I am perplexed at the sudden mention of young children brainwashed into seeing themselves as the wrong gender. We have not been talking about this, and it plays no visible part in the sudden explosion of affirmation pressure.

Medical professionals have been cowed by the activists; if a young girl wants to believe she's trans and that going under the knife will give her fulfillment, a counselor has to reaffirm her delusion or he will *lose his job.* You know this.

The reason a 13yo girl can be "deeply convinced" that she is trans is because she is not yet capable of thinking for herself. Her attitudes are compulsively conforming and when all of her friends are telling her the same thing, why, it must be so. It isn't until age 15 or so that intellectual independence begins for most people. If it ever does.

I think this fad will pass because fads always do. It may leave some residual damage to our language and may even lead to some minor social progress but it is not going to take too many stories of deprogrammed and mutilated children to trigger some cultural revulsion.

And the more people see of the Stephanies, the faster it will happen.

There is also the inadequacy of reassignment; a lot of "trans women" look, frankly, scary, and "trans men" are sexually nonfunctional, however convincing they may look with thickened facial bones and beards. If we survive the next few decades, which I doubt, it may be possible to literally convert between the sexes easily and reliably, but what we have not reached that point and what we call reassignment is little better than surgical caricaturing.