The transgender issue

George Fish

Platypus Review 187 | June 2026

THE TRANSGENDER ISSUE has become a political football kicked around by both sides of the “woke” political spectrum: the self-proclaimed “unwoke” alternative “woke” Right and the self-proclaimed “woke” Left. Abandoned completely in this rancid partisanship is reason, analysis, and recourse to established science, in favor of partisan impatience and objections to any conclusion that go against partisan assertions. And whenever partisanship enters, it only fouls and pollutes, never clarifies. That is precisely what has happened to the transgender issue.

I think we can all agree, for a start, that the weaponization of the transgender issue by Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and the minions of the Republican Right — and their outrageous claims — are reprehensible. But the “transgender-affirming” Left isn’t much better — they too have weaponized the issue, turning one’s subjective sense of gender identity (especially among minors, who are too young to even qualify for a learner’s permit for a driver’s license!) into an objective “alternative fact” — to invoke Kellyanne Conway’s infamous phrase.

But among those I regard as reprehensible on the transgender issue I do not include feminist transgender critics such as J. K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock. Their criticisms are of a different, more valid order, and they are undeservedly maligned as TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, as if somehow their feminism was corrupted and fake). The truth is, there is such a thing as biological sex, and it does not go away just because someone of one biological sex feels differently about what is his (or her) “real” sexual identity. The fact is, rapes of biological women have occurred in women’s shelters and prisons by transgender biological males, and many women who use such shelters to protect themselves from abusive males do not at all feel comfortable sharing such safe spaces with biological males, even though such males do not consider themselves male at all. I consider these valid objections. Quite simply, biological sex doesn’t just go away because of one’s subjectivity.

While the libertarian British magazine UnHerd has defended Rowling and Stock, as has implicitly the conservative atheist / freethinker group Center for Inquiry, sternly warning doctors who engage in sex-change surgery of their vulnerability to possible malpractice suits, most of the Left has gone the other, equally uncritical route, affirming that “transgender women are women,” period. However, it is intellectual and philosophical confusion to believe that one’s subjectivity creates objectivity, as whatever transgenders may think of themselves as, they are still biological females and males. Biological women have uteruses with fallopian tubes, and also manufacture eggs to be fertilized by sperm from biological males to create progeny. Biological women also do something that biological men can’t do, and this is directly related to the differences pointed out above: biological women menstruate; biological males do not. Similarly, biological males have penises for ejaculating such sperm, as well as testicles that can manufacture sperm. Even though modern surgical techniques can create a female vagina or a male penis, such surgery cannot create uteruses, fallopian tubes, or eggs, and similarly, cannot create sperm. And while female breasts may be enhanced or diminished by surgery, no such surgery can create breast milk for feeding the female’s newborn child. These are simple biological realities, and as such are the basics that sexuality has as its bedrock. To reify somewhat, Nature “created” sexuality to reproduce the species, nothing more.

Human society and culture, however, has considerably enhanced sexuality beyond this bedrock of “necessity” for procreation. To say otherwise is to sow confusion. Our human sexuality today is much more than merely reproduction of the species, no matter how much organized religions might maintain otherwise. It has physical dimensions, to be sure, such as sexual attractiveness, but also psychological and social ramifications that are bound up with other social and psychological issues, such as the “appropriateness” of certain types of sexual expression, where sexual expression is allowed or disallowed, as well as mental health and emotional readiness issues. Appropriateness of sexual expression, i.e., sexual freedom against the strictures of the state, has been recently discussed in two articles in Platypus Review by Gabe Gottfried and D. M. Faes.^[1] But it is not the issue of sexual expression and sexual freedom in face of the structures of the state which I am concerned with (and with, anyway, it wasn’t so much the state as initiator of such as it was the state bowing to the wishes of another pillar of organized society, organized religion and its prejudices). I wish to explore the issue more broadly, from psychiatric, statistical, socio-political, economic, and mental health and peer pressure issues, which is what I do below.

