The solidarity Trap

 

Read some Piaget please!

@prof_curiosity1

 

Among the more striking features of the contemporary gender debate is the demographic pattern of its support. Polling consistently shows that young women are among the strongest supporters of transgender identity claims, including claims that bear directly on the sex segregated spaces, services, and protections that exist specifically because of the risks women and girls face from male violence and predation. Understanding why requires taking young women's position seriously rather than dismissing it, and the developmental and social psychological literature offers a more illuminating account than simple false consciousness.

 

What makes this pattern additionally significant is a parallel demographic fact The population presenting at paediatric gender clinics underwent a complete transformation over the single decade from approximately 2012 to 2022. A caseload that was historically around 80 percent male became, at its peak, around 74 percent female. At the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service, referrals rose from approximately 250 per year in 2012 to over 5,000 per year by 2022. The female caseload within that expansion grew by a factor of roughly forty. The same pattern was documented in Sweden, Finland, Canada, Australia, and the United States across the same period. The generation of young women now most vocally supportive of the gender affirmative framework is the same generation from which that clinic population was almost entirely drawn. These two demographic facts are not independent of one another.

 

A third demographic fact belongs alongside them. Rates of self harm among adolescent girls rose sharply over the same period and through the same channels. Self harm in this population is itself a documented social contagion phenomenon, spreading through peer networks and online communities by mechanisms that researchers have studied with increasing precision. The temporal and demographic overlap between the rise in adolescent female self harm, the rise in adolescent female gender clinic referrals, and the consolidation of the online environments in which both phenomena spread is not coincidental. The Tavistock referral data and the Cass Review both documented high rates of self harm as a presenting feature of the adolescent female clinic population. These were not three separate groups of young women. To a significant extent they were the same young women, and the peer networks and online communities surrounding them were the same networks. The older young women who now appear in polling data as strong supporters of the gender affirmative framework were, in many cases, the friends and peers of that population. They were responding to a real crisis in the lives of real people they cared about. What they were not given was an accurate account of what that crisis consisted of, or of what responses to it the evidence supported.

 

The Solidarity Trap

Young women in their teens and twenties have come of age in an institutional culture that presents support for transgender identity as the natural extension of progressive values they already hold. Feminism, as it has been transmitted to this generation through education, social media, and popular culture, has been substantially reframed around the language of inclusion, allyship, and the rejection of exclusionary boundaries. To question whether a male bodied person should have unrestricted access to women's changing rooms is, within this framework, not a safeguarding question. It is a question about whether you are a good person.

 

Bandura's account of social learning is directly relevant here. Young women are not arriving at their positions through independent assessment of the evidence. They are acquiring them through the social environments they inhabit, the peer groups whose approval matters to them, the institutional frameworks of schools and universities that have adopted affirmative positions, and the online cultures that reward solidarity and punish dissent with considerable force. The position feels like a value freely chosen. The social mechanism producing it is considerably less free than it appears.

 

The Empathy Asymmetry

Young women are, on average, higher in empathic responsiveness than other demographic groups. This is not a weakness. It is a genuine human capacity that has social value. It also creates a specific vulnerability to a rhetorical framework that centres the distress of transgender identified individuals and presents any boundary setting as the cause of that distress.

 

The "better a live son than a dead daughter" argument, examined previously, is particularly effective on a population primed to respond to suffering and to feel responsible for alleviating it. When the message transmitted through every institutional channel available to a young woman is that transgender people face elevated suicide risk and that affirmation is protective, the empathic response is to affirm. Questioning the evidence base for that claim requires a kind of emotional detachment from an individual's presented distress that empathy actively works against. The young woman who asks whether the suicide risk data actually support the conclusion she is being invited to draw is not being asked to think more carefully. She is being asked to feel less.

