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.

Between 2016 and 2017 the number of gender surgeries for natal females in the U.S. quadrupled, with biological women suddenly accounting for—as we have seen—70 percent of all gender surgeries.1 In 2018, the UK reported a 4,400 percent rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatments.2 In Canada, Sweden, Finland, and the UK, clinicians and gender therapists began reporting a sudden and dramatic shift in the demographics of those presenting with gender dysphoria—from predominately preschool-aged boys to predominately adolescent girls.

Two patterns stood out: First, the clear majority (65 percent) of the adolescent girls who had discovered transgender identity in adolescence—“out of the blue”5—had done so after a period of prolonged social media immersion. Second, the prevalence of transgender identification within some of the girls’ friend groups was more than seventy times the expected rate.6 Why?

The most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) reports an expected incidence of gender dysphoria at .005–.014 percent for natal males, and a much lower .002–.003 percent for natal females, based on the numbers of those who, a decade ago, sought medical intervention.22 This is an incidence of fewer than 1 in 10,000 people. In the last decade, as Dr. Littman began to discover, adolescent gender dysphoria has surged across the West. In the United States, the prevalence has increased by over 1,000 percent.23 Two percent of high school students now identify as “transgender,” according to a 2017 survey of teens issued by the Centers for Disease Control and and Prevention (CDC).24 In Britain, the increase is 4,000 percent,25 and three-quarters of those referred for gender treatment are girls.

Over 85 percent of parents reported supporting the right of gay couples to marry. Over 88 percent of parents surveyed reported being supportive of transgender rights. Nearly 64 percent of parents had been called “transphobic” or “bigoted” by their children for such reasons as: disagreeing with the child about the child’s self-assessment of being transgender, recommending that the child take more time to figure out if the child’s feelings of gender dysphoria persisted, calling their child by the wrong pronouns, telling their child that hormones or surgeries were unlikely to help, calling their child by his or her birth name, or recommending that the child work on other underlying mental health issues before undergoing medical transition. Fewer than 13 percent of the parents believed that their adolescents’ mental health had improved after transgender identification. Over 47 percent reported that mental health had worsened.

Two weeks after Dr. Littman’s study was published, in response to activist outcry, PLoS One announced it would conduct a post-publication review of her paper and that a “correction” would be forthcoming. Dr. Littman was subjected to a battery of revision. “A lot of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream happened along the way,” she told me. “It was pretty stressful.” In March 2019, seven months after the initial publication, PLoS One issued Littman’s “correction.” None of her results had changed.

For Mother’s Day in May 2017, male-to-female cycling world champion (competing against biological women, that is) Rachel McKinnon was moved to encourage trans-identifying adolescents to cut off their own mothers. “Kids whose parents maybe don’t support them as much as we would hope—unfortunately this is too common. I want to give you some hope, though. I want you to know that it’s okay to walk away from unsupportive or disrespectful or even abusive parents.”

Trans influencers typically take a by-any-means-necessary approach to procuring cross-sex hormones. Whatever you have to do, whatever you have to say—do it. Your life is on the line. “Find out what they want to hear if they’re gonna give you T and then tell them just that,” offers one trans advisor on social media. “It’s about getting treatment, not about being true to those around you. It’s not their business and a lot of time, doctors will screw stuff up for you.”

Many of today’s educators regard the gender and sexual identity education kids receive from their parents as hopelessly inadequate. They are stepping up to correct the omission, to drag America’s families into the twenty-first century. LGBTQ students “need to have teachers and parents who are very comfortable—just go ahead, say the word ‘gay.’ Say it out loud! You know, in a very positive way,” Dr. Chiasson said. “Talk about transgender. Talk about gender diversity. Talk about your transgender uncle. This needs to just be part of our daily conversation. That’s what they need. And they need, when that happens, they need their parents to call the school and say ‘Thank you.’ ”

George Sand,

While all this sexual identity politics marches through the front door, a large-scale robbery is taking place: the theft of women’s achievement. The more incredible a woman is, the more barriers she busts through, the more “gender nonconforming” she is deemed to be. In this perverse schema, by definition, the more amazing a woman is, the less she counts as a woman.

The only rule is that sexual dimorphism must be rejected outright. Teachers present an array of gender and sexual identity options and appear pleasantly surprised when a child chooses wisely (that is, anything but cisgender). The kid is certainly not encouraged to share the big news with her folks. As fifth grade public school teacher and Equality California (LGBTQ activist group) liaison to the California Teachers Association, C. Scott Miller, explained to me: “As much as parents want to have rights, what they need to do is be involved in the process. And the more they’re involved with their kids anyway, the more they’re going to know what’s going on. It’s not the school’s obligation to call up and ‘out’ a kid to a parent because you’re not sending that kid home to the gay pride parade. You’re sending them home to somewhere that’s going to be very unsafe and a lot of misinformation, a lot of anger and it’s just not going to be a safe place for that kid.”

