Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

by Abigail Shrier

Gender dysphoria—formerly known as “gender identity disorder”—is characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex.8 It typically begins in early childhood—ages two to four—though it may grow more severe in adolescence. But in most cases—nearly 70 percent—childhood gender dysphoria resolves.9 Historically, it afflicted a tiny sliver of the population (roughly .01 percent) and almost exclusively boys. Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all.

America has become fertile ground for this mass enthusiasm for reasons that have everything to do with our cultural frailty: parents are undermined; experts are over–relied upon; dissenters in science and medicine are intimidated; free speech truckles under renewed attack; government healthcare laws harbor hidden consequences; and an intersectional era has arisen in which the desire to escape a dominant identity encourages individuals to take cover in victim groups.

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 multi-decade lows.3 This is at least partly the result of lack of opportunity: Today’s adolescents spend far less time in person with friends—up to an hour less per day—than did members of Gen X.4 And dear God, they are lonely. They report greater loneliness than any generation on record.

What happened? podcast host Joe Rogan asked Haidt. Why the sudden spike in anxiety, depression, self-harm? “Social media,” was Haidt’s immediate reply.

Public schools that provide these services might have good reason to assume they act in loco parentis, even with regard to matters that directly contravene the wishes and values of the actual parents. “I think that society looks to schools—because we have access to children—to be able to address a lot of social issues.” School violence and school shootings are two examples she gave me. “Not that we’re replacing family. But things that used to be the exclusive domain of family or society, we’re now asking schools to look at those a little more intentionally.”

They provide teacher training and videos and even coach the Gay–Straight Alliance (GSA), a popular after-school club.13 This is how gender ideology is taught in schools: with the materials, curricula, speakers, and teacher training supplied by gender activists.14 Kindergarteners are introduced to the “Genderbread Person”15 and “Gender Unicorn.”16 Kindergarten teachers read from I Am Jazz, and the little ones are taught that they might have a “girl brain in a boy body” or vice versa.

Nonetheless, this drivel is taught with the same sobriety and apparent thoroughness as facts about human reproduction and sexually transmitted disease.

The high school versions of three of the most highly respected health curricula26 that include gender identity and sexual orientation instruction are so raunchy, explicit, and radical that I couldn’t decide whether they were trying to excite adolescents to the point of orgasm or turn them off of sex entirely.

Faith initially thought the Pride celebrations were nice; she had been to many Pride parades herself. But she noticed her daughter seemed to be taking to the rainbow fervor at school with an intensity and gusto. “They had a festival. They had a booth where they were painting rainbow flags on everybody.” Her daughter spent a day in seventh grade wearing a rainbow flag. By the end of seventh grade, Faith’s daughter decided she was “asexual,” and then “trans.” She had never even kissed a boy, had not yet gotten her period. But the new identity gave her both a cause and a team.

The schools are not forcing adolescents to identify as transgender, but they are greasing the skids. The LGBTQ safe house they’ve fashioned is avant-garde and enticing, framed with moral superiority, insulated with civil rights. Those who teach gender ideology do not make adolescents transgender. They simply fill kids’ heads with gender options and ideology. Then, when the adolescents do experience a crisis, the heroic solution readily bobs to mind.

How did educators and activists manage to mainstream a radical view of gender through the schools? Like so many successful sales, this one was facilitated by irresistible packaging: anti-bullying. Appealing to both a moral imperative and Gen X parents’ extreme preoccupation with their children’s physical safety, the pitch was hard to resist. All of this sexual orientation and gender identity education was necessary—educators claimed—to prevent the battery, harassment, and acute psychological distress of LGBTQ children.

I have no doubt that legislators who pass anti-bullying laws and educators and school boards who implement gender identity and sexual orientation education are sincerely concerned about the welfare of LGBTQ-identified students—as all decent human beings ought to be. But where a measure taken to fix a problem goes so far in excess of remedy, it becomes clear that simple remedy was not primarily what the fixer had in mind.

All that’s required is the insistence that students display decency, civility, and kindness to their classmates. Follow the Golden Rule. Stand up to bullies. Any singling out of others for their differences—physical, religious, sexual, or otherwise—should be met with neither indulgence nor toleration. Bad behavior should be met with swift punishment.

