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3.44 AVERAGE
3.44 AVERAGE
This was a very interesting read. It listed a lot of staggering statistics and personal stories. Was it skewed for the authors perspective? Absolutely, but if you can read with an open empathetic mind, it gave some intriguing perspectives.
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
informative
sad
medium-paced
as funny as this might sound to most westerners, but i've never been more glad to have been born and raised in a predominantly socially conservative country
This book was really good very several reasons. One thing I really enjoyed was Shrier's writing style. Shrier has the capacity to be serious and humorous which makes her hard to chew topics more easily digestible. Her writing is clear and to the point so no time or energy is spent trying to decode the data. The book read quickly; normally nonfiction is a drag for me but I found myself getting through the book rather quickly compared to other nonfiction books I've read. I would have had the book finished quicker if I hadn't picked it up during finals week.
What else makes this book so incredible are the claims she presents. It is scientifically amazing that a group that has been historically dominated by men has seemingly overnight become dominantly female. To me, this book isn't a political statement but rather a review of recent events and a presentation of valid questions. Is Shrier completely correct in all of her claims? Maybe. Who knows? The point is that this is a conversation worth having if it means helping struggling youth.
What else makes this book so incredible are the claims she presents. It is scientifically amazing that a group that has been historically dominated by men has seemingly overnight become dominantly female. To me, this book isn't a political statement but rather a review of recent events and a presentation of valid questions. Is Shrier completely correct in all of her claims? Maybe. Who knows? The point is that this is a conversation worth having if it means helping struggling youth.
Abigail Shrier's main press related to this book was with Joe Rogan and the Daily Mail. That should tell you plenty. Anyway, here's my diatribe:
Look at it this way: Your child's been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. There are a lot of books on the subject, some of them are written by homeopaths and people who just talk about their experience raising a kid with diabetes in a healthy way with minimal medical help. These are okay. They don't hurt anyone unless it's the only sort of book you're reading on the subject.
There are also some books that rely on fear mongering. They talk about how insulin is just a money grab (taking only the American system into account) and how diabetes is a societal plague (ignoring that this is, in fact, type 1 diabetes, and is something your child's born with) it's because your kid's fat and encouraged by their friends to eat junk food! The kids are too lazy and play too many video games!
There are also books out there that claim YOU can cure your kid's diabetes! No medical help needed! This one book has everything you need on the subject. Special diets, laser treatments, essential oils, but no insulin or doctors involved thank you very much. Sometimes they suggest your kid has something else that just looks like diabetes. Tell you to get a second opinion. Maybe it's lupus, or an eating disorder! Who knows! The book, it seems, and the many people the book quotes! Maybe some of them are doctors too, they must know what they're talking about.
Here's the problem. These books are often written by people who A. Don't have a medical degree, B. Don't have degrees related to diabetic medicine and/or C. Don't have any personal experiences related to diabetes, but definitely know of a few horror stories about it.
There are also a lot of helpful books out there on diabetes.
There are books written by doctors. These books usually include chapters on the history of diabetes and what people used to think of it and how they treated it. There have been people with diabetes for centuries, millennia even. There are photos, and letters about them taken from all the way back then. They also cite peer reviewed studies and use that evidence to support the facts about how it works. There aren't a lot of opinions in these books, because it's just something that's been proven to exist through the scientific method. Diabetes is something that some people have, and this is how it's treated. Sometimes these books are more specific and focus on kids with diabetes and how best to help them. Maybe there are books written for kids especially.
Finally, there are books written by people with diabetes, or the parents of kids that have diabetes. These books are also helpful, and while they don't always have science to back them up, the personal experiences can give an inside look at what it's like to live with type 1 diabetes. Every one is different.
The book I'm reviewing, 'Irreversible Damage' were it about type 1 diabetes, would be telling you that diabetes doesn't exist in most cases. It tells you that your kid is losing weight because all the other kids claim to have diabetes, and they want to have it too just to fit in. It says that your kid's probably just going through a faze. This book is telling you that insulin might be something to consider, but if you just force your kid to eat oatmeal for the rest of their life, it'll be almost as good. Maybe you can try insulin later if that doesn't work, but right now your kid's too young to even think about that kind of thing. You probably don't even need to change diets yet, let's wait and see if anything gets better first. We'll know for sure if your child falls into a coma, and then we can start treatment.
