After my daughter came out as gender nonbinary and queer, an extended family member recommended that I read the book Irreversible Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier. This family member had not read the book but had heard about it on the Joe Rogan podcast.
I read the introduction of the book and dismissed it as inflammatory and hateful. But then, a transperson I love told me how their parent had tried to coerce them into reading it. I found that some of my friends thought it was great, and one said, “Everyone should read it.” I became really disturbed that parents might be trying to get their transgender and LGBTQ+ children to read this book. I decided I had better read the whole book so I could credibly explain why I found it so disturbing, and to find out if it was really as bad as I had thought from the introduction.
It was worse.
When I finished reading the book and all the footnotes, it was bristling with post-it notes marking places I found problematic. I typed up most of them, and the result was a six-page single spaced word document. For the sake of clarity, I am not going to include every instance where Abigail Shrier uses language that misleads the reader or shows contempt for transgender teens. I am going to write about my biggest concerns and give a few examples of each. Be aware that there are far more problems than the few I am bringing forth here. My biggest concern is the way the author uses language to mock and show her contempt for trans-teens. The language she uses will not convince the trans-person you love that they are not transgender. It could really convince them that suicide is the only option they have. My second biggest concern is the way the author exaggerates the scientific support for her claims. An author who has to exaggerate support for her argument and actively belittle any evidence detracting from her claims cannot be trusted.
Misleading and Outright Dishonest use of Terms
On page after page, the author talks about teens being part of an “epidemic” and a “peer contagion” and a “craze.” While these words have non-derogatory scientific meanings, a teenager reading the book will not understand this. They will feel bludgeoned by these dehumanizing words. Even most adults reading the book will not be immune to the gut reaction of fear that comes hand-in-hand with the words “epidemic,” “contagion,” and “craze.”
In chapter one, Shrier claims that today’s “coddled” teenagers are less emotionally mature than previous generations. She will use this claim to justify calling 25-year-olds “teenagers” and “children.” She needs to do this so she can shock the reader later when she talks about children getting gender altering surgeries. The reader is picturing ten-year-olds and fifteen-year-olds, but the “children” Shrier talks about getting surgery were all over the age of twenty-one when they had surgery. In chapter 3, she refers to an influencer named Ash as a “teenager,” conveniently ignoring the fact that she told us a few paragraphs ago that Ash is in his late 20’s.
Mockery and Contempt
In the introduction, the author compares transgenderism to the Salem witch trials, the nervous disorders of the eighteenth century, and anorexia, bulimia, and “repressed memory” of the twentieth century. She says, “One protagonist has led them all, notorious for magnifying and spreading her own psychic pain, the adolescent girl.”
In chapter 3, the author discusses the transgender influencers on YouTube who are supposedly convincing all these teenage girls that they are transgender also. Every time the author quotes or summarizes a trans-influencer’s words, she inserts a sarcastic parenthetical statement that mocks or belittles the person she has just quoted. Every time she refers to an interview she had with a transgender adult, she makes sure to tell the reader that she could tell what gender the person was born as just by looking at them or by listening to them talk. They can’t fool her, so they aren’t real.
Abigail Shrier never describes what a transgender teenager experiences because her audience is not transgender teens, and her goal is not understanding or compassion for transgender people. Instead, in chapter 1 (page 18) Shrier describes the normal mental struggles of female teenagers, and how those have increased in recent decades. She talks about depression, social anxiety, and the lack of in-person interaction teens face. She says “puberty is hell,” bringing up cramping, bloating, and menstruation as experiences no girl or woman wants to go through. She says girls are developing physically at younger and younger ages, leading to sexual attention from men when they do not yet feel sexual or want to be so.
These are (unfortunately) normal struggles for women and girls. Shrier’s intended audience can identify with these normal struggles. So when Shrier makes the claim that girls who identify as transgender are over-reacting to a normal adolescent experience, and she expects the reader to agree that to “decide” to be transgender is an over-reaction to the experience that they, themselves, had as teenagers and weathered just fine. The problem is today’s adolescents and their “inability” to bear stress. The reader doesn’t realize that the experience of a transgender teen is completely different from the normal struggles Shrier describes.
The author makes use of sarcastic quotation marks frequently. In chapter 6, while discussing gender affirming care, Abigail Shrier says to parents, “Put out of your mind every manner of very understandable parental interjection.”
What a tragedy that woke therapists will criticize a parent for saying things like, “Are you out of your mind?” and “No I will not call you Clive” and “We don’t even eat hormone-raised beef, for God’s sake!” The reader is expected to have had these same thoughts and to feel sorry for parents who cannot make these “very understandable” interjections. These phrases communicate contempt and ridicule, two things which no parent should ever show to any child under any circumstances.
