Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze

by Abigail Shrier

the diagnosis is made by the patient, not the doctor,

“I suffered from depression and anxiety my entire life. Testosterone has just knocked it out. I don’t know why. But for me, testosterone is awesome.”

In 2012, WPATH altered its standards to permit

even minors to receive hormone treatment on the basis of “informed consent,” meaning that neither diagnosis of gender dysphoria nor therapist’s note would be required.

Part of the answer lies with the Affordable Care Act of 2010, which indirectly forced health insurance companies to cover hormones and surgeries by barring health insurance companies from discriminating based on sexual orientation and gender identity. This meant that if insurance companies provided hormones (like birth control) to the

non-transgendered, it had to also provide the expensive cross-sex version to the transgender-identified. If health insurance companies were going to cover breast reductions for anyone, they had also to cover double mastectomies for the gender dysphoric; anti-discrimination law all but required it.29

The very idea that doctors should ever “gatekeep” is widely derided by trans activists, who seem to want the medicine cabinet left always open and fully stocked.

“They think that the mainstream news is full of lies and garbage, but when it comes from an independent person, that must be more realistic or something, more authentic in some way,”

when you see somebody [on Tumblr] talking about their experience and their opinions, that can trump data and facts because experience is more authentic than data or

“cult,” she insists, because “when you’re inside, you believe non-reality and you disbelieve reality. It literally got to a point where if I was in a queer space,” she said, “I would look at someone, and I couldn’t tell if they were male or female until they told me because I had trained myself to think that way. I would look at somebody and be like, ‘I don’t even know what their sex or gender is because I haven’t asked them their pronouns yet.’ I was so brainwashed.”

That, she says, is a mantra you hear frequently in the gender ideology world: you can’t trust “cis” people—you can only trust trans.

Erin, another detransitioner I spoke with, also described her own experience with testosterone as “addictive.” By the time Erin began a course of testosterone in her twenties, she no longer suffered gender dysphoria. But because she was still trans-identified, she felt a lot of pressure to take it. “People actually started to bring me testosterone,” she said. She realized she would never be fully accepted as a member of the transgender community without it.

‘Why would you put yourself in the position to be like under the knife and under anesthesia and with like all these possible complications when you’re not literally going to die from having breasts?’”

a lot of gender extremists would dismiss her desistance, claiming it proved she was “never really trans.” This is the circular logic that pervades trans ideology: if you desist, you were never trans to begin with. Thus, no real transgender people ever desist. It’s an unfalsifiable proposition.

“I would like to ask those people under what conditions do they think a lesbian can go to a gender therapist and be told, ‘No, you’re not trans, you are a lesbian.’ Because I have never heard of any situation where

that happens ever. How is it possible for any medical condition that every single person who walks in...

There are varying degrees of dysphoria, but there are not varying degrees of treatment.

“In contrast to comparable disorders, DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for Gender Dysphoria do not include ‘In Remission,’ ‘In Full Remission,’ or ‘In Partial Remission’ specifiers,” Dr. Blanchard pointed out in a tweet. “Thus, there is no apparent way to record a detransitioned patient for clinical or research purposes.”

She found Tumblr and its pro–eating disorder “pro-ana” (for “pro-anorexic”) sites that provide the how-to for eating disorders along with attempts at justification and moral support.

“These self-harm blogs were not simply the online diaries of depressed teenagers, but a thriving community in which mental illness became an identity,”

Helena and her cohort dissected Lady Gaga’s persona on social media. They ridiculed her looks, mocked her weight, and trashed her appearance. To me, Lady Gaga seemed the sort of star a talented young woman might seek to emulate.

“My goal went from diet pills to testosterone. . . . From fantasies about slicing off my thigh fat to slicing off my breasts.

“There’s so much depression, self-harm, and drug abuse in the trans community. They’re all goddamn miserable. And it’s just like this misery fest. . . . I mean, there’s obviously the people who put up a face and act like ‘I’m super trans but I’m really happy about it,’ but even those people, once you talk to them, you see their lives are catastrophes.”

Each of the desisters and detransitioners I talked to reported being 100 percent certain that they were definitely trans—until, suddenly, they weren’t. Nearly all of them blame the adults in their lives, especially the medical professionals, for encouraging and facilitating their transitions.

the moment these girls voice the shibboleth “I’m trans,” nearly every adult, even medical professionals, regard them with the awe owed to a prophet, not the skepticism usually applied to a suffering teen.

“Imagine if there was a cult, and every single member of that cult wanted a gastric bypass

because they needed to be skinnier because of the tenets of their cult. It wouldn’t be ethical for a doctor to give all these women gastric b...

Many detransitioning young women have since come to believe they were just young lesbians who had internalized homophobia and been led to believe that not being typically feminine meant they weren’t female at all.

further you travel toward that impossible horizon, the harder it is to retrace your steps and find the person you might wish to be once more.

Buck faults the trans community for not being more skeptical of the sudden epidemic of adolescent girls claiming to be trans. “How can we not question it? How can our own community not question it? That’s the part that I’m a little bit upset about; my own community not saying, Hey, we need to take responsibility for these children.”

“I had to go through many hoops to be able to be here today. I had to go to mental health care. I had to get a note. I had to do this whole step-by-step process, which enabled me to have a secure transition.” It isn’t a process he resents. It’s a process that he believes prepared him mentally for the life he now leads.

There’s something horribly sad about teenagers who aren’t even interested. Adolescent girls who would rather sit at home, dreaming of obtaining and injecting hormones, railing against “TERFs” online, than indulging fantasies of kissing or touching another teenager.

Pricked by the embarrassment of natural differences between men and women, they blame society and insist women need to be taught to adopt different preferences. But behind this insistence lies the idea that women’s preferences are inferior. Young girls are left to conclude that they must strive to be more like men—they must close the novel they were enjoying and take up coding. They must want things men want because men want them.

This is something psychologists have known for years: house anorexics on a hospital ward together, and anorexia may perseverate.

There are ways to oppose bullying without putting gender ideology front and center. It isn’t hard: you simply punish bullying—for any reason.

There is no reason to foment gender confusion merely to impress kids with the critical importance of treating all others with decency.

Girls are different. They are not defective boys simply because they sometimes fail to be single-mindedly self-interested,

Many trans adults I talked to apologized for the trans activists that claim to speak in their name. It’s important to remember that activists are the most extreme members of any group.