#abigail shrier

[our-queer-experience]

actually its insane how much modern transandrophobic rhetoric lisa littman is responsible for. the idea that young trans boys are following trends and developing fake disorders was run with by abigail shrier in her “irreversible damage” book, where she lists things from the lack of trans boys having sex to older (masculine) trans men preying upon or manipulating young girls… your average person with trans friends knows about this rhetoric but how many people know where it comes from?

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Abigail Shrier

Published: Jan 31, 2025

Loving, naive parents believed medical science was above politics and beyond question. Now, with the stroke of a pen, a destructive ideology has been eliminated.

When the history of 21st-century gender mania is written, it should include this signal entry: In 2020, a website called GoFundMe, usually a place to find disaster-relief appeals and charities for starving children, contained more than 30,000 urgent appeals from young women seeking to remove their perfectly healthy breasts.

Another entry, from June 2020: The New England Journal of Medicine, America’s platinum medical publication, published a piece explaining that biological sex is actually “assigned at birth” by a doctor—and not a verifiable fact, based on our gametes, stamped into every one of our cells. In fact, biological sex ought to be deleted from our birth certificates—the authors claimed—because a person’s biological sex serves “no clinical utility.” Breaking news to gynecologists.

Public schools began asking elementary kids whether they might like to identify as “genderqueer” or “nonbinary.” Any dissent from this gender movement was met with suppression. The American Civil Liberties Union’s most prominent lawyer, Chase Strangio, announced his intention to suppress Irreversible Damage, my book-length investigation into the sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls. “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he tweeted. Weeks later, Amazon deleted Ryan Anderson’s book criticizing the transgender medical industry.

I could go on. But as of January 28, 2025, I don’t have to.

On that day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing that the federal government would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” and that it would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

To the practitioners and promoters and numberless devotees of pediatric “gender affirming care”—a euphemism for the vast apparatus pushing junk science on vulnerable children and confused families—it came as a much-needed slap in the face.

If it seems odd that the spell of pediatric gender medicine should have been ended by politicians and not physicians, consider that in America, politics is how it began. Specifically, it began with Obamacare.

Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislation incentivizing and coercing private insurers to offer their products on a government exchange, prohibited those companies from discriminating on the basis of sex. And in May 2016, six years after the bill’s enactment, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services added this fateful qualification: Discrimination on the basis of “sex” was to include discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.”

“Obama effectively wrote into law, through healthcare, that gender identity is a protected class,” healthcare executive and gender-medicine researcher Zhenya Abbruzzese told me. And that opened a huge new source of funding for these treatments. “Because once these insurers feel like they have to cover it, that’s it. You have just turned on the engine,” Abbruzzese said.

If an insurer covers testosterone to treat a man who was deficient, then, according to gender ideology’s cracked logic, the insurer would also need to cover testosterone for a woman identifying as a man. If a procedure to remove a man’s unwanted breast tissue was covered, then a similar procedure for a woman identifying as a man must also be covered. Denying those claims could subject insurers to federal enforcement action.

To mandate coverage for gender treatments, activists “snuck in gender identity without Congress ever voting for it,” Abbruzzese told me. Transgender rights groups filed lawsuits, to test whether judges agreed: Suddenly, a “woman” was anyone who claimed to be one, as far as provision of healthcare was concerned. Luxury cosmetic treatments became available even to minors covered by their parents’ insurance—at fire-sale prices.

While gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists (“puberty blockers”) have never received FDA approval to treat gender dysphoria in youth, doctors could prescribe them “off-label” as long as they had reason to believe they would be helpful to patients. Everywhere physicians looked, activists and medical accrediting organizations (increasingly, one and the same) and every news outlet of legacy media assured them, as if with one voice, that these were “lifesaving” treatments.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), an activist organization styled as a medical one, issued guidelines used as the “standards of care” by all major insurers and Medicaid to justify the provision of, and reimbursement for, gender transition services. WPATH represented their guidelines as evidence-based. Court-ordered discovery in a 2022 lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice to overturn Alabama’s ban on gender treatments for minors revealed that WPATH’s guidelines lacked solid evidentiary basis, but also that WPATH leadership knew it.

