What does Jonathan Haidt's book say about gender dysphoria?
My recent review of 'The Anxious Generation'is available in the Irish Independent and so in this post I explore more specifically how Jonathan Haidt treats gender dysphoria in his latest book
I highly recommend Haidt’s latest book for parents, teachers, therapists and anyone who is interested in understanding today’s generation. Haidt’s title, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” might seem farfetched to some however he backs up his claims with strong research.
This is a well-organised and well-written book that is broken into four parts. Part One, A Tidal Wave, provides incontrovertible evidence about the tidal wave of mental illness among young people today. Part Two discusses The Backstory: The Decline of the Play-based Childhood and explores the benefits of a play-based childhood that includes risky play. One chapter in this section called “Puberty and the Blocked Transition to Adulthood”, highlights the human’s need for puberty in order to become a fully-functioning adult. Part Three, The Great Rewiring: The Rise of the Phone-based Childhood, explores Haidt’s concept of the four foundational harms: “social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.”
Haidt really nails it when he discusses the harms perpetrated by mobile phones. Thankfully, Haidt seeks resolution, Part Four is entitled “Collective Action for Healthier Childhood” and in this section he discusses specific resolutions that are needed to help this generation of young people. I’m very thankful that he doesn’t blandly advise the parents to “take their phones away”. Instead Haidt outlines how easy it would be for big tech to help parents put guardrails around children and adolescents. He also describes how schools and governments can help in this endeavour.
Chapter six (in Part Three) “Why Social Media Harms Girls More Than Boys” addresses the gender issue. On p.165, in the context of an analysis of disorders such as dissociative identity disorder and other disorders that spread sociogenically and through social media, Haidt writes:
“The recent growth in diagnoses of gender dysphoria may also be related in part to social media trends. Gender dysphoria refers to the psychological distress a person experiences when their gender identity doesn’t align with their biological sex. People with such mismatches have long existed in societies around the world. According to the most recent diagnostic manual of psychiatry, estimates of the prevalence of gender dysphoria in American society used to indicate rates below one in a thousand, with rates of natal males (meaning those who were biological males at birth) being several times higher than for natal females. But those estimates were based on the numbers of people who sought gender reassignment surgery as adults, which was surely a vast underestimate of the underlying population. Within the past decade, the number of individuals who are being referred to clinics for gender dysphoria has been growing rapidly, especially among natal females in Gen Z. In fact, among Gen Z teens, the sex ratio has reversed, with natal females now showing higher rates than natal males.*
Anyone who has been closely watching the gender issue will be aware that the sex reversal ratio is a good point as it highlights the strange phenomenon of ROGD. Yet this sex-reversal ratio is changing rapidly with most experts accepting that the ratio is now 70:30 girls to boys. There is certainly a good deal more ROGD girls than boys experiencing a form of trans-identification yet the number of boys experiencing this cannot be discounted anymore and so it is a pity that Haidt chose to position his point about gender dysphoria in a chapter that is focused entirely on girls. Nonetheless, Haidt’s point about the impact of social media on female teenagers is valuable and he outlines why girls are more vulnerable in four different ways: Girls are more affected by visual comparison and perfectionism; girls’ aggression is more relational; girls more easily share emotions and disorders; and girls are more subject to predation and harassment. I take issue with this last point, however, as many boys I have worked with clinically have been more harmed by predation compared to girls, who are subject to more predation but are not so easily lured in.
Haidt makes a weaker point when he discusses why so many young people are suddenly and without warning identifying as trans and seeking medical procedures to enhance their identities:
Some portion of this increase surely reflects the ‘coming-out’ of young people who were trans but either didn’t recognize it or were afraid of the social stigma that would attend the expression of their gender identity. Increasing freedom of gender expression and growing awareness of human variation are both forms of social progress. But the fact that gender dysphoria now often appears in social clusters (such as a group of close friends), the fact that parents and those who transition back to their natal sex identify social media as a major source of information and encouragement, and the fact that gender dysphoria is now being diagnosed among many adolescents who showed no signs of it as children all indicate the social influence and sociogenic transmission may be at work as well.*
While it is unfortunate that Haidt chooses to frame the “coming out” of young people who were trans just as he would presumably describe the “coming out” of young people who were gay, as this suggests a lack of understanding of the differences between being gay and medically transitioning, yet it is perhaps a sign of a slight change in the tide that he (subtly, without naming it) raises issues such as detransition and social contagion and then references research by Lisa Littman and Lisa Marchiano in this context.
Perhaps the only clear gain for parents of gender dysphoric kids is that Haidt highlights the issue of social contagion by stating that gender dysphoria “often appears in social clusters” and ultimately suggests that “social influence and sociogenic transmission” need to be considered in this context. Parents can now point to this book whenever they need to cite a very well-acknowledged, reliable and highly esteemed social psychologist who acknowledges the issue of social contagion and detransition and who is inarguably NOT transphobic.
*For those who are interested, Haidt references Block (2023), Kauffman (2022), the American Psychiatric Association (2022), Thompson et al. (2022), Turban et al. (2022), Aitken et al. (2015), de Graaf et al. (2018), Wagner et al., (2021), Zucker (2017), Haltigan et al. (2023), Littman (2018), Marchiano (2017), Littman (2021), Coleman et al. 2022), Kaltiala-Heino et al. (2015) and Zucker (2019) in this section.
Release date 26 March: “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness”
My review in the Irish Independent: https://www.independent.ie/life/family/parenting/how-to-save-our-kids-from-the-anxiety-epidemic-ban-phones-from-schools-for-starters/a1121803538.html