The song goes,
“You don’t need a weather man, to know which way the wind blows.”
It’s a terrible song. Most Bob Dylan songs are, of course. Whiny, vague rambling about how you should be a good person who does bad things, or a bad person who does good things, all this acoustic strumming trying to compel you to feel “folksy”, because Bob Dylan is “folksy” and you, too can be “folksy” if you pretend to like it. It’s funny. For all this work Dylan puts into the rebellious rambler image, his music is always really just about social acceptance. He’s marketing his best-seller albums as the outsider, the lone dissenting voice, so that everyone can praise him for what an outsider and dissident he is. He plays folk music not just because it’s what he knows but because the crowds in Greenwich Village know the right feelings to feel when folk music is played. They’ll clap and sing and stomp their feet because clapping and stomping in groups is what humans do, especially the hip and high-class humans who implicitly understand that embracing low-class art gives them superiority over those who don’t embrace them. The music is not really music but a project in cultural cohesion, of making sure that everyone is properly adjusted and has the correct emotional balance. You must not just listen, you must feel, and feel the way that Dylan is telling you to.
The transgender rights movement has been criticized for some time now as having creating the same sort of conformist environment. They exist within a small and highly specific ecosystem, largely confined to the upper echelons of academics and media. They are people who traffic in words and thoughts and feelings for a living. So it’s no surprise that they focus a lot on the thoughts and feelings of the people around them, and can be rather strident when the universe does not reflect their emotional state. It’s become very important for them to aggressively reflect their perceived cultural values and that everyone else does the same. And while their intentions are no doubt motivated by altruism, their tendency to turn everything into a crisis of trans existence warps their mission. It makes them not thinkers but common carriers of a cultural flame, addicted to the sense of purpose that social validation can give you. Their goal is not to change the world around them, but to reinforce their own sense of cultural aesthetics.
More the pity, then, that their critics are incapable of producing anything with more ideological maturity. The supposed pinnacle of this genre, Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters is allegedly the antidote to the “gender ideology” perpetrated by the “woke mob”. It was supposed to be full of “hard truths” and counter emotional hysteria with simple reason and rationality. What is it, in reality? A sugar-coated mess designed to soothe the aggrieved egos of conservatives who have had their feelings hurt. Combining the subtlety of a second-rate thriller writer with the prosaic mastery of a second-rate thriller writer, Shrier abandons any attempt to explain why the transgender craze is seducing our daughters. She quickly abandons any discussion of the craze at all, any real or practical solutions to a clear and present danger. Instead, it’s several hundred pages of lurid details and faux horror inviting the reader to join in with Shrier for some communal disgust for people they’ve never met. The purpose of the book, just like the trans rights movement, is not to think but to feel, to identify and to have one’s identity validated.
This technique sells books. It can make you a very famous author. It can bring lots of hate and grievance from your political opponents, which in turn can sell many more books than you could alone. But it speaks volumes about how serious you think the problem you’re addressing is. It speaks to your intellectual integrity, your ability to argue a point and defend it honestly. It does not make you brave. It makes you the same emotionally parasitic demagogue that you accuse your opponents of being. It means you will gladly throw away a hard look at reality for the soft, comforting embrace of your predetermined narrative. It makes you useless.
Because you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
The funny part about all of this is that I really come down on the same side of the debate that Shrier does. We’re both something of the gender-critical variety, both concerned about the spread of gender-questioning ideas. She opposes gender-affirming care for minor children, like I do. I’m troubled by attempts to shoehorn existing social and psychological problems into cases of mistaken gender identity, like she is. And both of us are deeply skeptical that the recent increases in reported gender dysphoria – mostly among young women – matches gender dysphoria as it has been previously understood. I started Irreversible Damage assuming that I would largely agree with Shrier about what she was writing, and that I wouldn’t find anything that ideologically novel between the covers. What I was looking for was what Shrier had promised - a clear-eyed, reality-based look at the social aspects of gender dysphoria. Was it really a social craze, as claimed? What triggered it, if so, and what keeps it alive today? What are the people inside of it experiencing? Dozens of expert sources analyzed, hundreds of interviews conducted, it seemed clear: there could surely be no better person to find out than Abigail Shrier.
