Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze

by Abigail Shrier

In October 2017, my own state, California, enacted a law that threatened jail time for healthcare workers who refuse to use patients’ requested gender pronouns.6 New York had adopted a similar law, which applied to employers, landlords, and business owners.

In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), the Supreme Court upheld students’ right not to salute an American flag. Writing for the majority, Justice Robert H. Jackson declared, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Teens of my era who came of age in the early 1990s set the high watermark in the U.S. for teenage pregnancy.2 It’s been plummeting ever since—as have rates of teenage sex—recently reaching multidecade lows.3

‘I don’t know exactly that I want to be a guy. I just know I don’t want to be a girl.’”

Biology—not hyper-feminized stereotypes—is what makes someone a woman.”

Teens and tweens today are everywhere pressed to locate themselves on a gender spectrum and within a sexuality taxonomy—long before they have finished the sexual development that would otherwise guide discovery of who they are or what they desire. Long before they may have had any romantic or sexual experience at all. Young women judged insufficiently feminine by their peers are today asked outright, “Are you trans?”

Adolescents are far less likely to have had actual sex than the women of my generation were at their age—

Many of the adolescent girls who adopt a transgender identity have never had a single sexual or romantic experience. They have never been kissed by a boy or a girl. What they lack in life experience, they make up for with a sex-studded vocabulary and avant-garde gender theory.

The most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) reports an expected

incidence of gender dysphoria at .005–.014 percent for natal males, and a much lower .002–.003 percent for natal females, based on the numbers of those who, a decade ago, sought medical intervention.22 This is an incidence of fewer than 1 in 10,000 people.

When Dr. Littman looked for academic research or popular reporting to explain why adolescent girls might be experiencing a spike in gender dysphoria, she couldn’t find anything.

“When we listen to girls versus boys talk to each other, girls are much more likely to reply with statements that are validating and supportive than questioning,” Amanda Rose, professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, told me. “They’re willing to suspend reality to get into their friends’ worlds more.

emotions. She considered the possibility that this atypical strain of gender dysphoria might itself constitute a form of intentional self-harm.

Psychologists who study sexuality measure the observable physiological response of the male and female sex organs to visual stimuli. Show a man the right kind of images and—long before he opens his mouth—his body will let you know exactly what he thinks of it. Not so with “being trans,” which has no scientific markers and, like recovered memories, depends entirely on a person’s say-so.

You don’t have to be certain you’re transgender in order to go on hormones. In fact, Kaylee adds, going on hormones is “probably the best way to actually tell if you’re trans anyways.”

And doctors prescribe this? So much for their oath.

There is nothing crueler, more “toxic” to trans gurus than parents who fail to jump on board with each step of gender transition and every tenet of gender ideology.

extending compassion is not the same as giving in to demands, particularly to demands that a parent believes are not in the child’s best interests.

Like Michael Jackson’s “perfect” nose, it may always lie one surgery away, just out of reach.

They coach you to lie to doctors by inventing a history of childhood dysphoria or omitting your own mental health history.

Like glitter, they add fun adornment without the weight or encumbrance of an actual relationship.

Their confessional videos are shown in schools,

What thr FUCK!!!!

The rationale for the new policy was simple: California state law already allowed “cis minors” to leave school to “receive hormones (that is, birth control) without the barrier of parental permission.”3 Trans kids should also be entitled to leave school to obtain their hormones. The

That's a sound argument. The problem is the medical profession are abusing their patients.

nonconforming”: Joan of Arc, Catherine the Great, George Eliot, George Sand, Sally Ride. But none of these women thought she was less of a woman for having taken on traditionally male roles. None insisted that she was really a man.

a woman is, the more barriers she busts through, the more “gender nonconforming” she is deemed to be. In this perverse schema, by definition, the more amazing a woman is, the less she counts as a woman.

Schools that administer this instruction never acknowledge that, as a scientific matter, it’s gibberish. It is biologically nonsensical to suggest that a girl’s brain—every cell of it stamped with XX chromosomes—might inhabit a boy’s body. No mention is made of the fact that there are no diagnostic or empirical criteria for deciding that a biological girl is in fact “really a boy.” Nonetheless, this drivel is taught with the same sobriety and apparent thoroughness as facts about human reproduction and sexually transmitted disease.

It’s essential that she learns gender stereotypes because, without them, “gender identity” makes no sense at all.

There is no reason to teach students, in the words of one of the most highly regarded school manuals, that the “expression of transgender identity, or any other form of gender-expansive behavior, is a healthy, appropriate and typical aspect of human development.”