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. “All her friends are bisexual,” her mother told me, a year after her daughter’s announcement. “There’s only one heterosexual girl in her little crew. Everybody else is lesbian, bisexual. My daughter had to one-up them and be ‘trans.’ ”

But as fifth grade public school teacher C. Scott Miller explained to me, parents can’t always get what they want. “Even parents that come in and say, ‘I don’t want my kid to be called that.’ That’s nice, but their parental right ended when those children were enrolled in public school.”

Brie called a doctor friend who said, “You know, stopping puberty is going to stop her brain development.” That was enough to prompt Brie to halt all talk of medical transition and begin scrutinizing the information the gender clinicians were doling out. When she realized her daughter seemed to be experiencing more distress as a transgender-identified adolescent than she had before, Brie quit her job and spent a few months traveling with her daughter, to remove her from the social environment in which she’d identified as a boy. Her daughter’s friends seemed to be fortifying the trans identity. To undermine that identity, Brie needed to get her away. They moved across the U.S., to the Southwest, where her daughter could start life, redux, once again as a girl.

One therapist’s website, I discovered, promises he will never serve as a “gatekeeper” between patients and their gender hormones or surgeries; he guarantees a same-day first-consultation letter of fitness for gender medical interventions.

“I tell them that we can’t change the mind and so we have to change the body,” Dr. Kaufman said. “That’s sort of the nutshell. I would let them know that if someone identifies this way, it’s pretty rare that they would change their mind. We have known that we can’t socialize someone into or out of a gender.”

In fact, a team of Dutch clinician-researchers who pioneered the use of puberty blockers found just that: Social transition is a significant intervention. In a 2011 journal article, they warned that early social transitions proved sticky. Given that girls who had been living as boys for years during childhood “experienced great trouble when they wanted to return to the female gender role,” they cautioned, “We believe that parents and caregivers should fully realize the unpredictability of their child’s psychosexual outcome.”

He was stunningly successful. Zucker’s colleague Devita Singh examined the outcomes in the cases of more than one hundred boys who had been seen by Dr. Zucker at his clinic.3 In cases in which a child had not been socially transitioned by parents, she found that 88 percent outgrew their dysphoria.

Nearly five hundred mental health professionals from around the world signed an open letter to CAMH protesting Dr. Zucker’s firing. It seemed obvious that the hospital had sacrificed an international expert on gender dysphoria and the families he served “for some real or imagined local political gain.”7 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.

If you’re thinking Dr. Bailey might land himself into trouble for these views, I can assure you, he knows. “You know, there’s a kind of progressive language police now and part of the function is to keep people off balance so that they’re always apologizing and never asking questions and also to prevent people from being able to have clear conversations about things,” he says. “I have heard even ‘transgender’ is problematic to some people. I don’t know what the correct language is and I don’t really care.” But he does care. I can hear it in his voice. What he won’t do is alter the language he employs to render his professional judgment. He isn’t above changing his mind in the face of evidence; scientists do that all the time. What he won’t do is knuckle under. THE

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.”

Hong Kong, for instance, had never experienced an epidemic of what Westerners call “anorexia”—girls, captivated by a belief that they are fat, engaging in self-starving. Not until 1994, that is, when local media widely publicized the story of a girl whose tragic death was interpreted by news outlets as an example of an unfamiliar Western ailment called anorexia nervosa. An outbreak of girls presenting with symptoms soon followed. It wasn’t that no one in Hong Kong had ever thought to starve themselves before 1994; it was simply that only when anorexia became a “culturally agreed-upon expression of internal distress did it become widespread.”

In fact, Marchiano says, genuine therapy pushes patients to question their own self-assessments. It does this with the explicit purpose of making the patient stronger. “If I work with someone who’s really suicidal because his wife left him, I don’t call the wife up and say: ‘Hey, you just have to come back!’ That’s not the way we treat suicide,” she said. “We don’t treat suicide by giving people exactly what they want. We treat suicide first of all by keeping people safe, and by helping them to become more resilient.” We ought to treat gender dysphoria that way, too. This

Marchiano believes suicide statistics are often employed by gender therapists in a manner that is both irresponsible and unethical. “It’s essentially emotional blackmail,” she told me. “It’s being used to force parents’ hands to do something that they don’t feel comfortable with.” But there’s something else she’s even more worried about: Insisting that an adolescent who doesn’t transition is likely to kill herself—that notion can also easily fall into the symptom pool, too. It may have already. “When you tell a group of highly suggestible adolescent females that if they don’t get a certain thing, they’re going to feel suicidal,” she says, “that’s suggestion, and then you’re actually spreading suicide contagion.”

Dr. McHugh does not doubt that those under the sway of an overvalued idea are suffering real distress. What he doubts is that they have accurately located its source. An anorexic, for instance, often becomes taken with the notion that if she simply lost more weight she would at last be happy with her body. But in fact, she’ll never get there—not by starving herself, at any rate. Pursued this way, happiness will forever be like the beach ball caught in a current, always bobbing out of reach. No amount of subtracted weight will deliver the bodily comfort the anorexic seeks because her weight was never the real problem.

