This is a very pugnacious article by Lionel Shriver in 'The Spectator'.
I first stuck my neck out on ‘trans’ nearly a decade ago, when a societal obsession with pretending to change sex was already going great guns. I’d been disturbed by this unhinged cultural preoccupation ever since documentaries about little boys in dresses started to glut our television schedules in 2012. I’m not proud of having kept my own counsel in print for three years thereafter, but this radical fad emerged inexplicably in tandem with the stern message that a single discouraging word would end your career. I delayed writing about the topic because I was cowardly and, regarding my self-interest, smart.
Any culture that squanders its efforts on drug regimes and plastic surgery meant to deceive both patients and the world at large that they are the sex they are not is profoundly decadent, if not debauched. We’ve a shortage of neither men nor women, and pretending to swap them back and forth is a waste of money, medical expertise and social aggravation. Private insurance and NHS coverage of this elective ‘treatment’ is a scandal. If people want to play fleshly dress-up, they should do so on their own dime.
This entire fiasco is based on lies, and a society that embraces bald falsehoods is eating itself hollow. You cannot change sex. ‘Trans women’ aren’t women. There’s no such thing as ‘gender identity’, ‘brain sex’, or being ‘born in the wrong body’. Sex is not ‘assigned’ at birth; it’s observed. Sex is not a feeling but an external, immutable, biological truth. All these mystical notions are medieval, and in institutionalising them across the modern West we’ve made ourselves ridiculous.
Until recently, dysphoria was a rare mental illness, which we’ve now elevated to a prestigious designer label. It’s still a mental illness, but the only one we ‘treat’ by nourishing the delusion – worse, a delusion we compel others, in the UK
https://archive.ph/R0gFU