I’ve being writing for a while now on the rise of the transgender movement and its consequences. Over the summer it upped in intensity when JK Rowling, one of the most famous women on the planet, strode into battle. Plenty was written about that (see the box below) and the ante was upped.

The stakes are high and I’d be willing to bet that campaigners are going to push for legislation as soon as they can. It’s worth noting now how deeply entrenched the ideology for the transgender movement already is in institutional life in the UK. It is there in the Tory Party & the Labour Party to slightly differing degrees and has complete control in the minor parties in England (Liberal Democrats & Greens) and in Scotland in the SNP. It rules the roost in the BBC and the police. It is the dominant view in universities and most businesses, it seems there is a distinct effort to suppress negative news and when it comes to social media like Twitter, its screaming mobs shout loudest.

While this is all political, the consequences are highly personal. Despite the battle being fought by furious transwomen and their allies, the victims will be young girls. It was ever thus. In his review of Abigail Shrier’s new book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters Tim Challies writes this:

Transgenderism, she came to believe, is a kind of craze that is seducing young girls who are not clinically dysphoric. Adolescents are particularly uncomfortable with themselves and particularly prone to suggestions. In today’s context they are prone to the suggestion that their discomfort may stem from being a boy trapped in a girl’s body. This never would have occurred to girls in previous generations, but today’s media and classrooms dangle it as a possibility or even probability. Meanwhile the forces of intersectionality attach great social cachet to transgenderism so it can allow a girl to be catapulted from invisibility to prominence. The forces are strong.

Those who decide to make the leap find support in schools and universities, therapists and physicians. They find heroes, gurus, and instructors on YouTube. With or without the consent of their parents they can change their names and pronouns, obtain a “binder” to flatten their chests, take medications to delay puberty, begin testosterone to masculinize their development, have their breasts removed, or even take the final step and have their genitals reconstructed through phalloplasty. Even some of the most moderate of these measures can have long-lasting physical and fertility effects and be permanently disfiguring. Yet some girls begin such a course of treatment when they are still merely children.

https://www.challies.com/book-reviews/the-transgender-craze-seducing-our-daughters/

A hundred years ago Christian missionaries in China lobbied against the practice of foot binding and have campaigned against female genital mutilation (FGM) in some cases to great effect. Perhaps transgenderism is a new form of an old sin and one that ends up with significant physical damage to the bodies of young girls. As Shrier notes,

In the last decade, she says, “the Western world has seen a sudden surge of adolescents claiming to have gender dysphoria and self-identifying as ‘transgender.’ For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those so identifying—they constitute the majority.”

https://www.challies.com/book-reviews/the-transgender-craze-seducing-our-daughters

So I wonder if the right approach to win public support is not to endlessly argue with ideologues that essentially dominate institutional life but to take another approach: protecting young girls from practices that damage their physical integrity and will (one day) be seen as just as wrong as footbinding or FGM.