Penna Dexter

Like many of the Canadian truckers, author Abigail Shrier never set out to make anyone angry and certainly not to become the center of controversy. To do that, she told an audience of Princeton undergrads recently, “You need only be two things: effective and unwilling to back down.”

Ms. Shrier’s bio includes Jewish day school, Columbia University, a fellowship for graduate study at Oxford, and a law degree from Yale. Then came a job at a law firm, marriage, three children, and freelance writing, including frequent op-eds for the Wall Street Journal. One of those pieces struck a chord with parents who were facing “a medical mystery — specifically, whose teen girls were suddenly identifying as transgender and clamoring to alter their bodies.” Ms. Shrier’s investigative work on this question resulted in her book: Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.

In it she describes what she says has become a social contagion among troubled teen girls.

Although the book hit number 1 at Amazon, Amazon employees threatened to quit if the company continued to carry it. When parents launched a grassroots effort to advertise the book, GoFundMe shut down their fundraiser. Spotify employees protested her podcast episode with Joe Rogan. And an ACLU staff attorney called Irrevesible Damage “ a dangerous polemic” and demanded it be censored.

Abigail Shrier figured her audience at Princeton might be wondering “what it’s like to be the target of so much hate.” How would it be “to have prestigious institutions disavow you as an alum” for deviating “from the approved script,” for countering the “force-fed falsehoods we’re all expected to take seriously.” She said: “It’s freeing.”  She didn’t expect her writing would earn her accolades at the “fancy institutions” she had attended. “The point of all that privilege,” she said, “was to be able to write and think as others lacked the will to do.”

It takes courage but – ‘Better to tell the truth’, says Abigail, than to be “the left’s star pupil.”