Why Girls Become Boys
Ten years ago, it was unlikely that you knew someone who identified as transgender. Today, it’s unlikely that you don’t know someone who identifies as transgender. The latest statistics reveal that 2 percent of high school students identify as transgender and the overwhelming majority of them are teenage girls.
Between 2016 and 2017, the number of teenage females seeking transgender surgery quadrupled. Surprisingly, if you graduated high school more than a decade ago there was a chance you didn’t know anyone who was transgender, because according to the Diagnostical and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, the condition underlying it afflicted 1 in 10,000 people and almost none of these cases were teenage girls.
In 2016, Brown University public health researcher Lisa Littman began studying the issue and concluded that peer influence and social media interaction had a lot to do with this trans-teen phenomenon. In the following edition of PragerU, author Abigail Shrier brings us more of Littman’s study and analyzes this disturbing trend and its implications.
