calm and informed rebuttal is most welcome. I wish the NYT would provide a forum for such rebuttals. I was commenting as a layperson, but–unlike Ms. Paul–you know of what you speak. Again, thanks.
I found the NYT piece compelling overall. The way you have nitpicked links here seems to me to miss the larger points being made. Edwards-Leeper is saying, after years of professional work in this field, she is seeing a difference in the patients being referred, more mental health issues unrelated to gender, less time feeling they were assigned the wrong gender. I believe her. Paul writes, some call this ROGD. I don’t care what you call it, or who is calling it what, I believe Edwards-Leeper and her observations.
When professionals who have been doing this work, and advocating for gender affirming care for decades, are saying, "We need to slow down, there needs to be more psychological exploration before hormone therapy," I believe them.
You can find many health centers now advertising hormone treatment for age 18+ on clinic visit 1, 2, or 3, with no psychological assessment first. Anyone who has lived long enough and has a shred of common sense knows that there will be 18 year olds who will change their mind (and maybe regret) this treatment.
And when we talk about numbers of regrets and detransitioners, I think we are in a basically "data free zone." Given the huge uptick in patients, we have no idea what percentage will regret and/or want to detransition. We just don’t know yet.
And what role does misogyny and homophobia play in all this? Some role at least. We live in an incredibly gendered and sexist society.
And, of course, the reason it matters to get this right for any one young person is because we are talking about medical interventions on their bodies, which can be permanent. "Do no harm." Medical practice is not the same as a person making a decision for themselves about which they later change their mind.
This decision requires someone else’s skills, knowledge, and license.
I think we cannot be afraid to look at these issues. We cannot hide from real concerns by labeling them "right wing" or "transphobic."
I agree that we cannot be afraid to look at these issues. I have never and would never dismiss legitimate concerns by labeling them anything.
However, I think the role misogyny is playing is one of jumping to the conclusion that female-assigned people cannot be allowed to make decisions for themselves and need patriarchy and its supporters, such as yourself, to step in and protect them, without any evidence that regret or detransition have increased or that the efficacy of gender-affirming treatments are lower than other treatments.
All the evidence we have goes in the opposite direction, but people are jumping to the misogynistic conclusion that female assigned people (trans men and transmascs, of which I am proudly counted) cannot make adult decisions or weigh what’s best for us. That is a dangerous and wrongheaded direction to go in without evidence. When there’s evidence? Come back and I will gladly follow it. Until that point you are demonstrating the misogynist attitudes that underpins this panic over adults making choices for their own bodies and lives that you doubt could be right for them because, on some level, you think their birth sex makes them less capable of self-determination and in need of saving.
Re: responses to misogyny and the evidence. I don’t know as there is any. That is exactly what I am saying. I think there are questions to consider. We know people cope with misogyny in all kinds of ways. For example, people who eat and make themselves obese to deal with having been a victim of sexual abuse. "Layers of fat to protect them." Or the opposite, starve to disappear, make themselves "unattractive." These are well known psychological phenomena that took years to understand but are known to affect hundreds of thousands of girls and women. How might society’s stringent enforcement of gender roles, misogyny, and sexism affect young people’s perceptions of their own gender identities?
So, I think we just have really different approaches to these things. While there’s an association between both obesity and anorexia and childhood sexual abuse, what your describing is a psychodynamic story that’s been put on those experiences.
We don’t "know" that women intentionally overeat or undereat to be less attractive- it’s much more likely that stress commonly causes over or undereating. What your describing is more of a rationalization after the fact.
I view the world through a much more scientific lens. I believe things that there’s evidence for, and remain skeptical of things there isn’t evidence for. I don’t really go in for these sorts of pop psych analyses that aren’t clearly backed by evidence, which seem to form a lot of the basis of your approach to understanding all these things.
I am a physician who has treated many women who have directly told me this is why they are obese or starved themselves. Please do not tell me what I am describing. Also, this is written about by professionals who specialize in treating eating disorders and obesity. I’m not going to argue this point further.
I am a scientific person, and that is what I am asking for. More thought, more science, more questions, more studies.
Yeah, exactly. You’re going on patient anecdotes and vibes rather than following any sort of medical data to guide your understanding, which you’re welcome to do but I’m just a bit more analytically minded than that.
The nice thing about the Internet is anyone can claim to be anything while hiding behind three letters.
"When professionals who have been doing this work, and advocating for gender affirming care for decades, are saying, "We need to slow down, there needs to be more psychological exploration before hormone therapy," I believe them."
How many professionals are actually saying this?
The decision to transition is, and always has been, made between a child, their parents, and their mental and physical health care professionals. It is not made lightly or haphazardly. Why shouldn’t we trust THOSE health care professionals to do their job responsibly? Are they not the best qualified?
Look into Tavistock and similar re-evaluations of gender affirming care in Sweden and Finland. There has been much written about this; also I remember NPR doing a story including Tavistock. There are people who have been doing this work a long time. And, no, not all medical professionals are "best" qualified.
