AP: Far More Teens Now Identify as Transgender

According to a new report from the Associated Press, “far more U.S. teens” are now identifying themselves as either transgender or using some other made-up “nontraditional” gender classification to make themselves stand out from the crowd.

The study, conducted by Nic Rider, a postdoctoral fellow from the University of Minnesota, looked at 81,000 teens in the state in 9^th and 11^th grade. It found that nearly 3 percent are either “transgender or gender nonconforming, meaning they don’t always self-identify as the sex they were assigned at birth.”

Rider said, “Diverse gender identities are more prevalent than people would expect.”

Assuming Rider’s Minnesota findings can be extrapolated to the rest of the country, that is an understatement. The best available estimates of a transgender population are currently derived from a 2017 UCLA study which found that only 0.7% of teens are transgender – approximately 150,000 adolescents across the country. It also found that 0.6% of U.S. adults identified as transgender – a total population of about 1.4 million. If Rider’s stats are more accurate, it would mean there has either been an intense explosion in the transgender population, the earlier study was wrong, or Rider’s questions were too inclusive and open-ended to nail down the facts.

Rider said that growing awareness of transgender issues in the media might have led teens to feel more comfortable expressing their identities.

“With growing trans visibility in the United States, some youth might find it safer to come out and talk about gender exploration,” he said.

Well, that’s one theory. The other possibility – which people in the adoring gay media will not care to address – is that all of this transgender madness is causing teens to indulge in a bizarre identity fantasy that they did not previously know was available to them. Teens often go through their high school years feeling strangely isolated and confused, and they will latch onto anything that gives them a renewed sense of “who they are.” This is particularly true if they don’t have a strong support system at home. Transgenderism is the hot new thing; maybe you don’t just like wearing jeans and baseball caps…maybe you’re actually a boy trapped in a girl’s body! Hey, everyone in the media says it’s a thing, so why not?

But here’s our favorite part of the story:

Dr. Daniel Shumer, a specialist in transgender medicine at the University of Michigan, wrote in an accompanying opinion article in Pediatrics that the study supports other research suggesting that earlier counts of the trans population “have been underestimated by orders of magnitude.” He said that the higher numbers should serve as a lesson to schools and physicians to abandon limited views of gender.

“Youth are rejecting this binary thinking and are asking adults to keep up,” he wrote.

Sorry, but the biological fact that there is a male half of the species and a female half of the species is not “binary thinking,” it’s binary truth. Not to pretend that there aren’t genuine instances of intersex birth, but they are extraordinarily rare and have little if anything to do with the transgender trend. Today’s top pediatricians are so paralyzed by political correctness that they are just going right along with this nonsense despite hard evidence that shows that transgender teens and adults suffer tremendously for their delusion.

Mental health, nor hard science, should be politicized. Unfortunately, the left has made it so that both are. It will not lead to anything good.