Heidi, I'm a democrat and I can't even begin to fathom how the gender identity thing blew up the way that it did and it's become a political hot potato politicians of all stripes don't know what to do with. Gender identity disorder used to be rare and now it's a cultural phenomenon among some of the younger people and there's a well entrenched system where people, including democratic politicians, are afraid to question it out loud lest they become targets for harassment like author J.K. Rowling has for speaking out. Kamala Harris can't fix the problem. Neither could Trump or any third party candidate.

It's actually not in the wheelhouse of a president as at all because it's a psychological/medical issue. It's really about mental health.

Normally playing around with gender bending was something that members of the gay and lesbian community would do as a way of being 'out' as a gay person. An old friend of mine is a gay man, he's middle aged like me, and years ago I asked him about all this gender identity crisis stuff with young people and he had no clue what was going on with this at all. He didn't know what I was talking about and had to look it up online himself and was dumbfounded by it.

The number of people who actually thought they were born in the wrong body and wanted sex change operations used to be very small and typically were adults usually in their 30s or older. They had to undergo years of psychotherapy before they were allowed to have sex change surgery. But now we have all these kids and younger adults convinced there is something wrong with their bodies, that they were born 'wrong'. Unfortunately they are posting with each other on various forums online and are reinforcing each other's gender anxiety and they are carrying this gender identity crisis stuff into their personal real life friendship groups, so in turn their friends begin to question if their bodies are also 'wrong'.

It's called social contagion. It's the same concept as the Salem witch trials craziness from 300 years ago. Hysteria and anxiety can spread from person to person, like the way a contagious flu virus passed around, except social contagion spreads psychological problems. The anxiety becomes socially contagious and spins out of control, completely changes how groups of people think and behave. Three hundred years ago innocent people were accused of witchcraft and killed in New England because anxious paranoid people thought they saw evidence of 'witchcraft' everywhere. Today we've got clusters of anxious kids and younger adults who think they were born the wrong sex and need to change their bodies to ease their anxiety issues.

We need what is happening in places like Great Britain, Norway and some of the other European countries where the national medical organizations are putting a stop to things like minors using puberty blocker hormones and having gender surgeries and are starting to take a serious look at the mental health issues behind gender dysphoria in kids and younger adults. This is a form of body dysmorphic disorder- an anxiety disorder where people who are normal looking mistakenly believe they are disfigured. With gender dysphoria they think they were born in the wrong body, were born the wrong sex and feel they have the wrong set of genitalia. Unfortunately the Internet brings people who pepetuate this mindset together with people who are pushing fringe agendas like post-genderism, having dozens or hundreds of genders, etc. along with those making money off of all this.

Sadly my oldest niece is a jerk and treats her kids badly emotionally, so her middle daughter is now 'non-binary' gender with emotional problems that aren't being addressed. Unfortunately there really need to be more psychological studies done looking at people with gender identity issues. We know that a lot of them are on the autism spectrum but not all are. But it would be helpful if they looked at what is happening in these young people's lives. Are they from emotionally dysfunctional homes? Are they more likely to have been physically or sexually abused as kids, particularly with all these preteen and teen girls who want to become transgender boys and believe being a girl is a bad thing? How many have low self-esteem issues, clinical depression and/or anxiety disorders? One thing that's weird is I live in the blue states northeast and you don't ordinarily see young people who are non-binary or transgender here in the suburbs. You probably see some in the largest cities, but it's not common in the suburbs. But when you see news stories online about parents dealing with having transgender and non-binary kids, a lot of them are suburbanites from the red states. My niece her family live in a red state with a high percentage of libertarians and they are libertarian. What's happening in these places where kids are more prone to developing identity crises? It's the same weird thing where that trend of giving baby girls masculine first names is far more common and popular in the conservative southern and midwestern states, especially the midwestern states, and is far less common in the northeastern blue states. Until more is known about the home lives, family dynamics, and mental health issues of young people with gender identity disorders it's going to be difficult to get a handle on the problem.