Toward a liberal-conservative alliance against Wokeism

Michael Shellenberger

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“That which is falling must still be pushed”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

People who worked in hospital clinics in the United States and Great Britain are blowing the whistle on the rush to prescribe puberty-blocking drugs and surgeries to children suffering from gender dysphoria.

Their claims are shocking: thousands of children, many if not most of whom may be gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and suffering anxiety disorders and autism, are being sterilized for a psychiatric condition that most will grow out of.

The whistleblowers are blunt. “What is happening to them is morally and medically appalling,” wrote whistleblower Jamie Reed at The Free Press. “Will we look back in ten, 20 years and be like, ‘What did we do?’” a British therapist told The Times of London.

Concerns over rushing girls into taking puberty blockers and surgically removing their breasts have been growing since the 2020 publication of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage. Shrier argued that girls who in the past might have had anorexia were now suffering sudden onset gender dysphoria and seeking to become boys.

Now, three years later, the evidence is overwhelming that Shrier was right.

Neither Shrier nor any of the other public figures who have raised concerns about the treatment of girls with gender dysphoria question that trans people deserve their rights and respect. The two of us, like many of the people raising concerns about the rush to drugs and surgeries for children, have long celebrated full rights for same-sex couples, including marriage.

But the best explanation for the rapid increase in girls who believe they are, in spirit, boys, and that they could take pills and remove their breasts in order to become boys physically, is that it is a social contagion like anorexia.

In response to a major increase in dysphoric children coming to the transgender clinics starting around 2015, both the Tavistock hospital in the UK and St. Louis Children’s hospital in the United States, along with around 100 similar clinics in the U.S., rushed to prescribe drugs rather than pause to investigate potential reasons for the increase.

These treatments were given despite widespread evidence that the children were suffering from a range of other psychiatric disorders, mental illnesses, and disabilities, particularly autism. “I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment,” said Reed, who worked at a special clinic at St. Louis Children’s hospital.

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