Photo courtesy of Alexandra Orbuch
On December 8, The Tory and the Princeton Open Campus Coalition (POCC) co-hosted Abigail Shrier, journalist and author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Tory Publisher Adam Hoffman ’23 began the evening with opening remarks discussing the campus response to the lecture. “I recognize that many of us – myself included – have been threatened and harassed as a result of our beliefs or merely our willingness to listen to Mrs. Shrier’s beliefs,” he said.
In his introduction, Hoffman drew a connection between Shrier and Arthur Koestler, an anti-totalitarian author who spoke out against Nazism in 1930s Europe. In his essay, “We, the Screamers,” Koestler discusses that no matter how vociferously he spoke the truth about the atrocities of his time, society refused to “rub their eyes and come awake.” In Hoffman’s words, Shrier “picks up where Koestler left off” in her valiant effort to speak up on “relevant issues that no others will touch.”
Shrier began by addressing what she termed “the elephant in the room,” or the fact that the event was being held off-campus due to safety issues because of the considerable amount of threats received and the University’s refusal to provide requisite protections. “Princeton is so far from a free campus,” she said.
Shrier discussed her background, from her upbringing in Maryland to her education at Columbia, Oxford, and Yale Law School. After law school, Shrier clerked in the U.S. Court of Appeals D.C. Circuit for the Honorable Judith W. Rogers, then practiced law until leaving her firm to raise her three children.
Shrier began working as a freelance journalist for a local paper, where the Wall Street Journal noticed her work and she began writing pieces for them as an opinion columnist. She was catapulted into the world of transgender issues when a reader contacted Shrier and shared the story of her teenage daughter who made the sudden decision to undergo a gender transition. Shrier was moved by “mothers and fathers who sobbed as they described how their daughters had become caught up in a craze that seemed completely inauthentic” to the children they had raised. That investigative journalism evolved into her book Irreversible Damage, which faced severe backlash and acclaim.
“I’m not a provocateur,” Shrier clarified. “You don’t have to be a troll to find yourself in the center of controversy. You need only be two things: effective, and unwilling to back down.”
Far from exploring the topic of transgenderism for the purpose of stirring up controversy, Shrier pursued the topic because “I knew it was truthful and I believed recording what I found—that there was a social contagion leading many teenage girls to irreversible damage—was the right thing to do.”
Shrier focused on free will and determinism, saying that she was long “tugged by the worry that human decisions and motivations were influenced by external factors like our personalities and upbringing and received ideas.” She is no longer plagued by such a fear. In fact, she considers it a “luxury” for our will to be impacted by “received ideas and our own personality-driven desires.”
Today, far more surreptitious and guileful forces are at play. Exploring the danger of social media and other outgrowths of our technological world, she remarked that we all “participate in our own manipulation at the hands of those who actively want us to think, and see, and vote differently than our own wills would have us do.” Algorithms created by companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google distort search results and push their favored content, silencing certain voices and giving unearned attention to others. Shrier’s own book was discouraged by the Amazon algorithm. “Your will is being toyed with, subverted, and manipulated,” she emphasized to her listeners, “and in a fairly insidious manner.”
Not only is our freedom undermined by “hidden persuaders,” but it is under constant assault, manifested in the growing aversion to free expression so prevalent today. Citing a statistic that almost two-thirds of Americans fear making waves by voicing unpopular viewpoints, Shrier told the audience: “That doesn’t sound like a free people in a free country.”
Shrier explained that physicians fearing reprisals fail to push back on the demands that children seeking puberty blockers be accommodated without question. Parents do not speak out against activists masquerading as educators for fear of being deemed ‘transphobic’. Students “keep their heads down” and nod when the Left parrots progressive talking points.
Shrier acknowledged the concerns on the part of students, namely future career considerations, but contended that if an institution “tells you, you can only work here if you think like we tell you to and keep your mouth shut,” then “it’s not worth grasping for.”
Shrier made an urgent plea: “Take back your freedom! Reclaim it now!” She urged attendees not to remain silent, but instead speak their minds “thoughtfully, courteously, with a goal in mind beyond giving offense.”
Shrier emphasized the importance of graciousness. When prompted to use someone’s preferred pronouns, Shrier civilly agrees as long as she “can do so without confusing my audience or muddying an argument.” She does not indulge the “false, dogmatic insistences of gender ideology,” but is unwavering in maintaining civility and respect on an interpersonal level.
Shrier ended her remarks with a final urge, instructing students to leave their mark on the world through a never-ending partnership with the truth. She told her audience to make it abundantly clear that they cannot be bought “with flattery.”
In the question and answer portion that followed, Shrier focused on the practical concerns facing the conservatives. “Conservatives don’t engage liberals and don’t engage them well when they do,” she reminded the audience. She intimated that she has received support for her book from a surprising number on the Left, notably from many in the LGBTQ community. “We need to win over sensible Americans” to avoid losing the nation’s core principles, she told the audience.
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