This anxious modesty only increases at the prospect of being spied on by the opposite sex. It could not have been much of a surprise to women when British news reported in October 2019 that girls whose school bathrooms had turned coed were skipping school to avoid the shame of using those facilities during menses. The horror of handling a period, even in a closed stall, was too much when next to a boy.

For a few months, Kristal was truly happy, able more or less to pass as a woman or at least get by without harassment. “So my life was good, I had no complaints. I was just doing my thing,” Kristal remembers. “And then Caitlyn happened and suddenly, I was under a microscope. I mean, every trans person was. We couldn’t walk down the street, you know.” For many classic sufferers of gender dysphoria, celebration of their trans identity is anathema. They aren’t looking to show off a “costume,” they want to be accepted as the real thing. “I knew I looked like a man in women’s clothing,” Kristal said. “But it became a freak show. I couldn’t have dinner in a restaurant without strangers hugging you. It was really bizarre. It was a really strange experience. So I felt that something weird was happening, and everywhere I went, people were asking my opinion on Caitlyn Jenner and, you know, it was just, it was awful.” Kristal’s gender dysphoria has been an unrelenting source of discomfort. She doesn’t want to be celebrated and she certainly doesn’t want to make other women uneasy. In fact, she says, transgender people’s ability to use the bathrooms of their choosing was really no issue until the activists politicized it. “I mean, they’re cubicles, you walk in, you do your business, you walk out.” She abhors what she sees as efforts by trans activists to make biological women feel unsafe, and she says the gender ideologues’ “pseudoscience is nuts.” Kristal knows that she is biological...

No surprise, then, that in a clinical trial 100 percent of children put on puberty blockers proceeded to cross-sex hormones.6 That is a stunning statistic, especially considering that when no intervention is made, roughly 70 percent of children will outgrow gender dysphoria on their own.7 Far from being “neutral,” the psychosocial effects seem closer to radical.

One young woman, Helena, told me that after she came out as “trans” to her mother in her senior year of high school, she couldn’t wait to start T. “So I told my parents that I was going to be on a sleepover and then I just drove to Chicago,” where the nearest “informed consent” clinic was located. She walked out of the office the same day with a course of testosterone, without even having had to present a therapist’s note.

Testosterone thickens the blood. Transgender-identified women are given a dosage of testosterone ten to forty times greater than their bodies would normally bear to produce the changes they seek.15 There is some indication that biological women on these doses of testosterone may have nearly five times the risk of heart attack that women have, and two-and-a-half times that of men.16 Since dosage is driven by desired physical appearance—rather than the alleviation of a physical illness—it is guided by aesthetic principles, not medical ones. Testosterone is typically justified as a treatment for “gender dysphoria,” but the endocrinologists who administer it rarely seem even to be evaluating its progress with the patient’s dysphoria. What they examine instead are blood levels to ensure that testosterone stays within normal range for a man.

Kids her generation may be sophisticated when it comes to utilizing technology, Benji told me, but they are strikingly naïve about the truthfulness or completeness of the content. “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,” she said. 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.” Benji decided privately

In the transgender social scenes both Benji and Erin frequented, testosterone was the coin of the realm, and top surgery a coat of arms. Older trans people at the LGBTQ center in Toronto, Benji said, would offer their testosterone to teens to try, and provide advice about which doctors were trans friendly, or trans themselves, and willing to see the kids after hours. One adult visited the center to coach the adolescents on convincing therapists to sign off on their top surgery. “So they basically concocted a bunch of stories as to why they needed top surgery. And it was like any lie is okay if it leads to surgery because you need surgery. That was like the mentality we had. The same thing with hormones.”

Questioning the panacea of medical transition was strictly verboten. At one point, Benji tried to “follow” a gay man on social media whose bio indicated that he was “homosexual—not homogenderal,” meaning he didn’t buy into gender ideology. She wanted to ask him questions and listen to what he had to say. According to Benji, one of her queer friends snapped a screenshot revealing that Benji followed this man and had allowed him to follow her back. The screenshot was then posted online, and Benji’s queer friend implored their mutual friends to “cancel” Benji and block her, she says. “Just because I allowed this person to follow me without blocking [him] immediately was proof that I should be excommunicated.” Benji was angry with her friend, and she let him know. He didn’t back down. “He was like, ‘If you talk to these people, what they have to say to you will make you suicidal. You will lose your identity, you will stop being trans. You will literally die if you talk to these people.’ ”

This is something psychologists have known for years: house anorexics on a hospital ward together, and anorexia may perseverate.3 As the writer Lee Daniel Kravetz puts it, “Bulimia is so contagious that support groups and in-treatment facilities designed to help patients are also primary spreading agents.”4 Treatment centers may help those with eating disorders to recover, but they can also provide opportunities for behavior modeling and foster unconscious competition over the worst symptoms, making everyone worse off. Offer a school assembly on one teen’s suicide and you will raise awareness, possibly at the cost of more suicide.5 The same goes for depression and cutting.6 And now trans identification.