Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

by Abigail Shrier

(Yes, thirteen-year-old girls can undergo “top surgery” in California.

EXCUSE ME

How they feel? But surely a drastic medical intervention like this one would be backed, at least, by a therapist attesting that a young girl really has actual gender dysphoria? We wouldn’t want to give top surgery to a girl who was just, say, having a nervous breakdown.

One prominent microsurgeon at one of the premier hospitals in the country told me that gender surgeries are such moneymakers, his hospital hires doctors to do gender surgeries who, in his opinion, are not qualified for the work.

Ding. Ding. Ding. It's always about the money.

There are varying degrees of dysphoria, but there are not varying degrees of treatment. If somebody has anorexia, the first move is not to put a feeding tube down their throat. But why is it for trans, the first move when somebody has dysphoria is to be like, ‘You need hormones.’ ”

We met to discuss a question that preoccupies us both: whether trans-identified teens are receiving good advice, mental health care, and medical care. Buck’s answer was an immediate “No.”

They think ‘It’s going to fix everything about the way I feel about myself.’… And that’s the dangerous part. It’s not going to fix everything until you fix your brain.”

Buck faults the trans community for not being more skeptical of the sudden epidemic of adolescent girls claiming to be trans. “How can we not question it? How can our own community not question it? That’s the part that I’m a little bit upset about; my own community not saying, Hey, we need to take responsibility for these children.”

Many of these girls—perhaps most of these girls—are not really meant to be “transgender” at all. “You could totally be gay. And now we’re just pushing girls who want to wear boys’ clothes into being trans. You can’t just say because someone dresses like a boy, you’re a boy.”

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.

Amen!

I have nothing but respect for the transgender adults I’ve interviewed. They were among the most sober, thoughtful, and decent people I had come to know in the course of writing this book. But I was concerned about another population, too, one I considered more vulnerable. A population we seem to have abandoned in pursuit of identity politics and progressive bona fides. A group that should, by right, be making us awfully proud, but instead seems to be teetering on the edge of disaster, the brink of despair—teenage girls.