Irreversible Damage

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
By: Abigail Shrier

There is a lot of controversy surrounding this book. You don’t find 51% 5-star ratings and 18% 1-star ratings (on Goodreads at the time of this review) on books unless it’s a highly polarized audience.

So I decided to read it for myself.

Before we go any further let me tell you what this book is NOT.

- It is NOT religiously motivated. This is not a Christian book. (Abigail Shrier is maybe Jewish?) There are no religiously motivated persuasions within. Shrier’s points and arguments are all based on interviews, psychological studies, and scientific data. I don’t believe there is a single Bible verse or mention of God. (And many of the doctors and people she interviews are not conservative politically, many never voted Republican)

- It is NOT anti-trans. Shrier says, “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.” She makes note of many trans adults who live happy adjusted lives and is not questioning the trans lifestyle in general. This book is targeted at the adolescent population and the rest of my review will explain why.

- It is NOT hateful. You may disagree with this, but it’s probably because we’re working with different definitions of the word ‘hate.’ I believe people can have intelligent discourse and disagree with each other without being hateful. I believe someone can publish a researched book with voices from all POVs to lay a case for their arguments without being hateful. She is respectful in her writing and does not resort to name-calling or degradation of any kind. This book was not a product of malice but a product of love for a vulnerable population that is being misled by the masses.

Why was this book written? Because this:

“Gender dysphoria—formerly known as “gender identity disorder”—is characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex. It typically begins in early childhood—ages two to four—though it may grow more severe in adolescence. But in most cases—nearly 70 percent—childhood gender dysphoria resolves. Historically, it afflicted a tiny sliver of the population (roughly .01 percent) and almost exclusively boys... Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages 11-21 ever having developed gender dysphoria at all.”

What we see now is a spike in trans-identifying adolescents and the majority of them are natal females. You do not see surges like this unless something else is a major and contributing factor. Many medical professionals decided it was worth investigating.

Buck Angel, a well-known trans man, even says, “How can we not question it? How can our own community not question it? That’s the part that I’m a little upset about; my own community not saying ‘Hey. We need to take responsibility for these children.’”

Abigail Shrier, writer for the Wall Street Journal, conducted hundreds of interviews with people of all sides of this issue, watched hours and hours of YouTube and social media footage, scoured many psychological and scientific studies, read pages and pages of research, and identified several contributing factors to what could be labeled a “transgender craze” in adolescent females (not unlike anorexia or bulimia spikes in previous decades). If you had the time, I am pretty sure almost everything she includes is completely verifiable if you find the stats unbelievable or the context lacking. For my part, I found everything to seem very credible and the few things I looked up rang true.

Her findings are separated into chapters titled: The Puzzle (what the data shows), The Influencers (social media and peer pressure), The Schools (indoctrination), The Moms and Dads, The Shrinks (requirement of affirmation therapy), The Dissidents (those cancelled for speaking out), The Promoted and Demoted (lesbians and women in general are the losers), The Transformation (the science of T and gender surgeries—a bit graphic), The Regret (stories from de-transitioners), The Way Back. (Note: Parenthetical additions my own)

I would also add that I do not agree with everything Abigail Shrier writes or supports in her book. However, I will not include any of that in this particular review because I believe it will detract from the gravity of what she uncovers in this book.

I started to write out all of the things I deemed worthy of your attention in the book and became overwhelmed at the task of paring it down. There is just too much to impart to you in a short review.

The things you will read are not what we're hearing in the media. But is it possible that there's more to the transgender movement than we're told? Wise people will consider all the information before shutting this down.

I found this book to be intelligent, enlightening, respectful but blunt, courageous, and absolutely imperative to be part of the conversation. I am thankful for the dogged work Abigail Shrier did to put this together.

Here’s a bulleted, non-exhaustive, list of some things I found significant. It’s a far less organized, coherent, and fleshed out version of what Shrier expounds upon in her book.