But today, discussing them openly opens a proverbial can of worms, and has led to blatant culture-wars partisanship on both the Left and the Right. I’ve given some examples of such partisanship from the Right above. But on the Left, we have, e.g., Left-political atheist commentator Hemant Mehta, notably in his Substack column Friendly Atheist, just as dogmatically asserting that “Transgender women are women,” and volubly, vehemently criticizing anyone who challenges this, often comparing them to Riley Gaines, the swimmer who lost a match to a transgender (biologically originally male) swimmer, who has been vehement in her denunciation of transgender males in women’s sports. (Reportedly, as I gleaned from Mehta and other sources on the Internet, the match that Ms. Gaines lost was to determine — fifth place!)^[2]

Mehta’s position — “transgender women are women” — isn’t generally up for debate on the Left. In fact, I know of no organized Left group that’s spoken on the transgender issue that doesn’t uncritically agree with this, although certain Left acquaintances of mine have expressed caveats; but then again, these comrades are without influence on the organized Left. Those who do think the transgender issue is up for debate — aside from the troglodytic Right — have been confined to libertarian leaning sources such as Quillette, which also prides itself as a free-speech forum. (In my opinion, the matter is still legitimately up for debate.)

What I want to do below is to soberly assess the facts involved and the evidence presented, the first of which being that we just don’t know that much that has been established scientifically about the effectiveness of transgender “therapy,” notably puberty blockers and gender-altering surgery. However, we need to know, as these procedures are usually permanently life-altering and irreversible. An ethical question is also involved: many transgender clinicians move for treatment well before all the matters are settled, citing grave self-harm, including suicide, if such treatment is not immediately undertaken — all on the word of a quite possibly minor, too young for a driver’s license, declaring he (or she) is of a gender other than his (or her) biological one! Such clinicians have a certain self-interest in these treatments (as do doctors and other professionals who depend on clientele for their living), as such treatment is both revenue-generating and quite expensive. Certainly an ethical question is involved here.

I want to start by looking at the statistics of the psychiatric diagnosis “gender dysphoria” (i.e., the belief or reality that one’s sense of gender differs from the biological one assigned at birth), and compare it to other psychiatric diagnoses of mental disorders and sexual dysphoria. A medically diagnosable gender dysphoria is real, and affects a small number of people. It is a chronic unease and anxiety due to a sense of mismatch between one’s biological sex and one’s perceived sexual identity, and it is rooted in nerve pathways rather than in the brain, though the evidence for this is not presently conclusive. Genetics and heredity also play a part. Still, it is there, causes extreme distress, is unrelated to sexual orientation (i.e., preference for sexual partners of one particular sex or the other), and is included in the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5-TR, the bible of psychiatric diagnosis classifications.^[3] DSM-5-TR estimates that the whole gender dysphoric population in the U.S. is less than one in a thousand persons, or <0.01%. That means that in the U.S., with a population of 343,147,700 in round numbers, with a 50-50 split between males and females,^[4] the number of gender dysphoric males and females overall is fewer than 347,150. Far smaller than the population of Indianapolis where I live, or, indeed, many a small or medium-sized city!^[5] Contrast these numbers to the number of hermaphrodites (i.e., people with both male and female genes), 1.7% of the population, or 5,833,500 people; schizophrenics, 1% of the population (3,431,500); people who are bipolar, 2.8% of the population (9,608,100); or depressives, i.e., people who suffer from depression, 8.3% of the population (28,481,300) (again, all in round numbers).^[6] So, the number of people with actual, genetically based, biological gender dysphoria is quite small, according to official psychiatry. Statistically, they are outliers, as their frequency is well below two standard deviations from the mean, meaning they are not within the statistical range of what, for lack of a better word, might be called “normal” human sexuality, i.e., binary, either heterosexual male or heterosexual female, both of which are what the vast majority of us humans are. How else would we have seven billion humans inhabiting today’s earth?

