If you know any middle or high school girls today, or if you are one yourself,

it would not be surprising if you know someone who identifies as transgender.

The latest statistics indicate that 2% of American high school students now identify as transgender

and the overwhelming majority of them are teenage girls.

Between 2016 and 2017 alone, the number of females seeking gender surgery in America

quadrupled. But if you graduated high school over a decade ago, it was unlikely that you knew

anyone who has transgendered because, according to the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental

disorders, the condition underlying it afflicted roughly 1 in 10,000 people or 0.01% of the population.

Almost none of these cases were teenage girls. In fact, before 2012, there was no scientific

or medical literature discussing adolescent girls who wanted to transition to the opposite sex.

That doesn't mean that we didn't know about transgender individuals. Gender dysphoria,

the severe discomfort in one's biological sex, has been studied for nearly 100 years.

It almost always involved boys who began feeling it between the ages of 2 and 4,

and were strong and persistent in their assertions to everyone around them that they were really

girls. When a phenomenon that affects one half of a population, boys suddenly begins affecting

the other half, girls. And when it's age of onset shifts from preschool to adolescence,

something significant is happening. In 2016, Brown University Public Health Researcher Lisa

Littman began studying the sudden spike in trans identification of teenage girls.

She concluded that pure influence and social media influence had a lot to do with this

trans teen phenomenon. After all, based on parent reports, none of these girls had exhibited

symptoms of gender dysphoria at the age that it typically first presents, early childhood.

YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram all host popular social media influencers,

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