Thoughts on Irreversible Damage
Do not move the ancient landmark that your fathers have set.
I finished Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier last night. I initially picked it up after seeing her make the rounds on more than one podcast I frequent. Hearing the story on those interviews convinced me that this was one to add to the reading list. Of course, I had multiple other titles stacked up in line before it, so it took me a while to even crack it open.
Well, crack it open I eventually did. It was certainly worthwhile.
Chapter Zero
One thing that had already been clear to me even before purchasing the book was how much controversy Ms. Shrier had brought upon herself simply by virtue of the subject matter. Perhaps the strength of my curiosity would have been less if I hadn’t known about the Target debacle (and indeed, a couple of cursory Google and Target searches this morning confirm that the book has once more disappeared from Target’s site). Good old Streisand Effect at work.
The first pages contain much context and qualification. The scope of the book is actually quite restricted to a very specific subset of the larger “trans issue.” It does not seek to address transgenderism as a whole; merely the recent, disproportionate, and memetic expression of it in young girls. For some, the qualification which might seem excessive in a more sensible cultural context, will still not suffice to quell accusations of bigotry (helping to perpetuate many of the problems the book describes). Actually, the mere suggestion that any group is not monolithic already puts one on dangerous rhetorical ground.
Easy/Tough to Swallow
Irreversible Damage is a tornado of tough topics discussed through extremely compelling stories. I hesitate to say it is a difficult read just as I hesitate to say it’s an easy one. The truth is: it is both at once.
On the one hand, I regularly found myself angered and saddened by the experiences relayed in every chapter. It was common for me to take a moment to physically look up from the page and think about some observation or tragic account I’d just read. If you can make it through the whole thing and not measure the slightest emotional impact, I guess you are stronger than I am. And by the way, I do not consider myself easily given to emotion.
On the other hand, the writing itself is smooth and thus easy to follow even through even the relatively thorny subject matter. The language used is always clear, even beautiful (not an expectation I held for this book by any means). It is almost as if Abigail Shrier has been writing professionally for a while.
Another author may not have been able to hold my attention simply because of the (again) extremely difficult topics. Yet I found myself unable to stop reading through the back third or so of the book in one shot, right up until bedtime. In fact, I almost booted up my computer to begin jotting down these thoughts immediately after I closed the finished book (I ultimately decided to hold off until better-caffeinated this morning). It’s obvious that great care was taken in the writing and editing to allow as many readers as possible to grasp the terrible realities depicted.
Mark me here: it is not trivial to convey information of this depth and impact in a way that is readily parsed by a wide audience. I believe Ms. Shrier has succeeded in doing so.
“Agenda”
Besides the overall readability, something else obvious to me as I read the book was that it must have been written by someone accustomed to doing a lot of research and representing otherwise-unheard voices. That is to say, a real journalist, and not what we have come to expect in much of modern news media/reporting.
Ms. Shrier is careful to represent a wide range of positions and perspectives via interviews and quotations, including many who consider themselves a part of or friendly to the transgender community. The analysis is multivariate, never pointing a finger at one sole cause or source of blame for the suffering documented through the stories told. Again, this level of qualification and nuance will never be enough for some, but there is no point chasing such impossibility.
This is not to say the book fails to come down decisively on the matter with a lament for how far we have gone in such a short time. But those accusing the book of merely having a transphobic axe to grind betray that they have apparently not actually read much of it.
A Book for Parents
I noticed a word at the bottom of the back cover as I finished and closed up my copy: “Parenting.” Too simple a categorical label, maybe. I don’t think Irreversible Damage necessarily seeks to be a “parenting” book per se. But I cannot deny the strong presence of parents’ struggles and experiences as perhaps the skeleton of the whole book.
If there is an “Agenda” to be seen in the book, it is surely that of equipping concerned (or worse, naive) parents to navigate this issue in the face of increasingly captured institutions which are not on their side: schools, universities, health care systems, and of course social media.
I am not a parent myself, or else I might be even more sobered by reading through than I already have been.
Elephants
The value of Irreversible Damage is not actually unique, though it is precious. It is the willingness to point out the emperor in the room, that the elephant has no clothes.
…Wait. Flip that.
You take my point anyway. There are potentially broad social and professional consequences for a writer on this topic. And yet I do see a growing counterculture ready to risk it. For that reason alone, the building of momentum, the ideas implicitly (and often explicitly) present in Irreversible damage are valuable: we can’t simply tiptoe around this stuff anymore.
The book ends with a call to courage for both parents and troubled teenage girls who might be worried that they are “in too deep.”
But I think the call to courage is broadly applicable to a variety of other conversations as well. The “elephant in the room” question for me is this: “what other social phenomona could be examined with the formidable approach Abigail Shrier takes, and what similarly disturbing signals and results discovered?”