pidemic-sd6qjt8wwhttps://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/author-abigail-shrier-faces-threats-after-warning-of-trans-epidemic-sd6qjt8ww”>Will Pavia, in New York:
Shrier, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, interviewed parents, teenagers, transgender adults and some “de-transitioners” who had undergone treatment and then regretted it. She was careful to make a distinction between those with gender dysphoria — a confusion over the gender they were assigned at birth — who manifested it at an early age and teenagers who might exhibit gender dysphoria for the first time during adolescence.
"The gender they were assigned at birth"? Oh dear, not a good start. It's a meaningless phrase – though a popular one in trans circles – because of course genders aren't "assigned" at birth. People are born either male or female. It's basic biology.
Then:
Chase Strangio, a transgender rights activist and a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), responded to the tweet by joking that “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on”.
By joking? He tweeted: Abigail Shrier’s book is a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans. I think of all the times & ways I was told my transness wasn’t real & the daily toll that still takes. We have to fight these ideas which are leading to the criminalization of trans life again.
And then the next day: Also stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.
Nothing jokey about it. No exclamation mark, no smiley face. He was deadly serious. And he deleted the tweet later.
Another supposed joke:
Grace Lavery, an associate professor at Berkeley University and an editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly, made a joke about wanting to remove the book’s insides so that “it could not reproduce” and then declared: “I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre.”
Lavery did in fact declare that her remarks were supposedly "ironic" when the backlash began, but really…it seems most implausible that the original tweet was meant as "a joke".
So, disappointing from the Times there. Why make out that the people leading the abuse against Shrier's book were just joking?
I wonder if it's significant that Pavia is reporting from New York, where trans rights seem to be taken much more seriously than over here.
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