- Children and young adults who are claiming to be trans are seeing medical professionals but are self-diagnosing and self-prescribing treatment based on their own subjective feelings. Medical professionals must agree with their patients or risk losing their license. This is not done with any other reason you see medical professionals. And these self-diagnoses are permanent and irreversible bodily changes- testosterone courses and gender surgeries.

- Schools are passing policies that allow children as young as 12 years old to leave school and obtain cross-sex hormones from a doctor without parental consent or knowledge. Schools are also teaching kids as young as kindergarten a full gender spectrum vocabulary and having them imagine what it’s like to be the other gender, all in the name of anti-bullying training. Schools are also allowing children to claim a new name and pronouns, and then using those names and pronouns and concealing it from the parents.

- YouTube and social media influencers are coaching kids (who so desperately want to try testosterone) how to alter their stories and align their ‘symptoms’ to match up with the DSM criteria for gender dysphoria. They instruct kids to say that if they don’t get what they want that they’ll commit suicide. They encourage girls to try chest binders and tell them how to get them without their parents knowing. They chronicle their ‘AMAZING’ gender transformations as glamorous events but give no information on the medical dangers and the adverse side effects of all of these steps. Many of which are irreversible. And if gender is fluid like they claim, and they could change to a different point on the gender spectrum later in life, irreversible transformations seem pretty significant.

- The idea of a ‘boy brain’ in a girl body evidenced in different interests and abilities is taking away from what it means to be a woman. Schools are rewriting history to explain characters like Joan of Arc and Catherine the Great, that because they took on masculine roles and broke barriers they aren’t ‘as female’ as we thought they were—aka the more a woman breaks barriers and accomplishes extraordinary things, or the more ‘amazing’ she is, the less of a woman she is. Female athletic achievements are being hijacked by natal men. It actually reinforces gender stereotypes instead of allowing a woman to be “equal” to a man. Girls can like trucks and the color blue and short hair and math and science, and not like makeup and dresses and still be a girl. Females can be a diverse group of individuals. But now they are being told- no, that means you’re actually a boy.

And because it’s just easier for you to read it for yourself—a crap ton of quotes from the people who know more than me:

“But what is gender identity? It has no diagnostic markers, no measurable signs no blood test to confirm it. It is a feeling— an attitude, that does not mean that it does not exist. But it does mean that, like many psychiatric ailments, it poses challenges to diagnosis and treatment. When the prospective treatment is an irreversible surgery, the slippery nature of the condition would seem to justify measured and careful evaluation.”

“Adolescent gender dysphoria has surged across the West. In the United States the prevalence has increased over 1000 percent...In Britain, the increase is 4000 percent, and three quarters of those referred for gender treatment are girls...In 2016, natal females accounted for 46 percent of all sex reassignment surgeries in the US. A year later, it was 70 percent.”

“There is nothing particularly outlandish in feeling discomfort in one’s own body or in suspecting that one might feel better in another. There are so many things about our physical forms that cause us distress and regret. We lug around bodies we would never have chosen...For those with gender dysphoria, this unpleasantness must be excruciating, and we should expect mental health professionals to be respectful of it, sympathetic to those who bear it, and understanding of their pain...But the new “affirmative care” standard is a different matter entirely. It surpasses sympathy and leaps straight to demanding that mental health professionals adopt their patients’ beliefs of being the “wrong body.” Affirmative therapy compels therapists to endorse a falsehood: not that a teenage girl feels more comfortable presenting as a boy—but that she actually is a boy.”

“Turns out, adolescents really care what their friends think—quite a lot in fact— and this distorts all kinds of choices they make. Teenagers take more risks than any other age group. They may even be neurologically inclined toward risk, especially where peer approval is on the line. It isn’t just that teenagers do dumb things. It’s that, when faced with their peers, they almost can’t help themselves. The prefrontal cortex, believed to hold the seat of self-regulation, typically does not complete development until age twenty-five.”

