Abigail Shrier is a journalist who wrote the book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters which was published in 2020. That book, which made her politically and socially radioactive made the case that the rapid uptick of trans identifaction, especially among young girls, was the result of social contagion. The book also criticized the basis of gender-affirming care, something that seems prescient now.
Today, Shrier has written that, in her opinion, the gender fever has finally broken thanks to the executive order signed this week by President Trump. Her entire piece is a striking summary of the recent cultural landmarks related to this topic.
When the history of 21st-century gender mania is written, it should include this signal entry: In 2020, a website called GoFundMe, usually a place to find disaster-relief appeals and charities for starving children, contained more than 30,000 urgent appeals from young women seeking to remove their perfectly healthy breasts.
Another entry, from June 2020: The New England Journal of Medicine, America’s platinum medical publication, published a piece explaining that biological sex is actually “assigned at birth” by a doctor—and not a verifiable fact, based on our gametes, stamped into every one of our cells. In fact, biological sex ought to be deleted from our birth certificates—the authors claimed—because a person’s biological sex serves “no clinical utility.” Breaking news to gynecologists.
Public schools began asking elementary kids whether they might like to identify as “genderqueer” or “nonbinary.” Any dissent from this gender movement was met with suppression. The American Civil Liberties Union’s most prominent lawyer, Chase Strangio, announced his intention to suppress Irreversible Damage, my book-length investigation into the sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls. “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he tweeted. Weeks later, Amazon deleted Ryan Anderson’s book criticizing the transgender medical industry.
It leaves you wondering how this could have happened in what is mostly a center-right country. And Shrier provides and answer to that question as well. According to her, the rapid change we’ve all witnesses was the result of Obamacare.
Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislation incentivizing and coercing private insurers to offer their products on a government exchange, prohibited those companies from discriminating on the basis of sex. And in May 2016, six years after the bill’s enactment, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services added this fateful qualification: Discrimination on the basis of “sex” was to include discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.”
“Obama effectively wrote into law, through healthcare, that gender identity is a protected class,” healthcare executive and gender-medicine researcher Zhenya Abbruzzese told me. And that opened a huge new source of funding for these treatments. “Because once these insurers feel like they have to cover it, that’s it. You have just turned on the engine,” Abbruzzese said. […]
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