Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

by Abigail Shrier

author runs the gamut of typical kindergarten gender identity instruction. Who Are You? offers kids a smorgasbord of gender options. (“These are just a few words people use: trans, genderqueer, non-binary, gender fluid, transgender, gender neutral, agender, neutrois, bigender, third gender, two-spirit….”) The way baby boomers once learned to rattle off state capitals, elementary school kids are now taught today’s gender taxonomy often enough to have committed it to memory. And while gender ideologues insist they are merely presenting an objective ontology, it is hard to miss that they seem to hope kids will pick a fun, “gender-creative”21 option for themselves.

know best. Parents must listen to their children, the book insists; but what it really seems to mean is that parents must agree with them.

suddenly identify as trans in adolescence necessarily have gender dysphoria at all. He believes they are likely a mixed bag of at least three groups: (1) some kids who are going to be transgender no matter what therapy they’re given; (2) kids who would naturally have outgrown their dysphoria on their own and proceeded to live as gay adults; and (3) “some contingent of teenage girls who just have borderline personality disorders and who have a kind of faux gender dysphoria, which they have identified as the locus of their unhappiness.”

drawn to “symptom pools”—lists of culturally acceptable ways of manifesting distress that lead to recognized diagnoses.13 “ ‘Patients unconsciously endeavor to produce symptoms that will correspond to the medical diagnostics of the time,’ ” Watters credits Shorter with discovering.14 “Because the patient is unconsciously striving for recognition and legitimization of internal distress, his or her subconscious will be drawn toward those symptoms that will achieve those ends.”15 Many social contagions are spread this way. Hong Kong, for instance, had never experienced an epidemic of what Westerners call “anorexia”—girls, captivated by a belief that they are fat, engaging in self-starving. Not until 1994, that is, when local media widely publicized the story of a girl whose tragic death was interpreted by news outlets as an example of an unfamiliar Western ailment called anorexia nervosa. An outbreak of girls presenting with symptoms soon followed. It wasn’t that no one in Hong Kong had ever thought to starve themselves before 1994; it was simply that only when anorexia became a “culturally agreed-upon expression of internal distress did it become widespread.”

Hearst Corporation, Christine Jorgensen became a household name,

Virtually everything that transgender activists hope to achieve in the broader culture has already been achieved on college campuses. While the broader American culture endures constant flogging, LGBTQ identities enjoy a nonstop parade. The universities revile privilege and facilitate emancipation from it, too. All they ask is a de minimis sacrifice to the intersectional gods. Your birth name is a good start.