Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

by Abigail Shrier

Adolescent girls flooded gender clinics eager for testosterone. Providers happily served up puberty blockers and courses of testosterone. Nothing to see here.

In 2016, Lisa Littman, ob-gyn turned public health researcher and mother of two, was scrolling through social media when she noticed a statistical peculiarity: several adolescents, most of them girls, from her small town in Rhode Island had come out as transgender—all from within the same friend group. “With the first two announcements, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s great,’ ” Dr. Littman said, a light New Jersey accent tweaking her vowels. Then came announcements three, four, five, and six.

But she knew enough to recognize that the numbers were much higher than extant prevalence data would have predicted. “I studied epidemiology… and when you see numbers that greatly exceed your expectations, it’s worth it to look at what might be causing it.

But you know, those were high numbers.” In fact, they turned out to be unprecedented. In America and across the Western world, adolescents were reporting a sudden spike in gender dysphoria—the medical condition associated with the social designation “transgender.” 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.

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.

Dr. Littman began preparing a study of her own, gathering data from parents of trans-identifying adolescents who had had no childhood history of gender dysphoria. The lack of childhood history was critical; as we have seen, traditional gender dysphoria typically begins in early childhood.

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 atypical nature of this dysphoria—occurring in adolescents with no childhood history of it—nudged Dr. Littman toward a hypothesis everyone else had overlooked: peer contagion. Dr. Littman gave this atypical expression of gender dysphoria a name: “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (“ROGD”).

Lionel Penrose, who introduced the term, explained that an idea that quickly spreads through a community “is not necessarily harmful or unreasonable because it is infectious.”

What distinguishes a craze—what makes it a “crowd mental illness”—is that during its reign “an abnormal amount of energy is discharged in one direction and that, as a result, matters more vital to the welfare of the group may be neglected.”

Dr. Littman’s paper had already been peer-reviewed by two independent academics and one academic editor. But Brown and PLoS One knew a woke mob when they saw one. They decided it was best not to make any fast moves, to slowly hand over their wallets.

None of the attacks acknowledged that parent report is a standard method for assessing child and adolescent mental health.

Nor did any of these critics mention that the primary academic research used to promote “social transition” (changing an adolescent’s name and pronouns with school and friends) for gender dysphoric children similarly relies on parent surveys.

Dr. Littman’s paper became one of the most widely discussed academic articles of 2018.17 Her analysis and conclusions drew praise from some of the most distinguished world experts on gender dysphoria.

the truth no longer seemed to matter much. Psychology Today published an open letter from “transgender-identified [and] cisgender allies… with vast expertise in gender and sexuality” purporting to refute Dr. Littman’s paper. The letter called her work “methodologically flawed” (for having relied on parental report) and “unethical” (for having reached its conclusions) and accused Dr. Littman of harboring “overt ideological bias” (for having dared examine the causes of trans identification at all).

The activists denounced Littman to her employer, the DOH, claiming that she had written a paper “harmful” to transgender youth. They demanded that the DOH “terminate its relationship with Dr. Littman immediately.”

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.

This is an incidence of fewer than 1 in 10,000 people.

In the United States, the prevalence has increased by over 1,000 percent.

In Britain, the increase is 4,000 percent,

and three-quarters of those referred for gender treatment are girls.

Over the next year, as Dr. Littman prepared her study, analyzed the data, and wrote her paper, clinicians across the Western world began reporting seeing more female adolescents presenting with gender dysphoria.27 Clinics in Sweden,28 Toronto, and Amsterdam reported that their ratios of gender dysphoria had flipped, from predominately natal males prior to 2006, to predominately natal females from 2006 to 2013.29

In 2016, natal females accounted for 46 percent of all sex reassignment surgeries in the United States. A year later, it was 70 percent.

Struck by the salient social aspect of their gender dysphoria—the evidence she noted from the prevalence of trans-identification within friend clusters—Dr. Littman began reading everything she could about another peer contagion: anorexia nervosa.

Dr. Littman searched out the “pro-mia” (pro-bulimia) and “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia) sites, where adolescents coach each other in how to lose the most weight and how to deceive parents about their eating.

Transgender influencers coach other adolescents on how to wheedle a testosterone prescription from a skeptical clinician.32 They advise teens to study the DSM diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria and prepare a pat story about how they “always knew” they were trans. They tell you to claim that you’ve felt this dysphoria for a very long time. They convey the urgency of transition—if you don’t do it now, you never will. You’re already at high risk for suicide.

