Transgender Craze Harms Young Women Especially

Whenever I try explaining modern controversies such as transgenderism to my whip-smart American uncle, he likes to joke that the world, as it is, is no longer decipherable to him and that, this being the case, it might be time for him to go on “eternity leave.” At 96, Uncle Frank is from a simpler time: a time when men were men and women were women, and the tensions between them — pronounced though they were — had something to do with a thing called “sex.”

I almost wonder whether Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who recently passed from this life at the age of 87, ever felt similar dismay. How strange the legacy of her life’s work, fighting discrimination “on the basis of sex,” must have seemed to her when Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC landed on her desk. The particulars of Harris, in which a male employee who claimed transgender status was fired (unlawfully, the court decided) for refusing to comply with the company’s sex-specific dress code, reminds me of a political cartoon I once saw in which advertisers at a convention were depicted discussing how best to present Barbie and Ken to the modern world. One advertiser, pointing to the stick-thin, big-breasted blonde, expresses doubts about the stereotypical Barbie, until another reassures him, “That’s Ken!”

Of course, the consequences of being forced to treat one sex as though it were the other are much less amusing, especially for women. Ginsburg worried in the oral arguments for Harris that the case could be used as precedent to displace women in their own sports teams, facilities, and competitions. She was right, of course. The theories and assumptions of “gender identity” are cropping up not only before judges and lawmakers. They are in schools, preschools, hospitals, sports teams, churches, corporations, media outlets, and every sphere of life imaginable. Within 100 days of office, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris have promised, they would pass the Equality Act, which would redefine sex to include gender identity in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The point can hardly be overstated — America is on the brink of a full-blown “gender” nightmare.

Few would be so coldhearted as to deny that distress related to one’s biological sex is a genuine affliction and that, at least for a small number of people, it can be so severe as to impair social and psychological functioning. There are serious discussions to be had about how best to medically treat and socially accommodate such individuals. Yet theories of “gender identity” are something else. They do not come from any scientific revelation, as explained by The Economist’s Helen Joyce, a leading writer on this subject. Rather, they can be traced back to “two lines of thinking that originated in America in the 1950s and [were] fused into a single, dominant narrative half a century later.” (This was, uncoincidentally, when the medical profession’s pursuit of “sex change” experiments began in earnest.) By the 1980s, the psychiatric profession recognized the problem of “gender-identity disorder.” By 2013, this had morphed into “gender dysphoria.” And by 2019 the politicization of gender confusion had become so overt that even the World Health Organization changed the classification from “disorder” to a mere “incongruence.”

Combined, then, medical and cultural elites have been pushing two contradictory messages: that the person who feels irreconcilably at odds with his sex requires medical “transition,” and that this person truly is (and always has been) of the sex with which they identify. So even though this man already is (in some mysterious, unscientific sense) a woman, “she” may need to have “her” penis surgically removed so that her body can conform to her mind. The way around this head-scratcher, activists ordained, was to use the word “gender” (originally a grammatical term) interchangeably with “sex.” The result has been to baffle, confuse, and distract us from the obvious and unmissable truth that human beings are a sexually dimorphic species, producing either male or female gametes, and that a person’s sex — such as it is — cannot be changed, only disguised. Incidentally, the existence of intersex persons is not proof of a sex spectrum any more than the existence of eleven-fingered persons is proof of a finger spectrum. As the sexologist and neuroscientist Debra Soh writes in her thoughtful new book The End of Gender, “it isn’t necessary to redefine ‘sex’ or eliminate the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ in order to facilitate acceptance of people who are different.”

Our personalities, of course, are another matter. And it’s here, in the murky science of psychology, that the catchall theory of “gender identity” has won over even skeptics like Soh. For instance, Soh writes, “Thankfully, advances in brain-imaging technology have offered new insights into understanding gender dysphoria,” and notes that “the brain structure of transgender individuals appears to be shifted in the direction of the sex they identify as, as opposed to resembling the brains of those who share their birth sex.” Citing a study that shows that “trans men showed a brain connectivity pattern closer to people who shared their gender identity (that is, men) than those who shared their birth sex (that is, women),” Soh also stresses that such studies are typically “confounded with sexual orientation” and that they ought to be interpreted with caution.

