[Starting around 2015], across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.

I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school.

Holy shit, and at the same time, not surprising. My neighbor told me about a year ago her teenage daughter is now non-binary and I advised her to see if that sort of thing was trending in her school. I don’t think she appreciated the suggestion, but I had to, in good conscience, at least try to point mom in the direction of what was really happening. I’d just read a story about how 9 of 10 “non-binary” girls in one school decided to be female again after they’d been learning from home during the pandemic (and not seeing each other every day, etc.)