Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

by Abigail Shrier

That so much trans activism claims to speak in their name is neither their fault nor their intention. They have very little to do with the current trans epidemic plaguing teenage girls. The Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century are closer to the mark. So are the nervous disorders of the eighteenth century and the neurasthenia epidemic of the nineteenth century.1 Anorexia nervosa,2 repressed memory,3 bulimia, and the cutting contagion in the twentieth.4 One protagonist has led them all, notorious for magnifying and spreading her own psychic pain: the adolescent girl.5

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.

For these girls, trans identification offers freedom from anxiety’s relentless pursuit; it satisfies the deepest need for acceptance, the thrill of transgression, the seductive lilt of belonging.

I wonder things I don’t say aloud, too: Whether this transgender craze isn’t partially the result of over-parented, coddled kids desperate to stake out territory for rebellion. Whether it is no coincidence that so many of these kids come from upper-middle-class white families, seeking cover in a minority identity? Or is it the fact that they overwhelmingly come from progressive families—raised with few walls, they hunt for barriers to knock down? And then there’s our modern-day obsession with mental health, medicating everyone toward the optimal level of happiness, as if we are all just tires in need of topping up. With the help of battalions of therapists, the upper-middle class has made a habit of extirpating anxiety, depression, and even the occasional disappointment wherever they find them. Perhaps we’ve trained adolescents to regard happiness as a natural and constantly accessible state. Perhaps they’ve come to believe momentary sadness amounts to a crisis—teenage doldrums a catastrophe to rectify rather than a phase to ignore.

Blanchard believes sex reassignment surgery is appropriate for some gender dysphoric patients. He claims to have treated trans-identified patients whose dysphoria was largely alleviated by surgical intervention. As head of Clinical Sexology Services at the Toronto Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Dr. Blanchard saw adult patients and recommended surgery for those trans-identified adult patients he believed it would help. But—and here’s the important point, in his view—he never recommended such measures merely on the basis of a patient’s demand. Part of Dr. Blanchard’s job was to determine whether patients were likely to succeed at presenting themselves as the opposite sex; he undertook this evaluation precisely because he hoped they would. Dr. Blanchard emphasized to me the daily difficulties of trying to present as the opposite sex. It’s psychologically wearing, sometimes much more than patients anticipate. “People who don’t pass well are going to be subject to stares and possibly hostile comments from strangers. I’m sure it does take a toll on people to have to brace themselves for every trip to the store to get a quart of milk.” For this reason, his clinic only saw adult patients and insisted they spend two years living as the opposite gender in order to be eligible for sex reassignment surgery. The last thing he wanted to do was approve surgery for someone who would later regret it. “I can’t think of any branch of medicine outside of cosmetic surgery where the pa...

the physician, the psychiatrist, and the surgeon from the responsibility of making the decision.” His clinic’s model was appropriate, he says, because patients “sometimes present with symptoms of gender dysphoria that are actually related to other psychiatric problems. Or they will present in a state of a kind of acute, fulminating gender dysphoria without having experienced what it would really be like to live in the world as the opposite sex.” Psychiatric patients should not be their own doctors; as the saying goes, a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client. It’s an old idea: physicians are not merchants. The shop owner lives by the conceit that the customer is always right; the physician trains to acquire a critical understanding of a patient’s needs. Giving in to a patient’s request is appropriate only when it coincides with his professional judgment.

THE NON-AFFIRMATIVE PSYCHOTHERAPIST: LISA MARCHIANO Lisa Marchiano is a Jungian analyst, a social worker, and a widely published author. Like a lot of therapists in North America and Europe, she began to notice a surge in adolescents identifying as transgender in the last five years, apparently out of nowhere. But unlike most of her colleagues, she greeted this phenomenon with skepticism. She never doubted the distress of the teenage girls claiming gender dysphoria. But as a profound admirer of the power of the unconscious, she was also well aware of the mind’s ability to deceive itself. “I think the human psyche is very susceptible to these kind of psychic epidemics,” she told me. “It happened with lobotomies. It happened with multiple personality disorder. It happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Human beings are susceptible to psychic contagion. We just are. Any of us.” When we feel psychological distress, she says, we want to explain it in a way that will prompt others to take it seriously. “So if you manifest [distress] in some novel way that no one’s ever heard of before, the likelihood is you’re going to be dismissed. But if it fits into a prescribed narrative, the unconscious latches onto that. It has explanatory value for you and you receive care and attention.” This is the idea developed by historian of psychiatry Edward Shorter, and popularized by journalist Ethan Watters: Patients are drawn to “symptom pools”—lists of culturally acceptable ways of manifes...

WHAT IS A WOMAN, ANYWAY? If “women” can no longer be defined according to physical characteristics or biology, how are we to define them? Prominent transgender author Andrea Long Chu has an answer: “Female is a ‘universal existential condition’ defined by submitting to someone else’s desires.”19 A more offensive or insipid definition of womanhood could hardly be imagined. But in order to redefine womanhood to include trans women, this sort of “solution” has become typical. Bereft of biological markers to explain who counts as a woman, trans activists rely on social stereotypes, many of them archaic or insulting. In this way, women’s biological uniqueness is denied outright—all reference to our specialness stripped with the acid of intersectional language. Pregnant women are increasingly referred to as “pregnant people,” and the word “vagina” replaced with the hideous phrase “front hole”; the more “inclusive” language strives to whitewash the feminine nature of anatomy that trans-identified biological women would prefer to forget.20

Virtually everything that transgender activists hope to achieve in the broader culture has already been achieved on college campuses. While the broader American culture endures constant flogging, LGBTQ identities enjoy a nonstop parade. The universities revile privilege and facilitate emancipation from it, too. All they ask is a de minimis sacrifice to the intersectional gods. Your birth name is a good start.