Diagnosing gender dysphoria in vulnerable girls

I wrote this back in July: 

The side of trans activism that makes the news - JK Rowling and all - is the issue of trans women muscling in (seems an appropriate verb) on women's spaces and activities, and even on the definition of what a woman is. But more shocking, and surely more tragic, is the other side of the trans coin, where troubled young girls are encouraged to transition to male, with the full panoply of serious medical and surgical intervention.

It's now reached the level of a cult, dwarfing the repressed memory movement of the 1980s and 90s. Back then, so the line went, if you were a young girl with problems and depression and low self-esteem, it was very likely down to sexual abuse you experienced as an infant. Head off to a therapist, and - at considerable expense - they'd sort you out by drawing forth those early repressed memories. Now...well, you must have gender dysphoria. Just pop these puberty blockers, take some testosterone, and we'll see if we can schedule you in for the surgery....mastectomy to start with, and then maybe the serious stuff downstairs.

So back then it was just your mind they were messing with: now it's your body too.

That was in a post about Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.

At Quillette now, Shrier details how gender activists have been working to cancel her book:

The notion that this sudden wave of transitioning among teens is a worrying, ideologically driven phenomenon is hardly a fringe view. Indeed, outside of Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and college campuses, it is a view held by a majority of Americans. There is nothing hateful in suggesting that most teenagers are not in a good position to approve irreversible alterations to their bodies, particularly if they are suffering from trauma, OCD, depression, or any of the other mental-health problems that are comorbid with expressions of dysphoria. And yet, here we are.

The efforts to block my reporting have been legion, starting with staff threats at a publishing house, which quickly reversed its original intention to publish my book. Once I obtained a stalwart publisher, Regnery, Amazon refused to allow that company’s sales team to sponsor ads on its site. (Amazon allows sponsored ads for books that uncritically celebrate medical transition for teenagers).

Because the book tackles an interesting phenomenon, a number of established journalists wanted to review it. The issue of trans-identification has seemed to come out of nowhere with Gen Z, the generation begun in 1995 whose large-scale mental-health crisis already has us so on edge. And the issue has created surprising bedfellows. Religious conservatives are concerned about the trend—but so are lesbians, who look upon the shocking numbers of teen girls transitioning with abject alarm. Many suspect that all this transitioning of girls is effectively euthanizing a generation of young lesbians.

In any case, every major newspaper and legacy magazine summarily turned interested journalists down. Whether they would have reviewed my book favorably or unfavorably, I have no idea—and it doesn’t matter. Kirkus, which reviews 10,000 titles per year, including self-published and obscure works—pretended my book didn’t exist.  [...]

But there is a victim here—the public. A network of activists and their journalistic enablers have largely succeeded in suppressing a real discussion of the over-diagnosis of gender dysphoria among vulnerable girls. As you read this, there are parents everywhere being lectured to by authority figures about how they have to affirm their daughter’s sudden interest in becoming a boy—no questions asked. From Amazon to I Am Jazz, everyone is telling them that transition is the path to happiness, and those who question this narrative are bigots. So they stare at their shoes and let the conversion therapy take its toll.

This is what censorship looks like in 21^st-century America. It isn’t the government sending police to your home. It’s Silicon Valley oligopolists implementing blackouts and appeasing social-justice mobs, while sending disfavored ideas down memory holes. And the forces of censorship are winning....

Depressing stuff.

Comments

[John the Drunkard]

Having to publish through Regnery is Bad News. Skim through their title list for a catalogue of right-wing crackpots.

Still, that's where we are nowadays. Just as it's impossible to critique jihadis without finding yourself next to racist anti-immigrants; pushing back against trans-imperialism puts one in the neighborhood of evangelical cranks.