IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE
不可逆的ダメージ
ーThe Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughtersー
Abigail Shrier
〜娘を誘惑するトランスジェンダーの熱狂〜
アビゲイル・シュライヤー
Praise for IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE
賞賛の声
“Abigail Shrier has written a deeply compassionate and utterly sobering account of an unprecedented and reckless social experiment whose test subjects are the bodies and psyches of the most emotionally vulnerable among us.” —JOHN PODHORETZ, editor of Commentary magazine and columnist for the New York Post
「アビゲイル・シュライヤーは、前例のない無謀な社会実験について、深く思いやりをもって、そしてまったく悲痛な証言を書いている。」-ジョーン・ポドホレッツ（『コメンタリー』誌編集者、『ニューヨーク・ポスト』紙コラムニスト
“Courage is a rare trait. Abigail Shrier has it in abundance. She defies the politically correct tide to write a moving and critically needed book about a terrible new plague that endangers our children—‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria.’ This book explains what it is, how it has spread, and what we can do about it. And Irreversible Damage is as readable as it is important.” —DENNIS PRAGER, nationally syndicated radio talk show host and bestselling author of The Rational Bible
「"勇気 "は稀有な特性だ。アビゲイル・シュライヤーはそれをふんだんに持っている。彼女は政治的に正しいとされる風潮に逆らい、私たちの子供たちを危険にさらす恐ろしい新しい疫病-"急速発症性同一性障害"について、感動的で決定的に必要な本を書いた。本書は、それが何であるか、どのように広がってきたか、そして私たちに何ができるかを説明している。取り返しのつかないダメージは、重要であると同時に読みやすい。」-デニス・プラガー、全国放送のラジオ・トークショー司会者、『理性的バイブル』のベストセラー著者
“Abigail Shrier dares to tell the truth about a monstrous ideological fad that has already ruined countless children’s lives. History will look kindly on her courage.” —MICHAEL KNOWLES, host of The Michael Knowles Show
「アビゲイル・シュライヤーは、すでに数え切れないほどの子供たちの人生を破滅させた、とんでもないイデオロギーの流行について、あえて真実を語っている。歴史は彼女の勇気を好意的に見るだろう。」-マイケル・ノウルズ・ショーのホスト、マイケル・ノウルズ
“Gender transition has become one of the most controversial issues of our time. So much so that most of us simply want to avoid the subject altogether. Such evasion can be just the thing that gives the majority an excuse to look away from the suffering of our fellow human beings. Abigail Shrier chooses to take the bull by the horns. She dives straight into this most sensitive of debates. The product is a work brimming with compassion for a vulnerable subset of our population: teenage girls. It is a work that makes you want to keep reading because it is accessible, lucid and compelling. You find yourself running out of reasons to look away. A must-read for all those who care about the lot of our girls and women.” —AYAAN HIRSI ALI, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and member of Dutch Parliament 2003–06
「性別移行は、現代において最も物議を醸す問題のひとつとなっている。そのため、私たちの大半はこの話題を完全に避けたがる。そのような逃避は、大多数に仲間の苦しみから目をそらす口実を与えるだけである。アビゲイル・シュライヤーは、角を矯めて牛を捕まえることを選んだ。彼女はこの最もデリケートな議論に真っ向から挑む。その結果、10代の少女たちという弱い立場に置かれた人々への思いやりにあふれた作品が生まれた。親しみやすく、明晰で説得力があるため、読み続けたくなる作品だ。目をそらす理由がなくなってしまうほどだ。少女と女性の現状を憂うすべての人々にとって必読の書である。」-アヤーン・ヒルシ・アリ、スタンフォード大学フーバー研究所研究員、2003-06年オランダ国会議員
“In Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier provides a thought-provoking examination of a new clinical phenomenon mainly affecting adolescent females—what some have termed rapid-onset gender dysphoria—that has, at lightning speed, swept across North America and parts of Western Europe and Scandinavia. In so doing, Shrier does not shy away from the politics that pervade the field of gender dysphoria. It is a book that will be of great interest to parents, the general public, and mental health clinicians.” —KENNETH J. ZUCKER, PH.D., adolescent and child psychologist and chair of the DSM-5 Work Group on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders
「アビゲイル・シュライヤーは、『不可逆的なダメージ』の中で、主に思春期の女性が罹患する新たな臨床現象、即発性性同一性障害（rapid-onset gender dysphoria）と呼ばれるものについて、示唆に富む考察を行っている。その際、シュライヤーは性同一性障害の分野に蔓延している政治的な問題からも逃げない。本書は、両親、一般市民、そして精神科医にとって、大いに興味をそそられる一冊である。」-ケネス・J・ズッカー博士、青年・児童心理学者、性同一性障害に関するDSM-5作業部会長
“Thoroughly researched and beautifully written.” —RAY BLANCHARD, PH.D., head of Clinical Sexology Services at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health from 1995–2010
「徹底的に研究され、美しく書かれている。」-レイ・ブランチャード、PH.D.、1995年から2010年までアディクション・アンド・メンタルヘルスセンターの臨床性科学サービス責任者
“For no other topic have science and conventional wisdom changed—been thrown away—more rapidly than for gender dysphoria. For a small but rapidly growing number of adolescent girls and their families, consequences have been tragic. This urgently needed book is fascinating, wrenching, and wise. Unlike so many of the currently woke, Abigail Shrier sees clearly what is in front of our faces and is brave enough to name it. Irreversible Damage will be a rallying point to reversing the damage being done.” —J. MICHAEL BAILEY, author of The Man Who Would Be Queen and professor of psychology at Northwestern University
「性同一性障害ほど、科学や常識が急速に変化し、捨て去られたテーマは他にない。少数ではあるが、急速に増えつつある思春期の少女とその家族にとって、その結果は悲劇的である。この緊急に必要とされている本は、魅力的で、胸を締め付けられ、そして賢明である。現在覚醒している多くの人々とは異なり、アビゲイル・シュライヤーは、私たちの目の前にあるものをはっきりと見抜き、勇気を持ってそれを名指ししている。『不可逆的なダメージ』は、現在起こっているダメージを覆すための結集点となるだろう。」-J.女王になる男』の著者、ノースウェスタン大学心理学教授
“Abigail Shrier has shed light on the profound discontent of an entire generation of women and girls and exposed how transgender extremists have brainwashed not just these young women, but large portions of the country.” —BETHANY MANDEL, editor at Ricochet.com, columnist at the Jewish Daily Forward, and homeschooling mother of four
「アビゲイル・シュライヤーは、女性と少女の全世代の深い不満に光を当て、トランスジェンダー過激派がいかに若い女性たちだけでなく、国の大部分を洗脳してきたかを暴露した。」
-BETHANY・MANDEL、Ricochet.comの編集者、Jewish Daily Forwardのコラムニスト、4児の母
“Every parent needs to read this gripping travelogue through Gender Land, a perilous place where large numbers of teenage girls come to grief despite their loving parents’ efforts to rescue them.” —HELEN JOYCE, senior staff writer at the Economist
「すべての親は、ジェンダーの国を旅するこの胸に迫る旅行記を読む必要がある。この危険な場所は、大勢の10代の少女たちが、彼女たちを救おうとする愛情深い両親の努力にもかかわらず、悲嘆にくれる場所なのだ。」-ヘレン・ジョイス、エコノミスト誌シニア・スタッフ・ライター
“Shrier’s timely and wise exploration is simultaneously deeply compassionate and hard-hitting. First carefully laying out many of the physical, psychological, and societal effects of the ‘transgender craze,’ she then points to the inconsistencies within the ideology itself. This book deftly arms the reader with tools for both recognizing and resisting, and will prove important for parents, health care professionals, and policy makers alike.” —HEATHER HEYING, evolutionary biologist and visiting professor at Princeton University
「シュライヤーのタイムリーで賢明な探求は、同時に深い思いやりと厳しい打撃を与える。トランスジェンダー・ブームがもたらす身体的、心理的、社会的影響の数々を注意深く説明した後、彼女はイデオロギー自体の矛盾を指摘する。本書は、読者に認識と抵抗のためのツールを巧みに提供し、親、医療専門家、政策立案者にとって重要であることを証明する。」-進化生物学者、プリンストン大学客員教授
“Writing honestly about a difficult and vital topic, Shrier compassionately analyzes the evidence regarding rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), a phenomenon declared off-limits by many in the media and the scientific establishment. Shrier simply isn’t willing to abandon the future of a child’s mental health to propagandistic political efforts. Shrier has actual courage.” —BEN SHAPIRO, editor in chief of The Daily Wire and host of The Ben Shapiro Show
「シュライヤーは、困難で重要なトピックについて正直に書いており、メディアや科学的権威の多くによって"立ち入り禁止"とされた現象である急速発症性同一性障害（ROGD）に関する証拠を思いやりをもって分析している。彼女は、プロパガンダ的な政治的努力のために、子供の精神的健康の未来を放棄することをいとわない。シュライヤーには実際の勇気がある。」-ベン・シャピロ(『ザ・デイリー・ワイヤー』編集長、『ベン・シャピロ・ショー』司会者)
For Zach, whose love is my secret weapon
私の秘密兵器である、ザックの愛によせて
She hides like a child But she’s always a woman to me. —Billy Joel
彼女はまるで子供みたいに隠しているが、僕にとってはいつだって一人の女性なんだ。-ビリー・ジョエル
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I take it for granted that teenagers are not quite adults. For the sake of clarity and honesty, I refer to biologically female teens caught up in this transgender craze as “she” and “her.” Transgender adults are a different matter. I refer to them by the names and pronouns they prefer wherever I can do so without causing confusion. Finally, I have changed the names and certain minor details of transgender-identifying adolescents (and their parents) to ensure that none is able to recognize herself and accuse her battle-worn parents of treachery. Because the stories of those vulnerable to this contagion are strikingly similar, some readers may believe they have recognized themselves—only to be wrong.
