The Decline and Fall of Old Europe

By now you know that the European Union’s antitrust chief has fined Google some $5 billion for anti-competitive activities. To be honest with you, I have no idea what this is all about, but I did manage to reflect that, when all is said and done, America has led the charge toward technological innovation, while Europe barely registers. You might say, and you would be right to say so, that China is now working to compete with America, but Europe… not so much.

While everyone is gnashing their teeth over the fact that President Trump has taken to treating European allies as junior partners, everyone fails to notice that  European nations are acting like junior partners. And like junior partners who cannot compete or even defend themselves.

When you cannot do better than to deconstruct what others have built, you are losing out in world competition. Immigration is not Europe’s only problem.

Holman Jenkins reports the news in the Wall Street Journal this morning:

The world’s 700 million iPhone users will look at the European Union antitrust action against Google’s Android phones and say “Huh?” Even veteran users of Android phones will be little more than bemused if they soon must spend a few extra minutes to install the world’s most popular apps, such as Google’s search and map apps. This is no biggie: The average Android user already downloads 50 apps to his phone that weren’t preinstalled by the manufacturer.

Only on one group would there be any immediate effect, and it would be bad: The up-and-coming poor person in some less-developed country landing his first smartphone, which will likely be cheap, and likely be running the Android operating system.

Jenkins raises the salient issue. What have the Europeans accomplished by their anti-trust fines? Not very much.

One hopes a considerate salesperson or knowledgeable friend will be handy to show him how to make his purchase useful by downloading the most stable, tested and invaluable (though free to the user) apps that the rest of the world is using, made by Google.

The sole practical consequence of the EU’s action would be to raise an obstacle to this person’s discovery of the opportunities created by access to the world through the mobile internet. Nice work. The EU’s celebrated competition commissioner, Denmark’s Margrethe Vestager, has not made the world a better place; she has made it kludgier.

What is the deeper meaning of it all. Why, President Obama saw it clearly. Kudos to him for understanding that Europeans were punishing American companies because they cannot compete. Thus,  because the march of technology has left them in the dust.

Jenkins continues:

Europe’s antitrust czar “appears to be disproportionately targeting U.S. companies.” No, that’s not a Trump tweet, as might be told by the employment of anemic modifiers like “disproportionately.” It was a statement issued by the U.S. Treasury during Barack Obama’s administration.

Mr. Obama himself would tell an interviewer in 2015 that EU actions were “more commercially driven than anything else” because their tech companies “can’t compete with ours.”

It’s too late to roll back the tape. If America is the engine of digital disruption, the EU now views itself as having a special mission to discipline America’s tech giants. Ms. Vestager has become that rarest of things: an EU bureaucrat who actually has an ardent public following.

So, Vestager is a political star in Europe. She is a symptom of the decline and fall of Europe. It’s not just Obama who is right. Trump is right to treat Europe, especially Western Europe, as junior partners.

What Makes Canadians Proud?

The country that made Justin Bieber its prime minister has now brought us another pride-boosting activity. You might not have guessed it, but… it’s the ability to have sex in a canoe.

It’s news you can use. Brought to you by the New York Times, no less.

What more can you want for a lazy Saturday.

Here are some instructions:

“Three words: center of gravity,” says James Raffan, former executive director of the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario. To avoid capsizing, bodies should stay low in the hull, especially if you intend to make any lateral rocking movements. In a country with more than 60 percent of the world’s lakes, crisscrossed by untold rivers and streams, it’s no wonder that the ability to copulate while floating in a small boat has become a point of national pride. In 1973, the author and historian Pierre Berton was quoted as saying, “A Canadian is somebody who knows how to make love in a canoe.”

I will leave the rest to your imagination.

I guess, when your prime minister is Justin Bieber you find your pride where you can.

Send That Thank-You Note

Every once in a while we run into some great advice. You know, like Adm. William McRaven’s advice to the graduating class at the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. Which was: make your bed.

