Has Our Trans Fever Broken?

The “gender-affirming care” craze began with politics, and it might end that way as well.

Is our long national transgender nightmare coming to an end? Abigail Shrier thinks so, and she likens it to a fever that’s finally broken.

And not a moment too soon. Shrier, an independent journalist and the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, was an intrepid opponent of this madness long before the tide began to turn, and she gives credit to Disruptor-in-Chief Donald Trump for finally putting the adults back in charge. Writing at The Free Press, Shrier rattles off a sequence of leftist outrages — from the public schools’ indoctrination to the ACLU’s legal bullying to Amazon’s virtual book-burning — then writes:

I could go on. But as of January 28, 2025, I don’t have to. On that day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing that the federal government would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” and that it would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

In the order, titled “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” Trump gets right to it: “Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.”

Indeed, it must. Shrier calls the order “a much-needed slap in the face” to those pushing the grotesque euphemism of pediatric “gender-affirming care.” They’re pushing “junk science,” she says, and she’s right. Otherwise, why else would a leading “gender physician,” Johanna Olson-Kennedy, be so eager to take $10 million in NIH funding to do a nine-year study on the effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on adolescents — and yet be so darn reluctant to publish the results?

Olson-Kennedy and her ilk would do well to consider where we’ve been. Here, Shrier paints a gruesome picture: “When the history of 21st-century gender mania is written, it should include this signal entry: In 2020, a website called GoFundMe, usually a place to find disaster-relief appeals and charities for starving children, contained more than 30,000 urgent appeals from young women seeking to remove their perfectly healthy breasts.”

The fever that Shrier speaks of — and the bad dreams and the soaked sheets that come with it — is an appropriate metaphor, especially for the confused and fearful but ultimately loving and well-meaning parents who’ve been through it.

Not that all parents are loving and well-meaning when it comes to the junk science of “gender-affirming” care. Some aren’t. But many, as Shrier writes, “are conscientious and loving and afraid, if a little naive. They believed medical science was above politics and beyond question.” Instead, these traditionally authoritative institutions convinced them to abandon their roles as protectors. “If the parents still weren’t convinced,” she adds, “therapists coerced them into allowing their daughters to undergo gender transition with this thinly veiled threat: ‘Would you rather a live son or a dead daughter?’”

This is monstrous, and it’s purely a product of our messed-up modern world. As Bethany Mandel writes in Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation, “The idea that a man can become a woman and vice versa — that biology, genetics, and anatomy are irrelevant — is unique to secular [read: Godless] modernity. While there have always been cross-dressing individuals throughout history, there has been no historical acceptance of the belief that one can change biological genders prior to the last several decades.”

How did we get here? No one seems to know. But if Shrier credits Trump for helping to rescue us, she also points an accusatory finger at Barack Obama for opening the transgender floodgates:

Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislation incentivizing and coercing private insurers to offer their products on a government exchange, prohibited those companies from discriminating on the basis of sex. And in May 2016, six years after the bill’s enactment, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services added this fateful qualification: Discrimination on the basis of “sex” was to include discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.”

And you thought he was just trying to make healthcare more affordable. (For a more detailed and more fascinating look at the history of the transgender movement, check out Chris Rufo’s Imprimis essay, “Inside the Transgender Empire.”)

“A lot of bad actors — pediatricians, surgeons, endocrinologists, therapists, teachers, even clergy — took advantage,” says Shrier. “No reason to let them off the hook: The science is, and always was, shoddy.”

It seems so obvious now, but that brings forward a troubling question: Why on earth did so few speak out?

https://patriotpost.us/articles/114141-has-our-trans-fever-broken-2025-02-03