Maybe there is truth to that. Diet does help diabetes, and sometimes it is wise to wait, at least little while, just to be sure. There's nothing wrong with wanting the best for your child.
The thing is, if your kid is diagnosed with diabetes, and your first instinct is to find something that will tell you that your kid isn't diabetic, or that it's the world telling them that they're diabetic, or your kid's friends are experimenting with insulin instead of just being happy with themselves... then you're a rotten parent. Your kid's suffering, and you aren't seeking proven solutions. You're the one telling your kid that they're wrong. They aren't diabetic, and they don't need insulin, because you read about it in a book.
This book is trying to sell that idea. Replace the words 'type 1 diabetes' and 'insulin' with any condition and solution, including 'transgender' and 'validating their feelings and actively fulfilling their needs.'
This book will kill the relationship with your child if you let it guide your choices. If you finish this book and agree with everything in it, it will be that much harder for you to understand your child when they seek therapy and hormones on their own, or they'll just leave without telling you anything. Read this book if you want, but read other books too. There are boatloads of books that have both scientific facts and personal experiences in them, written by trans people and the people that care about them, plus doctors in the field of transgender medicine and endocrinology. This is not one of those books.
I feel sorry for Abigail Shrier, because I can tell that thinking about this sort of thing takes up a lot of her time and energy. All I can say to her, if she ever reads this, is stop worrying so much about what other people have in their pants. It's f****ing creepy, especially when it's aimed at kids.
Look at it this way: Your child's been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. There are a lot of books on the subject, some of them are written by homeopaths and people who just talk about their experience raising a kid with diabetes in a healthy way with minimal medical help. These are okay. They don't hurt anyone unless it's the only sort of book you're reading on the subject.
There are also some books that rely on fear mongering. They talk about how insulin is just a money grab (taking only the American system into account) and how diabetes is a societal plague (ignoring that this is, in fact, type 1 diabetes, and is something your child's born with) it's because your kid's fat and encouraged by their friends to eat junk food! The kids are too lazy and play too many video games!
There are also books out there that claim YOU can cure your kid's diabetes! No medical help needed! This one book has everything you need on the subject. Special diets, laser treatments, essential oils, but no insulin or doctors involved thank you very much. Sometimes they suggest your kid has something else that just looks like diabetes. Tell you to get a second opinion. Maybe it's lupus, or an eating disorder! Who knows! The book, it seems, and the many people the book quotes! Maybe some of them are doctors too, they must know what they're talking about.
Here's the problem. These books are often written by people who A. Don't have a medical degree, B. Don't have degrees related to diabetic medicine and/or C. Don't have any personal experiences related to diabetes, but definitely know of a few horror stories about it.
There are also a lot of helpful books out there on diabetes.
There are books written by doctors. These books usually include chapters on the history of diabetes and what people used to think of it and how they treated it. There have been people with diabetes for centuries, millennia even. There are photos, and letters about them taken from all the way back then. They also cite peer reviewed studies and use that evidence to support the facts about how it works. There aren't a lot of opinions in these books, because it's just something that's been proven to exist through the scientific method. Diabetes is something that some people have, and this is how it's treated. Sometimes these books are more specific and focus on kids with diabetes and how best to help them. Maybe there are books written for kids especially.
Finally, there are books written by people with diabetes, or the parents of kids that have diabetes. These books are also helpful, and while they don't always have science to back them up, the personal experiences can give an inside look at what it's like to live with type 1 diabetes. Every one is different.
The book I'm reviewing, 'Irreversible Damage' were it about type 1 diabetes, would be telling you that diabetes doesn't exist in most cases. It tells you that your kid is losing weight because all the other kids claim to have diabetes, and they want to have it too just to fit in. It says that your kid's probably just going through a faze. This book is telling you that insulin might be something to consider, but if you just force your kid to eat oatmeal for the rest of their life, it'll be almost as good. Maybe you can try insulin later if that doesn't work, but right now your kid's too young to even think about that kind of thing. You probably don't even need to change diets yet, let's wait and see if anything gets better first. We'll know for sure if your child falls into a coma, and then we can start treatment.
