In 2019, when I began writing Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze quietly ravaging teenage girls for nearly a decade burst into an uncontrolled, destructive burn.
The previous year, a public health researcher then at Brown University, Dr. Lisa Littman, had stuck her neck out. In an academic paper, she hypothesized that the sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls was the result not of typical gender dysphoria (severe discomfort in one’s biological sex, normally beginning in early childhood) but of social contagion. Trans identification, Littman argued, had become the newest vector by which teenage girls experiencing some very real emotional difficulties talked themselves into illness and coaxed each other to self-harm. Analogous to eating disorders, transgender identification had become a maladaptive coping mechanism for untold thousands of anxious and depressed teen girls.
