Falling Asleep to Dissonance: My Nightly Reflections on the Trans Debate

A Voice in the Dark

Two nights ago, I began listening to Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier (2020)—an audiobook I had added to my library alongside Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce (2021), which I plan to listen to next.

Shrier’s book opens with a disturbing observation: teenage girls—once virtually absent from the clinical history of gender dysphoria—now dominate the statistics. “Before 2012,” she writes, “there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all.” But in recent years, the number of teen girls identifying as trans has surged. According to data from the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, the number of girls referred for gender identity services in the UK rose from just 32 in 2009/10 to over 1,740 in 2018/19—an increase of more than 5,000%, while the number of boys increased from 40 to 624, an increase of 1,460%. Shrier cites this dramatic surge as evidence of an unprecedented sociological shift, one that demands scrutiny beyond medical explanations.

What explains this sudden epidemic? For Shrier, the answer lies not in biology but in sociology—what she describes as a form of “social contagion.” Central to her argument is Dr. Lisa Littman's 2018 study, which introduced the concept of "Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria" (ROGD). Littman's research analysed 256 parent-completed surveys about adolescents who identified as transgender. Crucially, it found that 86.7% of these adolescents either experienced increased exposure to social media/internet content related to transgender identities, were part of friend groups containing transgender-identified peers, or both. Moreover, 36.8% belonged to friendship groups in which the majority had become transgender-identified within a similar timeframe. Littman’s study highlighted a particularly striking statistic: approximately 65% of adolescent girls identified as transgender abruptly following extensive exposure to peer groups and social media environments, where rates of transgender identification reached levels more than 70 times higher than would typically be expected.

In Shrier's own words:

Peer and social media influence were very much in evidence with this cohort of teen girls.

She describes the phenomenon as a “craze” spreading like a virus among anxious, unhappy girls. These were girls who “had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans ‘influencers.’” In short, her book portrays the rise in teen girls saying “I am trans” as driven not by inherent dysphoria but by social factors—peer influence, online communities, and cultural enthusiasm for transgender identity, a modern peer contagion effect.

This analysis can be supported and expanded upon with recent data from university student surveys. According to the 2020 and 2021 College Free Speech Rankings surveys conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), among 159 campuses sampled, three schools had a majority of students identifying as LGBTQ: Smith College (70%), Wellesley College (61%), and Oberlin College (51%).

Smith and Wellesley are elite women’s colleges, while Oberlin—though coeducational—has a longstanding reputation for left-leaning politics and LGBTQ activism. What these institutions share is a strong ideological culture that affirms and encourages identity exploration, particularly in the realm of gender and sexuality. Their student populations are overwhelmingly female, and they foster environments where LGBTQ identification is not only accepted but socially rewarded. These cultural conditions mirror the peer-reinforcement dynamics described by Littman and Shrier: tight-knit, progressive, often activist communities in which transgender identity may serve as both a personal statement and a ticket to social belonging.

Overall, FIRE found that 23% of American college students identified as LGBTQ, with significant variation by institutional type.

The above clearly shows that the dramatic statistics reported by FIRE for Smith, Wellesley and Oberlin are not outliers—they’re empirical echoes of the broader social patterns Shrier seeks to expose.

The FIRE surveys show that women are more likely than men to identify as LGBTQ (28% vs. 16%), yet the share identifying specifically as gay or lesbian remains virtually unchanged—about 2.8% of women and 6.1% of men. That gap indicates the recent rise in LGBTQ labelling is driven not by a surge in traditional gay or lesbian orientation, but by socially influenced categories such as bisexual, questioning, and transgender. This pattern lends weight to Shrier’s argument that the uptick in transgender identification among teenage girls and young women is best explained by social, rather than biological, factors.

