The transgender community stakes its identity in gender. It has taken identity to the extreme and has sought to claim that, despite biology and despite physical characteristics, “transgender” people are whatever gender they feel like on the inside.

In Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, she tackles the recent phenomenon in teen girls coming out as “trans” and why this is happening in such great numbers. Teen girls have always faced challenges and pressures that come with the transition from child to adult. Shrier writes that in other generations, this same push for control was seen throughout the ages — the 17th-century Salem witch trials, 19th-century female hysteria, and 20th-century anorexia/bulimia and cutting. When girls today declare they are trans, most of them are actually saying what so many teen girls have said in other iterations of this distress over the centuries — that navigating life as a teenager feels uncontrollable and horrible. Coming out as trans gives them a sense of belonging and acceptance that they have not hitherto felt. It gives them a sense of identity and control.

Another explanation — though, arguably, this is exceedingly rare — is that some of these people are too afraid to come out as gay or lesbian. People who tend to fall into this category are those who are also teens. It is illogical reasoning that coming out as trans now makes them heteronormative. I.e., if they are a man but identify as a woman, they can claim heterosexuality in a roundabout way.

The most classic explanation, however, is that for some of these people, transgenderism truly is a mental illness called gender dysphoria. The sufferer has a feeling of being trapped in the wrong body. This is more typically seen in male children.

Shrier, who has interviewed a plethora of trans adults, argues that this community at large wishes to simply fit in and live in peace. She also suggests that most would not fall into the category of activists who are exceedingly heinous in their tactics against their dissenters (see J.K. Rowling).

This is too simple a view because there is no self-limiting moral code when it comes to the championing of the transgender identity.

Case in point: Transgenderism leads to irreversible damage in teens through abuse of hormone treatment and mutilation of their bodies. It leads to parental rights being thrown by the wayside if they show any signs of objection. It leads to the breaking down of families. It leads to disingenuous and perverted sexual deviants getting into private spaces. It leads to deranged activists threatening anyone who doesn’t agree with them. It leads to bad medical and psychological practices, namely, enabling the delusion as opposed to helping treat it via rooting out the actual causes of their distress. In other words, it creates more problems and solves none.

If we define the American identity as freedom within the law, and if we define achievement based on merit, use of a common language, and liberty, then the transgender identity would embody none of these attributes.

Freedom within the law can only be achieved if we agree as a people to base our law on truth. Calling a man a woman (and vice versa) is not the truth. It is a lie that can be disproven with a simple blood test: XY or XX.

As far as achievement based on merit, one could argue that advocating for this mental illness instead of giving sufferers the help that would actually fulfill them has no merit at all. In Irreversible Damage, one pattern that emerges again and again with these young girls who are wanting to transition is that the more they are enabled, the more depressed and anxious they become and the worse their familial relationships get.

The transgender activists insist on convoluting language by blurring the definitions of pronouns and adding new words to the English lexicon. How many of us who disagree with their worldview have heard the words, “Well, you’re just a transphobe,” or, “That’s your cisgender privilege talking”? They have weaponized language to the extent that they want to outlaw so-called “hate speech.” Not only is this a violation of the First Amendment, but it’s like that old adage: If you say a lie enough, it eventually becomes the “truth.”

Could an argument be made that we all simply share a desire for liberty? In an ideal world, by letting people be free to practice what they believe within the bounds of the law, and by affording others the same courtesy in return, perhaps transgenderism would not be such a divisive cultural phenomenon. Unfortunately, this isn’t possible because activists don’t play by the rules. Instead, they delight in forcing people to use preferred pronouns, undermining parental rights, and violating biological women’s private spaces.

Until there is a reassertion of truth and sanity instead of enabling masked as compassion, the fissure of the American identity is only going to broaden.