Let me write you the letter.’ That’s not therapy.”Įven the medical profession itself has been found wanting. But as Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano explained, “This idea that a kid’s going to come in and tell us that they’re trans and that within a session or two or three or four, that we’re going to say, ‘Yep, you’re trans. Therapists – the very people who should be helping children to challenge their thinking – have been blindly affirming whatever their young patients have picked up from the internet.Īnyone who has stood against this has faced censure and condemnation. If their parents might be unsupportive, then they are not told, in case their children might feel “unsafe.” But this is something all parents need to know: this phenomenon is catching, and to be forewarned is to be forearmed.īut nothing could have happened without the cooperation of policy makers, and not only within the education system. With overwhelming folly, children are being transitioned in their schools with new names and pronouns. Ignoring both science and basic safeguarding, they have bought into the notion that we all have an immutable gender identity which may or may not match our sex.
Second, the educational system where adults who ought to know better have been enthralled, or threatened, by transgender activists. First, social media where children are influenced by strangers while their parents are kept in the dark. Shrier explores possible reasons why these daughters, often from liberal progressive households, want to be sons. Transgender identification was encouraged and intensified by friends and social media and, astonishingly, appeared to precede the experience of gender dysphoria itself. In some groups, most of the friends had done so. Shrier interviewed Lisa Littman, an American doctor who conducted an observational study and found that nearly 70 percent of the teenagers belonged to a peer group in which at least one friend had also come out as transgender. In the UK, for example, referrals of teenage girls rose by 4400% in the last decade. While there is documented history of young feminine boys expressing a desire to be girls, never before have girls dominated the work of paediatric gender clinics. The facts are clear: there is a contagion spreading among teenage girls who suddenly believe themselves to be boys. From Dr Kenneth Zucker, who oversaw the writing of the medical definition of “gender dysphoria,” to ordinary families whose children seem to them to have been swept along by this cult, Shrier talks directly to those with first-hand experience. Shrier’s informed analysis flows from dozens of interviews, including medical experts and parents. Whether you agree or disagree with her, this is a book that needs to be read. Yet children too young to even give consent for a tattoo are being corralled into making truly life-changing decisions. Besides, by then I’d had my own children. I am a transgender person, but I transitioned as an adult when I could understand the implications on my body and my relationship with society.
She reports the experience of one nineteen-year-old, “whose phalloplasty resulted in gangrene and loss of the appendage.” On the cusp of adulthood, that young person has been left without normal genitalia, for either sex, and tethered to a catheter. Shrier, a writer with the Wall Street Journal, pulls no punches when describing phalloplasty, the construction of an artificial penis. Behind the glittery exterior portrayed in the media, she encounters damaged children – many alienated from their families – in poor mental health and facing the prospect of infertility and medication for life. In a superb piece of investigative journalism, Abigail Shrier focusses on teenage girls – most with no history of gender dysphoria – who become captivated by the belief that they are transgender. Amid the trans debate, seemingly a battle between grown adults, vulnerable children are prey to a malevolent ideology that survivors call a cult.
Whether it is a statement or a question, the title of this book conveys the necessary urgency of this desperately sad story. A new book, Irreversible Damage, reveals how teenage girls are being duped into believing they want to be male, and are pushed into taking puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and undergoing double mastectomies.
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