Tourette Symptoms: Possibly a New Social Contagion

Are Tourette Symptoms a new form of social contagion? A new article from the Wall Street Journal intrigued me.  The title: "Teen Girls Are Developing Tics. Doctors Say TikTok Could Be a Factor." Here are the opening paragraphs:

Teenage girls across the globe have been showing up at doctors’ offices with tics—physical jerking movements and verbal outbursts—since the start of the pandemic.

Movement-disorder doctors were stumped at first. Girls with tics are rare, and these teens had an unusually high number of them, which had developed suddenly. After months of studying the patients and consulting with one another, experts at top pediatric hospitals in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. discovered that most of the girls had something in common: TikTok.

According to a spate of recent medical journal articles, doctors say the girls had been watching videos of TikTok influencers who said they had Tourette syndrome, a nervous-system disorder that causes people to make repetitive, involuntary movements or sounds.

No one has tracked these cases nationally, but pediatric movement-disorder centers across the U.S. are reporting an influx of teen girls with similar tics. Donald Gilbert, a neurologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center who specializes in pediatric movement disorders and Tourette syndrome, has seen about 10 new teens with tics a month since March 2020. Before the pandemic, his clinic had seen at most one a month.

I'm intrigued for a couple reasons. Back in college I spent some timing hanging around with guy who was smart and funny. He was also a really good tennis player and he had an easy going confidence.I was a several years younger than he was and I was not feeling confident about who I was at age 17. He also had a tic. Occasionally, his head suddenly jerked while he talked. This happened every couple minutes. After a while, I noticed that I was starting to do that too. The fact that I started doing this seemed odd, because I didn't decide to do it. It just started happening. I consciously clamped down on that behavior and I stopped doing it a few after I noticed myself doing it.

I'm also interested in this article because of the social contagion angle related to the sudden spike in teenaged girls who claim they were born in the wrong bodies. I'm speaking of the transgender social contagion phenomenon discussed extensively by Abigail Shrier (and see here).

Continue ReadingTourette Symptoms: Possibly a New Social Contagion

Facts as Hate Speech

Colin Wright is a biologist who often writes about sex and gender. He often pisses off people by claiming that there are only two sexes (and see here). But now, according to Instagram, he has also engaged in "hate speech." Here is his Tweet where he explains what happened at Instagram:

You can read the entire thread here.

Continue ReadingFacts as Hate Speech

The Vindication of Abigail Shrier

Abigail Shrier has taken a lot of heat for sharing well-documented information and raising important questions about transgender treatment and therapy. For example:

Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage has created quite a stir. When it was first released in June 2020, Amazon refused to allow the publisher to run sponsored advertisements of the book. After Joe Rogan interviewed Shrier on his podcast, some Spotify employees demanded that the episode be taken down. More recently, Target took the book off its shelves in response to a complaint from a person on Twitter, but later put it back due to other complaints from free speech advocates. Several others have declared the book to be transphobic and harmful to the trans* community (just skim some of the reviews on Amazon)—a particularly hot take among those who have not read the book.

A few days ago, Shrier published an article discussing interviews she has conducted with two well credentialed experts. Shrier's expressed motive is to help families with teenagers who are struggling with how to proceed. Shrier's interviews vindicated many of the points she made in her previous writings, including her book, Irreversible Damage. Here is an excerpt from "Why Marci Matters: Dr. Marci Bowers’ and Dr. Erica Anderson’s Candor Could Help Thousands of Families":

On Monday, I published probably the most important piece of my career thus far: an interview I did with two top gender medical providers – vaginoplasty expert and gender surgeon Dr. Marci Bowers and child psychologist at the UCSF gender clinic, Dr. Erica Anderson, who spoke candidly about risks of current treatment protocols guiding transgender medicine.

For the first time in the U.S., top gender medical providers collectively acknowledged four facts: early puberty blockade can lead to significant surgical complication and also permanent sexual dysfunction; peer and social media influence do seem to play a role in encouraging the current, unprecedented spike in transgender identification by teen girls; and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) – of which both Bowers Anderson are board members – has been excluding doctors who question current medical protocols to its detriment.

But the bombshell – the point made to me in interviews with so many endocrinologists, but never by any providers of transgender medicine – was that “orgasmic naïveté” is real and it’s a problem.

In Bowers’ words:

When you block puberty, the problem is that a lot of the kids are orgasmically naive. So in other words, if you've never had an orgasm pre-surgery and then your puberty's blocked, it's very difficult to achieve that afterwards. And I think that I consider that a big problem, actually. It's kind of an overlooked problem that in our informed consent of children undergoing puberty blockers, we've in some respects overlooked that a little bit.

Continue ReadingThe Vindication of Abigail Shrier