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

"Courage is a rare trait. Abigail Shrier has it in abundance."

"Such evasion can be just the thing that gives the majority an excuse to look away from the suffering of our fellow human beings."

"Thoroughly researched and beautifully written."

"The product is a work brimming with compassion for a vulnerable subset of our population: teenage girls."

"Writing honestly about a difficult and vital topic, Shrier compassionately analyzes the evidence."

"Unlike so many of the currently woke, Abigail Shrier sees clearly what is in front of our faces and is brave enough to name it."

"Biology—not hyper-feminized stereotypes—is what makes someone a woman."

"You’re talking about someone else’s body and their career. You’re going to hurt them."

"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."

"There is no such thing as a 'tomboy' anymore, as any teenage girl will tell you."

"Adolescents today do identify as lesbian, but it’s hard to miss that this identity has considerably less cachet than being trans."

"Puberty is a trial for anyone, perhaps girls especially."

"No debut so immediately captures the interest of boys and men as the arrival of breasts."

"They know every variant on gender identity, from 'non-binary' and 'gender fluid,' to 'two spirit' and 'transgender'—they may have even learned these at school, from a teacher."

"The rush it gives them, the thrill at the 'happy trail' of dark hair appearing on their bellies, the dissipation—they insist—of all social anxiety."

"The role of schools has changed. Technically, we are an educational institution, right? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. Technically, that’s what we are. But schools have expanded to be the hub for a lot more social services and looking more holistically, emotionally, at what’s going on with children. Looking at schools as a source of social justice. Our role continues to expand. The outreach now is profound."

"The reasons that a lot of teachers are hesitant to address LGBTQ issues in the schools is because they’re worried about what the parents might say. And the parents do call up and they complain and they’re upset. Yes, we serve the community, but in some places, we have to lead the community."

"They might then be surprised to learn that that is precisely how schoolchildren across America are increasingly being taught to see them: on the female side of the spectrum, perhaps, but not entirely female."

"The more incredible a woman is, the more barriers she busts through, the more 'gender nonconforming' she is deemed to be. In this perverse schema, by definition, the more amazing a woman is, the less she counts as a woman."

"Faced with a heaping buffet of gender identities to choose from, it's hard to imagine everyone isn't at least a little bit something."

"By excelling at math or wrestling or physics, she is necessarily challenging the gender binary."

"This is how gender ideology is taught in schools: with the materials, curricula, speakers, and teacher training supplied by gender activists."

"Imagine if anti-vaxxer groups were brought in to speak to students, asked to provide materials for health class, allowed to present their own versions of science."

"The gender literature is vast, full of dogmatic insistence and gentle prodding: Where do you fit on the gender spectrum?"

"No one seems to notice that at least one of the reasons gender stereotypes are reinforced in school is because educators are actively teaching them."

"The last tenet of gender ideology that Who Are You? presents is a child’s feelings as an infallible indicator of gender: 'You are who you say you are, because YOU know best.'"

"What is the cumulative effect of all of this LGBTQ education? 'I think what it does is it normalizes us.'"

"But it does something else, too. It encourages adolescents to focus relentlessly on their own gender identities and sexual orientations."

"How did educators and activists manage to mainstream a radical view of gender through the schools? Like so many successful sales, this one was facilitated by irresistible packaging: anti-bullying."

"The proof is simply how bullying would be handled in any other context. If a Thai kid were being picked on... the teacher would simply say: 'Knock it off. We don’t treat people that way.'"

"But instead 'bullying' is used as an excuse for a thorough indoctrination in gender ideology."

"I used to think association guidelines were based upon consensus or experts, I just don’t believe anything anymore."

"This is so common an experience that it hardly seems worthy of mention—as inseparable from adolescent girlhood as braces and training bras."

"What Angela was content to dismiss as a meaningless phase in herself became evidence of an outré sexual identity in her daughter."

"We are, all of us, so quick to diagnose ourselves in every way—including sexually and, now, in gender terms; it is a habit the next generation has picked up."

"She thinks she looks like a guy, she’s got the hair on her arms and everything, but she’s beautiful."

"She was the person he loved most in the world. She had broken his heart."

"My belief has always been, if I loved her enough, she wouldn’t do this."

"When we construe normal feelings as illness, we offer people an understanding of themselves as disordered."

"You don’t want your child to hang ‘himself’ in the garage just because you accidentally referred to her as ‘Rebecca.’"

"The therapist must agree, in other words, that a male patient with gender dysphoria who identifies as a woman really is a woman."

"We are, by nature, social animals—as Aristotle once observed. We absorb ideas about ourselves from our surroundings more often than we realize and more deeply than we know."

"Once you’ve been insisting to everyone that you’re one thing, it isn’t easy to announce to all your friends, classmates, acquaintances, teachers, and family that you might have made a mistake and change your mind."

"Social transition is not nothing; it is, in fact, an extremely potent and consequential act."

"If we attend a school or live in a family in which we are made to feel stupid or told we are, some number of us will come to believe it."

"The artifice worked, and the girl survived. Many years later... she had managed to be both and neither, never entirely fitting in with either community."

"The Jewish girl who survived the Holocaust emerged as a woman with no natural community, no home, no family—and no idea who she was."