What better than to have the commander of the Navy SEALs explain how best to start your day?

Now, thanks to so-called scientific research, we have another wonderful suggestion, one that is designed to improve your relationships without your even having to confess your most embarrassing secrets in front of all your colleagues. 

The new suggestion: send a thank you note!!! This means, dare I mention, that a thank-you text will not suffice. For the record, the researchers accept thank you email, but if you want to ascend the heights of good character, a written missive is best.

The New York Times has the story. (via Maggie’s Farm). Reporter Heather Murphy explains that it takes a minimal effort to write a thank-you note, but that doing so will elicit many great good feelings. Do the math. You have no reason not to send such notes, except your sloth and perhaps your inability to write a coherent sentence in the English language.

People who fail to send such notes tend to believe that the gesture is outdated and retro. They are therefore saying that they themselves are unimportant to the person whose gift or favor makes them deserve such a gesture.

Murphy writes:

But what did surprise two psychologists as they attempted to get to bottom of why so few people actually send thank yous is that many people totally “miscalibrate” the effect of an appreciative email. They underestimate the positive feelings it will bring.

“They think it’s not going to be that big a deal,” said Amit Kumar, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies well-being.

Derelict friends who fail to send thank you notes amass other reasons why it is right to be wrong:

They also overestimate how insincere the note may appear and how uncomfortable it will make the recipient feel, their study found.

This means that the average individual believes that a thank you note must be an exercise in brilliant, even poetic prose. They have no confidence in their ability to write three decent sentences in English, so they choose the path of rudeness. 

And they imagine that the recipient will feel uncomfortable receiving a thank-you note. I confess that I find that puzzling, because why would anyone feel uncomfortable about receiving the note?

In truth, as the researchers established, people who receive thank you notes are ecstatic and thrilled to receive them. Those who send them expect a far more muted response. This tells us that in an age where the word “empathy” oozes from everyone’s mouth, people have no real sense of other people’s feelings.

Good deeds deserve a thank you note. That means, not just a toss-off verbal expression of thanks. What kind of good deeds requires such a note? Kumar explains:

Sample letters included missives of appreciation to fellow students and friends who offered guidance through the college admissions process, job searches and tough times. In lab experiments, Dr. Kumar observed that it took most subjects less than five minutes to write the letters.

While prospective senders manifest an absence of confidence in their writing abilities, recipients universally reported that they did not care about the occasional syntactical infelicity.

Kumar concluded:

People tend to undervalue the positive effect they can have on others for a tiny investment of time.

When someone has done something nice for you, send a thank you note. This does not absolve you from the responsibility to return the favor. But, it will do wonders for your relationships.

If you don't believe me, try it. What bad could happen?

Child Rape in Sweden

Down with rape culture. It became a rallying cry for the woke feminist left. Cynicism aside, how could anyone disagree?

And yet, in the Feminist Paradise of Sweden, ruled by a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens—that is, a woke leftist coalition—the government has been condoning child rape. But, only when it is carried out by Muslim migrants. 

The Swedish government and everyone else, it seems, use the term “child marriage,” but, frankly, what would you call it when a nine year old girl is married against her will to a thirty or forty year old man she does not know. Surely, she cannot consent. Surely, she cannot consent to consummate the marriage. 

And yet, in some communities, child marriage is accepted as a way to preserve family honor. Someone should point out that just because think it is honorable to marry a child does not make it honorable. And just because you think that you are preserving family honor by murdering your teenage daughter does not make you any less depraved.

But, the exquisitely multicultural Swedes are trying to find an accommodation. Because we must accept that everyone’s culture is equal, don’t you think?

Politico has the story (via Maggie’s Farm):

A row over how to deal with child marriage among immigrants has inflamed political debate ahead of a general election in Sweden, where migration continues to divide public opinion and the far right is riding high in the polls.

