Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

by Abigail Shrier

Where were America’s science writers? Hiding under the covers. Sean Scott, a member of the National Association of Science Writers online discussion forum, heard of my book. He mentioned Irreversible Damage on the forum and expressed the hope that it would “shed some overdue light on a very sensitive, politically charged topic that potentially carries lifelong medical consequences.”

Nonetheless, for having mentioned it, he was kicked off the group’s discussion forum. Apparently, those tasked with explaining scientific phenomena to the public now recoil from scientific inquiry. And yet, despite these efforts at censorship, the book succeeded. Parents who had lived through the phenomenon I described read it and gave it to friends.

Parents even started a GoFundMe to put up billboards across the country to promote the book. GoFundMe—which at the time of this writing hosts over thirty thousand fundraisers to enable young women to remove their healthy breasts—shut the parents’ effort down.

Apparently on the complaints of two Twitter users, the book was pulled from Target.com.

A professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, went further, tweeting: “I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre.” But by this point, the book had already garnered grassroots support. I had been interviewed by top podcasters, including Megyn Kelly, Joe Rogan, and Ben Shapiro.

Letters flooded Target.com, demanding that the book be reinstated. Most Americans don’t like being told what they’re not allowed to read. Within twenty-four hours, the book was back at Target.com, having earned a place in the history of cancel culture—America’s fight over what ideas and people should be fired, shamed, shut out, and shut up.

The Economist named Irreversible Damage one of the “Books of the Year” for 2020, calling it “predictably controversial—yet there is not a drop of animosity in the book.”

Britain’s media had found its spine and was already proving itself more willing to host a reasonable discussion on the teen trans craze than the Home of the Brave.

Clinicians began publishing research confirming that they, too, had seen a growing number of teen girls with the atypical gender dysphoria Dr. Lisa Littman described.

The population of detransitioners—those who had medically transitioned, only to regret it and attempt to reverse course—exploded.

Then came Keira Bell. At sixteen, Keira Bell had pursued medical gender transition in Great Britain, starting a course of hormones and eventually having her breasts removed. Soon after she hit her twenties, she regretted her transition. She petitioned Britain’s High Court for a review of the medical protocols she had been ushered through and the hormonal treatments she had been given—protocols and treatments nearly identical to those in the United States.

The court’s opinion was damning. It noted that the defendant clinic had been unable to explain the sudden rise in teenage girls presenting at the clinic for hormones and surgeries. The clinic had admitted that not a single minor teenage girl had been turned away for inability to provide “informed consent.” The High Court noted also that the hormonal treatments came with serious health risks—that side effects might include “loss of fertility” and loss of “sexual function”; that “the evidence base for this treatment is as yet highly uncertain.”

Here, at last, was the first hint that the heavily guarded castle of Affirmative Care might begin to collapse under the weight of so many lies. The Times (of London), The Observer, The Economist—even The Guardian—hailed this as a landmark case. The U.S. legacy media pretended it hadn’t happened. Suddenly, America was no longer interested in borrowing the case law of European courts.

One of the largest suppliers of testosterone to biological females—Planned Parenthood—has already begun opening on-campus medical clinics at public schools across Los Angeles, the second-largest school district in America.

Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all.

America has become fertile ground for this mass enthusiasm for reasons that have everything to do with our cultural frailty: parents are undermined; experts are over–relied upon; dissenters in science and medicine are intimidated; free speech truckles under renewed attack; government healthcare laws harbor hidden consequences; and an intersectional era has arisen in which the desire to escape a dominant identity encourages individuals to take cover in victim groups.

For these girls, trans identification offers freedom from anxiety’s relentless pursuit; it satisfies the deepest need for acceptance, the thrill of transgression, the seductive lilt of belonging.

it’s hard to imagine the isolation of today’s adolescents.

Teens of my era who came of age in the early 1990s set the high watermark in the U.S. for teenage pregnancy.

It’s been plummeting ever since—as have rates of teenage sex—recently reac...

Today’s adolescents spend far less time in person with friends—up to an hour less per day—than did members of Gen X.

They report greater loneliness than any generation on record.

Rates of teenage abortion have plummeted.

In America, Britain, and Canada, teenagers are in the midst of what academic psychologist Jonathan Haidt has called a “mental health crisis”—evincing record levels of anxiety and depression.

Between 2009 and 2017, the number of high schoolers who contemplated suicide increased 25 percent.

The number of teens diagnosed with clinical depression grew 37 percent between 2005 and 2014. And the worst hit—experiencing depression at a rate thr...

Among preteen girls aged ten to fourteen, rates of self-harm are up 189 percent since 2010, nearly triple what they were only six years before.

