It's curiouser and curiouser that the trans community as a whole is unwilling to say: "Whoa, something else is going on here!" when confronted with a ~4000% spike in girls identifying as trans.

Instead, the community doubles down: Nothing to see here! They're all "really trans." (And if they subsequently detransition, they were never trans, it was their fault.)

You can see this at @TaviAndPort, too: a remarkable incuriosity about what's going on with girls.

Of course, there's always a risk when you argue that what makes someone trans is their own testimony alone and then say, "But not *that* person's testimony!"

(We see the same problem at work in the reluctance to disavow the Jessica Yanivs and Karen Whites of the world...)

This insistence that the wave of trans-identifying kids are all really trans and so should start down a medical pathway reminds me of the pharma industry that seeks to define people dealing with many kinds of challenges as chemically imbalanced and in need of drugs.

Or even Big Pharma's approach to opioids: pushing doctors to prescribe irresponsibly, without regard for patient safety. If people end up addicted, what does the pharmaceutical industry care? You might even be able to sell these patients a lifetime of methadone! (So, win-win?)

I don't think we can understand what's going on with the trans movement and kids without looking at the pharmaceutical playbook.

The pharmaceutical industry is not a charity looking out for kids' best interests. It's one of the biggest money-making enterprises in the world.

Transgender identity is a fast-growing market based on lifelong dependence on the pharmaceutical industry. Bringing kids—the younger the better—into the fold means more drugs sold and consumed for longer.

And if thousands of kids are wrongly put on a biomedical pathway, so what? If those kids go far enough in transition—from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones or sterilizing surgeries, destroying the child's endocrine system—that's still a win for Pharma: a customer for life.

For decades, the pharmaceutical industry has been inching diagnoses closer and closer to identities. Check out how bipolar disorder was marketed in the 1990s for an example.

Diagnoses-as-identities are effective recruitment tools, expanding the market. And transforming a questionable pharmaceutical regimen into an untouchable "identity" provides insulation from inquiry and criticism.

Transgenderism is the perfect vehicle for one of the most powerful industries in the world to rake in $$$ and silence critics in the name of diversity and inclusion. Is that really an accident?