Reuters ran an article by Robin Respaut and Chad Terhune, “Putting numbers on the rise children seeking gender care,”^[7] where the two reporters worked with a “health technology company,” Komodo Health, Inc., to get statistics on the number of youth aged 6–17 that had been newly diagnosed for gender dysphoria from 2017 through 2021, with the following breakdowns, indicating a sharp increase in the number of newly diagnosed:

2017: 15,172

2018: 18,321

2019: 21,375

2020: 24,847

2021: 42,167

Nota bene: while the numbers of new diagnoses steadily rise from 2017 to 2020, they jump 69.71% from 2020 to 2021! This, coupled with the low frequency of psychiatrically diagnosed gender dysphoria given above indicates that something is massively afoot beyond simple medical diagnosis, and that there certainly is on the surface a great deal of discrepancy between the supposed number of actual cases of gender dysphoria, which is quite small, and the prevalence of diagnoses for it, which are not only much larger, but are ballooning!

Consideration on this goes again to the DSM-5-TR, which gives the following for prevalence (frequency) rates, based on U.S. and European populations: self-identification as transgender ranges from 0.5% to 0.6% (i.e., in population numbers, 1,715,700–2,058,900); experiencing oneself as having an incongruent gender identity, 0.6%–1.1% (2,082,900–3,774,600); feeling that one is of a different sex, 2.1%–2.6% (7,206,100–8,921,800); and desiring to undergo medical treatment, 0.2%–0.6% (686,300–2,058,900). These are major discrepancies between perceived gender dysphoria conditions and the psychiatrically considered number of cases!^[8]

I’m going to suggest, as a starting point, that culture wars over transgenderism, from the Left and the Right, as well as social environmental concerns (e.g., mental illness, peer pressure, cultural and social susceptibility, the Internet and the way it promotes certain social identities), have created a phenomenon that appears to be far larger than the actual number of such individuals. This is a societal “ill” at least as much as it is a biological or genetic one.

For certain sectors of the Left, especially the Western Left, gender dysphoria or transgenderism is quite “hip,” quite trendy, and attracts more people to it that there are actual biological people with gender dysphoria. Or so it seems. This was borne out by a recent polling at elite Brown University,^[9] where 40% of the students identified as homosexual or transgender (whereas the actual percentage of male homosexuals is 10% of the male population, and of female homosexuals, 5% of the female population, according to Dr. Kinsey’s classic study of sexual prevalence in the U.S.).^[10] In fact, in certain sections of the Left it’s quite faddish and fashionable to be anything but a heterosexual male or female! This moves the issue from biology to social psychology and sociology.

We must honestly admit that the disconnect between those identifying as transgender and those with actual gender dysphoria makes gender dysphoria diagnosis, treatment, and the place of the gender dysphoric in society a matter of cultural and social norms, along with peer pressure, every bit as much as — if not more than — biological and genetic factors. That’s why it’s become a major culture-wars issue (i.e., toxically partisan for the Right and the Left), why it’s led to such acrimony, cultural shaming and affirmation, and such divisiveness, with culture-wars hostility. Missing on both sides, of course, is regard for the gender dysphoric as human beings, who are chess pieces to be maneuvered and even sacrificed as the strategy of either Left or Right demands. Humanity and humanism once again fall by the wayside. They are as much victims of Left intransigence as they are of Right bigotry and insistence on “proper” sexual norms. “Woke” versus “unwoke.”