筆者注
ティーンエイジャーはまだ大人ではないのは当然である。このトランスジェンダー・ブームに巻き込まれた生物学的に女性であるティーンエイジャーのことを、わかりやすく正直に言うために、私は "彼女 "や "彼女 "と呼んでいる。トランスジェンダーの大人は別問題だ。私は、混乱を招かない範囲で、彼らが好む名前と代名詞で呼ぶことにしている。最後に、トランスジェンダーであることを自覚している青少年（およびその両親）の名前と、ある種の些細な詳細は、誰も自分自身を認識できず、戦い疲れた両親の裏切りを非難できないように、変えてある。この伝染病にかかりやすい人々の話は驚くほどよく似ているため、読者の中には、自分自身を認識したと考える人もいるかもしれないが、それは間違いである。
FOREWORD
If you caught the reaction this book received in the months around its birth, you might assume it contained radical ideas. You might even suspect it was dangerous. And you might be forgiven for those assumptions—were we not living through doctrinaire and intolerant times. This book must not be sold, pled the letters that flooded my publisher before the bindings had been assembled and glued.
序文
この本が誕生して数カ月間の反響を見れば、過激な思想が含まれていると思うかもしれない。危険だとさえ疑うかもしれない。もし私たちが教条主義的で不寛容な時代に生きていなければ、そのような思い込みも許されるかもしれない。この本は売ってはならない」と、製本して糊付けする前に出版社に殺到した手紙の数々。
Transgender children who are not accepted or affirmed by their family have extremely high rates of depression, addiction, and suicide. This book will only contribute to this crisis among transgender youth. That none of these protestors had read the book (because no one had yet) seems to have mitigated neither their certitude of its menace nor their determination to smother it in the cradle.
家族に受け入れられなかったり、肯定されなかったりするトランスジェンダーの子どもたちは、うつ病、依存症、自殺の割合が極めて高い。この本は、トランスジェンダーの若者たちのこの危機を助長するだけだろう。この抗議者たちが誰もこの本を読んでいなかったことは（まだ誰も読んでいなかったのだから）、この本の脅威に対する彼らの確信も、ゆりかごの中でこの本を窒息させようとする彼らの決意も、軽減されることはなかったようだ。
The U.S. legacy media—once fans of debate and free inquiry—apparently agreed. Prominent journalists who pitched our esteemed magazines and newspapers with the hope of reviewing the book were all summarily turned down. Kirkus, which reviews ten thousand titles per year, including self-published and obscure works, never reviewed it. Even a bad review, the cognoscenti decided, was too dicey: people can’t always be trusted to think as they’re told.
かつては討論と自由な探求のファンだった米国のレガシー・メディアも、どうやら同意したようだ。尊敬する雑誌や新聞にこの本の書評を希望した著名なジャーナリストたちは、すべてあっけなく断られた。自費出版や無名の作品を含め、年間1万タイトルを書評する『カーカス』は、一度も書評しなかった。悪い批評であっても、物知りたちはあまりにも危険だと判断した。
Some might actually do the worst possible thing: read the book and evaluate its merits for themselves. Before this book had even graduated from “Pre-order now” to “Buy with 1-Click,” Amazon barred my publisher from sponsoring ads on the specious grounds that the book “claims to diagnose, treat, or question sexual orientation.” This book has nothing to do with sexual orientation, as the powers that be at Amazon well know. Nonetheless, thanks to this ad hoc policy aimed specifically at Irreversible Damage, if you entered search terms for it after it became available, Amazon would helpfully suggest that you read a different book—one of the hundreds celebrating medical gender transition for teenagers.
本を読んでその良さを自分で評価する、という最悪のことを実際にする人もいるかもしれない。この本が「予約注文」から「1クリックで購入」になる前に、アマゾンは、この本が「性的指向を診断、治療、質問するものである」というまやかしの理由で、私の出版社に広告のスポンサーになることを禁じた。アマゾンの権力者たちがよく知っているように、この本は性的指向とは何の関係もない。それにもかかわらず、『不可逆的ダメージ』に特化したこの場当たり的なポリシーのおかげで、この本が発売された後に検索キーワードを入力すると、アマゾンは別の本を読むよう親切にも勧めてくる。
In July of 2020, two weeks after the book launched, alternative media rushed in where legacy media feared to go. Joe Rogan invited me on his show, and for two hours we explored why a growing number of researchers believe social contagion is at play when clusters of girls suddenly announce, as if with one voice, that they are boys. Employees of Spotify, which exclusively hosts the Joe Rogan Experience, threw a fit, demanding that the interview be stripped from the platform.
本の発売から2週間後の2020年7月、レガシー・メディアが恐れていたところにオルタナティブ・メディアが押し寄せた。ジョー・ローガンは私を番組に招き、2時間にわたって、まるで一声であるかのように女の子たちが突然男の子であることを発表するとき、社会的伝染が起きていると考える研究者が増えている理由を探った。ジョー・ローガン・エクスペリエンスを独占的にホスティングしているスポティファイの社員は、このインタビューをプラットフォームから削除するよう要求した。
Spotify held ten meetings in an attempt to mollify its young staff with something less than full editorial veto. Where were America’s science writers? Hiding under the covers. Sean Scott, a member of the National Association of Science Writers online discussion forum, heard of my book. He mentioned Irreversible Damage on the forum and expressed the hope that it would “shed some overdue light on a very sensitive, politically charged topic that potentially carries lifelong medical consequences.” I spoke with Scott a few weeks later. He hadn’t even read the book; it merely sounded interesting to him.