And for the first few chapters, the promise rang true. What I found on those pages was a story – a story about Julie. Julie was an outgoing teenage girl, a talented 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-intensive world: professional ballet. Shrier, who interviewed Julie’s parents for the book and interweaves their personal anecdotes throughout the story, uses the page to tell the story of a girl who shined under pressure. She was becoming a key player in her dance troupe, dedicating her time to the art she loved and developing the passions bursting from within her. On the cusp of adolescence, high school seemed to be ready to turn that pressure into a successful and fulfilling 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.”
The cracks got wider. 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, but it didn’t seem to help the depression or the mental angst. Her parents watched as she became more withdrawn and were desperate to help in any way they could, even if they didn’t know quite what to do.
And then the cracks weren’t just cracks anymore. Julie’s therapist mentioned gender dysphoria as a possible cause of her issues, prompting her to spend more time with gender-questioning students at her school. She began spending more and more time online, frequenting that infamous “art-sharing website with a large transgender following”, DeviantArt. And as her mental health struggles continued, the pull these gender-questioning influences had on her only increased. The end result was only a matter of time. Julie adopted a new identity as a transgender boy at the end of high school, becoming someone her parents couldn’t recognize anymore. Her despondency and depression only seemed to worsen the further she went in, as she slowly cut off contact with her parents and the shadows of her old life. By the end of college, she had already received a double mastectomy and had not talked to her parents in years. And thus the tableau concludes. Parents heartbroken. Julie herself in the depths of despair. Shrier describes it all in vivid detail.
These stories, labeled with the names Shrier has picked to protect her subject’s privacy, are the main focus of the book. They make up most of the first chapter (appropriately labeled, “The Girls”) and serve as anchors throughout the book that tie the concepts under discussion to real human beings . These sections – “Sally”, “Meridith”, “Joanna” – contain narratives almost identical to Julie’s. Girls suffering from mental health issues travel down rabbit holes of internet culture and come out the worse for it. Parental support is rebuffed with accusations of transphobia as relationships explode into bitterness. Collegial struggles continually result in parental estrangement and gender transition is inevitable. It’s these stories, compelling as they are, that drew Shrier to write this book in the first place. I’m glad that they did. They mostly avoid invective and take a direct, human look at the lives of the people she’s writing about. They actually do start to unravel the ball of emotions surrounding the culture war and dig into the damage left in its wake. Were they used judiciously, they could have been the pointed thrust of a broader, more nuanced argument.
But this book isn’t about argument. It’s about making you feel something, specifically, afraid. And so, despite this being a book about the daughters at risk, the stories never stay with the daughters. To my disappointment, they always somehow manage to twist themselves into being about the “real” victims: parents. A girl is having trouble fitting in at school - how does it make her parents feel? She’s thrown in with some gender-questioning kids in her history class, and won’t stop acting like them. What do her parents think about it? Quoth “Richard”, a father to one of the girls in these stories:
“‘She thinks she looks like a guy,’ he told me. “She’s got the hair on her arms and everything, but she’s beautiful. They were actually calling her ‘sir’ [on our vacation], which was crazy. To me, she doesn’t look like anything but my daughter.’”
We can surely sympathize with Richard in this situation. His daughter, someone he loves very much, has decided that the identity that they built together was not worth keeping anymore. His world has broken in a way he never expected. But he’s also not the person that was seduced by the transgender craze. He’s not the one we should be talking to in this situation. His perspective might be nice, and it adds context, but an entire section devoted to how “Richard” feels inside isn’t very helpful when what we’re discussing is why girls like his daughter feel the need to be called “sir” on vacation. It’s only helpful if what you're aiming for is to let parents (the target demo) play out the mental image of themselves as a “Richard” in their very own horror movie. Because the hardships you can’t control make for much better entertainment than the ones you can.