If the deplorable behavior rose to the level of aggravated assault, as it seems to have in the case of Jamie Nabozny, they might expel the student or involve the police. But instead “bullying” is used as an excuse for a thorough indoctrination in gender ideology and the insistence that transgender students must be “affirmed” or suffer a steep psychological toll.

“When you’ve stopped puberty with puberty blockers and go straight to cross-sex hormones, you absolutely guarantee that you will be infertile.” When the gender clinicians pushed Katherine to start her preteen child on hormone blockers, they were proposing that she put Maddie on a path toward infertility.

What’s more, even if her daughter did not start puberty blockers and instead waited puberty out and then began cross-sex hormones (testosterone), this carried all sorts of risks of its own. Endometrial and ovarian cancer. Hysterectomy.

She rushed to inform Maddie’s school of all she had learned, before the teachers encouraged more adolescents along this path. “I thought I was being quite reasonable and giving them evidence and whatever. They treated me like I was the biggest transphobe.”

“This whole thing has shifted how I read, what I believe, the whole concept of an expert,” Katherine told me. “I used to think association guidelines were based upon consensus or experts, I just don’t believe anything anymore. I can’t tell you what my politics are anymore.”

One side effect may be that 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 out. As Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano has observed, “When we construe normal feelings as illness, we offer people an understanding of themselves as disordered.”

“If you feel fat, then you are. I support your lived experience. Okay, Fatty?”

It isn’t just that teenagers do dumb things. It’s that, when faced with their peers, they almost can’t help themselves. The prefrontal cortex, believed to hold the seat of self-regulation, typically does not complete development until age twenty-five.

“The truth is that our identities are socially negotiated,” said Lisa Marchiano, Jungian analyst and an outspoken critic of gender-affirmative therapy. It’s a heckuva point: Social transition, by definition, is a communal activity, requiring the buy-in of others. It insists on the community’s participation in this new identity. It requires that others accede to certain practices, if not entirely adopt the belief themselves. And it may even increase an adolescent’s dissatisfaction with her body: Once you’ve cemented her belief that she really is—or is supposed to be—actually a boy, her given body can only be an endless source of disappointment to her.

But to any mental health professional paying attention, the message was clear: Not even the most prominent members of their profession were safe from the activist mob. Get on board with “affirmative therapy”—or lose your job and maybe your license.

According to Blanchard, the issues surrounding transgender healthcare have become so politicized that the underlying mental health problem has become completely obscured. “The gender-critical feminists are using language like ‘misogyny,’ ‘patriarchy,’ ‘male domination,’ ” he says. And the transgender activists “are happy enough to have the argument in this language, because any language is better than talking about mental illness and clinical management of symptoms.”

“Autogynephilia” is an exclusively male phenomenon; researchers have never studied (or even discovered) women who claim to be turned on by the image of themselves as men. And most of the adolescent girls currently identifying as transgender had no history of childhood gender dysphoria.

Blanchard emphasizes that in the entire diagnostic history of gender dysphoria—dating back to the 1910s—there is no record of genuine transsexualism or well-established syndromes of gender dysphoria ever passing from one person to another. “People developed gender dysphoria in isolation from models.” They didn’t need prompting from a friend, a school assembly, or a YouTube influencer to realize their dysphoria; it simply was.

Dr. Bailey believes that for these teenage girls gender dysphoria is a hysteria much like multiple personality disorder, another historical example of disturbed young women convincing themselves they possess an ailment and then manifesting the symptoms.9 For academic psychologists like Dr. Bailey, the entire issue of gender dysphoria ought to be a matter of evidence. Rigorous empirical study should guide diagnosis, understanding, and treatment. Instead, today, the language swirling around the transgender debates has tended to make such science all but impossible.

Even Dr. McHugh’s critics admit that scientists have yet no reliable means of predicting who will be helped and who will be hurt by a gender surgery. For Dr. McHugh, that alone is sufficient reason to pull the plug, and limit these surgeries to controlled experiments overseen by an institutional review board. The medical profession should never have flung open the gates of surgery merely to appease a clamoring public.