Further, on the standard treatment regimen for gender dysphoria, there is the application of puberty blockers, initiation of hormone treatments, and even massive surgery. While the majority view, as expressed in scientific papers, appears to be that such treatment is effective, there is also a significant minority that states it isn’t. As an example, one 2020 review of the literature found 51 papers positively affirming such treatment as effective; however, four papers stated such treatment’s effects were null or negative.^[11] There is a small number of papers on both sides, which means there quite simply may not be a statistically significant sample of participants in such studies as to draw meaningful scientific conclusions. (Later, as more research came in, more negative studies were written.)^[12] Certainly, treatments through puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and even major surgery are medically invasive, and the ethics of such, not to say common sense, informs us that such major means of treatment had better be of very high efficacy and easily medically justified. That, to me, doesn’t seem to be the case right now. Especially given that being transgender is somewhat of a societal fad, at least in some social circles, it may well be that some people are being “treated” for a gender dysphoria they don’t genetically have.

It’s realistic, although cynical, to remember that medicine is a business, and major medical treatments command major revenues for the doctors involved. Moreover, given the number of transgender clinics now in the Western world — where the diagnosis of gender dysphoria seems to be given automatically — one wonders, are these clinics really effective treatment centers, or are they more akin to the oxycontin “clinics” that fueled the opioid-addiction crisis? It seems to me, a good answer is, “We just don’t know,” as the field right now is very much unregulated. (It’s worth mentioning that certain illnesses are more prominent in biological women than in biological men, e.g., breast cancer and lupus; and in biological men, of course, testicular cancer and the rare penis cancer that occurs only in uncircumcised men. So, wouldn’t it be medical malpractice to treat transgenders without regard for their original biological sex for these biological sex-based illnesses and their biologically based prevalences?)

While it’s quite fashionably neoliberal to demand no or only minimal regulation of sex-change clinics, and those which diagnose and treat gender dysphoria — just as Silicon Valley insists on no or only minimal regulation of AI — such an approach has long been discredited by those who are aware of real-world economics, which is, usually, the Left and Center-Left. Unregulated, or inadequately regulated, gender-dysphoria clinics and sex-change procedures can lend themselves to abuse, from hasty and premature diagnoses to permanent body changes that the recipient later deeply regrets, but which may well be irreversible. None of us, certainly none of us on the Left, wishes to live in a world where biology is alleged destiny and expressions of male and female sexuality are rigidly controlled and guided forcefully toward human reproduction. But may we also be going down the path of a rigid ideology that states transgender biology is destiny, where instead of being openly, e.g., a gay male or a gay female, one is “diagnosed” instead as “naturally” being a transgender female or a transgender male? Such a result, I maintain, is a naturally occurring possibility in the intellectually and philosophically confused time in which we live, and may already be happening.

Social factors and peer pressure simply can’t be ignored as propellants in the explosion of persons identifying as transgender, especially among young teenagers, for whom social and peer pressure are immense; yet the decision to change one’s gender is permanent, and adolescence is also a volatile time. Is it smart or correct to allow an adolescent to undergo such major sex-change treatment when that adolescent can’t get a tattoo without signed parental permission, can’t vote, let alone drink alcohol or consumer tobacco or vape legally? How many of us have made such major conclusions about our life identities that we didn’t change later? How many of us are who we were as teenagers, only just older? Very few, if any. I’m not the person I was at 12, 16, or even 18. Who I was in my late 20s or early 30 corresponded precious little to my adolescent expectations, desires and wishes, not to say identities. Yet, when it comes to identifying as gender dysphoric, we allow mere adolescents to make such permanent choices!

The whole matter thus calls for a big warning sign: “Proceed with caution.” But the culture-wars Left dismisses such caution as transphobia, unfortunately, while the culture-wars Right is openly and demagogically transphobic. I say, both sides are wrong — terribly, simplistically, wrong. “Proceed with caution” needs to be our societal watchword. Period.

This is especially so since an identity or diagnosis as transgender doesn’t negate biology. Biological males are still male, still have testosterone as the major sexual hormone, same as biological females have estrogen. Further — and this is important for sports — biological males, even if transgender, especially those not biologically “neutered” by early hormone treatments, are bigger, stronger, weigh more, and are taller generally than the corresponding biological females. Certainly, this is bound to create a valid sore spot among women athletes, who might well feel subject to unfair competition — as has happened. Not to mention rapes in prisons and in women’s centers by transgender “women” who are actually biological males. After all, one’s social or individual psychological identity does not negate the biological “facts of life.”

