How to make girls disappear

There's a fascinating dynamic where any question about why females are so overrepresented among youth seeking transition gets turned from “what’s going on with [girls]?” to “never mind the [girls]—what about the missing [boys]?”

Spun this way, the very fact that so many girls feel comfortable to come out as transgender means girls are doing OK, unlike those boys who must be hiding in closets all across the Western world:

"One speculation about the sudden increase in birth-assigned females suggests that it may be easier, or more acceptable, for birth-assigned females to present themselves in their preferred gender than it is for birth-assigned males…”

The discussion—GIDS’ Polly Carmichael is a co-author—trails off with a mealy-mouthed acknowledgement that, “[w]hatever the reasons, the evident over-representation of birth-assigned females does raise some important questions about what it means to be male or female in current society.”

Indeed, it does "raise some important questions about what it means to be male or female in current society.” Maybe even questions we’d want to deal with before gathering under the banner of affirmative care and denouncing the transphobic bigots (you can tell who the bigots are because they’re the ones asking questions)?

If we talked about what's going on with girls, we'd have to ask hard questions about how social contagion works and why so many girls hitting adolescence want out. That’s an uncomfortable conversation for clinicians who are committed to the belief that transgender identity is innate and that nothing and nobody can make someone trans. But if we make the skewed sex ratio all about the ‘missing’ boys, we can pretend the problem is that boys lack social support for trans identification, therefore everybody needs to be more affirming of transgender identities (and stop asking so many questions). (I think we call this ‘when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ syndrome.)

Of course, there are other ways gender-affirming clinicians make girls disappear. Girls become ‘boys’ in the language clinicians and researchers use. Scotland’s gender clinic for children doesn’t even track patients’ sex. Elective double mastectomies on teenage girls become ‘chest reconstruction’ on ‘boys.’ See how the moral calculus shifts? To intervene medically where injury or defect already exists is not the same thing as intervening on a healthy body. These doctors tell themselves they’re intervening on injured bodies and yet they carve up healthy ones. See who gets lost? These surgeries are performed on physically healthy girls, not injured or malformed boys.

And so, in so many ways, their tracks become muddled: we can’t see where these girls are coming from or where they’re headed. Sometimes, it seems like we don’t see them at all.