The organization suppressed publication of systematic reviews of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries undertaken by Johns Hopkins University. That research would almost certainly have revealed, as so many systematic reviews have now done, that while the risk of sterility, cardiac event, osteoporosis, and bone fracture were high, any alleged mental health benefits of the WPATH-approved puberty blockers-to-cross sex hormones protocol remained unproven.

But the Biden administration pressed onward, suing any state that enacted bans on medical transition for minors. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, a transgender adult, successfully pressured WPATH to drop minimum age requirements for gender medical treatments and surgeries in its September 2022 standards of care. Again and again, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris used the bully pulpit to assure “transgender Americans . . . especially the young people” that “your president has your back,” as Biden declared in an April 2021 address to Congress.

In 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services published a fact sheet claiming that gender affirming treatments for youth were “crucial to overall health and well-being.” Any physician or therapist who might otherwise have been tempted to discourage trans-identified youth from immediate and irreversible medical transition sat up and took note.

The Obama and Biden administrations worked in tandem with activist organizations. Federal funds poured into tainted research. Gender physician Johanna Olson-Kennedy received nearly $10 million from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on gender-confused adolescents ages 11 and up. (She later lowered the age to 8.) Olson-Kennedy and a team of colleagues recruited hundreds of transgender-identified minors. They gave one cohort of the children cross-sex hormones and another puberty blockers—to determine if either treatment produced improvements in mental health. (There was no control group.) After only one year on cross-sex hormones, two of her 315 subjects had committed suicide.

As for her nine-year study on puberty blockers, Olson-Kennedy didn’t like the results so, by her own admission, she shelved them. “She said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to the bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states,” according to The New York Times. She told the Times she intends to publish the data, but that getting her work to a place where it wouldn’t be “weaponized” required it to be “clear and concise. And that takes time.”

The public that had funded her research has never had the opportunity to review its results.

Trump’s executive order directs federally funded institutions to stop reliance on WPATH, calling its recommendations “junk science.” Cut off from what Abbruzzese calls WPATH’s “evidence laundering,” insurers will be forced to evaluate the gender medical evidence and issue policies on their own. Systematic reviews and investigations already undertaken in England, Finland, and Sweden indicate it’s not likely they will find the evidence for medically transitioning children to be terribly impressive. Activist researchers into gender medicine might soon see their federal grants dry up.

Every healthcare entity accepting federal dollars (nearly all of them, in Obamacare’s world) risks losing contracts with Medicare and Medicaid if they continue to provide pediatric gender transitions.

This executive order does not abolish pediatric gender medicine. Boutique practices that do not rely on federal funding can still offer “top surgery” to minors, for instance. There will surely be litigation to challenge the reach of Trump’s order.

But that order does break the spell—and the spell was always our biggest problem. Parents who allowed their children to transition are often caricatured as Hollywood eccentrics, the sort who bequeath their estates to teacup Chihuahuas. The parents I spoke to—even those who allowed their children to transition—are nothing like that.

Many are conscientious and loving and afraid, if a little naive. They believed medical science was above politics and beyond question. They had wandered into a Truman Show, an all-consuming simulacrum, designed to convince them to abandon their protective instincts. If the parents still weren’t convinced, therapists coerced them into allowing their daughters to undergo gender transition with this thinly veiled threat: “Would you rather a live son or a dead daughter?”

If it seems, suddenly, that only a fool would fall for this, then it is worth pointing out that millions of us were fools for a while. This social contagion spread far beyond teenage girls. It touched corporate executives who rushed to put pronouns in their profiles, pastors who raised the transgender Pride flag at their churches, and school administrators that actively deceived parents about the new gender identities they had selected for the parents’ children.

A lot of bad actors—pediatricians, surgeons, endocrinologists, therapists, teachers, even clergy—took advantage. No reason to let them off the hook: The science is, and always was, shoddy. When I published Irreversible Damage in 2020 and became, overnight, socially radioactive even among many conservatives, the medical risks were as plain to the experts then as they are today. One only needed to take an interest.

Desperate parents who transitioned their own children during this period, against their better judgment, made an understandable, if devastating, error. Harmonizing one’s views with the powerful reflects the oldest social survival instinct. We are engineered to stay within the herd and get along.

Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.

But we served a vital function: Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff. None of us ever expected to be welcomed back into the same elite circles that, only recently, had cheered or looked away as a generation of tormented girls took themselves apart.

==

In November of 1692, a soldier in the city of Gloucester in Massachusetts became convinced that his sister had fallen under the influence of witches. The girls from Salem were duly called to verify the presence of Satan, but on their journey something unexpected occurred. As they crossed the Ipswich Bridge they passed by an elderly woman. Almost by instinct, the girls broke into convulsions and cried out their usual accusations of sorcery. But the passers-by simply ignored them, or moved away. Without an audience to validate their cries, the girls had little choice but to fall silent and resume their journey. After this remarkable event, it is said that the girls made no further accusations.

This is our Ipswich Bridge moment. While those in authority continue to heed the cries of the new puritans, our society will continue to be dominated by the witches of their imaginations. If we continue to indulge them, we make ourselves party to their collective delusions. Starkey rightly observes that the half-truth is the most dangerous of falsehoods, and while we are right to be alert to the ongoing injustices in society, we would be unwise to give too much credit to those who exaggerate them for their own ends.

-- Andrew Doyle, "The New Puritans"

[onsomekindofstartrek]

Fucking Christ I had the most irritating argument recently.

So Big Joel put out a teaser for his upcoming video on Irreversible Damage. Now, while Cass Eris has covered this ground pretty thoroughly, I’m definitely glad that a bigger leftist YouTuber, and one as insightful as Henry, is taking a shot at it, just like I was glad to see multiple other video essays on the Somerton scandal. Abigail Shrier continues to be a very vocal fearmonger about trans issues.

In the comments of that video someone was like “yeah it’s unfortunate that this book was transphobic, but her new book, Bad Therapy, is incredible.”

Now, Bad Therapy has already gotten two videos from Cass Eris, so I feel qualified to sum it up as like, exactly her previous book but for mental illnesses she thinks are subclinical, rather than for being transmasc. So basically “overreaching doctors and counselors are using unnecessary therapy to make our children think they’re trans mentally ill.” Fun, right? And obviously fertile ground for her to push TERF ideas in a more subtle way without making the transphobia as obvious as she did in Irreversible Damage.

Now, whatever you think of the thesis “iatrogenic mental illness is a common outcome in teens who undergo school-mandated talk therapy” (it’s probably mostly horseshit,) you probably should find someone else to defend that thesis. You know, besides the woman who previously published a bestselling transphobic screed with a large section on how transness in teenagers can be iatrogenic. I would not like to take her word on anything related to psychiatric treatment of children, actually.

(Especially when she seems to have, as her main concern, the future reproductive capabilities of AFAB children. For Christ sakes, the cover of Irreversible Damage shows a picture of a small girl in 50’s clothing with a circle cut out of the picture roughly where the womb would be. Like Christ, I don’t want to hear anything this woman thinks about children!)

But no, when first Big Joel and then I push back, this person wants to argue like “oh but she’s so right in this new book and I wouldn’t read it and endorse if anyone else were talking about it” and shifting the burden onto me to prove that there’s some other person talking about this issue, and a load of shit like that. I think they think they won, too, because I just had to leave.

And the thing is… would you do this for anything else? “Oh this person is a young earth creationist, but we’re talking about embryology, not evolution, so I suppose we can trust them. And who else is talking about embryology? It’s your job to show me someone else talking in this way about the subject and maybe then I’ll consider not endorsing the obvious evangelical Christian grifter.”

No! Fuck no! She’s invested in the idea that parents need to protect their children specifically from devious healthcare providers to protect them from “being convinced they’re trans,” so a second book on the topic of healthcare providers causing mental illness in children is going to be biased at best, even if it doesn’t mention trans issues directly. How are you this dense?

