Have we reached “peak trans?” There have been some positive developments in the last year or two: pushback against corporate bullying, increased support for women in sports, and new limitations on trans “treatments” for minors in some Western European countries. The Cass Report is the latest example of this positive trend. But the multi-million-dollar industry behind the chemical castrations and physical mutilations is far from disappearing. That means that this will be a live issue for years to come. Concretely: teachers, counselors, and doctors will continue pushing this on children, while classroom and workplace activists will continue demanding ever more absurd special treatment and ever more stringent censorship of their universities, peers, colleagues and employers.
So, where do we turn when the demands come?
We are fortunate. For years—in some cases, decades—brilliant people have been working at this crisis while keeping their feet on the ground and refusing to bow to the mania. They did this day in, day out, while many of us were asleep or shrugged at the normalization of this dangerous fad.
Some of these people have been wary all along. Others have come to fight the craze from the inside: having themselves first undergone or even counseled transition, they realized what a horrible mistake this had been, and then dedicated their lives to warning others. I tell some of their stories below.
All of them are heroic. I want first of all to salute them and honor them for their courage and determination, and acknowledge the suffering they have endured—physically and emotionally, in so many cases, but also socially and professionally.
Secondly, however, I thought it would be handy to have a list of these heroes, and their books, articles, podcasts, and films, to help make sober sense of this phenomenon—and to keep it in the back pocket for when the crisis hits close to home.
Two notes are in order. For one, many of these resources are updated frequently, and so are worth following. Second, the list can obviously make no claim to being exhaustive. More people are speaking out every day, and more detransitioner support groups are emerging to help those in need. I would encourage you to keep your eyes open, and if you see someone or something that you think should be included, please say so in the comments.
1) Turning back the tide: Researchers, clinicians, and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM)
We have often been told to “follow the science”—but which science? And are its directions so unambiguous? Trans activists have their pet articles, but other researchers have drawn increasing attention to the flaws in many of those studies, including but not limited to small sample sizes, leading questions, and selective demographic bases. On top of that, there’s the wide disparity between initial research objectives and the ways the findings have been used. The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) is an initiative by researchers in this field to foreground these problems as well as to announce and discuss new research in the field as it emerges. For clinicians and those interested in the technical aspects of the medical and therapeutic side of this crisis, as well as staying up to date on the latest, SEGM is indispensable.
I want to flag some of the researchers and doctors active in this field by name. Dr. Miriam Grossman is a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist who has been working with patients struggling with gender-related questions for years. She has been warning about the crisis since 2009 or earlier. Her work has led her to testify before Congress and state legislatures about the “flood of detransitioners” that the current Zeitgeist would silence. Dr. Grossman has published two lists that are each worth your attention.
The first is a comprehensive set of parent resources—including everything from the background of the gender movement to guides for how to file an open records request if, for instance, your child’s school is attempting to transition your child.
The second is a list of key scientific papers assembled by another psychiatrist, Dr. Lauren H. Schwartz. Underneath topical subheadings—e.g. social transition, suicide vs. reported suicidality and self-report studies, transparency and the overstated certainty of benefits vs. understatement of risks, the phenomenon Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria [ROGD], and guides to care—are scientific articles published through 2023 in academic journals. The list also appears as the second appendix in Dr. Grossman’s book Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness (2023).
Of the various practical guides now available, I want to mention just at this point. Erin Brewer and Maria Keffler’s Commonsense Care: Parenting Gender-Confused Kids with Truth and Love (2022) has practical guidance for mothers and fathers faced with this and at a loss for how to proceed. The book is specifically endorsed by Dr. Grossman. Sue Evans and Marcus Evans take a somewhat different approach. For many years associated with the Tavistock Clinic’s eerily named Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) (more on that below), they came to believe that they were doing more harm than good, and radically re-thought their gender paradigm. For their framework, which will be useful for counselors and therapists, see Gender Dysphoria: A Therapeutic Model for Working with Children, Adolescents and Young Adults (2021).
To round out this section I want to honor a few researchers who have taken heroic stands at often tremendous personal costs—including professional isolation, loss of livelihood, cancellation, and smear campaigns: Dr. Stephen B. Levine, Dr. Lisa Littman, Dr. Michael Biggs. Each of them deserves a full story. And there are, and will be, many more like them.
