A Modest Proposal to End Insanity, Part I

Conversations around gender transition reveal deeper problems

If I thought it would make a difference, I would take a page from Jonathan Swift and write my own modest proposal. I would call it “A Modest Proposal for Helping Adolescents Deal with Social Anxiety and for Preventing Suicidal Ideation.” Here is how I would begin:

It’s a melancholy object to walk around the streets of the United States of America and see so many eleven- and twelve-year-old children being abused by parents who clearly do not love them. Having learned from the internet and their friends at school that they would be much happier subsisting wholly on macaroni and cheese and fried Oreos, these students return home to parents who do not affirm this choice, but proceed instead to give them chicken, broccoli, and even brussels sprouts! “But mom,” they insist, “eating macaroni and cheese makes me feel much better! I am a person who thrives best on Oreos! Besides, Joey was forced to eat broccoli and he started talking about how he was going to run away from home. And then, when his parents wouldn’t accept him as he is, he killed himself. Is that what you want me to do?” Clearly the answer is that the school authorities need to affirm these children’s desires and provide them access to macaroni and cheese and fried Oreos without the need for parental consent. Trained psychotherapists agree that by age eleven or twelve, “all children know who they are and what’s best for them to eat” and the parents need to affirm that.

This would be great fun for me to write, but would it make a difference? Probably not, because prophetic irony like Swift’s proposal requires the reader’s ability to reason logically—and to admit it when they get caught in a contradiction of their own values. The reader must also be able to acknowledge that certain statements can be scientifically verified as unequivocally false, such as “a diet of processed high-carb foods is healthy for a human being,” and that certain statements can be sociologically verified as unequivocally false, such as “children always know better than their parents what is best for them.”

If the current political landscape has taught me one thing, it is that we have all lost our minds. Something has happened that has made it socially acceptable—and maybe even desirable—for us to betray our own values, morals, and convictions (not to mention verifiable facts) when it is politically expedient to do so. I am trying to figure out what that is. It might be a fool’s errand.

But first let me describe just how insane the conversation and practice surrounding gender transition and gender affirming care has become. 

Abigail Shrier is a journalist who set out to understand why so many adolescents (especially girls) are seeking transgender care in the last two decades—a stunning increase of 1900%. Shrier talked to parents, trans influencers, and educators. Her book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters was denounced as transphobic. Similarly, Jennifer Lahl and Kallie Fell’s book The Detransition Diaries (and related documentary) tells the stories of seven young people who pursued medical transgender interventions—from puberty blocking hormones to double mastectomy—only to regret them later. Worse than being rejected, this book has been ignored by all but conservative press outlets.

Neither book is perfect. But both describe real people who have been harmed by well-meaning medical professionals. A surprisingly large and growing number of young people believe that they have been born in the wrong body. They seek (and easily attain) medical intervention. Not a few of them regret their decisions. They detransition and then testify at great social cost that the change did not give them the peace and self-acceptance they were promised. Three undeniable features emerge.

First, the stories illustrate that when a young person today declares they are trans and wants to medically transition to a different gender, social contagion is likely to be the primary cause. This did not surprise me after writing about the motivations and ethics behind the biotechnology revolution. I discovered that in almost every case, the person seeking medical enhancement begins with a learned contempt for their given body—its limits and its perceived imperfections. Those perceived imperfections are almost always constructs spread by social contagion. Breast implants are the simplest example. Since small breast size will never be considered pathological (by any medical definition), it must be the case that the woman has been taught to see her own body as imperfect and inadequate. That’s social contagion.

The particular social contagion driving every story of gender transition is relatively new, fueled by social media, undeniable, and extremely powerful. Lahl describes what Helena, interviewed in 2022, said about her thought process. Stories like Helena’s are important because she did not experience gender dysphoria as a cause of her depression. 

At age fourteen, she was spending a lot of time online, especially on Tumblr. There she picked up on an underlying theme with regard to gender that she thought offered her clues about her depression and isolation: messages like “if you don’t fit in, that’s a sign you’re trans” and “if you don’t like your body then that’s a sign you’re trans.” The suggestion was that the solution to these feelings was to transition and then she would fit in and like her body. Through hours of online engagement she began to think that she was a boy—a feminine boy.

Helena’s story is increasingly common. Every mom I know who has a daughter this age has reported the ubiquity of peer influence regarding all areas of sexual identity. Five years ago it was usually comments like: “you are wearing a blazer—you must be a lesbian or bi.” Now it’s “you don’t like being female—you must be trans.” We’ve moved from pressure to explore sexual orientation to pressure to explore gender transition practically overnight. Social contagion is the only way to explain this.

The second disturbing feature these stories share is an underlying misogyny. The vast majority of recent transitioners are female to male—most studies indicate at least seventy-five percent. This fact alone is so revelatory of the real issues here that I’m stunned by any feminist who is unwilling to acknowledge it. When I was Helena’s age, I was a tomboy (a category that is not allowed in the current discussion). I was an athlete on the cutting edge of title IX—supported in school, but not taken seriously by men. I wore blazers and pants because they were more comfortable. High heels seemed utterly idiotic to me. I also openly declared that I wanted to be boy, because boys got to do more things than girls—like deep sea fishing. (True story: my brother, who couldn’t care less about fishing, got asked to go on a trip, and not me. I was obsessed with fishing at the time). Feminism taught me that I was not the problem—our culture that thinks that only boys can do certain things or dress comfortably is the problem. 

As long as social inequalities among the sexes exist, misogyny will be a driving (but internalized) force behind every young woman who thinks she is a boy trapped in a girl’s body. What has trapped her is a very old and infantile stereotype of “true” femininity. Trans ideology is a regression for feminism, not an advancement. As Lahl puts it, our culture “encourages these children to change their pronouns and ushers them into a world where they can medically change their body to adhere better to sex stereotypes. And instead of changing the stereotypes that imprison them, the culture pressures them to change their bodies to fit the stereotypes better.”

The third feature these stories share is the most disturbing of all—and prompted my question of what is causing us to lose our minds. I will address that tomorrow.

Christina Bieber Lake is the author of Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism. She is a Contributing Editor for Current.