BOOK REVIEW

A Social Contagion

by Myles Robinson

[Print version of this article]

Irreversible Damage

by Abigail Shrier

Washington, D.C., Regnery, 2021

Paperback, 276 pages, $14.99

Oct. 13—This review is perhaps a bit late to the party, but hopefully serves to shed light on the craze surrounding transgenderism among young girls in the West—not just as “an issue” to be debated, or ridiculed, or used as a wedge between opinionated people on both sides, but rather as part of a process of cultural degeneration that has continued in the United States and Western Europe for many decades. Perhaps in doing so, we can start to unmask something about what has become everyone’s favorite toy: that tool of mass brainwashing, the terribly misnamed “smartphone.”

As readers of this publication know, it really is not our role to catalog the everyday activities of those people around us—acting as lemmings, oblivious and proud, marching off the cliff—but rather to help them abruptly change course. However, occasionally, as with the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a singular voice of sanity rings out, sounding an alarm and speaking the truth in such a way that it deserves our attention.

When Abigail Shrier’s book, subtitled The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters, was first released as a hardcover in 2020, it garnered much attention, reviews, praise, backlash, and criticism from all over the place. She exposes the whole process, which is brazen and out in the open, that in the name of “challenging convention” and “liberating a marginalized people,” targets vulnerable and insecure young girls to go down a dangerous path of switching genders. She focuses on not just one aspect of this dynamic, but looks at it from all sides. What Shrier does in this book is to lay out plainly, a compelling account of just how nuts our society has become.

‘Smart Phones’ and Gender Dysphoria

Gender dysphoria, Shrier explains, was rare before the advent of the “smartphone.” It predominantly affected boys, and was evident early on, around the age of two. Since 2012, however, a new trend has been emerging regarding this dysphoria. It is now affecting, en masse, pubescent girls who are glued to the Internet, girls who had no prior feelings of gender dysphoria, but for whom their teenage angst and YouTube feed drew them towards a “hot new” affliction, and a “hot new” cure. The medical community, spurred on by activists who lobby the trans-sexual agenda, have made it common practice to rush directly into puberty-blocking drugs like Lupron (sometimes referred to as chemical castration) and cross-sex hormones, and later surgery, as if to correct the mis-gendering these girls have suffered as a result of being born female.

Since for them, this is a human rights issue and not a mass delusion of image-conscious adolescent girls, the improper use of preferred pronouns and disregard of their new boy-name is akin to a hate-crime, and parents that are unsupportive are treated as abusers.

Shrier delves into the world of glamorous online “trans-influencers,” natal females whose new-found lives as men are cheered on and consumed by millions of teens on various social-media platforms, and who coach young girls on how to manipulate doctors into prescribing them testosterone. They portray a life of limitless potential on the other side of the gender line, and urge their followers to cross it with them, parroting like a pusher: “The drugs will set you free.”

Parents and other relatives who don’t support the transition can be replaced by an online “glitter family” who won’t question or doubt their decision, and treat these young people as the gender they wish to be. This only stokes the spike in loneliness, depression, and alienation that social media immersion is already causing within today’s younger generations. And to pressure the families even further into embracing their child’s delusional malady, they are told that suicide will be imminent if they don’t go along.

The UK’s Tavistock: Again Pushing Zero Population Growth

The Tavistock Institute, London’s premier psychiatry research institute which pioneered using psychiatry to keep poor Commonwealth subjects from procreating, set up the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in 1989. With the Cold War over and the Internet’s “world-brain” on the horizon, a new era in mass communication and thought control was being ushered in. With it was a brand of post-industrial behavior that was taking the most depraved elements of the rock-drug-sex hippie culture and making it normal and accessible for everyone. Sexual perversions would become as acceptable as drug-use, and would be introduced to people at a younger and younger age. The GIDS, led by a number of drug-pushing trans-sexual activists, became one of the first clinics in the world to start dishing out testosterone therapy to young girls who came in self-diagnosed as “trans.” Since 2010 the service’s number of young female patients has increased by 5,000%.

Contrary to conventional psychotherapy—which, albeit problematic, attempts to empower a patient to understand and overcome a mental affliction—these clinics treat the biology as the problem, not erroneous thinking, not compounding psychiatric issues, and especially not socially induced peer-pressure. And without as much as a ten-minute visit, the clinics put these girls on a course to arrest puberty, flood their bodies with testosterone, and eventually carve out their healthy breast tissue.[fn_1]

From the Tavistock’s Institute’s own website:

From 2009 the service [GIDS] has been nationally commissioned by NHS England [National Health Service England] and has hence grown in size and importance within the Trust [the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust]. It remains a unique service in the UK…. Gender has become an increasingly important part of the work of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and represents a significant proportion of its clinical services. With both an adult, and the only children and young people’s service being based at Tavistock and Portman, the Trust is now in a position of national, and arguably global, leadership in this area.

Families, doctors, friends, all of western society, are being arm-twisted into affirming these children’s new chosen identity. The patient is in the driver’s seat with regard to her diagnosis, and if she claims to be a boy, then certainly she is one. Whistleblowers from Tavistock’s GIDS have claimed that hormone therapy was administered to young girls by their fellow clinicians, citing merely an early affinity towards boyish TV shows as proof that the girl is indeed a boy.

It’s ironic that this gender-affirming healthcare relies on a strictly delineated, binary distinction between male and female, that has to be an innate, rock-solid, philosophical truth that everyone conforms to, and this mental construct must have nothing to do with whether you were born male or female. The gender-affirming care pushing children to transition is actually gender-conforming care. It uses these concepts of masculinity and femininity, and forces young people to choose a life of confusion, pain, costly medical procedures, and, potentially, deformity, based on an outward (and often fleeting) preference for image-oriented gender stereotypes. So, a young girl being interested in activities that are associated with boys is enough to warrant clinics like Tavistock ripping her whole physiology (and family) into pieces.

What of ‘Family Values’?

The family is truly the target of this approach. Taking the gender away from a pubescent daughter, niece, grand-daughter, or cousin serves to throw the whole dynamic into confusion and instability, and should be seen not as an effect of this dynamic, but more as its purpose.

Shrier’s book does a good job at putting the magnifying glass on ourselves. We have collectively permitted small cultural shifts, ushered in by the likes of these Tavistock Institute clinicians and scholars and Soros-style “grassroots” rights movements, to “liberalize” us and “free” us from rigid convention and norms. And little by little, this has given way to a veritable avalanche of error which, were it not so sad, could only be laughable. Shrier’s account is clinical, comprehensive, and most of all, loving, in how it deals with this mass-delusion, and those gripped by it.

Like other prominent Russians, President Vladimir Putin on Sept. 30 of this year made this comment about what they observe happening to the “values” of western nations which have become their adversaries:

Do we really want perversions that lead to degradation and extinction to be imposed on children in our schools from the primary grades? To be drummed into them that there are supposedly other genders besides women and men, and to be offered a sex change operation? Do we want all this for our country and our children?

The real question though, asked neither by this book nor by other outspoken critics of this craze, is: “What is a human?” And it’s examining that question—from the standpoint of the most beautiful art, the most profound discoveries, the most universal expressions of our uniquely human capabilities of imagination and reason—that could perhaps shed the most light on a craze that is really out to seduce all of us.

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