"What had been stolen from her left no physical trace, but the psychological lacerations were profound; her identity had been eroded by the deceptions of a mind that had finally managed to fool itself."

"If a boy is placed in a school in which the other boys tease him for being gay, he may come to internalize their homophobia. He may turn his anger inward, at himself."

"The entire issue of gender dysphoria ought to be a matter of evidence. Rigorous empirical study should guide diagnosis, understanding, and treatment."

"It's essentially emotional blackmail. It’s being used to force parents’ hands to do something that they don’t feel comfortable with."

"Insisting that an adolescent who doesn’t transition is likely to kill herself—that notion can also easily fall into the symptom pool, too."

"When you tell a group of highly suggestible adolescent females that if they don’t get a certain thing, they’re going to feel suicidal, that’s suggestion, and then you’re actually spreading suicide contagion."

"You cannot let yourself imagine that it might be a mistake because then you’d have to accept that you’ve been participating in something truly awful."

"No amount of subtracted weight will deliver the bodily comfort the anorexic seeks because her weight was never the real problem."

"The medical profession should never have flung open the gates of surgery merely to appease a clamoring public."

"We have entered a 'transgender moment,' as CNN called it in 2015—or perhaps the transgender moment has barreled into us."

"Of all of these badges of victim status, the only one that you can actually choose is 'trans.'"

"A girl’s body begins to feel less alien to her. If she is not pressured to share it too early, she will learn to wield it with pleasure."

"All who had known her at the start of college would find her unrecognizable by junior year."

"Sufferers of gender dysphoria can find their bodies endlessly distressing."

"There is no natural end to the series of medical treatments that call themselves remedies."

"Like freezing your eggs, blocking puberty is presented as simply allowing a young woman to put nature on hold while keeping her options open."

"Imagine you’re a fifteen-year-old girl. But unlike all of your friends, you have no pubic hair; you’ve never had a period; you have no breasts; you’ve never experienced orgasm."

"Testosterone suppresses anxiety and even lifts depression."

"Testosterone makes young women bold and unafraid."

"Taking testosterone is the best decision I’ve ever made. I’m so happy within myself."

"If you want to become a man, you have to expect being strong like one, horny like one, and, yes, prone to a heart attack like one."

"The greatest thrill of all may be that of disguise."

"If there is any way on earth to alleviate your gender dysphoria without phalloplasty, it’d probably be a good idea to pursue the alternative."

"But what they may be treating is anxiety and depression; most have battled one or both."

"I think it helped me dissociate from the person my parents thought I was or the person I was expected to be within my family."

"They tell you that you cannot emotionally or psychologically depend on your family or any cis-hets cisgenderheterosexualscisgender heterosexualscisgenderheterosexuals or non-queer people because they can’t possibly understand you or empathize with you or love you for who you really are."

"My parents had to seriously drag me out of bed to get me in the shower."

"But instead of providing a sense of well-being, Benji’s trans identification and embrace of gender ideology increased her gender dysphoria and her depression."

"Online shaming—she says—is pervasive in the gender ideology world, and a key mechanism for controlling the behavior of the suddenly trans-identified."

"Gender dysphoria, she decided, did not necessarily make her 'trans.'"

"There are varying degrees of dysphoria, but there are not varying degrees of treatment."

"He was like, ‘I’m literally going to die if I don’t have this medical procedure,’ and he was like, ‘Why would you put yourself in the position to be like under the knife and under anesthesia and with like all these possible complications when you’re not literally going to die from having breasts?'"

"It’s possible to live a transgender life, if that’s what feels right. But it’s also possible to have thought you should, only to decide you were wrong."

"Each day, we awaken to a miracle: another chance to try again. To ask forgiveness. To call our moms. To go just a little easier on ourselves."

"Our true sexuality is not an identity we choose online, but a feeling of attraction that emerges and even evolves over time."

"Teenagers are supposed to get angry and emotional. Parents are supposed to set limits."

"Your teenager may tell you she hates you; she may even believe it. But on a deeper level, some of her need for individuation and rebellion may be satisfied."

"Treatment centers may help those with eating disorders to recover, but they can also provide opportunities for behavior modeling and foster unconscious competition over the worst symptoms, making everyone worse off."

"Quit the habit of sharing every part of your lives (and theirs) on the internet."

"Adolescence is especially hard on girls. Effervescent with emotion, they buck and bray like wild horses."

"Being a woman is a gift, containing far too many joys to pass up."

"The life’s vigil begun at the moment of your birth turns out to be rather hard to quit."

"They held your wriggling form through every shot and stitch, and spent more nights than anyone can remember listening to the uneven flow of your breath."

"Identifying in any way is optional, it's personal, and it's subject to change."

"It's really important to acknowledge the uncertainty that comes with transitioning."

"While top surgery lessened his dysphoria about his breasts, it actually increased his dysphoria about his lack of a bulge in his pants."

"Acknowledging one's true self can significantly influence one's happiness and overall well-being."

"The effects of blocking puberty on brain development and cognition in gender dysphoric youths still lack conclusive studies."

"Access to puberty blockers during adolescence is associated with lower odds of transgender young adults considering suicide."

"From all behavioral parameters, anxiety seems to be most sensitive to testosterone."

"Puberty is a cornerstone of development, and interrupting this natural process can have profound impacts on an individual's future health and identity."