Nor does extensive sexual surgery create a fully biological male or female. While an artificial penis can be surgically created, it does not ejaculate the sperm that fertilizes the biological woman’s egg. An artificial vagina can similarly be created, but again, without the function of the real biological one. It can’t hold eggs for fertilization by male sperm. And it is reproduction that drives sexuality and sexual differentiation biologically in the first place!

Such is certainly far from being a mere “social construct.” While we can be many things societally, in the end it is based substantially on what we are biologically, and that can’t be brushed aside. Societal norms of what it means to be “male” or “female” ultimately come down to the biological question of producing offspring. Without such, the species does not survive. This is as true for humans as it is for fish or salamanders.

This is why the transgender issue is so toxic: it is a conflict where social norms often conflict with biological realities, which do not disappear because we within society would like them to disappear. Throw in peer pressure, changing societal expectations, cultural fluidity, and the dividing up of the public into us-vs.-them tribes, and the issue truly becomes an intense one — one for which there is just no easy answer except “proceed with caution,” meaningfully regulate the transgender clinic and transgender-clinic industries, understand that major invasive processes such as the standard treatments for gender dysphoria require a firmer scientific and ethical basis than they have now, and that, diagnostically, it is mandatory that real gender dysphoria be distinguished from mere adolescent whim and bowing to peer pressure. Thus, it would not hurt at all to follow the Dutch protocol and insist on long-term psychotherapy for someone declaring himself (or herself) gender dysphoric, to make sure. Again, caution should be the byword, certainly as evinced in the Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis’s clarifying recent article, “The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine.”^[13]

But how should we treat those who identify as transgender, no matter what the cause of it? With kindness, dignity, and respect, of course. They are, above all, human beings, and even if we think them wrong, we do not negate their humanity. And we certainly should not do so through rejectionist bigotry. Period.

While the “straight” Left will decry or even denounce much, or even all, of what I say above, I’m glad to say my views have been amply confirmed and upheld by an important contribution from the LBGTQ+ Left: Jamie Paul’s article, “How to Fix What Ails Trans Activism.”^[14] Paul’s article, which I find excellent and urge all to read, begins by pointedly noting that the harsh, uncompromising line, tone, and tenor taken by the supposed “Left” of the trans movement has had just the opposite effect of what it supposedly wanted: instead of making the broader public more trans-accepting, it has instead eroded support for trans people among that general public. Not only that, it has also eroded the general public’s support for gay rights, from acceptance of gay sex as not “immoral” to nonacceptance of gay marriage. Clearly, steps backward. Paul minces no words; he openly declares:

What went wrong? How did the left-wing trans movement squander a society’s worth of open-minded goodwill? Perhaps the biggest blunder was their refusal to compromise, especially over the most contentious policy areas, such as trans women in female-only spaces or youth gender medicine. On both of these fronts, activists steamrolled over scientific and ethical complexities, blithely dismissed or actively hid risks, and placed themselves at odds with a large majority of society. To make matters worse, they approached these issues, and all others, with an air of unassailable moral superiority and certainty that brooked no discussion. Anyone who expressed skepticism was either bombarded with alarming but misleading stats, or guilt-tripped, or screamed at, or systematically maligned, lied about, and lumped in with the far right. The movement tried to impose sweeping and unpopular changes without ever even attempting to persuade anyone. Their go-to strategy was public shaming, censorship, excommunication, and bullying. Activists behaved in a manner that made no sense unless the goal was to get people to hate them, and by extension, their cause.^[15]

Sadly, I can believe it. When we of the Left are shrill, uncompromising to the point of making enemies, and dismissing anyone who disagrees with us as having gone over to the enemy camp, we shouldn’t be surprised if we give grist precisely to that enemy camp, and convert the wavering, doubtful, or hesitant into implacable enemies. That’s the way human psychology works, and we of the Left should know it by now.