スポティファイは10回のミーティングを開き、編集の完全拒否権に劣るもので若いスタッフをなだめようとした。アメリカの科学ライターはどこにいたのか？布団の中に隠れている全米サイエンスライター協会のオンライン・ディスカッション・フォーラムのメンバーであるショーン・スコットが、私の本のことを耳にした。彼はフォーラムで『Irreversible Damage』について触れ、この本が "非常にデリケートで、政治的に荷担しており、生涯にわたって医学的影響を及ぼす可能性のあるトピックに、遅ればせながら光を当ててほしい "と期待を表明した。数週間後、私はスコットと話した。彼はその本を読んですらいなかった。
Nonetheless, for having mentioned it, he was kicked off the group’s discussion forum. Apparently, those tasked with explaining scientific phenomena to the public now recoil from scientific inquiry. And yet, despite these efforts at censorship, the book succeeded. Parents who had lived through the phenomenon I described read it and gave it to friends. The intellectual class had ignored the book, but parents who’d witnessed this craze up close, seen what a hash it had made of their daughters’ lives—they were done listening to experts. They took to social media to promote the book and encouraged others to buy it. Parents even started a GoFundMe to put up billboards across the country to promote the book. GoFundMe—which at the time of this writing hosts over thirty thousand fundraisers to enable young women to remove their healthy breasts—shut the parents’ effort down.
だが、そのことを口にしたために、彼はグループのディスカッション・フォーラムから追い出された。どうやら、一般大衆に科学現象を説明する役割を担う人々は、今や科学的探究に反発しているようだ。しかし、こうした検閲の努力にもかかわらず、この本は成功した。私が説明した現象を経験した親たちがこの本を読み、友人たちにプレゼントした。インテリ層はこの本を無視したが、この流行を間近で目撃し、娘たちの人生をどれほど台無しにしたかを目の当たりにした親たちは、専門家の意見に耳を貸さなかった。彼らはソーシャルメディアでこの本を宣伝し、他の人たちにも買うように勧めた。両親たちはGoFundMeを立ち上げ、この本を宣伝する看板を全国に設置した。この記事を書いている時点では、若い女性が健康な乳房を切除できるようにするための別の3万件以上の募金活動をしていたGoFundMeは、この両親らの募金活動を打ち切った。
In November of 2020, after the book had been selling briskly for four months, a Twitter user wrote to Target with the following demand: “@AskTarget why you’re selling a book notorious for its harmful rhetoric against us. Historically, harmful products have been pulled from this shelf, and this should be, too.” Apparently on the complaints of two Twitter users, the book was pulled from Target.com. Cheering this book banning, the deputy director for transgender justice at the American Civil Liberties Union tweeted, “Abigail Shrier’s book is a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans.” And also: “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”
2020年11月、この本が4ヶ月間好調に売れた後、あるツイッターユーザーがターゲットに次のような要求を書き込んだ："@AskTarget、なぜ私たちに対する有害なレトリックで悪名高い本を売っているのか。歴史的に、有害な商品はこの棚から撤去されてきた。どうやら2人のツイッターユーザーからの苦情で、この本はTarget.comから撤去されたようだ。アメリカ自由人権協会のトランスジェンダーの正義を担当する副部長は、「アビゲイル・シュリアーの本は、人々をトランスでなくすることを目的とした危険な極論である」とツイートした。そしてまた「この本とこのような思想の流通を止めてしまうことが私の使命だ。」
A professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, went further, tweeting: “I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre.” But by this point, the book had already garnered grassroots support. I had been interviewed by top podcasters, including Megyn Kelly, Joe Rogan, and Ben Shapiro. Excerpts from Irreversible Damage had appeared in the New York Post. People knew what the book was about and believed it was important. Letters flooded Target.com, demanding that the book be reinstated. Most Americans don’t like being told what they’re not allowed to read. Within twenty-four hours, the book was back at Target.com, having earned a place in the history of cancel culture—America’s fight over what ideas and people should be fired, shamed, shut out, and shut up.
カリフォルニア大学バークレー校の英語教授はさらに踏み込んでツイートした：「アビゲイル・シュライヤーの本を盗み、火刑台で燃やすことをフォロワーに勧める」。しかしこの時点で、本はすでに草の根的な支持を集めていた。私はメギン・ケリー、ジョー・ローガン、ベン・シャピロといった一流のポッドキャスターのインタビューを受けていた。『不可逆的ダメージ』からの抜粋は『ニューヨーク・ポスト』紙に掲載された。人々はこの本の内容を知り、それが重要だと信じていた。Target.comには、この本の復刊を求める手紙が殺到した。たいていのアメリカ人は、何を読んではいけないと言われるのを好まない。24時間以内に、この本はTarget.comに戻り、どのような考えや人々が解雇され、辱められ、締め出され、黙殺されるべきかをめぐるアメリカの戦いという、キャンセルカルチャーの歴史に名を残すことになった。
There were triumphs, too. The Economist named Irreversible Damage one of the “Books of the Year” for 2020, calling it “predictably controversial—yet there is not a drop of animosity in the book.” The Times of London named it to one of its “best book” lists as well. Britain’s media had found its spine and was already proving itself more willing to host a reasonable discussion on the teen trans craze than the Home of the Brave. A remarkable thing about the continuous campaign against Irreversible Damage: it came amid additional confirmation that the book’s claims were correct. Clinicians began publishing research confirming that they, too, had seen a growing number of teen girls with the atypical gender dysphoria Dr. Lisa Littman described.
しかし勝利もあった。『エコノミスト』誌は『不可逆的ダメージ』を2020年の "今年の一冊 "に選び、「予想通り物議を醸したが、この本には一滴の反感もない」と評した。 また、『タイムズ・オブ・ロンドン』紙もこの本を「ベストブック」のひとつに選んだ。 英国のメディアは背骨を見つけ、「勇者たちの故郷」よりも、ティーンエイジャーのトランス・ブームに関する理性的な議論を主催することに積極的であることをすでに証明していた。『不可逆的ダメージ』に対する継続的なキャンペーンについて特筆すべきことは、この本の主張が正しいことが新たに確認されたことである。臨床医たちは、リサ・リットマン博士が述べたような非典型的な性同一性障害を持つ10代の少女たちが増えていることを確認する研究を発表し始めた。
The population of detransitioners—those who had medically transitioned, only to regret it and attempt to reverse course—exploded. The subreddit to which many of them belong grew from seven thousand members—when I wrote the book—to seventeen thousand less than a year later. Video accounts of young women’s detransitions began colonizing YouTube, confirming the accuracy of what I’d written. Yes, they had been just like the girls I’d described. Yes, they now believed that their own mental health struggles had made them vulnerable to social media and peer pressure, which had encouraged them to medically transition.
脱トランス者、つまり医学的にトランス手術を行ったものの、それを後悔し、逆戻りしようとする人たちの人口は爆発的に増加した。彼女たちの多くが所属するサブレディットは、私がこの本を書いたときには7000人だった会員数を、1年も経たないうちに1万7000人にまで増やした。YouTubeには、若い女性たちの脱会に関する動画が投稿されるようになり、私が書いたことの正しさが証明された。そう、彼女たちは私が書いた少女たちと同じだったのだ。そう、彼女たちは今、自分たちの精神的な苦悩が、ソーシャルメディアや仲間からのプレッシャーに弱くさせ、それが医学的なトランス移行を促したと信じているのだ。
There were far too few safeguards, they said. Yes, they wished someone had intervened. Then came Keira Bell. At sixteen, Keira Bell had pursued medical gender transition in Great Britain, starting a course of hormones and eventually having her breasts removed. Soon after she hit her twenties, she regretted her transition. She petitioned Britain’s High Court for a review of the medical protocols she had been ushered through and the hormonal treatments she had been given—protocols and treatments nearly identical to those in the United States.