2) Therapists, investigators, communicators: Lisa Marchiano, Stella O’Malley, and Sasha Ayad
Marchiano, O’Malley, and Ayad are therapists and counselors who have worked with gender-questioning youth for a number of years. Their experiences in those settings suggested to them that gender dysphoria was often produced by domestic crises and social pressures. As they dug deeper, they found more and more evidence that this was so. What I like about them is their charitable and inquisitive spirit, their engagement with the scientific literature and their ability to communicate it, and their compassion for the people suffering from gender dysphoria. They are also fun: they have a refreshing and cheerful approach and a genuinely hopeful attitude which shines through in all their work.
O’Malley and Asad have been hosting an excellent podcast called Gender: A Wider Lens. Their guests are always fascinating, and even when the hosts disagree with them, they do so with clarity, charity, and depth. I strongly recommend listening to any episode, but one place to start would be their interview of one of the Dutch scientists behind a flawed study that has been misused to justify transitioning children. Another episode interviews researchers who expose the key flaws in that influential “Dutch protocol.”
With Marchiano, they have published a handbook called When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Parents (2023).
For families, schools, clinics, and companies, and other institutions looking for advice specific to their organizations, they offer a consulting service at Wider Lens Consulting.
Finally, O’Malley is Founder and Executive Director of Genspect, an international support and advocacy group of therapists, doctors, parents, and detransitioners who run conferences and seminars to present and highlight research on this crisis as well as solutions for those at risk. Genspect’s FAQ page is worth a read for well-researched responses to some of the most common questions.
3) Progressive countries rolling back trans: Norway, Finland, France, and the UK
In some countries where there was early enthusiasm for the trans movement, and very “progressive” policies making puberty blockers, hormone “therapy,” and surgery widely available, there has been a frank recognition that things are not as simple as the trans narrative suggests. In some of these countries, health authorities have begun to scale back the availability of such plans. The national situations are different enough that I will not go deeply into them here, but I wish to flag these for American readers in particular who may be tempted to look to progressive northern and western Europe as to courageous trailblazers whose lead we should follow. We should follow them—now that they are scaling back Big Trans. Here are just a few resources on Norway, Finland,France, and the United Kingdom.
The United Kingdom, though, deserves a further comment. It led the world for decades with its Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), mentioned above. Based at the Tavistock Clinic of its National Health Service, GIDS turns out to have had a history of pressuring children and families to make terrible decisions to transition (and even they warned against the emotional blackmail of the suicide threat, a favored activist technique). Hannah Barnes covers the story from the establishment of GIDS to its fortunate demise in her riveting book Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children (2023). Especially eye-opening is a remark she reports by its founder, Domenico Di Ceglie, openly wondering whether the GIDS created a problem that would not otherwise have existed. See also an interview with Barnes summarizing some of the findings, and my look at the Cass Report here.
4) Courageous journalists: Helen Joyce, Abigail Shrier, and Matt Walsh
This is, perhaps, an unlikely assortment. I doubt that Helen Joyce and Abigail Shrier, accomplished feminists, have much in common with Matt Walsh, a conservative political commentator well known for his work at the Daily Wire. For various reasons, Walsh is definitely an outlier on this list, and he may alienate some who are not conservatives by conviction. But I have good reasons to include them all here.
Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, uses academic research and her personal interviews with people identifying as trans in her book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020). Some of the trans-identifying people have detransitione; others haven’t. By turns sensitive and scorching, Shrier’s book especially highlights the phenomenon of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) in teens, especially teen girls. As documented by Dr. Lisa Littman (mentioned above) and others, ROGD has all the psychological and sociological markers of a disorder like anorexia or other forms of self-harm, including emotional or medical co-morbities compounded by peer pressure. Shrier’s book is a call to common sense that never loses sight of the personal anguish of the people at the heart of the story. And while we’re at it, Shrier’s new book puts much of the transgender crisis in the context of a broader civilizational crisis in childrearing practices, a malaise fueled by the the child psychology industry: Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up (2024).
