Posted on 06/22/2021 1:29:57 PM PDT by DeweyCA
One hundred and forty-six people in Halifax, Nova Scotia wait on a list to borrow a library book. A question hangs over them: Will activists let them read it?
The book is mine — Irreversible Damage — and it is an investigation of a medical mystery: Why is the number of teenage girls requesting (and obtaining) gender reassignment skyrocketing in the United States, Canada, Scandinavia and Europe? In Great Britain, it’s up 4,400% over the last decade.
Though it shouldn’t be, this has become a highly controversial area of inquiry. The book is an exploration of why so many girls would, in such a short timeframe, decide they are transgender. And it raises questions about whether they’re getting appropriate medical treatment.
The book is not about whether trans people exist. They do. And it is not about adults who elect to medically transition genders. As I have stated endlessly in public interviews and in Senate testimony, I fully support medical transition for mature adults and believe that transgender individuals should live openly without fear or stigma.
Yet since publication, I have faced fierce opposition — not just to the ideas presented, challenged, or explored — but to the publication of the book itself. A top lawyer for the ACLU called for it to be banned. Powerful organizations like GLAAD have lobbied against it and pressured corporations — Target and Amazon among others — to remove Irreversible Damage from their virtual shelves.
There’s a pattern to such censorship campaigns. A fresh example presented itself this past week at Science-Based Medicine, which bills itself as “a group blog exploring issues and controversies in the relationship between science in medicine.”
On Tuesday, one of the blog’s long-time contributors, Dr. Harriet Hall — a family physician and flight surgeon in the Air Force with dozens of publications to her name — posted a favorable review of my book. She examined the scientific claims as well as the medical ones and wrote that the book “combines well-researched facts with horrifying stories about botched surgeries, people who later regret their choices and therapists who are not providing therapy but just validating their patient’s self-diagnosis.” Dr. Hall not only shared my criticisms of “affirmative care” — that is, immediately agreeing with a teen’s self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria and proceeding to hormones and surgeries — but also noted that many physicians and therapists feel the same way but are afraid to say so.
Within a day, Dr. Hall’s article was flooded with nearly 1,000 comments, mostly, she says, from activists demanding the article be stripped from the site, but also from some readers expressing their appreciation. Angry emails from activists swamped the blog’s editors. Within two days, those editors had given Dr. Hall an ultimatum: retract, rewrite, or allow them to add a disclaimer.
“What surprised me was that my fellow editors attacked me, too. Basically what they said was that my article was not up to my usual standards as far as medicine, science and critical thinking went. And I didn’t feel that I did anything but what I always do. That surprised me,” she told me. Considering the editors’ ultimatum, she elected to have the editors who disagreed add a disclaimer to the website. “I told them I did not want it retracted. And the next thing I knew, they had retracted it.”
Let that sink in: a book review by a respected physician was bullied out of existence in America.
Public figures who have watched the success of such campaigns — and they are now weekly if not daily — now know they risk their livelihoods by engaging heterodox views. Jordan Peterson, for example, chose to demonetize the interview we did on his YouTube channel to, in his words, “avoid attracting counterproductive attention by jackals who weaponize demonetization.”
It’s not only corporations facing this type of activist pressure. Public libraries now do, too.
Halifax Pride, the annual LGBTQ festival, announced late last month that it would cut ties with the city’s library system over its insistence on carrying Irreversible Damage, calling it “transphobic,” and claiming that it “jeopardizes the safety of trans youth” and “debates the existence of trans people.”
So far, the Halifax Public Libraries have resisted. Their position is straightforward and apolitical: libraries exist to expose the public to the widest array of views, “including those which may be regarded as unorthodox or unpopular with the majority.”
The Halifax Public Libraries tried to compromise with the activists by pasting a note inside the book’s cover, directing readers to a list of “trans-affirming” resources. But the activists were unappeased. No ties with the libraries were restored. They want the book gone from the library and scrubbed from existence. Two copies in a library of nearly 1.2 million volumes are two too many.