安全策があまりにも少なかった、と彼らは言う。そう、誰かが介入してくれればよかったのに、と。そしてキーラ・ベルが現れた。16歳のとき、キーラ・ベルは英国で医学的な性別移行を追求し、ホルモン療法を開始し、最終的には乳房を切除した。20代になって間もなく、彼女は移行を後悔した。彼女はイギリスの高等法院に、自分が受けた医療プロトコルとホルモン治療の見直しを申し立てた。
In December of 2020, the High Court ruled for Keira Bell. The court’s opinion was damning. It noted that the defendant clinic had been unable to explain the sudden rise in teenage girls presenting at the clinic for hormones and surgeries. The clinic had admitted that not a single minor teenage girl had been turned away for inability to provide “informed consent.” The High Court noted also that the hormonal treatments came with serious health risks—that side effects might include “loss of fertility” and loss of “sexual function”; that “the evidence base for this treatment is as yet highly uncertain.”
2020年12月、高等法院はキーラ・ベルに判決を下した。 裁判所の見解は非難に値するものだった。被告であるクリニックは、ホルモン剤と手術のためにクリニックを訪れる10代の少女が急増したことを説明できなかったと指摘した。同クリニックは、未成年の10代の少女が "インフォームド・コンセント "ができないという理由で追い返されたことは一人もなかったと認めた。高裁はまた、ホルモン治療には深刻な健康リスクが伴うこと、つまり副作用として「生殖能力の喪失」や「性機能の喪失」が含まれる可能性があること、「この治療法の根拠はまだ非常に不確かである」ことを指摘した。
Finally, the court noted the clinic’s own admission that the young women who had begun the process of hormonal transition had shown “no overall improvement in [their] mood or psychological wellbeing using standardized psychological measures.” Here, at last, was the first hint that the heavily guarded castle of Affirmative Care might begin to collapse under the weight of so many lies. The Times (of London), The Observer, The Economist—even The Guardian—hailed this as a landmark case. The U.S. legacy media pretended it hadn’t happened.
最後に裁判所は、ホルモン療法を開始した若い女性たちが、「標準化された心理学的測定法を用いて（彼女たちの）気分や心理的ウェルビーイングに全体的な改善は見られなかった」とクリニック自身が認めていることを指摘した。ここにようやく、厳重に守られたアファーマティブ・ケアの城が、あまりに多くの嘘の重みに耐えかねて崩れ始めるかもしれないという最初のヒントがあった。ロンドンの『タイムズ』紙、『オブザーバー』紙、『エコノミスト』紙、さらには『ガーディアン』紙までもが、これを画期的な事件として称賛した。米国のレガシーメディアは、この件をなかったことにした。
Suddenly, America was no longer interested in borrowing the case law of European courts. Parents continue to flood my inbox with desperate cries for help but also with expressions of gratitude. They now know they are neither crazy nor alone. Teachers, therapists, and doctors still press distressed teens toward hasty medical transition.
突然、アメリカはヨーロッパの裁判所の判例を借りることに興味を示さなくなったのだ。私の受信箱には、助けを求める絶望的な叫びと同時に、感謝の表現で親たちが殺到し続けている。彼らは今、自分たちがおかしくも孤独でもないことを知っている。教師、セラピスト、医師たちは、悩める十代の若者たちに早急な医療移行を迫っている。
One of the largest suppliers of testosterone to biological females—Planned Parenthood—has already begun opening on-campus medical clinics at public schools across Los Angeles, the second-largest school district in America. Big Tech and most media outlets vilify, ignore, or silence all suggestion that an epidemic of teenage trans identification merits critical examination. The craze we cannot openly discuss in America shows no sign of slowing down. Is it merely a harmless fad? A cause for celebration? A marker of progress? I invite you to read this dangerous book and decide for yourself. Abigail Shrier Los Angeles, California
生物学的女性にテストステロンを供給する最大手のひとつである家族計画連盟は、アメリカで2番目に大きな学区であるロサンゼルス中の公立学校で、すでに校内診療所を開設し始めている。大手ハイテク企業やほとんどのメディアは、10代のトランス識別の流行が批判的な検証に値するというすべての示唆を中傷、無視、あるいは黙殺する。アメリカでは公然と議論することができないこの流行は、一向に収まる気配がない。単なる無害な流行なのか？喜ぶべきことなのか？進歩の指標なのか？この危険な本を読んで、あなた自身で判断してほしい。
アビゲイル・シュリアー
カリフォルニア州ロサンゼルスにて
INTRODUCTION
THE CONTAGION
Lucy had always been a “girly girl,” her mother swore. As a child, she would climb into high heels and frilly dresses to do her chores, retiring to a bedroom packed with Beanie Babies and an expansive array of pets she tended—rabbits, gerbils, parakeets. Dress-up was a favorite game, and she had a trunk full of gowns and wigs she would dip into, inhabiting an assortment of characters—every one of them female. She embraced the girlhood of the late 1990s, adoring the Disney princess movies, especially The Little Mermaid, and later, Twilight and its sequels. Lucy was precocious. At five, she read at a fourth grade level and showed early artistic promise, for which she would later win a district-wide prize. But as she reached middle school, her anxiety spiked. The waters of depression rushed in. Her affluent parents—mom was a prominent Southern attorney—took her to psychiatrists and therapists for treatment and medication, but no amount of talk therapy or drugs leveled her social obstacles: the cliques that didn’t want her, her nervous tendency to flub social tests casually administered by other girls. Boys gave her less trouble, and she had male friends and boyfriends throughout high school. Home life wasn’t easy; her older sister fell into a drug addiction that tore through the family like a hurricane, consuming both parents’ attention. Lucy’s ups and downs eventually resolved in a bipolar II diagnosis. But making and keeping female friends proved a trial that never concluded in her favor nor ever really let up. Liberal arts college in the Northeast began, as it so often does these days, with an invitation to state her name, sexual orientation, and gender pronouns. Lucy registered the new chance at social acceptance, a first whiff of belonging. When her anxiety flared later that autumn, she decided, with several of her friends, that their angst had a fashionable cause: “gender dysphoria.” Within a year, Lucy had begun a course of testosterone. But her real drug—the one that hooked her—was the promise of a new identity. A shaved head, boys’ clothes, and a new name formed the baptismal waters of a female-to-male rebirth. The next step—if she took it—would be “top surgery,” a euphemism for a voluntary double mastectomy. “How do you know this wasn’t gender dysphoria?” I asked her mother. “Because she’d never shown anything like that. I never heard her ever express any discomfort over her body. She got her period when she was in the fourth grade, and that was super embarrassing for her because it was so early, but I never heard her complain about her body.” Her mother paused as she searched for an apt memory. “I made her get a pixie haircut when she was five and she just cried buckets over it because she thought she looked like a boy. She hated it.” And then, “She’d dated boys. She’d always dated boys.” This book is not about transgender adults, though in the course of writing it I interviewed many—those who present as women and those who present as men. They are kind, thoughtful, and decent. They describe the relentless chafe of a body that feels all wrong, that seems somehow a lie. It is a feeling that has dogged them for as long as they can remember. Their dysphoria certainly never made them popular; more often than not, it was a source of unease and embarrassment. Growing up, none of them knew a single other trans person, and the internet did not yet exist to supply mentors. But they didn’t want or need mentors: they knew how they felt. Presenting as the opposite sex simply makes them more comfortable. They do not seek to be celebrated for the life they have chosen. They want to “pass”—and, in many cases, to be left alone. I spoke with some on the record and others off. For their honesty and courage, they easily won my admiration. One became a friend. That so much trans activism claims to speak in their name is neither their fault nor their intention. They have very little to do with the current trans epidemic plaguing teenage girls. The Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century are closer to the mark. So are the nervous disorders of the eighteenth century and the neurasthenia epidemic of the nineteenth century.1 Anorexia nervosa,2 repressed memory,3 bulimia, and the cutting contagion in the twentieth.4 One protagonist has led them all, notorious for magnifying and spreading her own psychic pain: the adolescent girl.5 Her distress is real. But her self-diagnosis, in each case, is flawed—more the result of encouragement and suggestion than psychological necessity. Three decades ago, these girls might have hankered for liposuction while their physical forms wasted away. Two decades ago, today’s trans-identified teens might have “discovered” a repressed memory of childhood trauma. Today’s diagnostic craze isn’t demonic possession—it’s “gender dysphoria.” And its “cure” is not exorcism, laxatives, or purging. It’s testosterone and “top surgery.” You’re not supposed to pick favorites among the amendments, because it’s silly, but I have one, and it’s the First. My commitment to free speech led me into the world of transgender politics, through a back door. In October 2017, my own state, California, enacted a law that threatened jail time for healthcare workers who refuse to use patients’ requested gender pronouns.6 New York had adopted a similar law, which applied to employers, landlords, and business owners.7 Both laws are facially and thoroughly unconstitutional. The First Amendment has long protected the right to say unpopular things without government interference. It also guarantees our right to refuse to say things the government wants said. This isn’t a matter of constitutional nuance; it’s remarkably straightforward. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), the Supreme Court upheld students’ right not to salute an American flag. Writing for the majority, Justice Robert H. Jackson declared, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” If the government can’t force students to salute a flag, the government can’t force a healthcare worker to utter a particular pronoun. In America, the government can’t make people say things—not even for the sake of politeness. Not for any reason at all. I wrote about this in the Wall Street Journal, under the headline “The Transgender Language War,” and a reader—a prominent Southern lawyer, Lucy’s mother—saw my piece and found something in it: hope. She contacted me under a pseudonym and asked me to write about her daughter, who had announced during adolescence that she was “transgender”—despite never having shown any signs of gender dysphoria in her youth. She said Lucy had discovered this identity with the help of the internet, which provides an endless array of transgender mentors who coach adolescents in the art of slipping into a new gender identity—what to wear, how to walk, what to say. Which internet companies sell the best breast binders (a breast-compression garment, worn under clothes); which organizations send them for free and guarantee discreet packaging so that parents never find out. How to persuade doctors to supply the hormones you want. How to deceive parents—or, if they resist your new identity, how to break away entirely. Under the influence of testosterone and the spell of transgression—the mother said—Lucy became churlish and aggressive, refusing to explain this new identity or answer any questions about it. She accused her mother of being a “gatekeeper” and “transphobe.” Lucy’s manufactured story of having “always known she was different” and having “always been trans,” her mother later discovered, had been lifted verbatim from the internet. In her new, highly combustible state, Lucy would fly into rage if her parents used her legal name—the one they had given her—or failed to use her new pronouns. In short order, her parents hardly recognized her. They became alarmed by Lucy’s sudden thrall to a gender ideology that seemed, well, a lot of mumbo jumbo, biologically speaking. Her mother said it seemed as though Lucy had joined a cult; she feared it might never release her daughter. Gender dysphoria—formerly known as “gender identity disorder”—is characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex.8 It typically begins in early childhood—ages two to four—though it may grow more severe in adolescence. But in most cases—nearly 70 percent—childhood gender dysphoria resolves.9 Historically, it afflicted a tiny sliver of the population (roughly .01 percent) and almost exclusively boys. Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all. In the last decade that has changed, and dramatically. The Western world has seen a sudden surge of adolescents claiming to have gender dysphoria and self-identifying as “transgender.” For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those so identifying—they constitute the majority.10 Why? What happened? How did an age group that had always been the minority of those afflicted (adolescents) come to form the majority? Perhaps more significantly—why did the sex ratio flip: from overwhelmingly boys, to majority adolescent girls? I liked Lucy’s mother, the Southern lawyer, and fell readily into the story she told, but I was an opinion writer, not an investigative reporter. I passed her story on to another journalist and assured Lucy’s mother she was in good hands. Long after I had moved on to other topics for the Wall Street Journal and the lawyer was swept from my inbox, her story remained stubbornly lodged in my brain. Three months later, I got back in touch with Lucy’s mother and all the contacts she had initially sent. I spoke with physicians—endocrinologists, psychiatrists, world-renowned psychologists specializing in gender dysphoria. I spoke with psychotherapists. I spoke with transgender adolescents and transgender adults to gain a glimpse of the interiority of their experience, the liberating tug of cross-sex identification. I also spoke with “desisters,” those who once identified as transgender and later stopped, and with “detransitioners,” those who had undergone medical procedures to alter their appearances, only to arrive at regret and scramble to reverse course. The more I learned about the adolescents who suddenly identify as transgender, the more haunted I became by one question: what’s ailing these girls? In January 2019, the Wall Street Journal ran my piece, “When Your Daughter Defies Biology.” It provoked nearly a thousand comments, and hundreds of responses to those comments. A transgender writer, Jennifer Finney Boylan, quickly wrote a rebuttal in an op-ed that appeared two days later in the New York Times. Her op-ed garnered hundreds of comments and hundreds more reactions to those comments. All of a sudden, I was flooded with emails from readers who had experienced with their own children the phenomenon I had described or had witnessed its occurrence at their kids’ schools—clusters of adolescents in a single grade, suddenly discovering transgender identities together, begging for hormones, desperate for surgery. When transgender activists attacked me online, I offered them the opportunity to tell me their stories as well. Several took me up on this, and we spoke. Detransitioners got in touch too. I opened a Tumblr account and invited transgender individuals and detransitioners to speak with me; many did. I sent the same invitations on Instagram, where hashtags like #testosterone, #transboy, and #ftm link hundreds of thousands of followers. Again and again, I reiterated my desire to listen to anyone who had something to offer on this issue. The responses I received formed the basis of this book. This is a story Americans need to hear. Whether or not you have an adolescent daughter, whether or not your child has fallen for this transgender craze, America has become fertile ground for this mass enthusiasm for reasons that have everything to do with our cultural frailty: parents are undermined; experts are over–relied upon; dissenters in science and medicine are intimidated; free speech truckles under renewed attack; government healthcare laws harbor hidden consequences; and an intersectional era has arisen in which the desire to escape a dominant identity encourages individuals to take cover in victim groups. To tell the story of these adolescent girls, I conducted nearly two hundred interviews and spoke to over four dozen families of adolescents. I have relied in part on parent accounts. Since traditional dysphoria begins in early childhood and has long been marked by a “persistent, insistent and consistent”11 sense of a child’s discomfort in his body (not something a young child can easily hide) parents are often in the best position to know whether the passionate dysphoria of adolescence began in early childhood. They are in the best position to know, in other words, whether the distress afflicting so many teenage girls represents traditional gender dysphoria or a different phenomenon altogether. Parents cannot entirely be trusted to know how their adolescents feel about their transgender identities or the new lives forged in its name. But parents can report the facts of their kids’ academic or professional standing, their financial stability and family formation or lack thereof, and even, sometimes, their social successes and failures. Are these transgender-identified adolescents still in school, or did they drop out? Do they maintain contact with old friends? Do they speak to any family members at all? Are they building toward a future with a romantic partner? Are they engaged in subsistence living on wages from the local coffee shop? I do not pretend to capture these adolescents’ whole stories, much less the fullness of the transgender experience. Transgender success stories are everywhere told and celebrated. They march under the banner of civil rights. They promise to breach the next cultural frontier, to shatter one more basis of human division. But the phenomenon sweeping teenage girls is different. It originates not in traditional gender dysphoria but in videos found on the internet. It represents mimicry inspired by internet gurus, a pledge taken with girlfriends—hands and breath held, eyes squeezed shut. For these girls, trans identification offers freedom from anxiety’s relentless pursuit; it satisfies the deepest need for acceptance, the thrill of transgression, the seductive lilt of belonging. As one transgender adolescent, “Kyle,” put it to me: “Arguably, the internet is half the reason I had the courage to come out. Chase Ross—a YouTuber. I was twelve. I followed him religiously.” Chase Ross was kind enough to speak to me, to help me understand what’s in the sauce. I present his story in Chapter Three. This is the story of the American family—decent, loving, hardworking and kind. It wants to do the right thing. But it finds itself set in a society that increasingly regards parents as obstacles, bigots, and dupes. We cheer as teenage girls with no history of dysphoria steep themselves in a radical gender ideology taught in school or found on the internet. Peers and therapists and teachers and internet heroes egg these girls on. But here, the cost of so much youthful indiscretion is not a piercing or tattoo. It’s closer to a pound of flesh. Some small proportion of the population will always be transgender. But perhaps the current craze will not always lure troubled young girls with no history of gender dysphoria, enlisting them in a lifetime of hormone dependency and disfiguring surgeries. If this is a social contagion, society—perhaps—can arrest it. No adolescent should pay this high a price for having been, briefly, a follower.
