Still Don’t Believe in Slippery Slopes?

Photo by Simone Dalmeri (Unsplash)

One of the marks of metamodernism is what some have called the tendency toward “highly narrated identities.” We self-diagnose who we are and, from that, over-narrate our identity under the impression that we are bettering our mental health.

In other words, you self-diagnose and identify with your self-diagnosis. You overanalyze your own story to explain, justify or solve your problems. For example, determining that you have a mental health issue, or that you’re an introvert, or an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or a “3” on the Enneagram, or had a parent whom you’ve diagnosed as passive-aggressive... the list goes on and on. From that self-diagnosis, you then label yourself. Attempt to understand yourself. Heal yourself. Explain yourself. Excuse yourself.

You write your own narrative. And it becomes all consuming. Knowing yourself becomes everything. Getting in touch with who you are becomes everything. Writing your self-narrative becomes the end-all of life.

And once you embrace and affirm this independent self-narrative, letting it become the authority of who you are and how others must view you, there is no end in sight. Once you begin identifying yourself as you wish, rather than how you were made, there is no limit to the potential insanity.

Consider gender identity issues. Gender dysphoria is real and can begin at a young age. But something is happening with Generation Z and Generational Alpha that is different. Dr. Preston Sprinkle, who is the President of the Center for Faith, Sexuality and Gender, wrote a book titled Embodied, which is a look at transgender identities, the church and what the Bible has to say.

In it, he tells the story of a young girl named Helena.

Helena was 14 when she felt she might be attracted to both boys and girls and began to explore what this might mean for her through the online community on Tumblr. It was there that she learned about various gender identities. She read story after story of people identifying as trans. Eventually, she started relating to the stories and began identifying as trans.

Helena learned on Tumblr that taking testosterone was the next step she had to take as a trans person. So, she began Cross-Hormone Therapy or CHT. She found that getting the testosterone was easy—all it took was a one-hour consultation with a counselor who asked about her dysphoria.

Looking back on it, Helena said, “I had all these rehearsed answers that I didn’t genuinely believe, but it’s really popular for the trans community to... help each other rehearse answers and tell each other what to say to doctors.” 

Helena was on CHT for two years. It wasn’t long before problems began popping up. Again, let me let her speak:

It is a common thing for women on testosterone to experience a lot of anger. Then there’s the weird phenomenon where you get upset and want to cry, but you can’t cry... eventually these kinds of problems started getting more apparent and I started feeling miserable. I was angry, like, all the time. Everything made me angry. I felt like I had been put through the wringer with all these emotional changes.... It really messed with my mental health.

Helena also learned that high doses of testosterone in females often cause their ovaries and uterus to atrophy after about five years. Helena was miserable—emotionally, physically, mentally. At some point, she remembers, she just had to say that this was not working.

Ultimately, she decided to de-transition back to a female.

In the last few years, stories like Helena’s have grown tremendously. The sudden rise of dysphoria in teens is a significant and real trend. Psychologists have termed it “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” or ROGD. It’s also a new phenomenon. Classic gender dysphoria usually is apparent at a young age—even as young as between the ages of two and four when they begin to grasp that biologically they are a boy or a girl. The vast majority grow out of it by the time they hit puberty, but it’s almost always been early onset.

What’s happening today is late-onset dysphoria among children, often after puberty, and it’s seeing a sudden leap—particularly among young female teens. To let you know how big of a spike, the Tavistock Centre in London, which was the main gender clinic in the U.K., treated 17 females in 2009. They treated 1,740 females in 2019. That’s a 5,000% increase among females in just 10 years. The controversy surrounding the center’s willingness to rush children into hormone treatments eventually led to its closing.

The current cultural thinking is that who you deem yourself to be is who you are, and no one can – or should – disagree. You have become the ultimate authority on yourself. You are your own god.

When those who embrace this philosophy are pushed about the obvious “slippery slope” on which it rests (e.g. What if someone wants to self-identify as a dog?), they inevitably push back, saying “That’s crazy, no one is doing that or will do that.”

That’s the way all slippery-slope arguments are rebutted: “That simply won’t happen. That’s fearmongering.”

Well....

A school in Aberdeen, Scotland has just allowed a child with “species dysphoria” to identify as an animal. First, we rushed to affirm those who felt that their body was the wrong sex. Now we have our first case to affirm a young child who feels their body is the wrong species.

Earlier, the Scottish Daily Mail said another secondary school pupil had been allowed to identify as a wolf. The student was part of a group known as “furries.” In January of last year, an Aberdeenshire Council was forced to deny claims that children at a secondary school were identifying as cats and requesting litter trays in the lavatories. While the rumor was denied, five months later a teacher in England was recorded telling a pupil she was “despicable” for refusing to accept that her classmate identified as a cat.

I am tempted to now write, “You can’t make this up.” No, you can’t. You don’t have to. Slippery slopes lead down any number of rabbit holes to insanity.

James Emery White

Sources

Benjamin Vincent, “Goodbye Postmodernism, Hello Metamodernism,” Christianity Today, May 6, 2024, read online.

Preston Sprinkle, Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, and What the Bible Has to Say.

Dominic Hauschild, “School Allows Child ‘With Species Dysphoria’ to Identify As an Animal,” The Times UK, October 8, 2024, read online.