NEW DESISTANCE DATA: 34.8% of youth (ages 15-21) from a group of 92 who identified as trans/nonbinary at some point in a 3.5-year study desisted by the last assessment. Those who consistently reported a trans identity (34.8%) were more likely to have had medical interventions.
As a hobby, I have been sounding the alarm about the declining fertility of both men and women for several years. However, the conversation was not entertaining or palatable for most of the women I interacted with, so I stopped having it as table talk. I’m better off discussing the latest scent at Bath and Bodyworks than discussing reality with women for social points.
I've recently started collecting all the bad takes on autism and chronic illness from young female Instagram content creators, so the Instagram algorithm now thinks I'm a gen z female and is flooding me with the content made by and aimed at them. I don't think those of us not from that generation can really understand just how unhealthy the content is that is saturating the online world of gen z females. And even if they are the rare girl not on social media or who spends only a small amount of time on it, this culture isn't restricted to just the online world. It's in the beliefs, attitudes, tones, outlooks, and personalities of all the girls around them in real life too. They can't escape from it.
We should remember a few things:
1.) Many (most?) young people in our society lack critical thinking skills or the resilience to examine their own beliefs or engage in debate
2.) Most of these people are being showered with bad ideas every time they open their phone (dozens of times per day)
3.) Additionally, they are being encouraged to view their preferences and impulses and prejudices and emotions as a priori true and important (rather than just valid)
4.) People are being encouraged to sort themselves according to opinions and shopping habits and musical preferences and fashions all while these things are being flattened and commodified ruthlessly. Behavior no longer matters, either in terms of being decent to others or improving one’s own life
Americans have discovered… a recipe for perpetuating racial conflict, and are now busy exporting it to the world. The biggest obstacle to acceptance of this analysis is the tendency people have to take it all at face value (e.g. to imagine that, if people are doing something in the name of “justice,” that what they actually want is to achieve some state of justice). Hence my sympathy for Bright’s approach.
There is, however, an important aspect of the psychodrama that I think he misses out on entirely. He comes closest to acknowledging it when he notes, of the anti-racism efforts of the “repenter” class, that “Sometimes all this can be rather ostentatious, and one rather suspects the moral kudos for being seen to do as much is playing rather too large a role in their motivations. But we need not be so cynical…” To which I am inclined to say “no, you need to be that cynical, perhaps even a bit more so.” Specifically, Bright is inattentive to the role that accusations of racism play in structuring the status hierarchy among whites in America.
