Gender ideology depends entirely on one question: Is gender dysphoria a legitimate biological disposition, or is it a social contagion?
With a few rare exceptions, almost all of the evidence points to the latter. For example, until very recently, gender dysphoria was considered a rare mental condition that affected mostly young boys. Now, however, 1 in 5 young adolescents say they identify as a gender different than their sex, with young girls making up the majority of those who seek treatment.
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More persuasive than this statistical switcheroo are the inconvenient testimonies of detransitioners — those who transitioned to identify as a gender different than their sex only to desist later on. Their stories tear apart gender ideology by rebutting its core argument: that a different identity will make a gender-confused person happier and more fulfilled.
Detransitioners have discovered that the opposite is true: Transitioning never fixed the underlying anxieties they struggled against because those anxieties were never the result of gender confusion. Rather, they stemmed from other mental woes, such as social isolation, body dysmorphia, and even repressed homosexuality. Adopting a new gender identity was simply a Band-Aid solution that made them feel better for a little while, with its new sense of purpose and built-in community, until reality set in and their troubles returned.
And more often than not, reality brought with it the realization that their new identity had made things worse. Their bodies had been irreversibly changed, and the gender-affirming community they relied upon dismissed their feelings of doubt as internalized “transphobia,” leaving them even more confused and alone than before.
Unfortunately, these stories of regret are becoming more and more common as the rate of gender confusion among young adults increases. But that’s not at all surprising — because if transgenderism is a social contagion, then it will ebb and flow and fall in and out of fashion as any other social trend does. Which is exactly what we’re seeing right now: Too many young adults are being swept away by gender ideology only to realize later that they’d been sold a bill of goods.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the gender lobby is doing everything it can to suppress detransitioners’ stories. A new report from Reuters, for example, found that few of the medical institutions involved in pushing “gender-affirming care” are willing to acknowledge detransitioners’ experiences, let alone allow them to inform their treatments. One doctor with whom the publication spoke, Dr. Kinnon MacKinnon, said efforts to stir up debate on the subject have been shut down completely.
From Reuters:
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Not everyone was willing to join the discussion. A Canadian health provider said it couldn’t participate, citing recent threats to hospitals offering youth gender care. An LGBTQ advocacy group refused to promote the event. MacKinnon declined to identify either, telling Reuters he didn’t want to single them out. Later, after he shared his findings on Twitter, a transgender person denounced his work as “transphobia.”","_id":"00000185-551c-d008-adad-f5df70d80000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b92f10002"}”>A few months ago, [MacKinnon] decided to organize a symposium to share his findings and new perspective with other researchers, clinicians, and patients and their families.
Not everyone was willing to join the discussion. A Canadian health provider said it couldn’t participate, citing recent threats to hospitals offering youth gender care. An LGBTQ advocacy group refused to promote the event. MacKinnon declined to identify either, telling <i>Reuters</i> he didn’t want to single them out. Later, after he shared his findings on Twitter, a transgender person denounced his work as “transphobia.”Dr. Marci Bowers, one of the leading practitioners who provides sex-change treatments for gender-confused persons and the president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, dismissed detransitioning as a “very rare” phenomenon. Dr. Jason Rafferty, a pediatrician who helped write the American Academy of Pediatrics’s statement of support for “gender-affirming care,” claimed detransitioners’ stories are “overrepresented” in the media and said the term “detransition” shouldn’t even be used because it’s a “very invalidating term for a lot of people who are trans and gender-diverse.”
These gender ideologues are doing to detransitioners what they’ve done to everyone who dares to question their ideology: dismissing them as hopeless bigots who deserve to be bullied into submission.
But it’s important to recognize why the backlash against detransitioners, which Reuters documents well, is so severe. As MacKinnon pointed out, “I can’t think of any other examples where you’re not allowed to speak about your own healthcare experiences if you didn’t have a good outcome.”
The reason is simple: Detransitioners have the power to bring the gender lobby’s house of cards down. They have the legal standing to sue healthcare providers who performed irreversible sex-change procedures on them while they were young and impressionable. They have the experience to speak on the long-term repercussions of social and physical transition. And, perhaps most importantly, they have the ability to expose gender ideology as a social contagion of which they were once a part.
Gender ideologues can dismiss and mock them as much as they want, but detransitioners’ stories are legitimate and powerful and becoming more and more common every day. We should hope that they realize, as the gender lobby clearly has, just how important their voices are.
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Kaylee McGhee White is the deputy editor of Restoring America for the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