Maybe there is truth to that. Diet does help diabetes, and sometimes it is wise to wait, at least little while, just to be sure. There's nothing wrong with wanting the best for your child.
The thing is, if your kid is diagnosed with diabetes, and your first instinct is to find something that will tell you that your kid isn't diabetic, or that it's the world telling them that they're diabetic, or your kid's friends are experimenting with insulin instead of just being happy with themselves... then you're a rotten parent. Your kid's suffering, and you aren't seeking proven solutions. You're the one telling your kid that they're wrong. They aren't diabetic, and they don't need insulin, because you read about it in a book.
This book is trying to sell that idea. Replace the words 'type 1 diabetes' and 'insulin' with any condition and solution, including 'transgender' and 'validating their feelings and actively fulfilling their needs.'
This book will kill the relationship with your child if you let it guide your choices. If you finish this book and agree with everything in it, it will be that much harder for you to understand your child when they seek therapy and hormones on their own, or they'll just leave without telling you anything. Read this book if you want, but read other books too. There are boatloads of books that have both scientific facts and personal experiences in them, written by trans people and the people that care about them, plus doctors in the field of transgender medicine and endocrinology. This is not one of those books.
I feel sorry for Abigail Shrier, because I can tell that thinking about this sort of thing takes up a lot of her time and energy. All I can say to her, if she ever reads this, is stop worrying so much about what other people have in their pants. It's f****ing creepy, especially when it's aimed at kids.
While providing excellent insight, statistics, information, and convincing arguments this book also suffers from the author's bias which occasionally peeps out. Unfortunately it is mostly written for people who already would be inclined to agree with the author based off of the title, especially mothers. Which makes sense, I mean it does say "our" daughters and is already quite divisive from the cover art alone. However I think it would have benefited from being a little more even handed. Despite Shrier being at pains to show an accepting attitude towards transgender adults, her disgust at the medical treatment being administered to youth inadvertently bleeds in to a generalized disgust of transsexual surgeries as a whole. I understand these surgeries can be pretty gnarly and full of risk but I think it could have been approached in a better way which wouldn't just give ammo to the highly volatile opposing side already looking for an excuse to dismiss this book. Details like saying "in a real sense, I felt like I was talking to a woman" when describing an encounter with a famous trans man are just unnecessary. However, all this being said there is a lot of very valuable points to be drawn from this book and it is full of very important ideas which should not be disregarded out of hand. Her discussion of what is going on in schools was especially disturbing and eye opening. I think in many ways Shrier is absolutely spot on and time will bear out the truth of what she is saying in many respects. She is worth listening to and worth considering despite being in a package which many would find very easy to pick apart and ignore. She has hit upon a serious problem which will potentially go down in history as being a notable and bizarre crisis, and to close yourself off from understanding this situation more fully because she has a way of putting her foot in her mouth like an embarrassingly out of touch mom would be a disservice to you.
challenging
dark
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
dark
medium-paced
It starts off quietly, but the mask drops only a few chapters in, revealing the cruelty just beneath the surface. This is an extremely cruel book, filled to the brim with child abuse, borderline fascism, medicalization of children’s bodies, conversion therapy, transphobia, queerphobia, and more.
Most importantly, and most damningly, the vast majority of citations are one of a few categories: (1) a legitimate scientific/medical source that was cherrypicked and bereft of its full context, (2) the same kind of source, but which flat contradicts the Shrier’s claim, (3) blog posts from the transphobic website 4thWaveNow, (4) broken links, (5) interviews with parents of trans/questioning kids that are out of their depth or simply outright bigoted, (6) interviews with “experts” who either occupy fields unrelated to the (misleading or outright false) claims they make about trans youth and adults, or have been in some way discredited and censured by the medical establishment/consensus, (7) interviews/updates with some trans youth/detransitioners whose stories are collapsed beneath the gravity of their parents’ abuse, and (8) interviews with trans-affirming experts that the author incorporates despite clearly misunderstanding/misinterpreting what they say.
