Today’s Youth Are Captivated by Dissociation

Today’s Youth Are Captivated by Dissociation
Uruguayan transgender person Sebastian Salaverry Mijares, 18, who started taking hormones to transition more than a year ago, poses outside his family house in Montevideo on Sept. 27, 2020. (Pablo Porciuncula/AFP via Getty Images)
Jennifer Bilek
7/28/2021
Updated:
8/1/2021
Commentary
In less than a decade, what has been called a “transgender human rights movement” has morphed from stories about children and young people being born in the wrong body, to kids with “gender identity disorder” to “gender incongruence,” and now to “gender expression,” complete with its own line of makeup, fashion models, body scars, and hormone home delivery services.

The promotion of the dissociation of children from their sexed bodies receives a boost by a more general embrace by the young of dissociation on social media. And social media has, in turn, been adopted by those seeking to turn a profit off of young people’s body dissociation.

Becca is a young woman who is part of the online community of TikTok youth making videos about their purported dissociative identity disorders. Dissociative identity disorder (DID) used to be called multiple personality disorder (MPD), made famous in the 1976 movie “Sybil,” whose lead character was played by the actress Sally Field. It made a fortune at the box office before the original story was debunked.

In this online community, a “system” hosts what are called “alter personalities.” The alters each have their own consciousness, who are given a voice within the community.

The condition of DID, for those who are believers, arises out of childhood trauma that forces the individual to create other personas, or “alters,” to cope with the pain.

Becca calls herself “the lavender system.” Jamie, an alter of Becca’s, is purportedly the primary protector of the lavender system. Bella is a new alter being “hosted” by Becca, who thereby doesn’t yet know what her role is in “the system.” There are eight personalities living in her body, Becca claims.

This dissociation or splitting of oneself echoes the “gender identity” narrative very closely.

Asher is another alter, one of a 29-person system, hosted by Chris, a 31-year-old man diagnosed with DID. In an Input magazine report, Asher is said to have the largest account in the community of DID TikTok, with 1.1 million followers, amassed since February 2021.

April, another of Chris’s alters, tells us she experiences gender dysphoria because Chris has a male body.

The reclassification of DID in the DSM (“Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” an authoritative text for mental health professionals) from MPD echoes the repetitious changes for the classifications of “gender identity” in the DSM. And like “gender identity” ideology, many professionals feel DID has been debunked.

Dr. Richard Loewenstein, writing for Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, says that in his experience, “many clinicians, researchers, journalists, and members of the public have beliefs about dissociative disorders (DD) founded on unexamined ideas and influenced by media portrayals. Often, both skeptical and naively credulous views of DD appear to be based on the media portrayal, not the scientific literature.”
Dr. Clifford N. Lazarus, writing for Psychology Today, shares his ambivalence, stating, “The fact that the mental health establishment reclassified MPD as DID indicates that the very concept of the disorder is unstable, open to debate, and hard to pin down.”

What can be said with certainty about the “gender identity” craze as it is manifesting in children is that it is hard to pin down. As laws are being changed state to state to replace sex with “gender identity,” there hasn’t been one stable definition of what it is.

Whether it’s real or a performance, it’s obvious that something is happening online that encourages dissociation in children. It feels very real for them. From “gender identity” threads on Reddit and Tumblr to DID TikTok communities, dissociating from reality seems to have mesmerized our youth.
Perhaps we need to examine the relationship between these high-tech social media companies and those in the medical-industrial complex profiting off the portrayals of body dissociation as glamorous and fascinating.
Planned Parenthood (PP), which has become one of the largest companies profiteering off cross-sex hormones, has teamed with the social media platform Tumblr. Tumblr is driving positive associations of “gender identity” ideology and thereby body dissociation as normal and healthy. Tumblr has initiated a campaign supporting PP.
PP also launched on TikTok last year. Before the coronavirus pandemic, TikTok was predominantly favored by British teenagers but is now one of the most popular video-sharing apps in the world, downloaded more than two billion times globally. When lockdowns were enforced, UK installations surged by 34 percent.
Johnson and Johnson is teaming with surgeons and using YouTube to advertise double mastectomies for young women as enhancement surgeries.
Doctors performing sex amputations on youth are also selling their “services” on social media platforms.
Perhaps it’s not the kids who have the problem. They don’t understand that what they perceive as freedom is really the power of marketing. Big Pharma has teamed with Big Tech to sell body dissociation. Youth have been turned into consumers as well as the consumed.
Jennifer Bilek is an artist and investigative journalist tracking the forces behind the gender identity industry. She writes at The 11th Hour Blog.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Jennifer Bilek is an artist and investigative journalist tracking the forces behind the gender identity industry. She writes at The 11th Hour Blog.
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