But Jamie Paul does have a solution, and it’s a good one, despite what intransigent elements of the Left may think: liberalism, both politically and in the acceptance of the values of the liberal society — tolerance, respect for individual rights, established science, and the rule of just and proper law. Just as acceptance of such “liberalism” advanced the civil rights movement of the 1960s, of women’s rights in the 1970s, and gay rights in the 1980s, 90s, and early 00s. For, after all, liberals are not the surrogate Right; they are, in my opinion, the “near Left” (in contradistinction to the “far Left”) with whom we have more with which to agree than to disagree — and when we do disagree, we can agree to disagree for now and discuss civilly at a later time, when it does not conflict with our coming together for concerted common action. In this sense, “liberal” does not mean “sellout,” but rather “magnanimous.” And it has a hoary and genuine Left pedigree: the United Front and the Popular Front, which gave us the New Deal, strong trade unions, and the united across ideological tendencies anti-Vietnam War Movement. See, far Lefties? It works!

Lastly, I couldn’t agree more with Jamie Paul than he asserts at the end of his article, the same as I concluded above: “‘Trans women are women’ has, as an organizing (and often shrieked) mantra, produced results that no one is satisfied with. Perhaps a better version would be ‘trans people are people.’”^[16] I wholeheartedly agree.

Afterword

The above was sent off for publication on January 27, 2026. However, new information vital to my article above, and supportive of my theses, came in on March 26, 2026. On that date, according to a news story from the Associated Press,^[17] the International Olympics Committee (IOC) ruled that participation in all women’s sports in the Olympics would be limited to biological females, to be genetically determined by a one-time nonintrusive DNA test via a test of saliva, cheek swab, or blood sample, with the right to appeal the results. As the IOC itself stated, “Eligibility for any female category event at the Olympic Games or any other IOC event, including individual and team sports, is now limited to biological females,” thus excluding transgender “women” who are actually biologically, male.^[18] As the IOC document issuing this decision stated, “Males experience three significant testosterone [the male hormone — GF] peaks: In utero, in mini-puberty of infancy and beginning in adolescent puberty through adulthood.” It added that this gives males “individual sex-based performance advantages in sports and events that rely on strength, power and/or endurance.”^[19] The IOC document was issued on March 26, 2026, and the rule will be in effect for the 2028 Summer Olympics to be held in Los Angeles. The document further stated that “the Male performance advantage” over biological women was “10-12 per cent . . . most running and swimming events,” at least 20% in “most throwing and jumping events,” but can be greater than 100% for explosive power events including “punching sports.”^[20]

In this author’s opinion, this is the way it should be. Transgender women who have achieved or surpassed puberty are biological males, with important physical advantages generally over biological females in musculature, height, weight, strength, and endurance. To have such people compete against biological females gives them an unfair advantage. Biological sex does not go away just because we would wish it so, comrades of the Left. Subjectivity does not create objectivity. Just because I consider myself a woman does not, by biology, make me one. (We can also approach this with some sardonic humor. Say I consider myself a blue coffee cup instead of a human. Does my subjectivity thus make me a blue coffee cup?)

Actual cases of genuine gender dysphoria, as I pointed out above, are statistical outliers, with the vast majority of humans, both male and female, well within the “normal” biological spectrum. That is, of course, what makes the reproduction of the human species so possible, even to the risk today of overpopulation! But then, I’m a math nerd with a good background in math and statistics, and one prone, when a math or calculation problem comes up, to reach for my calculator. I would also like to remind all the Marxists out there of the dialectical law of change in quantity resulting in a change in quality. Since math is the science of determining quantity par excellence, it’s quite apparent that the determination of change in quality depends on math, i.e., the determination of change in — quantity! Unfortunately, despite our living in a world where we are constantly surrounded by numbers, the need for math, and the need for statistics, far too many on the Left are mathematically and statistically illiterate. (The technical term for such is “innumerate,” and math illiteracy is “innumeracy.”) While there certainly is nothing wrong with going to a college or university and majoring in the liberal arts or  humanities, and certainly enough, narrow-minded STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics] graduates who do not understand the humanistic and ethical dimensions of what they do is very, very far from socially desirable, since basic math skills are instilled in grade school (or should be), there is thus no excuse whatsoever for innumeracy! So, comrades, learn and hone up on your basic math and statistics skills. You vitally need them.

