‘To treat all kids with issues as trans is a terrible mistake’

The psychologist – who transitioned at 58 – tells Zoe Strimpel how she was branded a traitor for raising the alarm over the treatment of gender dysphoria in children

At first glance, Dr Erica Anderson seems an unlikely figure to have become a warrior campaigner and leading voice against the “fasttracking” of teenagers by gender clinics. She is 71, she is trans, and a clinical psychologist who specialises in working with transgender youth and has helped hundreds of young people transition. Plus, she lives in the ultimate progressive stronghold of Berkeley, California.

“I came here to establish my new life as Erica,” she says, speaking to me over Zoom from her home office. Stylishly dressed in a neat, brightly coloured top and wearing chic, thick-rimmed spectacles, she speaks slowly and carefully. Books line the wall behind her, and plants are dotted about the small room. These modest circumstances are closely connected to Anderson’s decision, at 58, to “come out” as trans and begin hormone treatment, thereby ending her marriage.

As we speak, it soon becomes clear that she is not so unlikely, after all. Politically, she comes across as free-thinking though cautious. She is no prisoner to the harsh and polarising binaries that have come to define the trans debate. “I’m accused, I think justifiably so, of being in the middle and trying to understand the particulars and the nuance of all these issues,” she says.

Her worry about the haste with which children are being labelled trans is part of what makes parents trust her. But many on the trans-rights side feel deep hostility towards her. “I’ve been vilified in some quarters. You know, people who... tell me to shut the f--- up. They think I’m hurting trans people.” By they, she means mostly young members of the “far Left”, who “think that any questioning of any of this constitutes treason, you know, to the cause”.

A renowned psychologist of 40 years’ experience, she began her gender journey decades ago, when it was rare to find people willing, able or inclined to come out as transgender – a statistical rarity so extreme that prior to 2012 there was no scientific literature on teenage girls developing gender dysphoria at all.

Born in 1951, Erica – born Eric – grew up in Edina, Minnesota, “subject to the Polar Express [wind],” she tells me, and had “a really kind of wonderful childhood”. Anderson’s parents were “an advertising executive and my mother was an English teacher, who stayed at home with us children”.

“I didn’t have any serious problems. I wasn’t gender confused when I was a child. Nobody thought of me as an effeminate boy. I was fine being a boy. I was very athletic all the way into adulthood.” Eric was also heterosexual, and has remained attracted to women.

As a teenager, Anderson “started to have some questions about why I was so curious about girls and how they were different”. Over time, a degree in psychology led to more learning about different conditions. “I started reading about sexuality. I took a human sexuality course. The term transgender was not even in my sexuality textbook. But the thing that came closest to it was transsexual, and that appeared in the section on fetishes; in the chapter on sexual aberrations.

“I married my future wife as we were both finishing graduate school, and we relocated to Minnesota, where I had a postdoc. And then we had two children and I was the father of two children. Sometimes, people are surprised to learn that. I was their father and they knew me only as their father until I came out to them about 13 years ago.”

At the time, being trans invited rank discrimination. Anderson recalls being “discriminated against by universities, in health care – an endocrinologist refused to work with a trans person – and discriminated against in housing, where someone refused to rent a house to me because I was trans”.

I wonder what it was like harbouring the desire to be Erica for all those years, long before the current progressive state of culture. “There was no discussion of any of these things. So those of us who had feelings like this pretty much suppressed them. There were probably some who would have been seen as a feminine boy, and maybe they thought they were gay and maybe they were gay. But that was not my story.”

It seems surprising how little her history matches the (until recently) traditional one of childhood gender dysphoria, and she tells me: “I often say, when you’ve seen one transgender person, you’ve seen one transgender person.”

Anderson has no regrets about her late transition. Her wife had told her that she would divorce her if she transitioned. “I sort of decided it was potentially important enough to me to have a period of my life living as Erica, that I would resign myself to being a barista at Starbucks [if necessary], if I couldn’t be a psychologist.”

