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lpm100 's review for:
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
by Abigail Shrier
5.0 out of 5 starsVerified Purchase
The newest mass movement/ hysteria/craze
Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2020
5 stars plus
The Newest Mass Movement/ Hysteria/ Craze
*************
Intentional or not, this is a peculiar updating of Eric Hoffer's book "The True Believer."
He observed that: "The mass movement appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation."
So, it happens here/now that the latest craze is being transgender.
The author is extremely pithy, quotable and talented writer--approaching the quality of a David Berlinski. (p. 31- "I wonder things I don't say aloud, too: Whether this transgender craze isn't partially the result of over-parented, coddled kids desperate to stake out territory for rebellion. Whether it is no coincidence that so many of these kids come from upper-middle-class white families, seeking cover in a minority identity? Or is it the fact that they overwhelmingly come from progressive families - - raised with few walls, they hunt for barriers to knock down?")
All of the elements to start this bonfire were put there over a long time by different elements.
-Social media makes it such the people have less face-to-face contact and human interaction.
-Academia and the chattering class have always been there to try to tell you that white is black and black is white, and everything is framed in moral superiority (p.70). There has also been a significant uptick in excessive / professional victimology.
-Mental health professionals find that they can make a perfectly good living if they generate the market of people with gender dysphoria.
*******
The author asks a very good question, which is: How can it be that we already know what is the rate of gender dysphoria that... And yet you will see that there is a 44 fold increase decade on decade of people seeking gender treatment, and in one high school of 500, 7 people will come out as transgender. (p.27-"rapid onset gender dysphoria").
Just by the math: the number of false positive appears to be 200x higher than the number of true positives. If a person diagnoses himself with gender dysphoria (or if his psychiatrist does the same), they are much more likely to be wrong than right.
True gender dysphoria is a 1 in 10,000 event. But, 2% of high schoolers help diagnose themselves as having gender dysphoria?
That is something like a 200-fold overdiagnosis. (And that's not hard to believe. Can we please remember that at first Asperger's didn't exist. Then it did exist, and everybody and their brother was diagnosing themselves with it. And then, from one DSM to the next, it stopped existing?)
The tragic case of Dr. Lisa littman is a great example. (To be honest, these woke mobs really are identical to the perpetrators of the Salem witch trials.)
*******
How to keep your own kids out of this mishegoss? (And let's remember that the state public schools are already being infected with this hysteria.)
We send our kids to Orthodox Jewish schools, and not only is there no evidence of this type of thing there but: girls wear dresses and boys wear slacks and shirts with collars. We had a severely mentally damaged person who did try to challenge that, and the school told him/her very plainly that that school was not for him/her.
I would guess that for the other 99.9% of the country that is not Orthodox Jewish.... Catholic/Muslim/other parochial schools would be a good start. (I don't think you have to be one of them to go to their schools.)
*******
I wonder "How big of an issue this is?" (If you believed the author, you'd almost think that every third person was on the cusp of transitioning.)
I did a quick search on Facebook, and one group for detransitioning had 594 people, and the gender identity disorder group had just a little bit under 700 people. (My Facebook page about Orthodox Jewish conversion has 300 followers, and another one I know of has over 1,000.)
*******
The only thing that is consistent in all of these stories is that all of the people profile had severe confounding mental disorders. (p.165--"70% of children will outgrow gender dysphoria on their own.")
There is also the question as to the ethics of using hormone blockers and disfiguring surgeries to treat something that is, in the majority of cases, a mental problem.
If you remove a woman's breasts, and then she decides that she wants them back.... That is the equivalent of a patient wanting blue eyes and the doctor removing both functioning eyes to put in 2 blue glass eyes.
They look like eyes, and they are blue but they have completely lost their function.
*******
This book is short, and that's good because ultimately I conclude that these are just prototypical examples of Bored Young White People Trying to Shed Their Acedia--a thing that annoys me more than words can describe.
And they are apt to do this in a thousand ways (joining Black Lives Matters movements, or trying to pass as black people --I have in mind Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King-- or burning things down in riots), so this author's detailing of that is just one more among an uncountable number.
A description of all of the mental architecture around these movements was laid out several decades ago (Eric Hoffer, again). The updating with these specific symbols is old wine in new bottles.
In the "Update" section (written as an afterword), these things mostly resolved themselves in the way that they usually do: people tire of them, and then they move on with their life. (In this case: It may fizzle out like Beanie Babies.)
The author quotes a doctor (p.142) that suggests that the transgender craze will end in the court system, by patients suing doctors that "diagnosed"/disfigured them. (In that case: It will fizzle out in the same way as multiple personality disorder.)
In one case, the parents stopped financing it. (That's a tried-and-true way to stop such frivolity.) But that wasn't the majority of cases.
My preoccupation with getting bills paid and children bathed makes it such that: I myself do not suffer from any sense of futility, and so it's aggravating to have to even know about people that are so bored that they do. (If you want a working definition of "white privilege," folks, there you have it.)
And to that end, though moderately interesting, the 227 pages of this book are quite enough. (223 pages of prose@ 12 chapters works out to <19pps/chapter.)
Verdict: Recommended at the second hand price.
