Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

by Abigail Shrier

But they all believe gender dysphoria is, first and foremost, a psychopathology—a mental disorder to treat, not primarily an identity to celebrate. They all agree that the current epidemic of gender dysphoria among adolescent girls is atypical (some deny it meets the requirements for “gender dysphoria” at all). And they believe that “affirmative therapy” is either a terrible dereliction of duty or a political agenda disguised as help.

All suspect that this epidemic may be the result of peer contagion. They also have all suffered ostracism, deplatforming, and public censure for having insisted that gender dysphoria ought to be treated—and not merely facilitated. They believe that it is wrongheaded to regard helping a patient overcome gender dysphoria as “conversion therapy.” They are dissidents from the current order, by dint of therapeutic duty and the Hippocratic oath.

“I can’t think of any branch of medicine outside of cosmetic surgery where the patient makes the diagnosis and prescribes the treatment. This doesn’t exist. The doctor makes the diagnosis, the doctor prescribes the treatment. Somehow, by some word magic or word trickery, gender [activists] have somehow made this a political issue,” he says.

What irks him about the informed-consent model now in place in so many gender surgery centers is that it essentially “absolve[s] 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.

Psychiatric patients should not be their own doctors; as the saying goes, a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.

In 1979, as psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Dr. McHugh shut down the gender identity clinic, which performed sex-change operations. In his view, the hospital had “wasted scientific and technical resources and damaged our professional credibility by collaborating with madness rather than trying to study, cure, and ultimately prevent it.”

“The truth is, not all women menstruate and not all people who menstruate are women,” one article blithely informs readers, as if that were factual.

there are no good long-term studies indicating that either gender dysphoria or suicidality diminishes after medical transition.

The binders aren’t comfortable, and they pose risks of their own: back pain, shoulder pain, chest pain, shortness of breath, bruised and fractured ribs.20 Binding can also permanently damage tissue,21 leaving breasts looking like deflated balloons, flat and wrinkled.

Dr. Olson-Kennedy is the one of the country’s best-known advocates for early medical transition in children and adolescents.

Her spunky alto and rap-session manner are cool, fun, reassuring. Her words, hair-raising as a fire alarm: “So what we do know is that adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasoned, logical decision,” she says. “And here’s the other thing about chest surgery: If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.”

The radial artery that supplies blood to the neophallus must be connected to the artery in the groin area under a microscope, using sutures about one-fourth the thickness of a human hair. The same suturing must be done to veins alongside the radial artery, to direct blood flow into the groin. Blood clots are common, since even trivial injuries to the lining of the vessels will cause platelets to stick. A clot can cause the graft to fail, creating an open wound that, because of inflammation, cannot be sutured closed.

One of the alarming aspects of transgender medicine today is that, as doctors have rushed to meet the demand of patients and activists, the standards of care have fallen. In 2012, WPATH altered its standards to permit even minors to receive hormone treatment on the basis of “informed consent,” meaning that neither diagnosis of gender dysphoria nor therapist’s note would be required.

The gender ideology world she inhabited was a “cult,” she insists, because “when you’re inside, you believe non-reality and you disbelieve reality. It literally got to a point where if I was in a queer space,” she said, “I would look at someone, and I couldn’t tell if they were male or female until they told me because I had trained myself to think that way.

Benji now believes the stress and academic pressure she felt at home was a key instigator of her escape into a trans identity. “I think it helped me dissociate from the person my parents thought I was or the person I was expected to be within my family,” she said. When she complained online about her parents, queer adults often coached her on running away from her family. At the time, she believed that these adults—not her parents—had her best interest in mind, and that they were generally helping her to escape mentally and physically from a tumultuous home.

They were “weaponizing it against me to kind of draw me into their community more, and draw me away from anyone who would give me rational ways of thinking about my life.”

Online shaming—she says—is pervasive in the gender ideology world, and a key mechanism for controlling the behavior of the suddenly trans-identified. If your friends catch you failing to use the correct terminology, they will attempt to reeducate you. They believe they are helping. They don’t want you to be called out. They don’t want to have to cancel you, too.

The more she reads and reflects on her own experience, the more convinced she has become that trans-identified teens are being hurt by a medical system that fast-tracks their demands without regard for their actual welfare. “That’s another thing too that I think about a lot. There are varying degrees of dysphoria, but there are not varying degrees of treatment.

She believes that mental health professionals ought, instead, to present an array of treatment options to meet the range of severity of dysphoria. Therapy alone should be the treatment for more mild cases. Transition, a much more drastic measure, should be treated as such; therapists should not so readily encourage patients to undertake the daily grind of having to “pass.”

In 2017, another detransitioner I spoke with, Jade, created a Reddit forum for detransitioners who wanted to ask questions or share their experiences. Today, it has over seven thousand members.