[ex-foster]

Current read.

I really enjoyed Shrier's insights in Irreversible Damage. This book follows similar themes.

[illustrioussanguine]

PSINK_CUTOUT

Psychoanalysis and Fascism: Part 3

“Almost immediately, reality gave ground on more than one point. The truth is that it hankered to give ground. Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever which gave the appearance of order— dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tlon and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet?”

– Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 1940

[secret-covet]

Double mastectomy at 14 = child mutilation.

Bombing a 12 year old child to pieces ≠ child mutilation.

[docgold13]

have you read Abigail Shrier's book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up? I found it disturbing but interesting.

I have not read this book, but am familiar with it and familiar with the author’s previous work condemning the so-called ‘Transgender Craze’ affecting today’s youth.  

Shrier does make some interesting points and I agree with the sentiment that younger populations have been overly pathologized in the psychological and psychiatric fields.  

Unfortunately, Shrier’s decision to rely on anecdotes rather than empirical research findings undercuts a lot of what she is trying to say.  I feel like there is some good intentions in Shrier’s writings, yet the temptation to make a name for herself as a sort of ‘anti-woke’ voice on child psychology has taken her down a dark road that is likely to prove harmful to many young people contending with issues related to gender dysphoria.    

[makiruz]

Abigail Shrier, the woman who wrote the anti-trans masc Bible has written another book, now about how therapy is messing with kids in general.

Seeing as a large part of Irreversible Damage was parents mad that their kids aren't dolls to be molded by parents but actual human beings with agency, I think I know where this might be going

[cartoonradfem]

does anyone know where to find a link to an audiobook of Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage?

[psycheapuleius]

[rachel-sylvan-author]

"Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up" by Abigail Shrier

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Julian Adorney, Mark Johnson and Geoff Laughton

Published: Mar 23, 2024

In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard tells the story of a jet fighter pilot who was practicing high-speed maneuvers. As Willard puts it, “She turned the controls for what she thought was a steep ascent—and flew straight into the ground. She was unaware that she had been flying upside down.”

What if we were flying upside down? But let’s go further. What if an entire generation was flying upside down–flying through fog and danger, unable to see either ground or sky, and the well-intended adjustments pushed on them by “experts” were just bringing them closer to catastrophe?

That’s the lens through which we interpret Abigail Shrier’s New York Times bestseller Bad Therapy.

There’s no denying that the youngest generation is in crisis. As the Addiction Center notes, members of Generation Z “run a higher risk of developing a substance abuse problem than previous age groups.” A 2015 report found that 23.6 percent of 12th graders use illicit drugs. The American Psychological Association reports that just 45 percent of Gen Zers report that their mental health is “very good” or “excellent,” compared with 51 percent of Gen Xers and 70 percent of Boomers. A concerning 42 percent of Gen Zers have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, and an astounding 60 percent take medication to manage their mental health.

It gets worse. The rate of self-harm for girls age 10-14 increased over 300 percent from 2001 to 2019 (before the pandemic). According to a 2021 CDC survey, 1 in 3 teenage girls have seriously considered killing themselves.

Well-meaning therapists, teachers, and school counselors are trying to help the next generation to rise up. But what if everyone involved is upside down? What if, like the fighter pilot that Willard describes, what they think is rising up is actually bringing them into deeper danger? Shrier makes a strong case that that’s exactly what’s happening.

Lots of educators encourage kids to spend more time checking in with their feelings. In the 2021-2022 school year, 76 percent of principals said that their school had adopted a Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum. Common SEL practices include: asking students how they’re feeling at the start of each day, teaching that students should be more aware of how they’re feeling in any given moment, and encouraging students to use activities like writing and art to express their feelings.

The problem is that all of this obsession with feelings can actually make students feel worse. As Yulia Chentsova Dutton, head of the the Culture and Emotions Lab at Georgetown University, says, “Emotions are highly reactive to our attention to them.” “Certain kinds of attention to emotions, focus on emotions,” she explains, “can increase emotional distress. And I’m worried that when we try to help our young adults, help our children, what we do is throw oil into the fire.” Or to put it another way: when we ask kids over and over again how they’re feeling, we’re subtly and accidentally encouraging them to feel bad.