In the event, she flourished as a psychologist and maintained a good relationship with her children (a son and daughter, now both in their late 30s) – though says she is “distant” with her ex-wife and implies she is currently single.

Like many older transitioners, she is sensitive to suspect diagnostic trends. But with concern growing over the steep rise in the number of teens identifying as trans, she is among an increasing number of experts and parents who feel they can no longer keep quiet.

In the UK, between 2010 and 2022, the number of girls referred to the Tavistock clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) in London rose by 5,000 per cent. According to a recent YouGov poll, 85 per cent of secondary teachers in the UK reported an increase in the number of trans students in the past three years, with those “birth-assigned female” outnumbering “birth-assigned male” by almost seven to one.

By 2019, 74 per cent of those referred to the Tavistock were female, whereas previous referrals were mostly boys – referrals of young women have increased at twice the rate of men. “Transgender is definitely this generation’s anorexia” is how writer Charlie Bentley-Astor, who has been outspoken about her psychologically lethal brush with gender “affirmation” treatment, has described it.

Critics, including some from within the transgender-treatment community, say some clinics are too quick to offer irreversible treatment to children who would otherwise outgrow their gender-questioning. In the US, the number of gender clinics treating children has grown from zero to more than 100 in the past 15 years, with an “affirmation-only” model that prescribes hormones to children without question.

And yet, blinded by ideology, or terrified, the refusal of experts to tell the truth has hobbled progress and understanding. In 2021, Anderson resigned in despair from “a leadership role” at WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health), the US society at the forefront of transgender care.

“I had colleagues who were saying things such as ‘we shouldn’t talk to the press’,” she says. “The attitude was, ‘let’s stick our head in the sand. Or let’s just huddle in a room with other scientists and talk amongst ourselves and forget what’s going on out there’, as though they could determine what was going on in society. It was so misguided. I finally gave up and I said, ‘If this is what you want to do, I’m gone’.”

So dismayed was she at what was going on among her peers, she contemplated giving up her practice entirely. Though, she says, “I rarely give up on anything, so I think that it’s just in me to persevere. And I think I’ve seen a turn. Two years ago, I felt like I was the only one in my peer group expressing these concerns. Since then, many, many parents have come to me and said, your criticisms of the gender clinics are spot on.”

Overdiagnosis of children raises fundamental issues that go far beyond identity and into the marrow of parenting rights, family, education and health. Some say Britain has led the way in slowing the madness, with the imminent closure of the Tavistock clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service, following the paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass’s damning interim review into its practices.

Her review found overwhelmed staff and waiting lists of up to two years that leave young people “at considerable risk” of distress and deteriorating mental health. Endocrinologists prescribed puberty-blocking drugs (as a precursor to life-changing cross-sex hormones) to most of the children referred to them by Gids.

Anderson’s position is twofold: one, where possible, schools must include, not exclude, parents; and two, these teens should be treated holistically and with psychotherapeutic counselling, not simply medicalised with drugs.

She says many children seeking gender “affirmation” have other disorders: autism, PTSD, bipolar, depression and anxiety. “To treat all the kids as though they’re trans, I think it’s just a terrible mistake,” Anderson tells me. There is a “different clinical picture” in which “the [typical] patient now showing up – and this is true in the UK and Europe as well as the US

– is a female person and does have some of these other co-occurring issues. And so to presume that the models we’ve had for treating the typical traditional gender-presenting kids work with this group of kids, I think is dangerous. There’s no reason to believe that treating gender dysphoria will cure depression, will resolve trauma, or change someone from being on the autism spectrum to not being on the autism spectrum. And I think it’s mistaken to think that expediting care for gender issues will treat all the other issues.” Many parents, Anderson says, have shared horrifying experiences of taking their child to a clinic and finding, within 15 minutes of a first visit, “it was not ‘here’s an outline of how we’re going to evaluate your child’. It was like, ‘here’s what we do with hormones’.”

