What Did You Do During the Transgender Social Contagion?

A Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria Mother on a book she had to wait seven years to come into existence

What did you do during the transgender social contagion that consumed the lives of so many confused teenagers with the eager collusion of the educational, medical, legal, and political establishments of the Western world? Did you participate in the propagation of corrupted science in support of this contagion? Did you celebrate the importation of bizarre experimental practices from the outer fringes of human extremity into the spaces of ordinary bourgeois domesticity? Did you allow yourself to be complicit in harming children while earnestly believing yourself to be a hero and a savior?

These are the questions that a sane posterity will pose to those of us living today. We don’t know whether we will ever reach that sane posterity —whether we do or not is what is being contested today in schools and legislatures and medical offices throughout the Western world. It is, as an anon Twitter reply guy put it to me so eloquently a couple months ago, “a stress test for civilization itself.” I’ll be talking more about the inquest that the sane posterity that all sane people should be working to deliver to our posterity at the Genspect conference in Colorado next month.

The speech will be among other things a tribute to those standing up on behalf of reason and reality in the face of a movement that portrays itself as the vanguard of humanity while in practice inducting children into a cult of medicalized self-harm. Women like the authors of this book reviewed here by a mother of a daughter caught up in this contagion who also happens to be an excellent prose stylist. Stella O’Malley, Sasha Ayad, Lisa Marchiano — three who were unique in fulfilling their duty to patients caught up in a social contagion who inspired others to fulfill their duties that so many others shirked at the first hint of social pressure to do so.

The author at last feels safe to be in public saying aloud what she has known for the many years she had to spend in hiding from an astro-turfed pseudo-consensus of the Great and the Good that framed inducting confused children into a cult of medicalized self-harm as being on the vanguard of humanity.

Let her emergence into the light be a portent of the preference cascade to come.

— Wesley Yang

By Jenny Poyer Ackerman

Maybe you’ve noticed something odd about the way transgender issues are covered in our information ecosystem. 

Normally, topical news stories follow a predictable upstream flow. An intriguing anecdote gets the attention of a local reporter. If similar anecdotes are spotted elsewhere and a trend emerges, national news outlets might pick up the thread. Longer articles appear in major magazines. If there are conflicting theories about the origins or the meaning of the story, someone writes a detailed analysis of the conflict. Later, books might be written about the story’s hidden contours or its lingering impact. 

If that sounds about right, ask yourself whether it describes how you learned whatever it is you know about transgender issues. I suspect most people feel underinformed here, and it’s not for lack of interest. The information flow outlined above has been, in this case, forcibly interrupted, especially where it concerns pediatric ‘gender medicine.’ The evidence of this is the article you haven’t seen in The New Yorker chronicling the transition and later detransition of three teenagers with varying presentations of autism; or the investigative series that didn’t appear in the Atlantic following the mob justice inflicted on the journalist Jesse Singal for barely dipping a cautious toe in these raging waters. 

You get the idea: magazines have taken a vow of silence. Metropolitan newspapers (the only papers we have left, really) have pledged themselves to maudlin coverage of ‘anti-LGBTQ+’ legal matters, as have liberal media outlets like MSNBC, CNN, PBS and NPR. Once that story is filed, it’s time for them to clock out. Nothing else on this subject worth elucidating, folks!

So, if you’re curious about the clinical meaning of gender dysphoria, or the long-term impact of puberty suppression, or whether it’s even possible for humans to change sex in the first place? You’ll need a book for that. In yet another facet of the mystical, bespoke, gauzy intrigue guarding all things Trans, there’s a big hole in the doughnut where the routine reporting belongs. Logical flow is for logical stories: this one’s special. Still, we get a little extra curious about information we sense is being hidden from us, or obfuscated. That’s especially true when it’s information we need to help a child of ours who’s suddenly acting peculiar and saying some very alarming things about their desire to remove body parts.