The reason is that, as psychiatry professor Michael Linden explains, most of us don’t feel happy all the time. Dealing with life involves ignoring a certain amount of moment-by-moment discomfort: I’m tired, my feet hurt, I’m sore from sitting down all day, I’m a little worried about my mom. When we encourage kids to check in many times per day on how they’re feeling, we’re tacitly encouraging them to bring to the surface–and then dwell on–all the things going on in their minds that are not “happiness.” That’s why, as Linden puts it, “Asking somebody ‘how are you feeling?’ is inducing negative feelings. You shouldn’t do that.”

But it gets worse.

Obsessing over our emotions can actually prevent us from doing the things that might make us feel better. Anyone who’s spent too long wallowing after a bad break-up knows this; at a certain point, you have to shelve your unpleasant emotions so that you can get on with your life. Psychologists describe two mental states that we can occupy at any given time: “action orientation” and “state orientation.” “State orientation” is where you focus primarily on yourself (e.g., how you feel about doing the task at hand, whether your wrist hurts or you’re starting to get sick, etc.). “Action orientation” is where you primarily focus on the task at hand. As a study published by Cambridge University Press notes, only the latter is actually conducive to pursuing and accomplishing goals. “State orientation is a personality that has difficulty in taking action toward goal fulfillment,” the authors warn. By encouraging young people to focus so much on their feelings, we might be hurting their ability to adopt the mindset necessary to accomplish goals in life. If so, that would make them even more unhappy. 

But the dangers posed by well-meaning “experts” telling students to fly in the wrong direction–towards the ground instead of towards the sky–go well beyond encouraging unhappiness and depression. Rates of suicide and self-harm for young people are skyrocketing. But in their attempts to cope with the spike, well-meaning administrators might be making the problem worse. Here are questions from the 2021 Florida High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey, administered to students age 14 and up:

During the past 12 months, did you ever feel so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that you stopped doing your usual activities?  During the past 12 months, did you ever seriously consider attempting suicide?  During the past 12 months, did you make a plan about how you would attempt suicide?  During the past 12 months, how many times did you actually attempt suicide?  If you attempted suicide during the past 12 months, did any attempt result in an injury, poisoning, or overdose that had to be treated by a doctor or nurse?

A survey authored by the CDC asked students “During the past year, did you do something to purposely hurt yourself without wanting to die, such as cutting or burning yourself on purpose?” Another survey offered this question to Delaware middle schoolers: “Sometimes people feel so depressed about the future that they may consider attempting suicide or killing themselves. Have you ever seriously thought about killing yourself?”

Administrators may be asking these questions with the best of intentions, but the end result is to normalize suicide in young peoples’ minds. If you were 12 years old and taking a survey like this along with all of your classmates, you might reasonably conclude that suicide, or at least suicidal ideation and/or self harm, were pretty common at your school. Otherwise, why would everyone your age have to take such an exhaustive assessment about it?

One reason this is so dangerous is that, as Shrier writes, “The virality of suicide and self-harm among adolescents is extremely well-established.” Following the release of Netflix’s TV show 13 Reasons Why, which some said valorized a fictional girl who killed herself, several studies found a spike in teen suicide rates. The CDC agrees. In a post warning about the dangers of “suicide contagion,” the CDC said that journalists should avoid things like:

“Engaging in repetitive, ongoing, or excessive reporting of suicide in the news.”

“Reporting ‘how-to’ descriptions of suicide.”

“Presenting suicide as a tool for accomplishing certain ends” (i.e., as a “means of coping with personal problems”).

But this is most of what the surveys described above are doing. They are deluging students with repetitive and excessive discussion of suicide. They are describing different methods for killing yourself (e.g., cutting or burning yourself). One survey, which asks students who have considered killing themselves why they did so (possible answers include “demands of schoolwork,” “problems with peers or friends,” and “being bullied”) is a textbook example of presenting suicide as a “means of coping with personal problems.”