The Medical Pathway: From “Pause Button” to Permanent Change

If peer contagion is the spark, the medical system is the accelerant. Shrier devotes much of Irreversible Damage to tracing how quickly and thoroughly the health care establishment embraced “gender-affirming care” for minors—often with minimal psychological evaluation or parental consent. The core mechanism is what clinicians call “the gender journey,” a series of steps starting with social transition and progressing through puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and, in some cases, surgery. 

Once celebrated for caution and measured deliberation, paediatric care has, in Shrier's account, become swept up in ideological fervour. “The job of medicine,” she writes, “is to question self-diagnosis, not codify it.” Yet increasingly, doctors feel pressured to affirm rather than investigate. “Every adult in her orbit,” Shrier warns, “is trained to nod along.”

This environment facilitates what she calls “a gender journey with no off-ramps.” Even therapists no longer explore trauma, depression, or developmental struggles—instead, they validate identity claims immediately.

The therapist’s office used to be the one place a girl could go and hear: ‘Let’s talk about that.’ Now it’s: ‘Of course you are.’

Shrier interviews girls who describe how their therapy felt more like onboarding than exploration. One said: “They told me I was brave. I hadn’t even told them my story.” Another: “My friends said if I didn’t transition, I’d be denying who I was. But I wasn’t even sure who I was.”

She also explores the rise of gender clinics and paediatric transition services, pointing out that some operate on business models tied to speed and volume. “In a single year,” she reports, “Planned Parenthood grew from offering hormone therapy in two clinics to more than 200.” In this environment, transition becomes a product: “diagnose fast, prescribe faster.”

Advocates often describe puberty blockers as a neutral intervention—a reversible “pause button” that simply gives a young person time to explore their identity before committing to more serious steps. Shrier is blunt in her rejection of that framing, but she does so not by speaking in abstractions. She points to the clinical data: once a teenager begins puberty blockers, nearly 100% proceed to cross-sex hormones. That is a conveyor belt and the “pause button” metaphor is “completely false”.

“Puberty blockers… are a profound intervention,” she writes. “They don’t pause puberty; they derail it.”
(U.S. Senate testimony, 2021)

And the risks are not minor. For girls placed on testosterone, Shrier cites evidence of increased heart disease risk, reduced fertility, permanent voice lowering, and sexual dysfunction. Those who undergo mastectomies—many as young as 15—are left permanently altered, often without having experienced full adult development or sexual maturity. One de-transitioned she interviews puts it starkly:

Joining the pro-trans world felt like joining a cult. When you’re inside [this world], you believe non-reality and you disbelieve reality.

These aren’t edge cases. They’re increasingly common. And Shrier argues that the ideology of “affirmation” now dominates so completely that questioning this medical cascade is seen as dangerous—even when raised by parents, teachers, or physicians themselves.

Based on outcomes in clinical trials, puberty blockers seem to nearly guarantee a child will proceed to cross-sex hormones.

For Shrier, that’s not health care—it’s fast-tracked, ideologically-driven intervention masquerading as compassion. What makes it especially troubling is that the process exploits a vulnerable window of adolescence, one during which the human brain—especially the prefrontal cortex—has not yet reached maturity.

Educational Institutions and the Ideology of Affirmation

If peer groups and medicine form the social and clinical scaffolding of adolescent transition, then universities and schools are where the ideological groundwork is laid—and where the silence of adults has become the norm.

Universities, in particular, develop and propagate the ideological frameworks underpinning the gender-affirmation model, which are then transmitted and enforced by schools. While universities generate the theories, policies, and cultural frameworks, schools are not passive recipients—they actively implement these ideas, often advancing them without parental knowledge or consent. Shrier is unequivocal: educational institutions at both levels are not neutral; and this is supported by the evidence from the referral data for the Tavistock clinic.

Shrier shares the testimony of educators who are instructed to use a child’s preferred name and pronouns at school while still using the birth name at home—a duality that amounts, in Shrier’s words, to “institutional deception.”

“Parental rights,” one administrator tells her bluntly, “ended when those children were enrolled in public school.”