The reasons for the speed with which gender issues have besieged adolescent girls are not yet entirely understood. One theory, espoused by Anderson, is that the pandemic pushed children online more intensively, causing a major upswing in gender confusion; trans influencers on TikTok and YouTube became more powerful, telling girls feeling anxious about puberty that they are in the “wrong body”, and extolling the virtues of breast binding and testosterone. And, says Anderson, girls are more susceptible to social influence. It’s a toxic collision.

“If you go on YouTube,” says Anderson, “there is a thing you just put in [the search box]: ‘the 100 most popular trans influencers’. They actually have started to collect them. So someone on this YouTube video says, ‘young person, teenager, if you’re uncomfortable in your body, maybe you’re in the wrong body’. When I was a pubescent teenager, it seemed like everybody was uncomfortable with their body. And the punchline for that is, so you’re trans. But the people who are saying these things are not psychologists.”

Parents are utterly bewildered by the speed with which their daughters have fallen into this vortex – and by the way they have been treated by schools. “Creating, in effect, a double life between school and home creates a rupture,” says Anderson. “And we know from the research that the difference between the genderquestioning kids who do well, whatever the outcome of their gender journey, and those who don’t, is family support. So to institutionalise a choice, to not try to get family support, is a grave mistake.”

Anderson’s sense of the wrongness of school policy towards parents has led her into uncharted territory: siding with conservatives. In a brief against a Maryland school district in a case brought by parents in 2020, Anderson argued, as Hilary Cass has done, that the legal authority of parents includes how their child is addressed in school, and, crucially, that social gender transition is “a major and potentially life-altering decision that requires parental involvement, for many reasons”. The briefing meant she was accused of siding with the enemy. “I have been asked… how could you align with a Right-leaning advocacy group?”

But she is glad she did it – and would gladly do more. “It was a great

‘I’ve been vilified, and lost patients. But parents thank me for speaking out’

‘There’s a resurgence of ageism, with young trans people disdainful of older ones like me’

privilege to work with the attorneys on the Maryland brief. They made it easy for me to contribute. Other groups have approached me.”

In return for her efforts, she has been railed at by fellow trans people and activists, who call her a “traitor”. She has been “cancelled” by some patients, too. “I have lost, I will admit, a couple of young trans patients who read something and decided that they couldn’t any longer work with me, even though I helped them transition.”

I ask Anderson whether the treatment of parents by both schools and children signals an underlying social shift. She points to the lengthening of the period of adolescence, which creates “this kind of weird dynamic setup where the kids are dependent upon their parents, but they resent them. I think there has been an erosion of respect. In the past few years, both undergraduate and graduate students are not giving any credence to the views of the professor. It’s as though we’re equivalent; but I’m a professional in this field, and I studied it for decades, and you are a student.

“I think there’s a resurgence, at least in America, of ageism,” she adds. “I feel a split in the trans community, with young trans people being very disdainful of older trans people. And I find it impossible to justify – like, what is the reason you are dismissive of someone like me?” Someone, in other words, who helped make the world the more trans-accepting one it is today.

Anderson does feel that at last change is on the horizon, crucially in the growing number of lawsuits, in school districts in states including California and Wisconsin. “The lawsuits are going to change things a lot. You know a number of schools [in the US] are being sued by parents who were frustrated that they went ahead and did these things privately, and didn’t tell them.” Florida has just proposed a bill promoting parental rights that would restrict the use of gender pronouns in school.

But we have a long way to go – here in Britain, despite the closure of the Tavistock clinic, the Department for Education has failed to provide clear guidance, as schools await the months-late consultation document on the topic. Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, has refused to meet with the Bayswater Support Group – 800 parents of gender questioning or trans children, united by a claim to be “wary of medical solutions to gender dysphoria”.

The task now is to hold governments to account over guidance for children, parents and charities. And, of course, to start showing girls why they don’t need to change gender to be OK.

Anderson, certainly, is not giving up. “I continue to write and speak out. The parents who come to me are so appreciative... and say thank you for speaking up and trying to balance the conversation and make sure that parents are involved. They’re not trying to deny the rights of trans people, or even that their own children are trans. They just want a reasonable situation in which to protect their children and live their lives.”