A tug-of-war between the ruling Social Democrat-Green Party coalition and the opposition over the government’s role in managing or eradicating the practice — which predominantly affects young girls, and in some cases boys, from immigrant backgrounds — is emblematic of a broader struggle to find a balance between efforts to integrate a large number of new immigrants and preserve a Swedish way of life.

Sweden does not allow child marriage when it takes place in Sweden, but it has recognized marriages between adults and children if they were performed abroad. Of course, once the child brides are brought to Sweden, they will be raped. The woke feminist Swedes do not seem to care:

Although Sweden in 1973 banned marriages in which one or both parties is underage, it was possible under some circumstances to get special dispensation. The previous center-right government tightened the law in 2014, amid growing awareness of the prevalence of so-called honor-related oppression — including forced marriage — among some immigrant communities.

Still, marriages between underaged partners are recognized — and not annulled — if carried out abroad. The government has come under pressure to close that legal loophole and invalidate all marriages that involve minors. But it declined to vote for a proposal — put forward by parliament’s committee on civil affairs this spring — that would do so, saying it was formulating its own plan to tighten existing laws.

Now, the government is trying to remedy the situation:

The government’s proposal — which it finally put forward in May — would mean Sweden does not recognize marriages carried out abroad where one or both parties were under 18. It would also require spouses who are over 18 when they arrive in Sweden (but married when they were underage) to renew their vows in order to be legally recognized as married. However, critics say it is unclear how authorities would enforce the rule in practice.

A government pamphlet issued by its National Board of Health and Welfare and targeted at adults with underage spouses also drew fierce criticism, including from Cabinet ministers, for treating the issue too lightly and not clearly communicating that child marriage is against both Swedish law and cultural norms.

The opposition Liberal Party— being of the right— has proposed its own measures. It is trying to shut down both child marriage and female genital mutilation—carried out when girls are taken to foreign countries:

In June, three weeks after the government finally presented its proposed legal amendment, the Liberal Party presented its own list of proposed measures to tackle honor-based oppression, which party leader Jan Björklund called “the greatest challenge to equality” in Sweden.

The proposals included travel bans for families suspected of planning to bring their daughters abroad to marry them off or to have them undergo female genital mutilation. Under the Liberals’ proposal, authorities would also be able to confiscate families’ passports and make parents attend meetings with social services. They also proposed tougher punishments for those found guilty of forced marriage, as well as the extradition of foreigners convicted of crimes with honor motives.

It ought to be an easy matter. There should be no debate about whether to countenance child rape. And yet, in feminist Sweden the keepers of multicultural political correctness seem not to be able to address the issue forcefully. After all, they do not want to hurt anyone’s feelings and do not want to to offend anyone's cultural practices, no matter how barbaric and criminal they are.

She Doesn't Know That Therapy Ruined Her Life

The woman wants to find some light in the midst of her agony. Unfortunately, she is a casualty of therapy and has chosen to write to New York magazine’s advice columnist Ask Polly. She calls herself Scrambled, because her life feels like scrambled eggs, but she is clearly in serious distress. You will see throughout her letter that she is consulting with therapists. When she does not consult with therapists she does whatever else she can to feel good. But ends up feeling awful.

Anything but addressing her problems directly and consequentially. Polly, being something of a recovering therapy junkie herself, whines on about how this woman should feel her feelings. And she says, with all the authority she can muster, that the woman should not just be dealing with her abandonment issues… she should be rewriting her entire life story.

Leave it to Polly to hand out the worst advice. Leave it to Polly to show us how and why therapy has become the problem not the solution. While Scrambled was dealing with her abandonment issues in therapy, her husband was taking everything she had, half of the custody of her child and the entirety of her business.

As you read her story, keep this in mind: this woman does not need a therapist. She needs a good lawyer. She needs to fight the good fight against this man. Forget about the life story. Forget about the abandonment issues. Forget about feeling her feelings. All of it sends her into her mind and detracts from the most important point: she has been taken for a ride, with the collusion of her therapist.

