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- Herausgeber: BookThug
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
When "Irreversible Damage" was published, author Abigail Shrier received hundreds of accusations and cancellation demands. However, the book quickly became a best-seller and was chosen book of the year by The Times and The economist. This summary presents her fundamental insights on the issue of gender dysphoria and on research that shows a sudden increase in the number of girls saying they don't want to be women, and self-identifying as transgender.
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Seitenzahl: 41
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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INTRODUCTION: THE CONTAGION
Shrier introduces Lucy’s story. She was a girlish precocious girl, who loved Disney’s princesses. By middle school, she started to have anxiety and depression. She also had trouble socializing, and things got worse when her elder sister started having drug abuse problems. Both her parents paid her little attention, and female friends were always cause of trouble. But things changed when she started a liberal arts college.
“When her anxiety flared later that autumn, she decided, with several of her friends, that their angst had a fashionable cause: “gender dysphoria.” Within a year, Lucy had begun a course of testosterone. But her real drug—the one that hooked her—was the promise of a new identity. A shaved head, boys’ clothes, and a new name formed the baptismal waters of a female-to-male rebirth”1.
Lucy’s mother claims her daughter didn’t really have gender dysphoria, because she had never before shown any discomfort with her body or with her being a girl.
Shrier’s book is not about transgender adults, who have had their own struggle and made their own admirable path.
How did the author become interested in this subject? In October 2017, California passed a law that forced healthcare workers to use the patients’ chosen pronouns (or they could do jail time). To her, that was unconstitutional.
“If the government can’t force students to salute a flag, the government can’t force a healthcare worker to utter a particular pronoun. In America, the government can’t make people say things—not even for the sake of politeness. Not for any reason at all”2. Shrier wrote a piece about this subject for the Wall Street Journal, with the title “The Transgender Language War”.
Shrier was then contacted by Lucy’s mother, because in her piece she had found some kind of hope. The author comments that in the beginning she wasn’t interested in the story, and she passed it on to another colleague. But after three months, she got in touch with Lucy’s mother and started the investigation.
Some of the facts that the author states:
“Gender dysphoria—formerly known as “gender identity disorder”—is characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex.
It typically begins in early childhood—ages two to four—though it may grow more severe in adolescence. But in most cases—nearly 70 percent—childhood gender dysphoria resolves.
Historically, it afflicted a tiny sliver of the population (roughly .01 percent) and almost exclusively boys. Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all.
In the last decade that has changed, and dramatically. The Western world has seen a sudden surge of adolescents claiming to have gender dysphoria and self-identifying as “transgender.” For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those so identifying—they constitute the majority”3
She tried to figure out why this has changed so much. Why were now the majority teenage girls with no previous manifestations of discomfort with their bodies? Shrier interviewed parents, and that was one of the criticisms she received: Why had she turned to parents instead of interviewing directly the trans teens? She claims that parents know their daughters and can provide information about their mental condition (as will be seen, many of the transgender girls are autistic, anorexic or practice self-injury), their school performance, how they behaved as children, how much time did they spend on the Internet before they came out as “transgender”, and so on. Throughout the book, she sometimes picks the word “cult” to refer to the transgender ideology: many of the people who fall for that craze feel they are caught in a cult, where no doubts or questioning is allowed.
“This is a story Americans need to hear. Whether or not you have an adolescent daughter, whether or not your child has fallen for this transgender craze, America has become fertile ground for this mass enthusiasm for reasons that have everything to do with our cultural frailty: parents are undermined; experts are over–relied upon; dissenters in science and medicine are intimidated; free speech truckles under renewed attack; government healthcare laws harbor hidden consequences; and an intersectional era has arisen in which the desire to escape a dominant identity encourages individuals to take cover in victim groups”4.
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1 Shrier, Abigail, Irreversible damage. The transgender craze seducing our daughters, 13.
2 Shrier, Abigail, Irreversible damage. The transgender craze seducing our daughters, 14.
3 Shrier, Abigail, Irreversible damage. The transgender craze seducing our daughters, 15.
4 Shrier, Abigail, Irreversible damage. The transgender craze seducing our daughters, 16.