Thus the current obsession with transgenderism in America might be an unintended consequence of a media strategy that is backfiring spectacularly in real time. Into this forbidding miasma come three intrepid women — a psychotherapist, an adolescent therapist and a Jungian analyst — from two countries (Ireland and the US) on a mission to dispel the mystique and talk plainly about reality between the covers of their new book, When Kids Say They’re Trans. And not a minute too soon.

Now maybe you’re wondering, who’s even writing this review? I’ve never heard of her: what makes her such an authority? Glad you asked. I’m what I call an ROGD Elder. ROGD stands for Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, which my daughter contracted in middle school (it was going around), back in the pioneer days of 2016. If you’re in the know, you’ll say, ‘wait a minute! ROGD wasn’t even a thing until Dr. Lisa Littman described it in her research at Brown University in 2018!’ True, but then I didn’t start writing about this until last year. In years one through six I kept my head down, deep in the information ‘rabbit hole’ where Lisa Littman is a household name.

The rabbit hole is a place where Stella O’Malley and Sasha Ayad have served as beacons of light and sanity to a small but alas rapidly growing population of podcast listeners whose lives have been disrupted in the most deeply personal ways by a bizarre catechism that our societal institutions began chanting in unison around 2016. The podcast, “Gender: A Wider Lens,” distills everything known about Trans with a reassuring delivery that's accessible to everyone.

To get an idea of the heavy lifting When Kids Say They’re Trans takes on, you have to know that the current ideas of ‘best practice’ in therapy are 100% aligned with the media in terms of ideological certainty. For example, if you seek professional therapeutic help for your daughter because she’s suddenly declared a need for a double mastectomy now, and changes her name to Flame after spending the weekend mainlining YouTube videos; you need to know the therapist you’ve booked has probably been trained not only to agree with your daughter that this plan is awesome but to cast you as a suppressive transphobe from whom Flame might actually need to distance theirself in order to ‘stay safe.’

I know I can be a little sarcastic, but the preceding sentence is factually true: I’ve got receipts. Dismayed by the utter derangement of their own professions, our clearheaded authors recognized an urgent need to tell parents it’s okay to maintain contact with material reality, to ask questions and think this through.

Not just okay, but necessary – indeed the very essence of a parental duty. They don’t say: ‘most of our colleagues are dangerous: cross the street if you see one coming,’ because they’re trained to act calm, professional and diplomatic. They instead model in themselves the equipoise we should all expect from the therapeutic profession but which that profession emphatically rejects when the subject is gender identity.  The authors provide practical advice grounded in the wisdom of parents’ instincts about their own children, affirming our rights and responsibilities as their primary guardians. When Kids Say They’re Trans contains all the information a thinking, caring parent needs to navigate the seriously absurd/absurdly serious cultural minefield surrounding us.

 The authors begin by describing the problem: 

“A perfect storm of social phenomena has occurred, a confluence of apparently random events: the arrival of social media […..] a rise in the popularity of identity politics and a corresponding surge in social-justice activism; ‘diagnosis creep’ (widening definitions of disease so that more people are diagnosed) and the tendency to self-diagnose via the internet. This confluence of events has resulted in an unexpected consequence: thousands of young people across the world have suddenly and intensely come to believe they need to medically transition to a different person.”

Next, they discuss some shortcomings in the clinical response to that storm. From the therapist’s office….

“The affirmative approach doesn’t accord well with treatments for any other mental health issue — therapists don’t usually simply agree with a patient’s self-diagnosis and green-light whatever treatments the patient wishes.” 

…to the surgical suite:

“Some surgeons are offering interventions specifically for people who identify as non-binary. These include phallus-preserving vaginoplasty and vagina-preserving phalloplasty”

Quoting from the website of the Crane Center for Transgender Surgery:

“Genital nullification, Nullo, or Eunuch procedures involve removing all external genitalia to create a smooth transition from the abdomen to the groin. In some cases, this involves shortening the urethra. For patients born with a uterus, a hysterectomy is required prior to any genital nullification procedure. Your specific goals can be discussed with one of our surgeons to develop a plan that works for you.” 

