And there are “clusters of adolescents in a single grade, suddenly discovering transgender identities together.” They’re generally from white families with higher incomes. Now the number of cases has skyrocketed, the sufferers are overwhelmingly girls, and none of it is happening until adolescence. It affected a tiny sliver of the population and was almost exclusively found in boys.
Historically, gender dysphoria-“characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s own biological sex”-begins in early childhood. What’s wrong with them and why do they all seem to be coming down with the same sickness? She writes: “The more I learned about the adolescents who suddenly identify as transgender, the more haunted I became by one question: What’s ailing these girls?”Īnd this, despite all the opprobrium that will doubtless be heaped on Shrier for writing this book, is exactly the right question to ask. Shrier spoke to doctors and families and psychologists and researchers in an effort to understand this phenomenon. Indeed, if their parents didn’t go along with their demands, they would cut off their family, or even threaten suicide. She was contacted by families of some of the girls involved, many of them desperate to get their story out, to explain how their children who had never showed the least sign of wanting to be a boy suddenly became convinced they had been born into the wrong body and that they needed to undertake drastic measures to alter their appearance. Not for any reason at all.”īut the restrictions on freedom of speech demanded by the transgender movement are only the tip of the iceberg, as Shrier quickly realized. In America, the government can’t make people say things-not even for the sake of politeness.
As she notes in the book: “If the government can’t force students to salute a flag, the government can’t force a healthcare worker to utter a particular pronoun. Shrier, a lawyer by training, began her journey into this topic with a 2018 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about how the state of California had enacted a law threatening jail time for health-care workers who failed to use patients’ preferred gender pronouns. Shrier’s urgent new book, Irreversible Damage. If you want to understand why suddenly it seems that (mostly) young girls from (mostly) white middle- or upper-class backgrounds (many of whom are in the same friend groups) have decided to start dressing like boys, cutting their hair short, changing their name to a masculine one, and even taking hormones, using chest compressors, and getting themselves surgically altered, you must read Abigail K. And the other thing was that, as thoroughly bizarre as many of these mothers found it-if a child was gay, they completely understood, but how can you just wake up one day and decide you’re actually a boy?-they dared not say anything, at least not above a whisper. But suddenly every suburban mom I ran into had a story about her children’s school or extracurricular activity that involved a transgendered child. I had been reading articles for years about the transgender movement I knew someone in college who had transitioned. And I received a lengthy email from my daughter’s swim coach at the local YWCA-a man whose missives had never included anything besides practice times and requests for volunteer timers-explaining that someone on the team had come out as transgender the coach attached an entire Washington Post article explaining how we should treat the child and the proper pronouns we should use to refer to “them.” Then, another mother told me she and her daughter were sitting at a synagogue lunch when they were joined by a man who “presented” as a woman. The girl had some big news: She was now a boy. First, a friend told me about a letter her daughter, then 11, had received from her closest summer-camp friend. A few years ago, three things happened in the course of a single week in my life.