 

The self harm dimension of this pressure deserves particular attention because it operates with an additional layer of force. The emotional leverage applied to supporters of gender affirmation is not limited to suicide risk in the abstract. In many cases it is immediate, personal, and directed at a specific friend or peer who is known to self harm, who presents as being in acute distress, and whose distress is attributed, explicitly, to a failure of affirmation by those around her. The young woman in that position is not being asked to hold a considered political view. She is being told that her questions, her hesitations, or her boundaries could contribute directly to her friend's injury or death. That is a burden of a qualitatively different order from ordinary social pressure, and it is one that operates most powerfully on precisely the demographic most disposed to take it seriously. Understanding why young women support the gender affirmative framework requires understanding this mechanism clearly, because it is not reducible to ignorance or social conformity. It is empathy being weaponised against the very people whose empathy makes them most responsive to it.

 

Winnicott's account of the False Self offers a further dimension. In social environments where the expression of concern about female only spaces is met with social punishment, the performance of solidarity becomes a condition of belonging. The position is internalised. It feels authentic. The compliance dynamic sustaining it is invisible from inside it.

 

What the clinic data add to this picture is material that the empathy framework cannot easily absorb. The adolescent girls who presented at gender services in large numbers from around 2012 onwards showed, as a population, high rates of prior psychiatric comorbidity including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and self harm, high rates of trauma, and high representation of same sex attracted young people. The Cass Review, commissioned by NHS England and published in 2024, found that these comorbidities were inadequately assessed under the affirmative pathway and that the evidence base for the interventions provided was weak. A young woman whose empathic response leads her to support affirmative care for a peer in distress is, on this evidence, not necessarily supporting the intervention most likely to help that peer. The compassionate response and the clinically indicated response are not the same thing, and the institutional environment has not been transparent about that distinction.

 

The Safeguarding Asymmetry

There is a further dimension to the self harm connection that the gender affirmative framework has not adequately addressed, and that the young women supporting it have rarely been invited to consider. Clinical and institutional safeguarding practice applies robust protocols to adolescent self harm. A school that becomes aware a pupil is self harming is required to respond with care, professional assessment, parental involvement, and a pathway toward appropriate support. The same framework that governs that response would not permit a practitioner to tattoo a minor, or to facilitate any other permanent irreversible alteration of a young person's body, on the basis of that young person's expressed wish alone.

 

The affirmative pathway, as it operated at its peak, provided or facilitated access to mastectomy, cross sex hormones, and other irreversible interventions for adolescents from a population in which self harm was a common presenting feature, on the basis of assessment processes that the Cass Review found to be inadequate. The logical structure of the safeguarding asymmetry is worth stating plainly. A clinical system that treats superficial self harm as a safeguarding emergency requiring comprehensive professional response, while simultaneously facilitating irreversible surgical alteration of a healthy body in the same population, is not applying its safeguarding principles consistently. The young women who supported their peers through affirmative pathways were not told that this asymmetry existed. They were given instead the reassurance that the clinical pathway their friends were entering was evidence based and appropriately governed. The independent reviews have since established that it was neither.

 

The Misidentification of the Threat

A significant part of the explanation lies in how the threat landscape has been framed for young women. The feminist tradition that this generation has inherited emphasises, correctly, that women face serious risks from male violence, from structural inequality, and from the policing of female bodies and behaviour. What it has been less successful at transmitting is the specific relevance of sex segregated spaces and services to the management of those risks.

 

Young women who have grown up with relatively routine access to mixed sex environments in schools, universities, and workplaces may not have a fully developed intuition for why a domestic violence refuge, a rape crisis centre, a hospital ward, or a prison must be single sex to function as intended. The argument that a male bodied person who identifies as a woman poses no additional risk in those environments feels, to someone who has not examined it carefully, like the compassionate position. The argument that biological sex remains relevant to risk assessment in those contexts feels, within the prevailing framework, like bigotry.

 

This misidentification is compounded by a feature of the adolescent female referral population that has been documented but rarely foregrounded in public discussion. A substantial proportion of the girls presenting at gender clinics were same sex attracted young people whose distress was rooted, at least in part, in the difficulty of developing a lesbian identity in social contexts that still carried residual stigma. The gender affirmative framework offered those young women a reframing of their same sex attraction as a male heterosexual identity, providing community belonging and a coherent explanatory narrative for their distress. The young women in their peer groups who supported that reframing were not wrong to respond to the distress. They were responding, however, to a framing of it that the independent clinical reviews have since found to be inadequately evidenced. The threat they perceived, of a friend in crisis who needed affirmation, was real. The specific response they were encouraged to offer was not the only one available, and may not have been the most helpful.

