Editors note: the following book review appears in the Fall 2021 issue of Eikon.
Abigail Shrier. Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2021.
“You’re not supposed to pick favorites among the amendments, because it’s silly, but I have one, and it’s the First” (xxv). In the Introduction to her controversial best-seller, Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier explains how her commitment to free speech led her to write about a gross violation of it. Her article, “The Transgender Language War,” addressed state laws mandating the usage of an individual’s preferred pronouns and threatening jail time for noncompliance. Shortly after the article appeared, a prominent Southern lawyer reached out to Shrier with a sad but increasingly common tale: her daughter had recently identified herself as “transgender.”
The daughter, Lucy [a pseudonym], “had discovered this identity with the help of the…
