Sex

CAN’T WAIT TO HEAR HOW IT’S PERFECTLY NORMAL TO TRANSITION…:

The Kids Who Identify as Animals: A rising subculture of kids says they don’t feel entirely human. Here’s what their parents are learning to do with that. (Kara Baskin, 10/14/26, Boston Magazine)

What is new is where—and how young—the search happens. The furry world these kids move through lives largely online: The International Anthropomorphic Research Project (IARP), a group of scholars who study it, finds a heavy overlap with digital media use, and nearly 60 percent of furries say they found the fandom before turning 18. It’s a place where identity is constantly performed, debated, and policed, often by other kids. Yet even for the most online generation in history, some things arrive before the algorithm. The Internet gave Sol the word for it, and others who understood. But the feeling was already there.

The fandom also overlaps heavily with other marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ and nonbinary young people—which has made it a target of moral panic. In 2022, the baseless claim that schools were installing litter boxes for students who identified as cats ricocheted across the Internet and into political speeches, sparking a new battle in the culture wars.

Furries are also routinely conflated with sexual fetish—adult furry content exists online—though that bears little resemblance to the kids sewing tails, painting masks, and trading art at PortCon. “One of the biggest misconceptions is that there’s sort of an adult undertone when really, this is about expression, identity, and creativity,” Werkhoven says. “There’s the conception that furry is strictly like a kink, and that’s not true. It’s: ‘I have a character, and that character is a dog.’”

That fear-and-fascination cycle is where most parents come in. Catherine, a Newton mother of two furry kids (now 27 and 21), found out her older child was a furry only because her younger one let it slip years ago; the older one feared the stigma too much to say so. “These furries are all anonymous. They’re in big fur suits, right? It could be anybody. I don’t know, factually, if this has ever happened, but there is fear that pedophiles will take advantage of younger kids,” she says. Then she chaperoned her younger child to a convention and found it closer to an art fair than a den of iniquity: kids and caregivers, mental health workshops, and costumes of startling craft. “They come up with a whole character. They have very elaborate stories of their character and terminology. It doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or girl, gay or straight; they become this other person, and they can open up,” she says. “I was impressed.”

Catherine’s reassurance, though, rests on something therian parents don’t have. Her children invented their “fursonas.” Sol didn’t invent the cat. The question in Susanne’s house isn’t whether this is safe—it’s what it means that her daughter isn’t pretending.

STOLEN “VALOR”:

The Decline of Bisexuality: Most people who identify as bisexual live like they’re straight. (Ellie Gardey Holmes, October 2, 2026, American Spectator)

Take Kate Brown, who served as Oregon’s governor from 2015 to 2023. Brown’s bisexual identity made her special to progressives. When she was sworn in as governor, Time’s headline announcing her inauguration read: “Oregon’s Kate Brown Becomes First Openly Bisexual U.S. Governor.” She used her identity to prop herself up as a heroic inspiration to people. “If I can be a role model for one young person that decides that their life is worth living because there’s someone like them in the world, it’s worth it,” she said in 2016.

And yet Brown’s identity requires virtually nothing of her. She has been married to her husband for 30 years. All she needs to do is continually insist that she is attracted to women even while she is married to her husband. (One notes that heterosexual people do not typically announce an attraction to people other than their spouse.)

Former Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema likewise claims a bisexual identity, and likewise does nothing as a result of it. She was previously married to a man and then carried on an affair with another man, and she has not publicly dated a woman.

Brown and Sinema are not alone. The Pew Research Center found in 2015 that a full 84 percent of people who identify as bisexual are in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, while 7 percent aren’t in any relationship at all.

In a world where LGBTQ identity confers fewer social benefits, we can assume that bisexuals will often be the first to drop their identities, as they were the easiest to adopt in the first place and they don’t have much impact on one’s life.

Social contagions pass.

FADS COME, FADS GO:

Young Adults Identifying as LGBTQ Has Dropped 21% Since 2023 (Emily Brown, 3/05/26, Relevant)

Looking at BRFSS responses from 2014 through 2025, Twenge found that among adults ages 18 to 24, identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual peaked in 2022 at 20% before dropping to just over 15% by 2025 — a 21% decline in just three years.

The changes show up first, and most clearly, among the youngest adults.

IT’S IDEOLOGY, NOT CARE:

Psychiatric Morbidity Among Adolescents and Young Adults Who Contacted Specialised Gender Identity Services in Finland in 1996–2019: A Register Study (Sami-Matti Ruuska, Katinka Tuisku, Timo Holttinen, Riittakerttu Kaltiala, 04 April 2026, Acta Paedeatrica)

Gender-referred adolescents showed significantly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls both before (45.7% vs. 15.0%) and ≥ 2 years after referral (61.7% vs. 14.6%). Those referred after 2010 had greater psychiatric needs than earlier cohorts, both before (47.9% vs. 15.3%) and ≥ 2 years after (61.3% vs. 14.2%) referral. Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender reassignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment. After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls.

