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.
Big Business
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.
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.
Powerfully written! This reminds me of the article we summarized a few newsletters back about the BIg Pharma social media patient influencers, especially on TikTok which is the most commonly used app among youth. And that New York Post article you mention is forsure something to read...
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. This post serves as an antidote to all the polarizing red vs. blue political noise about this important issue. You raise significant concerns, and we wouldn't be doing justice if we're not discussing controversial matters that concern the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ people in the face of so much corporate profit.
Recently, Washington passed a law that allows kids to seek gender-affirming care without parent consent. It makes sense we're having debates about this. Yet very few debates I've seen are capable of taking the emotions out enough to think critically and process conflicting and complex information. Especially for trans issues, we need to be asking deeper questions together in order to make sense of this changing human reality and prevent it from being co-opted by corrupt power structures under the guise of social justice.
A democratic 'inclusive' society would care about presenting the whole picture to the public to invite open dialogue. You're doing that with this blog post. Thanks for starting this ongoing, complex conversation, Mark.
Hey thanks! The patient influencers on social media are a perfect example of Big Pharma manipulating culture.
The article on the Washington law gives me pause. It says, "licensed youth shelters no longer have to report the location of a runaway child to the child’s parents if the child is seeking gender-affirming or reproductive care. " So gender-affirming medical treatments are now being regarded as in the same category as unwanted teen pregnancies. That seems pretty off to me.
What was really striking when researching this post was how how hard it was to find even basic information on the topic. It's as if the whole conversation is being manipulated at a very high level. Hopefully this post cuts through some of that.
I definitely think your post is cutting through the manipulation. Finding a media platform that's giving voice to all perspectives on this issue is almost non-existent. Lack of open dialogue + government scare tactics + inciting social division makes it a piece of cake for special interests to manipulate us. Gender identity issues are deeply politicized, which means we're already pushing bills and new policies without even talking about it in-depth as a society. Consider this excerpt from a Reason article:
Wow. Good points. People on both "sides" of this polarized topic seem determined to just make everything worse.