Jordan Peterson Explains Why Gender Dysphoria Often Resolves Without Medical Transition in Adolescent Girls
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Jordan Peterson Explains Why Gender Dysphoria Often Resolves Without Medical Transition in Adolescent Girls
Jordan Peterson speaks with a detransitioner who began medical transition at 13 and had a double mastectomy at 15. The conversation examines the psychological and biological realities of female puberty that often underlie gender dysphoria in adolescent girls. Peterson explains how increased negative emotion during puberty, body self-consciousness, and autism spectrum traits can converge to create distress that was once understood to resolve naturally in 80-90% of cases. The discussion challenges the modern practice of affirming medical transition in adolescents and reveals what research showed before gender dysphoria became politicized.
January 12, 2023
The Medical Transition Journey
A young woman shares her story of medical transition that began at age 12 when she first experienced gender dysphoria. After seeing a therapist and receiving a diagnosis, she started on puberty blockers at 13, moved to cross-sex hormones, and underwent a double mastectomy at 15. By 16, she realized medical transition was not the right decision for her and stopped. Her early puberty began around age nine, earlier than most of her peers, which she remembers as emotionally difficult.
The Biology of Female Puberty and Negative Emotion
Jordan Peterson explains a critical fact that was never communicated to this young woman by her therapists: before puberty, boys and girls experience approximately the same levels of negative emotion, including anxiety, emotional pain, frustration, disappointment, shame, guilt, and self-consciousness. However, when girls hit puberty, their negative emotion levels increase significantly. On average, biologically mature women are more sensitive to negative emotion than biologically mature men, and this difference emerges at puberty.
Peterson outlines three possible explanations for this phenomenon. First, sexual dimorphism in physical strength emerges at puberty. While boys and girls are fairly evenly matched physically before puberty, afterward boys become taller, stronger, heavier, and possess much greater upper body strength. Women are at a physical disadvantage regarding anything involving physical combat, so it makes sense for them to be somewhat more sensitive to threat.
Second, women are more sexually vulnerable than men because they bear a much higher cost for reproduction through pregnancy and the protracted dependence of infants. This greater vulnerability makes it adaptive for them to be more sensitive to any threat associated with sexual activity.
Third, women are generally charged with primary responsibility for infants, who are extremely dependent and vulnerable. A case can be made that adult women's nervous systems are actually adapted for the mother-child dyad rather than for the emotional well-being of the individual woman alone. Women need to be threat-sensitive because they will be taking care of extremely dependent children, even though the negative consequence is that women are much more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety than men. Cross-culturally, this difference ranges from three to one to five to one. Men have their own associated pathologies, including higher rates of antisocial behavior and alcohol abuse, but women predominate on the negative emotion side.
Early puberty exacerbates these issues because it means dealing with the complexities of physiological transformation at a very young age, along with whatever hormonal turbulence emerges. Peterson emphasizes that it is very common for young women to experience high levels of negative emotion focused particularly on their bodies. Female negative emotion characteristically manifests as body shame and self-consciousness, likely because women are evaluated more rigorously on the basis of physical appearance than men, while men are evaluated more harshly on performance indicators like socioeconomic status.
The Complex Childhood That Led to Transition
The detransitioner confirms that every single aspect Peterson described played a role in her childhood distress, her transition, and eventually her detransition. Growing up as a tomboy and on the autism spectrum (diagnosed only the previous year), she had difficulty getting along with other girls and found she fit in more with boys. When she hit puberty earlier than most peers, she got taller and took pride in keeping up with the boys. As years went on, however, the boys got taller and physically outmatched her, which brought distress.
As socialization became more sex-oriented with age, she found it even harder to fit in with girls while simultaneously noticing a divide emerging between herself and boys. This created profound loneliness—she didn't feel like one of the girls, but was also losing connection with male friends she deeply cared about.
Body image issues started from a very young age. Born into an image-oriented, sex-oriented society, she looked forward to developing breasts and a mature body before puberty. Once puberty arrived, her body wasn't what she expected and she was disappointed with her appearance. Very skinny and smaller-chested, she grew up in an era that glorified voluptuous bodies with lots of curves—bodies described as bottom-heavy, hourglass, or pear-shaped. She was quite thin, slightly muscular, with shoulders that were the widest point of her body. She developed a complex over this. She preferred short hair, felt she didn't look like other girls her age, felt she wasn't pretty, and believed she never would be.
