Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier

 When I think back to my own high school years in the 1990s, no one came out  as  “trans.”  And until the last five years, that is precisely what the statistics for gender dysphoria would have predicted. Somewhere around .01 percent of the population means that you probably didn't go to high school with anyone who was "trans" either.

But that didn't mean that girls were a monolith, or that we all expressed girlishness in the same way.

I had been a "tomboy", which basically meant I excelled at sports and  preferred the comparatively straightforward company of boys. Friendship with girls so often seemed unnervingly like breaking into a bank vault, all those invisible lasers shooting every which way, triggering alarms of sudden offense.

But there is no such thing as a "tomboy" anymore, as any teenage girl will tell you. In its place is an endless litany of sexual and gender identities - public, rigid and confining. As sixteen-year-old Riley, a young woman who began identifying as a boy at thirteen, put it to me:

“I think being a masculine girl today is hard because they don’t exist. They transition.” Transition, that is—to boys.

Years after my high school graduation, some of us who had dated the cutest boys  would  come  out  as  gay.  Others we might have silently suspected of being gay turned out not to be.  None of us then felt pressured to make any identity decisions we couldn’t easily take back.

Teens and tweens today are everywhere pressed to locate themselves on a gender spectrum and within a sexuality taxonomy—long before they have finished the sexual development that would otherwise guide discovery of who they are and what they desire. Long before they my have had any romantic or sexual experience at all. Young women judged insufficiently feminine by their peers are today asked outright, "Are you trans?"

Many of the girls now being cornered into a trans identity might, in an  earlier era,  have  come  out  as  gay.  “You’ve  got a  situation  where young lesbians are being pressured if they don’t give into this new idea of what it is to be a lesbian,” prominent gay writer Julia D. Robertson told me. That “new idea” is that lesbians do not exist: girls with more masculine presentations are “really” boys.

Some adolescents today do identify as lesbian, but it’s hard to miss that this identity has considerably less cachet than being trans. Riley told me that fifteen students in her British all-girls' school of five hundred have come out as transgender. "How many girls are lesbian?" I asked her. She thought about it for a moment, and I watched her be surprised by the answer: "None," she said. 

 - from “Irreversible Damage” by Abigail Shrier (Swift Press, 2020)