Why I’m Not Waiting For The Gender ‘Pendulum’ To Swing Back
So Abigail Shrier “pokes the bear.” And reveals the intolerant religiosity of Gender Ideology.
So why poke the bear? Why travel to Tel Aviv, one of the world’s most left-leaning cities, where hundreds marched against the publication of my book, Irreversible Damage, in Hebrew, blaring horns and pounding bass drums? Why speak out in leftist hotspots like Tel Aviv—so many people asked me—when there are perfectly rational cities like Jerusalem, where I could meet fans and make common cause? The questioners often imply the reaction is my fault—that I am deliberately causing trouble.
A mistake lies at the heart of this question, a false conceit borne of metaphors like tides, and pendulums and fashion fossils like bellbottoms: That if we all stay quiet, the trans extremism will swing back or die down, like feathered bangs and breakdancing.
Gender Ideology is not a pendulum, and it will not swing back with a little help from inertia. Gender Ideology is a fundamentalist religion—intolerant, demanding strict adherence to doctrine, hell-bent on gathering proselytes. I do not here use the term “religion” metaphorically or lightly.
Induction into this religion begins with a baptism: the selection of pronouns and often a new name, greeted with all the celebration (and more) of a conversion. It evangelizes aggressively: through social media influencers, who claim to know a teen’s truest self better than her parents and to love that teen so much more than they ever could. Therapists, teachers, and school counselors play evangelist to numberless kids at American school.
There’s no physical evidence that any of us possesses an ethereal gender identity, of course. It may actually be disprovable; there is a good deal of evidence against it. No matter. The adherents take it on faith. The notion that each of us is born with a gender identity, utterly separable from our physiology, known only to us, imagines gender identity as the secular version of the ‘soul.’
I haven’t blogged about Abigail Shrier in a while. Here is a YouTube interview (30 minutes) where she discusses her reporting on the insanity that is seducing our daughters, sons, and far too many adults in the Western World.
Partial Transcript
(2:06) [Why Target canceled her book]. Twitter activists complained. They [target.com] removed the book. There was an outcry. I sold a lot of books. It sold out everywhere. They put the book back up for sale and then the second no one was watching they quietly deleted it again. So it’s not available and has not been for months and months and months has not been available on target.com.
And you you see this testing going on at all over the place. I mean i got a letter the other day from a man in Vermont who had offered to donate it to his library and the library refused to take it. This is a book that people are on waiting lists to read and um you know libraries won’t, you know, very often won’t carry it. They just refuse um and and we’re seeing that you know in Halifax, Nova scotia there was, there are 150 people on the list to read the book and Pride tried to shut it down and have it removed on the grounds that in a library of literally over a million volumes this one book made them unsafe.
THEIR REASON?
Anything from oh she’s not a medical doctor which of course you know no journalist who writes about any medical scandal is ever a medical doctor….that’s why we interview experts.
….there is no consensus view [among medical experts]. That’s the problem. There’s a lot of disagreement within the medical community how this should be handled unfortunately what’s going on right now is a real medical scandal and the few doctors you know who are willing to speak up really risk losing their license.
…with regard to this you know transgender health care I just pointed out you know I did an exploration of the the sudden rise out of nowhere of teenage girls deciding they were transgender I looked at why why are they suddenly the leading demographic. We have a hundred year diagnostic history of this thing called gender dysphoria, the severe discomfort with one’s biological sex, and it was always boys and men and now overwhelmingly the leading demographic is teenage girls across the west and and I wanted to look at why, why that might be and I explored you know I talked to a lot of experts who offer a lot of different reasons and uh that’s what I explored in the book.
(5:15). Why are girls so susceptible? Could you summarize?
Teenage girls in mental health distress anxiety depression and other you know anything from borderline personality disorder to other, you know, psychological struggles have always been susceptible to pure contagion they’ve always been susceptible to the idea that there’s something really wrong with them and that if they just lose enough weight or, you know, if they get control these multiple personalities or I mean there’s a you know they they come up with these explanations. Sometimes they’re introduced from by therapists in this case it’s all over the culture and the and social media and the ideas. They look to the culture to figure out what’s wrong with them and today the answer that they’re landing on is…oh I know what the problem is I’m supposed to be a boy. And the moment a young person says that a young woman says that she goes from a lonely teenager who may struggle to find friends to someone who is celebrated in her school congratulated by her therapist and whose doctor can’t wait to start her on a course of hormones.
(6:40). So this is kind of uh we’re taking these universal feelings that that all teenagers experience especially girls and what we have now is a they’re being presented with a with a handy kind of framework for understanding those feelings and that’s what brings them to transgenderism.
