Reclaim Your Freedom

If you’ve not yet heard of Abigail Shrier, you need to get yourself acquainted with her. She wrote a fantastic book, called Irreversible Damages; the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which, as you can imagine, promptly got her banned, censured and trolled by all the fancy people.

At this moment you might be thinking what a terrible place for someone to find themselves in, but Ms. Shrier’s fearless response to her critics and her unabashed refusal to quietly go away leaves the impression that all this hullabaloo has only toughened her resilience and reenergized her passion. Good for her and us.

I’m not going to review her book (although I think you should read it), which dives in to the disturbing world of gender transition among teenage girls, but I’d like to highlight a talk she recently gave to students at Princeton University. Please do yourself a favor and read it, you will not be disappointed. In it, she discusses how she found herself in the unlikely position of being the most hated woman in America in a humble and bluntly honest way.

“I’m not a provocateur. I don’t get a rush from making people angry. 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.”

She also emphasizes the importance of recognizing truth for what it is, not what some want to force it to be. One example she gives the blatant unfairness of allowing transwomen to compete in women’s sports.

“Ellie Marquart swam her heart out for Princeton. When will Princeton fight for her? Where are the student protests to say—enough is enough. When a biological male who has enjoyed the full benefits of male puberty—larger cardiovascular system, 40% more upper body muscle mass, more fast-twitch muscle fiber, more oxygenated blood—decides after three seasons on the men’s team to compete as a woman and smashes the records of the top female swimmers in this country, that is not valor—that’s vandalism.”

Right? It’s a lie that these men don’t have a competitive advantage over women, anyone with half a brain cell can figure this out. Yet no one at Princeton or any other elite institution complains so it’s allowed to continue at the expense of women who have sacrificed and trained hard all their lives only to watch it all go down the drain.

Our culture is soaked in lies like this all wrapped up in a protective bubble of media narrative, big tech censorship and political posturing. This allows the lies to fester, grow and be virtue signaled via the smart set as the truth.

Take these phrases:

All lives matter.

A man can’t become pregnant.

Virus’s stop transmitting when enough people have gotten and recovered from, which protects the herd overall from further viral spread.

A black man is more likely to be murdered by another black man than a police officer.

Differences in pay between men and women in America have nothing to do with sexism.

Fighting perceived racism with racism only creates more of it.

They are all indisputably true and honestly innocuous, yet they’ve become explosive, fighting words. Why is that? It’s because a narrative got set very early on that defined them, what’s acceptable for public discussion, who the “good” and “bad” players are and what the truth is.

Those who dare to speak against prevailing narratives got accused of misinformation and called haters, racists, granny killers and, in the case of rowdy parents protesting critical race theory at school board meetings, domestic terrorists! It’s no wonder people are hesitant to speak up.

But, speak we must because we are truly in a war, one of propaganda and bullying and it’s actively harming people and changing the country for the worse. The only way this stops is if people, lots of people mind you, start sticking up for the truth, no matter the consequences. It really does matter and you really can make a difference. As Ms Shrier states:

“I didn’t write Irreversible Damage to be provocative.  In a freer world, nothing in my book would have created controversy. I wrote the book 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. I also believe if I hadn’t written it, thousands more girls would be caught up in an identity movement that was not organic to them but would nonetheless lead them to profound self-harm. But I didn’t write it specifically to stop them. I wrote it simply because it was true.”

I get that people are afraid of losing their jobs, social status or just plain can’t be bothered…but is that really a fulfilling and free existence?

I’ll close with another quote from Ms. Shrier because it’s so perfect.

“Whatever freedom is—it isn’t that—and all of the wonderful education you have earned here will have been wasted if you find yourself one day observing some lie predominating in your own field and the best you can do is sit on the phone with me anonymously lamenting the state of things. You will soon be graduates of Princeton. Show some self-respect and reclaim your freedom.”

Amen to that.