Needless to say, none of this directly above negates treating all transgender persons with dignity and respect, as the corpus of my text indicates. |P

^[1] Gabe Gottfried, “(19)17 shades of gay,” Platypus Review 179 (September 2025), <https://platypus1917.org/2025/09/01/1917-shades-of-gay/>; D. M. Faes, “Transgender liberation? A movement whose time has passed,” Platypus Review 111 (November 2018), <https://platypus1917.org/2018/11/02/transgender-liberation-a-movement-whose-time-has-passed/>.

^[2] See, e.g., Hemant Mehta, “Kirk Cameron and his buddies harassed a TN library until its director got fired,” Friendly Atheist (March 17, 2023), <https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/kirk-cameron-and-his-buddies-harassed>.

^[3] American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (Washington: American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2022). The DSM-5 was first prepared in 2013, and a text revision was published in 2022.

^[4] Taken from the U.S. Census Population Clock on January 25, 2026. According to the Clock, there is one birth every 9 seconds, and one death every 9 seconds, and a net one person gain every 22 seconds.

^[5] Remember, the frequency rates are given in percentages, i.e., hundredths of 1.00, which is 100%. To do the math, one must convert to decimal fractions appropriately.

^[6] I am grateful to my friend and comrade Barry Finger for providing the frequencies of hermaphrodism and common mental disorders.

^[7] Robin Respaut and Chad Terhune, “Putting numbers on the rise in children seeking gender care,” Reuters (October 6, 2022), <https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/>.

^[8] See “Prevalence,” in “Gender Dysphoria,” in DSM-5-TR, 515.

^[9] Ryan Doherty and Sofia Barnett, “LGBTQ+ student self-identification has doubled at Brown since 2010, according to Herald polling data,” Brown Daily Herald (June 24, 2023), <https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2023/06/lgbtq-student-self-identification-has-doubled-since-2010-according-to-herald-polling-data>.

^[10] Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948); Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia, W. B. Saunders, 1953).

^[11] What We Know Project, Cornell University, “What Does the Scholarly Research Say about the Effect of Gender Transition on Well-Being?” (2018), <https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/>.

^[12] See “Troubling evidence on trans care,” The Week (January 26, 2024), <https://emedialibrary.overdrive.com/emedialibrary-batavia/content/media/10423015>.

^[13] Helen Lewis, “The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine,” The Atlantic (June 29, 2025).

^[14] Jamie Paul, “How to Fix What Ails Trans Activism,” Queer Majority (October 24, 2025), <https://www.queermajority.com/essays-all/how-to-fix-what-ails-trans-activism>. I am indebted to my friend and comrade John Triplett for bringing this article to my attention.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] Ibid.

^[17] Graham Dunbar, “Transgender women athletes banned from female Olympic events by new IOC policy,” Associated Press (March 26, 2026), <https://apnews.com/article/ioc-olympic-transgender-female-eligibility-520cd9cee152a312767a667acf77dbc8>.

^[18] Ibid.

^[19] International Olympic Committee, “IOC Policy on the Protection of the Female (Women’s) Category in Olympic Sport and Guiding Considerations for International Federations and Sports Governing Bodies” (March 26, 2026), <https://stillmed.olympics.com/media/Documents/International-Olympic-Committee/EB/policy/policy-on-the-protection-of-the-female-category-english.pdf>.

^[20] Ibid.