Transgender identification among girls is increasing at an alarming rate.
Thousands are self-diagnosing and then obtaining hormones and surgeries with little or no expert consultation. But it gets worse.
Here’s what the transgender activists don’t want you to know.
Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, has been targeted by gender activists and publishers.
They are trying to censor and suppress her book, while journalists and Big Tech companies have tried to cancel her on social media.
Shrier is a freelance journalist and contributor to the Wall Street Journal who investigates cultural phenomena.
She sought to investigate why the number of females seeking gender surgery had quadrupled in the United States between 2016-17, especially among Gen Z teens facing a well-documented mental-health crisis.
She was particularly alarmed that many of the transitioning procedures were supported by schoolteachers and rubber-stamped by therapists, doctors, surgeons, and medical organizations out of fear of being perceived as “transphobic.”
Her concern, she says, is one held by a majority of Americans, including both religious conservatives and even factions of the LGBTQ community.
“The notion that this sudden wave of transitioning among teens is a worrying, ideologically driven phenomenon is hardly a fringe view,” Shrier wrote in a recent opinion piece for Quillette.com.
“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.”
She says efforts to censor her book have been “legion,” starting with threats made by the staff at a publishing house that initially agreed to publish it and then reversed its decision because of staff pressure.
Once she did find a publisher, Amazon refused to allow the publisher’s team to sponsor ads on the site.
When journalists wanted to review her book, they were turned down by nearly every major mainstream newspaper and legacy magazine.
It was even rejected by Kirkus, which reviews more than 10,000 books per year including such titles as the “Trans Teen Survival Guide” and “Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out.”
Shrier has promoted the book herself by appearing on popular podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience and The Megyn Kelly Show.
Shrier and Rogan discussed research that shows the growing number of girls with gender dysphoria is due to social contagion, a new phenomenon rampant among adolescent and teenage girls consumed by social media.
“These are the same high-anxiety, depressive [mostly white] girls who, in previous decades, fell prey to anorexia and bulimia or multiple personality disorder,” Shrier said.
“Now it’s gender dysphoria, sometimes along with some or all of those other conditions.”
“Parents are being presented with the seductive idea of transition as a utopian cure-all.”
After her episode on the Rogan podcast aired, Shrier said she was overwhelmed with messages from both parents and transgender adults thanking her for spreading awareness of the issue.
But employees at Spotify, one of the streaming services for Rogan’s podcasts, protested, calling the interview “transphobic” and demanded it be deleted from the platform.
Rogan and Shrier were also labeled “transphobic” by Media Matters and Men’s Health.
Shrier wrote that these protests were a “warning shot” to other media outlets.
“Unless you want trouble, do not challenge the narrative of unquestioning ‘affirmation’ for every child who claims to be trans — no matter the age, context, or lack of responsible medical oversight provided to the family,” she said.
Shrier says that, thanks to the podcast, word of her book and its thesis spread to parents who were concerned about the issue but afraid to speak out due to threats and gaslighting by gender 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,” she wrote on Quillette.com.
“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.”
Some parents were so alarmed by efforts to suppress Shrier’s book that they donated money to erect a billboard in West Hollywood to help promote it.
But even that was met with efforts to suppress and censor the campaign.
When parents started a pair of GoFundMe sites to fund and promote the campaign, the fundraising company closed the accounts.
“If a mentally fragile 18-year-old wants help removing her healthy breasts, GoFundMe will happily facilitate it. 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,” notes Shrier.
But Shrier isn’t bitter about the attempts to suppress her book. She says the real victim is the public, which is being manipulated by political and social activists attempting to force their narrative on children, parents and their support groups.
“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.”
“… 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… 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.”
Such efforts is “what censorship looks like in 21st-century America” – those who disagree are smeared, blocked, or “the target of a woke campaign.”
“It isn’t the government sending police to your home. It’s Silicon Valley oligopolists implementing blackouts and appeasing social-justice mobs, while sending disfavored ideas down memory holes,” she said.
The forces of censorship — supported by a left-leaning mainstream media and social media platforms controlled by big tech companies like Twitter and Facebook— are winning because their efforts “leave almost no trace” and because “most Americans have been content to surrender virtually every liberty in exchange for the luxury of having products delivered to their door,” Shrier says.
“Most would happily submit to the rule of Big Tech, so long as their Netflix isn’t disrupted.”
