Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

A new medical paradigm, therefore, may do something more profound than give doctors a new way to understand what they see: it can change what they see. Sometimes, a new condition is born – and sometimes it gains sudden popularity. The history of medicine is scattered with psychosomatic diseases that appeared, spread like wildfire and died away as medical thinking changed again. One sign a new condition may fall into this category is that it mainly affects teenage girls and young women. They are more likely than other demographics to indulge in ‘co-rumination’: repetitive discussion and speculation within a peer group. That can lead to internalising problems, and thence to anxiety, depression and self-harm. Girls are also often more empathetic than boys, and better at reading moods, which means emotions spread faster in a female peer group than in a male one. That is why self-harm and eating disorders can run through female friends, and why historical episodes of mass hysteria, such as fainting fits, uncontrollable laughter or crying, and outbreaks of paralysis or tremors, have so often occurred in convents and girls’ schools.