This attitude is not limited to rogue districts or radical fringe actors. It is systemic, embedded into anti-bullying programs, sex-ed curricula, and the training of school counsellors.

Teachers view parents as bullies, who know next to nothing about gender theory or queer theory.

Shrier recounts meetings with teachers who describe being told that “sexual dimorphism must be rejected outright,” and that the only morally defensible position is full affirmation of any declared identity, regardless of the child’s age or history.

The influence of this ideology, she argues, does not stop at the classroom door. It flows directly into children’s smartphones, where gender influencers, transition YouTubers, and Tumblr micro-celebrities present trans identity as both rebellious and redemptive. The result is an immersive belief system—what Shrier at one point describes as “a cult of affirmation”—in which every sign of adolescent discomfort becomes a potential signal of being trans.

She describes girls who had never shown any signs of gender dysphoria, only to emerge from a school assembly or online forum convinced they were born in the wrong body. One quote captures the emotional urgency driving these decisions:

They flee womanhood like a house on fire, their minds fixed on escape.

The question Shrier raises—urgently and repeatedly—is this: why are we affirming escape instead of helping girls face what they are running from?

In her view, the new ideology sells transition not as one difficult option among many, but as the answer. And once a girl declares she is trans, the script is set: affirmation, treatment, celebration. Dissent becomes dangerous. Concern becomes bigotry. And even parents who love and support their daughters may be accused of “abuse” for asking questions.

The Parents: Disbelieved, Dismissed, and Shut Out

Shrier’s interviews with parents are some of the most affecting parts of her book—not because they are dramatic, but because they are ordinary. These are not fringe reactionaries or cultural crusaders. They are mothers and fathers blindsided by a change in their daughter so sudden and disorienting, it feels as though she vanished overnight.

The stories follow a common pattern: a previously well-adjusted daughter becomes withdrawn, irritable, then suddenly declares herself trans—often after discovering online communities or encountering affirming language at school. Parents describe feeling as if they’ve lost access to their child. And when they seek help, the institutions they turn to—schools, counselors, pediatricians—treat them not as partners in care, but as obstacles.

One parent tells Shrier:

My daughter was a sweet, creative girl. She never hated being a girl—until last year. Now she’s convinced she’s a boy, and everyone at school calls her by a different name. I wasn’t even told.

Over and over, Shrier documents school systems that actively withhold information from parents, citing privacy policies and student autonomy. Some parents are stunned to learn that their child has already been referred to gender clinics without their knowledge. Others are told that refusal to affirm could lead to self-harm or suicide. Shrier highlights this messaging as emotionally coercive and medically unproven.

In her view, what’s happening is not empowerment—it’s abandonment. The very adults charged with protecting children are, she argues, outsourcing that duty to ideology.

Parents, already reeling from a sudden change in their daughter, are often told that questioning her new identity is ‘transphobic’ or even abusive.

Some of these parents comply, fearful of losing their child altogether. Others resist, only to find themselves isolated or attacked. Shrier includes testimonies from parents who are socially ostracized or even reported to authorities for refusing to go along with transition plans.

“I was told,” one mother recalls, “that if I didn’t affirm, my daughter might kill herself. No one asked if I had concerns. No one asked if I knew her.”

Shrier emphasizes that affirmation culture frames parental resistance as though it is abuse.

When a girl tells you she’s trans, you have only one acceptable response: Celebrate. Anything else is bigotry.

The result is an inversion of authority: the child becomes the expert, the therapist becomes the enforcer, and the parent is left outside the room.

Yet many of the girls interviewed later regretted their transitions. Some de-transitioned quietly, ashamed or too afraid to speak. Others now suffer lifelong side effects.

“I lost my voice,” one said, “and not just the one I speak with. I mean the one inside me. The one that used to say: ‘I’m not ready.’”

Still, the book is not without hope. Shrier closes her chapters on family by urging parents to reclaim their role—not through panic or rejection, but through calm, consistent engagement. She offers practical advice: limit screen time, foster offline friendships, discuss identity thoughtfully but firmly, and above all, don’t surrender your instincts to institutional pressure.