 

That crisis frequently included self harm. A peer group supporting a friend who is simultaneously self harming, identifying as transgender, and receiving institutional affirmation of both the identity and the clinical pathway associated with it is not well positioned to ask whether those presentations are connected, whether the self harm and the gender distress share a common origin in unaddressed psychological need, or whether the affirmative pathway resolves the underlying distress or redirects it into a medicalised channel. Those are the questions that comprehensive clinical assessment should answer. The Cass Review found that such assessment was routinely not being completed. The peer group, lacking both the professional framework and the institutional permission to ask those questions, could only respond to what was visible: a friend in distress who said she needed affirmation, in a social environment that said affirmation was the only compassionate response.

 

This is a failure of transmission, not of intelligence. The women who built the sex segregated services now under pressure built them in direct response to their experience of male violence and male entitlement. That experiential foundation is not being passed on with the clarity it requires.

 

The Online Environment and Social Contagion

The online environments in which young women's social identities are substantially formed have specific features that amplify this dynamic. Social media platforms reward emotional intensity, in group solidarity, and the public performance of correct values. They punish dissent, boundary questioning, and the expression of positions that the in group has designated as harmful. The young woman who expresses concern about male bodied people in women's changing rooms does not receive a considered rebuttal. She receives social punishment in the form of pile ons, unfollowing, accusations of bigotry, and potential real world consequences including loss of friendships and professional opportunities.

 

Vygotsky's account of cognitive development through social interaction is relevant here. Thinking happens in social contexts and is shaped by the tools and frameworks those contexts provide. A young woman whose social environment provides no legitimate framework for expressing concern about sex based rights, and active punishment for attempting to do so, is not well positioned to develop a considered position on the question. The thoughts that cannot be expressed without social cost tend not to be fully formed.

 

The convergence of self harm and gender identity content in online environments used by adolescent girls is a specific and documented feature of those platforms rather than an incidental overlap. The communities in which gender identity frameworks circulated among adolescent girls were frequently the same communities in which self harm content circulated, and the algorithmic logic of recommendation systems tends to draw users deeper into emotionally intense content regardless of its clinical character. A young woman who enters an online community through distress of any kind may encounter both self harm content and gender identity frameworks as part of the same information environment, presented with equivalent social validation. The research on self harm contagion in online environments applies with equal force to gender identity frameworks spreading through the same channels by the same mechanisms. The Tavistock data documented social clustering as a conspicuous feature of the adolescent female referral population, meaning the simultaneous presentation of multiple young people from the same friendship group, school, or online community. Independent clinical reviews in Sweden and Finland reached similar observations. The online environment was not a background factor in the demographic shift. It was a primary transmission mechanism, and it operated on the same population of adolescent girls whose older sisters and peers now appear in polling data as the strongest supporters of the gender affirmative framework.

 

The Generational Transmission Failure

There is a further dimension that feminist analysis has been slow to examine. The generation of women who built second wave feminism, who understood from direct experience why sex based protections matter and who fought to establish them in law and policy, has not always transmitted that understanding effectively to younger women. In some cases the transmission has been actively impeded by an institutional feminism that adopted the affirmative framework and presented any concern about sex based rights as reactionary.

 

The result is a generational gap in feminist understanding that serves neither generation well. Older women who raise concerns about the erosion of sex based rights are characterised as dinosaurs by younger women who have not been given the tools to understand why those rights were established in the first place. Younger women who express discomfort with aspects of the affirmative model are given no legitimate framework within mainstream feminist culture for developing that discomfort into a coherent position.

