A Fad? Mass Hysteria? What Explains the Growing Number of Trans People in the US?

Who Are Trans People?

Why are so many proclaiming they are “trans people” especially in the US? In May, NBC reported that nearly one in ten teenagers consider themselves “gender-diverse” – a term that is now defined as “people whose gender identities or gender expressions differ from the sexes they were assigned at birth.”

It is not only the language that has been commandeered by the transgender agenda. The news media, the entertainment and educational sectors, government, corporations, the sports world and even the military have accepted the rules and sometimes laws about treatment of those whose “gender identities differ” from their birth certificates.

To understand this dramatic shift in society, I interviewed three women, in their fifties, about the phenomenon of trans people. They did not want their names used because of the retributory zeal of “cancel culture.”

Attention Seeking

The first woman is the aunt of two nieces who are “transitioning.” She says the popularity of labeling oneself trans is about attention, pure and simple. “When young people announce that they are really a different gender and demand another name and pronoun be used, the whole family will revolve around them. If they had previously been ignored, they are now a star.”

Mass Hysteria

A Northwestern university academic told me she believes the growing number of young people identifying as trans is a demonstration of the phenomenon of “mass hysteria.” Seen during the Salem witch trials, at a Lancashire cotton mill in 1787, in Tanzania in 1962 during the laughter epidemic and as recently as the 2015 Outwood academy in Ripon in the UK, the social anomaly is now called mass psychogenic illness (MPI).

Psychiatric Drugs

A health policy analyst I interviewed believes that psychiatric drugs are an important factor in the growing number of trans identifiers. “The younger generations have been treated with antidepressants, ADHD drugs, mood stabilizers and other psych drugs at a level never seen before and they often started at a young age,” she says. “These drugs, cause personality changes which is especially concerning in people whose identities haven’t even formed yet. It is not surprisingly that young people have serious identity crises from them including gender confusion.”

There are other theories that seek to explain the growing number of trans identifiers that range from simple generational rebellion and negative changes in parenting to the effects of endocrine/hormone disrupters in the environment and in the food supply.

trans people. Cartoon by NewsBlaze.
Trans people. Cartoon by NewsBlaze.

“Because I Say So”

Can anyone think of a social, political or economic institution that relies solely on the subjective testimony of individuals like the trans movement does other than religion?

A faith-guided person is not ridiculed because it is recognized that the beliefs are true for him or her. But, and it is a big but, neither is society rearranged to accord with the subjective convictions as the trans movement now demands.

For a sense of the absurdity of the trans proposition, imagine that someone declares he is a Russian Orthodox saint trapped in a contemporary body. Moreover, he has felt that way since he was five years old. The person is free to wear robes and ancient headgear and refer to himself as Sergius. But should teachers, employers and the government be required to address the “saint” in the Koine Greek language to keep him from feeling “bullied” or a recipient of micro-aggression?

Moreover, would teachers, employers and the government officials who don’t address the person in his preferred language and otherwise “affirm” his saint identity be the reason for his unhappiness – as opposed to his pre-existing mental, emotional and psychological problems? Especially if the “saint” then transitioned back to a secular identity and said he regretted the previous incarnation? Would those who refuse to participate in a social lie and corroborate the fabricated saint identity be called religious “phobes”?

“Victims of Gender Identity?”

During the final Democratic debate in December of 2019, journalist Yamiche Alcindor posed the following question of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“Senator Sanders, at least 22 transgender people were killed in the United States this year, most of them transgender women of color. Each of you has said you would push for the passage of the Equality Act, a comprehensive LGBTQ civil rights bill. But if elected, what more would you do to stop violence against transgender people?”

Sen. Sanders uttered the obligatory homage about discrimination against “the transgender community, against the African-American community, against the Latino community, and against all minorities in this country,” but the fact remains three times as many people die from bee stings in the U.S. Clearly “transgender women of color” is the Left’s poster category for all victimizations rolled into one.

Moreover, in covering “violence against transgender people” mainstream media seldom-to-never mention the role of deliberate gender misrepresentation in dating contexts when it relates to those statistics. Certainly violence should not be condoned but few would react unemotionally if the person they were romantically involved with suddenly revealed that they were not the gender they conveyed?

Trans People Bullied or Bullies

History shows few cases of social and legal deference to a minority as small as those who identify as trans people – which is less than one percent. Yet as employers and institutions adopt trans language and behavior rules, public figures are being cancelled, disenfranchised and shamed for straying from the orthodoxy.

Few will say it out loud: that the formerly bullied trans population has become the bullying party. And its aggression is anything but micro.

pronoun mass hysteria. Image by NewsBlaze.
Pronoun mass hysteria. Image by NewsBlaze.

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