And yet there is a more fundamental, chicken-and-egg dilemma when using such studies to understand gender dysphoria (i.e., the psychological rejection of one’s sex). Does the brain activity produce the behavior, or does the behavior produce the brain activity? How can we tell? Confusingly, given the book’s title (“The End of Gender”), Soh asserts that “gender identity is an inherent part of who we are, and our experience of gender is dictated by biological influences exerted before we were born.” But what does she mean by “gender identity”? For whom is it “inherent”? Trans people? Everyone? Even her self-described “mentor and friend,” the sexologist Ray Blanchard, has a strikingly different emphasis. In a 2019 interview for National Review, Blanchard said:

It’s only at very unusual moments that a normal man or woman has a conscious awareness of “I’m a woman” or “I’m a man,” and this is often a highly emotional situation. . . . The concept of cross-gender identity is really not a normal gender identity that has found itself lodged in the wrong body. Cross-gender identity is a constant preoccupation with, and unhappiness about, the individual’s gender. So, I guess you could say I believe in cross-gender identity, but I don’t much believe in gender identity.

Paul McHugh, the former head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, which shut down sex-change surgeries owing to concerns over efficacy, went further still, telling me, “Since the 1970s, I have listened to many people such as John Money explaining this concept,” gender identity, “but most of them are working on a definition, not of something clear and coherent, but an idea that will permit them to do what they want with patients.” Even Soh cannot help peppering her careful analysis with ideological assertions. “Even if scientific research showed no brain correlates with gender identity, adults should be free to do what they want with their bodies.” Well, sure. But in what other field of medicine do we let the patient diagnose the problem and then prescribe his own treatment? Soh believes that, among other things, testosterone exposure in utero may be a prominent factor in the development of our “gender identity.” That the prenatal environment should have a lasting impact on our personalities is both plausible and worth investigating, but given that “gender identity” theory has not yet been proven, it seems a bit of a stretch to say that “gender [which Soh earlier defined as ‘how we feel in relation to our sex’] is indeed biological and not due to socialization.”

The sudden demographic shift in gender dysphoria, from mostly males to mostly females, is surely cause for reexamining the socialization argument. “In 2016, natal females accounted for 46 percent of all sex reassignment surgeries in the United States. A year later, it was 70 percent,” reports Abigail Shrier in Irreversible Damage. There are dozens of gender youth clinics throughout the United States and, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hundreds of thousands of American teenagers who say they’re transgender.

From the 17th-century Salem witch trials to the Satanic-ritual-abuse panic of the 1980s, historically there tends to be disproportionate representation of young females in psychological crazes. In the summer of 2018, Lisa Littman, an assistant professor at Brown University, published a dispassionate research paper on “peer and social contagion” among transgender youth. The study resulted in fierce backlash from activists. Both the limited data available and anecdotal evidence would suggest that Littman was onto something important. Three-quarters of children seeking to change their gender at the main gender clinic in the United Kingdom are girls.

Shrier sees what many of her readers might not: “To those of my generation and older who might be inclined to think: ‘No adolescents would choose a transgender life unless they were truly, painfully gender dysphoric,’ I would suggest a caveat — nobody in your generation.” (Soh agrees that there is “no such thing as a transgender child.”) Building on research by sociologist Jean Twenge, Shrier paints a picture of girlhood in crisis: disconnected from one another by smartphones, miserably self-conscious, withdrawn from sexual curiosity, and suffocated by helicopter mothering, where yesterday’s misfits might have worn black eyeliner and listened to heavy metal, today’s awkward girls are taking testosterone, binding their breasts, and spending hour upon hour alone and online, watching charismatic transgender talking heads who have had sex-disguising surgeries and swear by them.

Shrier reminds us that she is not an “investigative journalist,” yet she has done her homework, tracking down every person she can find who has something to offer on the issue. The parents’ testimonies are passionate and heart-wrenching but, alone, Shrier worries that they cannot be trusted. That’s why she talks to the likes of Ken Zucker, a Canadian psychologist who has worked with gender-dysphoric children for decades, whose work is among the most cited in the field, and who is “no fan” of the affirmation model. Zucker is, per Shrier, “a journalist’s nightmare”: “Although he has maintained a clinical practice for decades, when he talks about his work he is a consummate academic — apparently incapable of providing a straightforward answer to any question without considering every nuance, drawing all sorts of fine distinctions, and reaching for every caveat that will make his ultimate statement precise.”

This is what you would expect of a scientifically minded clinician trying to do his job. Yet it stands in stark contrast with those who are considered “leaders” in the field of “transgender medicine.” Consider, for instance, the gung-ho activist doctor Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who casually admitted in a Texas court deposition that she had personally referred “about 200” adolescent females for double mastectomies since (being transgender boys) “they’re not girls.” Olson-Kennedy, who is the director of the largest transgender youth clinic in the United States, is famous for saying, among other stupid and dangerous things, that “if you want breasts at a later point you can go and get them.” Another popular activist trope is that children will kill themselves if they are not permitted to transition. But Zucker’s research suggests, as Shrier relates, that “the mental health outcomes for adolescents with gender dysphoria were very similar to those with the same mental health issues who did not have gender dysphoria.” In other words, “we have no proof that the gender dysphoria was responsible for the suicidal ideation or tendency to self-harm.”

