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It’s not by accident as media, government, schools, medicine, and destructive, anti-God ideologies have come together in a perfect storm to manipulate, drive, or fund gender confusion in young people.
It may just seem like an inordinate number of young people are embracing “gender diversity,” as they like to call it, but it’s not an illusion.
A recent study found that there was a 422 percent increase among 18- to 24-year-olds identifying as transgender from 2014 to 2023, which is five times higher than the increase among all adults, leaving researchers to conclude that there is a marked generational gap.
Brooke Wells, Jennifer Le, Jean Twenge, and Nic Rider wrote the paper based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFFS), which only includes adults.
The researchers analyzed data from almost two million Americans and learned that the number of all adults identifying as transgender increased slightly from 5 out of 1,000 (0.53 percent) to 9 out of 1,000 (0.89 percent). Yet among those aged 18 to 24, the rate increased from 0.59 percent to 3.08 percent, a 422 percent increase.
The rate of those identifying as transgender also increased at a similar rate for those ages 25 to 34 going from 0.3 percent, the lowest of all age groups, in 2014 to 1.69 percent in 2023.
The rate of those identifying as transgender for groups older than 34 years decreased overall from 2014 to 2023.
The study shows that in 2014 there was not much difference between the age groups in transgender identification. 35-to 44-year-olds were the most likely to identify as transgender at around 0.7 percent, which was only a 0.4 percent difference from the least likely group.
But there was a sudden and drastic rise in transgender identification among 18- to 24-year-olds from 2014 to 2015 and even more so in 2020. The extreme rise in the number of those aged 25 to 34 identifying as transgender started in 2020.
The researchers said there was another telling way to look at the data, based on birth year.
A strong positive trend began for those born after 1987 and then began accelerating dramatically for those born after 1996. Less than 0.6 percent of those born in 1987-1988 identified as transgender. That had risen to nearly 1.1 percent for those born in 1992-1993 and then rose to 3.8 percent for those born in 2004-2005.
The study also found that whites are the primary drivers of the increase in identifying as transgender. In 2014 less than 0.5 percent of whites ages 18-24 identified as transgender; that proportion rose to almost 4.5 percent in 2023, a 1,024 percent increase. Over the same period, there was a 181 percent increase among Hispanics and a 115 percent increase in blacks who identified as transgender.
The question is, why the generational gap and the exponential increase in young Americans and whites identifying as transgender?
Despite what you may hear, the answer isn’t hard to figure out, but there are numerous reasons behind the rise. Here are just a few:
The primary driver, not surprisingly, is the glut of information that characterizes the digital age. The outsize influence of social media, the Internet, and even traditional media outlets that have embraced LGBTQ ideology have a profound impact on younger generations. In example after example parents say their teenager began believing they were a different gender after spending large amounts of time in their room on the Internet.
Many of these teens started watching online videos that taught them about gender theory and encouraged them to believe they were in the wrong body.
The internet also features numerous LGBT groups that claim to be communities for young people but actually spread propaganda with the intent of separating children from their parents and helping them find a new family in the LGBT movement.
This phenomenon hit its peak during COVID lockdowns in 2020. Locked into their homes or apartments with little to do but get on the Internet and social media, isolated from normal conversations and activities, and fearful and mentally impacted by the constant doomsday scenarios being pushed by the media, young people looked to social media and Internet sources for solutions to their problems. What they were promised was a panacea the Internet was all too willing to provide: All their problems and pains were because they were born in the wrong body and their isolation could end if they joined the LGBT family.
The Biden administration made it a priority to normalize LGBT ideology, but it didn’t start the push. The U.S. began funding LGBT programs long before Joe Biden became president; however, no administration accepted, promoted, or bankrolled the LGBT ideology more than this one.
For example, investigative reporting by the Epoch Times found that over the last three fiscal years, the federal government spent $4.1 billion in taxpayer dollars on LGBT programs.
For years, these funds have gone to efforts within the U.S. and countries around the world. For example there’s the $3.4 million grant the National Institute of Health gave the University of Connecticut to develop “a smartphone-based just-in-time adaptive intervention aimed at improving access to HIV- and substance use-related harm reduction services for Malaysian GBMSM [gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men] engaged in chemsex.”
“Chemsex” is the use of drugs in sexual activity, particularly meth.
The government has given plenty of taxpayer dollars to LGBT initiatives aimed at Americans as well. For example, the Department of Health and Human Services announced earlier this year $5.1 million for LGBTQI+ youth and their families, a massive three-fold increase over the $1.7 million it granted in 2023.
The grants were given through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). SAMHSA published a report that “indicates that lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults are more likely than straight adults to use substances, experience mental health conditions including major depressive episodes, and experience serious thoughts of suicide.”
However, rather than see any link between being lesbian, gay, or bisexual and having mental health issues, SAMSHA and the Biden administration decided that the real issue was inequity in health services and discrimination against LGBT people.
So SAMSHA created resources identifying “affirming” mental health care and discussing how to “deal with harmful approaches such as ‘conversion therapy.’” Such efforts should be no surprise considering the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to ban conversion therapy worldwide.
The administration also gave $240,000 to Seattle Children’s Hospital to create a “fully functional online interactive sex education tool” to be used by “transgender and gender expansive youth.”