Talk all you want about strong, empowered women. Talk all you want about therapists helping women to be strong and empowered. This woman oozes weakness. Her therapist’s approach compounds the weakness and has made it impossible for her to function in the world.

With this in mind, here are a few excerpts from her letter, with commentary:

My husband left me 17 months ago after 11 years together. I knew things weren’t perfect (we’d been in therapy for a few months together because he wouldn’t have sex very often and only under duress, and it was making me so sad), but he left so rapidly that even the therapist was shocked by the departure. I’ve been told since then that his personality type often does that — cool as a cucumber and then, with no warning at all, they are gone.

So, she dragged her husband into couples therapy because she was not getting enough sex. Perhaps if she had not been so assertive about her sexual needs, her husband would have found her more attractive. Surely, he could not have reacted well when therapy was accusing him of being an inadequate lover.

Moreover, if we may extrapolate from other experiences, if said man one day runs into a new woman who turns him on, who has a better developed feminine mystique, he is going to drop his wife, the mother of his child, without thinking. Which is what happened.

To write this off as a personality type is to miss the point entirely. And the first point is, couples counseling failed this couple. If the therapist was shocked at how quickly the husband left, the therapist was oblivious to the real issues in this marriage.

Needless to say, Scrambled has nothing bad to say about the therapist… which is a good part of her problem.

And then, her husband took her business from her:

I had my own business, and my ex was out of work for about 18 months before he joined the business, where he worked for six months. Four days before he departed, he got me to sign all these documents making the business fifty-fifty (instead of sole trader), and he fought to take it over completely in the split. In the end, I gave up the fight, and he paid me a nominal amount for it. I spent a few months working in a terrible job, which I got fired from, then took a lot of last year to try to recover: going to the beach, meditating, doing a gratitude practice, acupuncture, therapy, seeing friends, and every tool I could possibly think of.

Doesn’t it strike you that this woman needs only one thing in life right now: a good lawyer. Polly doesn’t mention it, but it’s so obvious that it cries out for attention. How did she get to the point where she allowed her husband to bully her into signing over half her company? Was she represented by counsel? And how did the husband get to take over the entire company? If she did not have counsel she should speak to a good lawyer, right now, to see whether she can do anything to fight back. 

Polly believes that Scrambled should be outraged. Of course, this is true. But the issue is: what to do about it. You must be able to do more than marinate in your outrage. Taking a consequential action is a good start.

Scrambled’s therapist wants her to examine her abandonment issues. Her husband left and her father died. Even Polly knows that the two losses are not commensurate. How does a therapist get away with thinking that they are?

In therapy, we’ve explored whether the death of my dad 18 years ago is related to the intensity of my grief (as the therapist said after we’d passed the one-year mark: “There’s still a LOT of energy behind this”); it’s the second time that the most significant man in my life has left.

The therapist is perfectly useless and hopeless. Her father died eighteen years ago… please! The therapist wants this women to continue to waste away in therapy. It’s sad and pathetic. As I have been wont to say, she has surely had enough therapy.

Don’t believe me? Examine the way Scrambled describes her life, a life that therapy has given her:

So here I am. Almost a year and a half beyond my breakup and feeling no closer to recovery or finding a way to move on with my life. I am actively job-hunting, as I need to get some income coming in, but I’m also terrified of how I will work full-time, be a single parent, have a life, get enough sleep. I’m exhausted. I am trying to do the things that make me feel better, even if briefly — swimming in the ocean, going to the gym, seeing friends, etc. I’m dating but not meeting anyone remotely interesting, and in fact I just turned all the apps off to have a break. And I’m sad. I still think about my ex all the time and wonder how I can possibly get him to change his mind (even knowing that I can’t). Sometimes I think maybe I should try to be friends with him, but I know it’s actually about getting back together, and it will be too devastating when he inevitably meets someone else (again) and moves on. Sometimes I feel venomous hatred toward him, but I also really think that’s covering this deep sadness. I’m binge-eating, though trying all the time not to.

