The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'A medication advertisement transgender.'
My local coffee shop is a trans hangout. I have a few good friends who are trans and feel like we all have a right to express our identities however we see fit. When I turn on any new Netflix show, it seems like every third character is trans. And trans issues are always in the news.
At some point during the last few years, I began to suspect that trans perspectives were being over-represented in pop culture, and I wondered why that might be. When I asked Google, all I encountered was a bunch of info on gender reassignment and few solid answers to even the most basic questions. How many people are trans? How big is the market for trans-specific drugs and medical procedures? What I eventually found was a little troubling. This Pulse article looks at the topic in detail. Here's some of what it says:
Approximately 2% of high school aged teens identify as "transgender." In 2021, approximately 42,000 children and teenagers across the US received a diagnosis of "gender dysphoria." This is more than triple the number in 2017, and we are likely to see the same trends when data from 2022 and beyond is released. ... 20-30% of patients may discontinue hormone treatment within a few years due to various medical complications. ... 60 to 90 percent of children who identify as transgender no longer want to transition by the time they're adults.
So only 1 in 50 kids identifies as trans and up to 90% of these kids grow up to change their minds about transitioning. If these figures can be believed, that's a very small number of trans people in the population. But since gender dysphoria diagnoses tripled from 2017 to 2021, there is reason to believe the trans population is experiencing a period of explosive growth. While some of this growth can likely be attributed to increasing societal acceptance of trans people, the coinciding growth in gender reassignment drug sales and surgeries suggests that Big Pharma and industrial medicine have a strong interest in popularizing transgender identities.
Transitioning is big business for surgeons. According to one report, "The U.S. sex reassignment surgery market size was valued at USD 1.9 billion in 2021 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.23% from 2022 to 2030." Two billion dollars a year is substantial, and that's an intense growth rate. The figures from drug sales are harder to find. A New York Post article provides figures for one drug:
Medroxyprogesterone acetate, a common drug in "gender-affirming therapy," has long been used to chemically castrate sex offenders. Another widely used medication is Lupron, a controversial hormone blocker. Lupron was initially developed to lower testosterone levels in men with prostate cancer, effectively chemically castrating them. It's now used as a puberty blocker in the booming business of "transitioning" children. Lupron manufacturer AbbVie made $726 million on the drug alone in 2018. AbbVie has joined other major pharmaceutical companies in lobbying to keep drug prices high.
If just one medication in this class was making $726 million annually five years ago, it's reasonable to assume that the total market for all related drugs might amount to several billion a year today. That's a lot of motivation for Big Pharma to stimulate demand for their products. And given the industry's all-pervasive reach and incredible sophistication, it may be promoting gender dysphoria in a million little ways throughout culture, such that the advertising campaign is easily mistaken for a more organic increase in societal awareness of trans issues.
According to the Pulse article, another factor that may be contributing to gender dysphoria is environmental exposure to hormone disrupting pesticides like atrazine. The use of these toxic chemicals is widespread. It would be interesting to see if trans drug makers and chemicals manufacturers have large investors in common.
Although there's probably more to say, saying more might get me canceled. Which brings me to my final point. The whole conversation about trans issues on social media is tightly controlled by unseen armies of hostile individuals. That doesn't promote the free exchange of ideas. It produces a climate of fear.
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