Abigail Shrier has been through the wringer over her book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.”
Released a year ago, the book isn’t about transgenderism in general — but specifically about the impact it’s having on girls “who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans ‘influencers,'” according to the book’s description.
As you might already know, the left hates “Irreversible Damage.”
Last November, a woke social media user complained to Target that the book was for sale on its website, and Target promptly took it down. Only after a lot of pushback about free speech and free exchange of ideas did Target backtrack and put “Irreversible Damage” back up for sale.
Now what?
Now, a Canadian LGBTQ event wants her book dropped from a public library — and the group is looking to cut ties with the library system over it, Shrier wrote in an essay for former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss’ Substack page.
More from Shrier’s aptly titled piece, “The Books Are Already Burning”:
Halifax Pride, the annual LGBTQ festival, announced late last month that it would cut ties with the city’s library system over its insistence on carrying Irreversible Damage, calling it “transphobic,” and claiming that it “jeopardizes the safety of trans youth” and “debates the existence of trans people.”
So far, the Halifax Public Libraries have resisted. Their position is straightforward and apolitical: libraries exist to expose the public to the widest array of views, “including those which may be regarded as unorthodox or unpopular with the majority.”
The Halifax Public Libraries tried to compromise with the activists by pasting a note inside the book’s cover, directing readers to a list of “trans-affirming” resources. But the activists were unappeased. No ties with the libraries were restored. They want the book gone from the library and scrubbed from existence. Two copies in a library of nearly 1.2 million volumes are two too many.
Not even the Nova Scotia Library Association or the Canadian Library Association has come to the library’s defense, though their standing orders explicitly require member libraries “to guarantee and facilitate access to all expressions of knowledge and intellectual activity, including those which some elements of society may consider to be unconventional, unpopular or unacceptable.”
Yet a lot of library users want to read it
Despite all the woke pushback against her book by Halifax Pride, Shrier said nearly 150 people are on a library waiting list to read “Irreversible Damage.”
Indeed, Amazon — where it’s ranked at the top of LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies and No. 7 in Political Commentary & Opinion — said “Irreversible Damage” was named a book of the year by The Economist, and one of the best books of 2021 by the Times and the Sunday Times.
But more matches are being lit
Still, she added, Science-Based Medicine — which Shrier said self-describes as “a group blog exploring issues and controversies in the relationship between science in medicine” — recently took down a review of “Irreversible Damage.”
On Tuesday, one of the blog’s long-time contributors, Dr. Harriet Hall — a family physician and flight surgeon in the Air Force with dozens of publications to her name — posted a favorable review of my book. She examined the scientific claims as well as the medical ones and wrote that the book “combines well-researched facts with horrifying stories about botched surgeries, people who later regret their choices and therapists who are not providing therapy but just validating their patient’s self-diagnosis.” Dr. Hall not only shared my criticisms of “affirmative care” — that is, immediately agreeing with a teen’s self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria and proceeding to hormones and surgeries — but also noted that many physicians and therapists feel the same way but are afraid to say so.
Within a day, Dr. Hall’s article was flooded with nearly 1,000 comments, mostly, she says, from activists demanding the article be stripped from the site, but also from some readers expressing their appreciation. Angry emails from activists swamped the blog’s editors. Within two days, those editors had given Dr. Hall an ultimatum: retract, rewrite, or allow them to add a disclaimer.
“What surprised me was that my fellow editors attacked me, too. Basically what they said was that my article was not up to my usual standards as far as medicine, science and critical thinking went. And I didn’t feel that I did anything but what I always do. That surprised me,” Hall told Shrier, who added that Hall chose to have disagreeing editors include a disclaimer. “I told them I did not want it retracted. And the next thing I knew, they had retracted it.”
*story by The Blaze
