Censoring Abigail Shrier

As you know, because you have read about it on this blog, Abigail Shrier has written an excellent book on today’s transgender debate. As it happens, and as she reports in a Quillette article, her book, entitled Irreversible Damage has not been widely reviewed. The mainstream media has tried to shut down all discussion of transgenderism, a phenomenon that has become a social contagion among high school girls. 

Given America’s current mania for fighting every kind of bigotry, most media outlets and more than a few scientists believe that the real problem is not teenage girls being mutilated but transphobia.

Shrier describes her argument:

Thousands of teen girls across the Western world are not only self-diagnosing with a real dysphoric condition they likely do not have; in many cases, they are obtaining hormones and surgeries following the most cursory diagnostic processes. Schoolteachers, therapists, doctors, surgeons, and medical-accreditation organizations are all rubber-stamping these transitions, often out of fear that doing otherwise will be reported as a sign of “transphobia”—despite growing evidence that most young people who present as trans will eventually desist, and so these interventions will do more harm than good.

Shrier’s view is mainstream. Most Americans do not believe that young girls should be allowed to transition:

The notion that this sudden wave of transitioning among teens is a worrying, ideologically driven phenomenon is hardly a fringe view. Indeed, outside of Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and college campuses, it is a view held by a majority of Americans. There is nothing hateful in suggesting that most teenagers are not in a good position to approve irreversible alterations to their bodies, particularly if they are suffering from trauma, OCD, depression, or any of the other mental-health problems that are comorbid with expressions of dysphoria. And yet, here we are.

And the reaction against gender reassignment has brought together people of very different political persuasions:

Religious conservatives are concerned about the trend—but so are lesbians, who look upon the shocking numbers of teen girls transitioning with abject alarm. Many suspect that all this transitioning of girls is effectively euthanizing a generation of young lesbians.

Shrier’s book has not been reviewed and has not been discussed. Yet, the alternative media, led by Joe Rogan (and Megan Kelly) have given it far more attention than it would have gotten in major media outlets.

At a time when censorship is the vogue, we should be happy to see that there are ways get around it:

Largely thanks to the Rogan podcast, word about my book’s thesis spread to parents all over the world, who’d either kept their mouth shut, or had been gaslit as transphobes when they expressed objections to the advice they were getting from activists. Many had quietly arrived at the common-sense explanation I offer—namely, that most of these teen girls were never trans in the first place. The parents’ pain and sadness—the natural result of caring for a child who believes herself to be psychologically alienated from her own body, and headed toward medical self-harm—was compounded by the claims that their parental concern was a source of further damage, perhaps even leading to suicide.

And, alarmed parents have been helping to support Shrier, to disseminate an alternative to gender reassignment:

Parents who’ve lived through this social contagion—who’d seen it strike daughters who’d never before exhibited signs of gender dysphoria in childhood—became so alarmed at suppression efforts that they dug into their own pockets to promote my work. That’s how I became one of the few authors in the world to have her own billboard in West Hollywood. Other parents started an account on GoFundMe, a website that facilitates fundraising efforts for all sorts of causes. GoFundMe closed the account. The parents started another campaign. GoFundMe closed that account, too. If a mentally fragile 18-year-old wants help removing her healthy breasts, GoFundMe will happily facilitate it. (The site currently hosts over 35,000 campaigns to pay for female “top surgery” alone.) But if you believe your daughter has become caught up in a movement that will leave her angry, regretful, maimed, and sterile, you’re out of luck.

While the censorship has not hurt book sales, the general public is being duped by transgender activists-- to mutilate their children-- in the name of science:

But there is a victim here—the public. A network of activists and their journalistic enablers have largely succeeded in suppressing a real discussion of the over-diagnosis of gender dysphoria among vulnerable girls. As you read this, there are parents everywhere being lectured to by authority figures about how they have to affirm their daughter’s sudden interest in becoming a boy—no questions asked. From Amazon to I Am Jazz, everyone is telling them that transition is the path to happiness, and those who question this narrative are bigots. So they stare at their shoes and let the conversion therapy take its toll.