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" Though it's often considered insulting to note, women in the aggregate have different preferences: we tend to put "people jobs" over "things jobs", as someone once put it to me. This has caused feminists a great deal of consternation. Pricked by the embarassment of natural differences between men and women, they blame society and insist women need to be taught to adopt different preferences. But behind this insistence lies the idea that women's preferences are inferior. Young girls are left to conclude that they must strive to be more like men- they must close the novel they were enjoying and take up coding. They must want things men want because men want them.
The talking point about the dearth of women CEOs is a classic. The fact of this disparity might just as easily be understood differently: CEOs lead fairly unbalanced lives. They make a lot of money and have very little time. Their relationships suffer. They have high rates of divorce. Women might recognize this difference and assume that men are the ones to be pitied.
We might just as easily say: Women are so much better adjusted, so much wiser for preferring relationships to dollars. We might as easily say: Of course women prefer literature to software engineering! It's far more interesting. It has the power to transport, to move hearts and minds. Literature is the story one generaton tells to the next. So many women study, teach and produce great literature. Who is the wiser sex?
Instead we presume that if men dominate the STEM departments, they must be occupying the university's Arcadia. If CEOs are overwhelmingly male, then women are being unfairly excluded- by men who outfox them, a system that diminishes them, preferences that lead them astray. We want to have it both ways: acknowledging sotto voce that Sumner Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, and Jeff Bezos have not enjoyed enviable personal lives, while insisting every woman should or would stand in their shoes, given half a chance. [...]
We must stop. It's a dumb habit, thoughtless and base. It reflects an unflattering insecurity we shouldn't indulge. The jealousy at its heart suggests that either we believe women aren't truly capable, or they have somehow be duped, made victims by a "system" that, generation after generation, locks us out and shuts us in with so many glass ceilings and walls. It's an exhausting set of untruths. Worst of all, girls are listening. "
― Abigail Shrier , Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
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" Today’s adolescents, practiced in therapy, have assimilated its vocabulary. They can tell you what sorts of social situations they find emotionally challenging and the precise contours of the psychological problem that’s to blame—“social anxiety,” “testing anxiety,” “panic attack,” and so forth. Such diagnoses have a way of reifying the problems they describe.
Therapy is predicated on the conceit that our thoughts and feelings must always be monitored. That any swing to one side is cause for alarm, and that even minor disturbances ought to be listened for and deciphered, like faint signals from a distant planet. Almost by definition and certainly in practice, therapists lead adolescents deeper into the forests of their minds. Is it any wonder, then, that it’s so hard for them to find a way out? "
― Abigail Shrier , Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
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" I think the whole area has become politicized,” said psychotherapist Marcus Evans, who resigned from England’s national gender clinic, the Tavistock Foundation, over the lack of careful protocols in its treatment of transgender-identified children. “The drugs, you know, the hormone blockers, first of all, they say it’s a neutral act. What are they talking about? You’re going to powerfully interfere with a person’s biological development,” he said to me over Skype. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it…. But you don’t say it’s a neutral act…. They’re not with their peers anymore. "
― Abigail Shrier , Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
