patrick.net

Lucy had always been a 'girly girl', her mother told me. As a child, she loved high heels and frilly dresses.

Dressing up was a favourite game, and she had a trunk full of gowns and wigs she would dip into, inhabiting an assortment of characters – every one of them female.

She adored Disney princess movies, especially The Little Mermaid. ...

Arriving at university, she was invited to state her name, sexual orientation and gender pronouns.

Lucy spotted the new opportunity of social acceptance, a whiff of belonging.

When her anxiety flared later that autumn, she decided, with several of her friends, that their angst had a fashionable cause: gender dysphoria – a distressing mismatch between one's birth sex and the person they feel they are.

Within a year, Lucy had begun a course of testosterone. But her real drug was the promise of a new identity.

A shaved head, boys' clothes, and a new name formed the baptismal waters of a female-to-male rebirth.

The next step would be 'top surgery,' a euphemism for a double mastectomy.

I came across Lucy's story after writing in the Wall Street Journal about the new laws on the use of gender pronouns, under the headline The Transgender Language War.

In October 2017, my state, California, had enacted a law backed by possible jail sentences for healthcare workers who refused to use patients' requested gender pronouns.

New York had adopted a similar law, which applied to employers, landlords and businesses.

Both laws are unconstitutional, violating the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.

Lucy's mother saw my article and found something in it: hope. She contacted me under a pseudonym and asked me to write about her daughter. ...

In Britain, in 2018, there was a 4,400 per cent rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatments.