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erinstewart 's review for:
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
by Abigail Shrier
Right wing backlash isn't really my thing. I only read this because I came across a free copy.
I was startled by the level of factual inaccuracies and disingenuous representation of research and "researchers" by this book. The PLOS one study she talks about, for example, surveyed parents whose teens had "suddenly" come out as trans (i.e. without a long period of gender dysphoria) and found that almost all the teens had suddenly come out as trans. Like, sample bias couldn't be a factor here? Another finding was that most had come out after an increase in internet use, so the author of this book (not the study's author) attributes coming out to internet contagion - "too much" trans content on the YouTubes or whatever (which the author refers to as "propoganda"). It reminds me a lot of parents attributing autism to vaccinations just because the ages of some vaccines and the age of onset of signs of autism tend to coincide. There's a whole big section on skeletal sexual dimorphism as though sex estimation of the skeleton is an exact science and not... an estimation. In fact skeletal differentiation is hard out of specific cultural contexts (certain activities have a masculinising effect on the skeleton) and age (being younger is feminising). The pelvis is most reliably dimorphic but not perfectly so - skeletons get graded on a continuum where "male" and "female" traits often overlap. The author also makes out the existence of intersex people as statistically negligible but that's 1-2% of the population.
I can't go through the factual issues one by one and others would be more qualified to do it, but my goodness! The stuff on "autogynophilia" is menorably problematic, and I'd refer those interested to a YouTube video by Contrapoints on the topic.
I think this is a moral panic. Points the author makes about the role of contagion when it comes to teens understanding themselves as trans could be fair I guess. There's not enough information to know. Especially when it comes off the bat of spurious associations and weird assumptions about biology. As well as the unquestioned feeling that transition is itself a bad thing.
The author has to contend with the fact that transition is demonstably good for some proportion of people (she thinks it's a small proportion). In order to accommodate this, she divides trans people into two groups, good trans (people who have had gender dysphoria their whole life, people who aren't proud of their identity and just want to pass) and bad trans (people who suddenly claim to be dysphoric despite no obvious signs in childhood or never were, people who don't seem to mind if they pass, people who transition because of social contagion). This is a very common strategy when arguing to take away rights. Think of the good abortion (because you'd die without one) versus the bad abortion (because you had sex). This is exactly how you go about making individuals jump through hoops to establish legitimacy before they assert any rights or get treated with respect.
The biggest problem for me was the lack of curiosity and empathy about what the teens the author talks about are going through. She interviews parents, and detransitioners, but not the teens themselves. Instead, the author just puts weird speculations about Tumblr in there. This lack of empathy seems sort of the author's point, one of her theories (based on nothing) is that teens become trans because their parents are too understanding so don't have anything to rebel against. Yikes.
I was startled by the level of factual inaccuracies and disingenuous representation of research and "researchers" by this book. The PLOS one study she talks about, for example, surveyed parents whose teens had "suddenly" come out as trans (i.e. without a long period of gender dysphoria) and found that almost all the teens had suddenly come out as trans. Like, sample bias couldn't be a factor here? Another finding was that most had come out after an increase in internet use, so the author of this book (not the study's author) attributes coming out to internet contagion - "too much" trans content on the YouTubes or whatever (which the author refers to as "propoganda"). It reminds me a lot of parents attributing autism to vaccinations just because the ages of some vaccines and the age of onset of signs of autism tend to coincide. There's a whole big section on skeletal sexual dimorphism as though sex estimation of the skeleton is an exact science and not... an estimation. In fact skeletal differentiation is hard out of specific cultural contexts (certain activities have a masculinising effect on the skeleton) and age (being younger is feminising). The pelvis is most reliably dimorphic but not perfectly so - skeletons get graded on a continuum where "male" and "female" traits often overlap. The author also makes out the existence of intersex people as statistically negligible but that's 1-2% of the population.
I can't go through the factual issues one by one and others would be more qualified to do it, but my goodness! The stuff on "autogynophilia" is menorably problematic, and I'd refer those interested to a YouTube video by Contrapoints on the topic.
I think this is a moral panic. Points the author makes about the role of contagion when it comes to teens understanding themselves as trans could be fair I guess. There's not enough information to know. Especially when it comes off the bat of spurious associations and weird assumptions about biology. As well as the unquestioned feeling that transition is itself a bad thing.
The author has to contend with the fact that transition is demonstably good for some proportion of people (she thinks it's a small proportion). In order to accommodate this, she divides trans people into two groups, good trans (people who have had gender dysphoria their whole life, people who aren't proud of their identity and just want to pass) and bad trans (people who suddenly claim to be dysphoric despite no obvious signs in childhood or never were, people who don't seem to mind if they pass, people who transition because of social contagion). This is a very common strategy when arguing to take away rights. Think of the good abortion (because you'd die without one) versus the bad abortion (because you had sex). This is exactly how you go about making individuals jump through hoops to establish legitimacy before they assert any rights or get treated with respect.
The biggest problem for me was the lack of curiosity and empathy about what the teens the author talks about are going through. She interviews parents, and detransitioners, but not the teens themselves. Instead, the author just puts weird speculations about Tumblr in there. This lack of empathy seems sort of the author's point, one of her theories (based on nothing) is that teens become trans because their parents are too understanding so don't have anything to rebel against. Yikes.