The Biden-Harris administration has pushed medical professionals to perform gender transitions on minors and is currently the plaintiff in a case at the Supreme Court that seeks to overturn state bans on sex changes for minors.
The administration has also sought to withhold funds from schools and youth centers that would not implement its favored policies of allowing students to use the bathroom or locker room of their chosen gender and to use their chosen name and pronouns. The administration even altered Title IX to cover gender identity, completely wiping out its intended purpose, which is to provide women and girls private spaces and extracurricular activities. That effort had already been blocked in 26 states when a federal judge not only ruled against the radical new Title IX rule but enjoined it from being enforced anywhere.
Many schools were very willing to comply with the Biden-Harris administration’s policies. Schools are now pushing gender theory on children as young as preschool and even hiding the gender confusion of children and teens from their parents. As a result, conflicts between parents and schools have become widespread as parents seek to stop schools from indoctrinating their children and introducing them to sexually explicit material.
Perhaps no other school has encapsulated this issue more than Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). MCPS, the largest school district in Maryland, released a list of books that teachers would be reading to students. The books include Pride Puppy, which teaches preschool age children words like “intersex” and “drag king.” One book teaches “three- and four-year-olds to search for images from a list of words that includes: ‘intersex flag,’ ‘drag queen,’ ‘underwear,’ ‘leather,’ and the name of a celebrated LGBTQ activist and sex worker.”
Other books talk about gay weddings and changing a person’s gender. Teachers are also told to tell students that doctors and parents guess what a baby’s gender is when they are born and that they can be wrong.
At first the district notified parents about the books and allowed them to opt their children out of the lessons. So many parents requested to opt their children out, however, that MCPS decided it was “undermining MCPS’s educational mission” and told parents they would no longer be informed when the books were being read or be given the choice to opt out.
Parents of a variety of different religions and viewpoints were outraged and protested, demanding the right to opt their children out of the lessons. Some parents filed suit, but at at each level, federal judges have sided with MCPS, ruling that parents have no right to opt their children out of such indoctrinations. The parents have since appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The district’s efforts seem to be having an effect: From 2019-2022, MCPS reported a 582 percent increase in students identifying as gender non-conforming.
As mentioned previously, school districts across the country are overtly lying to parents about students’ gender confusion. In one of many such examples, the Linn-Mar Community School District in Iowa encourages children to transition and puts the children on “gender support plans.” The districts will refer to the children using their preferred name and pronouns at school and allow them to use the bathroom or locker room of their choice, but in all communications with the parents use the child’s sex-specific pronoun and given name to hide the child’s gender confusion.
Against all scientific logic, evidence, and common sense, many doctors and the country’s most prestigious medical associations are aggressively pushing gender ideology on vulnerable patients.
Why? One reason is profit. A Daily Wire report caught doctors from the Pediatric Transgender Clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center calling transgender surgeries “big moneymakers.”
And it’s not just major surgeries that promise a new revenue stream. When a person begins on the path to gender transition, he or she becomes a lifelong patient. That person will need puberty blockers for years, followed by cross-sex hormones for their entire life. Factor in surgeries and treatment for complications and a transgender person is a golden goose for medical professionals.
Perhaps that helps explain why medical professionals are so quick to rush a person to gender transition. The testimony of whistleblowers and detransitioners, as well as court documents, shows that many mental health professionals and medical professionals put children on the path to gender transitions after one short conversation. Whistleblower Jamie Reed, who worked at Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, has said that many children were placed on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones on their first visit.
Another reason why transgenderism has thoroughly infected the medical profession is that many doctors, especially recent graduates, buy wholesale into the ideology and are “true believers.” These doctors are willing to manipulate patients, threaten parents, defy established protocols, and push all manner of ethical boundaries in the cause to medically and surgically alter children to a “different” gender.
It isn’t just transgender identification that has increased exponentially among the younger generations. A Gallup survey found that 22.3 percent of Gen Z identify as LGBTQ+, compared to 9.8 percent of Millennials, 4.5 percent of Gen X, 2.3 percent of Baby Boomers, and 1.1 percent of the Silent Generation.
That rise is driven primarily by women, as 28.5 percent of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ+ while just 10.6 percent of Gen Z men do.
The reasons for this increase are numerous, but they largely come down to two things: the rejection of God’s Word and objective truth, and the adoption of the sexual revolution, radical feminism, and intersectionality.
America’s rejection of God’s Word has already led to societal decay and, without any change, could eventually lead to societal demise.
There is no objective standard of truth or morality outside of God. When America abandoned God’s Word, it abandoned God’s design for sex and marriage. We soon encouraged sexual promiscuity, eliminated the distinctions between men and women, and then embraced homosexuality. That has led us to the rejection of the reality of immutable sex.
LGBTQ+ identification carries with it the right to be near the top of the intersectional pyramid of victimhood. Perhaps no group is considered more oppressed than a transgender person. This gives a young person attention and the feeling of both being oppressed and morally superior. In a culture that is obsessed with self-glorification and victimhood, there is nothing that can court a young person’s desire to feel special more than becoming transgender.
This article couldn’t begin to provide enough discussion of each of these (and other) reasons for the increase in transgender identification, but we hope it has helped you to understand why it’s happening. This increase is not by accident — and it is clearly not without consequence.
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