Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

by Abigail Shrier

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.”