I’ve covered Tavistock: https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/in-england-reduced-access-to-gender-affirming-care-led-to-tragedy?rq=tavistock
And I’ve even covered the specific NPR segment: https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/in-england-reduced-access-to-gender-affirming-care-led-to-tragedy?rq=tavistock
That NPR segment also featured Jamie Reed, who I’ve done multiple deep dives into. Here’s the most in depth, where I went through every claim she made and evaluated whether it had been substantiated or disproved by a mainstream news outlet: https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/jamie-reeds-allegations-are-not-even-partially-confirmed?rq=jamie%20reed
I understand that my personal credibility isn’t nearly as high as NPR’s and I don’t expect you to simply take my word for it. But even very good outlets occasionally make mistakes or feature unreliable people. If you read my stories, you don’t have to take my word for it, all the evidence I’m using is right there for anyone to follow my reasoning, and draw their own conclusions.
In any field there is a wide range of quality, including therapists and doctors. Some are good, some not. Some are serving gender confused children well. Some are not. It’s not one size fits all.
Pamela Paul’s column and the influence it has under the banner of the New York Times has the potential to do great damage to the transgender and non-binary communities. As you describe here, it is purposely misleading and ignores rigorous research on the subject. Tellingly, does not include any discussion or contact with the 98 percent, plus or minus, of transgender people for whom gender-affirming care has been beneficial, even life-saving. Paul’s niche seems to that of a make-up artist for the alt-right; few will listen to Ben Shapiro or other far-right culture warriors as he burns Barbies or Tucker Carlson hurling insults at the transgender community. Paul dresses up their rants in the emperor’s clothes of shoddy references, the appearence of expertise, and "just asking questions" moderation under the banner of The New York Times.
As an exercise in demonstrating how bias this piece is, and how it uses the same approach used reliably by the Right to villianize other minorities, try replacing "transgender" with "gay" on occasion — it would read like a diatrible for conversion therapy. It is maddening that this dabbler in social commentary can dismiss the experience, professionalism and dedication of thousands of physicans, therapists, social workers and their professional organizations and give credence to the few on the fringes who support her pre-drawn conclusions.
If I sound angry, it is because I am. In a sicking convergence of events, this opinion piece came out just as the details of the murder of Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old British transgender girl also made the headlines. No doubt other acts of violence and hatred will follow with the aid of fellow travelers like Paul who will gladly deal in such sensational journalism to get clicks and headlines.
To decline to post my last response exactly proves my point – you are afraid to really dig into the issues raised by Paul. Yours is a position of weakness.
As I have told other obsessive weirdos in the past who thought their comment was being censored because it didn’t post immediately: I do not monitor the comments for this website 24/7, sometimes I’m away from my laptop, or asleep. I just approved a bunch of new comments that came in over night, yours among them.
Thanks for this! The NY Times has had such problematic coverage on trans people, and this article was just another on the pile. I cancelled my NYTimes membership over it, as they have demonstrated no desire to change and instead hide behind the opinion columns for shoddy non-journalistic standard reporting. IF they wanted to cover these questions responsibly, it would not have been written by Pamela Paul and would be nuanced reporting of many sides of the issues. Any depth of journalistic standards they have in their news is getting lost through the opinion columns they host disguised as "news".
Ross Douthat is also sometimes guilty of stating opinions as if they were fact. And I once caught a factual error in regard to wind turbines in an Ezra Klein piece. The latter was probably an honest error due to a rather confusingly written primary source. The error was one which would mislead readers into thinking that wind power would take up far more land area than it takes up. I pointed out the error to various editors at the Times but no correction was issued. (When I saw the same error in the magazine Science News I wrote the magazine and they thanked me and quickly ran a correction.)
I don’t know what the official NY Times’ position is on factual errors on the opinion page, but if the NY Times is not going to fact-check the opinion page then they should run a very prominent disclaimer to that effect at the top of the opinion section. And they should have a public editor!
Just looking at the bit on the ROGD hyperlinks:
This is angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff, Evan. I imagine that if I checked out your other claims here they’d have similar results, but I haven’t done so.
A paper being retracted is not evidence that it was controversial, and it’s weird you think it is. It was retracted for failing to obtain informed consent from the participants.
There is no evidence of rapid onset and social contagion provided in the Reuters story, which is not about ROGD. There is evidence of an increase in referrals to gender clinics by female-assigned youth, which is the phenomenon ROGD has (unsuccessfully) sought to explain. If I say the moon is white because it’s made of chalk and you ask me to prove it and I link to a Reuter’s story that says the moon is white, have I proved it’s make of chalk?
Unlike Paul, I try to be really fair and honest in my work. So here I accurately described all her links in one representative paragraph, which included 5 that were misleading and 1 that was unobjectionable. The ratio stands for itself.
Suzanna Diaz is not a researcher, she’s the pseudonymous parent of an "ROGD kid" who was included as an author on a paper about such parents. This isn’t a knock on her or a gotcha, she’s just not a researcher and no one has ever claimed she is.
I noticed the very same issues with the article when I read it. It takes the form of an investigative deep dive, with original reporting and interviews. But its placement in the opinion section belies that. Is an opinion being expressed here, or is it purporting to report facts?
