This article about two women who transitioned to male and then back to female again was on the BBC a few months ago.
Detransitioners are probably pretty rare right now - though no one is tracking them. But the number of children being referred to gender clinics has vastly increased - from 77 to 2,590 in a decade. It suggests many children and young people with other conditions are being misdiagnosed and rushed into making irreversible physical changes. In the UK you have to be over 18 for surgery, but even taking testosterone leads to permanently lowed voice and male facial and body hair. Other countries allow minors to get SRS. Also, the increase has mostly been in girls, and especially girls with autism. It’s not an epidemic of teenage boys wanting to chop off their penises, it’s an epidemic of teen girls who feel unhappy with their changing bodies and the role assigned to them by society, wanting to chop off their breasts and become men. Rowling isn’t the only woman who I have seen say she’s afraid she would have been diagnosed transgender if she was a teenager now.
If it was just an epidemic of teenagers wanting to experiment with pronouns and dressing differently, then I wouldn’t have such a problem with it. People shouldn’t feel bound by traditional gender roles. But the current paradigm actually reinforces them. It tells young people like Ahunter3 that they’d be happier if they transitioned. Instead of saying that it’s okay for anyone to have stereotypically masculine or stereotypically feminine interests or a combination, it says if you don’t fit the stereotype you’re ‘really’ the opposite sex, or non-binary. And the treatment is to change your body with hormones and surgery, something the activists have been pushing to make easier to access, and at a younger age.
Maybe I care more because I recently had a baby - a daughter - and what Rowling said about thinking things would be better for her daughters, and being horrified at how misogynistic society has become really resonated with me.