How Gender Ideology Conquered the West: From a Berlin Clinic to Your Child's Classroom

The idea that a man can become a woman by believing it did not fall from the sky. It was built — brick by brick, decade by decade — by academics, activists, institutions, and corporations over the course of a century.

If you want to understand why a police force in Canada used the word “gunperson” while families were identifying their dead children, you need to understand the intellectual pipeline that made that word seem reasonable to the people who chose it.

This is that pipeline.

It Started in Berlin

In 1919, a German physician named Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft — the Institute for Sexual Science — in Berlin. It was the first institution in the world to treat what we now call transgender patients medically, including some of the earliest known surgical interventions.

Hirschfeld coined the term “transvestite” in 1910 and spent his career arguing that sex and gender existed on a continuum rather than in fixed categories. His Institute conducted 18,000 consultations in its first year alone.

In 1933, the Nazis raided the Institute, burned over 20,000 of its books, and destroyed its archives. Those iconic images of Nazi book burnings that appear in every World War II documentary? Many of them are Hirschfeld’s books. He died in exile two years later.

The Institute was gone. The ideas survived.

The Man Who Invented “Gender”

In 1955, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University named John Money became the first person to use the word “gender” as something distinct from biological sex. He argued that gender was a societal construct — malleable, shapeable, and entirely separate from the body you were born in.

He called it “gender neutrality at birth.” His theory: raise any child as either sex before age two and a half, and the child would accept the assigned identity.

He got a chance to prove it.

In 1966, an infant boy in Winnipeg named Bruce Reimer suffered irreparable damage to his penis during a botched circumcision. Money advised the parents to raise Bruce as a girl. The child was castrated, given rudimentary female genitalia, and renamed Brenda.

Money reported the case as a resounding success. For decades, it appeared in psychology textbooks as proof that gender was socially constructed. The “John/Joan case” became a landmark.

There was one problem. It was a lie.

“Brenda” Reimer rejected the female identity from the start. He experienced severe distress, relentless bullying, and psychological torment. At thirteen, he was finally told the truth. He immediately began living as male and took the name David.

In 2002, David’s twin brother Brian died of a drug overdose. In 2004, David Reimer died by suicide. He was thirty-eight.

The case that was supposed to prove gender is a social construct proved the opposite — that biological sex has a powerful, perhaps determinative, grip on identity. But by then, Money’s theoretical framework had already escaped the lab. The idea that gender and sex are separate things had become the foundation of an entire academic discipline.

From the Academy to Your Bookshelf

In the 1970s, Women’s Studies programs began appearing in universities across the West. By the 1980s, they were mainstream. By the 1990s, they were being renamed — “Gender Studies” — reflecting a shift from studying women to studying the concept of gender itself.

In 1990, a philosopher at UC Berkeley named Judith Butler published Gender Trouble. The book made a radical claim: gender isn’t something you are. It’s something you do. Gender is “performative” — a kind of ongoing theatrical production created through repeated speech and behavior. Even biological sex, Butler argued, was only meaningful through the lens of socially constructed gender categories.

Gender Trouble became the most influential book in the history of gender studies. It is the intellectual foundation of queer theory. And it provided the philosophical architecture for the claim that now dominates Western institutions: that your internal sense of your gender overrides the reality of your body.

The pipeline from Butler’s book to your child’s classroom took about twenty-five years.

The Diagnostic Shell Game

Ideas become institutions when they get official classifications.

In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association added “Gender Identity Disorder” to the DSM-III — classifying it as a mental disorder. In 2013, the DSM-5 renamed it “Gender Dysphoria” and moved it out of the sexual disorders category. The stated reason: the old term was stigmatizing.

In 2019, the World Health Organization went further. The ICD-11 reclassified gender identity issues as “Gender Incongruence” and moved it out of the mental health chapter entirely. The WHO explicitly stated it is “not a mental disorder.”

In forty years, the official classification went from mental illness to a non-pathological variation of human experience. Whether this reflects advancing science or advancing politics depends on who you ask.

The Corporate Takeover

By the 2010s, gender ideology had left the academy and entered the boardroom.

The Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index became a benchmark for Fortune 500 companies. To score well, companies needed transgender-inclusive health benefits, pronoun policies, and non-discrimination protections. ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) metrics gave institutional investors another lever.

After George Floyd’s death in 2020, DEI programs surged — largely propelled by Black Lives Matter and the ideological intersection of queer identity, racial grievance, and Marxist critical theory. Over 50% of S&P 1500 companies incorporated at least one ESG metric into executive incentive programs. Gender identity became a corporate performance indicator.

By 2023, the backlash had begun. Major corporations started scaling back DEI language. Only twelve Fortune 500 companies reported LGBTQ+ workforce composition data. The corporate rollback continues — but the infrastructure remains in place.

When Hollywood Decided

In 2014, TIME Magazine declared the “transgender tipping point.” Laverne Cox appeared on the cover — the first openly transgender person to do so.

In 2015, Caitlyn Jenner came out in a Diane Sawyer interview watched by 16.9 million people. Her reality show premiered two months later.

