Many of my readers will not be “Tucker fans” like the person who made this comment to the Tweet below:
I’m not a Tucker fan AT ALL, but am so grateful for him getting this out there. And Helena too!
I’m grateful as well. Tucker Carlson aired a brief interview with Detransitioner Helena Kerschner.
Helena was introduced to Gender Ideology on the social media platform, Tumblr. As a self-described “fifteen-year-old kid playing with pronouns on Tumblr,” her life went seriously off the rails.
…what leads a girl with no history of discomfort with stereotypical “girl” toys and clothes, or even the slightest desire to be a boy in childhood, to want to be a “man” through hormonal injections as she approached adulthood? In a vacuum, such a profound confusion leading to such drastic measures sounds like it should be rare and a sign of some sort of severe mental disturbance. Was I a fluke? Was I some kind of idiot who mistakenly believed I was trans because I’m crazy or just downright irresponsible?
Helena
You can read about her journey in the link below. As you read her story notice all the co-morbitities she suffered from: e.g. eating disorder, early trauma (age 7), etc….
Yet today these issues get swept under the rug by clinicians and gender clinics (Planned Parenthood in this case) in the rush to Transition patients to their ”authentic selves.”
You might be surprised to know that according to Helena, many of today’s Social Justice Warriors who use words like “oppression” “marginalization” “equity” and “inclusion” are very much wedded in their overall objectives. Proponents of Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory, something I wrote about in a previous post, are joined at the hip with many Gender Ideologues. Here’s what Helena had to say about that:
A major aspect of Tumblr culture has always been social justice ideology. Things that are now being played out and witnessed by the general public on platforms like Twitter and TikTok, like dissociative identity disorder LARPers, demisexuals, neopronouns, otherkin, and everything you see on @LibsOfTikTok, have long existed in an uncannily identical form on tumblr.com. The oppression hierarchy of racial and gender identities now being written into law in many of our once serious nations was the state religion of the People’s Republic of Tumblr long before your political junkie uncle knew the term “CRT”. As cultish religions tend to operate, open devotion to the religion is mandatory. Perhaps the outsiders most likely to understand the way social dynamics worked on that website would be survivors of Scientology or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. On Tumblr, the situation was such that any claim to being “oppressed” would accumulate social credibility, while any unfortunate “privileged” status was justification for verbal abuse. As a “privileged” person, you were expected to constantly grovel and apologize, you had no right to speak on any issue involving the group you were “oppressing”, and you could not object in any way to any mistreatment hurled against you because of your race, gender, or sexuality.
I found myself in a bit of a double bind. On one hand, I had found what felt like the perfect group of friends who understood me on an intuitive level, who I was able to talk to openly about the things I liked and made me “weird” in real life, but on the other hand I was a “cishet white girl” in an environment where that was one of the worst things to be. Since Tumblr users are mostly biological females, the “cishet white girl” holds the position of most privileged and therefore most inherently bad group. In this climate, you are made to feel guilty and responsible for all the horrors and atrocities in the world. No hardship you could possibly go through could ever be as bad as the prejudice and genocide POC and LGBT people face every. Single. Day. Insert clap emoji. LGBT people and POC can’t even walk out of their houses without being murdered by cishet white people just like you!
So what does a disillusioned, confused privileged white girl do to become accepted in that environment?
Its understandable that any young person exposed to this kind of belief system would grow to deeply resent being white, “cis”, straight, or (biologically) male. The beauty of gender ideology is it provides a way to game this system, so that you can get some of those targets off your back and enjoy the camaraderie of like-minded youths. You can’t change your race, pretending to have a different sexuality would be very uncomfortable in practice, but you can absolutely change your gender, and it’s as easy as putting a “she/they” in your bio. Instantly you are transformed from an oppressing, entitled, evil, bigoted, selfish, disgusting cishet white scum into a valid trans person who deserves celebration and special coddling to make up for the marginalization and oppression you supposedly now face. Now not expected to do as much groveling and reaffirming to everyone how much you love checking your privilege, you can relax a little and talk about your life without wondering if you are distracting from the struggles of or speaking over marginalized groups, because you are marginalized too. With the new pronouns often comes a wave of positive affirmation from friends and followers, and the subconscious picks up quickly that there’s a way to make the deal of being on Tumblr even sweeter.
Online she could be a “fictional character in a fictional universe.” And take the target of “white privilege” off her back by “changing” who she was.
Adolescent girls are uniquely susceptible to this kind of social contagion blackmail. [See this post and this one for details.]
The adolescent brain is in a developmental stage primed to incorporate experiences into the process of identity formation, and spending so much time in fantasy without building much of an identity through real social and life experiences can lead to the identity and fantasy elements becoming indistinguishable.
Living in the Tumblr virtual universe Helena was insulated ”from experiences and perspectives that might have challenged the views I was developing about myself and the world.”
A message to all parents. Monitor your child’s social media usage. You paid for it. Also, should your child get swept into this social contagion, Embrace, Don’t Affirm. As you’ll read her mother could have handled things better, but one thing she refused to do was “affirm.” Helena’s mother is a doctor.
Helena confirms the fact about School Secrets in her article. And the ever growing Detrans community.
I remember finding the reddit r/detrans forum, which at the time had only around 100 subscribers, if memory serves me (it now has tens of thousands). This clued me in to the fact that at least a handful of people out there were feeling regret too.
This is a very in-depth article about Helena’s journey. If you want to know why there has been a huge spike in the Western world of white adolescent girls identifying as Trans, and you want to hear it from someone “on the inside” this is a must read.
She ends it by saying:
My story is not a fluke, and I am not uniquely troubled or irresponsible. What I am though, is fortunate, because there are others for whom the harm has been exponentially worse. Though there is much strength to be found in overcoming, the fact is that today, any young person who remotely struggles with self-esteem, making friends, fitting in to common gender roles, or body image is now vulnerable to being subjected to what amount to medical experiments that may permanently destroy the prior functioning of their bodies before they have had the chance to build identity and strength through the normal means of overcoming life’s challenges. I have seen firsthand that for some people, the medical and psychological damage is far beyond what could be considered a healthy amount of adversity.
If you care about this issue, please read the whole thing. Helena is a ”rose”…
By Any Other Name
The story of my transition and detransition
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For anyone interested in an extended review of the Gender-Critical Pro-Creation argument presented on this blog, but without having to scroll through every post, please visit the Menu at the top of each page and click on the Top Posts link.