Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier has become one of the most celebrated books among anti-trans advocates for its popular and accessible repackaging of their movement’s current master narrative: that trans youth and young adults who come out are largely confused cis youth, mostly assigned female, adopting an inaccurate identity under the malign influence of social contacts, media, and culture. Its central arguments are founded on bad information. The supposedly “epidemic” growth in the population of trans youth constitutes an extremely small share of all youth, and may even represent underrecognition and undertreatment of trans youth. The proposed hypothesis for contagious spread of trans identity in youth, “rapid onset gender dysphoria”, is likely the result of an illusion created by the methodological choice to theorize based only on parents’ external perceptions of another’s onset of gender dysphoria; this shortcoming was later corrected by interviewing trans youth, with substantially different findings on this “rapidity”.
The main thrust of Irreversible Damage is to foment existing discomfort and panic among conservatives about “protecting” “their” “women and children” on the basis of this very thin evidence. Scientific misfires like “rapid onset gender dysphoria” are offered up as justification for political and personal sentiments that would persist anyway: the opposition to recognizing the authenticity and basic equality of trans people, and the belief that trans people are ambassadors of an unnatural and threatening social disease that must be met with hostile suppression. The pseudoscientific narrative dresses these positions in a pretense of respectability, as something a reasonable person could believe.
But there’s also a series of statements in Shrier’s book that have nothing to do with subtleties of statistics, demographics, or methodology. Instead, this appears to be a far more straightforward matter of factual findings. Shrier suggests repeatedly that trans men taking testosterone will experience an increased risk of endometrial, ovarian, or other reproductive cancer due to this transition treatment. However, existing literature on trans men using testosterone indicates that they do not face any higher risk of cancers at all. Continue reading
Have you ever looked at an object and forgotten what it was called? Maybe you’ve been in the produce section of a grocery store, standing in front of the pineapples and found yourself thinking “Banana? Mango?” I have. In fact, as a stroke survivor and anxiety/depression sufferer, these moments occur more often than I’d like to admit. Sometimes, alternative suggestions don’t even come up. I can stare at an ordinary object for a full minute without a single clue as to what it’s called. I can say from experience that the seconds in that minute are very, very long as the situation gradually transforms from a humorous anecdote to an inconvenience to something I might Google later and finally something I know I need to talk to my doctor about. I often wonder: Do I not have the words at all? Will they come back? Will I be okay or will I eventually lose my ability to work and function in society altogether? 
