The startling “hockey stick” of young women suddenly announcing that they’re not women is making that explanation difficult to believe, especially when placed alongside the similarly dramatic graph portraying the crumbling mental health among Gen Z women. Facts must force experts and activists to reckon with the widespread harm being done to young women. As one book on the subject puts it, the damage being done to women’s lives and bodies is “irreversible.”
In his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice President Al Gore famously showed an image that became an icon of global warming. The so-called “hockey stick” graph plotted global temperatures over the centuries, reportedly showing that a spike occurred after humans began using fossil fuels. For Gore and his fellow climate activists, this was the “smoking gun” that something unprecedented was happening to the planet. Except, this graph has been widely disputed as containing “serious flaws.”
Today, a different “hockey stick” graph, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, shows a huge, sudden, and startling spike in the number of girls and women identifying as transgender. Since such records have been kept, the percentage of adults who identified as transgender within a population remained consistently low. For baby boomers and Gen Xers, those who identified as transgender were overwhelmingly men who identified as women.
Even today, in fact, the most in-your-face and high-profile transgender figures are men calling themselves women, like Bruce Jenner, Jazz Jennings, Lia Thomas, and Dylan Mulvaney. Concerns over privacy in bathrooms and fairness in sports are overwhelmingly (for obvious reasons) concerns about men entering women’s spaces.
However, the rate of Gen Z women identifying as men has skyrocketed to about twice that of Gen Z men identifying as women. This is roughly quadruple the rate of millennial women who identified as male. In fact, almost 1 in 30 Gen Z women now identify as men, and a further 1 in 25 identify as nonbinary. To paraphrase Christian author Samuel James on Twitter, the trans revolution has, in just the last few years, become a girls’ revolution.