The Gender Bubble

How exploding numbers of trans-identified kids looks like a stock-market bubble

If you’re a parent of a trans-identified child, a medical practitioner, a teacher or a counsellor, a member of the LGB community, or a Gender Critical feminist concerned about the number of children being rushed into gender reassignment without safeguards in Canada and around the world, you may be like me, constantly aghast, wondering how can this possibly be happening?   

Is this a social contagion as has been widely speculated?  Is this a function of kids being groomed and indoctrinated somehow in the dark recesses of Tumblr and Reddit? Is this a mass hysteria or delusion?  It seems to me as the parent of a child who fits the pattern of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, who are among the tens or hundreds of thousands of other teen girls who have gone down this road in the last decade, that I am constantly trying to peer into a black box looking for contours in the shadows and trying to understand this darkness. 

It's now been twelve months since I was shaken from my delusion that my child changing her pronouns at school was a harmless and passing fad – and when I looked up from the things of life that occupy us all, the kids, the activities, the pets, the parents and all the business of life, I found myself in a world I didn’t recognize.  A world of horrors that seem to look a lot like they belong in a science fiction dystopia.   

I’ve obsessed with the question, “What is this?” and “Where did it come from?”  and I know I’m not alone.  Mia Ashton’s brilliant twitter thread on social contagion explores this topic and I share here another angle on the analysis – one that predicts an end to this departure from biological reality.  The only question perhaps, as we always ask in the finance and economic world is:  will it be a hard or a soft landing?

In my recent thinking, as markets around the world have peeled back stock prices in some sectors by 75%, and as bond markets shudder with the impact of dramatic interest rate hikes, I realize I’m trained in the tools to talk about what’s happening.  I have been sitting on the model that describes the explosion of trans-identified children the whole time, and if this model fits, it predicts what will end up happening with this frightening phenomenon as the bubble bursts.  I have the descriptive and predictive model of the gender cult because I have lived the analogues in stock market phenomenon for two decades.   

I’m a Chartered Investment Manager and I began my career in finance and banking on September 11, 2001, the day I received my offer to work as a business-banking associate for one of our Big Five Banks in what would turn out to be a line of business that collapsed because of the internet bubble.

The first day I began my role as an investment advisor a few years later, I was introduced to the work of Nobel Prize winning Economist Dr. Daniel Kahneman, and the principles of the field of Behavioral Finance. It was once widely assumed that investors are fundamentally a rational bunch, making decisions about investing and trading with their lifesavings in logical and pragmatic ways with the best available information. As it turns out, according to research finding of people like Kahneman, there are herds of investors who are completely divorced from fundamental reality and are ruled, as Warren Buffet has observed for decades, by the two primal emotions of fear and greed and because of those emotional rulers, people individually and collectively make consistently, and sometimes very bad decisions.

As I reflect on what increasingly appears to be another type of bubble, an ideological one, it occurred to me that one of the drivers of financial bubbles is also one of the four Cardinal Sins: Greed. The longer I contemplate what I see as the Trans Bubble, the more I see that it too is driven by one of those Cardinal Sins namely Pride, in the form of Moral Righteousness.

When these types of emotions take over, and reason is subsumed by feelings, we disconnect from reality entirely and our collective consciousness becomes possessed and driven by what we have historically called evil - and the outcomes of the trans bubble, the sterilization of vulnerable children by the thousands in Canada, that is hidden behind the pretty rainbow flag and the nice sounding word “Inclusion, is appropriately described as such. Evil. The force behind it, the Vainglory of Pride, is so morally certain and unquestionable that it collectively abuses criticism and questions into silence, terrorizing objectors under threats of social shame, humiliation, investigation, and career destruction.

A more secular way to think of these bubbles is that they are part of a collective psychosis or mass hysteria - sometimes called a Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI) or more recently described as a Mass Formation. Over the centuries these MPIs have manifested as witch hunts, laughing hysterias and even genocidal ideologies. When this happens, we are swept up by felt senses and addictive passions. Group beliefs take the place of facts and individual reason, and like lemmings led to the edge of cliff by the Pied Piper, we rush towards the precipice of disaster.

We can understand the patterns of these types of hysterias using centuries of stock market bubbles as a proxy - because unlike the dozens or hundreds of moral panics and mass delusions that have captured people over the centuries, the patterns of irrational behavior that repeat in capital markets and economics are recorded and analyzed with data over time - and we have centuries of documented cyclical disconnections from reality to examine to see that these are regular patterns of human behavior.

The major disconnections from reality we see with gender ideology, originated in the academy and the elite universities as a sub-branch of an ideology known as Critical Theory, or colloquially as Wokeism. Queer theory says that there is no such thing as biological sex, and that gender is a social construction - that it’s made up, as if humans are born a blank slate and are programmed into their gender by parents and social expectations. This bubble has expanded to such an extent that it is being taught to children in public schools all over Canada and the US - widely to children who are still young enough to believe in the Easter Bunny and that they can be a super-hero.

Like the hedge-fund bulls and Wall Street bankers, gender zealots cannot be told that their party will end badly and will leave the lives of millions destroyed - nor can they be convinced that prepubescent children are too young to make decisions about becoming lifelong medical patients by choice. The social justice warriors, the DEI people, are high with the addictive euphoria that comes, not from the greed that drives the stock market, but from the self-righteous rush that comes asserting moral superiority over others - their own sinful Pride.

In the peak of the stock market there are no heard voices of dissent. Newspapers rarely published them; media scoffed them to the margins but in the end we always have the few contrarian bears who are proven right.

Stock Market bubbles have been a phenomenon for centuries, the most recent large-scale (systemic) bubble bursting gave us the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 when the predatory practices of aggressive American mortgage lenders, combined with the bundling of those toxic mortgages into instruments that obscured their underlying nature, stretched credulity in the narrative to its limit.

American Lenders sold NINJA loans. Those No Income; No Job mortgage loans featuring extremely low near-term teaser rates that ratcheted up dramatically after a few years leaving borrowers across America cashflow-crushed, and soon, defaulting on mortgages and walking away from their homes. These mortgages had similar features to department store credit cards that offer no payments for 12 months, but if one fails to pay the entire balance before the 12 months are up, one pays the full interest from the day of purchase at a rate of 31.9%.

Central banks had lowered interest rates following the implosion of the tech bubble at the turn of the century, and with increasingly easy access to borrowing and cheap money, housing prices in the US skyrocketed. Bush era deregulation made it so that, unbeknownst to most borrowers, American Sub-Prime (B-Lending) became “Buyer Beware” instruments.

The more temptingly cheap and apparently “risk-free” mortgages were written, the more housing prices went up. That was until tranches of toxic Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBSs) began to demonstrate that their underlying mortgages, bundled into supposedly safe income instruments, were not safe at all.  All of this seems to parallel the false promises of the gender industry claiming that puberty blockers are reversible pause-buttons.  Risk-free returns are always a red flag, but in euphorias, hysterias and bubbles, magical thinking becomes the norm.  

As borrowers began to default on their loans, banks, hedge funds and institutional investors who were trading in these MBSs realized that the the hundreds of billions of dollars that they had once viewed as liquid, high quality, and AAA safe, found that they were holding garbage-grade notes that no-one in the world wanted to touch.

As we know, these toxic assets ended up bankrupting massive institutions like Lehman Brothers, collapsing others like Bear Stearns, and forcing once iconic firms like like Goldman Sachs to beg for high-priced bailouts from Warren Buffet as a global liquidity crisis locked up markets around the world.

The low interest rates & the massive increase in housing prices leading up to the bust in the US had fueled consumption and a false sense of growth in the economy. It also fueled the wild party on Wall Street as institutional leverage (borrowing) hit dizzying heights. The removal of regulations made it easier-and-easier to borrow money to invest in more-and-more speculative ways.  Hedge funds, which had become darlings of the investment world, collapsed. Some had been creating returns for investors and managers by having borrowed 90% of their investment dollars. Suddenly as markets collapsed, having been hit with margin calls, the hedge fund industry was crushed.

In the business we called the problem A Contagion. We also refer to the issues that arose out of the crisis, as Systemic.

Perhaps it is useful to share here how a company value, or stock value is typically determined in what we call a fundamental analysis. If you’ve ever seen Dragon’s Den or Shark Tank on television, the Dragons start with simple questions: Do you have any sales? What are you profit margins? Are you unique in your market or do you have competition? What assets do you own? Do you have secure suppliers, and can you meet the demand? In business we call this due diligence. It means that before making major decisions, we do a reality check.

Bubbles form when investors frenzy into a fantasy world that is disconnected from basic realities, when they forget the fundamentals.  When markets are hot and trendy, hucksters and fraudsters are able to hide among the seemingly credible institutions and they make false promises, use lies and deceptions to entice people to invest, Bernie Madoff comes to mind, the creator of the largest Ponzi Pyramid in history.  What are the long-term consequences of these medicines and surgeries?  Have there been any credible studies to support the wild claims and projections?  Are these promises too good to be true?

We can see these things visually in more secular charts, (secular meaning isolated from the larger systemic trends). In Canada, in the days when I was hired into Banking, Nortel Networks and JDS Uniphase were two of the largest companies in the country by value. In the gold-rush-like frenzy, fueled by greedy speculation about our technological future, investors possessed by idea that the stock could only go up and that it was a sure-thing, piled into Nortel, driving prices higher and higher, and the more money that poured in, the more people thought it was a good idea to buy in - until the bubble burst. In the years that followed scandals came to light.  Accounting irregularities, cooked books and false reports. 