At the risk of being called a TERF or a transphobe, here’s my take on Pamela Paul’s article:
Most of what she said falls into the category of "there’s a huge rise in teens wanting to change genders and we should be cautious about encouraging them to undertake procedures/take hormones" This doesn’t seem all that controversial. What’s debatable is whether there is in fact a trend towards encouraging kids who only recently expressed the desire to change genders, and with very little evaluation, or whether that’s uncommon. I’ve read things saying both.
The fact that virtually all of the comments were supportive of the article shows there’s a sizable number of people who are not right wing zealots who feel alarmed at the treatment protocol (again, if it exists) that says any teen who expresses a desire to change genders should be believed and should be allowed to receive whatever intervention they request.
As a parent of a young adult (yes, that means I’m a GenXer and out of touch by definition), I have to wonder how my daughter would have fared if she were 10 years younger. Up until about age 7, she was into stereotypical girly things – Disney princesses, insisted on wearing dresses every day, did ballet, etc. – and then through 6th grade was the opposite – sports-obsessed, refused to wear a dress, best friend was a boy, liked to wear a tie, didn’t fit in with the girls. We let her dress how she wanted and let her pursue her interests, but no one suggested she was trans or nonbinary, because it wasn’t common, even in our very liberal community. As she got older, she gradually settled into being less of a tomboy, sometimes dressing quite girly, other times not. She’s still into sports and has good friends of both genders and considers herself bisexual. I may be wrong, but in the current climate, my guess is that in elementary school she might have concluded she was trans or nonbinary, might have wanted to change her name, and depending on how her community treated/encouraged her, she might have continued to identify as trans and might have wanted to explore hormone treatment as a teen. Or maybe she wouldn’t have. The point is, I have seen my kid become very, very passionate about a particular thing or aspect of her identity, and she would have sworn up and down at the time that whatever it was was permanent, only to change her mind 6, 12 or 18 months later. This, I think is the real fear parents have. We want what’s best for our kids and want them to be happy, but making permanent alterations to one’s body and possibly impairing future fertility are huge steps that we don’t want to happen unless they are what the kid really wants on a long-term basis, not just because lots of other kids are putting that label on themselves, but because they truly believe they’re in the wrong body. And I’ve certainly heard -again, I can’t say definitively that it’s true – that some providers tell parents who question their kid that if they don’t fully support whatever level of transitioning the kid requests, the kid will attempt suicide. None of this, to my mind, is transphobia. If suddenly there was a huge DOWNWARD trend in teens identifying as trans, wouldn’t the transgender community question whether it was a social phenomenon and not that suddenly everyone was happy with their assigned gender? Finally, as someone who was a kid during the 1970s, when Marlo Thomas’ "Free to Be You and Me"/ limitless ways to be a "boy" or a "girl," was the trend, it’s hard not to think that the rise in young people rejecting their genders is a step backward to the 1950s.
Classic form of concern trolling. Your daughter would not have been made trans if she is not trans. That’s not how this works. Please, for the love of god, consider that you’re like the millionth person to suggest "I/my son/my daughter shudder might have turned out trans!" if they were growing up today. That’s not consistent with what we know to be true about trans children. Please stop pushing the unsubstantiated canard that people are trans because of social contagion. You’re way out of your depth.
Yeah, and if I’m the millionth person to suggest that, maybe, just maybe there’s some validity to that concern? It comes from the very real fact that there’s been a documented rise in the number of teens identifying as trans and seeking treatment. As I said before, if there were a sudden exponential decrease in the number of people identifying as trans, wouldn’t that suggest something going on socially, that was influencing that? It’s exactly this kind of dismissive tone that turns people off who want to be supportive and understand the issue fully. Every wonder why there’s a perception that trans activists are intolerant and condescending? Reread your post.
It doesn’t suggest that there is a social pressure causing the rise. This is a very clear case of correlation that does not necessarily mean causation. Increased social acceptance can indicate, for example, more willingness to speak openly whereas people (including children) felt shame before. The disproportionate amount of concern ("the millionth person") does not equate that there is something to be concerned about. In fact, this is a much clearer indication of social "norms" as internalized pressures than the pressure on kids to be trans cited here. To say that a large outpouring of concern lends validity to said concern is a really faulty logic based in confirmation bias. Respectfully, it might be better to sit with the answers to some questions: what would have been different about your daughter had she identified as nonbinary? Why is it concerning to think about? It sounds to me that you provided affirmation for your daughters’ gender expression regardless of what it was, which consequently is largely the extent of gender affirming care, so what may have been different for your daughter if she had been met with pressure to present as only feminine?
That Stephanie Winn post is incredible (derogatory), and far beyond the accupuncture recommendation. She explicitly wants to juice parents’ "creativity" in how they intimidate and abuse their child, and repeats this fact over and over. Winn shouldn’t be allowed near a child, let alone licensed to counsel families. Incredibly damning for Pamela Paul to have whitewashed an advocate for child abuse like this in her crusade against trans kids.