A reader contacted me under a pseudonym a few months ago. She turned out to be a prominent Southern lawyer with a problem she hoped I’d write about. Her college-age daughter had always been a “girly girl” and intellectually precocious, but had struggled with anxiety and depression. She liked boys and had boyfriends in high school, but also faced social challenges and often found herself on the outs with cliques.One of the striking things about the article is that it pulls together a trope - Young women from rich, privileged, progressive backgrounds creating their own chosen tragedies and failures that are selectively different from the tragedies and failures which reality and circumstance visit arbitrarily on those not so privileged.
The young woman went off to college—which began, as it often does these days, with an invitation to state her name, sexual orientation and “pronouns.” When her anxiety flared during her first semester, she and several of her friends decided their angst had a fashionable cause: “gender dysphoria.” Within a year, the lawyer’s daughter had begun a course of testosterone. Her real drug—the one that hooked her—was the promise of a new identity. A shaved head, boys’ clothes and a new name formed the baptismal waters of a female-to-male rebirth.
This is the phenomenon Brown University public-health researcher Lisa Littman has identified as “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” ROGD differs from traditional gender dysphoria, a psychological affliction that begins in early childhood and is characterized by a severe and persistent feeling that one was born the wrong sex. ROGD is a social contagion that comes on suddenly in adolescence, afflicting teens who’d never exhibited any confusion about their sex.
Like other social contagions, such as cutting and bulimia, ROGD overwhelmingly afflicts girls. But unlike other conditions, this one—though not necessarily its sufferers—gets full support from the medical community. The standard for dealing with teens who assert they are transgender is “affirmative care”—immediately granting the patient’s stated identity. There are, to be sure, a few dissenters. “This idea that what we’re supposed to do as therapists is to ‘affirm’? That’s not my job,” said psychotherapist Lisa Marchiano. “If I work with someone who’s really suicidal because his wife left him, I don’t call his wife up and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to come back.’ . . . We don’t treat suicide by giving people exactly what they want.”
[snip]
Nearly every force in society is aligned against these parents: Churches scramble to rewrite their liturgies for greater “inclusiveness.” Therapists and psychiatrists undermine parental authority with immediate affirmation of teens’ self-diagnoses. Campus counselors happily refer students to clinics that dispense hormones on the first visit. Laws against “conversion therapy,” which purports to cure homosexuality, are on the books in 14 states and the District of Columbia.
I live in a community and among a social set who are among the most privileged humans of all times. They are among the top 5% in wealth or income in the richest nation in history. They are among the most educated at the most elite schools. Sometimes they are also extremely accomplished. They live in the most exclusive and class homogeneous communities.
All should be well in such a paradise. But as I watch their children, not all is well. There is the occasional tragic car accident. There are the much more frequent descents into drug or alcohol dependencies. There is the cherishing and nurturing of psychological conditions. There is a rash of tattooing, piercings, head-shaving, hair-dying, gender identity experimenting, transient LGBT experimentation, etc. And, oh, the number who think it is good career planning to pursue the arts or sociology or studies, etc. For some these various things are a phase, for many they are a chosen life-style. And all of it is, to a greater or lesser degree an indulgence by parents of their children and an affirmative choice of the children.
Now I am not claiming this affects every child but it affects a startling number and it is no longer a rare phenomenon. And it is not immaterial. Whether it is 5% or 10%, possibly 20%, the consequences are large and not infrequently tragic and either irreversible or extremely difficult to reverse.
The experimentation with deviation from social norms does seem to occur disproportionately among young women.
I have occasionally wondered whether it is an unanticipated response of my own generation's naive idealism. There was a period of time when we thought that maximum freedom combined with effective protection of all rights to the utmost degree would bring the greatest good to the most people. I still don't think those are bad ideals, I just think they were more complicated than we acknowledged and we pursued them clumsily.
Specifically, I wonder whether the ideas and mantras of my college days weren't perhaps the foundation for these challenges among young women today. "You go, girl!", "Girl Power!", "I am Woman, hear me roar!", "You can have it all!", "You've come a long way baby!" We created an impossible expectation of young women that they would all be rich and famous and powerful and would choose to conquer corporations and have children and have entirely equal marriages, and leave all the old folkways behind. We were creating the future and it was bright.
But that is not how it turned out. Traditionalists, realists, and pragmatists have always held this to be a hopelessly naive vision. We can all and each of us achieve many things occasionally but we can't all achieve everything always.
However, it was a firm vision that excited many among the privileged Mandarin Class and they pursued it with vigor. A crystalizing questioning of that vision occurred in 2012 when Anne-Marie Slaughter published Why Women Still Can't Have It All in The Atlantic. In some ways it was insultingly tone-deaf. Here was a woman at a top university, also taking a leave of absence to work in government at the top levels of policy making, her entire career greased by public money and with a husband who did everything possible to help her achieve what she wanted complaining about hard it all was. There seemed absolutely no awareness that 90% of the population would rejoice to have had 10% of the opportunities or choices she had chosen to make. To say nothing of the familial, institutional and policy affirmative action programs sustaining her own desires.