Conclusion
Severe psychiatric morbidity is common among gender-referred adolescents and appears to be more prevalent in those referred after the recent surge in referrals. Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment.

SPECIAL, SO SPECIAL:

Where Did Gender Identity Come From?: A new book offers a concise and compelling history. (Leor Sapir, Aug 07 2026, City Journal)

Gender identity originates in 1960s niche psychology, where, Brubaker reminds us, it was “relevant only in rare and expressly pathological cases [i.e., disorders of sex developments and transsexualism]. Nobody then imagined that gender identity would become a universally applicable and bitterly contested category.”

As MIT philosopher Alex Byrne has explained, Robert Stoller and Ralph Greenson, both psychologists at UCLA, coined the term “gender identity” in 1963. They defined it as “the sense of knowing to which sex one belongs, that is, the awareness ‘I am a male’ or ‘I am a female.’” On this understanding, everyone has a gender identity, which emerges in early childhood and accords with one’s sex. In rare cases, children develop feelings of belonging to the other sex, and the question becomes how to understand this and how to help them.

The most notorious use of gender identity in the clinical setting was that of John Money, a sexologist at Johns Hopkins University from the early 1950s until his death in 2006. Money argued that a child’s gender identity is socially acquired and that, if conditions are right, children can be successfully reared into the opposite sex. Money tested his theory on David Reimer, whose penis had been burnt off as an infant in a botched circumcision. The experiment ended in failure, with Reimer unable to live as a woman and later committing suicide.

Despite Money’s failure with Reimer, the notion that humans have a gender identity that, through social validation, can functionally override their sex “escaped the clinic.” A concept initially used by clinical “gatekeepers” to screen patients and decide who is eligible for medical interventions was soon “deployed and controlled by patients themselves . . . [I]t became a category deployed against gatekeepers and gate keeping,” writes Brubaker. “This new understanding of gender identity as a patient-controlled, patient-empowering category was codified in the paradigm of ‘gender-affirming care.’”

Making gender identity independent of sex means that options don’t have to be limited to just two. Viewing the condition as a normal variation rather than a form of pathology means that society should trust individuals, including children, to know their gender identity. And making it a universal human experience gave rise, in our therapeutic culture, to what Brubaker calls a new “identity imperative,” meaning a “social and cultural obligation to think and talk about one’s identity through the prism of the deep-seated cultural idea of authenticity and of an inner ‘true self.’” Such an ideal “requires young people to ‘have’ a gender identity, to reflect on that identity, and to know and name that identity.” By this logic, the “cisgendered,” those who take their “assigned sex” at face value, fall short relative to their transgendered peers in realizing their full humanity.

Gender identity, Brubaker notes, also confers social status. For some young people, “asserting a nonbinary gender identity may even be a claim for distinction or social recognition as an interesting, unconventional person who’s not a ‘normie.’” Gender identity thus becomes a plausible site for adolescent projection of normal angst about puberty and about who one is, especially relative to one’s peers.

SURGERY IS NOT PSYCHOLOGY:

The Detransitioner’s Dilemma: The Road From “Sunk Cost” to “Radical Acceptance” (Carol Tavris, July 8, 2026, Skeptic)

To better understand the factors that lead young people to identify as transgender, and then to detransition, data analyst M. Lal and psychiatrist Stephen B. Levine analyzed the stories told by 37 detransitioners—25 biological females and 12 biological males—on publicly available video testimony.4 Their scholarly goal was to identify the main factors (they call “pathways”) into transition and those that eventually led them to change course. Of course this group is not representative of all detransitioners, as if such a sample could ever be created, but their stories corroborate much of what is already known about the young people who find themselves caught in the gender-affirming world and later struggle to get out. Most of the group had originally transitioned in their mid-teens, and detransitioned in their 20s and some even their late 30s.

To know how and why these women and men abandoned their trans identities, we need to know how they adopted them to begin with. Consistent with almost all other studies, Lal and Levine found a high prevalence of concurrent conditions long known to accompany gender dysphoria in young people: psychological disorders (notably autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, eating disorders); sexual abuse; childhood neglect and a history of abusive relationships; and, sadly, homophobia. When young people take a deep dive into the internet to find explanations of their symptoms and suffering, they encounter communities that actively persuade adolescents who are uncomfortable with their bodies, or who have emotional disorders, that they are “really” trans and their problems would vanish with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Many of Lal and Levine’s participants explicitly described the message they heard over and over: “if you are uncomfortable in your body, you are transgender.”