“These self-harm blogs were not simply the online diaries of depressed teenagers, but a thriving community in which mental illness became an identity,”

7 she later wrote. An identity was precisely what Helena had been looking for, and victim identities appealed to her mental state.

Like Benji, Helena also told me—unprompted—that the world of gender ideology felt like a cult. It was an assessment I would hear often from detransitioners: walking away didn’t feel like an option.

“There’s so much depression, self-harm, and drug abuse in the trans community. They’re all goddamn miserable. And it’s just like this misery fest….

Helena clawed her way back. She reconnected with her family. She told her story online. She began to co-moderate the subreddit that offers support to those thinking of detransitioning, fending off the hordes of ideologues that accuse her of trans hate.

With three other young women, in 2019, she founded Pique Resilience Project, a group of detransitioners and desisters devoted to telling every adolescent who will listen: you don’t have to be transgender.

Others, like Desmond, did not turn back until an accumulated course of testosterone left her doubled over in pain from the uterine atrophy it produced. The only way to alleviate the pain, doctors insisted, was hysterectomy. So a year ago, she underwent the procedure. When she awakened without a uterus, she realized her entire gender journey had been a terrible mistake.

Nearly all of the detransitioners I spoke with are plagued with regret. If they were on testosterone for even a few months, they possess a startlingly masculine voice that will not lift. If they were on T for longer, they suffer the embarrassment of having unusual intimate geography—an enlarged clitoris that resembles a small penis. They hate their five-o’clock shadows and body hair. They live with slashes across their chests and masculine nipples (transverse oblong and smaller) or flaps of skin that don’t quite resemble nipples.

Each of the desisters and detransitioners I talked to reported being 100 percent certain that they were definitely trans—until, suddenly, they weren’t.

So when I see these people who have like spent years on Tumblr, indoctrinating themselves, and then they go to the doctor—it’s like, the doctor is the one who has the responsibility to be like, ‘Can this person tell what is reality? Is this person making a decision that’s good for them?’ ” Many detransitioning young women have since come to believe they were just young lesbians who had internalized homophobia and been led to believe that not being typically feminine meant they weren’t female at all. Nearly all of them struggled with mental health and engaged in self-harm.

Those who transition often assume that there is no going back. This is gender ideologues’ favorite dogma, that epistemic access to one’s gender identity is perfect: “Kids know who they are.” Because no one can be wrong about his or her gender identity, there is no reason ever to change your mind.

Here’s the point, and it’s an important one: there is life after detransition.

We are, all of us, doomed to hurt those we love. Most of us disappoint our parents in some respect; or at least, we’re not exactly who our parents would have designed, had they been granted just a little more say. Worse yet, we disappoint ourselves. But then, each day, we awaken to a miracle: another chance to try again. To ask forgiveness. To call our moms. To go just a little easier on ourselves. If you believe you’ve made a mistake by transitioning, the best time to turn back is now.

Nonetheless, he is adamant that extensive therapy must accompany any medical transition. Part of a therapist’s role, he says, is to question adolescents’ self-assessment and to help them figure out if they are even trans. Because many of them, he says, may not be. “A sixteen-year-old kid might think that they’re this, but do they actually know? And I can say that, as a fifty-seven-year-old person. You grow and you learn through experience. And at sixteen, how much experience have you had?”

Nearly every novel problem teenagers face traces itself back to 2007 and the introduction of Steve Jobs’s iPhone. In fact, the explosion in self-harm can be so precisely pinpointed to the introduction of this one device that researches have little doubt that it is the cause.

A population we seem to have abandoned in pursuit of identity politics and progressive bona fides. A group that should, by right, be making us awfully proud, but instead seems to be teetering on the edge of disaster, the brink of despair—teenage girls. They hold the very possibility for our future. If only they weren’t tearing themselves apart.

But of course, the social contagion captivating teens has nothing to do with those who have suffered gender dysphoria since childhood and, in adulthood, fashioned for themselves a transgender life.

All the institutions we’ve built to keep young people from making irreparable mistakes have failed them. The universities, the schools, the doctors, the therapists, and even the churches have been won over by a dogged ideology that claims to speak for a more important class of victim.

If you’re a trans-identifying teen who has cut off your family and somehow found your way to this book, I know your parents aren’t the “glitter family” you might have wanted.

If parents are fools for failing to notice that their children have, at some point, grown up, then they are at least in good company. The life’s vigil begun at the moment of your birth turns out to be rather hard to quit.

They fumbled plenty. Far too excited for your sixth grade play, oblivious to your broken heart. And now that your need for them is over, helpless and lame—they can’t seem to stop. They should see you as the adult you’ve become. Instead, they look at you and see their whole world. Maybe they’ll never understand you. Maybe you know the life you want, and maybe you’re already leading it. Then you have nothing to lose. How about giving them a call?