Then Shrier says, “You don’t want your child to hang ‘himself’ in the garage just because you accidentally referred to her as ‘Rebecca’.” Can you feel the mockery dripping out of these sentences of Shrier’s? Can you begin to see why I am so concerned about parents handing this book to their transgender child (be they fifteen or twenty-seven or forty)?
On page 79 Shrier belittles gender dysphoria by equating it with being a tomboy. Being a tomboy is not the same as gender dysphoria — as proven by Shrier, herself, on page 36 where she lists the DSM-5 definitions of gender dysphoria.
On page 98, Shrier tries to delegitimize body dysphoria by equating it to a woman looking in the mirror and being shocked that she has more wrinkles than she remembered. Shrier deliberately downplays actual dysphoria, which is much different than “lugging around a body we wouldn’t have chosen.” If you will listen to an actual person who has gender dysphoria describe what it is like, you will understand how grievously Shrier is deceiving the readers of her book.
Catch-22
In chapter one, the author belittles transgender men for not really seeking to be men. She says:
“They don’t want to pass- not really. ..They make little effort to adopt the stereotypical habits of men: they rarely buy a weight set, watch football, or ogle girls… Only 12 percent of natal females who identify as transgender have undergone or even desire phalloplasty. They have no plans to obtain the male appendage that most people would consider the defining feature of manhood.”
Later, in chapter 12, after describing how complex a surgery phalloplasty is, and how likely it is to go wrong, the author admits, “if there is any way on earth to alleviate your gender dysphoria without phalloplasty, it’d probably be a good idea to pursue the alternative.”
So your transgender loved one is left with no good options. According to Shrier, if they are really transgender, they should prove it by conforming to toxic societal stereotypes. Further, either they do not have surgery, and Abigail Shrier (and people like her) can accuse them of not being serious enough to be legitimately transgender, OR they do undergo surgery, and Shrier (and people like her) can say they are clearly mentally ill because no one in their right mind would undergo such a complicated surgery with such a low success rate.
Lying about the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ children and adults
Shrier makes a one-sentence statement now and then, claiming to acknowledge the pain these transgender teens are suffering all the while writing multiple paragraphs belittling and dismissing that pain and claiming that people transition genders to receive a “social status upgrade.”
In chapter 4, Shrier describes a boy named Jamie being terribly bullied. Then she writes a paragraph where all her chosen words dismiss his experience. She says, “But one need not appeal to the case of Jamie…to believe that LGBTQ students might be picked on more than most…and are likely more abused than non-trans-identified kids…reports by activist groups suggest the same.” Here the author uses her words to cleverly introduce the possibility of doubt for something widely known and not disputed by anyone because she needs to belittle the bullying that transgender youth face in order to support her claim that kids are only “choosing” to be trans because it levels up their social status.
In chapter 8, Shrier calls being transgender a “status upgrade,” meaning that teens choose to be transgender because it wins them friends and popularity. But what does the data actually show? Twenty-two percent of transgender women who were perceived as transgender in school were harassed so badly, they left the school because of it. Another ten percent were kicked out by the school. The idea that transgender youth have an advantage because they are transgender ignores the actual conditions of their lives. The reality is bleak, as you can read about in this largest study ever of transgender people (click on the underlined words to read the study.)
Lying about the Support for her Claims
In the introduction (pxx) Shrier claims that after her book was published “Clinicians began publishing research confirming it…” the only footnote here links to a paper published by Ken Zucker, rehashing the one problematic Canadian study (by himself) which is the basis for most of the claims this book makes. Hardly the huge, growing support Shier makes it sound like that her book is building.
On page 134 the author speaks of “several long-term studies” that have shown that a majority of children with gender dysphoria have outgrown it. The footnote only lists one. Again, it is Dr. Zucker’s study. There is no other study to support her claims. Anyone who must continually inflate and exaggerate their evidence is not someone I trust.
Shrier refers to a survey study done by a Dr. Littman which she claims proves that teenage girls are only deciding to be trans because it is currently popular to do so. Dr. Littman’s “study” was actually a survey of an extremely limited set of parents for the purpose of gathering data. This data could then be used to create hypotheses to be researched and tested. Only parent who disagreed with their child about their gender identity and whose children did not express gender dysphoria until their teenage years were included. In Dr Littman’s own words:
“The purpose of this study was to collect data about parents’ observations, experiences, and perspectives about their adolescent and young adult (AYA) children showing signs of an apparent sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria that began during or after puberty, and develop hypotheses about factors that may contribute to the onset and/or expression of gender dysphoria among this demographic group.”
