Mick Hartley

Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze, talks to two trans doctors who now admit that they went too far. The standard of medical care given to transitioners, they admit, was sloppy and unprofessional:

For nearly a decade, the vanguard of the transgender-rights movement — doctors, activists, celebrities and transgender influencers  — has defined the boundaries of the new orthodoxy surrounding transgender medical care: What’s true, what’s false, which questions can and cannot be asked. 

They said it was perfectly safe to give children as young as nine puberty blockers and insisted that the effects of those blockers were “fully reversible.” They said that it was the job of medical professionals to help minors to transition. They said it was not their job to question the wisdom of transitioning, and that anyone who did — including parents — was probably transphobic. They said that any worries about a social contagion among teen girls was nonsense. And they never said anything about the distinct possibility that blocking puberty, coupled with cross-sex hormones, could inhibit a normal sex life.

Their allies in the media and Hollywood reported stories and created content that reaffirmed this orthodoxy. Anyone who dared disagree or depart from any of its core tenets, including young women who publicly detransitioned, were inevitably smeared as hateful and accused of harming children.

But that new orthodoxy has gone too far, according to two of the most prominent providers in the field of transgender medicine: Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist who operated on reality-television star Jazz Jennings; and Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic. 

In the course of their careers, both have seen thousands of patients. Both are board members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the organization that sets the standards worldwide for transgender medical care. And both are transgender women.

Earlier this month, Anderson told me she submitted a co-authored op-ed to The New York Times warning that many transgender healthcare providers were treating kids recklessly. The Times passed, explaining it was “outside our coverage priorities right now.” 

In the old days it was assumed, rightly, that the problem of gender dysphoria in young children would usually sort itself out during the course of development through adolescence. The new dogma insists on early intervention, from puberty blockers – which turn out to have all kinds of problems which have only recently come to light – to invasive procedures like vaginoplasty, which are seldom easy or in any meaningful sense successful. There's no easy way back for these unfortunate victims of medical malpractice.

Anderson agreed that we’re likely to see more regret among this teenage-girl population. “It is my considered opinion that due to some of the — let’s see, how to say it? what word to choose? — due to some of the, I’ll call it just ‘sloppy,’ sloppy healthcare work, that we’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process. And that is going to earn me a lot of criticism from some colleagues, but given what I see — and I’m sorry, but it’s my actual experience as a psychologist treating gender variant youth — I’m worried that decisions will be made that will later be regretted by those making them.”

What, exactly, was sloppy about the healthcare work? “Rushing people through the medicalization, as you and others have cautioned, and failure — abject failure — to evaluate the mental health of someone historically in current time, and to prepare them for making such a life-changing decision,” Anderson said. 

I asked Bowers about the rise of detransitioners, young women who have come to regret transitioning. Many said they were given a course of testosterone on their first visit to a clinic like Planned Parenthood. “​When you have a female-assigned person and she’s feeling dysphoric, or somebody decides that she’s dysphoric and says your eating disorders are not really eating disorders, this is actually gender dysphoria, and then they see you for one visit, and then they recommend testosterone — red flag!” Bowers said. “Wake up here.”

When two professionals who are themselves trans women and who seem to buy into the whole gender identity business – when even they admit that it's gone too far, and lives are being ruined – well, the writing is surely on the wall.