CHAPTER ONE
THE GIRLS
If you’re an American born before 1990, the words “teenage girls” likely invoke a clutch of young women giggling at the mall. Backs against the pile carpet of a bedroom floor, hair splayed, listening to a song on repeat while conversation runs a similar circuit, chasing some ambiguous interaction with a boy or a girl. Untold hours poorly spent that somehow add up to the truest friendship. Recounting a first kiss or heartache or longing for both and neither, nail polish remover spoiling the air like turpentine. To understand the contemporary trans epidemic among teenage girls, we’ll need to explore just how far girlhood has departed from this picture. It isn’t merely that the image requires a gadget update—Spotify for CDs, text messages swapped in for telephone talk. It’s that adolescence today contains far fewer of the in-person comforts and torments and consolations that once filled the everyday life of teenage girls. Being asked out or rejected or kissed or fondled—crying and celebrating and laughing about it with your best friend, her voice and expression, not just her words, promising you weren’t alone. I remember my first kiss, with Joel, at lunchtime, behind the Jewish day school we attended. His eyes were a liquid brown. His breath smelled like cinnamon gum. A shock of tongue and panting breath, the dizzying cloy of his Drakkar Noir knocked me punch-drunk, left me dumb. When it was over, I willed myself to walk casually back indoors. Did I look different? I felt sure I must. Every molecule of the world seemed subtly rearranged. I had the urge to run and scream and laugh and also, strangely, to take it all back—gripped as I was with the worry I had done something wrong. But by the logic of 1990s middle school, submitting to the orchestrated kiss was the least I could do. I was Joel’s girlfriend, after all. Until two weeks later, when I wasn’t anymore. He told one of my friends I wasn’t a “good kisser.” Fair enough. Then again, I was twelve. He had wanted to dump me sooner, but he’d had to wait until he had the chance to catch me alone, in person. My friend Yael filled me in on the details she had gathered from his friends—a litany of my demerits as girlfriend material. I went back to my other friends: Aaron, who had missed me during my brief withdrawal; Jill, who’d never thought Joel was that great anyway; Ariel, who took the opportunity to punish me for my brief romantic success, pointing out that everyone knew Joel preferred Jennifer. Even the best of friends didn’t always excel at comforting. But however imperfect their support, there it was: Joel, delivering the news; Yael, providing context and commentary; Aaron, helpfully oblivious to the trauma of it all; Jill, rolling her eyes, begging me to kick around a soccer ball; Ariel, chiding me before taking me back. The fibrous humanity of the average dumping. Each bit of hurt or comfort delivered by someone who looked me straight in the eye; someone I could reach out and hug, if I’d wanted to. The communal nature of in-person adolescent embarrassments more or less held true for young women born in 1990, and 1980, and 1970, perhaps going all the way back to the 1920s. For those women born in 1978, as I was—those who came of age when American teenagers were like charged particles, always crashing into each other—it’s hard to imagine the isolation of today’s adolescents.1 Teens of my era who came of age in the early 1990s set the high watermark in the U.S. for teenage pregnancy.2 It’s been plummeting ever since—as have rates of teenage sex—recently reaching multi-decade lows.3 This is at least partly the result of lack of opportunity: Today’s adolescents spend far less time in person with friends—up to an hour less per day—than did members of Gen X.4 And dear God, they are lonely. They report greater loneliness than any generation on record.5 But let’s resist nostalgia’s trap. Teenagers are more broadly tolerant today, according to academic psychologist Jean Twenge, an expert on the generation born beginning in 2000 (“Gen Z” or “iGen”). Rates of teenage abortion have plummeted.6 It has been decades since a rash of middle school bathroom blowjobs was cause for widespread societal alarm. To understand how some of the brightest, most capable young women of this era could fall victim to a transgender craze, we should begin by noting that adolescent girls today are in a lot of pain. In America, Britain, and Canada, teenagers are in the midst of what academic psychologist Jonathan Haidt has called a “mental health crisis”—evincing record levels of anxiety and depression.7 Between 2009 and 2017, the number of high schoolers who contemplated suicide increased 25 percent.8 The number of teens diagnosed with clinical depression grew 37 percent between 2005 and 2014. And the worst hit—experiencing depression at a rate three times that of boys—were teenage girls.9 Lest one assume that these girls are merely reporting their depression in greater numbers (and not necessarily experiencing more of it), Haidt points out that the average rates of self-harm reflect the same spike: an increase of 62 percent since 2009—all among teenage girls.10 Among preteen girls aged ten to fourteen, rates of self-harm are up 189 percent since 2010, nearly triple what they were only six years before. What happened? podcast host Joe Rogan asked Haidt. Why the sudden spike in anxiety, depression, self-harm? “Social media,” was Haidt’s immediate reply.11 As Twenge wrote for The Atlantic, “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”12 The iPhone was released in 2007. By 2018—a decade later—95 percent of teens had access to a smartphone and 45 percent reported being online “almost constantly.”13 Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube—all very popular with teens—host a wide array of visual tutorials and pictorial inspiration to self-harm: anorexia (“thinspiration” or “thinspo”), cutting, and suicide. Posting one’s experiences with any of these afflictions offers the chance to win hundreds—even thousands—of followers.14 Anorexia, cutting, and suicide have all spiked dramatically since the arrival of the smartphone.15 Teenage girlhood in America is practically synonymous with the worry that one’s body does not measure up. In eras prior, ideal beauty may have taken the form of a few girls in your class: the ones who could not help being beautiful, leaning into their lockers, tossing their hair, and—most inexplicable to me—knowing when to smile and keep their mouths shut. But only a few members of my class were traditionally beautiful, something the rest of us grudgingly accepted. And even they weren’t perfect—not really. They were human, as so many of our (always in-person) interactions confirmed—messy and vulnerable, inclined to mortification and misstep, same as the rest of us. They wore too much perfume. Their smiles shone with braces. Puberty struck decisively and without warning: they bled through their jeans and sweated through their gym clothes. Social media personas—that is to say, the “friends” most relevant to today’s teens and with whom they spend the most time—admit no such imperfection. Carefully curated and “facetuned,”16 their photographs set a beauty standard no real girl can meet. And they sit constantly in a girl’s pocket, feeding fears of inadequacy, fueling obsession over her perceived flaws—all the while vastly exaggerating them.17 Even under the best of circumstances, teenage girls have been cruelly unforgiving critics of their own bodies—and each others’. But today, social media supplies the microscope and performs the math. How much less beautiful are you than your friend? Today’s teen needn’t venture a guess. A simple subtraction of “likes” renders that calculation easy enough. Failure is predetermined, public, and deeply personal. We know that social media makes people anxious and sad. We know that, as a group, adolescent girls are the hardest hit by its negative effects. But there is something else too: adolescent girls, who historically faced life’s challenges in pairs and groups, are now more likely to face them alone. Members of Gen Z are less likely to go to parties, hang out with friends, date, go for a car ride, head to shopping malls, or even go to a movie than were those of previous generations.18 By 2015, high school seniors were going out with friends less often than eighth graders did just six years earlier.19 When they do meet up in person, they are much more likely to bring along a parent. With mom always hanging around, they are also far less likely to take risks—less likely to smoke or drink or drive recklessly. That would seem to be a good thing. Only 71 percent of eligible high school students have a driver’s license—the lowest percentage in decades. But coddling has its costs. Risk-taking provides an indispensable bridge on the bumpy route to adulthood.20 Eighteen-year-olds today have the emotional maturity of Gen X’s fifteen-year-olds; thirteen-year-olds today, of Gen X’s ten-year-olds, according to Twenge. “Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable,” she