Was my 10-year-old client with gender dysphoria influenced by exposure to beliefs of the “Transgender Movement,” perhaps in school? If so, would she have struggled with anxiety about her biologic gender at such a young age without that experience?

We can tell you with authority that this young girl was influenced by a conversation with peers. This was touched on in the school environment and the general awareness of her classmates at such a tender age, of the transgender movement ideology, created confusion and fear. This is normal for young children as a part of growing up, that new things that represent a potential defect of some kind for which they can be criticized or will just feel within themselves there is something defective or undesirable about their makeup, that someone will find out and then criticize them, is a major distraction and impediment to growth and learning, and a threat to emotional health in particular. That is what happened here, that this young girl who had some karmic remembrance of other lifetimes and struggles with gender, became alarmed because this issue was out in the open being discussed among young schoolchildren, and as always happens, felt to be the butt of jokes and teasing using that as a motivation, not through any particular awareness that it applied to the victim of the moment, but simply because this is what young kids do to one another. They tease one another to see if they can get a rise out of the other person, to try out having some kind of power, and work through aggressive impulses using the tools at hand in what is current in the dialogue among the peer group, to use the buzzwords of the day and the cultural shibboleths as understood by young people, inevitably imperfectly, but still wanting to try out being an aggressor because they have witnessed it seem to work to advantage for others. And so, young people will try this on for size and often end up inadvertently wounding their peers unintentionally. They are not thinking so much about how the teasing will be felt by the other party and might be carried on in their makeup as a wound that will fester and perhaps grow with intensity over time. They are simply learning about life and often just mimicking one another and trying out a bad idea. But nonetheless, the mud sticks to its target and that taint may be taken to heart and undermine self-confidence, and that is what happened with your client. She developed a very significant social anxiety because of inner fears and worries about her gender orientation, needlessly, because she was picking up discussion from her peers about this, having been somewhat incompletely informed about the ideas of the transgender movement, and lacking maturity and an adult perspective, could readily distort that partial knowledge in various ways when used as ammunition in sparring with one another. This is not so different at young ages than what puppies do in their play, to growl and mock fight, to even mouth one another, but without really biting in strength. And as you know, unfortunately, there are always a percentage of even quite young people who are on the spectrum of savagery in being disconnected from their higher self to a large degree and capable of quite heartless attacks against their peers, and that can be quite damaging, much more so than normal horseplay and teasing. In this case, your client suffered not only unjustly but inappropriately, because she does not truly have a severe gender dysphoria but only the fear this is so. She will work out her sense of things and her identity will jibe with her biology, and because you have worked on her, there will not be long-term scars from what has happened, and that is a blessing, indeed.