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Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters is a 2020 book by Abigail Shrier, published by Regnery Publishing. The book endorses the contentious concept of rapid-onset gender dysphoria, which is not recognized as a medical diagnosis by any major professional institution and is not backed by credible scientific evidence.
Shrier states that there was a "sudden, severe spike in transgender identification among adolescent girls" in the 2010s, referring to teenagers assigned female at birth. She attributes this to a social contagion among "high-anxiety, depressive girls who, in previous decades, fell prey to anorexia and bulimia or multiple personality disorder". Shrier also criticizes gender-affirming psychiatric support, hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery as treatment for gender dysphoria in young people.
Response to the book has been divided. Positive reviews largely endorsed Shrier's thesis while much of the criticism was regarding the book's heavy use of anecdotes and other problems with its evidentiary basis. There were several boycotts aimed at the book which characterized it as anti-trans and its use of "she" and "her" to refer to transmasculine and non-binary teenagers as misgendering.
2020 book by Abigail Shrier