Irreversible Damage

The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

Abigail Shrier, a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, has written a serious and thorough book examining the peer contagion of girls deciding they are “transgender”. Under the influence of friends and social-media influencers, entire groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as “transgender” at alarming rates, defying all medical statistics. Girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans “influencers”—and rushed to undergo a faddish form of self-harm: irreversible gender treatment and surgery.

First impressions are that this is a detailed and well-researched book. It is not surprising, then to discover that Abigail has conducted nearly 200 interviews. She has interviewed trans-identified girls, their anguished parents, school teachers, promoters of gender ideology, paediatricians, psychiatrists, world-experts in gender dysphoria, transgender adults, gender therapists, endocrinologists and the surgeons who perform gender surgeries, as well as to the “detransitioners”—young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves.

There will, no doubt, be those who accuse this book of being “transphobic”. However, any reader will find that Abigail’s sympathy and understanding extends to everyone interviewed, and this comes through in her interview with prominent “transman” Buck Angel.

The book combines engaging storytelling of the experiences of those caught up in this contagion with commentary based on thorough research and interviews with experts.

A work of this calibre adds the necessary intellectual heft to such statistics as:

• “Among pre-teen girls aged ten to fourteen, rates of self-harm are up 189 percent since 2010, nearly triple what they were only six years before.” (pg.3)
• “Between 2016 and 2017 the number of gender surgeries for natal females in the U.S. quadrupled, with biological women suddenly accounting for—as we have seen—70 percent of all gender surgeries.” (pg. 26)
• “First, the clear majority (65 percent) of the adolescent girls who had discovered transgender identity in adolescence—‘out of the blue’—had done so after a period of prolonged social media immersion. Second, the prevalence of transgender identification within some of the girls’ friend groups was more than seventy times the expected rate.” (pg. 26)
• “Several studies indicate that nearly 70 percent of kids who experience childhood gender dysphoria—and are not affirmed or socially transitioned—eventually outgrow it.” (pg. 119)
• “No surprise, then, that in a clinical trial one hundred percent of children put on puberty blockers proceed to cross-sex hormones.” (pg. 165)
• “In 2007, there was one gender clinic in the United States. Today, there are well over fifty; Planned Parenthood, Kaiser, and Mayo all disburse testosterone, too. Many do so on a first visit, on an ‘informed consent’ basis, no referral or therapy required. The age of medical consent varies by state. In Oregon, it is fifteen.” (pg. 167)

From the Publishers:

Unsuspecting parents are awakening to find their daughters in thrall to hip trans YouTube stars and “gender-affirming” educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls—including medically unnecessary double mastectomies and puberty blockers that can cause permanent infertility. Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status, Shrier finds, but once they take the first steps of gender transition, it is not easy to walk back. Shrier offers urgently needed advice about how parents can protect their daughters.
A generation of girls is at risk. Abigail Shrier’s essential book will help you understand what the trans craze is and how you can inoculate your child against it—or how to retrieve her from this dangerous path.

About the Author

Abigail Shrier is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal. She holds an A.B. from Columbia College, where she received the Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship; a B.Phil. from the University of Oxford; and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier is available June 30, 2020 in hardcover (276 pp, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-68451-031-3) from Regnery Publishing, www.regnery.com.

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