The authors remind us that we’ve weathered episodes of poor clinical judgment before, including the regrettable popularity of the prefrontal lobotomy and, more recently, the so-called Satanic Panic:

“[A] look back through the strange history of our field indicates that this parallel contagion has happened before. In the 1980s and 1990s, a bizarre theory swept through America that had originated among mental health professionals: a wave of horrific Satanic abuse rituals was taking place and children subjected to this abuse could completely ‘repress’ the memories. Therapists saw it as their job to ‘uncover’ these memories… [which] were often flamboyant, easily disproved, and coaxed from the imagination using hypnosis, sedative drugs and relaxation techniques.” 

They describe the errant professionals with characteristic empathy:

‘This was a group of healers who believed that they not only had discovered the key to their patients’ suffering but also were exposing a hidden evil across society. The therapists, in short, were as caught up in the cultural currents as their patients.”

Devotees of the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast will be familiar with WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which is the command center from which all treatment guidelines are handed down to clinicians. The current guidelines can be found in WPATH’s Eighth Standards of Care — “Sock 8” is how it’s pronounced in the biz — which I’ve referred to with some satisfaction as an ‘astonishing literary swashbuckler.’ 

This document effectively signs all the relevant permission slips: for the Florida surgeon who advertises on Tik Tok with her catchy “I love to Yeat the Teets!” slogan (translation: “I’ll happily cut off your breasts for $10,000”) to the ‘Nullo’ surgeon featured above, to the therapists in your hometown and the counselor at your child’s middle school. WPATH’s emissaries populate the pediatric ‘gender clinics’ that dot the American landscape, usually adjacent to university teaching hospitals.

Gender clinics were not a thing here before 2007, when the flagship operation opened for business in Boston. Now the number of clinics is estimated to be at least 100. They provide ‘gender affirming care’ to kids of most ages (and all genders) under the implied legal roof of their respective governing bodies (the Endocrine Society, AMA, American Psychological Association, American Academy of Pediatrics) whose protection derives, in turn, from WPATH. The market has expanded so rapidly and so widely that there’s also an EPATH for Europe and an USPATH for us. Conferences are organized regularly to make sure providers stay motivated and up to speed.

Consider all the money and machinery, the livelihoods and political commitments invested in the full flourishing of pediatric sex-change medicine. It is a juggernaut with no pre-existing institutional opponent: a Big Oil with no Sierra Club, a Big Tobacco with no Lung Association.

WPATH is a sort of malign incarnation of the Ministry of Silly Walks, the classic Monty Python sketch. Just as no one thought there needed to be a Ministry of Regular Walks, so it goes with human sexual dimorphism. These days even material reality needs a good lobbyist.

Which brings us to yet another heroic feat performed by an author of When Kids Say They’re Trans: our clever Stella, when she wasn’t podcasting or writing books or leading workshops in Ireland, was busy building Genspect, a little nonprofit that could.

Could what? For openers, they hosted a conference last year in the same city at the same time as WPATH’s conference! Not only that, they offered free admission to any WPATH attendees who might be interested in crossing the street to listen in on the case for not sterilizing kids. Reader: a few of them did cross the street to listen in! This tactic was bold to the point of brashness from an institutional perspective. But as a substantive matter, frontally challenging an institution that markets its madness as the gold standard of transgender medicine – whose recommendations recently rejected age minimums for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries; that withdrew a draft chapter on ethics and replaced it with a chapter adding “eunuch” to the list of indications for surgical body modification  –is simple common sense. 

Parents in my position are fond of sentences that begin, “When this is all over…” for its implied promise that at some point the madness will surely be stopped. My prediction is that when it’s all over, the three authors of When Kids Say They’re Trans will be lionized for the massive impact they will have made with their calm, reasonable argument for exploratory therapy.

This book is the practical embodiment of a much larger project. It will help parents regain trust in their own intuitive judgment, and it will coax families safely back to a recognizable shared reality. When viewed through a wider lens, this book will be seen as one element of a sweeping, audacious strategy for returning humanity to its senses.