Book Review - Irreversible Damage, by Abigail Shrier
Can we ever truly defeat gender ideology?
One of the quirks of human nature is that what sparks cultural wildfires is almost completely arbitrary, and comes from where we least expect it. For example, the Equal Rights Amendment was, for all intents and purposes, a correction of linguistic oversight. It was to be the twenty-seventh amendment, passed with the same consensus that the twenty-sixth amendment had just used to expand the franchise to those under age 21. The year was 1971, President Richard Nixon had given the amendment his full support, and opposition to it just… seemed very unlikely. It was a simple step - just add “and women” in a few places to the Constitution. Everyone thought it was an anodyne, uncontroversial proposal.
It wasn’t.
Lightning in a bottle, cultural flashpoint, mass movement: we have a lot of words for this sort of phenomenon. Completely unremarkable cultural artifacts and incidents can spark massive social change and unrest, in completely unpredictable ways. The next Phyllis Schlafly could be anyone. We never know, and really can’t know, when the next Greening Of America will be written. Or the next Hillbilly Elegy. The content in those books had been written countless times before, and are still being written today. They advanced neither unallowable ideas nor particularly novel ones, even though they did tell a story that was somewhat rare at the time of their publishing. But those books became the focal point for - and post-hoc rationalization of - political movements that radically transformed how this country works. The authors of those books experienced what all intellectuals dream of - their ideas sparked colossal and immediate social change. And all it took was a book - a few hundred pages of their experiences that blew other people’s minds. The minuscule straw that could break a camel’s back.
It’s natural, then, that some authors should focus their careers chasing the lightning. Bottle in hand, they believe that if they write the right book – if they can sense the moment, speak a truth nobody else is - that they too can be the proverbial snowball that rolls downhill. If they can pull it off, the rewards are immense. They can have the social change that they want, have it right now, with an unquestioning and resolute public behind them. They can awaken the average American to the truth that’s inside of them, the thing that they know deep within but cannot put into words. This is a thick genre, one with many examples and indeed many successes. Facing down a society riddled with contradiction, some of them are sure to go through at least some of the time. It is not a bad gamble to make.
But Abigail Shrier, in her 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, fails to hit the mark. Part of this is that she has picked more of a popular position than she lets on. “Seducing Our Daughters” is perhaps a bit florid, but it’s something that a great number of people would stand by. Those people may not be welcome at a Yale alumni luncheon, and that does matter, but the most dramatic analysis of our culture still recognizes that progressive understandings of gender are still only accepted in limited circles. This book is unlikely to reveal an “inner truth” when the topic is very much an “outer truth” for many people. And it’s this popularity that causes Shrier to pursue the argument that she lays out, and what makes that argument too weak to stand. Rather than bring light to the arguments about gender in society, she hides it in the preconceptions and prior assumptions that she knows her audience will share. She never moves too far from positive and subjective rhetoric, avoiding statistics or science in favor of the anecdote, the personal drama, and the shock she knows it will generate. In a debate already deeply personal and strangled by emotional conflict, Shrier’s book rides those dividing lines straight into the arms of her audience. It means she misses the opportunity to do what the books says it will do - tell the truth.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that I think she’s lying. Before reading this book, I largely agreed with Shrier’s precepts about gender. Like me, she opposes what is called gender-affirming care for minor children, a model of medicine and psychiatry that focuses on reaffirming the patient’s notion of their gender identity. Like her, I am also deeply skeptical that the recent increases in reported gender dysphoria - mostly among young women - matches gender dysphoria as it has been usually understood. That is why, after the tumult that occurred when Shrier published Irreversible Damage, I was incredibly interested in what was billed as an honest conversation on these topics. It’s part of why I read the book - the image of Shrier as the voice of reason against a blatantly doctrinaire culture appealed to me. I hoped that this book could be what its critics said it was not - something that sought not to judge but to analyze the problem and to confront it. Not just to cut through the partisan politics but to understand this issue as a deeply human one, where the happiness of both cis and transgender people are on the line. I wanted to know more - why do many more natal girls identify as boys today? Can Shrier tell me what is happening, when nobody else will? Can she explain what’s going on?
But Shrier instead opens the book with a story – a story about Julie. Julie was an outgoing teenage girl, a talented ballet dancer and star student. Her prospects for a professional future in dance were quite good, according to her parents, and she was on track to break into what is an extremely competitive and skill-demanding world. Shrier, who interviewed Julie’s parents for the book and interweaves personal anecdotes throughout the narrative, tells the story of a girl who is shining under pressure. She advances in her dance troupe, dedicates her time to the art she loves, and finds a key outlet for her passion. On the cusp of adulthood, her high school career seems to be ready to turn that pressure into a successful and happy life.
