stephanieluxton 's review for:

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier

5.0

---

I was nervous to read this book because the title does indeed sound transphobic, but I saw Abigail Shreir on Joe Rogan's podcast and it made me want to read it. The book isn't transphobic, it's very well researched, and it's terrifying. It's about young, impressionable, lonely, anxious/depressed teenage girls with no history of any kind of gender dysphoria self diagnosing themselves as trans (sometimes in entire friend groups) and how therapists, doctors, and schools fail these girls by celebrating this decision, throwing hormones at them, and encouraging surgery rather than getting to the root of their mental health issues. Obviously it's more complicated than that but overall this book is about an epidemic of young girls coming out as trans who aren't really and the damage being done to them because no one is allowed to study or talk about it. It's a classic case of society trying to help one group of people and accidentally damaging another in doing so. There's a lot of interviews with trans people, parents, doctors, etc. I think the author was brave to write this book and I enjoyed reading it.