I’ve also been sitting in it — the pain, the sadness, the anger. Trying to surrender to it, since I do know that when I resist and wish for things to be different, it all feels worse. I’m walking into the fire day after day after day, but to be honest, I don’t know if I believe I will ever recover from this heartbreak.

There she is, after a year of therapy, after a failed couples therapy, sitting in pain. Someone needs to tell her to take charge of the situation, preferably by hiring a good lawyer and firing her therapist.

A Black and White World Meets Asians

The Rolling Stones wanted to paint the world black. Today’s deep thinkers want to paint it black and white.

By now, you know the narrative. Whites all profit from white privilege. They receive certain advantages merely on the basis of being white. No one ask whether they or their ancestors accomplished anything in life… the privilege is unjust, on its face.

And blacks are the objects of discrimination. They have been victimized by whites for centuries and need special privileges, in the form of affirmative action or diversity programs, in order to catch up.

Such is the argument. Yet, as David Marcus notes on The Federalist, the argument becomes dust when you consider that the nation’s overachievers are not white or black, but are Asians. And they are not wealthy Asians.  They are invariably poor Asians whose only path to prosperity involves very hard work on their studies. 

Now that higher educational institutions have discovered that a disproportionate number of Asians are outcompeting both whites and blacks, they are trying to do something about it. They are discriminating against Asian applicants. Harvard University admissions departments concocted a personality test, according to which Asian students with less than scintillating personalities were considered less desirable applicants than cool kids from minority groups.

Marcus explains:

Historically the basis and justification of race-based admissions was that white students benefited from centuries of racial injustice in myriad ways. As a result, affirmative action was meant to redress historical imbalances and level the playing field for minority students. But now that we see race-based admissions are disadvantaging Asians more than they are whites, this basis simply falls apart.

It is farcical to imagine that somehow centuries of systemic white supremacy are benefiting Asian students, many of who are first-generation Americans or even immigrants themselves. Moreover, there is no plausible way to suggest that these recent arrivals had any hand in creating the systems that disadvantage other minority groups.

True enough, it is absurd to blame white supremacy for the achievements of poor Asian students. This proves that it’s not a black and white world.

Marcus also addresses the larger argument in favor of affirmative action, namely that diversity is its own reward. He quotes the newly woke Max Boot:

Boot’s second argument, and the one more likely to gain purchase on the Left, is that diversity in student bodies is its own reward. He writes: “You learn more about life if you go to class with people who are different from you — who have different abilities, different geographic origins, different social classes, different sexualities, different religions, different political views and, yes, different ethnicities. You don’t necessarily want a student body made up entirely of bookworms.”

Yes, but… Boot and other proponents of diversity-as-its-own-reward forget one salient fact. If you admit students who are vastly underprepared to do the work, you will need to dumb down the curriculum. Otherwise they will be totally lost in class and will all flunk out. The argument arose in New York City when the new school chancellor decided that there was something wrong with New York’s most prestigious public schools, Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science. The problem: too many Asian students and too few minority students.

Now the chancellor and the mayor are trying to admit more students who cannot do the work. To which teachers and alumni responded that you cannot teach multivariable calculus when a tenth or so of your students cannot do algebra. Or some such.

The American university system has been using diversity quotas for decades now. The courts and the bureaucrats mandated it. Do you think that the generally inferior education students are receiving in universities derives from the fact that more and more students cannot really follow the material as presented, and that professors are now required to dumb it all down, to prevent the diversity programs from being exposed as failures.

What is Transgenderism?

If this be madness, there seems to be no method to it. No clinical or therapeutic method to the current mania about transgenderism. An article by Jesse Singal in the Atlantic this month refers us back to an article in The Economist from last fall… two serious studies of what Camille Paglia saw as a sign of cultural collapse.

