Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

by Abigail Shrier

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...