Perhaps I’m slow on the uptake. But somehow I’m just catching on that the latest tactic of the Left in the culture wars is to indoctrinate all the kids from K-20 in the latest insane piece of orthodoxy before letting the outside world, most particularly the parents, know what is going on. So, to use the example of the new racism going by the name “anti-racism” or Critical Race Theory, by the time you find Ibram Kendi’s “How To Be an Antiracist” on the shelf at your local bookstore, your kid has already without your knowledge undergone multiple years of instruction (if white) that s/he is an “oppressor” and a “systemic racist,” or (if black) that s/he is “oppressed” and a “victim.”

Is the same tactic pervasive in other areas? I had had some inklings that the ideology of transgenderism may be another such area, but I must admit that I hadn’t been paying that much attention. After all, what percentage of the population could this ideology apply to — maybe 0.1%? Then a few weeks ago I read a piece by Abigail Shrier at Bari Weiss’s Substack (“Top Trans Doctors Blow the Whistle on ‘Sloppy’ Care”), and I decided it was time to get Ms. Shrier’s book (“Irreversible Damage”) to learn some more about what is going on out there.

The short version is that we have what may have started as a perfectly reasonable request for respect for a group of people some of whom in the past have experienced ridicule or bullying. But over time the request became a campaign and and campaign fell into the hands of the most extreme activists and ideologues. These people recognize no limits on their demands, let alone any trade-offs in life generally, and are prepared to destroy all who get in their way.

So, in case you’re not au courant on this, here are some things from Ms. Shrier’s book to bring you up to date:

Internet “Influencers.” You or others in your family may use Facebook or its Instagram offshoot to share pictures or videos among a few tens or dozens of family and friends. That may seem quite benign and harmless. But are you familiar with the world of “influencers”? These are people who devote their lives to building up big followings and then exploiting the followers for some combination of making money and promoting some cause. In the transgenderism field, Ms. Shrier identifies numerous such “influencers” with followings in the hundreds of thousands at any point in time, who use their platforms to advocate to underage kids to declare themselves “trans” and to get going on the process of changing their gender. The influencers in the “trans” space start off with the advice that “if you think you might be trans, you are,” but it goes way beyond that. Many sites advise, for example, as to exactly what narratives to mouth to schools and to doctors to best convince them to give you puberty-blocking and then sex-changing drugs, and to keep it all from the parents (even when the kids are as young as 12 or 13).

The “Affirmation” Standard of Care. A key piece of the advocacy is demanding “affirmation” as the standard of care. What this means is that if a kid ever once says that s/he is “trans,” then from that point forward no one may question that proposition, and the only proper therapy is assisting and “affirming” the kid in the transition. The not small issue with this is that the process of gender transition involves drug regimens and surgeries that may be irreversible or only partially reversible. This is a major difference from the kid who announces “I’m gay.” As Shrier points out, in no other area involving potentially irreversible treatments would the self-diagnosis of a 13 year old be accepted as gospel. For example, if an anorexic 13 year old announces “I’m fat,” and demands liposuction to further reduce weight, no adult would just accept that without serious pushback. Similarly, if a kid announces that s/he is transracial, and wants surgery to change the appearance of her/his nose or lips or other body parts, that again would not just be taken as true.

Many schools are deeply involved in concealing information from parents. From Shrier, page 74:

The affirmation of trans-identified students is [thought to be] so essential to their welfare and safety . . . that it is the policy of . . . many public schools, including those in California, New York, and New Jersey, that when a trans-identified student “comes out” at school, the parents not be informed. In cases where the student claims to have unsupportive parents, as we have seen, school administrators and staff even go so far as to conceal the student’s newly announced identity from the parents, while surreptitiously changing the child’s name and pronouns on all school forms.

Shrier documents instances of underage kids getting put by schools and doctors onto regimens of puberty blockers and other serious life-altering drugs while the schools intentionally conceal what is going on from the parents.

The Teachers’ Unions specifically support the program of concealment from the parents. From Shrier, again at page 74:

[According to the NEA] . . . “[p]rivacy and confidentiality are critically important for transgender students who do not have supportive families. In those situations, even inadvertent disclosures could put the student in a potentially dangerous situation at home, so it is important to have a plan in place to help avoid mistakes or slip-ups.”

There is a concerted campaign to run out of the profession any therapists who dissent, even a little, from the “affirmation” standard of care. Shrier documents several instances. Most famously, a guy named Kenneth Zucker was psychologist-in-chief at Toronto’s Center for Addiction and Mental Health, where he ran a gender clinic for several decades. He was “universally recognized as an international expert on child and adolescent gender dysphoria.” (Page 123) However, he mostly declined to follow the regime of “affirmation” therapy, and instead often encouraged what is referred to as “watchful waiting” to see if the patients would simply grow out of their claimed dysphoria. Most did. Sometimes he recommended no therapy at all. In 2015 Ontario passed a statute banning “conversion therapy” for gender dysphoria. Activists came for Zucker, asserting that his practices constituted a form of “conversion therapy.” He was promptly fired. Shrier:

[T]o any mental health professional paying attention, the message was clear: Not even the most prominent members of their profession were safe from the activist mob. Get on board with “affirmative therapy” — or lose your job and maybe your license.

Overall, it’s a picture of one more area where the most crazed zealots have seized complete control and buffaloed nearly everyone into conformity.

There are a couple of areas where I would have liked to see some additional information from Shrier. Maybe the information is missing because it’s just impossible to get reliable information on these subjects, particularly since the topic has become so intensely politicized.

One question I have is, now that declaring a “trans” identity has become trendy for a teenager, what percentage do so? And how many of those then move on to puberty blockers and then to hormones and then to surgery? Shrier gives a figure of 0.1% of the population as having had gender dysphoria before the current craze, but doesn’t give a current percentage. Looking around the internet, I find figures as high as 3%, but those are from sources that look like advocates and not necessarily reliable. Still, at 3% of the population, this must be seen as a significant issue, whereas at 0.1% it would be much less so.

And then there is the question of how much of this is reversible if the patient changes his/her mind. To the extent that treatments are not reversible, it seems to me an enormous problem to let children under age 18 demand them and get them without so much as a rigorous cross-examination from any adult. Most of the surgical treatments — most commonly, a double mastectomy for a girl who wants to transition to boy — are clearly not reversible. And how about hormone therapy, most commonly testosterone for a girl transitioning to boy. Advocates claim that hormone therapy is substantially reversible. But testosterone at the minimum causes things like facial hair, change in musculature, and a deeper voice, that are not going to go away. And then there is the issue of fertility. Shrier cites several sources for the proposition that a woman who suppresses her ovulation for a substantial time by testosterone therapy is not likely to regain full fertility, if any at all, by stopping treatment. Looking around on the internet myself, I can find several sources (for example here) that at least partially take the other side, by for example giving instances of trans-men who have had babies after being on testosterone treatments for a long time. But that’s not the same as proof that the former woman has not lost a great deal of potential fertility.

As I noted in this post back in June, Shrier’s book has been subject to strenuous efforts at suppression. Just what is it about this transgenderism issue that makes any attempt to discuss it somehow wrongful?