Twenge wrote for The Atlantic, “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”

The iPhone was released in 2007. By 2018—a decade later—95 percent of teens had access to a smartphone and 45 percent reported being online “almost constantly.”

Posting one’s experiences with any of these afflictions offers the chance to win hundreds—even thousands—of followers.14 Anorexia, cutting, and suicide have all spiked dramatically since the arrival of the smartphone.

Social media personas—that is to say, the “friends” most relevant to today’s teens and with whom they spend the most time—admit no such imperfection. Carefully curated and “facetuned,”16 their photographs set a beauty standard no real girl can meet. And they sit constantly in a girl’s pocket, feeding fears of inadequacy, fueling obsession over her perceived flaws—all the while vastly exaggerating them.

adolescent girls, who historically faced life’s challenges in pairs and groups, are now more likely to face them alone.

By 2015, high school seniors were going out with friends less often than eighth graders did just six years earlier.

Only 71 percent of eligible high school students have a driver’s license—the lowest percentage in decades. But coddling has its costs. Risk-taking provides an indispensable bridge on the bumpy route to adulthood.

“Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable,” she writes.

Many of the adolescent girls who fall for the transgender craze lead upper-middle-class, Gen Z lives. Carefully tended by those for whom “parent” is an active verb, even a life’s work, they are often stellar students. Until the transgender craze strikes, these adolescents are notable for their agreeableness, companionability, and utter lack of rebellion. They’ve never smoked a cigarette; they don’t ever drink. They’ve also never been sexually active. Many have never had a kiss—with boy or girl.

But they are in pain—lots of it. They are anxious and depressed. They are awkward and afraid. Like the infant that learns to avoid the edge of a bed,22 they sense a dangerous chasm lies between the unsteady girls they are and the glamorous women social media tells them they should be. Bridging that gap feels hopeless. The internet never gives them a day—or even an hour—of reprieve.

Only 12 percent of natal females who identify as transgender have undergone or even desire phalloplasty.23 They have no plans to obtain the male appendage that most people would consider a defining feature of manhood. As Sasha Ayad put it to me, “A common response that I get from female clients is something along these lines: ‘I don’t know exactly that I want to be a guy. I just know I don’t want to be a girl.’ ”

After school, Julie would often meet up with Lauren, who introduced her to anime, computer-animated images of anthropomorphized creatures. “I had no idea it was tied into this whole trans culture,” Shirley said to me. Online, Julie began to visit DeviantArt, an art-sharing website with a large transgender following and a lot of gender ideology in its comments section.

Julie found a local dance company that would permit her to train as a male. But she wasn’t strong enough, Shirley told me.

Her mother was frightened that Julie’s apparent fixation was going to hurt her or someone else. She reprimanded her, “It’s not just your body and your career. You’re talking about someone else’s body and their career. You’re going to hurt them.” But by then, Julie was done taking advice from her mothers. She abruptly cut off contact with them. She has hundreds of followers on Instagram; her mothers are blocked from viewing her account.

in the 1990s, no one came out as “trans.” And until the last five years, that is precisely what the statistics for gender dysphoria would have predicted. Somewhere around .01 percent of the population means that you probably didn’t go to high school with anyone who was “trans” either.

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. Long before they may have had any romantic or sexual experience at all. Young women judged insufficiently feminine by their peers are today asked outright, “Are you trans?”

Academic literature supports the idea that it is not uncommon for young children periodically to express the desire to be the opposite sex.

Dave offered her what he considered just good sense: “You might want to try appearing a little less unusual when you go for these jobs,” he said. “If you want to get a job, you should probably tone it down a little bit.”

A week later, Sally sent her parents an email informing them that she considered them “toxic,” did not feel “safe” with them, and would no longer be in touch.

“We paid for her tuition 100 percent the whole way through. We paid for her to get settled in New York City. We paid for her first six months when she had her unpaid internship so she could get her first job. The week before she cut off all contact with us, she borrowed two thousand dollars.” Mary and Dave continued paying for Sally’s cell phone and health insurance long after she wouldn’t return their calls or emails. “We’re toxic, but our money isn’t.”

The average age of menarche among American girls is now twelve, according to Scientific American,27 down from age fourteen a century ago. The average age of breast development is now nine to ten years old.

One day, while she was walking the dog with her parents, Gayatri floated the idea of starting testosterone and getting top surgery. Her parents became alarmed. By then, they had learned that Gayatri’s school had been using her “new name” and pronouns (though never on any documentation sent home) entirely without their knowledge.

“In 2014, when the Pew Research Center asked seventeen-year-olds whether they had ‘ever dated, hooked up with or otherwise had a romantic relationship with another person’—seemingly a broader category than the earlier one—only 46 percent said yes.”