New words:
Metoidoplasty
Perseverate
Oophorectomy
Orichiectomy
Homosexual Transsexualism
Autogynephilic Transsexualism
The newest mass movement/ hysteria/craze
Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2020
5 stars plus
The Newest Mass Movement/ Hysteria/ Craze
*************
Intentional or not, this is a peculiar updating of Eric Hoffer's book "The True Believer."
He observed that: "The mass movement appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation."
So, it happens here/now that the latest craze is being transgender.
The author is extremely pithy, quotable and talented writer--approaching the quality of a David Berlinski. (p. 31- "I wonder things I don't say aloud, too: Whether this transgender craze isn't partially the result of over-parented, coddled kids desperate to stake out territory for rebellion. Whether it is no coincidence that so many of these kids come from upper-middle-class white families, seeking cover in a minority identity? Or is it the fact that they overwhelmingly come from progressive families - - raised with few walls, they hunt for barriers to knock down?")
All of the elements to start this bonfire were put there over a long time by different elements.
-Social media makes it such the people have less face-to-face contact and human interaction.
-Academia and the chattering class have always been there to try to tell you that white is black and black is white, and everything is framed in moral superiority (p.70). There has also been a significant uptick in excessive / professional victimology.
-Mental health professionals find that they can make a perfectly good living if they generate the market of people with gender dysphoria.
*******
The author asks a very good question, which is: How can it be that we already know what is the rate of gender dysphoria that... And yet you will see that there is a 44 fold increase decade on decade of people seeking gender treatment, and in one high school of 500, 7 people will come out as transgender. (p.27-"rapid onset gender dysphoria").
Just by the math: the number of false positive appears to be 200x higher than the number of true positives. If a person diagnoses himself with gender dysphoria (or if his psychiatrist does the same), they are much more likely to be wrong than right.
True gender dysphoria is a 1 in 10,000 event. But, 2% of high schoolers help diagnose themselves as having gender dysphoria?
That is something like a 200-fold overdiagnosis. (And that's not hard to believe. Can we please remember that at first Asperger's didn't exist. Then it did exist, and everybody and their brother was diagnosing themselves with it. And then, from one DSM to the next, it stopped existing?)
The tragic case of Dr. Lisa littman is a great example. (To be honest, these woke mobs really are identical to the perpetrators of the Salem witch trials.)
*******
How to keep your own kids out of this mishegoss? (And let's remember that the state public schools are already being infected with this hysteria.)
We send our kids to Orthodox Jewish schools, and not only is there no evidence of this type of thing there but: girls wear dresses and boys wear slacks and shirts with collars. We had a severely mentally damaged person who did try to challenge that, and the school told him/her very plainly that that school was not for him/her.
I would guess that for the other 99.9% of the country that is not Orthodox Jewish.... Catholic/Muslim/other parochial schools would be a good start. (I don't think you have to be one of them to go to their schools.)
*******
I wonder "How big of an issue this is?" (If you believed the author, you'd almost think that every third person was on the cusp of transitioning.)
I did a quick search on Facebook, and one group for detransitioning had 594 people, and the gender identity disorder group had just a little bit under 700 people. (My Facebook page about Orthodox Jewish conversion has 300 followers, and another one I know of has over 1,000.)
*******
The only thing that is consistent in all of these stories is that all of the people profile had severe confounding mental disorders. (p.165--"70% of children will outgrow gender dysphoria on their own.")
There is also the question as to the ethics of using hormone blockers and disfiguring surgeries to treat something that is, in the majority of cases, a mental problem.
If you remove a woman's breasts, and then she decides that she wants them back.... That is the equivalent of a patient wanting blue eyes and the doctor removing both functioning eyes to put in 2 blue glass eyes.
They look like eyes, and they are blue but they have completely lost their function.
*******
This book is short, and that's good because ultimately I conclude that these are just prototypical examples of Bored Young White People Trying to Shed Their Acedia--a thing that annoys me more than words can describe.
And they are apt to do this in a thousand ways (joining Black Lives Matters movements, or trying to pass as black people --I have in mind Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King-- or burning things down in riots), so this author's detailing of that is just one more among an uncountable number.
A description of all of the mental architecture around these movements was laid out several decades ago (Eric Hoffer, again). The updating with these specific symbols is old wine in new bottles.
In the "Update" section (written as an afterword), these things mostly resolved themselves in the way that they usually do: people tire of them, and then they move on with their life. (In this case: It may fizzle out like Beanie Babies.)
The author quotes a doctor (p.142) that suggests that the transgender craze will end in the court system, by patients suing doctors that "diagnosed"/disfigured them. (In that case: It will fizzle out in the same way as multiple personality disorder.)
In one case, the parents stopped financing it. (That's a tried-and-true way to stop such frivolity.) But that wasn't the majority of cases.
My preoccupation with getting bills paid and children bathed makes it such that: I myself do not suffer from any sense of futility, and so it's aggravating to have to even know about people that are so bored that they do. (If you want a working definition of "white privilege," folks, there you have it.)
And to that end, though moderately interesting, the 227 pages of this book are quite enough. (223 pages of prose@ 12 chapters works out to <19pps/chapter.)
Verdict: Recommended at the second hand price.
New words:
Metoidoplasty
Perseverate
Oophorectomy
Orichiectomy
Homosexual Transsexualism
Autogynephilic Transsexualism