Psychologists who study peer influence ask what it is about teenage girls that makes them so susceptible to peer contagion and so good at spreading it. Many believe it has something to do with the way girls tend to socialize.

“They’re willing to suspend reality to get into their friends’ worlds more. For this reason, adolescent girls are more likely to take on, for instance, the depression their friends are going through and become depressed themselves.”

Teenage girls spread psychic illness because of features natural to their modes of friendship: co-rumination; excessive reassurance seeking; and negative-feedback seeking, in which someone maintains a feeling of control by angling for confirmation of her low self-concept from others.

Dr. Littman never suggested that gender dysphoria doesn’t exist or that these girls didn’t have it. What she hypothesized was that these adolescents’ gender dysphoria had an atypical etiology, that is, a set of causes that differed from the classic diagnosis.

She theorized that the drive to transition might represent a “maladaptive coping mechanism” for dealing with legitimate stressors and strong emotions. She considered the possibility that this atypical strain of gender dysphoria might itself constitute a form of intentional self-harm.

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.

Chucking the DSM-5 aside, or perhaps blissfully unaware of it, trans YouTuber Jake Edwards advises that even if you don’t have traditional gender dysphoria, you might still have one of the “other types.” “For example there is a social dysphoria” which includes “anything in a social situation that makes you feel negative about yourself.”

“ ‘I don’t identify with my birth-given sex, but how can I figure out where on the spectrum I am or whether I want to go through the process of transitioning completely or if I just want to be smack-dab in the middle?’ ”5 Chase Ross told me he currently identifies as “60 percent male” and the rest, “squiggle.”6 Confused? That may be the point.

Influencers typically claim that “being trans” is like being gay—innate, biologically determined, and immutable.

Show a man the right kind of images and—long before he opens his mouth—his body will let you know exactly what he thinks of it. Not so with “being trans,” which has no scientific markers and, like recovered memories, depends entirely on a person’s say-so. And even once arrived at, a person’s new gender identity can change, again and again.

Many influencers will tell you, as “queer” influencer Ashley Wylde puts it, “Having doubts while you question your gender is one hundred percent normal.”8 One might think that they’d advise exercising caution about transitioning given the capriciousness of one’s gender feelings, but the reverse is true. Doubts should never stop your transition.

Male-to-female Instagram influencer Kaylee Korol admits she too wasn’t sure she was trans for a while. “I know for myself, my certainty really ebbed and flowed before hormones, where one day I’d be super certain and the next day, I’d be wondering why I even considered it. And it wasn’t only until a little while on hormones that things started to align and I was like ‘Aha, this is great, I’m never going back.’ ”10

What trans videos like Elliott’s rarely mention are the dangerous medical side effects. It turns out that breasts—glandular tissue, fatty tissue, blood vessels, lymph vessels and lymph nodes, lobes, ducts, connective tissue, and ligaments—are not really meant to be squashed flat all day long.

But try convincing a teenager that something she wants to do carries risks.

As Chase Ross puts it in his “Trans 101” video series, testosterone “brings more legitimacy to your transition.”

But then, Chase rushes to reassure: “the legitimacy of your transition is how you define your transition.”

You don’t have to be certain you’re transgender in order to go on hormones. In fact, Kaylee adds, going on hormones is “probably the best way to actually tell if you’re trans anyways.”

You might have heard that testosterone comes with bad side effects—but you’ll rarely hear them mentioned here.

“So basically I lay down on this little chair thing, with my butt hanging out,”17 an obviously female Alex Bertie vlogged at age seventeen, documenting her first injection of testosterone. A nurse “shoves a needle in, and I’m kind of like, ‘Uh, uh, that hurts a little bit more than I thought it would.’ There was like a spike of pain. And then as she injects it, the pain kind of like goes up a little bit, just slowly increasing.”18 Alex Bertie was more than up to the test: “I’m not going to lie, it hurt. It f*ing hurt.”

Jett Taylor has a message: “True love is unconditional love. Love without restrictions. For you not to accept someone as they truly are—is you not truly loving them.”

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.”

“I want to give you hope that you can find what we call your ‘glitter family,’ your ‘queer family.’ We are out there, and the relationships that we make in our glitter families are just as real, just as meaningful as our blood families.”

extending compassion is not the same as giving in to demands, particularly to demands that a parent believes are not in the child’s best interests.

When your child announces she’s trans, Skylar patiently explains, your job as a parent is not to question an adolescent but to follow her lead. “Saying ‘No you’re not, you’re wrong, or this is just a phase’ just leaves your child feeling unsupported because really, they’re not going to change because there’s nothing to ‘fix.’ ”