In Irreversible Damage, Wall Street Journalist, Abigail Shrier investigates why groups of female friends in universities and schools across the world are coming out as 'transgender'. These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex.

Teenage girls have a constant online diet of social media which feeds and magnifies every traditional insecurity.  Feeling inadequate as girls, they are being encouraged to think that they are not girls actually at all and unsuspecting parents now find their daughters in thrall to YouTube stars and 'gender-affirming' educators and therapists, who encourage life-changing interventions.

Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria – severe discomfort in one’s biological sex – was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively.

Abigail Shrier has talked to the girls, their agonised parents, and the therapists and doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to 'detransitioners' – young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves. Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status, Shrier finds, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back.