The authors of these surveys seem to at least recognize the risk that students are flying upside down, and that these surveys might take them closer to the ground. One survey concludes by telling students, “If any survey questions or your responses have caused you to feel uncomfortable or concerned and you would like to talk to someone about your feelings, talk to your school’s counselor, to a teacher, or to another adult you trust.” The survey also includes links to different hotlines.

Communicating to kids that suicide is normal and a possible solution to their problems might be the worst way that some schools are failing kids, but it’s also far from the only way.

Schools are increasingly lax about standards, willing to let almost anyone get away with almost anything. Some accommodations do make sense: for example, it makes sense to give a kid with dyslexia more time to complete the verbal component of the SAT. But Shrier argues that standards are falling for perfectly healthy students too. “School counselors—students’ in-school ‘advocates,’” Shrier writes, now “lobby teachers to excuse lateness or absence, forgive missed classwork, allow a student to take walks around the school in the middle of class, ratchet grades upward, reduce or eliminate homework requirements, offer oral exams in place of written ones, and provide preferential seating to students who lack even an official diagnosis.”

Shrier documents stories of students who have been allowed to turn in work late because they were having a “tough Mental Health Day” or because “I was having a rough day and dealing with my gender identity.”

The problem with this is that one of the primary things that children and teenagers do is try to figure out the boundaries of the world. When a child throws a tantrum, it’s not malicious–they’re trying to understand this new world and figure out what they can get away with. As Jordan Peterson writes in Twelve Rules for Life, young children are “like blind people, searching for a wall.” “They have to push forward, and test,” he writes, “to see where the actual boundaries lie.” What’s true of young children is also true of older children and even (to a lesser extent) adults. All of us are trying to figure out the rules of life–that is, what we can get away with. If well-meaning teachers and counselors tell students that one of the rules is that you don’t have to do your homework on time if you say that you’re having a rough day, then we shouldn’t be surprised when more young people seem to manifest rough days.

But this is the opposite of what students need–especially the truly disadvantaged students who so many of these efforts seem to be aimed at helping. In his memoir Troubled, clinical psychologist Rob Henderson writes that, “People think that if a young guy comes from a disorderly or deprived environment, he should be held to low standards.” But, he warns, “this is misguided. He should be held to high standards. Otherwise, he will sink to the level of his environment.”

So kids are depressed, anxious, and poorly behaved. Educators are trying to help them by encouraging them to tap in more to their feelings, by asking them more questions about suicide, and by trying to accommodate their difficulties even more. But all of this is backwards. Educators are encouraging students to do what they think will take them higher–away from the ground and back to the safety of the sky. But both kids and educators are upside down. And every adjustment that the “experts” are telling kids to make just brings them closer to the ground–and a catastrophic collision.

Now’s a good time to emphasize that this isn’t all schools, all teachers, or all administrators–not by a long shot. There are heroic educators working every day to help students to rein in their problems, stop taking advantage of accommodations that they don’t need, and develop the emotional resilience to deal with the problems of adolescence. But the problems documented above do represent a trend. And while it’s not every school, the trend is too big to ignore.

What will happen if this trend continues–if an entire generation keeps going “up” until they crash into the ground? Most severe and most damaging is the harm to the generation itself. Shrier tells the story of Nora, a 16-year-old girl who helps put a human face on all of the brutal statistics described in the introduction to this piece. Nora describes her friends as going through a litany of serious mental health problems: “anxiety,” “depression”; “self-harm” (as Shrier notes, “lots of self-harm”) including “Scratching, cutting, anorexia,” “Trichotillomania” (pulling your hair out by the roots); and more. As Shrier writes, “Dissociative identity disorder, gender dysphoria, autism spectrum disorder, and Tourette’s belong on her list of once-rare disorders that are, among this rising generation, suddenly not so rare at all.”

But the dangers can also ripple out beyond just one generation. The full danger may be nothing less than an imperiling of our democracy.