Heying points out that otherwise the numbers don’t make sense. By the time she left Evergreen State College in 2017, 40 percent of students were answering yes to campus surveys asking, “Do you identify as LGBTQ?” “So that’s obviously insane,” she said. “There’s simply no way that 40 percent of any student body” is LGBTQ, “when across cultures, LGB consistently comes in at around 10 percent, and probably even that is high. There’s just no way.” (By 2020, 50 percent of students at Evergreen were identifying as LGBTQ or “questioning.”

So you’re feeling sad. What could be the source? Spoiler alert: you’re probably trans.

In 2007, there was one gender clinic in the United States. Today, there are well over fifty; Planned Parenthood, Kaiser, and Mayo all disburse testosterone, too. Many do so on a first visit on an “informed consent” basis; no referral or therapy required. The age of medical consent varies by state. In Oregon, it is fifteen.

Then again, in the last two decades, doctors have fallen in social status. The now ubiquitous talk of a “human right to medical care” implies a patient’s right to demand a doctor’s labor. No longer seen as men and women of science, they are now commonly referred to as “health care providers”—a diminution of prestige that makes them out to be little different from nannies and preschool teachers—that is, “child care providers.” With little scientific status to safeguard, their Hippocratic oath becomes less compelling than the patients right in front of them.

It isn’t only teachers who have become activists. Sex-change operations are now commonly referred to, even by doctors and medical centers, as “gender affirming surgeries”—as if doctors had given up the business of curing altogether and instead offered patients mere support and encouragement. Most hormone-dispensing doctors provide no brakes and no reality check on these distressed patients. They are awash in unreality themselves. There are vanishingly few gatekeepers. 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.

Postmodern queer theory regards experience as more valid than fact, she said, and her generation imbibes endless streams of this ideology from the internet. “So 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 something.”

You “get people direct messaging you that you’ve never spoken to before, being like, ‘Wow, this must be so hard for you, how can I help you?’ or like, ‘You’re so brave.’ Like that kind of thing,” she told me. “There’s just so much positive reinforcement that there’s just no room at all for any criticism or any thought that something bad could be happening.”

The gender ideology world she inhabited was a “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.”

There are varying degrees of dysphoria, but there are not varying degrees of treatment. If somebody has anorexia, the first move is not to put a feeding tube down their throat. But why is it for trans, the first move when somebody has dysphoria is to be like, ‘You need hormones.’ ”

Helena abandoned all of her hobbies, including painting. By the end of high school, her only hobby was “being trans.”

Like Benji, Helena also told me—unprompted—that the world of gender ideology felt like a cult. It was an assessment I would hear often from detransitioners: walking away didn’t feel like an option.

Nearly every novel problem teenagers face traces itself back to 2007 and the introduction of Steve Jobs’s iPhone. In fact, the explosion in self-harm can be so precisely pinpointed to the introduction of this one device that researches have little doubt that it is the cause. If I had told you in 2007 that one device would produce a sudden skyrocketing in self-harm among teens and tweens, you would likely have said, “No way is my kid getting one.” And yet, here we are: the statistical explosion of bullying, cutting, anorexia, depression, and the rise of sudden transgender identification is owed to the self-harm instruction, manipulation, abuse, and relentless harassment supplied by a single smartphone.

Our true sexuality is not an identity we choose online, but a feeling of attraction that emerges and even evolves over time. Understanding it requires us to go into the world, to have in-person experiences with other people. Sasha Ayad says that parents today are often afraid of upsetting their teens because they have the idea that their job is to ensure their child is “happy and perfectly adjusted and well-balanced 100 percent of the time.” Not only is that an unreasonable goal, it misunderstands the inherently tumultuous state of adolescence. Teenagers are supposed to get angry and emotional. Parents are supposed to set limits. If you have a fight with your teenager, she might be angry with you, but she’ll feel the presence of a guardrail.

All the institutions we’ve built to keep young people from making irreparable mistakes have failed them. The universities, the schools, the doctors, the therapists, and even the churches have been won over by a dogged ideology that claims to speak for a more important class of victim.