Basically that’s right. I mean imagine you know a young woman who you know prior era would have who would be anorexic and be convinced that if she just lost enough weight everything would be better it’s very you know they they latch on to the because they are in real pain this does not discount their pain. We know that rates are very high of anxiety depression self-harm for this generation and they’re in they’re in a lot of pain and they looked you know psychological pain is very hard to explain to someone in a way that gets you noticed and in a way that gets you you know interest and help. And what they want they want they want the affection they want the celebration and they want the attention and one way to frame it so that they get those things um which which i think they do need they do need attention they do need compassion but the way that they’re framing it is is not necessarily accurate in fact very often i think it’s inaccurate that what they what they have is not real typical gender dysphoria.
(9:04) on social media these young women are constantly coached in you know gender ideology and told that oh if you feel uncomfortable, (every woman goes through a period around puberty of feeling uncomfortable in her body) and she’s taught and they spend tremendous amount of times social time on social media they’re taught that that feeling means you’re transgender at a time when it’s very uncool to be a straight girl who is “cisgender” you know comfortable in her body at all. So the number of forces pushing on her to declare this identity are a lot and as soon as she declares a trans identity or non-binary identity she’s celebrated.
She goes on to discuss job insecurity within the medical profession if you disagree with “gender affirmative care” & then discusses the REAL CONVERSION THERAPY.
An excellent article by Jonathan Haidt helps us understand why our girls in particular have felt so alienated from the world around them and most importantly their own bodies.
I was first alerted to this disturbing cultural trend after reading Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage.” She painstakingly documented the sudden enormous increase in predominantly middle to upper middle-class white female adolescents who were identifying as other than their birth sex. This was occurring largely in liberal or progressive households.
According to Haidt’s research, in 2013, students on college campuses began pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech.
Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) noticed that these students were using cognitive distortions that were similar to those associated with depression. As a person who battles depression himself, he knew something about these distortions.
Here’s how his friend Haidt put it:
Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.
Because of what CBT taught Greg, he hypothesized that colleges supporting these distortions, rather than teaching critical thinking, could cause students to become depressed.
This idea was further developed in the book “The Coddling of the American Mind” which he co-wrote with Haidt.
In 2020, a study found that young liberal women reported higher rates of mental health conditions compared to other groups. Some explanations for this trend suggest that technology and social media, rather than politics, might be the main cause. Another theory is that depressed individuals tend to view reality negatively, and progressive institutional leaders may have inadvertently taught young progressives to catastrophize events to get what they want.
This focus on victimization and external locus of control (a belief that external factors control your life) could contribute to higher rates of depression and decreased sense of agency.
Phone-Based Childhood
In his substack article Haidt discusses how a phone-based childhood may contribute to passivity and mental health issues, particularly among liberal girls.
He suggests two main reasons for this phenomenon.
First, liberal girls use social media more than other groups, which can lead to reduced face-to-face interaction and contribute to poor mental health.
Second, the messages consumed by liberal girls on social media might be more damaging to their mental health than those consumed by other groups.
The article also points out that Gen Z as a whole has developed a more external locus of control, which means they believe their lives are more influenced by external factors rather than their own actions.
Liberal Gen Z individuals (of both sexes) have become more self-derogating, as well.
Haidt also suggests that the loss of “play-based childhood” in the 1990s, when parents stopped letting their children play and explore unsupervised, might have contributed to this shift in locus of control.
And finally Haidt’s article explores the role of the social media platform Tumblr in shaping disempowering beliefs, particularly around identity, fragility, and victimhood. The podcast series “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” highlights how Tumblr’s culture war between young progressive women and right-leaning young men contributed to today’s cancel culture and may have influenced the development of distorted ways of thinking.
So, What Should We Do?
In his conclusion, Haidt argues that around 2013, many young people, particularly liberal women, embraced three Great Untruths, which caused an increase in anxiety and depression.
The Great Untruths are:
1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker 2. Always trust your feelings 3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).
They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).
Haidt suggests that universities and progressive institutions have adopted these Untruths, leading to reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that exacerbates mental health issues.
And he proposes two policy changes to address this issue:
1). Universities and schools should stop performing reverse CBT through programs based on the Great Untruths. Instead, they should focus on evidence-based practices that promote mental health and well-being.
2). The US Congress should raise the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 or 18, treating social media and other addictive apps like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. This would require parental consent for minors to sign contracts or open accounts, helping protect them from harmful content and potential mental health consequences.