Well, no, you probably aren’t. There are many reasons adolescents (or anyone else) might feel uncomfortable with their bodies. Shall I count the ways? But the normal discomforts, pleasures, and surprises of puberty are magnified for young people on the autism spectrum, who, Lal and Levine found, misattributed the concrete thinking styles, sensory processing difficulties, and social deficits typical of autism to having gender dysphoria. One explained how having a transgender identity provided “a structured, rule-based community” that alleviated his social isolation. Another said that the dysphoria label “perfectly fit” his “severe OCD, undiagnosed autism, and a general sense of alienation.” Participants with ADHD spoke of how transitioning provided a focused goal for their hyperfixations, soothing their unflagging restlessness.

A second route to transitioning, for nearly half of this cohort, was the motive not to become the opposite sex but rather to escape the sex they were. Many had been sexually abused: One young woman’s distress over her developing breasts “was just from sexual abuse,” she said, yet when she told that to her physician, she was given puberty blockers immediately. Another described his transition as “surgical self-harm” to destroy the “boy whose presence was only worthy of contempt” from his father.

In a gloomy reflection of the state of male-female relations today, a significant number of the participants wanted to transition as a way of opting out of the heterosexual dating market. “[My] eating disorder and dysphoria came from the same place,” said one young woman. “If I had less fat, I would look less female.” Several of these women wanted to create a nonsexual, androgynous body rather than a masculine one, to escape the feeling that their body “was on display—like it was somehow ‘there for boys’ or ‘there for men.’”

For their part, several biological males described transition as a “flight from manhood” and a way to suppress what they felt was an overactive libido. (Note to boys: That’s normal, guys—you’re teenagers.) One said he wanted a “sexual lobotomy” to destroy the “brainwashing” that male sexuality was inherently evil. Some wanted to distance themselves from cultural claims of “toxic” masculinity and the “predatory” male; one associated a “caricature of maleness” with being “brutish” and concluded that “I can’t possibly be that.” Another said he had absorbed “a lot of rhetoric about how much men suck.”

Finally, a third route to transitioning was homophobia, another factor that turns up repeatedly in studies of adolescents in gender clinics. Eleven biological males transitioned primarily to escape the stigma associated with being gay; one said that he “100%” wanted to avoid the shame of homosexuality. Several biological females felt that living as a trans man was preferable to living as a masculine lesbian; one transitioned in an effort to bypass the complexities and stigma she associated with being lesbian.

DISORDER IS DISORDERLY:

Another Major Transgender Suicide Study Crumbles (Leor Sapir, Jun 16 2026, City Journal)

Yet, in what has become routine in this research area, the NHB study’s findings and conclusions later crumbled under scientific reexamination. As a methodological criticism published (to its credit) in the NHB last month—over a year after the original study—shows, the observed elevation in suicide attempts came from a small sample (roughly 100 youth) in a single state (Idaho), at a time when that state’s “anti-transgender” laws were not even in effect. Further, the researchers did not properly control for confounding factors. (The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine has published its own methodological analysis, which is worth reading.)

FADS COME, FADS GO:

Fewer Young People Are Identifying as Trans, Non-Binary, or Non-Heterosexual: A new report suggests the recent surge in non-traditional identities may have peaked (Steve Stewart-Williams, Oct 14, 2025, Nature-Nurture)

First things first, it’s not that young people have become less woke, more religious, or more conservative. It’s also not that they’re spending less time on social media. Kaufmann tested all those hypotheses, and found no support for any of them.

One hypothesis he did find some support for, though, is that the trend is partly due to changes in mental health. Youth mental health hit a low point during the pandemic, and has since bounced back to some degree. Consistent with the idea that this shift drove changes in identification, statistically controlling for mental health weakens the time trend considerably. It doesn’t eliminate it entirely, however, so it can’t just be down to changes in mental health.

Another possibility is that identifying as non-binary or non-heterosexual was, to some extent, a youth fashion that’s now going out of fashion. As Kaufmann put it, the decline “seems most similar to the fading of a fashion or trend. It happened largely independently of shifts in political beliefs and social media use, though improved mental health played a role.”

BIOLOGY IS A STUBBORN THING:

Revealed: How Male and Female Brain Cells Differ in Gene Activity: Variations in gene expression could help to explain why brain-disease risks differ according to sex. (Miryam Naddaf, 4/17/26, Nature)

[T]he study also identified 3,382 genes that showed sex-biased expression in at least one of the six brain regions. A closer look at these genes revealed a set of 133 genes with consistent sex differences in their average expression levels across all cell types and all regions studied. “That’s very much a ground zero for the molecular effects of sex,” says study co-author Armin Raznahan, a child and adolescent psychiatrist also at the National Institute of Mental Health.