Dr. Bernadette Wren at the Tavistock and Portman has pointed out that the last two years have seen a slowing in the rate of increase: “There may have been an absolute peak of young people who had been sitting on this for quite a long time coming forward … It may be that there’s a really, really large reservoir of people who are only finally beginning to speak about this now.” Conversely, anti-trans advocacy groups like Stephanie Davies-Arai’s “Transgender Trend” have attributed this increase to “the media … promoting awareness and acceptance of transgender theory as uncontested truth” and to an unsubstantiated clinical entity termed “rapid onset gender dysphoria” – an etiology proposing that trans youth contract gender dysphoria due to “internet and peer-group influence”.
The claim that this increase in referrals is driven by a heretofore unknown form of gender dysphoria is highly questionable, particularly given the lack of any evidence delineating the proposed condition as a syndrome distinguishable from classical gender dysphoria. And a new report from an adult gender service in Oxfordshire calls into question the very idea that a unique “trend” must be taking place among trans adolescents (Fielding & Bass, 2018). ■