The Normality of Adolescent Body Distress
Peterson responds that it is very rare for an adolescent, particularly a female adolescent, to feel attractive in the early stages of puberty. While she may have experienced these feelings in an exaggerated manner for the reasons she described, everything she experienced is in some real sense par for the course for the vast majority of people for a few years.
Autism, Interest in Things, and Communication with Boys
Peterson addresses the autism spectrum aspect. The biggest reliable difference documented between males and females—one that becomes even larger in egalitarian societies—is orientation of interest. Women are higher in negative emotion and more agreeable (both compassion and politeness). Though this difference isn't massive, it's significant and maximizes in egalitarian societies, suggesting it's biological.
The biggest difference, however, is in interest: males are more reliably interested in things, while females are more reliably interested in people. People on the autistic spectrum are also more reliably interested in things. Extremely autistic people are described psychologically as lacking theory of mind—they have a hard time understanding what's going on in someone else's mind and tend to be almost entirely thing-oriented. There is a much higher preponderance of autistic symptoms among engineers, particularly in Silicon Valley. When male and female engineers marry, their children are disproportionately likely to be autistic.
The fact that she is tilted toward the autistic end of the spectrum might simply indicate neurological wiring that tilts her toward interest in things—not necessarily autistic in itself, just part of normal variation in attentional orientation. However, being on the spectrum and more interested in things would make it more difficult to communicate with girls, who are reliably more interested in people.
Self-Consciousness, Body Image, and Gender Dysphoria
On the image front, Peterson explains that self-consciousness ties into negative emotion. When you're on stage talking to people and become aware of yourself, it tends to make you nervous, sweaty, and uncomfortable—experiencing high levels of negative emotion. Self-consciousness itself appears to be a manifestation of negative emotion; the two are incredibly tightly linked statistically, almost indistinguishable from one another.
Very often in girls, self-consciousness in relationship to their body (one of the primary ways they're assessed for attractiveness and social status) takes the form of intense preoccupation with body and image. This can be exacerbated by whatever social trends are in place, but it's a very deep-seated problem. The fact that she hit puberty earlier obviously made this more complicated because it meant she was less neurologically and practically mature when she had to contend with all these issues.
Peterson emphasizes that everything she described could, in some sense, have been attributed to the difficulties of normative development.
Deconstructing the Two Components of Gender Dysphoria
Peterson asks listeners to imagine gender dysphoria as having two components. The first is a tendency toward negative emotion—suffering from anxiety, depression, frustration, disappointment, pain, shame, guilt, and self-consciousness. The second is more specifically focused on discomfort with the body. The first component is the bulk of it.
Looking across forms of psychopathology, the major segment is high levels of negative emotion like depression and anxiety. A secondary segment is the particular manifestation of that—in this case, body dysmorphia. The claims that uninformed mental health professionals make about elevated suicide risk if you're gender dysphoric are erroneous. The elevated risk for suicide is actually a consequence of the general proclivity for depression and anxiety, not a specific consequence of gender dysphoria, or at least that's only a small subcomponent.
The main cluster of psychopathological manifestation is centered on heightened levels of negative emotion, which of course spikes for adolescent girls.
What Research Showed Before Politicization
Peterson reveals important research that may not have been communicated to the young woman. Good long-term studies of children with gender dysphoria were conducted in Toronto by Ken Zucker, who ran a clinic for gender dysphoric kids before this became part of the culture war. Zucker was a straight and honest scientist, a very good researcher, and not a political person.
His clinic's peer-reviewed studies showed that gender dysphoria of the type she described is relatively rare, but if you leave kids alone until they're 18 or 19, 80 to 90 percent of them settle into their biological identity. However, about 80 percent of them also adopt a homosexual orientation.
The pathway Zucker identified before politicization was: a child who was gender non-conforming temperamentally (not having a pattern of typical female interests), prone to depression and anxiety, would develop gender dysphoria. This combination would produce intense gender dysphoria around the dawn of puberty. But if clinicians simply backed off and waited, those kids would settle into their bodies, generally adopting a homosexual orientation.
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