Irreversible Damage
2020 book by Abigail Shrier
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters is a 2020 book by Abigail Shrier, published by Regnery Publishing, which endorses the controversial concept of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD). ROGD is not recognized as a medical diagnosis by any major professional institution nor is it backed by credible scientific evidence.
Shrier says that the book is about "the 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 while promoting the book she wrote that these were "the same high-anxiety, depressive (mostly white) 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 (together often referred to as "gender-affirming care") as treatment for gender dysphoria in young people.
The book has received mixed responses. Several positive reviews were published endorsing Shrier's claims about trans people, but the book was also criticized for repeating anti-trans medical misinformation. Several retailers refused to sell the book in response to these criticisms.
Summary
Shrier states that she began to investigate adolescent-onset gender dysphoria after being contacted by the mother of a young adult with no apparent history of childhood gender dysphoria, who identified as transgender in college. She describes what she sees as difficulties facing teenagers who were assigned female at birth, whom she refers to as "biological girls": isolation, online social dynamics, restrictive gender and sexuality labels, unwelcome physical changes and sexual attention.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Irreversible Damage” is 2020 book by Abigail Shrier. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Irreversible, Damage and book, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q81745634. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Irreversible Damage” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.