But then the cracks begin to show. As Shrier tells it,
“One of Julie’s friends gave an oral presentation that year on gender and sexual identity for class. The friend introduced the Genderbread Person, a classic tool of gender identity instruction, in which a gingerbread cookie outline of a person is diagrammed. Arrows locate the seat of gender “identity” as the brain; the seat of “attraction” as the heart; gender “expression” as the whole body, and for biological “sex”, an arrow points to where the genitals would be.
Julie was captivated.1
The seeds were planted. Some of what followed was perhaps unavoidable for any teenager - the stress of a busy schedule and social anxieties took a toll on Julie’s well being. She began therapy after struggling with self-harming behavior, where Shrier carefully includes that the therapist raised gender dysphoria as a possible cause of her personal ills. Shrier also notes Julie’s sudden turn into “gender ideology” after the genderbread person, in her increased online activity (frequenting DeviantArt, the infamous “art-sharing website with a large transgender following”2 ) and growing friendships with gender questioning students at her school. This combination, according to Shrier, turns inevitably fatal. Facing continued struggles with mental health, Julie adopts a new identity as a transgender man and begins shunning her parents. After high school, the story ends with Julie cutting off her parents completely and receiving a double mastectomy in order to transition to the body she feels she belongs in. Parents heartbroken, and Julie herself in the depths of despair, Shrier plays up the tragic and very human elements that this story brings. And Julie’s parents were hardly the only ones to give interviews.
These stories, labeled with the names Shrier has picked to protect her subject’s privacy, are the main content of the book. They make up most of the first chapter (appropriately labeled “The Girls”) and are strewn throughout the greater narrative as milestones in the foreign land of gender ideology. The subheadings - “Sally”, “Meredith”, “Joanna” - all tell a story almost identical to Julie’s above. A teenage girl, showing great promise but perhaps with a few difficulties, is staggered by the weight of adolescence. Instead of turning to her parents (the source of these stories), the girl inevitably travels down the rabbit hole of internet culture and comes out the worse for it. She begins to adopt gender questioning views, usually supported by her parents at first, but becomes increasingly radical with the influence of gender questioning or transgender friends at school. The results are, for Shrier, predictably tragic. Unsurprisingly, delving deep into internet subculture does little to improve the young teenager’s mental health. The friends accelerate the fire by encouraging the new gender identity the teenager has selected and pitting her parents as adversaries. The story usually concludes in college, where the newly transitioned adolescent finally cuts all ties with their parents, labels them transphobic, and continues to suffer socially. The dreaded double mastectomy, a deep object of Shrier’s obsessions, often rears its ugly head. Throughout the book, as the topic moves from “The Shrinks” to “The Dissidents” and “The Schools”, these narratives are a constant, always pulling the discussion back to the inevitable cycle of breakdown and transition that Shrier has heard firsthand from dejected parents. And indeed, she really has done the legwork with these set pieces. They’re well written and give a human weight to the topic. They can stray into invective at times, but they’re remarkably balanced and are spared the sort of shock treatment the rest of the book suffers from. Were they used more judiciously, or perhaps contained to the aforementioned “The Girls” chapter, they would have been the pointed thrust of a broader, more balanced argument.
But this is the critical flaw in Irreversible Damage: they’re not supposed to be that, because the book isn’t an argument. It’s a cultural statement, targeted at a public she knows will buy the book and the underlying sentiments at face value. And as the book goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that the itinerant tour through the various slices of gender-questioning culture (“The Moms and Dads”, “The Puzzle”, etc.) that we’re stopping just long enough to be horrified without asking any questions. In chapter three, “The Influencers”, we're treated to a dive inside the (bizarre, incomprehensible ) world of transgender social media figures and the online gender questioning community. The world of social media influencers, period, is already one deeply absurd to me, so Shrier has to do little work to convince me that these trans icons might not be unparalleled voices of clarity on this topic. Presumably Shrier has the opportunity here to answer questions, to explore a subculture her readers will be unfamiliar and distrustful of to understand their motivations. Instead, her ham-handed and violet-tinged writing style smashes the chance of discovery with a mallet. Instead of exploring why these people do what they do for a living - convince teenagers to question their gender identity on the internet - and finding out what drives them to do that, we’re treated to the alternatively sarcastic and histrionic style in which Shrier writes. Some choice examples:
“Chucking the DSM-5 aside, or perhaps blissfully unaware of it, trans YouTuber Jake Edwards advises that even if you don’t have traditional gender dysphoria, you might still have one of the ‘other types’”3
“Sick with the flu? Find yourself in a car crash? Dumped by the love of your live? Not to worry, [Rachel] McKinnon will be right over.”4
An adult might wonder – as I did – what doctor oversees this witchcraft? This trial-and-error administration of hormones with indeterminate and shifting goals?5
The online trans community is, by their explicit intention, a freak show. No coverage of it would make them come across as “normal” to Shrier, as indeed they want to be something better than “normal”. But doesn’t it matter why they think “better than normal” comes with a lot of mental health challenges? Doesn’t it matter why Jake Edwards has invented “other types” of gender dysphoria, why he sees them as equally valid? Shrier either avoids these questions or never sees them as something to address. Instead, she focuses on the narrative - these people are freaks, and they’re coming for your daughters. Everything that she writes - the stories, the snarky asides, the statistics and data when she bothers to present them - are done in service to that narrative. The other chapters, focused on other topics such as the healthcare establishment and gender-affirming care, are modeled on an identical pattern. Ignore why someone would feel pushed to cut off their body parts in order to feel accepted. Chalk it up to internet porn and dismiss it with a wave of your hand. Where you really need to focus is on the juicy details - what happens when a phalloplastic surgery goes wrong? How many times can we mention that transitioning ruins sex? Where else can we bring up that double mastectomies eliminate the possibility of breastfeeding? Frankly, it’s voyeuristic and a little disgusting to have to sit through the cabinet of transgender horribles being paraded in front of me, in a desperate attempt to force outrage at the lives of others. And it doesn’t do what the book promised it would - investigate and understand why girls are transitioning so often. Explain to me why someone, who is different than me in almost every way, would choose to become an evangelist for questioning gender identities. Give me insight into something that is completely alien to me, and I assume to all of Shrier’s readers, so that we can solve the problem.