When you are willing to sacrifice your children to a dumb idea, something is deeply wrong with the culture. It isn’t just that parental approval is required before physicians can mutilate children by giving them puberty blockers or by performing double mastectomies on fourteen year olds. Worse yet, some parents bring their children into clinics hoping that the clinicians will declare their children to be transgendered.

Singal, for example, offers case studies of children who thought they were transgendered and changed their minds. He offers studies of children who transitioned and then changed their minds… and tried to detransition. And he offers cases of transgendered people who supposedly transitioned successfully.

  

Throughout the study you have the impression that these children are being manipulated by the culture, by psycho professionals, by the massive publicity accorded to a Caitlyn Jenner and by the attacks on anyone who would dare suggest that transgenderism is not real.

Both the Economist and Singal weigh both sides to the debate. They are effectively fair and balanced and both do a good journalistic job. Singal, for example, offers us the case studies showing that children who are suffering from an ill-defined psychological problem suddenly find themselves magically cured once they transform into the opposite sex.

Regarding the therapeutic benefits of transitioning, Singal writes:

More recently, a wave of success stories has appeared. In many of these accounts, kids are lost, confused, and frustrated right up until the moment they are allowed to grow their hair out and adopt a new name, at which point they finally become their true self. Take, for example, a Parents.com article in which a mother, writing pseudonymously, explains that she struggled with her child’s gender-identity issues for years, until finally turning to a therapist, who, after a 20-minute evaluation, pronounced the child trans. Suddenly, everything clicked into place. The mother writes: “I looked at the child sitting between my husband and me, the child who was smiling, who appeared so happy, who looked as if someone finally saw him or her the way she or he saw him or herself.” In a National Geographic special issue on gender, the writer Robin Marantz Henig recounts the story of a mother who let her 4-year-old, assigned male at birth, choose a girl’s name, start using female pronouns, and attend preschool as a girl. “Almost instantly the gloom lifted,” Henig writes.

And yet, Singal also notes the extremely large number of transgendered children (around 70%) who change their minds. He adds that the suicide rate among the transgendered is appallingly high:

Suicide is the dark undercurrent of many discussions among parents of TGNC young people. Suicide and suicidal ideation are tragically common in the transgender community. An analysis conducted by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Williams Institute, published in 2014, found that 41 percent of trans respondents had attempted suicide; 4.6 percent of the overall U.S. population report having attempted suicide at least once. While the authors note that for methodological reasons 41 percent is likely an overestimate, it still points to a scarily high figure, and other research has consistently shown that trans people have elevated rates of suicidal ideation and suicide relative to cisgender people.

A so-called treatment that produces that much suicide is clearly not effective. To think otherwise is to succumb to the ambient madness.

By that I am referring to what the clinicians call the “social contagion” effect. Children are being effectively brainwashed by the new level of social acceptance and high status given to the transgendered.

Singal reports:

When parents discuss the reasons they question their children’s desire to transition, whether in online forums or in response to a journalist’s questions, many mention “social contagion.” These parents are worried that their kids are influenced by the gender-identity exploration they’re seeing online and perhaps at school or in other social settings, rather than experiencing gender dysphoria.

In truth, as the Economist reports, the media coverage of the issue correlates with an increasingly large number of people who declare themselves to be transgendered. It notes the statistics from Britain and America:

A growing number of children and adolescents are coming out as transgender. Referrals to Britain’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) have increased from 94 to 1,986 over the past seven years. The picture is similar in America. The country’s first gender-identity clinic for children and adolescents opened in Boston in 2007; by 2015, there were over 50 such clinics in North America. Their patients belong to the first generation of children and teenagers who are altering their bodies to fit their gender.

Culture warriors have advanced the transgender cause. The Economist continues:

But ever since Caitlyn Jenner starred on the cover of Vanity Fair’s July 2015 issue and transitioning became a subject of general discussion, the volume has been jacked up by partisans of the culture wars. Massed on one side are trans activists and their progressive allies, who champion the right of an oppressed minority to self-determination. On the other side stand religious ideologues, who deny the very idea that one’s gender can differ from one’s God-given sex, and whose crusade to ban transgender people from using the bathroom of their choice has become a campaigning issue in American politics. Mustering uneasily nearby is a group of feminists, some of whom do not think that men can ever truly become women.

