Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 03:2 (Fall 2021)
Article: Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
Author: Janie B. Cheaney

Eikon 3.2 (Fall 2021) p. 116

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

REVIEWED BY

Janie B. Cheaney

Janie B. Cheaney is an author and Senior Writer for WORLD News Group.

Abigail Shrier. Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2021.

“You’re not supposed to pick favorites among the amendments, because it’s silly, but I have one, and it’s the First” (xxv). In the Introduction to her controversial best-seller, Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier explains how her commitment to free speech led her to write about a gross violation of it. Her article, “The Transgender Language War,”1 addressed state laws mandating the usage of an individual’s preferred pronouns and threatening jail time for noncompliance. Shortly after the article appeared, a prominent Southern lawyer reached out to Shrier with a sad but increasingly common tale: her daughter had recently identified herself as “transgender.”

Eikon 3.2 (Fall 2021) p. 117

The daughter, Lucy [a pseudonym], “had discovered this identity with the help of the internet, which provides an endless array of transgender mentors who coach adolescents in the art of slipping into a new gender identity — what to wear, how to walk, what to say” (xxxvi). Lucy was not alone, her mother said. There seemed to be a surge of early-adolescent girls who had never displayed any boyish proclivities, now claiming that they were boys all along.

A follow-up article in the Wall Street Journal2 attracted so many comments, pro and con, that Shrier opened a Tumblr account for them. Comments led to contacts, followed by almost two hundred interviews with parents, school administrators and counselors, “detransitioners,” medical specialists, social-media “influencers,” and Trans adults. In her words, “The responses I received formed the basis of this book” (xxix).

Eikon 3.2 (Fall 2021) p. 118

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, which goes by the unlovely acronym ROGD, had become a hot topic even before Abigail Shrier began her research. Not too long ago, gender transitioning was a phenomenon exhibited almost entirely by males. But since the middle of the last decade, more and more girls began insisting that they were actually boys, and most of them were from white, high-income, progressive families. A majority of therapists and physicians were affirming these inclinations and prescribing hormone blockers, testosterone treatme...