Gender ideology run amok

Gender dysphoria — the feeling of severe discomfort in a person's biological sex — is certainly real. It is also exceedingly rare. For nearly 100 years of diagnostic history, gender dysphoria typically began in early childhood, between the ages of two and four. When these children were left alone — when no one intervened medically or encouraged what we today call "social transition" — over 70 percent of them naturally outgrew their gender dysphoria.

Today, however, we don't leave these children alone. Instead, the moment children seem not to be perfectly feminine or perfectly masculine, we label them as "trans kids". Teachers encourage them to reintroduce themselves to their classes with new names and new pronouns. We take them to therapists or doctors, nearly all of whom practice so-called affirmative care — meaning they think it is their job to affirm the diagnosis of gender dysphoria and help the children medically transition.

The typical first step in treatment administered to these kids is puberty blockers, which shut down the part of the pituitary gland that directs the release of hormones catalysing puberty. The most common of these drugs is Lupron, whose original purpose was the chemical castration of sex offenders.

The claims made by so many doctors and gender activists today that these medical transition measures for children are safe and reversible — that they are a "pause button", without serious downsides — are not only dishonest, but destructive.

Prior to 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on gender dysphoria arising in teenage girls. Dr Lisa Littman, then a Brown University public health researcher, used the phrase "rapid onset gender dysphoria" (ROGD) to refer to the subsequent sudden spike in transgender identification among teenage girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria.

I've spoken to families at top girls' schools who attest that 15, 20, or in one case 30 percent of the girls in their daughter's seventh grade class identify as trans. When you see figures like that, you're witnessing a social contagion in action. There is no other reasonable explanation.

Truth is being obscured by gender ideology. Lies are told about the risks of the transition treatments administered to young children, both to play down the dangers of those treatments and to exaggerate the degree to which those treatments are known to be helpful. Lies are told about the researchers and journalists who attempt to report on the crisis of social contagion among teenage girls undergoing transition treatments. And lies are told about the movement to eradicate women's protective spaces.

Young women who object to biological males participating in girls' sports are told that their objections are proof of transphobic bigotry.

These mendacious dogmas have corrupted our K-12 schools, our universities, and our legacy media, as well as our scientific journals and our medical accrediting organisations — the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, etc.

To give you a sense of how far things have gone, I was informed in late 2020 by a member of the National Association of Science Writers — an association of journalists with scientific backgrounds — that a member of the association's online forum had been expelled for mentioning my book on the transgender social contagion among teenage girls. He hadn't even read my book. He just mentioned that it sounded interesting, and for that he was banned as transphobic.

Similarly, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, paediatricians, and researchers who are concerned about the risks of gender interventions report that they struggle today to get their research published. And public and private funding of research is almost entirely restricted to researchers who promote gender transition and downplay the risks.

There are phalanxes of young doctors now, many of them in paediatrics or child psychiatry, who are open about their belief that their primary job is "social justice".

They unreservedly celebrate the increase in transitioning treatment of young people and are inexcusably complacent about the risks of those treatments. We're seeing a startling politicisation of medicine and science, which is symptomatic of a larger woke corruption of American society.

I'm also often asked why it is that the gender ideology activists are doing what they are doing. What possible justification could there be, for instance, for telling small boys that they might be girls and small girls that they might be boys? My best guess at an answer occurred to me while talking to de-transitioners. I heard repeatedly from these young women that while they were transitioning, they were angry and politically radical. They often cut off relations with their families, having been coached to do so online by gender activists.

So what do we do about it? How do we push back? First and foremost, we must oppose the indoctrination of children in gender ideology. There is no good reason for it, and it does real harm. We can absolutely insist that all children treat each other kindly without indoctrinating an entire generation in gender confusion.

Abigail Shrier is an American journalist and author, with degrees from Oxford; and Yale. She is the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Regnery, 2020). The above article is an excerpt from her essay in the June/July 2021 edition of Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College, Michigan, and is reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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