Sky News reported that “hundreds of young transgender people are seeking help to return to their original sex.” The report focused on a woman, Charlie Evans, 28, who was born female but identified as a man for nearly ten years before returning to her original identity, a process that is called “detransitioning.” Similar stories of regret are receiving significant media attention in the U.K. Marcus Evans, the former governor of the British National Health Service’s London-based adolescent and adult clinical services, which oversees the largest gender youth clinic in the country, warned that “the treatment of gender-dysphoric youth has become highly politicised and, in many ways, operates outside good medical practice.” Evans handed in his resignation after 35 years, citing the gender clinic’s “woeful” care and saying it was “not fit for purpose.”

As with the clinicians who resigned from the London clinic, Lisa Littman, who was first to research the social contagion in teen girls, recently told me of her serious concerns about whether those being diagnosed with gender dysphoria actually have an underlying issue such as “trauma, sexual assault, homophobia, homophobic bullying, misogyny, or a mental-health condition.”

But both inside and outside the profession, clinical activists are ruthless in pursuit of their aims, and they accept no criticism. At the website of Psychology Today, a Harvard psychiatrist and medical researcher, Jack Turban, recently published a summary of some research that he said showed a link between “conversion therapy” — by which he means therapies geared at helping a person psychologically accept his biological sex — and suicide. Medical professionals posted their critiques of his work, suggesting the studies were fundamentally and dangerously flawed in their methodology and conclusions, but Psychology Today appears to have deleted their comments.