The central message is simple but resolute:

Parents know their daughters best. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

The Bigger Picture: A Culture That Forgot How to Say “No”

Shrier is not writing as a psychologist, a doctor, or a politician. She writes as a journalist—and as a woman—trying to map a cultural shift that almost no one in power wants to name. Her argument is not that every trans-identifying girl is confused, nor that transgender people don’t exist. Her focus is narrower and more specific: that a sudden and massive wave of adolescent girls—many with no history of gender dysphoria—are being shepherded down a medicalized path they cannot fully understand, for reasons that are social, emotional, and ideological.

And the culture, she argues, is not only failing to ask why. It is actively punishing anyone who does.

At the root of her critique is an erosion of adult responsibility. Teachers defer to students. Doctors defer to patient declarations. Therapists no longer explore underlying trauma or developmental struggles—instead, they affirm. Every authority figure, Shrier writes, has been trained to say yes.

I can’t think of any branch of medicine outside of cosmetic surgery where the patient makes the diagnosis and prescribes the treatment. This doesn’t exist.

Except here, in adolescent gender care.

But perhaps Shrier’s most arresting conclusion is not about medicine or education. It’s about womanhood. Her book suggests that something has gone very wrong in how we present the female body to the next generation. Bombarded by hypersexualized images, offered few cultural models of strong femininity, and increasingly told that discomfort in puberty is a medical emergency, many girls are opting out.

“They aren’t really choosing to be men,” one parent tells her. “They just don’t want to be girls anymore.”

For Shrier, the answer isn’t surveillance or stigma. It’s something more radical: cultural repair. Adults—parents, teachers, therapists, politicians—must relearn how to draw lines. Not to be cruel, but to care. Not to dominate, but to guide.

Her final chapter offers seven recommendations, all practical, all aimed at re-establishing boundaries: restrict access to social media, don’t relinquish language, resist ideological capture in schools, and above all, celebrate being female.

Teach girls that it’s a wonderful thing to be a woman.

It is a quiet ending. Not angry, but sorrowful. Shrier’s voice is not that of a crusader, but of someone deeply alarmed by a generation of girls being steered into irreversible decisions by people too afraid—or too ideologically committed—to intervene.

🧠 Reflections in the Dark

This blog series isn’t a polemic. It’s more like a notebook—written in the mornings, based on what I remember from the night before, as I drift off to sleep listening to these challenging, often dissonant reflections on gender, identity, and the social movements that have reshaped the conversation. It’s also a return, for me, to questions that first unsettled me as a university student in the 1990s—questions about sex difference, truth, and what we’re allowed to believe.

A Young Man in the Wrong Classroom

I was born in 1975 and entered university in the mid-1990s, at a time when identity politics and postmodern theory were reshaping the social sciences. In my first year, I enrolled in Sociology, only to discover it was largely an exercise in ideological conformity. The opening tutorial offered three frameworks: Traditional Marxism, Social Constructionism, and Functionalism—though only the first two were presented as valid.

Wanting no part in Marxism, I explored Social Constructionism, but something didn’t sit right. I had watched the student protests in Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall unfold on television just a few years earlier, and now here I was, being taught Marxism—not as history, but as a kind of secular gospel. When the time came to choose elective subjects, I enrolled in Women’s Sociology, hoping to find a more grounded discussion of gender difference. Instead, I found myself even more alienated.

The Feminist Standpoint and the Silence of Dissent

The first tutorial in Women’s Sociology began with an explanation of the Feminist Standpoint—the assertion that knowledge is rooted in gendered experience, and that academic work in the course must be written from a female perspective. I was the only male student in the room. When the lecturer made clear that the Feminist Standpoint was not just encouraged but compulsory, I felt a wave of discomfort. How could I, as a man, write from a position I did not occupy?

The next blow came quickly: any attempt to explain gender through biology was dismissed as “Biological Reductionism,” a violation of the course’s ideological boundaries. I approached my tutor after class, asking if I might write from my own point of view instead. She said no—it wasn’t allowed. I then asked if I could explore the role of biology in shaping sex differences. Again, no. I left that meeting demoralized, aware that not only my voice but my framework for understanding the world was unwelcome in the classroom.

Mars, Venus, and My First Rebellion

Still shaken but not ready to give up, I went to the university library in search of something—anything—that might offer a perspective on gender I could believe in. I wasn’t looking to rebel; I was looking to understand. I scoured the shelves for feminist works that acknowledged biological difference, but found only more theory wrapped in jargon and hostility toward the very question I wanted to ask.

Then, almost by accident, I found a copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray (1992).


It wasn’t an academic text, but it was honest, accessible, and unapologetically built on the idea that men and women are fundamentally different in ways that matter. It spoke to what I had felt intuitively but had been told I wasn’t allowed to say.

I used it to write my first assignment—a paper challenging the claim that men "treat women as sex objects," arguing instead that male attraction is rooted in biology, not misogyny. I received a mark of 50%. Technically a pass, but in practice a message: there is no room here for that kind of thinking.

The Evolution of My Desire to Understand

Disillusioned and feeling intellectually stranded, I dropped out of that university and moved to Melbourne the following year, hoping to find a more open academic environment. I re-enrolled and resumed my studies, this time steering clear of courses where ideology came pre-packaged.

It was during this period that I discovered the work of David Buss, a leading evolutionary psychologist whose research on human mating strategies offered the scientific grounding I had been searching for. His book The Evolution of Desire (1994) provided a rigorous, data-driven approach to understanding sex differences—one that neither reduced women to stereotypes nor denied the role of biology in shaping behaviour.


Buss didn’t speak in slogans or moral certainties; he spoke in evidence, patterns, and evolutionary logic. Though I didn’t write about his work as a university student, it became a private framework through which I could rebuild a view about gender difference that had been, until then, systematically dismantled.

📚 Bibliography & Further Listening

• Book: Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier (2020)
  Google Books

• Abigail Shrier’s U.S. Senate Testimony, 2021 Link

• Book: Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce (2021)
  Google Books

• Podcast: The Trans War on Reality, with Helen Joyce on The Brendan O’Neill Show, Episode 57, Listen on Spiked (Aired: 29 July 2021)

• Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). (2020). “2020 College Free Speech Rankings.” https://www.thefire.org/research/publications/student-surveys/2020-college-free-speech-rankings/

• FIRE 2021. “2021 College Free Speech Rankings.” https://www.thefire.org/research/publications/student-surveys/2021-college-free-speech-rankings/

• Figure 1. Share Identifying as LGBTQ by Institutional Type Source: FIRE 2020 and 2021 student surveys. N= 4,078 Liberal Arts College; 4,515 Ivy League; 27,652 R1; 4,140 R2; 1,122 R3. Survey weights applied.

• Kaufmann, Eric. (2022). "Diverse and Divided: A Political Demography of American Elite Students." Report No. 7, Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, October 3, 2022. https://www.cspicenter.com/p/diverse-and-divided-a-political-demography#footnote-1-75102098.

• The Top 30 Most LGBTQ Friendly Colleges, college transitions.com, April 9, 2025, Link
• Littman, L. (2018). Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. PLOS ONE, 13(8), e0202330. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202330
• Dr. Lisa Littman on Backlash over Gender Dysphoria and Transgender Research | The Megyn Kelly Show Link
• Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust referral data (as summarized by Transgender Trend, 2019). Available at: https://www.transgendertrend.com/surge-referral-rates-girls-tavistock-continues-rise/

• Book: Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray (1992)
  goodreads.com

• Book: The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating by David M. Buss (1994, 3rd edition 2016)
  goodreads.com

• Book: When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault by David M. Buss (2021)
  goodreads.com