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Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters Kindle Edition
"Irreversible Damage . . . has caused a storm. Abigail Shrier, a Wall Street Journal writer, does something simple yet devastating: she rigorously lays out the facts." —Janice Turner, The Times of London
Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria—severe discomfort in one’s biological sex—was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively.
But today whole groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as “transgender.” These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans “influencers.”
Unsuspecting parents are awakening to find their daughters in thrall to hip trans YouTube stars and “gender-affirming” educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls—including medically unnecessary double mastectomies and puberty blockers that can cause permanent infertility.
Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, has dug deep into the trans epidemic, talking to the girls, their agonized parents, and the counselors and doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to “detransitioners”—young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves.
Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status, Shrier finds, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back. She offers urgently needed advice about how parents can protect their daughters.
A generation of girls is at risk. Abigail Shrier’s essential book will help you understand what the trans craze is and how you can inoculate your child against it—or how to retrieve her from this dangerous path.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRegnery
- Publication dateJune 30, 2020
- Reading age18 years and up
- File size1924 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—Dennis Prager, nationally syndicated radio talk show host and bestselling author of The Rational Bible
“Writing honestly about a difficult and vital topic, Shrier compassionately analyzes the evidence regarding rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), a phenomenon declared off-limits by many in the media and the scientific establishment. Shrier simply isn’t willing to abandon the future of a child’s mental health to propagandistic political efforts. Shrier has actual courage.”
—Ben Shapiro, editor in chief of The Daily Wire and host of The Ben Shapiro Show
“In Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier provides a thought-provoking examination of a new clinical phenomenon mainly affecting adolescent females—what some have termed rapid-onset gender dysphoria—that has, at lightning speed, swept across North America and parts of Western Europe and Scandinavia. In so doing, Shrier does not shy away from the politics that pervade the field of gender dysphoria. It is a book that will be of great interest to parents, the general public, and mental health clinicians.”
— Kenneth J. Zucker, Ph.D., adolescent and child psychologist and chair of the DSM-5 Work Group on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders
“Thoroughly researched and beautifully written.”
—Ray Blanchard, Ph.D., head of Clinical Sexology Services at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health from 1995–2010
“Abigail Shrier dares to tell the truth about a monstrous ideological fad that has already ruined countless children’s lives. History will look kindly on her courage.”
—Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show
“Abigail Shrier has written a deeply compassionate and utterly sobering account of an unprecedented and reckless social experiment whose test subjects are the bodies and psyches of the most emotionally vulnerable among us.”
—John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine and columnist for the New York Post
“For no other topic have science and conventional wisdom changed—been thrown away—more rapidly than for gender dysphoria. For a small but rapidly growing number of adolescent girls and their families, consequences have been tragic. This urgently needed book is fascinating, wrenching, and wise. Unlike so many of the currently woke, Abigail Shrier sees clearly what is in front of our faces and is brave enough to name it. Irreversible Damage will be a rallying point to reversing the damage being done.”
—J. Michael Bailey, author of The Man Who Would Be Queen and professor of psychology at Northwestern University
“Abigail Shrier has shed light on the profound discontent of an entire generation of women and girls and exposed how transgender extremists have brainwashed not just these young women, but large portions of the country.”
—Bethany Mandel, editor at Ricochet.com, columnist at the Jewish Daily Forward, and homeschooling mother of four
“Every parent needs to read this gripping travelogue through Gender Land, a perilous place where large numbers of teenage girls come to grief despite their loving parents’ efforts to rescue them.”
—Helen Joyce, senior staff writer at The Economist
“Gender transition has become one of the most controversial issues of our time. So much so that most of us simply want to avoid the subject altogether. Such evasion can be just the thing that gives the majority an excuse to look away from the suffering of our fellow human beings. Abigail Shrier chooses to take the bull by the horns. She dives straight into this most sensitive of debates. The product is a work brimming with compassion for a vulnerable subset of our population: teenage girls. It is a work that makes you want to keep reading because it is accessible, lucid and compelling. You find yourself running out of reasons to look away. A must-read for all those who care about the lot of our girls and women.”
—Ayaan Hirsi Ali, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and member of Dutch Parliament from 2003–2006
“Shrier’s timely and wise exploration is simultaneously deeply compassionate and hard-hitting. First carefully laying out many of the physical, psychological, and societal effects of the ‘transgender craze,’ she then points to the inconsistencies within the ideology itself. This book deftly arms the reader with tools for both recognizing and resisting, and will prove important for parents, health care professionals, and policy makers alike.”
