Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

by Abigail Shrier

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.