Why Abigail Shrier Took on the Transgender Craze Amongst Teenage Girls

 

I remember seeing the full podcast of this last year, and the part that has stayed with me the most is where she says:

“When [Dr] Lisa Littman looked at the [transgender] prevalence rate she found that it's 70 times what we would expect within a friend group, which means it's highly concentrated in groups of friends... we wouldn't expect that if it were randomly distributed among the population.

“If we’re just reverting to normal, now that there’s greater societal acceptance... if we’re just reverting to a normal base rate of transgender women, where are all the women in their 40s and 60s coming out as trans? They should be coming out! Now’s their time! We should see tons of women in their 40s and 60s and so on coming out as transgender. We’re not seeing that: we’re seeing the same population that gets involved in cutting... anorexia, bulimia... and convinces themselves there’s a problem”.

In Britain there has been a four thousand percent increase in teenagers identifying as transgender the past decade, and three-quarters of those referred for gender treatment are girls.

Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier

 When I think back to my own high school years in the 1990s, no one came out  as  “trans.”  And until the last five years, that is precisely what the statistics for gender dysphoria would have predicted. Somewhere around .01 percent of the population means that you probably didn't go to high school with anyone who was "trans" either.

But that didn't mean that girls were a monolith, or that we all expressed girlishness in the same way.

I had been a "tomboy", which basically meant I excelled at sports and  preferred the comparatively straightforward company of boys. Friendship with girls so often seemed unnervingly like breaking into a bank vault, all those invisible lasers shooting every which way, triggering alarms of sudden offense.

But there is no such thing as a "tomboy" anymore, as any teenage girl will tell you. In its place is an endless litany of sexual and gender identities - public, rigid and confining. As sixteen-year-old Riley, a young woman who began identifying as a boy at thirteen, put it to me:

“I think being a masculine girl today is hard because they don’t exist. They transition.” Transition, that is—to boys.

Years after my high school graduation, some of us who had dated the cutest boys  would  come  out  as  gay.  Others we might have silently suspected of being gay turned out not to be.  None of us then felt pressured to make any identity decisions we couldn’t easily take back.

Teens and tweens today are everywhere pressed to locate themselves on a gender spectrum and within a sexuality taxonomy—long before they have finished the sexual development that would otherwise guide discovery of who they are and what they desire. Long before they my have had any romantic or sexual experience at all. Young women judged insufficiently feminine by their peers are today asked outright, "Are you trans?"

Many of the girls now being cornered into a trans identity might, in an  earlier era,  have  come  out  as  gay.  “You’ve  got a  situation  where young lesbians are being pressured if they don’t give into this new idea of what it is to be a lesbian,” prominent gay writer Julia D. Robertson told me. That “new idea” is that lesbians do not exist: girls with more masculine presentations are “really” boys.

Some adolescents today do identify as lesbian, but it’s hard to miss that this identity has considerably less cachet than being trans. Riley told me that fifteen students in her British all-girls' school of five hundred have come out as transgender. "How many girls are lesbian?" I asked her. She thought about it for a moment, and I watched her be surprised by the answer: "None," she said. 

 - from “Irreversible Damage” by Abigail Shrier (Swift Press, 2020)

To defeat woke tyrants, the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are

By Glenn H. Reynolds

Most Americans hate woke politics — and most minorities don’t share “woke” priorities. Indeed, according to pollster David Shor, woke excesses are causing black voters to flee the Democratic Party. Despite endless charges of “racism,” former President Donald Trump took the biggest share of minority voters of any Republican in my lifetime.  

Woke tyrants ride high, even so; according to a Cato/YouGov poll, 62 percent of Americans self-censor their political expression. Only a tiny minority of consumers care about Mr. Potato Head’s toxic masculinity, about “Aunt Jemima” as a brand or about the #MeToo aggressions of Pepé Le Pew. Yet corporations, universities and governments rush to placate that minuscule slice of the population, trashing large chunks of our culture in the process.

It’s happening not because anybody voted for it, but because a small but determined and vicious minority is bullying people to go along, relying on cowardice and groupthink to achieve ends that could never happen via majority vote: How do you think Dr. Seuss would have done in a referendum?

How does this happen? To some degree, the woke abuse the good nature of Americans. For the most part, Americans want their fellow citizens to be happy. If they hear something makes others unhappy, they generously look to change things.

And there’s fear. Writing about the goings-on at New York’s Dalton School, Bari Weiss notes that even parents who think the political correctness has gone too far are afraid to speak out: They think their kids’ shot at the Ivy League could be at risk. And it’s not just Dalton.

Weiss quotes one mother: “I look at the public school, and I am equally mortified. I can’t believe what they are doing to everybody. I’m too afraid. I’m too afraid to speak too loudly. I feel cowardly. I just make little waves.” Another says: “It’s fear of retribution. Would it cause our daughter to be ostracized? Would it cause people to ostracize us? It already has.”

In his book “Skin in the Game,” Nicholas Nassim Taleb writes about the surprising ability of small but intransigent minorities — 3 percent to 4 percent is enough — to change the direction of entire societies. He writes: “The most intolerant wins. . . . Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. . . . [I]t will eventually destroy our world. So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities.”

Does this mean we should be less tolerant of our own minoritarian tyrants? In a word, yes.

I don’t mean that they should be forced into camps, or even driven from their jobs and from polite society, as the woke are all too willing to do to their opponents. But they need to be deprived of the thing that is most important to their self-image: moral credibility.

The woke think of themselves — and want everyone else to think of them — as deeply moral. If they have a flaw, it’s that they just care too much. They’re too idealistic, too empathetic, too eager to make the world a better place.

That’s bulls–t (pardon my French, Pepé!). If you look at what they do, rather than what they say about themselves, it quickly becomes obvious that the woke are horrible, awful people, and they should be treated as such and reminded of this whenever they raise their head.

Historically, it’s not the good guys who are out burning books and censoring speech. It isn’t the caring, empathetic people who try to destroy lives based on something someone said years ago, often while young, often taken out of context. It isn’t the good guys who take undisguised glee at the ruining of lives, families and careers.

You know who does these things? Horrible, awful people. Selfish people. People with serious mental and emotional problems who seek some sort of vindication for their deficient characters by taking power trips while imposing suffering on others.

Treat these tyrants as what they are: awful people who shouldn’t be listened to and who need to work hard on joining the better half of the human race. And remind them of it, over and over. Because it’s true. Deep down, they know it, too.

___________________

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.

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