—Heather Heying, evolutionary biologist and visiting professor at Princeton University
"If you want to understand why suddenly it seems that (mostly) young girls from (mostly) white middle- or upper-class backgrounds (many of whom are in the same friend groups) have decided to start dressing like boys, cutting their hair short, changing their name to a masculine one, and even taking hormones, using chest compressors, and getting themselves surgically altered, you must read Abigail K. Shrier’s urgent new book, Irreversible Damage."
--Commentary Magazine [review by Naomi Schaefer Riley]
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B07YL6XK55
- Publisher : Regnery (June 30, 2020)
- Publication date : June 30, 2020
- Language : English
- File size : 1924 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 293 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #78,876 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #4 in LGBTQ+ Studies (Kindle Store)
- #5 in Censorship (Kindle Store)
- #36 in LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Abigail Shrier is the New York Times bestselling author of BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up (2024). She received the Barbara Olson Award for Excellence and Independence in Journalism in 2021. Her previous bestseller, IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020), was named a ‘Best Book’ by The Economist and The Times (of London). It has been translated into ten languages.
Shrier holds an A.B. from Columbia College, where she received the Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship; a B.Phil. from the University of Oxford; and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
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To be clear at the start, I support basic human rights for all people, including people who wish to present socially as the stereotypic opposite sex, or even, as adults, alter their bodies as part of that quest. However, it is not a basic human right to force other people to deny material realities. Sex is a material reality, not a social construct. I do not support the anti-science ideology that conflates and confuses sex with personality/gender, claiming human sex (biology) is therefore a “spectrum”, or a “social construct”, or that a person’s sex at conception can later be changed — it cannot.
Personality is a spectrum, or actually a series of spectrums, and hopefully evolves somewhat over a lifetime as we mature. The political left seems to think that supporting the LGBT population requires total capitulation to an irrational ‘genderist’ (sexist) ideology that, like far right religious conservatism, locks sex and personality together. On the right, a girl who likes to play with trucks should squelch that interest and strive to enjoy only properly “feminine” (?) activities like the universe intended. Ridiculous. On the left, a girl who likes to play with trucks should recognize she is a boy and start puberty blockers, then testosterone, then double mastectomy. Ridiculous — a blatant revival of old-fashioned sexism in an even more destructive form. What to do? Make sure she has some trucks to play with. It’s part of her girlhood.
Many on the left either have no idea what is going on, or they are blinded by genderist ideologues who have captured the conversation with BIG MONEY support ultimately coming from the gender clinics, hormone manufacturers, and pornography empires who want all the bodies and eyeballs they can get. On the11thhourblog, you can follow the money powering the insidious marketing campaign. These big dollar interests, disguised as a civil rights movement, have corrupted LGBT organizations, the ACLU, the Dems, the academy, feminism, the liberal media, healthcare professionals and more. This left-leaning LGBT person could not be more pleased with Shrier’s compassionate, factual and balanced book. Someone who actually cares enough about young girls to stick her neck way out there in this era of unreason.
I do not want teenage girls to be misdirected and gaslit about the nature of sex, or forced to compete with boys in sports where male physicality gives an innate advantage, or forced to share female spaces with boys.
So...what a breath of fresh air this book is, exposing the role of social media, money, and the new cultish version of “trans” in making life for some adolescent girls too painful to bear. If you care about your children’s science education and/or sex education, read this book. If you have a daughter, read this book.
7/11/20 Edit:
Schrier ends the book with seven ideas for parents of girls to consider. I would add one more idea into the mix:
8. Learn how destructive relationships and groups can gain control of a person, and teach your children how to recognize the tactics of cults and thought control.
I recommend TERROR, LOVE AND BRAINWASHING by Alexandra Stein. Also consider books by Robert Lifton or Steven Hassan. Finally, read a disturbing 2017 paper written by Jenn Smith, a Canadian trans-identified male: “Synanon, the Brainwashing Game and Modern Transgender Activism: The Orwellian Implications of Transgender Politics.” You can google it.
7/25/20 Edit:
I have just learned about a new organization of healthcare professionals who recognize the problem with the current ‘gender affirmative’ model and have banded together to promote evidence-based gender medicine. These adults are standing up together in a way that makes them more difficult to silence. I am grateful.
SEGM - Society for Evidenced-Based Gender Medicine. “Our aim is to promote safe, compassionate, ethical and evidence-informed healthcare for children, adolescents, and young adults with gender dysphoria.”