As Shrier notes, many kids in school are almost constantly monitored. Her own kids have “recess monitors” at their school–“teachers who involve themselves in every disagreement at playtime and warn kids whenever the monkey bars might be slick with rain.” On the bus home, they have “bus monitors.” Better that kids know they’re being observed by an adult at all times than that one kid push another to give him his lunch money.

One of the most pervasive forms of monitoring is what are called “shadows”—ed techs or paraeducators whose job is to cling closely to one particular student so that they don’t have any issues. The original intention certainly made sense. If a child had autism, a shadow could help the kid to integrate into the main classroom rather than being sent to Special Ed. But, as Shrier notes, scope creep has been substantial. “Today,” she writes, “public schools assign shadows to follow kids with problems ranging from mild learning disabilities to violent tendencies.” Nor is the problem restricted to public schools: “private schools advise affluent parents to hire shadows to trail neurotypical kids for almost any reason.” Shadows monitor and guide almost every interaction with their chosen student, from when to raise her hand to how long to hug a fellow student.

As Peter Gray, professor of psychology at Boston College and an expert on child development, puts it, “Kids today are always under the situation of an observer. At home, the parents are watching them. At school, they’re being observed by teachers. Out of school, they’re in adult-directed activities. They have almost no privacy.”

But when kids spend their entire waking lives being monitored by an adult, they start to think that kind of monitoring is normal. Worse, they start to think that they need it. If a child gets constant guidance from an adult, what are the odds that she’s going to cultivate her own independence? If she expects authoritarian adults to monitor and run every aspect of her life already, what is she going to think of a liberal democracy that more-or-less leaves people free to handle their own affairs?

No wonder just 27 percent of Americans age 18-25 strongly agree with the statement that “Democracy may have problems, but it is the best system of government” (compared to 48 percent of Americans as a whole). 

So what’s the solution? If our kids are upside down and getting lower to the ground, then the only thing that makes sense is to help them reverse course. Is there something that’s the opposite of always asking them about their feelings, telling them that life is too much for them or their peers to cope with, and constantly telling them that they’re too fragile to do their homework if they’re having a rough day? Yes. That something is called antifragility.

Antifragility is the idea that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Greg Lukianoff note in The Coddling of the American Mind, kids are naturally antifragile. That doesn’t just mean that they’re tough. It means that “they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow.” Not letting a kid hand in homework late doesn’t just teach them to do their homework on time; it also teaches them that they can deal with a 0 in class and not die. They can pick themselves up, brush themselves off, and even earn an A in the class overall if they bust a sweat for the rest of the semester. Telling a kid who’s having a “tough mental health day” that you’re sorry to hear it but they still need to take today’s test doesn’t just teach the kid that low-level excuses don’t fly; it also teaches them that a hard day isn’t enough to stop them. It teaches them that they’re stronger than whatever negative emotions they’re currently experiencing.

It’s time to remind kids that they are strong–before it’s too late.

All quotes not otherwise attributed come from Abigail Shrier’s book Bad Therapy.

-

About the Authors

Julian Adorney is a Contributing Writer to FAIR’s Substack and the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving and protecting Western civilization. You can find him on X at @Julian_Liberty.

Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneer Performance Partners and a facilitator and coach at The Undaunted Man. He has more than 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies. He blogs at The Undaunted Man’s Substack.

Geoff Laughton is a Relationship Architect/Coach, multiple-International Best-Selling Author, Speaker, and Workshop Leader. He is the founder of The Undaunted Man. He has spent the last twenty-six years coaching people world-wide, with a particular passion for supporting those in relationship, and helping men from all walks of life step up to their true potential.

[wisdomfish]

“Dismiss! Ignore!” is what the birds shriek

You and I might miss a Sunday sermon — he [Satan] doesn’t. You and I might neglect feasting upon the word — he won’t. The devil is the most regular and most attentive church attender.

He does not feast for nourishment; he feasts so you won’t, that sinners might not find or continue with Christ. Luke’s account has it, 

“the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved” (Luke 8:12). 

Paul calls it,

“the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). 