Granted, Shrier is a parent herself. It would be wrong for her to not consider the role of parents in this conversation, and it would be impossible for her to completely ignore it. But her pathologies and preconceived notions have seeped so completely through these stories that it becomes somewhat uncomfortable to read at times. For example, Shrier seems to have a singular obsession with the idea of mastectomies. Whenever the subject is broached, Shrier immediately lets loose with a litany of rhetoric about how breasts (and especially breastfeeding) are central to the meaning of what a woman is. In fact, for someone who (rightly) objects to calling women “bleeders” because it’s incredibly dehumanizing and degrading, it’s strange that she always manages to come back to breastfeeding when trying to explain what makes up the central tenets of womanhood. For example, what lies in wait for a girl ensorcelled by the false song of transition? “She’ll wake up one morning with no breasts and no uterus and think, ‘I was just sixteen at the time. A kid. Why didn’t anyone stop me?’” Really? She won’t ask, “I’ve lost all my friends, why didn’t anyone stop me?” Of course not. She won’t stop to ask about the untreated mental troubles that Shrier tells us caused this transition. She won’t even consider the wide array of health risks Shrier spent the last chapter fantasizing about. “She’ll wake up with no breasts, and no uterus”. Because what is a woman, other than a pair of breasts and a uterus? What else matters, as long as those organs are kept intact? Why focus on these girls, their struggles, their hopes and fears and the real injury being done to them? That’s what one would do if one wished to solve the problem. But it’s clear that Shrier has other priorities.
As the book drags on, it slowly sets in that this itinerant tour throughout the various slices of gender-questioning culture (“The Moms And Dads”, “The Puzzle”, etc.) is meant not to educate us but to give a cartoonish description of gender-questioning ideology that deflates any real intellectual value we might take from it. Take Chapter Three, “The Influencers.” Inside this vignette we take a dive into the (truly absurd) world of transgender social media figures. Now, any world consisting of social media influencers is already suspicious territory to me, regardless of their gender preferences. I’m perfectly willing to accept that the internet may not be the best way for children to explore their gender identity, and that these trans icons may not be unparalleled fonts of teenage wisdom. But I can recognize that ignorance of this world makes me powerless to act. Why does someone seek out these influencers for advice? Why do these influencers choose this as a career? Given this problem, how can we navigate it as a society? Shrier is the one who knows. She’s the one with the countless interviews, hours of research, and hard-won expertise. I’m leaning on Shrier to explain to me why she thinks this is happening, so I can better understand what it is we should do.
But, as we’ve seen, understanding reality takes a backseat when the opportunity arises to join the audience in collective hatred. Knowledge doesn’t come with the same tribal feel-goods that derision can bring. So any wisdom she has to impart is smothered in a ham-handed writing style dripping with the level of sarcasm only someone deep within the media ecosystem can attain. 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’”
“Sick with the flu? Find yourself in a car crash? Dumped by the love of your life? Not to worry, [Rachel] McKinnon will be right over.”
“An adult might wonder – as I did – what doctor oversees this witchcraft? This trial-and-error administration of hormones with indeterminate and shifting goals?”
Way to really own them.
The online trans community is, intentionally and explicitly, bizzare. No coverage of it could make them come across as “normal” to Shrier. Their aspiration is to something beyond the “normal” that Shrier ascribes to. But doesn’t it matter why their “better than normal” comes with a lot of mental health issues? Doesn’t it matter why Jake Edwards has invented “other types'' of gender dysphoria and why he sees them as better than the DSM-5’s definition? Shouldn’t we know what makes these ostensible role models so attractive to kids? How else can we address the problem? But Shrier either didn’t see these questions as worth her time or just didn’t realize they would be worth asking. Instead, she focuses on a picture of transgender people that paints them as comic-book villans who are alternatively knuckle-dragging illiterates and cunning manipulators who are capable of brainwashing children through a computer screen. None of the words on these pages – the stories, the snarky asides, even the data when she bothers to present it – explain or describe the problem. Their sole purpose is to confirm what you already knew, to wrap you further into the warm simplicity that ignorance can bring.
The result is that her attacks on gender-questioning culture never grow beyond their page limits and never reach a workable conclusion. They instead become incredibly hollow and constrained to the Gawker-level snark Shrier insists on writing in. Discussing testosterone injections, one of the most serious things one can do to one’s body, Shrier quips:
“Within the first few months of injections, as body and facial hair begin to sprout, it’ll be clear that she’s done serving up her body for ridicule. She’s on the boy’s team now.”
Oh. It’s that simple, then. “She’s on the boy’s team now.” We can wrap all these complicated discussions about social contagion and dysmorphia into a pat little phrase that sounds like it came off the backside of an Aerosmith album. Do we explore why she wants to be “on the boy’s team?” No, but Shrier will make a couple lazy guesses that it’s all about body image, or social anxiety, or something, and wander off into the next paragraph. What about the science, then, those “cold hard facts?” Will she talk to proponents of youth hormone treatment, get a sense for why they think this is the best course of action? Does she talk to the critics of youth hormone treatment, her presumptive allies, about why it’s not the best course of action? No. She’ll bring the experts in later when the topic is phalloplasty gone wrong, and we can spend pages telling you about all the terrible things surgeons are capable of. This is just the trivial matter of modifying one’s endocrine system. In all, she spares three pages on the topic of testosterone injection, half of which are taken up by anecdotes of girls seeking them out in various subversive ways. Instead of fully examining this deep and dangerous subject, one that could (per Carole Hooven’s T: The Story Of Testosterone) make a book all by itself, Shrier substitutes some throwaway lines about how girls probably like T because it makes you, like, more aggressive, or whatever, and stumbles away. By contrast, will the section labeled “Testosterone – The Risks'' be as vague? Not quite. Here, Shrier loses her timidity with detail. We learn all about the various things testosterone can do to you – increased risk of heart disease! Forget about birthday dinner at the Red Lobster now! Irritability and mood swings! Your ladylike demeanor might be completely erased! And worst of all, let’s not forget vaginal atrophy – it makes you have sex bad! Your “new eroticism may be limited to the do-it-yourself sort”, Shrier intones, again demonstrating an obsession with reproduction that was better left in health class. But after all this hyperbole, she never actually tries to explain why girls are taking testosterone. The reader is expected to fill those details in themselves, because Shrier knows the only people reading are the ones who live inside her shared narrative of womanhood. She can only play in the places where the people already agree with her.
So what does Shrier focus on: the bad things that happen to you when you transition, or why girls are doing this to themselves in the first place? What’s worth more words: vaginal atrophy, or an explanation of the social pressures that are causing it? It doesn’t mean changing your rhetoric to be more moderate. You can be just as critical, just as bold, and just as outspoken. But you have to make an argument. You have to push outside your cloistered world and speak in the language of reason. It’s not a question of tone, it’s a question of being effective. It’s what it will take if Shrier wants her ideas taken seriously outside of the context of her own culture. So until she’s capable of that, she ought to spare me the voyeurism and the performed outrage. Spare me the histrionics and the mock concern. Spare me the mocking, for what it’s worth, and treat such problems with the seriousness one would think the craze seducing our daughters would merit.
Abigail Shrier has made a name for herself by claiming to be a brave and defiant voice willing to challenge the gender establishment. She is the rebel, the dissenter, the outsider willing to risk it all just to tell the truth. Thousands of her readers believe it. But it’s a lie. Abigail Shrier is a coward. The truth she tells, just like the gender nonconformists she’s so afraid of, is her truth. Yes, she’s been subject to unfair criticism online. She has a level of social infamy that she does not deserve and is not the shrieking transphobe her critics paint her as. But nothing she did in Irreversible Damage was a real risk. She did nothing to threaten her social standing among the very-online anti-wokes she’s surrounded by. The circles she was already in - these high-status conservatives who are convinced that there is war being made on high-status conservatives - were not fed anything they did not already believe. Their needs were attended to at every turn. And rather than mount a real argument, expecting her audience to work and wonder and think, she took the easy road and told them how brave and noble they were. Safe and sound from the outside world, ensconced in their little bubble.
Irreversible Damage was a book that was supposed to burst bubbles. It was uniquely positioned to do so, drawing on huge amounts of firsthand research and experience. But it failed. It simply shut down the gender conversation in exchange for an onanistic affirmation session that has ensured the continuance of the gender wars. Countless more young women, faced with a cocktail of social pressure and internal strife, will seek gender transition as a means of escape. The opposition to this will be constrained to places where it’s already not happening – the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the campuses of some red-state schools, the paranoia of a few obsessive parents. Neither side will ever actually offer to solve these girl’s problems. Neither side will ever understand what’s going on, because the bliss of ignorance will always be too sweet to overcome. And everyone will close their eyes and listen to the voices telling them that they’re right, that what they believe makes them not only virtuous but brave, and that they live in a world desperate to stop them from living their truth. Shrier has elected to become part of that chorus. This book, her “cancellation”, and our attention-deficit culture has seen to making sure she’s part of it forever. She could have written the book we needed. She wrote the book her critics knew she would.
Because you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.