Not even the Nova Scotia Library Association or the Canadian Library Association has come to the library’s defense, though their standing orders explicitly require member libraries “to guarantee and facilitate access to all expressions of knowledge and intellectual activity, including those which some elements of society may consider to be unconventional, unpopular or unacceptable.”
Silent supporters stand alongside the Halifax Libraries. They sign up to borrow the book, now nearly 150 of them, and post supportive messages on Twitter usually under pseudonyms.They know that the activists waging this battle — over who gets to determine what we can read, what ideas adults are allowed to explore, will, at some point, come for ideas they favor, or causes they support.
But like too many individuals and institutions who try to hold fast to liberal values in the face of an intolerant and illiberal onslaught, the Halifax Libraries stand alone in the public square.
I know how they feel.
Half of Twitter seems to think I'm some sort of demon. But if you read my inbox, you’d think I was popular, awash as I am in secret fan mail and “silent supporter” notes.
Here is an entirely typical example — one of hundreds I’ve received over the last year:
Hi, Mrs. Shrier, I just wanted to drop you a quick note thanking you for your bravery. It might surprise you to know that I work for a prominent progressive politician (obviously I could never express my support for your work publicly). But it should be known that not everyone on the Left has totally lost their mind.
The author turned out to be a senior staffer for a popular 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. But the email itself was a version that I’ve come to expect: I agree with you, though I couldn’t possibly say so publicly. I have a job to think of, a reputation to uphold, children to put through college, a mortgage to pay, promotions to gun for, a spouse to please, friendships to maintain. All of the trappings of a comfortable life.
Child and adult psychologists and psychiatrists write to say they have witnessed a surge in transgender identification among teen girls who seem to be acting under peer and social media influence. Teachers write to say they believe that the phenomenon is plainly an example of social contagion within their classrooms. Surgeons and pediatricians and endocrinologists write to wonder aloud at what has happened to their profession.
There are lawyers who posit that lawsuits are on the way — brought by others, presumably. Professors who have come to hate their jobs — you can’t discuss your own research without trampling on a young generation’s vast neural network of sensitivities. Journalists at our most storied newspapers, TV networks, and literary magazines, even at NPR, write to tell me they liked my book, they agree with it, and to tut-tut the abuse directed at me. They assure me that the horrible accusations — from child predation to white supremacy and transphobia — accusations that will forever live on the internet, blackening my name, are things no one really believes. They wish — wish! — they could say so publicly. Each of these notes has touched or boosted me at times when I’ve needed it.
The fear these silent supporters express is rational. Even the most ordinary comments can get you branded as persona non grata, some flavor of ‘phobe’ or ‘ist.’ Hardly a week goes by without a story of some professor being reprimanded, a starlet losing a job, or a young reality TV figure abjectly apologizing for something he said that was completely obvious and true. Others have faced more profound threats — parents to the custody of their children, journalists and even editors of scientific journals to their physical safety. People I respect have lost livelihoods and marriages.
And so, for over a year, I responded to those silent supporters with thanks and reassurance. You don’t have to speak out, just send me your documents — I will expose it for you. No need to stand up for me publicly, just tell me what you know. For a while, this seemed a decent bargain.
But then, a few months ago, a pediatrician reached out to say that she also thought it was insane that minors were self-prescribing testosterone and that she agreed that her profession was negligent in unquestioningly “affirming” the sudden trans-identification of teenagers.
The standard response didn’t cut it this time. I wrote back as politely as I could: That’s just not good enough. You are a doctor. We aren’t the same with regard to medical scandals. I can continue to seek and publish the truth. I can interview experts and report what they’ve said. But you can appeal to your own authority. You took a Hippocratic oath. If you see young patients in harm’s way, you have an obligation to do something.
The same is true for other professions. If you are a teacher, you entered the profession in order to expand young minds. If you are watching them being warped, it’s your responsibility to fight that. If you are a journalist witnessing lies being spread by your colleagues, it’s your responsibility to stand up for truth. If you are a professor, watching your colleagues being bullied — a med school professor watching hokum being peddled as fact, a scientist watching the corruption of research — there’s no one else to speak up but you.
Each of us knows this in theory. But why do so few oppose the pressure, lies, and the corrupting force of these bullying campaigns?
The silent supporters have each performed the same risk-benefit calculation and arrived at the same conclusion: Speaking up isn’t worth it. It could cost a job, reputation, peace and friends — it requires the assumption of risk and a willingness to sacrifice.
And it is easy to justify our silence. We tell ourselves that we are protecting our families by remaining quiet and in the short-term, and we may be. But we are also handing our children over to a culture in which freedom of conscience and expression are drowned out. We are teaching our children that truth shouldn’t be our primary concern — or at least, that truth is negotiable or subordinate to being agreeable. They are learning that it is more important to remain acceptable to the powerful than to be truly free.
Whether or not most people admit it, what keeps them from speaking up in the face of what they know is wrong is fear. Fear not primarily of unemployment, though that is a pressing concern, but fear of ostracism. This deep and ancient fear is behind our desperate reach for innocence and safety when we virtue signal. By contrast, we stand exposed when we speak unpopular truth. Within your tribe, there will be people who pull away from you, and if you think well of them — and sadly, even if you don’t — this causes pain.
The pain is measurable and real, as Professor Kip Williams, an expert on ostracism, told me: “When people say their feelings are hurt, or they're feeling heartbroken, or they're feeling punched in the gut because of what their partner did, then you think its a metaphor. But in fact, it's the same feeling physiologically. You're having the same effects. And the brain detects it as pain.” We feel real physical pain at being cast out by a social group.
So terrible is this fear and this pain that in ancient Rome, a person sentenced to death could opt for exile instead. The Romans understood that ostracism was a punishment as bad as death.
What can make it bearable? According to Professor Williams, getting yourself accepted by another group. This is also the way to confront most of life’s heartaches — surrounded by those you love. And there is no better way to gain respect from those you don’t already know than by being identified with truthfulness.
Fear of ostracism is rational. But we are now living in a world in which evolutionary biologists are threatened with losing their platforms for engaging in debate about the source and treatment of a deadly virus; in which prize-winning composers have been professionally ruined for saying arson is bad; in which authors are editing already-published books to placate online mobs. That should scare us far more than losing friends or status.
So look to the Halifax Library. Summon what faith you can in those things you know to be right and true: a person is not defined by her race; biological sex is real; scientific research requires ideologically unencumbered investigation; activists shouldn’t bully libraries; and books should not be banned.
The first hundred or so silent supporter emails meant the most to me. They made me feel less crazy and less alone. But the inescapable reality is that defeating this ideology will take courage. And courage is not something that can happen in private. Courage requires each one of us to speak up, publicly, for what we believe in. Even when — especially when — it carries costs.
Regards,
Hang on to your photocopier/printers.
You might have to become desktop publishers for real.
In this case, the author is talking about genuine girls.
Censorship, official suppression, and “book burning” will lead to the rise of an underground “Samizdat” press. The more censorship is enacted, the wider and greater the underground press will become. It is self evident, and it is a portend of things to come.
I have read this book. It is well-researched with a valid hypothesis - are young, adolescent females, facing the physical, psychological, and social changes that come with puberty, more susceptible to the “escape” of adopting the trans persona?
Maturing as a woman is difficult. One's body changes. Breasts and hips, menstruation, sexual advances, etc. These young women seek less to become “males” as they seek to not become women (yet). Puberty-delaying drugs can help. Testosterone is an especially powerful drug - stops menstruation, stops hips from widening, stops breasts from developing. Stops that confusing estrogen stuff. If you don't develop mature female attributes (or have them sexually removed) you won't get the sexual attention you're not ready for. Add to that that it's currently “cool” to identify as trans - what adolescent girl doesn't want more social affirmation? Doctors and therapists can't help them address their actual problems, and in some states, neither can parents.
The book focuses on this population - extremely susceptible adolescent females - but makes no other judgments about the whole trans movement. It is a good read - if you can find it.
“The book is not about whether trans people exist. They do. And it is not about adults who elect to medically transition genders. As I have stated endlessly in public interviews and in Senate testimony, I fully support medical transition for mature adults and believe that transgender individuals should live openly without fear or stigma.”
The author is wrong. There is no such thing as a boy becoming a girl or visa versa. There are certainly people mentally ill enough to think that’s happening or to wish it upon themselves - but that doesn’t make it real.
The author has his head so far up his liberal ass that burning his book would be doing everyone a favor.
That adolescent girl are being pressured to “transition” into psuedo “boys” is verification that the whole transgender movement is based on hatred of women; notice how women are being diminished, i.e., mothers are called “birthing people” and “menustrators.”
She is referring to teenage girls who transition to become boys. This has been a popular new fad for the past 10 years.
I agree, two sexes is all there is. Everything else is a mutation/birth defect or a mental disorder. I don’t care what adults do with their bodies and their own money. What I do care about is people under the age of 21, and using public funds do. Yes, 21 years should be the new age of maturity. The 18-20 year olds I see are just kids, it is the way they are raised.
yes the author finally gets it, regarding her “anonymous supporters.” the key word is authority. the word authority creates responsibility, and to willfully shirk responsibility is a sin. no two ways about it.
we got too many self-rationalizing, self-censoring, risk averse people completely hiding on our side. they have got to step up. and yes, you can can do it in ways to protect yourself, and you can be smart and use good judgement, but you’ve got to do it. and yes, it’s going to cost. it even possible that you’ll pay the ultimate cost this side of Heaven, but Heaven is more, far more, than worth it. that’s God’s promise.
or “his.” not sure of the sex of the author.
Thanks for the clarification, Parity!
Thanks also for the excellent summarization!
Regards,
They are going through puberty which is not a comfortable for a girl.
You start growing breasts, you menstruate which is messy and painful, your emotions go crazy, your smell changes, even your center of gravity changes.
It gets better with time. Your body adjusts and your emotions settle and you learn to deal with it and even find advantages.
But when it starts you can feel like an alien in your own body.
And that is when they tell you that feeling that way means you are a boy trapped in a girl body. And they will give you stuff that will make you feel more normal.
And it does... for a while.
Doctors, therapist and physiologist are not able to tell you that you might be making a mistake, they can only affirm.
Your parents can do nothing and may even lose custody if they oppose you taking the blockers.
And by the time you realize you made a mistake you are sterile, you might never be able to have normal sexual pleasure or even any and that is without even having the surgery that will really mess you up.
Yeah, it's not a breeze, like it is for boys going through puberty!
Puberty is just one, long picnic for boys! No funny physical changes... no additional social pressures... no new societal expectations...no psychological stresses.
Regards,
Apparently my explaining what the book was about offended you in some way.
Taking everything personally and playing the victim card used to be a liberal trait.
No, wasn't at all offended - just slightly annoyed by the one-sidedness of your reply. So thought that it would not be "disproportionate" to respond with a slightly snarky comment pointing out that boys also have it rough.
Taking everything personally and playing the victim card used to be a liberal trait.
"Playing the victim card?!" Re-read my original reply. I was being SNARKY.
Regards,
It was not one sided.
That is what the book is about, girls being pressured into sexual mutilation because they are uncomfortable with puberty.
Take it up with the author that she is not giving equal time to boys despite the fact they do not seem to be the focus in this case. Not every problem hits everybody and everywhere equally.
"Playing the victim card?!" Re-read my original reply. I was being SNARKY.
And if that is what you need to believe.
But from this side it sounded exactly like that lunatic female who whined that saying "Hey Guys" to a mixed group was sexist or some such nonsense.
Some girls deal with this by developing an eating disorder instead.
Harmless Teddy Bear: And if that is what you need to believe.
Sorry, HTB, didn't realize that you were telepathic / had a degree in Psychology, and could thus divine my true thoughts and motivations.
Harmless Teddy Bear: But from this side it sounded exactly like that lunatic female who whined that saying "Hey Guys" to a mixed group was sexist or some such nonsense.
Would you also take issue with someone saying "ALL lives matter?"
Regards,
BTW: I would never say "guys" in addressing a mixed group - but that's just because I respect the Fairer Sex and also the integrity of the English language.
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