Imprimus "In 2007, America had one pediatric gender clinic; today there are hundreds. Testosterone is readily available to adolescents from places like Planned Parenthood and Kaiser, often on a first visit—without even a therapist’s note.
"How did we get to this point? How is it that we are all supposed to pretend that the only way you can know I’m a woman is if I tell you my pronouns? How did we get to an America in which a 13-year-old in the State of Washington can begin “gender affirming” therapy without her parents’ consent? How did we get to an America in which a 15-year-old in Oregon can undergo “top surgery”—elective double mastectomy—without her parents’ permission? And what can we do about it?***
"To understand how we got to this point, it is useful to begin by considering gender dysphoria—the feeling of severe discomfort in a person’s biological sex. Gender dysphoria is certainly real. It is also exceedingly rare. It afflicts about 0.01 percent of the population, most of whom are male.
"For nearly 100 years of diagnostic history, gender dysphoria typically began in early childhood, between the ages of two and four, and usually involved a boy who insisted that he was not a boy but a girl. . . ."
Abigail Shrier is a journalist and author. She received her A.B. from Columbia College, where she was a Euretta J. Kellett Fellow; her B.Phil. from the University of Oxford; and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was a Coker Fellow. A member of the Board of Advisors of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, she has written for numerous publications, including City Journal, Newsweek, RealClearPolitics, The Federalist, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.