Correlation isn’t always causation, but as social media-related body image issues have spiked, so too has adolescent gender dysphoria: the UK’s Gender Identity Development Service reported a twenty-fold increase in referrals over a decade, from 138 children in 2011 to 2,383 in 2021. This was primarily driven by adolescents, with 15 being the most common age of referral. Similar patterns are observable in other developed countries including New Zealand and Canada. Reliable statistics are more difficult to obtain for the United States, where healthcare is decentralised, but a 2022 UCLA report shows that estimates for the total number of American transgender youth has risen sharply: 0.5 percent of Americans overall identify as transgender, but this rises to 1.4 percent among youth aged 13–17. According to one recent study, new gender dysphoria diagnoses in American children nearly trebled over five years, from 15,172 referrals in 2017 to 42,167 in 2021.
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