Irreversible Damage - Rambling Readers

Hardcover, 276 pages

English language

Published June 30, 2020 by Regnery Publishing.

ISBN:: 978-1-68451-031-3
OCLC Number:: 1159847135

(1 review)

The "trans" epidemic sweeping teenage girls. Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria -- severe discomfort in one's biological sex -- was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively. But today whole groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as "transgender." These are 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." 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. Abigail Shrier, a writer for the …

The "trans" epidemic sweeping teenage girls. Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria -- severe discomfort in one's biological sex -- was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively. But today whole groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as "transgender." These are 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." 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. Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, has dug deep into the trans epidemic, talking to the girls, their agonized parents, and the counselors and the doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to "detransitioners" -- young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves. Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls' social status, Shrier finds, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back. She 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. - Jacket flap.

7 editions

crabbygirl reviewed Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier

Review of 'Irreversible Damage' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

My mother asked me why I'm so obsessed with this topic; what does it have to do with me? The afterword of this book finally made me be able to voice it: all the mothers, so in love with their daughters, confused, worried, walking a tightrope of panic and self-censorship. how can any mother turn off the concern for their child's welfare that was born right alongside that baby? So, with Shrier's last chapter revisiting all those pair bonds, it made me realize that, for me, this is a sympathetic metaphor for the fracture I felt when my own daughter hit her teens and all former traces of her disappeared...

The best parts of the book were observations that could be pulled out and applied to a more general audience, like the 'therapy language game' that frames normal emotion as illness in search of a diagnosis, and that a symptom …

My mother asked me why I'm so obsessed with this topic; what does it have to do with me? The afterword of this book finally made me be able to voice it: all the mothers, so in love with their daughters, confused, worried, walking a tightrope of panic and self-censorship. how can any mother turn off the concern for their child's welfare that was born right alongside that baby? So, with Shrier's last chapter revisiting all those pair bonds, it made me realize that, for me, this is a sympathetic metaphor for the fracture I felt when my own daughter hit her teens and all former traces of her disappeared...

The best parts of the book were observations that could be pulled out and applied to a more general audience, like the 'therapy language game' that frames normal emotion as illness in search of a diagnosis, and that a symptom pool leads to inflated diagnoses. The reminder that assemblies that try to curb eating disorders and anorexia just as often read like seminars on how to join-in. It is telling that in hospitals, the anorexics that live together have much slower recovery rate than the ones who are kept separate.

The worse parts of the book was when she indulged in her inner eye-roll, especially when introducing the Youtube transmen influencers. With their candor, I doubt they realized their interviews were going to be used against them and I couldn't help help but feel sorry for them and their impending groveling session before the trans community.