12/6/20 Edit:
In the UK on 12/1/20, Keira Bell age 23 won her case against the NHS Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service. The Court determined that adolescents and children under age 16 are NOT capable of giving consent to life-altering medical and surgical interventions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to address gender dysphoria. Further, at ages 16-17 physicians should consider obtaining a court order for such treatment. This is a major win in the fight against the rampant medical transing of children. You can read the judgment for yourself by searching Bell-v-Tavistock.
12/21/20 Edit:
Within the last couple of days Amazon has deleted all the comments made in response to reviews. About 23 comments were made in response to my review. That dialogue was genuine and beneficial. I am sorry to see it has been removed from view.
Puberty is hard on girls. (I know; I understand.) Adding to the stress of your changing body is the cruelty and criticism girls inflict upon themselves and others. They are in genuine pain. As Shrier points out this transgender movement in young girls is a new social contagion. We know it is a social contagion because it is so statistically new and overwhelmingly high in numbers. Often this is concentrated among a group of peers or around a specific community or school system. Girls are learning about this through school programs, but especially through social media influencers. We all know that social media can make everyone anxious and sad, however, it affects adolescent girls are the hardest. "Adolescent girls, who historically faced life’s challenges in pairs and groups, are now more likely to face them alone." These are girls who are isolated from other people and turn overwhelmingly to social media for their support and information. This gives them a community, acceptance, and the opportunity to escape into a victim identity, which gives them support immediately. Being transgender is one of the few you can choose.
When talking to a counselor or therapist, the young girls often are encourage to quickly start puberty blockers, or testosterone, and look toward top surgery (double mastectomy), all of which inflict irreversible damage on their bodies. It seems appropriate (to me) to have a requirement that young people wait until their brains mature before being encouraged to make such life changing decisions. "The prefrontal cortex, believed to hold the seat of self-regulation, typically does not complete development until age 25." Certainly you can live as a man and later, after age 25-28 once your brain has reached maturity, you can look into hormones or surgery. Shrier makes a good point that this transgender craze may partially be the result of over-parented kids desperate to stake out territory for rebellion.
According to Dr. Zucker, the mere fact that patients may have fixated on gender as a source of their problems does not mean that that they are right or that transitioning will alleviate their distress. "I said to this kid, ‘I don’t care if you have a male brain or a female brain. This is how you’re feeling currently and we need to figure out why you’re feeling this way and what is the best way to help you lose this dysphoria.’ " It is worth asking whether a standard guided less by biology than by political correctness is in the best interest of patients. Allow their brains to mature, pass the age of rebellion, before making life changing decisions that will affect their health. "Teens and tweens today are everywhere pressed to locate themselves on a gender spectrum and within a sexuality taxonomy - long before they have finished the sexual development that would otherwise guide discovery of who they are or what they desire."
Shrier talked to trans people, parents, influencers, doctors, academics, and professionals on both sides of the issue in this informative, well written and presented examination of this current trend. This is not a transphobic book, unless information is something to be feared. She ended the book with seven rules that were wonderful for reasons beyond the topic at hand: 1. Don’t Get Your Kid a Smartphone 2. Don’t Relinquish Your Authority as the Parent 3. Don’t Support Gender Ideology in Your Child’s Education 4. Reintroduce Privacy into the Home - Quit the habit of sharing every part of your lives (and theirs) on the internet. 5. Consider Big Steps to Separate Your Daughter from Harm 6. Stop Pathologizing Girlhood 7. Don’t be Afraid to Admit: It’s Wonderful to Be a Girl.
I totally agree with this closing remark from Shrier because it seems that being female has lost favor with the broader culture and there is a war against it: "But for Pete’s sake, whatever type of women young girls become, they should all listen to feminists of a prior era and stop taking sex stereotypes seriously. A young woman can be an astronaut or a nurse; a girl can play with trucks or with dolls. And she may find herself attracted to men or to other women. None of that makes her any less of a girl or any less suited to womanhood."
