"I was never promised easy children": a look at 'trans kids' mania from a different lens

A reader was told her son needed to be drugged because of his behaviour as a child. She shared her experience with me in a powerful email

I have followed very closely the explosion of “trans” kids into public discourse in the last few years. In that time, the debate has been neatly folded into the rights of sexual minorities, which makes a certain amount of sense. Telling kids they can “change their gender” is part of a wider discomfort with societal sex roles, biology, and sexuality, and often the kids who think they are trans are actually just gay. 

But when it comes to the issue of transitioning children, I’ve long thought that there are two other factors at play in contemporary culture that have smoothed the path for this truly deranged idea of sex change operations for minors.

Photo by lilartsy on Unsplash

One is the decades long embrace of plastic surgery in adults — something that seems to have reached fever pitch in the last few years, judging from the hideously deformed faces plastered everywhere. No one ever seems to ask why society just went along with this, as though the extreme, puffy eyes and lips, and embalmed tautness of the skin were some how better than looking like an old person. We collectively just acquiesced with a shrug, like it was somehow not a grotesque and pathetic spectacle.

The second factor is even more unsettling, and that is the long-standing practice of drugging healthy children for behaviours deemed aberrant by teachers and others in positions of authority, in the name of treatment of ADHD.

Since I have not dealt with an ADHD child personally, the subject of this diagnosis has never been at the forefront of my attention. But I had often heard it claimed that many more children were being treated for this disorder than actually had it, and I had a sneaking fear this was true. 

Then two weeks ago, Dr Robert Malone’s Substack featured a writer who was making this claim, and I read the essay with great interest. Dr Yaakov Ophir, a research associate at the Natural Language Processing lab of the Israel Institute of Technology, asks a stark question:

“But what if the scientific consensus is wrong? What if the medications for ADHD are not as effective and as safe as we are told?”

The whole essay is worth a read. And the parallels with transitioning minors (as well as the COVID vaccine mandates for children) jumped out at me. Putting kids on cross-sex hormones to prevent puberty is currently all the rage; but for decades we’ve been giving kids powerful psychiatric drugs to put a stop to common childhood behaviours.

A few days after I read Ophir’s essay, I received an email from a subscriber. The person wrote: “roots of the [transgender] cult, at least in the USA [are] the ADD/ADHD propaganda that goes after (mostly) young boys.”

She went on:

“I became aware of this due to our youngest, a son, being targeted by this mob. The mob (schools, counselors, former friends) wanted us to put amphetamines in his tiny body because of his being on the far end of male non-violent and non-compliant behavior. We walked out on anyone who suggested turning him into a zombie rather than just deal with raising him. I was never promised easy children. Various articles estimate boys diagnosed with ADD/ADHD at about 13% of all boys. A 2016 study states 62% of diagnosed children (boys) were on amphetamines. Many of these boys go on to a life of delinquency, illegal drugs, school shootings and prison. I believe the ADD/ADHD attack on (mostly) boys and the Trans attack on (mostly) girls are part of a planned movement to undermine the population and destroy the future (the eugenicists never rest). Getting people to accept as normal drugging the male behavior out of boys led the way to accepting puberty blockers, hormones and slicing off the body parts of children.”

I was taken aback by the strength of this woman’s point, and very moved by her decision to trust herself over the supposed experts. 

So many American parents have ceded their own authority to a scientific-medical-pharmaceutical establishment whose motives are deeply, deeply questionable. Yet here was one family, standing strong, against the tide of professionals whose credentialism has cowed so many American parents, with sometimes disastrous results.

When I was writing this essay, my mother reminded me of a story she had told me before, about her brothers. There were six girls born one after another in my mother’s family before two boys came along, with the final count rounding out to seven girls and three boys. When my mother was around 11 she was horrified at how her brothers, aged 6 and 7, would fight each other and make a tremendous amount of noise. She hadn’t seen anything like that from her sisters. When the brothers weren’t fighting, they were sweet and tender and she loved them. But to each other, they could be like little wild beasts, compared to the girls. (Those little boys grew up to be men who are very peaceable and gentle, by the way. I have wonderful uncles.)

If you look up ADHD on the Internet, Google helpfully provides the top three symptoms: 1. Inattention: short attention span for age (difficulty sustaining attention), difficulty listening to others. 2. Impulsivity: often interrupts others 3. Hyperactivity: seems to be in constant motion; runs or climbs, at times with no apparent goal except motion.

Wow! That sounds exactly like…being a little kid. Just like stress and anxiety and embarrassment over going from girl child to female teenager is totally normal and natural. Is it possible that we have been treating totally normal child and teen behaviours as a disease? Just because dealing with them is difficult?

In this 2015 Time article by family therapist Marilyn Wedge, author of the book Disease Called Childhood, writes of a family who came to her because they did not want to give their seven year old boy Adderall, which his paediatrician had recommended.

“I helped them come up with a plan for Aiden to get plenty of physical exercise. They enrolled him in tee-ball and began taking family bike rides and hikes on weekends. We explored dietary changes, which sometimes help overactive kids. Ava found that eliminating sugar, gluten, and foods with artificial colors from Aiden’s diet had a noticeable effect in calming him down. While not all kids have a sensitivity to these foods, they can be irritating to some children. Scott and Ava structured Aiden’s time on school days. After school he would have a healthy snack and a glass of milk. He could play outdoors with the neighborhood kids until five, when it was time to begin his homework. After Aiden finished his homework, he would be allowed to play a video game or watch TV for an hour. At bedtime, Scott and Ava took turns reading to him.”

Doesn’t this sound like a normal childhood? Playing outside with other kids, spending extra time doing wholesome activities with parents on the weekends, not eating garbage, a little bit of downtime in front of a television, and a structured bedtime routine. How is this something that a family therapist needs to tell parents to do, so they don’t resort to giving their kid amphetamines?

I don’t mean to issue a blanket condemnation of parents who reach out to professionals for help with challenging kids. And I’m not saying that ADHD does not exist, nor am I arguing with people’s positive experiences with treatment. Being an adult, I am very aware that life often seems like a series of terrifyingly difficult decisions, with no easy outs. And for so many people, work-life balance and quality family time is a dream, not a reality. I get all that.

But judging from the wholesale establishment embrace of drugging, mutilating and sterilising minors, American parents have been preyed upon. As lives became ever more complicated, financially difficult, and society seemed less and less safe, the professionals whispered to beleaguered, worried, parents that they had the solution, in the form of a little pill that would make all their problems go away. 

So first childhood became a disease. Now puberty is a disease. How many children have been maimed, psychologically and physically, by this anti-child, anti-human mindset that has taken over?

“I was never promised easy children,” my subscriber wrote. 

Internalise those words, mothers and fathers of the west. There is real wisdom in it. She is correct: none of us are promised easy children, nor are we promised great beauty or eternal youth. Coming to terms with where our grow-up realities diverge from our childhood fantasies is the process that makes us mature adults. If we — the adults — do not undergo that process with as much grace as we can muster, we risk doing real harm to ourselves and those around us. Especially the ones who most need us to be mature adults: our young.