Now, of course, American progressives have rallied to the cause. Given that their feminist sisters have long insisted that gender is merely a social construct, they are obliged to accept that your gender is what you believe it to be:

Thanks in part to the full-throated support of progressives and trans activists, one approach is gaining ground in America. It contends that children know themselves best: if your three-year-old says he is a girl, do not deny or question her but instead support her. When she is ready to transition, assist her to do so – whether that means buying pink dresses now or approving her use of cross-sex hormones later on. Parents who affirm their kids’ desire to transition have been widely lauded for their courage; doctors who question whether medical intervention is in a child’s best interest have been accused of transphobia.

Activists see no problem in giving hormones to adolescents. The Economist reports that these claims are highly dubious, at best. At worst, they can cause significant medical problems:

Yet there are serious questions about these hormones’ medical and psychological effects. Blockers are often described as “fully reversible”, and it is true that if you stop taking them puberty will eventually resume. But it is not known whether they alter the course of adolescent brain development and possible side-effects include abnormal bone growth.

Cross-sex hormones are even more problematic. Their long-term medical and psychological effects are unknown, though it is clear that oestrogen brings with it a clinically significant risk of deep vein thrombosis, while testosterone increases the chance of developing ovarian cysts later in life, which is why some transgender men have their ovaries removed. In addition, some of the effects of cross-sex hormones are irreversible. With testosterone, there is no return from the deepening of the voice and the augmentation of the clitoris; with oestrogen enlarged breasts will remain.

This approach makes Wren, of the Tavistock and Portman in London, nervous, as children who begin taking blockers early on in puberty, followed immediately by cross-sex hormones, will never produce mature eggs or sperm of their own. “Can a 12-, 13-, 14-year-old imagine how they might feel as a 35-year-old adult, that they have agreed to a treatment that compromises their fertility or is likely to compromise their fertility?” she wonders. The risks of hormone therapy are high, but many young people and their families think that the price of caution is greater. It’s hard for parents, says Wren. “They see their suffering child, they want to remedy the suffering, and there’s a treatment out there. Why wouldn’t you give it?”   

What is it like being trans? The Economist reports the case of Max, a woman who thought she was a man, who transitioned to being (mostly) a man and then detransitioned:

Six months after he began successfully passing, he realised, deep down, that he wasn’t sure. “I started being like, oh damn, this is for real.” There were drawbacks to being seen as a man. Women he passed on the street were “scared” of him. He couldn’t talk about his childhood without lying or leaving things out. He found laddish banter distasteful. And the possibility that someone would discover he was transgender haunted him. “People don’t love to find out that you weren’t born a man.”

The magazine suggests that Max decided to be transgendered because she was attracted to girls. This means that, in some cases, transgenderism is another name for homophobia:

Max detransitioned for several reasons; the most significant one was that she is not transgender. She was unhappy as a child not because she was a boy trapped in a girl’s body but because she didn’t understand that she could be the kind of girl who hated girly things but loved other girls, without having to metamorphose into a man….

But Max and her therapist overlooked, or discounted, the possibility that her mental health problems, far from being symptomatic of gender dysphoria, could actually be the cause of it. Max now believes that her dysphoria sprang from the anxiety and depression, which in turn arose from her difficult experiences as a young lesbian with bi-polar and attention deficit disorders, with which she was diagnosed three years ago.

What if they suspect that a young woman’s internalised misogyny and repressed lesbianism accounts for her desire to turn herself into a man? Transitioning might temporarily mitigate her dysphoria but therapy would be less drastic and more effective, as would more informal kinds of support provided by LGBTQ groups.

As I say, America is in deep trouble.