All of the therapists “said the same thing to me. They said: ‘At this age, kids know who they are.’” If Maddie thought she might be transgender, then—by definition—she was.

“He said that my daughter was at high risk of suicide if I didn’t ‘affirm.’ He said that parental affirmation is the key—that’s the most powerful way to prevent her possible suicide.

after years of socially identifying as a person of the opposite sex, the social costs of taking it all back are quite steep. It’s hard to change your mind about something you’ve been insisting on for so long—even if you might wish you could.

“When you’ve stopped puberty with puberty blockers and go straight to cross-sex hormones, you absolutely guarantee that you will be infertile.”

(testosterone), this carried all sorts of risks of its own. Endometrial and ovarian cancer. Hysterectomy.

She began posting what she had learned on discussion forums about transgender-identified adolescents, alerting parents to the risks of the medications, sharing her own experience—Maddie’s psychological entrenchment in her boy identity after having been “affirmed.” Her posts, she says, were deleted, and she was banned from discussion boards.

several times, she says, her posts were

removed. Katherine’s research eventually took her to TransgenderTrend, a UK-based website, and 4thWaveNow, its American counterpart—“gender critical” forums for parents who are skeptical of their adolescents’ sudden identification as transgender. 4thWaveNow is one of the largest consortiums of information for those who believe that medical transitioning is neither salutary nor appropriate for most adolescents.

I wondered whether all this open-mindedness hadn’t robbed their daughters of the rebellion they so badly seemed to want.

Homosexuality has always been around, she assured me. But this transgender epidemic—this is new. “This trans thing? I feel like it came up five years ago and everybody jumped on the bandwagon. And to tell me that it’s always been there, when I grew up in the heart of the fashion industry—it wasn’t.”

the next generation is coming to see all human emotion as a sign of mental illness—something to medicate, curb, give therapy for, or otherwise blot

Having long ago accepted that something must really be wrong with them, the only task left is to diagnose it.

The standard asks—against much evidence, and sometimes contrary to their beliefs on the matter—that mental health professionals “affirm” not only the patient’s self-diagnosis of dysphoria but also the accuracy of the patients’ perception. The therapist must agree, in other words, that a male patient with gender dysphoria who identifies as a woman really is a woman.

But the new “affirmative-care” standard of mental health professionals is a different matter entirely. It surpasses sympathy and leaps straight to demanding that mental health professionals adopt their patients’ beliefs of being in the “wrong body.” Affirmative therapy compels therapists to endorse a falsehood: not that a teenage girl feels more comfortable presenting as a boy—but that she actually is a boy.

diagnoses before the patient is even examined,

approaches her therapist and says: “I just know I’m fat. Please call me ‘Fatty.’” Imagine the APA encouraged its doctors to “modify their understanding” of what constitutes “fat” to include this emaciated girl. Imagine the APA encouraged therapists to respond to such patients, “If you feel fat, then you are. I support your lived experience. Okay, Fatty?”

Truly the last thing any of us would countenance from therapists is this response to an anorexic: “If you think you’re fat, then you are, and we can talk about weight-loss programs and liposuction.” Or, to Nia: “If you say you’re white, then you are. There are treatments that we can explore to fix your coloring. I have a great plastic surgeon for you.”

that is so likely to strengthen the patient’s flawed self-perception and because agreeing with the patient’s self-assessment has never been a mental

An adolescent who comes out as gay asks her parents to accept her for what she is. An adolescent who is transgender-identified asks to be accepted for what she is not.

Dr. Kaufman seemed to be introducing an ontology—one in which chromosomal DNA is no more determinative of identity than the ineffable feelings of an eight-year-old.

Again and again, I heard this question from gender therapists and also from parents to whom they had spoken: “Would you rather a dead daughter or a live son?”

world-renowned gender psychologist Kenneth Zucker—no fan of affirmative therapy—called an “experiment of nurture” when he spoke to me. It places a child or adolescent in an environment in which the entire school is asked to participate in affirming this child’s identity as the opposite sex. If the adolescent wasn’t entirely convinced of her new identity before the experiment, she may be much more so after it is underway.

Once you’ve been insisting to everyone that you’re one thing, it isn’t easy to announce to all your friends, classmates, acquaintances, teachers, and family that you might have made a mistake and change your mind. “You’re worried about losing face,” Lisa Marchiano explained. “First of all, you’re going to get treated like a traitor to the trans community if you step away,