<p>So much of the conversation around gender ideology centers on de-transitioners, and rightly so. People who were manipulated and mutilated, especially as children, deserve to be heard — not only so they can receive justice, but so others can be spared what was done to them by a medical establishment that they should have been able to trust.</p>
<p>And yet the harm of gender ideology is not limited to medical malpractice. Just ask Simon Amaya Price, the subject of a recent <a href="https://www.iwfeatures.com/documentary/how-this-desister-broke-free-from-the-transgender-contagion/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">documentary by IW Features</a>. His story shows us that the carnage that has been done is not just medical, but fundamentally human — and that our society will continue to crumble if we don’t attempt to understand what got us here in the first place.</p>
<p>Simon is a “desister,” which means that he identified as transgender but reverted to accepting his birth sex before doctors could drug him with cross-sex hormones or operate on him. Unlike so many others who had the misfortune of being entangled in gender ideology as children, he retains his physical health and his body parts.</p>
<p>Still, what’s obvious from his story is that the psychological and social elements of gender transition — which are what eventually lead transgender-identifying people to undergo medical transition — leave lasting damage.</p>
<p>Simon was the first boy at his school to start identifying as transgender — but not the last.</p>
<p><iframe loading="lazy" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gAYCQB8qFL4?si=Y6iQt2K4lWEogNH6" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>“Between the time I left after 10th grade and the time my class graduated, one sixth of the boys in my grade identified as transgender, and a similar proportion continued in the grades below me,” he told IW Features. “In that way, I bear the responsibility as patient zero in my small private high school in a suburb of Boston, and some of these kids medicalized, and there&#8217;s a degree to which I bear some guilt for that.”</p>
<p>It’s understandable on an individual, human level why Simon might feel guilt, especially as he was able to escape gender ideology medically unscathed while many of his peers did not. Still, he was only 14 years old when he started identifying as transgender. A child who can’t even vote or buy a beer can’t be held responsible for this level of social breakdown.</p>
<p>So we have to ask ourselves as a society: who <i>is</i> responsible?</p>
<p>Simon’s story offers some answers.</p>
<p>He recalls being called anti-gay slurs and being sexually assaulted by an older boy in his early to mid-teens, which rendered him lonely. Unfortunately, he was not alone in this: a <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2792857" target="_blank" rel="noopener">2022 study</a> found that transgender-identifying children were two times as likely to have experienced sexual violence as their peers.</p>
<p>This pushed him to join his school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, as he had no friends but wanted and needed community to get him through his trauma. But instead of talking about homophobia and bullying, the Gay-Straight Alliance watched videos by a transgender-identifying YouTuber named ContraPoints, a man who identifies as a woman.</p>
<p>“This is where I learned about the concept of gender dysphoria and transition,” Simon recalled. His health class reinforced this, asking students to place themselves on the “gender unicorn.” And after these ideas were placed into his head, he began searches that led him down the rabbit hole of transgender identity. His therapist at Boston Children’s Hospital immediately affirmed him and referred him to the gender clinic.</p>
<p>This was a pattern among the adults he encountered.</p>
<p>“All of the medical professionals I saw, except when I moved to a new therapist, were explicitly affirming when I brought the subject up with them. Whenever I brought it up with a teacher or a professor, they were also affirming and caved [to] my requests,” he said.</p>
<p>In other words, the adults who should have known better enabled this madness. It was adults who were in positions of authority — in education, in medicine — who could have said “no,” but didn’t, either because they were true believers or because, more likely, they did not want to rock the boat.</p>
<p>But rocking the boat is the only way out of the grasp that gender ideology has on society today. In fact, much of the reason Simon desisted in the first place was because he was forced to start confronting questions about his “gender identity” head-on.</p>
<p>In addition to his father’s pushback, one event in particular helped Simon realize that progressives did not have his best interest in mind: he publicly opposed affirmative action in his freshman year of college, got canceled, and, in the wake of being labeled a “Nazi,” lost any social credit he got from identifying as transgender. This, he said, made him recognize the greater fallacy of gender ideology.</p>
<p>Simon&#8217;s story is a testament to what actual bravery looks like: a willingness to stick to one’s convictions — and, in the case of gender ideology, to reality itself. Every American who is willing, in the immortal words of Nancy Reagan, to “just say no” to an ideology that is so obviously false on its face can create a positive ripple effect, just like Simon did, and help restore sanity to this country.</p>
<p><i>Neeraja Deshpande is a policy analyst at Independent Women (</i><a href="http://independentwomen.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><i>independentwomen.com</i></a><i>) and a contributor to IW Features.</i></p>
<p><em>The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.</em></p>

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He Was Almost A Victim Of The Transgender Cult. His Story Is A Warning.