Between 2014 and 2020, transgender characters appeared across streaming platforms: Transparent, Pose, Disclosure. Research found that viewing multiple transgender TV characters improved viewers’ attitudes toward transgender policy positions.

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is how cultural normalization works. Ideas move from the academy to entertainment to policy to your child’s perception of reality.

Your Child’s Classroom

The part most parents don’t know — and need to.

In 1990, Kevin Jennings founded GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network). Originally focused on anti-bullying, the organization expanded into gender identity curriculum for K-12 schools.

In 2011, California became the first state to require LGBTQ-inclusive content in social studies curricula. By 2024, six more states had followed: Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington. GLSEN’s resources now include elementary-level programs like “I Am Me: Talking About Identity” and pronoun education lessons teaching children that “pronouns are connected to people’s gender identity, and that everyone gets to choose which pronouns work for them.”

Meanwhile, eight states passed laws prohibiting instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina. In January 2025, President Trump issued an executive order prohibiting federal funding for K-12 instruction on “gender or equity ideology.”

The curriculum battle is the front line. And most parents are still finding out it happened.

The Social Contagion Question

In 2018, Dr. Lisa Littman published a study proposing something called “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” — a pattern of adolescents, primarily girls, suddenly identifying as transgender after heavy social media use and peer group influence. She described it as resembling social contagion.

The backlash was immediate. Brown University distanced itself from the study. PLOS ONE issued a correction. Sixty-one health organizations signed a letter saying ROGD is “not a recognized medical diagnosis.”

But the numbers kept climbing. Self-identification as transgender among 18-to-24-year-olds increased fivefold between 2014 and 2022 — from 0.6% to 2.8%. Among 13-to-17-year-olds, it more than doubled — from 1.4% to 3.3%. Gen Z adults identifying as LGBTQ+ hit 22.7% by 2024.

In 2020, journalist Abigail Shrier published Irreversible Damage, documenting what she called a “transgender craze seducing our daughters” — adolescent girls with no prior history of gender dysphoria who suddenly identified as transgender after exposure to social media content and peer groups. The book became a bestseller and was banned from several platforms.

The establishment says there’s no social contagion. The numbers say something changed.

The Tide Is Turning

Here’s what the media doesn’t tell you: Europe is reversing course.

Finland (2020): Revised its guidelines to prioritize psychological support over medical intervention for youth.

Sweden (2021-2022): Karolinska Hospital — Sweden’s largest — stopped prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors outside clinical studies. The national health board stated “the risks are likely to outweigh the expected benefits.”

Denmark (2023): Shifted to counseling-first treatment. Only 6% of referred youth received hormonal interventions.

United Kingdom (2024): The Cass Review — a landmark independent investigation commissioned by NHS England — found that the evidence base for puberty blockers and hormones in youth is “weak.” The Tavistock clinic, which had seen referrals explode from 77 in 2009 to over 2,700 by 2019, was shut down. Parliament banned puberty blockers for minors. By 2025, NHS England confirmed it had issued zero new hormone prescriptions to minors in the year since the Cass Report.

The same countries that pioneered medical gender transition for children are now pulling back. The evidence they were promised never materialized. The children they experimented on are starting to speak.

The Detransitioners

They are the people the movement doesn’t want you to hear from.

Detransition rates vary by study — from 1.87% to 13.1%, depending on definitions, methodology, and time frames. But the movement is growing. Organizations like Genspect, Beyond Trans, Post Trans, and Detrans Voices now provide support networks, legal resources, and public advocacy.

In March 2025, the first-ever Detrans Awareness Day was held on Capitol Hill, where detransitioners testified before lawmakers about medical interventions they now regret — interventions they received as teenagers, often after minimal psychological evaluation, under the “informed consent” model that organizations like Planned Parenthood adopted.

Planned Parenthood went from 32 clinics offering transgender hormones in 2016 to most of its nearly 600 centers today. Their “gender-affirming care” increased by 49% in a single reporting period. Many locations operate on an informed consent model — no gatekeeping psychological evaluation required.

These detransitioners are not abstractions. They are young women who had healthy breast tissue removed. They are young men who were chemically castrated. They were children when the adults in charge told them that the solution to their pain was a needle, a scalpel, and a new name.

Where We Are Now

The pipeline is complete. An idea born in a Berlin clinic in 1919, given theoretical language by a Johns Hopkins psychologist in 1955, turned into a philosophical system by a Berkeley philosopher in 1990, normalized by Hollywood in 2014, embedded in corporate policy by 2020, and delivered into elementary school classrooms by curriculum providers funded by advocacy organizations.

And it has produced a generation of confused children, a medical establishment that is only now beginning to reckon with what it has done, and a culture that cannot say the word “man” in a police report.

The question for Christians is not whether this matters. It is what we do about it.

The answer starts with understanding how we got here. Now you do.

This article is a companion to “Tumbler Ridge: Where Is God When Children Die?” and “Male and Female He Created Them: What the Bible Says About Gender — And What Parents Need to Know”.

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This article is part of the Savage Mercies gender ideology series. Related reading: