Irreversible Damage

Books | Films | Seaweed | Training

14 June 2021 - Askøy

Tweet

Humans live in a landscape of memetic warfare. Memes are not just jokes, but originate in the work of Richard Dawkins in analogy with genes. Per Wikipedia, "A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures." A stable meme is one that includes provisions for protecting itself, for example a religion that prohibits idols of any other god existing protects itself by destroying objects of competing religions. Memes can also exploit humans natural proclivity towards in-group/out-group behaviors.

In Abigail Shrier's new book, Irreversible Damage, she argues that like other body destructive behaviors such as anorexia, bulemia and cutting, identifying transgender is an infectious meme propagating through the social groups of young women. The issue has become completely politicized as the once marginalized transgenderism has gone mainstream. Just the suggestion that transgenderism might be an identity that teenagers try out rather than an inborn abosolute truth is such an antethema to the community that for a time they succeeded in getting Shrier's book banned on Amazon and in some large American retailers like Target. Ironically this only solidified Shrier's argument that the transgender community can be cult-like in its persecution of dissent.

Shrier goes on to argue that many of the people who should be protecting young girls have abdicated that responsibility to the idea that transgenderism deserves special protection. Teachers, psychologists, counsellors, school, and doctors are often legally required to unquestioningly affirm the transgender assertions of teens and do so without informing parents. Qui bono? Drug companies selling hormones and plastic surgeons, as since 2010 insurance companies in the US are required to cover these treatments. If a patient decides they are transgender then by medical definition they now are, and they are pushed toward lifelong drug dependency on hormones and sugery that can currently only superficially mimic the gender that the patient prefers. Shrier asserts that a young woman unhappy with her body maybe shouldn't be directed toward hormones and surgery as a default. It's as though we as a society learned nothing from the opioid crisis. When doctors abdicate their decisionmaking role, patients are left at the mercy of drug companies and their marketing.

More disturbingly as a parent is the all too familiar the story of a young girl whose friends discover transgenderism, spends a lot of time on Tumblr, and then she decides to adopt the transgender identity as well. This leads to obstricizing real family members for new her transgender family that pushes body modification and antisocial behavior to maintain in-group cohesion. This parent will always love his kids though, and always be ready to welcome them back in whatever form.