These two weaknesses - the reliance on anecdote and the constant, unrelenting beat of Shrier’s moral horror - are said to be in response to “gender ideology”. This is the stock phrase that Shrier uses when referring to the broad and indeed sprawling coalition of transgender activists, gender-affirming physicians, and those who take a progressive view of gender identity. It’s good enough for the task at hand: we certainly need something to call these people and it is true that they have a uniting set of preconceived notions - an ideology. They are bound together across a wide array of circumstances by the inviolable belief that gender is socially determined. This partisan fervor often induces them to be jacobinistic and irrational, and usually to the detriment of their cause. But how does Shrier come about this moral horror? Why is she so shocked and disgusted by mastectomy and words like “menstruating persons?” Quite simply, it’s because she has a uniting set of preconceived notions. She believes that gender is determined through primary sex characteristics, that the category of “woman” is broad enough to encompass “strong” and “logic-oriented” and “self-starting”. She has a gender ideology, too. It’s one I rather agree with, to be honest. But the house of cards on which this narrative is constructed completely falls apart if the reader does not subscribe to Shrier’s gender ideology. Her arguments fall flat if one doesn’t recoil in horror when one turns the page. The great truth that Shrier insists that she’s telling, that the whole world doesn’t want her to say, is completely subjective. She’s speaking her truth.
And this is what I find most frustrating about the book. It falls into the same delusions and hysterics that the gender questioning movement exhibits when their positions are challenged. It counters emotional histrionics with emotional histrionics, matches overwrought overreaction (“if you’re child doesn’t transition, they’ll kill themselves!”) with delusional overreaction and a predilection for run-on sentences(“Perhaps the greatest risk of all for the adolescent girl who grasps at this identity out of the blue, like it is the inflatable ring she hopes will save her, is also in some ways the most devastating: that she’ll wake up one morning with no breasts and no uterus and think, I was only sixteen at the time. A kid. Why didn’t anyone stop me?”6). Like her critics, Shrier can’t see out of the gender bubble she’s in, can’t understand why anyone would feel that way. Part of my frustrations are admittedly based in the fact that I am in the same place: I can’t understand why anyone would feel that way, either. The transgender friends and colleges that I have largely find this very-online culture as confusing and distant as I do. I can’t tap into the rationalizations that these people are making when they insist on gender-affirming care and gender-neutral identification cards. I’m trapped in the gender bubble, too. Gender is just so personal that all of us are likely trapped in our own presuppositions, unable to see past the shadows of our own minds and experiences. We all needed a book that could cut past those illusions and try to find out what is really happening. Investigate the lives of the transitioning, the detransitioners, and the people who love them. Forget about taking sides - we needed a book that could tell the truth.
But Shrier could not write that book. The seduction of a sympathetic audience and her own natural instincts on a very personal topic were too much to overcome. And as such, it saddens me to say that the critics were right. This book was little more than invective – a diatribe against a worldview Shrier finds disgusting and dangerous. And as such, these problems will persist. Countless more young women, faced with a cocktail of social pressures and internal discord will seek gender transition as a means of escape. The opposition to this will be confined to the places where it’s already not happening - the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the campuses of schools in deep-red districts, the paranoia of the post-90s parent deathly afraid of when “they” will come after their children. And never shall the twain meet. Never will one side have an answer for the other, be able to explain why they may be right and the other wrong. All they will have is the intoxicating, all-encompassing idea that they’re right, that what they know deep inside makes them not only virtuous but brave, that they live in a world desperate to stop them from living as they were meant to be. They will go on telling their truth, and we will wonder why the truth is never spoken.
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