TRANS DERP EXPRESS.

I hate to go to that well again but goddamn, David French is on a roll. In this case he tackles the transgender menace. Apparently a lot of kids are goin' trans nowadays -- it's "fashionable," a fad, like pop rocks and rainbow parties -- and like them incredibly dangerous!

Indeed, transgender diagnoses have become so fashionable that doctors are sometimes stampeding to prescribe life-altering drugs even to kids — and then later, when the kids grow up, recommending mutilating surgery. In other words, doctors aren’t necessarily waiting for evidence of “consistence, insistence, and persistence"

"When the kids grow up" means "when they're adults," by the way. Oddly, I haven't heard of any American parents being forced to let their kid's dick get sawed off -- please let me know if you have! -- nor even to let him or her take the initial "life-altering drugs" (I assume French means hormones, but he doesn't specify, perhaps hoping his readers will imagine an Instant Pussy Pill that alters your young'un in a puff of smoke and with a sound effect like twink).

In fact, so far all French can offer for data is a vague reference to the number of minors in the U.K. some anti-trans group says are seeking counsel for gender dysphoria, which is up hundreds of percent -- though when you trace his source you see that means it's gone from 94 to 969, out of a population of 64.1 million.

So what does he have as evidence that the Transmanian Devil is sweeping America?

Here in the United States, the evidence is more anecdotal...

Uh huh.

...but the anecdotes are disturbing. Rod Dreher...

Rod Dreher! There's the tell. You may have read some of Brother Rod's anecdotal Tales of Trans Terror, but if you know his work at all you'll know that for hysteria he outstrips even French, especially when it comes to sexual apostasy.

Now assuming, as I said, that no one is forcing this stuff on the families of the prototrans kids, what is French's beef? It's not as if people can't judge for themselves whether they want it for their kids; aren't Republicans, after all, of the party of personal responsibility? Even a whiner like French can't pretend that Ma and Pa Kettle would let their boy Jethro take pussy pills just because he saw Caitlyn Jenner on the teevee and felt unbidden feels.

It seems what's really enraging French is really that transgenderism is acknowledged and (especially) that it is acceptable among people he can't successfully marginalize. The tell is in lines like "It’s all science, you see. And denying that science not only makes you a Neanderthal, it makes you a bigot," of which the wretched thing is full.  His sputtering rage is not that something is being forced on him and his, because it isn't, as much as his desire for unearned sympathy compels him to pretend -- it's because someone else chooses it, and when he tries to bully them he finds himself unsupported, because bullying such people has gone out of style. How that must sting!

UPDATE. Early in the morning and already comments are glorious. Here for example is Big_Bad_Bad_Bastard, with an apposite reference to French's earlier obsession: "Anecdotally, the vast majority of male-to-female transpersons are millennial boys who were ashamed of their low grip strength. Now they have perfectly acceptable female boomer grip ranges."