This article is taken from the December-January 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Young men, said Aristotle, “are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent when they last, but quickly over”. (He had little to say about women, regarding them as inferior because they couldn’t produce semen, which he attributed to their bodies being too cold.)
Setting aside the cod science, most countries’ legal systems recognise, like Aristotle, that the desires of youth are strong but fleeting. With varying age cutoffs, laws protect young people from regret by banning activities that risk long-term harm, such as buying alcohol or cigarettes, taking on debt or getting tattooed.
This insight that teenagers and young adults are impulsive and mercurial sits awkwardly with the central tenets of trans ideology: that everyone has an innate gender identity, and that it is reasonable to align one’s body with that identity by taking hormones and undergoing surgery.
Never mind that these claims are contradictory — if gender identity is distinct from sex, what can it possibly mean to align the two? Nonetheless they are written into many countries’ laws, preached by gender clinicians and expounded on TikTok by excitable neopronouned youths.
These claims imply that no child is too young to declare a trans identity, and to be believed. Diane Ehrensaft, an influential psychologist based in San Francisco, has said that toddlers can send non-verbal “gender messages”. A baby boy may signal a female identity by unpopping his onesie to mimic a dress, or a baby girl may rip out a hairclip to indicate she is really a boy. Ehrensaft has advised parents of children as young as three to “affirm” their gender identities — that is, to lie to them and everyone else about their sex.
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No one knows how many children and young people identify as trans, because no one is counting. The 2021 census found that 1 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds said their gender identity differed from their sex, but the question was so badly phrased that the statistics regulator has declared the results unreliable — a first in the census’s history.
The UK’s main child gender clinic saw a 20-fold increase in referrals in little more than a decade before closing last year, but an unknown number of hormone prescriptions are written by GPs, and many trans-identifying people do not medicalise. Surveys of teachers suggest that most schools have some trans-identifying pupils, but again no one is counting.
One thing is certain, however: the number of trans-identifying people is now dozens of times higher than the best estimate a couple of decades ago of one in 30,000 for males and one in 100,000 for females.
If the soaring number is due to greater social acceptance, at some point it will level off. But the pattern of the past ten years looks more like a craze. The outsize increase in trans identification amongst teenage girls, a group prone to social contagion; clusters of trans identification in friendship groups; the boom in celebrities with trans kids: it all looks more like fashion than correction.
There are intriguing hints that the fashion may be starting to fade. In America, surveys at a few elite colleges find big falls in non-binary identification, and one national survey found a stunning fall of nearly half in both trans and non-binary identification amongst 18- to 22-year-olds between 2022 and 2024.
Meanwhile polling in the UK shows fast-rising disapproval in every age group of the policies implied by gender affirmation, such as permitting men who identify as women into women-only spaces and sports.
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What, then, of those who were caught up in the social contagion? Once it has passed, will they persist in their trans identities or abandon them? What, that is, of detransition?
It seems implausible that a teenager whose trans or non-binary identity is expressed solely through an unflattering haircut and pronoun declarations will stay the course once these signifiers become passé. The friends who virtuously validated that identity will grow up and find better things to do. But others will have undergone physical changes that despite now being unwanted cannot be undone.
An influential American gender clinician brushed off parents’ concerns
that trans-identified teenage girls might later regret having their breasts removed
The gender affirmative approach fostered a remarkably frivolous attitude to life-changing interventions. A recent article in the New York Times compared adopting a trans identity to the author’s long-ago decision not to try out for her high-school swim team.
Johanna Olson-Kennedy, an influential American gender clinician, once brushed off parents’ concerns that trans-identified teenage girls might later regret having their breasts removed, saying, “If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.”
But scars are for life, and bags of silicone are nothing like the intricate physiology that enables breastfeeding. Similarly, neovaginas and neophalluses are crude simulacra, lacking the functionality of the body parts they mimic, and created by destroying healthy organs.
Clinics around the world minimised the effects of puberty blockers — powerful drugs that arrest the normal progression to adulthood — by describing them as a reversible “pause button” giving gender-confused children “time to think”.
But it was always obvious that interfering with a crucial developmental stage risked stunting mental and physical development, and that when started early in puberty and followed by cross-sex hormones, blockers would cause sterility and sexual dysfunction.
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For those who regret such major interventions, there is no pretransition body to return to. Detransition means forgiving themselves for a decision that, with hindsight, seems foolish; they must learn not to blame themselves, or perhaps well-meaning parents who believed what specialists said. They must learn to live with the anger they feel towards clinicians who were all too happy to help them damage their healthy bodies but are missing in action when it comes to mitigating that damage.
Many will have to navigate regret alone. Gender-affirming therapists routinely recommend cutting off friends and relatives who are insufficiently ecstatic about trans identification; trans community groups cast out detransitioners like apostates.
Detransitioners can expect nothing from the teachers who socially transitioned them as children behind parents’ backs, the trans evangelists who promised a new “glitter family” to replace the one they abandoned, or the clinicians who guilt-tripped parents with false claims about transition being “life-saving”.
Women who detransition may find new friends amongst sex-realist feminists. Detransitioned men have no such ready-made support network. Women who oppose trans ideology recognise the role played by pornography and cross-dressing fetishes in many men’s decision to identify as a woman, and the harm done to women’s rights by trans-identifying men who enter women-only spaces. Some are suspicious of men who perpetrated such harm, not grateful that they have stopped.
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No doubt some of those who now identify as trans will continue to take pleasure in asserting a cross-sex identity and in their altered bodies. But the one-sided deal imposed by the trans lobby on wider society, which prioritised trans people’s access to opposite-sex spaces and services over other people’s rights, is now being unpicked.
In April the Supreme Court ruled that for the purposes of equality and anti-discrimination law, “sex” means biology, not paperwork or self-identification. Employers, service providers and the government have been slow to understand the implications for single-sex provision.
But soon enough, trans-identifying people will have to face up to the fact that they never had the right most of them took for granted to use spaces and services for the opposite sex. It seems plausible that continuing to identify as trans will be less appealing without the guarantee that others will be forced to play along.
Detransitioners will need specialist counselling to cope with a new, medically created form of grief and loss. Those who took cross-sex hormones or removed their genitals will need new medical protocols. Endocrinologists will have to work out if and when to recommend stopping cross-sex hormones, and how best to support people who no longer have testicles or ovaries. Detransitioners whose urinary tracts have been damaged by hormones and surgery will need help coping with infections and incontinence as they age.
And later still care homes will have to learn how to handle dementia patients distressed by being unable to remember why their genitals are missing, or to understand why carers are referring to them as the sex they are not. Desires may be fickle and fleeting, but still have lifelong consequences.