writes.21 They are far less likely to suffer the wounds brought on by adolescent heedlessness—but they’ve also failed to be toughened by the scars. Plunge into the furnace of adolescent experimentation, and you may suffer harm. Survive, and you are likely to emerge steelier, so much fragility having been banged out. In researching this transgender craze, I spoke with over four dozen parents. Again and again, I heard a variant on, “My daughter is seventeen, but if you met her, you’d think she was fourteen.” Many of the adolescent girls who fall for the transgender craze lead upper-middle-class, Gen Z lives. Carefully tended by those for whom “parent” is an active verb, even a life’s work, they are often stellar students. Until the transgender craze strikes, these adolescents are notable for their agreeableness, companionability, and utter lack of rebellion. They’ve never smoked a cigarette; they don’t ever drink. They’ve also never been sexually active. Many have never had a kiss—with boy or girl. According to Sasha Ayad, a therapist whose practice is largely devoted to trans-identifying adolescents, many have never masturbated. Their bodies are a mystery to them, their deepest desires under-explored and largely unknown. But they are in pain—lots of it. They are anxious and depressed. They are awkward and afraid. Like the infant that learns to avoid the edge of a bed,22 they sense a dangerous chasm lies between the unsteady girls they are and the glamorous women social media tells them they should be. Bridging that gap feels hopeless. The internet never gives them a day—or even an hour—of reprieve. They want to feel the highs and lows of teenage romance, but most of their life occurs on the iPhone. They try cutting. They dabble in anorexia. Parents rush them to psychiatrists who supply medications to pad their moods like so much cotton batting, which helps—unless feeling something is the point. Where is all the raucous fun that should, by right, be theirs? They’ve heard their parents’ stories; they’ve seen the movies. That epic road trip is hard to recreate when few of your friends drive and parents prefer it that way. They could go to the mall, if it hadn’t closed down, and if teenagers still went to the mall (they don’t). Local environs can’t begin to compare with the labyrinthine corridors, ingeniously customized, supplied by their phones. A decade ago, if it ever occurred to you that female-to-male transsexuals existed, you might have thought of Hilary Swank’s portrayal of Teena Brandon in the 1999 biopic Boys Don’t Cry. Swank’s characterization is captivating. Teena Brandon renames herself “Brandon Teena,” chases girls, swigs beer, and joyrides through rural Nebraska dressed as a boy, and mostly passing as one. Brandon chases a strikingly conservative vision of happiness. What Brandon wants is to find the right girl, win her, marry her, make her happy. You spend the entire movie hoping like hell she’ll succeed. The abuse Brandon heroically endures, the knowledge that no one in her place and time is likely to offer the kindness or acceptance Brandon craves, the devastating certainty that this story can only end in tragedy—all of it registers in the viewer’s clenched gut. The adolescent girls currently identifying as transgender have almost nothing in common with this picture. They don’t want to “pass”—not really. They typically reject the boy–girl dichotomy that Brandon Teena took for granted. They make little effort to adopt the stereotypical habits of men: They rarely buy a weight set, watch football, or ogle girls. If they cover themselves with tattoos, they prefer feminine ones—flowers or cartoon animals, the kind that mark them as something besides stereotypically male; they want to be seen as “queer,” definitely not as “cis men.” They flee womanhood like a house on fire, their minds fixed on escape, not on any particular destination. Only 12 percent of natal females who identify as transgender have undergone or even desire phalloplasty.23 They have no plans to obtain the male appendage that most people would consider a defining feature of manhood. As Sasha Ayad put it to me, “A common response that I get from female clients is something along these lines: ‘I don’t know exactly that I want to be a guy. I just know I don’t want to be a girl.’ ” “JULIE” For most girls, the prospect of becoming a professional ballet dancer is a pipe dream, but by Julie’s middle school years it was a proximate possibility. She was distinguishing herself en pointe, nabbing top roles in her dance company and dancing, well, all the time. Summer meant more dance, not less, and she qualified for an exclusive summer intensive, which she attended each July. Her mothers are gay Midwesterners—an estate lawyer and a school counselor—neither of them ideological or activist. “None of our friends are gay or lesbian, just because our friends are who our friends are. So our friends are normal,” Shirley, one of Julie’s moms, told me, before bursting into sudden laughter: “There’s that word, ‘normal’!” Based on Julie’s crushes, they always believed Julie was straight, and that was more than fine with them. They homeschooled Julie through the third grade. In fourth grade, her moms enrolled her in all-girls’ private school, where she immediately excelled academically and struggled socially. Julie had some friends, but not many. “She has always been a very physical kid. Part of the reason she took to dance, she had a lot of physical energy.” In middle school, she shoved a girl and was suspended. “The kids were all being rowdy at the bus stop and it turned out that the girl had recently had abdominal surgery, although of course [Julie] didn’t know that.” In the ninth grade, all the girls were encouraged to join a school activity, and Julie joined the Gay–Straight Alliance (GSA), a popular student club. Her mothers regarded this as a welcome showing of solidarity with a community that included her mothers. Julie’s participation in the club was not attended by a coming-out announcement. “As far as I knew, she identified as straight. She was pretty girly and feminine. She seemed normal,” Shirley said, again bursting into embarrassed laughter. Julie had no history of gender dysphoria—neither as a child nor even through puberty. “She was a developing body, wearing a bikini at the pool. You know, normal fifteen-, sixteen-year-old.” More than once her mother encouraged her to skip the early-morning GSA meeting and sleep in. Julie refused. There was an older girl at the GSA, Lauren—a sophomore—and Julie seemed in thrall to Lauren’s good opinion. “Everything was all about Lauren,” Shirley told me. Her mothers were a little unnerved by the extent to which Julie seemed to revere her new friend. After school, Julie would often meet up with Lauren, who introduced her to anime, computer-animated images of anthropomorphized creatures. “I had no idea it was tied into this whole trans culture,” Shirley said to me. Online, Julie began to visit DeviantArt, an art-sharing website with a large transgender following and a lot of gender ideology in its comments section.24 Her sophomore year, Julie landed the part of Cinderella in the eponymous ballet. She invited all her friends and two of her teachers to the performance. “She was thrilled and did a really good job of it.” But when Julie came out on stage to take her bows, Shirley noticed her catch Lauren’s eye. She “sort of looked like she was ashamed of herself and faded. All of her joy sucked out of her body.” By then, Lauren had come out as “transgender,” although Julie’s mothers didn’t know it yet. Nor did they know Julie was toying with adopting that identity as well. Gendered performances, such as occur in ballet, fly in the face of trans identification. To transgender adolescents, gendered behavior that accords with one’s sex is the ultimate blunder—it unmasks as frauds those who lack commitment, who are really just “cis” after all. But Julie was still feeling her way around gender ideology. One of Julie’s friends gave an oral presentation that year on gender and sexual identity for class. The friend introduced the “Genderbread Person,” a classic tool of gender identity instruction, in which a gingerbread cookie outline of a person is diagrammed. Arrows locate the seat of gender “identity” as the brain; the seat of “attraction” as the heart; “gender expression” as the whole body; and for biological “sex,” an arrow points to where genitals would be. Julie was captivated. Shirley was disturbed. “I thought, ‘Does this really make sense, to chop a person up like this? Why would you cut yourself up into all these little compartments?’ ” Sophomore year, the pressures of Julie’s ballet company—the cattiness and fierce competition with the other performers—intensified. “She was anxious and depressed. She told us she had been cutting.” Her mothers quickly found Julie a therapist. During their first meeting, the therapist raised the possibility with Julie that she had gender dysphoria and referred Julie to an endocrinologist for hormone therapy. “It was the first and last meeting, put it that way.” Her mothers found another therapist, who met with Julie two to three times a month. “It was everything we could possibly afford.” Her mothers were also paying for expensive private school and ballet. The therapist began the session by asking Julie her preferred name and pronouns. Julie supplied a male name and pronouns, which is how the therapist referred to her from then on. But rather than satisfying Julie, all this affirmation seemed to make her more anxious and unhappy. “Every time our daughter came out of that session, when that therapist was affirming her… she was angry, and detached and cocky.” By junior year, Julie had grown disenchanted with ballet and excited by a different dream: becoming a boy. She cut off her hair and demanded that her mothers use her new name and pronouns. “We resisted that for a period of time. And then we thought, ‘Well, maybe we could try this out and see how it goes.’ Same thing: when we started calling her by her chosen name she became angrier, more distant, emotionally detached. After a couple of days or a week, we’re seeing a pattern, it’s like, ‘Well this isn’t getting us anywhere.’ We ditched that.” Shirley met with the school administrators, who assured her that as long as Julie was at their all-girls’ school, they would treat her as a girl and use her given name and female pronouns. “Well, that’s not what happened.” Without her mothers’ knowledge or permission, Julie’s teachers, administrators, and friends all acceded to Julie’s request and began referring to her as a male student and by her new male name. Julie began to lead a kind of double life. “When she was too much at school, too much at her computer, she became morose, withdrawn, angry. We had no idea she was indoctrinating herself with these YouTube videos.” Julie’s mothers didn’t yet know about the trans influencers on YouTube that she had started watching intensively. But they sensed their daughter was slipping away. “One time I do remember quite clearly,” Shirley said, “I sat her down, and I said, ‘You know, if I really believed that this was the right fit for you, I would be helping you do whatever it was going to be to help you be comfortable in your skin. But there is nothing that matches your history that leads me to believe this is somehow right for you.’ ” Julie went upstairs to her room to think about it. When she came back down, she seemed to have regained her calm. There was another point, over dinner, when Julie was talking about various gender identities, and her mother, a little exasperated, said, “That seems like a small box to put yourself in. So a woman is someone who identifies as a Barbie doll and wears bikinis and is really catty? Biology—not hyper-feminized stereotypes—is what makes someone a woman.” Julie’s mental health began to deteriorate. One evening, when one of her mothers came home from a second job, she found Julie in a full-blown panic attack. They took Julie to the hospital, where the doctors confirmed that she was physically fine. The next morning, while their daughter slept in, one of her mothers checked Julie’s phone. She found a series of texts between Julie and another girl, referring to Julie as “the best boyfriend” she ever had. Her mother became distraught—both that this other girl was addressing Julie as a boy, and that none of this seemed to be doing her daughter very much good. Senior year, Julie was accepted on a partial scholarship to a collegiate fine arts program. But having witnessed Julie’s transformation into a surly adolescent with faltering mental health, her mothers were nervous to let her go. They asked her to take a year off. At eighteen, Julie moved out of the house, signed up for Medicaid—although she was still on her mothers’ insurance—and began a course of testosterone. Julie found a local dance company that would permit her to train as a male. But she wasn’t strong enough, Shirley told me. “From what I understand, the choreographer had to rechoreograph it three times because she couldn’t keep up [as a man]…. She dropped a couple of dancers.” Her mother was frightened that Julie’s apparent fixation was going to hurt her or someone else. She reprimanded her, “It’s not just your body and your career. You’re talking about someone else’s body and their career. You’re going to hurt them.” But by then, Julie was done taking advice from her mothers. She abruptly cut off contact with them. She has hundreds of followers on Instagram; her mothers are blocked from viewing her account. “We have someone who’s been able to snoop in on her [Instagram]… I saw the picture of her, right after her mastectomy, lying in the hospital bed, talking about how this is the best day of her life, tears of joy, this kind of thing, and four hundred of her cheerleaders saying, ‘Yay,’ ‘Awesome job,’ ‘We’re so proud of you,’ ‘You can do this.’ You know—the usual.” CARVING UP GIRLHOOD When I think back to my own high school years in the 1990s, no one came out as “trans.” And until the last five years, that is precisely what the statistics for gender dysphoria would have predicted. Somewhere around .01 percent of the population means that you probably didn’t go to high school with anyone who was “trans” either.25 But that doesn’t mean that girls were a monolith, or that we all expressed girlishness in the same way. I had been a “tomboy,” which basically meant I excelled at sports and preferred the comparatively straightforward company of boys. Friendship with girls so often seemed unnervingly like breaking into a bank vault, all those invisible lasers shooting every which way, triggering alarms of sudden offense. But there is no such thing as a “tomboy” anymore, as any teenage girl will tell you. In its place is an endless litany of sexual and gender identities—public, rigid, and confining. As sixteen-year-old Riley, a young woman who began identifying as a boy at thirteen, put it to me: “I think being a masculine girl today is hard because they don’t exist. They transition.” Transition, that is—to boys. Years after my high school graduation, some of us who had dated the cutest boys would come out as gay. Others we might have silently suspected of being gay turned out not to be. None of us then felt pressured to make any identity decisions we couldn’t easily take back. Teens and tweens today are everywhere pressed to locate themselves on a gender spectrum and within a sexuality taxonomy—long before they have finished the sexual development that would otherwise guide discovery of who they are or what they desire. Long before they may have had any romantic or sexual experience at all. Young women judged insufficiently feminine by their peers are today asked outright, “Are you trans?” Many of the girls now being cornered into a trans identity might, in an earlier era, have come out as gay. “You’ve got a situation where young lesbians are being pressured if they don’t give into this new idea of what it is to be a lesbian,” prominent gay writer Julia D. Robertson told me. That “new idea” is that lesbians do not exist: girls with more masculine presentations are “really” boys. Some adolescents today do identify as lesbian, but it’s hard to miss that this identity has considerably less cachet than being trans. Riley told me that fifteen students in her British all-girls’ school of five hundred have come out as transgender. “How many girls are lesbian?” I asked her. She thought about it for a moment, and I watched her be surprised by the answer: “None,” she said. “SALLY” Had she been born to a prior generation, Sally would have been called a “tomboy”—prodigiously athletic and physically daring. “She was always the first one off the high dive,” her mother told me. “She had a lot of physical confidence, I think.” The youngest of three kids, she spent her early years fighting to keep up with her two older brothers. “She went through a very short period, when she was four or five, of wanting to be a boy. And we thought that was very much of a piece with having these older brothers. And you know, she cut her own hair with scissors.” Her parents didn’t think much of it. Her two older brothers were her whole world, and her desire to be a boy was neither pronounced, severe, nor persistent, just a “little phase” that “kind of came and went.” Academic literature supports the idea that it is not uncommon for young children periodically to express the desire to be the opposite sex.26 “The only thing we did say to each other,” her mother, Mary, said in a Midwestern accent thick as buttermilk, “was ‘Gee, I wonder if she’s going to be a lesbian.’ ” In her mother’s telling, Sally was a dream child: happy, obedient, the sort who drew friends toward her, who ran on her own steam. “Oh, gosh, she was my easiest kid,” her mother told me. “She has two older brothers, so I had my three in five years. It was a zoo. It was always a zoo. But she just always went and did her own thing. It was before the whole computer thing was really a big deal. They’d make a club or a newspaper.”