Why Girls Become Boys

Almost none of these cases were teenage girls. In fact, before 2012 there was no scientific or medical literature discussing adolescent girls who wanted to transition to the opposite sex.

That doesn't mean that we didn't know about transgender individuals. Gender Dysphoria—the severe discomfort in one's biological sex—has been studied for nearly one hundred years. It almost always involved boys who began feeling it between the ages of 2 and 4 and were strong and persistent in their assertions to everyone around them that they were really girls.

When a phenomenon that affects one half of a population—boys—suddenly begins affecting the other half—girls, and when its age of onset shifts from preschool to adolescence, something significant is happening.

In 2016, Brown University public health researcher Lisa Littman began studying the sudden spike in trans identification of teenage girls. She concluded that peer influence and social media influence had a lot to do with this trans teen phenomenon. After all, based on parent reports, none of these girls had exhibited symptoms of gender dysphoria at the age that it typically first presents: early childhood.

YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram all host popular social media influencers—today's version of Hollywood stars—who insist that if you feel uncomfortable in your body, you're probably trans. Many promise that if you start a course of testosterone, all of your problems will go away.

There's every reason to believe that these girls are experiencing real psychological pain—rates of anxiety, depression, and instances of self-harm are all at record levels for this generation. A quick fix becomes very tempting. So it doesn't take much—a YouTube video, a friend's suggestion—to get a troubled girl to buy into the fantasy that gender transition is the answer.