Breaking the cardinal rule of sociology that correlation is not causation, Shrier uses the results of the survey to draw most of her conclusions about the cause of the “teenage trans epidemic.” She also mistakes the demographic group of the survey as indicative of the whole population, instead of recognizing that it was a very small and tightly controlled group based on the limits put on the survey by Dr. Littman.
On page 31 of chapter 2, Abigail Shrier tries to get Dr. Littman to speculate on a variety of possible causes of the “trans craze.” Dr. Littman refuses to theorize beyond the limits of her data (kudos to her), but much like a lawyer in a courtroom calling out a list of questions she knows are unfair and will be objected to by the defense and thrown out by the judge, yet calling them out anyway because she knows it will influence the jury; Shrier calls out all her speculations hoping to influence the reader and capitalizing on the fact that there is no opportunity for the defense to object, and the likely fact that the reader is not reading critically, but only to find validation for the position they held when they began reading.
Are college students choosing to identify as trans because being white and rich is “perhaps the most reviled identity on today’s campuses?”
“I wonder aloud if inflated collegiate sexual assault statistics haven’t scared adolescent girls off of womanhood entirely.”
Is “this transgender craze partially the result of over-parented, coddled kids desperate to stake out territory for rebellion?”
A discerning reader will see how these questions show utter contempt for students. In Shrier’s mind, they are all pampered rich kids who are over-reacting to small problems. There is no acknowledgment that any college student would have a legitimate reason for claiming to be transgender. The reality of the danger of sexual assault on college campuses is apparently “inflated,” and the well-known fact that transgender persons are vastly more likely to be victims of assault than cisgender persons is blatantly ignored by Shrier because, again, that would weaken her position of claiming that students are “choosing” to be transgender because being a woman is dangerous.
Distinguished World Experts?
Shrier says (on page 29) that Dr. Littman’s research drew praise from “some of the most distinguished world experts on gender dysphoria.” The foot note quotes tweets on twitter from Ken Zucker, and J. Michael Bailey.
Dr. Ken Zucker is the author’s favorite expert to quote. This doctor has been kicked out of the medical practice in Canada for using reparative therapy (a form of conversion therapy). You can read about his coercive treatment method in an article which describes Zucker treating a little boy who wants to be a girl by counseling his parents to never allow him to wear pink or play with dolls. The little boy is described as walking by a store window display and covering his eyes so that he won’t see the pink sparkly things and want them. I’m just a mom and not a doctor, but that method seems like shame and repression to me, not healing.
The other “distinguished expert” who tweeted support for Dr. Littman’s study is J. Michael Bailey. Some of his “distinguished” work includes advocating lenience for a rapist whose victims were infants and young children. According to Dr. Bailey, “if he didn’t physically hurt them, and if they didn’t remember traumatically, his actions should be penalized less than had he physically hurt them and they did remember.”
In a paper published (read online at pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) J. Michael Bailey stated that it was “morally acceptable” for parents to screen for and abort gay fetuses because “selection for heterosexuality may benefit parents and children and is unlikely to cause significant harm.”
Did you get that? He is claiming that abortion is ok if the fetus is gay. Aborting a gay fetus is “unlikely to cause significant harm.” I guess death doesn’t count as “significant harm” as long as the person who dies is gay? What??
Is this really the world expert whose recommendations we are going to trust?
Not me.
If you want to know what the science actually shows, and why Dr. Ken Zucker’s research is not to be trusted, I recommend this 9 minute read from Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-the-science-on-gender-affirming-care-for-transgender-kids-really-shows/
Tell the Truth
If you want to advocate against gender transition for adolescents, you are free to do so. But tell the truth.
When speaking to your child/family member/friend, tell the truth and say, “I don’t have any science to back my feelings up, but I am afraid you will regret your choice.”
Tell the truth and say, “I don’t trust that you understand the consequences of hormones or surgery.”
Tell the truth and say, “I think you are mentally ill, not transgender.”
Tell the truth and say, “I don’t think you know what you really want.”
Tell the truth and say, “I don’t think God wants you to transition.”
And after you tell the truth about what you think, you need to be ready to hear the truth about what they think, and be willing to recognize their conclusions about themselves as at least as valid as yours.
And PLEASE do not use this hateful book to try to convince anyone. Truth telling and compassion are important. This book holds little (if any) of either.
Marvelous Pigs in Satin 