By Maria Keffler, 7/10/20, Federalist.
Abigail Shrier’s new book, 'Irreversible Damage: the
Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,' adroitly addresses a controversial
topic without shirking from the truth.
Transgenderism has been called the medical scandal of our time. Facilitated
by contemporary culture’s voyeuristic fascination with all things sexual, and
its blithe willingness to turn a blind eye to the mutilated bodies and
psychological devastation in transgender activism’s wake, this social and
political movement is sweeping through our nation’s schools with catastrophic
consequences for children, families, and society.
Abigail Shrier’s latest book, Irreversible
Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,
accomplishes the Herculean task of revealing and explicating the history,
circumstances, and repercussions of an ideology that has to a great extent
targeted adolescent and teen girls, evidenced by a 4,000 percent increase in child referrals to gender clinics in
the last ten years, most of whom are females.
Shrier, a parent and Oxford-, Columbia-, and Yale-educated
attorney and journalist who writes for the Wall Street Journal, digs deeply and
widely into this phenomenon, interviewing doctors, researchers, teachers,
therapists, transgender-identified adults, and transgender-identified children
and their parents in a search for answers to two questions: “Why?” and “What
now?”
She parses out in shocking clarity how social media
influencers, school administrators, medical and mental health practitioners,
and calculated activism have created and propagated a social contagion that
preys upon young girls as they navigate the struggles common to all females as
they come of age. At the time girls’ bodies and minds are transforming from
those of children to those of adult women, the transgender ideology that’s been
diffused like mustard gas into every corner of our social atmosphere
capitalizes on these girls’ search for identity and meaning by affirming their
deepest fear: You are not
acceptable the way you are.
The Damage Done
Irreversible Damage lays
bare the social, psychological, and political forces that converge in a ghastly
maelstrom to ravage young lives. At school and online, “teens and tweens today
are everywhere pressed to locate themselves on a gender spectrum and within a
sexuality taxonomy–long before they have finished the sexual development that
would otherwise guide discovery of who they are,” Shrier declares, led there by
“so much gender identity and sexual orientation education, delivered with the
tireless passion of priests.”
As I read Shrier’s apt and piercing commentary on the
origins of transgender ideology and how it’s taken such a stranglehold on our
society and children, I found myself underlining whole passages and scribbling
commiserative notes in the margins. At the end of a section on bullying, in her
chapter on schools’ complicity in the harms wrought on these girls, I penned an
epiphany: “Schools and activists have turned their weaponry against the family.
The bullies, according to them, are no longer society or other students; by
transgenderism’s twisted and sadistic logic, parents are now deceitfully
vilified as their own children’s worst oppressors. That is evil.”
Indeed,
third-wave feminism’s manifesto on the abolition of the family as a requisite
for female liberation serves as a catalyzing force behind the transgender
phenomenon. Irreversible Damage brushes against this
self-defeating premise in its conversations with radical feminists and
lesbians, who recognize the transgender narrative as nothing less than a
misogynistic apocalypse for women’s safety and rights.
Shrier catalogs
schools’ disrespect for parents as evidenced by policies that not only allow
but require school personnel to withhold from parents information about their
child’s sexuality and gender. She further records a fifth-grade teacher’s
not-uncommon position that “parental right[s] ended when [their] children were
enrolled in public school.” But Shrier does not delve into transgenderism’s
intentional destruction of the nuclear family as pointedly as I wish she might
have.
Shrier is
admirably empathetic of the transgender adults she’s met who simply want to
live their preferred lives quietly, under society’s radar, and largely do not
agree with radical activists’ pursuit of children as recruits. Shrier’s
treatment of all who live outside social norms is open-handed, and she affords
generosity to those whose perspectives may not agree with her own.
She does,
however, endorse the ethos that one’s sexuality is fixed and immutable, a
theory weakened by the numbers of former homosexuals who successfully changed
their desires through therapy, as well as by former heterosexuals who in
mid-life left their opposite-sex spouses to pursue homosexuality. You will not
find in Irreversible Damage any whisper of homophobia or
skepticism about the LGB portion of the LGBT narrative, for better or for
worse.
An exhaustively researched and meticulously organized
treatise that deftly interweaves strands of personal narrative, biography,
exposé, investigative journalism, and parental guidance, Irreversible Damage draws
back the curtain on a phenomenon cloaking itself as heroism while devouring
with blood and malice a vulnerable and valuable segment of our next generation.
Anyone who has daughters or cares about children should read this book in order
to be armed for battle, defensively and offensively.
Hope and Direction
In Irreversible Damage Abigail Shrier has done
for us the preponderance of work necessary to demonstrate exactly who are the
enemies of all who value healthy children, healthy families, and a healthy
society, and what tactics they employ. The gatekeepers we trusted to safeguard
our children have not only failed, they have turned their teeth and claws on
our kids as well as on us. We can no longer afford to be blissfully ignorant of
what’s happening to our children.
In fact, deliberate ignorance explains the overwhelming
lack of widespread inquiry into the transgender narrative and its results: “You
cannot let yourself imagine that [affirmation therapy] might be a mistake
because then you’d have to accept that you’ve been participating in something
truly awful,” Shrier quotes Lisa Marchiano, a Jungian analyst, researcher,
social worker, and therapist who does not hold with her profession’s party line
on gender affirmation.
Marchiano’s haunting words echo throughout Irreversible Damage,
and serve well as its central premise: The transgender experiment on our
daughters is something truly awful, and unless we put a stop to it, we are all
guilty of participation in it. But Shrier leaves us with hope and direction in
her final chapter: The Way Back.
She
sums up in six simple words all that is necessary for parents of
transgender-identified children, for therapists and educators, and for society
itself to begin righting the terrible wrongs done to our daughters: “It requires
merely knowing the truth.”
Maria
Keffler is one of the co-founders of the Arlington Parent Coalition, which
supports parents in holding schools accountable to parental authority, and in
keeping their children safe at school. Keffler is a former middle and high
school teacher who holds a masters degree in educational psychology. She lives
in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband and three children.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment