Abigail Shrier: Taking on the trans lobby has made me Public Enemy No 1
It was 2019 when Abigail Shrier, the American journalist, first raised the alarm in an article for the Wall Street Journal about the harm the promotion of trans ideology was doing to young people, and particularly to teenage girls. The article went viral, as the problem – at least to anxious middle class parents – was beginning to feel urgent throughout liberal America.
At the time, despite statistics relating to teenage gender dysphoria every bit as terrifying as those across the pond, gender ideology was still considered a niche issue in Britain: a spat between a vocal, studenty fringe of the trans rights community, do-goody institutions like Scottish libraries and poetry programmes, and the tough-skinned feminists rolling up their sleeves to point out the madness.
Flash forward to the present, and the limits of gender-bending trans ideology have now been tested in sport, where trans women have competed, or tried to compete, against biological women, and in prisons and in hospitals, where there have been cases of rape by trans women of biological women. Earlier this month, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission had to issue guidelines making clear that biology matters in contexts such as competitive sport and hospital wards. Last week, even Rishi Sunak went public with his view that biology is “critically important” to policy – not exactly traditional territory for a chancellor.
But as the world continues to roil over trans women’s rights, that other trans battle rages on: the one concerned with the rising numbers of teenage girls suddenly appearing to suffer “rapid onset gender dysphoria”.
This corner of the trans war is arguably the gravest. The scale of the problem and its stakes were brought to public attention thanks in no small part to Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, the 2020 book Shrier wrote on the heels of her Wall Street Journal article.
It was a book whose publication was a shot heard round the Western world. It promptly made Shrier the American Left’s Public Enemy Number One. Target, the US retail chain, briefly stopped selling it for its allegedly transphobic content. An English professor at Berkeley called for a burning of the book – which, she later claimed on Twitter, she had meant ironically. The censorship storm went on. No major outlet would review it. Chase Strangio, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, which once defended Nazis’ rights to free speech in public, tweeted: “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100 per cent a hill I will die on”. The American Booksellers Association apologised for sending the book out in its July “white box” mailing, calling the decision “a serious, violent” incident. Amazon refused to advertise the book, and employees resigned over its decision to sell it at all (seemingly untroubled by the availability of Mein Kampf on the site).
In person, it’s hard to believe that Shrier is the author of such a cultural bogeyman – a book so harmful its very existence is deemed a violence. Shrier has invited me to lunch at a kosher cafe in Pico-Robertson, the Jewish area of her hometown that she describes as “the Golders Green of LA”, adding on her email that “the service is famously terrible, so they’ll leave us alone”.
To get there I make my way past yeshivas, synagogues and bagel shops on the slightly flyblown, empty-feeling West Pico Boulevard. Shrier, a strikingly attractive, petite orthodox Jewish woman is already there, bent over a laptop. With intense, laser-like blue eyes and an enveloping but frank way of speaking, she is clearly fiendishly bright: every bit the graduate of Columbia, Oxford and Yale Law School (her thesis at Oxford was on vagueness in the law).
Shrier orders her usual – a warm goat’s cheese salad – for both of us, and begins to talk about the toxic ironies of sexual culture in American schools, the main battleground of Irreversible Damage. In California, she says, children are introduced at a young age to “really sexually explicit material”. “But on the other hand,” she says, “you couldn’t do a better job of getting them to be completely creeped out by sex then introducing them to anal play and blood play in seventh grade.” I choke on a piece of goat’s cheese. Blood play?! (For those ignorant of the practice, it is sexual activity in which a participant is deliberately cut to release blood). “Yeah. Literally.” She is referring to the textbook S.E.X, subtitled “The All-You-Need-To-Know Sexuality Guide to Get You Through Your Teens and Twenties”, one of the books initially recommended as part of the teaching pack for high school students by California’s Board of Education, which includes information about blood play, among other things. “There was a huge fight, a protest,” says Shrier, who adds that, “by the way, the teachers still have [the book] on their shelves in California.”
As the subtitle of her own book makes clear, Shrier does not see the incredible rise in the numbers of teenage girls calling themselves trans as something natural or immutable, but as a social and cultural phenomenon. Historically, gender dysphoria, medically diagnosed, affected 0.01 per cent of the population, and almost only boys, beginning around ages two to four. Before 2012, Shrier writes, there was “no scientific literature on girls ages 11 to 21 ever having developed gender dysphoria at all”. But between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender surgeries on born females in the US quadrupled, vastly displacing those of boys. In the UK in 2018, there was a 4,400 per cent rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatments; in Canada, Sweden and Finland, girls have also far outpaced boys in claiming to be in the wrong bodies. Rapidly growing communities of adolescent girls keen on transitioning watch YouTube videos on how to bind their breasts, how to get hold of testosterone without parental approval and so on.
Central to Shrier’s argument and broader anxiety is the role of the state in all of this. Though progressive California, her home, is her focus, the tropes she describes are increasingly recognisable in Britain, too. She pinpoints the “activist teacher” – accompanied by an equally disturbing rise in the activist doctor and the activist therapist – seeking to grab an ever-greater share of influence over their charges.
Peering over her cappuccino, Shrier explains what she thinks is going on. “I mean [teachers are] a failed group, right? Nothing is worse than American public schools in terms of the results. Now does that mean every teacher’s bad? Of course not. I mean, I owe so much to my incredible teachers. But look at the public school teachers of America. I mean, if you look at Los Angeles County, at the number of students performing far below grade level, their product is spectacularly unimpressive. So if you’re going to evaluate teachers based on how well they’re teaching, they’re going to get a very bad grade. If you’re going to evaluate them based on how much they’ve become enlightened gurus to their students, yeah, well, maybe they can be successful, and that’s what they’re going for. They want to be gods to these children. They want to replace their families.”
Shrier says she doesn’t know whether teachers are as “messianic” in the UK as in the US, or whether “you have something similar or equally ridiculous” as, for instance, those who use TikTok to “share their pan-sexuality with their five-year-old.” I suggest that while some British primary schools have sunk so low as to foist on children lessons on the correct way to address non-binary people, it’s still not quite so bad … yet.
Shrier is troubled by this substitution of teacher for family, and tells me her next book will be about the leaning out – in some cases the pushing out – of parents from their children’s lives, the void where family values and a sense of duty used to be. “Some of the educators I interviewed in my book felt very proud of this [substitution]. They said, ‘look, we’ve become the family. I mean, we provide three meals a day, backpacks full of clothing. We’re now doing medical services on campus. We’ve been acting in loco parentis for years. So this is our prerogative.’ They really had a very entitled understanding in their role vis-a-vis families. I think that partly it’s that two-parent families, working families are extraordinarily dependent on the schools,” says Shrier, because, to state the obvious, parents need to work.
But parents of Shrier’s generation are also to blame, she thinks: they (she is 43) “abdicated all parental authority”. And into the vacuum of authority there “entered a lot of very bad actors, activists, psychologists, social workers … parents in my generation were so determined not to be authoritarians that they allowed other people to come in and fill that role in their children’s lives”. Shrier is clear that this is a tale of white liberal malaise, and the “drumbeat” of insistence by the woke on the widespread oppression of “trans black women, trans black women” is – according to a black pastor Shrier is friendly with – “actually an attempt to get the idea going, because in fact it has not made headway in black communities. This has been [mostly] a progressive, white upper middle class phenomenon,” she says.
Halfway through our meeting, her phone rings and it is another desperate parent. They were, like so many, begging Shrier for help with their suddenly gender-dysphoric and hostile teenage daughter.
“I’ve known people who’ve cut off their families and it’s so cruel to their parents, but I’ll tell you something,” she says. “I do think that [the kids] are often hurt the worst. I’ve now talked to easily over a thousand parents. And what these parents wake up every morning thinking about is their kids. And let me tell you, these kids get themselves into trouble and there are two people on Earth who will do anything for them, and it’s not the therapist who only sees them during certain hours for money. And it’s not their queer family or whatever, you know, the new family who only likes them if they agree with the activist agenda. It’s their actual family. And no, I don’t think that means every family is great and that you should never create distance” – especially where abuse is concerned.
But parents, maintains Shrier, are being punished for something quite different now. “Your parents take away your phone. They punish you. That’s [deemed] abusive. Your parents don’t agree with your new name and identity. So you turn around to them at 15 and you say, ‘Mom, you better call me this’, and if she doesn’t snap to? There are therapists who report the parents. There are social workers who report the parents for abuse. I’ve talked to them. I’ve seen the reports from social services: that’s abuse today, according to the activist class. Drawing any line with your teenager.”
With suicide held up as the possible consequence of parental pushback, some children realise their power, adds Shrier, “because they figure out real early, that’s a way to get everyone’s attention. And the problem is, these kids are troubled kids. They’re stressed out. You know, they’re bored and they have borderline personality disorder. They have a lot of stuff going on; they’re hormonal, and they figured out one way to really get back at Mom, which is tell [people] you’re suicidal.”
Shrier says that none of the many parents she has talked to are bigoted. Most of them are political progressives – but even the conservative parents “dream that their daughter would just be a lesbian and not have undergone all the scary physical changes. And they send me the photos. These girls are not prospering. I mean, you can see it in the pictures. They look … not well.”
Underpinning all this, Shrier thinks, is what appears to be a misogyny masquerading as enlightenment: essentially, girls are given the message they’re no good. When we first speak, it’s months before trans woman Lia Thomas will win at the National Collegiate Athletic Association swimming championships in March, a result that has roiled America, but Shrier sees it coming. “It’s an act of terrible vandalism to allow male [born] swimmers to destroy women’s swimming. We all know that.”
Are things still so terrible two months after the uproar following Thomas’s win? Shrier says in America the answer is yes. “I don’t think it has got better,” she told me over the phone last week. “We are more awake to it, maybe. But [the administration] came out [right after] and said that gender affirming surgery is potentially lifesaving for kids and that the justice department would go after anyone who tried to curtail it.” She points to a chilling executive order issued on March 8 by the White House that guaranteed “an educational environment free from discrimination on the basis of sex, including sexual orientation and identity”. Yet “identity” – namely what gender you choose to call yourself (say, a trans woman) – is not the same as sex, which is what you are (a woman). Once again, the needs of biological women are subsumed within the trans rights agenda.
Shrier is hopeful, adamant that this will be fought in the courts. “You’re seeing parents start to file lawsuits, which is what they need to do.” But she envies the robustness of British discourse. “I believe in the American people, I really do. I think there are a lot of reasonable people here, but obviously, Britain is in a better position. I mean, look at your feminists,” she says, referring to activist Julie Bindel, academic Kathleen Stock, author JK Rowling, and The Telegraph’s Suzanne Moore. “Wow, so impressive. We’re just … look at the difference.” While some similar women’s voices have emerged in the US recently, they remain outliers. Unlike in the UK, these women “have no institutional backing,” says Shrier. They are “completely alone”.
Two hours have passed, and Shrier insists on giving me a lift to the Tar Pits museum, a favourite of her family’s, where the prehistoric creatures of LA are preserved vividly. It’s all skeletons, all material reality, and as a counterpoint to the cultural mess we’re currently making of biology, I can more than see the appeal.