“Lisa Marchiano says, genuine therapy pushes patients to question their own self-assessments. ‘If I work with someone who’s really suicidal because his wife left him. I don’t call the wife up and say: ‘Hey, you just have to come back!’ That’s not the way we treat suicide. We don’t treat suicide by giving people exactly what they want. We treat suicide first of all by keeping people safe, and by helping them to become more resilient.’ We ought to treat gender dysphoria that way, too.”

“Each of the desisters and detransitioners I talked to reported being 100 percent certain that they were definitely trans—until, suddenly, they weren’t. Nearly all of them blame the adults in their lives, especially the medical professionals, for encouraging and facilitating their transitions.”

“In a recent academic study, Kenneth Zucker found that the mental health outcomes for adolescents with gender dysphoria were very similar to those with the same mental health issues who did not have gender dysphoria. In other words, we have no proof that the gender dysphoria was responsible for the suicidal ideation or tendency to self-harm. It may have been the many other mental health problems that gender dysphoric adolescents so often bear.”

“’When you’ve stopped puberty with puberty blockers and go straight to cross-sex hormones, you absolutely guarantee that you will be infertile.’ When the gender clinicians pushed Katherine to start her preteen child on hormone blockers, they were proposing that she put Maddie on a path toward infertility… Katherine could not understand how psychologists would encourage this, how doctors would allow it, or why medical professional standards would permit parents to consent to eliminating such a vital human capacity on behalf of their minor children. And yet, right in front of her, schools were encouraging it, parents were going along with it, the media was celebrating it, and everyone was acting as if this were perfectly kosher… What’s more, even if her daughter did not start puberty blockers and instead waited puberty out and then began cross-sex hormones (testosterone), this carried all sorts of risks of its own. Endometrial and ovarian cancer. Hysterectomy.”

“A leaked 2019 report from the Tavistock and Portman Trust gender clinic in the UK, which showed the rates of self-harm and suicidality did not decrease even after puberty suppression for adolescent natal girls. The report was so damning that a governor of the clinic, Dr. Marcus Evans resigned. He told the press that he feared the clinic was fast-tracking youths to transition to no good effect and in some cases to their harm.”

"If the last decade has witnessed a rise to prominence for transgender Americans, it has also seen the demotion of women and girls. Biological boys identifying as girls are already overpowering the very best high school girl athletes across the country. Female runners, swimmers, and weightlifters are being routed by trans-identified biological boys, many of whom were only middling athletes on the boys’ team. Those who object to the unfairness are either dismissed or accused of bigotry."

"In February 2019, tennis great and proud lesbian Martina Navratilova wrote for the Sunday Times that allowing trans athletes to compete in women’s sports was unfair to biological women. She was labeled a transphobe and dropped by her sponsor Athlete Ally."

"Once used in chemical castration of sex offenders, Lupron is the go-to puberty blocker, FDA-approved to halt precocious puberty. What the FDA has not approved is using Lupron to halt normal puberty in anyone—transgender-identified or otherwise. In general, doctors don’t like to interrupt healthy endocrine signaling based on the say-so of minors, and gender dysphoria has no observable diagnostic criteria. There are as yet no reliable studies that show Lupron is safe for these kids. All available studies note the “low quality” of evidence, or contains similar caveats."

"This is the circular logic that pervades trans ideology: if you desist, you were never trans to begin with. Thus, no real transgender people ever desist. It’s an unfalsifiable proposition."

(Benji was trans from 13-19 but not anymore) "When she complained online about her parents, queer adults often coached her on running away from her family. At the time, she believed that these adults—not her parents—had her best interest in mind, and that they were generally helping her to escape mentally and physically from a tumultuous home. But she no longer sees it that way. They were “weaponizing it against me to kind of draw me into their community more, and draw me away from anyone who would give me rational ways of thinking about my life.”

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