In the last five to 10 years, treatment at gender clinics has increased some four to five thousand percent. On fundraising platforms like GoFundMe, tens of thousands of young women are now seeking money to pay for double mastectomies as part of their ‘medical transition.’ If you hear figures like this and are left wondering what’s changed?, you are not alone.
On Thursday’s show, Megyn was joined by Miriam Grossman, MD, a psychiatrist and author of the forthcoming book Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness, to talk about what’s behind these trends and what tools parents need to be prepared.
Transgenderism in Children
Dr. Grossman has been a practicing child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist for decades. Long before gender identity became the center of the culture war, she has been counseling families about the falsehoods and dangers of the ideology. She appeared as one of the experts in Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman? documentary, and now she is getting ready to release her latest book, Lost in Trans Nation, as a resource for parents.
In order to understand the state of gender ideology today, Dr. Grossman said it’s important to understand what was previously accepted in medical communities. “There are very rare children – we’re talking about one in tens of thousands of people – who, before the age of five or seven, have a strong inner sense that they are or should be the opposite sex,” she explained. “We’ve always known about them – I learned about them when I was in medical school and doing my training in child psychiatry – but they were so unbelievably rare that I never expected to see even one child like that in my practice.”
Fast forward to 2023, and Dr. Grossman said it’s her primary focus. “That’s all I do,” she shared. “My practice is composed of kids who have distress over their sexed bodies and their parents, however, the kids that I’m seeing are not those one-in-10,000 kids who recognized and started to express their discomfort at an early age.”
Instead, the cases Dr. Grossman most often sees involves children that had previously never expressed discomfort with their gender. “These are kids who never would have heard about that idea of being born in the wrong body had they not heard about it from friends, or on the internet, or from their teachers or their guidance counselor.”
How Parents Are Being Blindsided
Dr. Grossman believes that the overwhelming majority of today’s trans cases comprise “an altogether different group of people” than the classic patient type, which is leading to parents being “blindsided” and “ambushed” by their children who “suddenly out of the blue” announce they are now the opposite gender and want to begin hormone therapy. “Most parents are not expecting this at all, and they don’t know how to respond… or what this is all about,” she shared. “So, they’re stuck in a massive crisis and it often turns into a catastrophe.”
Megyn shared a story about a “conservative” family she knows that is currently going through this with their college-aged daughter as an example of just how pervasive this has become. As Dr. Grossman confirmed, “no family is immune.” The patients she has treated in her practice almost always come from “loving and devoted” homes. “These are parents that have tried to give their child everything that they possibly could,” she said. “These are parents that have been looking out for their kid, they just weren’t looking out for this.”
What makes matters more challenging is how the medical establishment has embraced gender affirming care. “How did our mainstream medical establishment get captured and taken over by these dangerous ideas – the idea that a child can be born in the wrong body and the idea of exposing a child to that notion as if it’s normal [and] something to celebrate,” Dr. Grossman asked.
She said it’s not just pediatric and psychological organizations that have been influenced but endocrine societies as well. “These endocrinologists are the people that are going to be prescribing the blockers and cross-sex hormones,” she explained. “So, it’s really been a massive… successful crusade through the medical establishment.”
Giving Parents a Toolkit
The main reason Dr. Grossman wrote her new book is because there are steps parents can take long before their children ever come home with a new name and pronouns. “That evening when they get the text or the announcement at the dinner table, I don’t want them to suddenly feel lost,” she shared. “Like, what do I do with this? Am I going to use this new name? Do I use these pronouns? Could my kid really be one of those rare cases of transgenderism?”
In her book that will be out this summer, Dr. Grossman offers educational resources for parents and children that has the “medically accurately, biologically accurate information that they need.” She also offers guidance on how to kind medical providers who have not been “captured” by the trans movement.
Ultimately, she considers herself a “woman on a mission,” and that mission “is to provide parents with the information that they need and the tools that they need in order to prevent this catastrophe.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Dr. Grossman by tuning in to episode 568 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.