HIGH SCHOOL CAN SUCK IF YOU'RE AN OUTLIER.

A College Fix contributor attempts to deal with her son's troubles.

Two years ago my husband and I were blindsided by our son telling us he was “trans” without any gender confusion before this time. He only had male friends and only liked and played with typical male toys and activities.

Apparently, boys wanting to cross are relatively rare, all the attention a few runners in Connecticut get notwithstanding.  These parents weren't sure what they were dealing with, and they did some digging.  (It's College Fix, so I can't vouch for the validity or generality of what follows.)

Quickly some interesting commonalities emerged: 85 percent of our boys had an IQ over 130. We learned that these are mostly smart nerdy boys who claim they are straight and want to identify as a lesbian. They also were also often on the autism spectrum, had suffered trauma, or had internalized homophobia.

Put another way, outliers in the social structure of their high school.  That's the way of the world: the matching and mating rituals select for the modal population, and it's always going to be tougher for the people who live farther from the mode, whatever that mode is.  I suspect, though, that the matching and mating opportunities are going to be tougher for crossers than for people who practice their alternative lifestyles with the anatomy they were born with.

It's possible, though, that the columnist is pushing the analysis too far.

But, as we dug deeper, we began to notice more common threads, and as we pulled on them, the story came into focus. On average, our kids are white kids coming from two-parent homes, with comfortable lives — sometimes even VERY comfortable lives.

What on earth can this mean? What are these kids so lacking that they hope to find by identifying as trans? One can speculate.

One possibility is that those upscale communities are precisely the places where the modal selection is strictest: how dare you not aspire to attend the Ivies or to work on cars or otherwise be a nonconformist?

There might be other incentives at work.

Is society pushing a culture of hate of anyone who is not marginalized and these vulnerable kids are picking up on this? Are they embarrassed to be white, male or female and — God forbid — straight? Are they embarrassed of their cookie-cutter homes, their private schools, their bank accounts and successful parents? Maybe it’s simply that kids think it’s cool to be oppressed and part of the victim class.

These are questions that we MUST start asking. We can’t wait for the medical and scientific communities to step up and investigate what’s going on, so it’s up to parents to do the hard work. Teens have always pushed back against expectations. It’s called teenage rebellion. But this rebellion isn’t harmless. The stakes are high. They involve drugs and amputations. We can’t let passing teenage privileged ennui and rebellion result in irreversible harm.

Perhaps it came to this, dear reader, when adults fifty or sixty years ago did not push back too hard on long hair and psychedelia, and perhaps that will be material for future social science.

It might be, though, that the simple act of not frowning on being different will yield dividends.

By third grade, we realized you were different, but we still didn’t realize you were weird. Truthfully, we’re used to people like you. Our family is full of engineers, artists, musicians, computer programmers, and a lot of “free-thinkers.” Family gatherings always have chess, political debates, and quartets around the piano. That’s just us.

And besides, you had a small but solid group of friends. There was Pokémon, then Minecraft, then Magic, then Dungeons and Dragons, then Catan. You were never in the center of things, but you weren’t alone.

But then, in middle school, things started to change. By 7th grade, school finally started to require some effort, and it turned out you were pretty disorganized. People kept calling you smart, but the teachers were annoyed at your humor, and frustrated that you wouldn’t or couldn’t follow the guidelines for assignments. Classmates didn’t appreciate your frank (if accurate) descriptions of their efforts. I’ll admit, we got pretty frustrated with you, too.

And then puberty arrived, with its triple curse of acne, braces, and bizarre growth. The girls appeared to have it all together (I know they don’t, but they do appear that way). And the popular boys seemed to know exactly what to do. They can talk sports to each other, they brag about their romantic exploits. They never get in trouble for stupid reasons like forgetting an assignment three times in a row. Your anxiety started to kick in, and it seemed like you got smaller. And some of your guy friends moved on.

So you drifted over to the weird-o crowd. Well — I’m not sure what you call yourselves, but that’s what we would have called you back when I was in school. At different schools these are the geeks, or the theater kids, the math team kids, or the artsy-fartsy kids.

There's that selection for the mode, again, and no matter how critical a mass there is of the outliers, the mode shifts less rapidly. It has nothing to do with crossing.

They don’t know that gifted kids and ADHD kids and Autism kids and Asperger’s kids are slower to develop emotionally and sexually. They don’t know that sexuality takes time and experience to figure out, and that the majority of trans teens seeking medical treatment haven’t even masturbated or kissed someone yet. They don’t know that 80% of trans children end up becoming comfortable with their birth sex if you just give them time. They don’t know that there are increasing numbers of desisting and de-transitioning people in their twenties. They don’t realize that hormones permanently stunt your growth, decrease your IQ, and can cause sterility. They don’t know that these hormones are prescribed off-label and there’s no research on the long-term outcomes. They don’t even know that the most recent research shows that short-term outcomes are clearly worse.

They don’t realize that you’re weird. But I do. You’re weird, kiddo. You’ll figure that out in a year or two. But that’s okay. We are all weird. And I love you anyway. You’re going to be just fine.

Parents of 'tweens and teens who might be troubled about their "identity" might also find ways to introduce the concept of "peaked in high school" in a tactful way.