Helen Joyce must be one of the few Ph.D. mathematicians who also have a background in musical theater. There is no doubt a story in that. She pivoted to journalism as a writer for the Economist, and in the pages of that publication began following the gender ideology movement before publishing her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (2021). Moved in particular by a number of encounters with detransitioners, she exposes the trans movement’s history, its principles (“gender-identity ideology 101”), the effects on children, the importance of female-only spaces and sports, and institutional takeover by activists, before pointing to hopeful signs for the future. The book earned the praise of Prof. Kathleen Stock, a feminist and philosopher who has herself been canceled for such outrageous opinions as that lesbian dating apps should not exclude women who do not wish to hook up with “women” who have penises (yes, you read that tortured sentence correctly).
Then there is Walsh. Regardless of your political positions, I would strongly encourage everyone to watch his film What is a Woman? He has done a tremendous service to us all by exposing the mendacity and vacuous ideological basis of the trans movement. He has brought to light the suffering of detransitioners and noble work of therapists in the resistance, including some on this list, who otherwise would have remained in relative obscurity. And he has done this for an audience of nearly 200 million viewers on Twitter alone! If you are not one of them, I urge you to take a look. The film is now available only on the DW website, with a 15-minute clip available for free here. It would well be worth a month’s subscription.
5) Say Their Names: Keira Bell, Chloe Cole, Helena Kerschner, Scott Newgent, and thousands of other detransitioners
Finally, we come to those before whom I am most filled with awe. They are real heroines. We hear so much about denying the existence of trans people. I have found that those who complain loudest about that are those who are the quickest to deny the existence of those who regret their transitions. Yet a “detrans” subreddit now has over 50,000 members (not all of whom will be detransitioners, of course, but the interest is clearly vast). There are too many to name individually, but I want to name just a few especially courageous individuals:
Keira Bell is a young British woman who, against a background of family turmoil and social difficulties, was counseled to “transition.” She underwent hormone therapy at 16 and a double mastectomy at 20 before being hit with crushing regret. Bell v Tavistock, her case against Britain’s flagship Tavistock Clinic, was initially successful, and while it ended up being overturned by the Supreme Court, it brought massive public pressure on the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development service. Combined with other revelations by former employees, this forced GIDS to shut down. Read “My Story” in Keira’s own words.
Chloe Cole’s trajectory is very similar. A tomboy growing up in California, she was socially transitioned at 12, put on puberty blockers at 13, and subjected to a double mastectomy at only 15 years old. By 17 her regret was acute and chronic, and she began detransitioning. Since then, this brave young woman has dedicated her life to warning others about the dangers, and is actively campaigning at state and federal levels for laws that will protect children from what she suffered. This includes fighting the cynical legislators who in 2023 made Cole’s native California a “sanctuary state” for misguided parents hoping to transition their children.
Scott Newgent is a woman whose transition in her 40s was a disaster. Her emotional testimony in Walsh’s What is a Woman?brought to light the medical, professional, domestic, social, financial, emotional, and spiritual horrors she suffered, and continues to suffer. (Note that Newgent uses a male name and masculine pronouns; the hormone and surgeries were severe enough that she feels even social detransition would be impractical. But she also says she would not have transitioned had she known the consequences. This fact, which reflects biological reality, is important, so I will stick with feminine pronouns.) She has courageously offered her life to public as a cautionary tale about the hell that transitioning brought her, largely through through the project Trans Regretters.
Helena Kerschner, another young American woman, suffered like so many young women from all kinds of adolescent anxieties, including body-image issues. In her powerful piece “By Any Other Name,” Kerschner describes how it was time spent on the internet (in her case, Tumblr) that exposed her to trans ideology, and how others in her online “community” coached and pressured her into transitioning. With a team of young women with similar stories, she heads the Pique Resilience Project, a detrans advocacy and support group.
The bottom line: Trans must not claim more lives
There is absolutely nothing inevitable about the victory of the trans movement in our society, culture, or institutions. The heroes and heroines listed above—and so many others whom I want to acknowledge in a general way, even if I have not mentioned them by name—deserve our attention and support when they are attacked and maligned and ostracized, as they are so often.
So remember them. Inform yourself by reading their stories and their research. Take advantage of their findings, and their hard-won wisdom, when the crisis finds you. These people have done and are continuing to do the work that may save your company or your school—or your children.