Top reviews from other countries
I'm 55, with a 19 and a 22 year old. Either one of my kids could easily have fallen prey to this seductive movement and entered into a lifetime of medicalization. At 12, my youngest "came out" to me as lesbian, and I simply told her she can form romantic attachments to whoever she likes, but I wasn't willing to label her at that point. She didn't like my firmness, but now she looks back on that phase with embarrassment, as a moment when she felt left out, wanted to be special, belong, and be celebrated... the queer kids were getting stuff she wasn't getting, so she joined the LGBTQ club at school. Now she is exclusively heterosexual, it seems. By the grace of whatever, she didn't get hooked into trans back in 2016. But I wouldn't consider any of these kids to be "out of the woods" until they're at least 28. and In my limited circle of friends and acquaintances I know:
• A dear friend of mine, 57-year-old progressive father of a 21-year-old daughter who he says was likely drawn into the trans idea when she developed breasts and attracted unwanted attention from males. He thinks she was likely lesbian. His wife immediately affirmed the girl coming out as trans, and the name and pronoun changes. She is now is on testosterone and has had a double mastectomy. My friend felt that he had to affirm this, or be estranged from the family. He talks about the intense loneliness of being skeptical. I wish he'd had this book four or five years ago.
• My 19-year-old daughter's best friend, born female. The two girls met at the start of the grade 12 year of high school, and the relationship has been rocky because of this girl's mental health issues. The girl obsessively pursued my daughter romantically as a 17-year-old, and at that time, was presenting as a female. She had a meltdown over my daughter's insistence that they be platonic friends, and they were estranged for over a year. Now this girl is back in my daughter's life, with a double mastectomy, lower voice, and a beard. She just happily told me about her surgery, and how grateful she was that her wait time had been shortened because of a cancellation in the schedule. I see nothing but carnage.
• A 22-year-old young woman who began "transitioning" to male in high school, she came from a very troubled family situation, and appeared at my dinner table as an additional guest when I invited my dear friend and her son. She had changed her name to a boy's name, her voice was artificially low, and my dear friend, who has followed the girl on instagram, recently showed me photos of her proudly displaying her mastectomy scars, and then subsequent photos showing she was back to wearing fancy dresses and letting her hair grow longer. My friend assumes she is detransitioning.
• A friend of mine whose 16-year-old daughter with autism wanted to have her breasts removed. This woman was distraught that the medical system would perform the surgery on a teenager, even without Mom's consent. This was several years ago, and I saw the girl last year, talking about her creative work, dressed to accentuate her female figure, and I thought she had disisted. I just found out that at age 24, a few months ago, the girl decided to have a double mastectomy after all.
• My dear friend's son, who I watched grow up, was always a very impulsive, physical, aggressive boy. In his teen years, his father left the country, and he descended into addiction. A talented musician, he was the lead in the high school band. He treated his mother very badly, was volatile and violent, and said awful misogynistic things to my daughter, who looked up to him as a brother figure. Then, suddenly, he came out as a trans woman. The counsellor my friend brought him to immediately affirmed him, and told her, in his presence, "What would you prefer, a dead son or a live daughter?" He was combative about his pronouns and chosen name, and an arrangement was made for him to move in with his father in a country where the health authorities have suddenly done a 180º on medicalizing people who claim a trans identity. When his estrogen ran out, he would have had to jump through many hoops to access more of it, and apparently, couldn't be bothered, so has ceased. My friend has no contact with her son, and when her brother died, the boy made no contact to offer condolences, and did not attend the funeral.
• A female friend has twin daughters, one of whom insisted she was a boy from about age 3 or 4. This would be over a decade ago. Mom decided to affirm the child with her chosen male name and pronouns, dad was reluctant but got on board. There was a complete social transition by kindergarten at school, etc. I don't know for certain, but I assume there was full medicalization that began at puberty. Certainly this child currently presents as male, and I can't imagine they didn't receive the "life-saving, gender-affirming" hormones and surgery treatment.
I don't think I know a single family in my peer group that isn't dealing with some kind of profound mental health issue with one or more of their kids, and the transgender dysphoria is more common now that the nut allergies that transformed school lunch policies 15 years ago. I'm the child of two PhD biologists, and I chafe at the notion that we should talk about "pregnant people" and define lesbians as "non-male." There is a biological reality that no superficial chemical or surgical treatments can change. My own daughter is caught up in this tangentially, as a friend to girls who insist they are boys, and also because her rights as a woman are being eroded by trans activists who have hijacked the federal protections in place and marginalized biological females who deserve remedies in cases of discrimination on the basis of sex.
This book highlights the capture of once-trustworthy medical institutions like the Endocrine Society, where ideology now trumps biology, and activism thwarts scientific research. It's quite a scandal, and the irreversible damage being done to young people is not rare. It's happening over and over again in my own social circle. I'm not willing to keep quiet about it.