Jesus would have us hear and through hearing with faith see his glory. “Listen! Behold!” he began his sermon. “Dismiss! Ignore!” is what the birds shriek.

~ Greg Morse

[z0mbiechylde]

The Dangers of Giving Hormones to Kids with Gender Dysphoria

[mazlizaothman]

Kecelaruan dan Huru-Hara LGBTQ

Ada anak perempuan yang kasar dan lasak, dan lebih suka bermain dengan kanak-kanak lelaki. Ada anak lelaki yang berperwatakan lembut dan lebih selesa bermain dengan kanak-kanak perempuan. Kelakuan ini mungkin berubah bila mereka meningkat dewasa atau kekal sehingga dewasa. Apa pun, seorang perempuan yang kasar dan lasak tidak semestinya adalah seorang lesbian. Begitu juga, seorang lelaki yang…

[coochiequeens]

A "Detransition Awareness Day" would harm students, but not informing them of the long term impact of transitioning is just fine.

Officials within a Vermont school district said that celebrating “Detransition Awareness Day” is hurtful and students who identify as “trasngender” and that it does not align with the districts “equity policy,” according to documents obtained by Parents Defending Education and shared exclusively with Townhall. 

The documents show that on Feb. 6, 2023, a parent emailed the school board and superintendent of Essex Westford School District requesting to add “Detransition Awareness Day” on March 12 to the school calendar. In addition, the parent requested that the book “Irreversible Damage” by Abigail Shrier be available to students “ “on an easel atop the shelves in the HS library.”

In response, the school district claimed that students who transition genders “in any direction” are recognized during Pride month, which occurs in June (via PDE):

People who transition genders in any direction are recognized on national coming out day and during Pride month. We would, of course, support someone transitioning in any direction. Centering transitioning gender as damaging does not align with the EWSD Equity Policy's requirement of being LGBTQIA+ affirming. This particular frame on gender transition -- moving from a trans status to a status of gender assigned at birth because of damage done -- is not something we would center. Instead, we would support any person transitioning for any reason through the current days and structures we recognize and be supportive of their transition by recognizing the gender to which they identify. Detransition can be hurtful to transgender people and youth. We want to meet their mental needs.

PDE noted that the district equity and inclusion administrator “crafted an initial response to the parent but added that they ‘should probably grab a quick consult’ from a local activist” (via PDE):

The response from the outside activist states that the “detransition awareness narrative and literature that this person offered as ‘evidence’ is not scientifically based nor is detransition as common as folks want others to believe it is.” They continue: “folks (often TERFS) will claim that society, peer groups, and even doctors are forcing people to transition rather than experience the discomfort of puberty or that these people are following a fad” and that it is a “dangerous narrative that hurts efforts to get transgender people the affirming care they need.” The activist also asserts that “often people who are talking about their detransition may be doing so after being subjected to conversion therapy or are being propped up by organizations that don’t support transgender people.” Finally, they share that “if detransition awareness was truly a celebration of gender identity in all of its nuance we would view it in the same way the equity policy celebrates those marginalized voices who are often silenced.”

Shortly after, a parent requested that the district add “World Detrans Awareness Day” to the school calendar. The district struck this down, claiming it was due to the “framing and purpose” of the day. 

The district equity and inclusion administrator added that they “would not add a day to the calendar where the underlying narrative or content of the day points at others in harmful ways based on identity or for existing in the first place.”

In other email correspondences, a district administrator claimed that they “have great concerns” about Shrier’s book and that the book “actually goes against our equity policy and can cause harm.”

Erika Sanzi, director of outreach for Parents Defending Education, told Townhall: “"Schools should get out of the habit of celebrating all these silly days on the calendar but if they are going to do so, they can't choose sides. And if school officials think that detransition awareness violates their equity policy, they'd be wise to get rid of that policy because it's clearly not equitable or inclusive despite claims to the contrary."

I hate that this is from conservative site. But they do have a point. If the school board wants to honor Pride Month and other TQ+ days then they should also honor those who realized being trans wasn't for them afterall. You can't take sides and claim your inclusive