Something has clearly been lost. Adolescent girls — paradoxically, safer yet unhappier than ever — are experiencing the pangs and pains of puberty, mistaking it (as all adolescents do) for an existential crisis, then swallowing the ideological “identity” poison pill, which leaves them scarred for life. Shrier, who is a mother as well as an Ivy League graduate, notes that “a generation ago, mothers’ reactions to their daughters’ anxiety would likely have been to ignore, dismiss, or perhaps admonish. As in, ‘Don’t you ever hurt yourself. If you’re feeling sad, just tell me.’ Or, ‘Why don’t we take you to the mall for some ice cream?’ Or even, ‘You’re making a big deal out of nothing.’” Overdiagnoses — “social anxiety,” “testing anxiety,” “panic attack” — have a way of “reifying the problems they describe.” Her recommendation for parents today? “Stop pathologizing girlhood.”

One reason this is all getting so out of hand is complacency. Many seem to be under the impression that the transgender debate is just some eccentric fringe preoccupation and that, even with the activists’ stronghold, it is still unlikely to affect them. But the spaying and neutering of the sexes is happening culturally and collectively, as much as it is happening literally to a minority of (often vulnerable) individuals. Soh reminds us that “the sexes have different sexual systems, stemming from thousands of generations of evolutionary influence, and these differences play out in meaningful ways.” Propagating politically convenient myths — for instance, that women enjoy casual sex as much as men do, or that “gender-typical” masculinity is “toxic” — is not helpful, to say the least. And neither is feeding gender ideology into public-school systems, which tends to be accompanied by mechanical and degrading depictions of sexual relations. Per Shrier:

The high school versions of three of the most highly respected health curricula that include gender identity and sexual orientation instruction are so raunchy, explicit, and radical that I couldn’t decide whether they were trying to excite adolescents to the point of orgasm or turn them off of sex entirely. Anal sex is promoted so often that one would assume the writers believed they had invented it. Fisting and anal stimulation by mouth are discussed in supplementary materials, leaving nothing to the imagination. No orifice is left behind.

The simultaneous bombardment with gender propaganda and sexual pornography does not inspire romance, mystery, responsibility, and mutual respect between the sexes but rather serves to confuse, mislead, degrade, or, as Shrier puts it, “turn them off of sex entirely.” Consider the numbers. In December 2018, The Atlantic ran a cover story declaring “the sex recession,” noting that a record number of young people were having no sex at all. Between 1991 and 2017, the percentage of high-school students who had had sex dropped from 54 to 40 percent, according to the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Since the 1990s, teen pregnancy has also been steadily declining. At first glance this may appear to be good news, but I suspect that this withdrawal from sexual interest has less to do with newfound responsibility than it does with isolation and confusion, from which it is in everyone’s interest that this generation recover.

It would be difficult for anyone to fully explain a crisis that is happening in real time, but the first wave of books exploring the subject are vital ammunition. Already, many of the predictions made by Douglas Murray in his book The Madness of Crowds — for instance, that formerly transgender twentysomethings will begin to sue their doctors — have come true. While Soh’s book gives a clear and methodical lay of the land, debunking common scientific misconceptions, Shrier’s provides a personal, inquisitive, and often moving narrative of girls in trouble. If such authors know that, in writing these books, they are joining the losing side, they are also hopeful that things will turn around. J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, who has ridden valiantly into this controversy, has written, “I believe the time is coming when those organisations and individuals who have uncritically embraced fashionable dogma, and demonized those urging caution, will have to answer for the harm they’ve enabled.”

Realistically, it is only a matter of time before the books on this theme start to resemble John Colapinto’s As Nature Made Him (2000), about the real-life tragedy of the Reimer brothers, twin boys subjected to a disastrous experiment by psychologist John Money, one of the earliest pioneers of gender-identity theory. One of the boys was subjected to sex reassignment in infancy. Both committed suicide in their thirties. Depressingly, though, even that story hasn’t been enough to bring the wretched gender train to a halt, as current events have demonstrated.

The day of the oral arguments for Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, I stood outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., watching the transgender protesters outnumber the women’s-rights ones about eight to one. I also had the chance to interact with a group of four 18-year-old girls, exactly like those Shrier describes in her book. I asked them why they were there, and they explained that they were freshmen at American University. I asked them why they had gotten involved in the LGBTQ+ group, and they explained that it was all bound up with a sense of belonging. I asked them whether a woman could have a penis and they blushed and said they didn’t know about the “sex stuff.” They suggested that I ask someone older.

I wonder who will be left to ask, in a few decades’ time. I wonder who will do the asking, curiosity being banished. I worry that we are not at the “end of gender” at all, we’re only just beginning.