In her book Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier explores the phenomenon of teenage girls trying to become boys by changing their clothes and names, as well as pursuing surgical and hormonal interventions. Naomi Schaefer Riley writes in her review:

Historically, gender dysphoria—“characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s own biological sex”—begins in early childhood. It affected a tiny sliver of the population and was almost exclusively found in boys. Around ten years ago, all that changed. Now the number of cases has skyrocketed, the sufferers are overwhelmingly girls, and none of it is happening until adolescence. They’re generally from white families with higher incomes. And there are “clusters of adolescents in a single grade, suddenly discovering transgender identities together.”

Ordinarily, we don’t go to doctors explaining that we think we have pancreatic cancer and just expect them to treat it. We go to doctors with symptoms and expect them to run tests and find the source of our pain. When anorexics tell us they are too fat, we don’t expect medical professionals to agree and help them search for a Weight Watchers meeting. But when it comes to gender dysphoria, therapists are supposed to adhere to the “affirmative-care standard,” which basically means telling a patient his or diagnosis is correct and then figuring out how to “treat” it.

It is not just the demand for self-mutilation that should tip us off to the cultish nature of this movement. . . . Take the way that the transgender activists treat apostates, for instance. If someone decides to “de-transition”—that is, she starts to believe that her biological sex was the right one after all—she is shunned, harassed, and threatened online. And current believers are warned not to have anything to do with her.

How bizarre it is that, after decades of giving girls the message that girls can do whatever they want and be whomever they want, what they have decided is that they don’t want to be girls.

As the negotiations leading up to the 2015 nuclear deal began in earnest, Tehran launched a major effort to cultivate support abroad for its positions, according to a report by Jay Solomon:

In the spring of 2014, senior Iranian Foreign Ministry officials initiated a quiet effort to bolster Tehran’s image and positions on global security issues—particularly its nuclear program—by building ties with a network of influential overseas academics and researchers. They called it the Iran Experts Initiative. The scope and scale of the IEI project has emerged in a large cache of Iranian government correspondence and emails.

The officials, working under the moderate President Hassan Rouhani, congratulated themselves on the impact of the initiative: at least three of the people on the Foreign Ministry’s list were, or became, top aides to Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s special envoy on Iran, who was placed on leave this June following the suspension of his security clearance.

In March of that year, writes Solomon, one of these officials reported that “he had gained support for the IEI from two young academics—Ariane Tabatabai and Dina Esfandiary—following a meeting with them in Prague.” And here the story becomes particularly worrisome:

Tabatabai currently serves in the Pentagon as the chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, a position that requires a U.S. government security clearance. She previously served as a diplomat on Malley’s Iran nuclear negotiating team after the Biden administration took office in 2021. Esfandiary is a senior advisor on the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, a think tank that Malley headed from 2018 to 2021.

Tabatabai . . . on at least two occasions checked in with Iran’s Foreign Ministry before attending policy events, according to the emails. She wrote to Mostafa Zahrani, [an Iranian scholar in close contact with the Foreign Ministry and involved in the IEI], in Farsi on June 27, 2014, to say she’d met Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal—a former ambassador to the U.S.—who expressed interest in working together and invited her to Saudi Arabia. She also said she’d been invited to attend a workshop on Iran’s nuclear program at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. . . .

Elissa Jobson, Crisis Group’s chief of advocacy, said the IEI was an “informal platform” that gave researchers from different organizations an opportunity to meet with IPIS and Iranian officials, and that it was supported financially by European institutions and one European government. She declined to name them.