This is a book designed to incite paranoia and violence toward an extremely marginalized group. This is a book rooted in pure (that is, unquestioning) ideology, in the funding of large right wing organizations. The book lacks nuance and care toward its “subject,” pretending concern not for youth but only for the oh-so-beleaguered parents. This book wades into conspiratorial thought so radical, that you’re almost surprised that she doesn’t mention a (((cabal))) pulling the strings of this transgender “craze.” This book is not just cruel, it revels in its cruelty — there is a dark, pathological excitement that you can palpably feel as Shrier more explicitly wields body horror regarding surgeries, disgust at trans bodies, and contempt for those making up the tenuous safety net for gender nonconforming kids trying to survive the malignity of their parents.
If you want an unvarnished look at the face of the modern far right, this is an extremely useful book. It contains virtually every slippery argumentative tactic known to right wing grifters, ghouls, and fearmongerers — I do think there is utility in understanding these methods so that you can directly think on how to combat them.
However, this book is extremely disturbing — especially so for anyone trans-adjacent (of which I am included). It’s reading a textbook on how to dehumanize, and if you’re in the particular group facing that dehumanization — well, you’re like livestock reading a home grill cookbook. In sum, huge content warning to anyone sensitive to this strain of barely-mitigated malice.
Most importantly, and most damningly, the vast majority of citations are one of a few categories: (1) a legitimate scientific/medical source that was cherrypicked and bereft of its full context, (2) the same kind of source, but which flat contradicts the Shrier’s claim, (3) blog posts from the transphobic website 4thWaveNow, (4) broken links, (5) interviews with parents of trans/questioning kids that are out of their depth or simply outright bigoted, (6) interviews with “experts” who either occupy fields unrelated to the (misleading or outright false) claims they make about trans youth and adults, or have been in some way discredited and censured by the medical establishment/consensus, (7) interviews/updates with some trans youth/detransitioners whose stories are collapsed beneath the gravity of their parents’ abuse, and (8) interviews with trans-affirming experts that the author incorporates despite clearly misunderstanding/misinterpreting what they say.
This is a book designed to incite paranoia and violence toward an extremely marginalized group. This is a book rooted in pure (that is, unquestioning) ideology, in the funding of large right wing organizations. The book lacks nuance and care toward its “subject,” pretending concern not for youth but only for the oh-so-beleaguered parents. This book wades into conspiratorial thought so radical, that you’re almost surprised that she doesn’t mention a (((cabal))) pulling the strings of this transgender “craze.” This book is not just cruel, it revels in its cruelty — there is a dark, pathological excitement that you can palpably feel as Shrier more explicitly wields body horror regarding surgeries, disgust at trans bodies, and contempt for those making up the tenuous safety net for gender nonconforming kids trying to survive the malignity of their parents.
If you want an unvarnished look at the face of the modern far right, this is an extremely useful book. It contains virtually every slippery argumentative tactic known to right wing grifters, ghouls, and fearmongerers — I do think there is utility in understanding these methods so that you can directly think on how to combat them.
However, this book is extremely disturbing — especially so for anyone trans-adjacent (of which I am included). It’s reading a textbook on how to dehumanize, and if you’re in the particular group facing that dehumanization — well, you’re like livestock reading a home grill cookbook. In sum, huge content warning to anyone sensitive to this strain of barely-mitigated malice.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Biphobia, Child abuse, Deadnaming, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Genocide, Hate crime, Homophobia, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Racism, Sexism, Sexual content, Suicide, Toxic relationship, Transphobia, Forced institutionalization, Medical content, Medical trauma, Lesbophobia, Outing, Gaslighting, Abandonment, Dysphoria, Classism
Recommend Cass Eris’ (a cognitive psychologist) YouTube series, going in depth on every chapter of the book as well as inspecting almost all of Shrier’s citations.
informative
medium-paced