THE PERILS OF THE SEX-CHANGE CRAZE

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters Abigail Shrier Regnery Publishing £22.99 (ebook out now; hardback available August 20) ★★★★

Changing sex used to be vanishingly rare, and then suddenly it wasn’t. Over the past decade, there has been a 1,000 per cent increase in gender dysphoria (feelings of profound unhappiness with one’s physical sex) among American adolescents; in the

UK, that rise is even more dramatic, at 4,000 per cent. And whereas this was once almost exclusively a phenomenon of boys wanting to become girls, now the majority of cases are girls who identify as boys or non-binary. What could have caused this remarkable shift?

That’s the question that journalist Abigail Shrier sets out to address in this book, which – alarmist title aside – is well-evidenced and thought-provoking. Finding answers, however, is made difficult by the trans rights movement which, rather than seeking to help others understand, has launched careerruining attacks on researchers. Shrier talks to some of them for this book, but the most important figures here are the girls themselves and their families, whom the author profiles at length.

The picture that emerges is something much more complex than the familiar narrative of ‘born in the wrong body’. None of these girls appeared to be trans until their teenage years. Some are lesbians – but as one young woman explains to Shrier, being a lesbian is ‘just not very cool… it’s a porn category’, whereas being trans is celebrated. Others have eating disorders or issues with self-harm: for them, taking male hormones and having surgery to remove their breasts seems like another way to attack the body.

Shrier argues that this is being driven by social contagion. Trans identification spreads through schools, through friendship groups, through ‘influencer’ videos that offer a rose-tinted take on transition. But the medical pathway is not something to be taken lightly. Hormone treatments lead to lifelong infertility alongside other health problems. What’s euphemistically called ‘top surgery’ is actually an elective double mastectomy, while ‘bottom surgery’ to masculinise genitals is rarely undertaken and subject to heinous complications.

For some, this will be the path to a happy life. But as ‘affirmation’ becomes the medical default, Shrier sees doctors surrendering their professional judgment and duty of care. Unsurprisingly, there’s now a growing population of ‘detransitioners’ – women who have reidentified with their birth sex, and are now coming to terms with the changes to their bodies. Shrier’s strong opinions sometimes get in the way of her case (she encourages parents to tell their daughters that childbirth is ‘life’s greatest blessing’, which seems unlikely to go over well with the average gender-questioning teen), but this is a powerful glimpse of a crisis in the making.