“A Certain Madness Amok”

At this moment, a Vancouver postman named Rob Hoogland is sitting in a jail cell in British Columbia. He will be there until at least April 12, when he’s scheduled for a court date. At that time, he may be ordered to remain behind bars for a period yet to be determined.

Has Hoogland killed or robbed somebody? Is he an arsonist? A rapist? No. What did he do, then? Short answer: he tried to save his emotionally unstable daughter from self-destruction.

The long answer begins in the 2015–16 school year, when, as Hoogland recounted in a talk last October, his then fifth-grade daughter (he also has an older son) was getting into trouble at school and Hoogland and his estranged wife (whom he divorced in the spring of 2015) decided it might be good for her to see her school counselor. Since it’s forbidden by the British Columbia Supreme Court to make her name public, she’s referred to in legal documents as “A.B.” (Hoogland is “C.D.,” and the girl’s mother is “E.F.”)

Unknown to Hoogland, A.B. continued to see school counselors well into seventh grade, when one day she suddenly cut her hair very short. At the end of that school year, Hoogland saw that she was listed in her yearbook under a male name. It turned out that the school had been feeding her transgender ideology, and that she’d already begun “socially transitioning” to a male identity under the direction of a psychologist, Wallace Wong, who was encouraging her “to take testosterone.” To this end, Wong referred her to an endocrinologist at the Gender Clinic and Children’s Hospital in Vancouver.

It used to be understood that gender dysphoria is vanishingly rare, typically afflicts boys, and almost always begins to manifest when a child is extremely young. In recent years, however, there’s been an epidemic in many Western countries of older girls who suddenly claim to be in the wrong body. This “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” as Abigail Shrier argues in her important 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (which I reviewed), is a fad rooted in a number of contemporary social factors.

Many have expressed concern about this trend. Yet transgender activists, eager to increase their visibility and clout, have embraced these girls as real cases of gender dysphoria and have pushed for them to be “transitioned,” pronto. Such transition usually starts with the administration of puberty blockers, continues with massive doses of testosterone, and concludes with “gender-affirmation surgery”—known to today’s self-identified trans teenagers, rather innocuously, as “top surgery” (mastectomy) and “bottom surgery” (metoidioplasty and phalloplasty, which transform the clitoris into something resembling a penis).

A decade ago, subjecting minors to these protocols would have been seen as malpractice and child abuse. But in the last few years, the practice has won widespread political, cultural, media, and judicial support. Never mind that puberty blockers, while presented as harmlessly allowing young teens a “pause,” so that they can ponder their options, can in fact be quite harmful and are almost always followed by hormone therapy; that testosterone, which can cause sterilization, osteoporosis, heart disease, and stunted growth, invariably results in such irreversible symptoms as sterility, facial hair, and a deeper voice; and that “gender-affirming surgery,” of course, destroys healthy body parts that can never be restored.

The argument by supporters of these treatments is that they bring peace and wholeness to anxious young people. Routinely, those urging quick medical action for gender-dysphoric teens point to the suicide rate among them, far higher than the base rate. But they omit to mention that this rate doesn’t decline after transitioning—and that treatment can actually cause depression. Trans-activist lawyers for A.B. claimed that she was an urgent case because she was suicidal, and that she’d attempted suicide once because of her gender dysphoria. In fact, her endocrinologist stated that she showed no sign of suicidality.

Hoogland, for his part, knew of only one suicide attempt: A.B. had ingested “a bottle of something,” and he and his ex-wife had rushed her to a hospital, where she told doctors that she’d made the attempt because she’d been romantically rejected by her gym teacher. According to Hoogland, A.B. told him at one point: “If you don’t let me take testosterone I’m going to kill myself.” When he replied, “No, you know you’re not,” she said, “I know, but they told me to say that.” Indeed, it’s well known that if you claim to be suicidal, it can help get your treatments approved and get you to the front of the surgical queue.

It’s also been established that most kids who say they’re the other sex will change their minds soon after puberty. This alone would be reason to withhold radical, irreversible treatments until patients reach adulthood. But most of the doctors and psychologists involved in trans therapies seem to be as blithely indifferent as the trans activists are to this statistic. With utterly unfounded confidence, they’re placing massive numbers of young girls on the female-to-male assembly line.