 

Erikson's account of identity formation is relevant here. Young women are in the developmental phase in which identity is being constructed in relation to peer groups, institutional frameworks, and the values those frameworks transmit. An identity built around progressive solidarity, including solidarity with transgender claims, is not a cynical performance. It is a genuine developmental achievement within the social context that produced it. The problem is not with the young women. It is with the social context that has failed to provide them with the full picture of what they are being asked to endorse.

 

The clinic referral figures make that failure concrete. A generation of adolescent girls presented at gender services in numbers that no clinical framework had anticipated or prepared for, with a comorbidity profile that included high rates of self harm and that warranted comprehensive psychological assessment, in a context of documented peer and online influence. The institutional response, in many services, was an affirmative pathway that did not require that assessment to be completed before social or medical steps were taken. The older young women who supported their peers through that process, and who now appear in polling data as strong supporters of the gender affirmative framework, were not given the information that would have allowed them to evaluate what they were supporting. They were not told that the clinical pathway their friends were entering had an evidence base that five independent international reviews would subsequently find to be weak. They were not told that the safeguarding protocols governing that pathway were, by the standards applied to other interventions in the same population, inadequate. They were told that affirmation was safe, evidence based, and compassionate, and that questioning it was harmful. On the available evidence, at least the first two of those claims were false.

 

 

What Is Actually at Stake

The rights being eroded are not abstract. Single sex spaces exist because women and girls are at elevated risk of voyeurism, sexual assault, and harassment from male bodied people in contexts of undress or physical vulnerability. Domestic violence refuges are single sex because women fleeing male violence require environments from which male bodied people are excluded as a condition of physical and psychological safety. Rape crisis services are single sex because the trauma of male sexual violence requires a recovery environment defined by the absence of male bodies. Female prisons are single sex because the incarceration of male bodied people among a female prison population creates documented risks of sexual violence.

 

These are not theoretical concerns. They are the documented reasons why these spaces were established. The young woman who supports the erosion of these boundaries in the name of inclusion is not being asked to make a small concession to compassion. She is being asked to dismantle a safeguarding architecture built in direct response to the real world consequences of male violence against women.

 

That she is often unaware of this is not her failure. It is the failure of the institutions, educational frameworks, and cultural transmission mechanisms that should have made it clear. The same institutional failure that produced a generation of young women supportive of the erosion of sex based rights also produced, in the same cohort, the largest wave of adolescent female gender clinic referrals ever recorded, in a population characterised by high rates of self harm and inadequate clinical assessment. The phenomena share a cause, and addressing either requires being honest about all of them.

 

 

Conclusion

Young women's support for transgender identity claims, including claims that undermine sex based rights, is not irrational. It is the predictable product of social learning in an institutional environment that has framed affirmation as compassion and boundary setting as bigotry, transmitted through online cultures that punish dissent, to a demographic with high empathic responsiveness and incomplete access to the history of why sex based protections were established.

 

The demographic data from paediatric gender clinics, and the self harm data from the same population, sit alongside this picture not as separate concerns but as its empirical correlates. The same social environment that shaped the political views of young women shaped the clinical presentations of their younger sisters and peers. The forty fold increase in adolescent female referrals over a single decade, the social clustering patterns, the high rates of self harm and psychiatric comorbidity, the disproportionate representation of same sex attracted young people, the safeguarding asymmetry between the treatment of self harm and the facilitation of irreversible surgery in the same population, and the inadequate assessment documented by five independent international reviews are all features of the same cultural moment that polling captures when it records young women as the strongest supporters of the gender affirmative framework. These young women were responding to real distress in people they loved. They were doing so within an institutional environment that gave them a false account of what that distress consisted of and what the evidence supported as a response to it.

 

Understanding this does not require condescending to young women. It requires taking seriously the social and developmental mechanisms that shape all human belief formation, and asking honestly whether the institutional environment surrounding this generation of young women has given them the information and the conceptual tools they need to form genuinely considered positions on questions that bear directly on their own safety and rights.

 

The answer, on the evidence, is that it has not. Correcting that failure is not a political project. It is an educational one, and it is one that respects young women enough to give them the full picture rather than the approved version of it.

 

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