A more recent example of a secular bubble is the Canadian Cannabis company, Canopy Growth, which peaked in the $60/share range in 2019 before crashing to below $5 or by almost 95% of its value: I personally know investors, in spite of being warned about the nature of these bubbles and the madness of greed, made and then lost millions on Cannabis stocks.

Stock market bubbles fit the patterns of Mass Delusions, Mass Psychoses and Moral Panics and seem to be common.

During the Dutch Tulip Mania centuries ago, according the famous book, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay, a single tulip bulb of the variety called the Admiral Liefken, sold for almost ten times the market price of four fat oxen and almost forty times the market price of twelve fat sheep and so it is clear with dozens of historic examples of complete and total human irrationality that we are capable of buying into ideas that not only have no value, but end in human destruction and misery. It’s one thing to lose money in the collapse of a greed bubble, it’s another entirely to have a bubble driven by the sin of Moral Righteousness.

The explosion of children presenting to gender clinics, especially since 2015 when Jazz Jennings debuted on reality TV, is terrifying. Richer data about this trend is emerging almost daily. The latest number I heard about the number of gender clinics in the US is up from three hundred, as I read in 2019-2020 publications, to over seven hundred. In 2005 there were less than a dozen in the country.

It’s important to articulate what this means in explicit terms. Childhood sex-change interventions involve the administration of puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones. Puberty-Blockers are SOLD to kids with dysphoria, and to parents of those kids as temporary pause-buttons to allow for an “evaluation period” of their cross-sex identification. They are billed as totally reversible, yet, in the investigation of the Tavistock GIDS clinic in the UK, now shut down, under rigorous investigation, and condemned by the UK Health Minister as unsafe for children, statistics emerged that demonstrated that 98.7% of children put on puberty-blockers went on to cross-sex hormones.

In those cases, we now understand that because those children will not develop secondary sex characteristics (breasts & widening hips in girls, testicular and penile growth and development in boys) that these children will not only be sterilized but will likely never develop the ability to experience sexual arousal and orgasm in their lifetimes.

Unlike any of the historic stock market bubbles where the direct casualties are the individual investors who invested at the peak of the chart, who lost everything they had; and the indirect casualties who lost jobs during the resultant recessions, the casualties of this bubble are our vulnerable children.

The kids who are undergoing medical transition, at the time of transitions, are widely reported as having multiple co-morbid mental health and neurological conditions like compulsive behavior, mood disorders and autism. The casualties are the families destroyed by schools who alienate parents who might question the cross-sex ideations of their children - who are cut out of their children’s lives by the schools and the courts. The casualties are the intimate relationships never to be experienced as these children grow into adulthood. The casualties are healthy bodies and the shortened lives of these people, who became lifelong medical patients, subjects of pharmaceutical experiments and barbaric surgeries performed by doctors, whose first oath is to do no harm, who removed healthy reproductive organs from children and young people in the name of an over-hyped fad.

We’ve had the stats from the Tavistock GIDS clinic for children presenting for transition from between 2007 to 2017 as surging 4,400%. In Ottawa, Canada, the city I live in, our clinic at the children’s hospital is up 2,000% since 2014. It’s the same story and the same terrifying graph everywhere.

There is an old and perhaps apocryphal story about the stock bubble of 1929, before markets lost 90% of their value after the roaring twenties, when Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK, decided it was time to get out of the markets. He was getting his shoes shined according to the story, and the shoeshine boy began giving him stock tips.

As an investment professional I’ve seen this time and again. People calling about Bitcoin, or about cannabis stocks, or real-estate in the frenzy of price explosions asking how to get in on the action. In Ottawa, which was once known as Silicon Valley North, where tech was the largest employer in 2001, when I was hired into a brand new division for the bank, in Internet-Banking, it was impossible to go for dinner without overhearing conversations about Nortel Options, or Rebel.com, a brand that raised millions in an Initial Public Offering (IPO) with an internet address, no product, no service and no sales.

Before the Housing Crash and Financial Crisis, if you’ve seen the movie, “The Big Short,” analysts went to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the major ratings agencies, like Moody’s, trying to convince the regulators and the rating agencies that there were deep systemic risks that could blow up the financial system. There was simply no appetite for the conversation.

These bubbles eventually burst. Perhaps, when it comes to the gender bubble, we will remember that moment as the time when a female nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States declined to define what a woman is; Perhaps a leading detransitioner’s voice will rise to prominence and become clarion caller to sanity.

