The New York Times bucked powerful pressure from the transgender lobby to showcase some of the teenagers who were pushed and harmed by irreversible surgery and body-changing hormones.
The landmark article may help many other progressives quietly recognize the cruelty of converting unhappy teenagers into lifetime subjects for use by the political lobby and its medical allies.
In the report, the New York Times interviewed Grace Powell, who, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and oftentimes bullied. When puberty hit, she felt that it had made everything worse, and she suffered from depression.
Then, when Powell was 12 or 13, she found transgender propaganda online and started to believe that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was because she had been born in the wrong body.
She also came across the argument that if one doesn’t transition, they will end up killing themselves — a narrative constantly promulgated by trans activists.
At 17, Powell told her parents that she believed she was the opposite sex. Her parents then “sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious,” the New York Times reported.
Powell ended up starting cross-sex hormones by the fall of her senior year of high school. The summer before college, she received a double mastectomy. She then attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she went by the name Grayson, and lived with a male roommate on a men’s floor in a dormitory.
But at no points during her medical or surgical procedures did anyone ever ask Powell about her depression or why she wanted to change her sex, she said. Powell, now 23, added that no one had ever asked her about her sexual orientation or any trauma she may have had.
Therefore, the therapists and doctors never learned that she had been sexually abused as a child, Powell said.
“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell told the New York Times. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”
“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” she added. “It’s a mess.”
The New York Times acknowledged that “Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.”
Furthermore, the outlet also admitted that kids are “a new and growing group of patients” in the transgender department.
While transgender adults, who have “had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria” their entire lives, are happy with their transitions, this growing group of children that are going to clinics seeking sex changes is a new phenomenon, clinicians say.
Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, told the New York Times that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had suffered with gender dysphoria their entire lives, and that she felt a sex change made sense for almost all of them.
“But that is just not the case anymore,” Edwards-Leeper said. “The population has changed drastically.”
Now, most of her patients have no history of childhood gender dysphoria, she noted.
“The population has changed drastically,” the psychologist said.” As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”
Meanwhile, there is an uptick in what are known as “detransitioners,” who say that only conservative media outlets seem interested in telling their stories. They say that when they change their minds, they feel abandoned.
“I was always a liberal Democrat. Now I feel politically homeless,” one woman whose son changed his mind after coming out as trans and starting hormone therapy said.
The New York Times also acknowledged the menacing question that trans activists always ask parents of children who have discovered transgender propaganda, which is, “Do you want a dead son or a living daughter?”
After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess if the teenager had A.D.H.D. instead referred him to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and “gender,” the outlet reported.
The mother told the New York Times that she had assumed the specialist would conduct some type of evaluation or assessment, but it didn’t happen. Instead, the meeting was short and kicked off on a shocking note.
“In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen said.
Parents are constantly warned that taking any path other than transitioning their child will mean putting their kid at risk for suicide. Parents are told that they will effectively kill their own children if they do not let them get a sex change.
Activists who advocate for letting kids undergo transgender-related medical procedures cite studies saying there is a connection between those procedures and a lower risk of suicide.
“But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive,” the New York Times reported.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.