None-the-less it was one of the most open acknowledgments that the promised vision was not an achievable reality and might have been founded on some deep untruths.
But that is a separate story. My point is that Slaughter was of an age to choose to be a member of the vanguard of a new vision most of us were pursuing. She was coming to a recognition of the impossible contradictions of that vision. And nothing has changed about the vision since then.
It is hard to be a member of a vanguard and to have to acknowledge that what you were seeking was unachievable or simply wrong. The tragedy is that subsequent generations have had that world vision imposed on them without their choice. As Shrier points out, all our institutions remade themselves as agents of the social justice theory, critical theory, postmodernist enterprise. Young men and women are both suffering from a failed and outmoded set of expectations.
I wonder whether what Shrier is reporting on is not but one aspect of young women's defense mechanisms against an impossible vision. They are still told they can have it all, that they can achieve everything they wish, that they can have marriages that are perfect and children without career impacts, and achieve everything a man can achieve. It is a near total lie. All of us are constrained. Without family money, little of this is even conceivable.
We can have equal opportunity and equality before the law. Beyond that, no. We all want different things to different degrees. We all impose different limits on ourselves as to what we are willing to do. Without acknowledging those realities, we are still encouraging kids to make bad decisions and to put themselves in a position of failing to achieve an impossible vision. The defense is that if I can deviate from norms in a dramatic way that gets designated for special treatment, I don't have to judge myself as a failure to achieve that which is impossible to achieve.
Perhaps ROGD and so many of the other manifestations Shrier reports are all a natural consequence of young women shielding themselves from unreasonable expectations.
Shrier's article sparks a lot of different considerations, way too many for a blog post. Some snippet mental models which seem relevant to the issues raised above.
Defining deviance down - We tolerate every increasing deviance from effective norms. That deviance has costs which can only be sustained by the productivity generated by the original norms. The increasing acceptance of deviance destroys the very system which temporarily can sustain that deviance.
The Phenomenon of Social Contagion - We still don't understand enough about this but it seems clearly to be a real and tragic phenomenon manifested not only in the rise of ROGD but in school shootings, mass shootings, suicide waves, etc.
Social Contagion as gendered phenomenon - Is it true that social contagions are more frequent among women than men and to a greater degree? I have never seen a robust study addressing that question but I have seen plenty of studies which report it as a subsidiary observation. It appears to be real. Why? I have never seen a good exploration of that idea.
Extreme WEIRD - Is this the really primarily a function of extreme WEIRD conditions? Shrier is not claiming so but her data suggests that it is. Curious to see that explored.
Class polarization - Why do the social pathologies of the Mandarin Class vary so significantly from the middle and working class? Is it simply that they can afford to indulge those behaviors or is there something else going on?
The self-destruction of an incoherent Vision (extreme tolerance) - In my youth in Europe, peer acquaintances enamored with Marxist ideology were prone to claim that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own self-contradictions. That has, in subsequent decades, been proven demonstrably untrue. All improvements in global human welfare have occurred as a consequence of capitalism and global trade while the few true tragedies are all associated to some degree with people pursuing Marxist theories. The irony is that much of the philosophical underpinnings that make ROGD possible are all associated with various forms of neo or reformed Marxism - Critical Theory, Social Justice Theory, Postmodernism, etc. And all of them are in the process of collapsing under their own internal self-contradictions. The tragedy is that they threaten to take everything else down with them.
Conflict of Visions - There clearly is a departure in our Mandarin Class and institutions from the norms of the great American Middle. Thomas Sowell explored this in his book A Conflict of Visions and well as The Vision of the Anointed. Interestingly, two of our most prominent public intellectuals (Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt), using different terminologies, identify the same phenomenon. The camps are not necessarily ideological, though that is how it manifests. One Vision is a shiny vision that everyone is good and cooperative and we simply need to reduce barriers, improve access to resources, increase transparency and make it easier for people to connect and all will be well. This is variously called the Open Vision, the Unconstrained Vision, and the Utopian Vision. It is beautiful and hopeful. Utopians pursue the best and focus on finding the best deterministic answer.
The alternative is an acknowledgement that people are different from one another, pursuing different goals in different ways. That resources are limited and choices are about what is possible not what is ideal. This is often referred to as a Constrained Vision or a Tragic Vision or a Pragmatist Vision. Pragmatists pursue optimal decisions, not ideal decisions. They know that there are things they cannot know or control. The recognize that not all systems are deterministic. They acknowledge emergent order. They focus on trade-offs given limited resources. The issue is not whether one vision is true or not. The question is which one most effectively advances human welfare.
Hint - It isn't the Utopian Vision
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