The fad for transgenderism is unbelievable – and should stay that way

For years, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has wrapped itself in a guise of medical expertise, advising doctors, schools and corporations in America about how best to treat the hundreds of thousands of people who have mysteriously become confused about which sex they are (personally, I’d recommend a quick dart to the loo to pull down their pants). In truth, WPATH is an advocacy organization whose storm troops comprise manic men in dresses who hate women but also think they are women. Get your head around that.

In 2024, a trove of intra-organizational emails exposed the recklessness of WPATH’s indiscriminate promotion of “gender-affirming care” (neither affirmative nor care) for ostensibly transgender minors. These susceptible children suffer disproportionately from other mental health problems and do not, as WPATH members freely admitted among themselves, possess the competence to give informed consent to life-altering medical treatments. The ignominious emails were published and analyzed in a report entitled The WPATH Files, written by Mia Hughes and widely publicized by the American journalist Michael Shellenberger.

WPATH stages big, rowdy annual conferences celebrating self-poisoning and genital mutilation all around the world. In recent years, a doughty counter-organization called Genspect has staged conferences in the same city as WPATH’s, to call attention to the copious harms that the past 15 years of cultural intoxication with transgenderism have wrought among families, children and adults who’ve fallen under the sway of gender ideology, and “detransitioners” who’ve woken to the reality that changing sex is neither possible nor desirable but who are often left permanently mangled and emotionally scarred. Last weekend in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was one of Genspect’s speakers. Of necessity, security precautions were ferocious.

After two days of presentations by young people brutalized by this generational fetish, physicians horrified by its medical consequences, therapists appalled by the complicity of their colleagues and journalists decrying the purposeful bewilderment of schoolchildren, it’s a tough call whether the cumulative effect was depressing or encouraging. Obviously, this ludicrous fashion for pretending to change sex ever having taken such hold is depressing; as fads go, this one is far more destructive than the crazes for pet rocks or razor scooters. Yet the hundreds of determinedly dissenting attendees, including many desolate parents who had lost children to the trans cult, and the dozens of professionals who are risking their reputations to resist the capitulation to gender ideology in their fields, were collectively encouraging.

The audience and presenters concurred that, slowly and agonizingly, the tide is turning on this vast medical scandal

The audience and presenters both roughly concurred that, slowly and agonizingly, the tide is turning on this vast medical scandal. Especially thanks to a handful of courageous women such as the Brits Maya Forstater and J.K. Rowling and American investigative reporter Abigail Shrier, it’s now possible to speak aloud what five years ago would have been career-ending heresies. As I’m neither a medical expert nor a parent of a trans child, my utility was primarily hortatory. Set in a fictional near past in which the notion has seized the western world that people are all equally intelligent and that discrimination against dumb people is “the last great civil rights fight,” my most recent novel, Mania,aims to illustrate human vulnerability to ideological contagion. Of the social hysterias that have swept the West since about 2012 – #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Covid lockdowns, climate catastrophism, rabid vituperation against Israel – my “Mental Parity Movement” most resembles the West’s abrupt infatuation with transgenderism.

Such as there is one, the lesson the novel imparts is the disheartening truism that people will believe anything. Specifically, most people will believe whatever everyone else appears to believe, if only because everyone else appears to believe it. Fortunately, exceptions abound. Mania’s disgusted protagonist represents the minority: skeptics almost genetically immune to psychic pandemics. Yet in a crowd, our species naturally manifests a hive mind whose irrational or even deranged conceits now buzz through the globe’s fiber-optic cables in seconds.

Thus the thrust of my recent event ran: never relinquish your incredulity. While we skeptics may be constitutionally resistant to deranged popular dogma, we’re still adaptive. We may not believe just anything, but we can get used to anything. So it’s vital to refresh our astonishment at the widespread adoption of a practice that 20 years ago would have been exclusively pursued by a few lost, misguided mental patients.

The fad for transgenderism is unbelievable and should stay that way. This movement gleefully defies biological reality. Sex is not in the mind but is written in our every cell. “Some people are born in the wrong body” is an absurd, medieval fiction. Because it’s impossible to change sex, transgenderism is merely a psychically, socially and financially expensive form of play-acting. Cynical, fanatical or criminally naive, its doctors impede and corrupt adolescents’ natural development into adulthood, butcher and amputate healthy body parts, destroy erotic function and sterilize young people. Yet for at least a solid decade anyone objecting to this modern-day voodoo has courted infamy, ostracism and unemployment.

A Genspect montage: one mother asked me to write about her son, who detransitioned, was shunned by the trans “community” and took his own life. Self-described as effeminate from childhood, another detransitioner testified onstage to having been duped by doctors who convinced him he’d have an easier time as a gay man if he lived as a woman. His trans medication halted his growth in adolescence. After emerging from this nightmare, the 22-year-old, originally informed that without pharmaceutical intervention he’d likely grow to between 6ft and 6ft 2in, is now permanently stunted at 5ft 8in. All this tragedy is both utterly unnecessary and deliberate. Never relinquish your incredulity.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.