Some might say that despite evidence to the contrary, the prevailing myth about G.I.D. – that people are “born in the wrong body” – might well have led the 17th century philosopher René Descartes to re-define today’s emotion-centric culture as, “I feel, therefore I am.”

Either way, the sense that transgender is uniquely a genetic issue has become a foregone conclusion which leads more and more people to assume that God simply somehow made a mistake.

“There probably has been something of an increase in the transgender phenomenon since the media began covering it,” says Dr. Warren Throckmorton, Ph.D., director of college counseling and associate professor of psychology at Grove City College.

Throckmorton has seen close to 4,000 clients since he began counseling in 1980 and approximately 1 to 2 percent of his caseload involves people with “significant gender concerns” – a number that he estimates is about the same as the general population.  Throckmorton has been actively involved in the movement to debunk media and cultural myths that surround gender issues since 1997, when the American Association of Mental Health Counselors unsuccessfully tried to ban reorientation therapy, or counseling that is based upon the belief that homosexuality is not inborn.

“In the 80s, although there were a lot of politics involved in the gay/lesbian issue, it wasn’t an issue in counseling,” he says.  “People would come in and say that they didn’t want to be gay, and the counselor would begin to work on all of their issues.  Part of the problem today is that if kids who have same-sex attraction come in, counselors assume that they are hard-wired that way.  It’s like a curse and the counselor focuses on it so much that it becomes a part of their identity and their daily psychology, so it seems huge to them.”

Randy Thomas is a counselor with Exodus International, the world’s largest Christian referral and information ministry for homosexual issues.  Thomas has been ministering to the homosexual and transgendered communities for almost a decade, and is also concerned about the way that culture exacerbates the problem of gender-related struggles.

“We live in a society that is doing everything it can to obliterate God-given gender roles to begin with,” Thomas says, citing the recently-created term of ‘metrosexual’ and the secular feminist movement.  “We also have a very sexually permissive and abusive society that sometimes creates environments which cause people to not want to identify with their own gender.  Mysandry [fear and/or hatred of men] and mysogyny [fear and/or hatred of women] are rampant and even celebrated.”