Perhaps we will mark the peak of the trans bubble with the release of the Interim Cass Report in the UK, which led to the closure of the Tavistock Gender Identity Disorder Services (GIDS) clinic in the UK by the Minister of Health - who declared the gender clinic, which had been run under the auspices of the National Health Service of the United Kingdom, to be unsafe for children. Here we can see the peak of the graph and the beginning of the decline.

No-one rings a bell when these events have begun to collapse, but in the forensic analysis, the evidence and argument that the hysteria was a delusion all along appears to have always been there. Voices of the bears, stampeded by the bulls.

When it came to the Global Financial Crisis precipitated by the US Housing bubble, the contagion was first brought to light in May of 2007. By September, the central banks had stepped in and lowered interest rates by an unprecedented 0.75% as part of a series to mitigate the problem.

Over the next twelve months, the financial world shook as it became apparent that the greed, that cardinal sin, had driven the global economy to the very brink of collapse. One Financial Analyst I know, working for a big bank on Bay Street, whose mandate was assessing the risk of doing business with other global banks told us later that we were within thirty minutes of the complete collapse of the global economy.

In this case, we lemmings collectively avoided the disaster of going over the cliff, and we found ourselves rebuilding institutions and a sense of reality over a period of deep recession and reflection as we asked ourselves, “how in hell did we not see this before?”

The signs of the gender bubble are everywhere. I’ve spoken to more than one parent of children in Ottawa public schools where 30% to 40% of girls in the class are identifying as trans or non-binary. Speculation is that this is a social contagion, like the laughing sickness documented at a Tanzanian boarding school in the early 60’s, or like the explosion of one reported case of binging and purging, a unique phenomenon at that time in 1972 to millions of teenage girls in the 80s and 90s with bulimia is perhaps not quite the right model. Universities, public schools, corporations, and governments were not all drawn in to supporting the self-harm of eating disorders. What we have is systemic and widespread and has never been seen in human history. A destructive idea that says, not only can children choose their gender, but that it’s a good idea to do it medically.

Pew research released a study in June 2022 where they announced that now, fully 5% of Americans under 30 are identifying as Gender Non-Conforming. In my family, I have a child, born daughter, who has medicalized and believes she is a male. She like many thousands of children have, has cut me out of her life for asking questions about the medical side-effect of cross-sex hormones. My natal brother is AGP. My niece’s two half-sisters, ROGD. My cousin’s daughter too.  On and on I could list.   

Start having this conversation and asking questions and you’ll see this is everywhere - like shoeshine boys giving stock tips. Like overhearing conversations about weed stocks at the restaurant.

In Canada what is horrifying is that federal legislation prevents any therapist from asking questions. No politician will touch the issue, afraid to be condemned as bigoted and transphobic.  On one hand, the legislation says that conversion therapy is illegal, and that a therapist, doctor, teacher, or counsellor cannot attempt to change someone’s gender identity, which means that if a girl says she’s a boy, no-one is allowed to disagree with her. On the other hand, professionals, like an endocrinologist I know from Montreal, simply remove themselves from dealing with trans-identified patients at all, because the professionals know that for one wrong word, they could be reported to their professional colleges for anti-trans discrimination and subjected to investigations for transphobia. 

Like the insiders on Wall Street, who knew what was happening and declined to speak up, people, out of self-preservation instinct are afraid to say anything.   The inflationary element of the bubble itself, viciously destroys anything that would question it’s moral claims of protecting children and of helping them become their “authentic selves.”

Widely, this has given vulnerable children on the path to medicalization, a sense of righteousness, entitlement, and magic shield from any form of criticism: the pretty pink and blue of the trans flag.

Children are literally blackmailing therapists into sterilizing them and rendering them asexual through the administration of blockers, hormones, and surgeries.  Efforts are ongoing to tear down any regulatory or moral barrier to questioning the practice of the gender reassignment of children to make it even easier.

I’ve spoken to a leading child psychiatrist, who has since ghosted me, who indicated concern, but who will not summon the moral courage to speak against what’s happening.  Just like the regulators and ratings agencies of Wall Street at the peak of the housing bubble. 

Warren Buffet has said about bubble bursting, “When the tide goes out, you will find out who has been swimming naked.” The hucksters and the scammers and the sociopaths exploiting the hysterias for their own enrichment and status will be exposed. Investigations will take years. Congressional Hearings. Truths and Reconciliations will be public. Astounding settlements to victims of this cult will be paid. We will mourn for the sins we allowed to be perpetrated on our children.

With the gender bubble, the fears, perhaps like the fears of the prescient people who shorted the housing market, is that if we don’t stop this madness, there will not be a soft landing, and the hard landing may destroy us all.