This is a guest post submitted by Lane Anderson (a pseudonym), a practicing psychotherapist who has worked extensively with “trans teens” and their families. She shares with us her clinical insights into her clients, adolescent psychology, and the impact of the transgender phenomenon on our society as a whole.
If there are other mental health providers reading this post, please consider guest posting or responding in the comments section below the article. See this earlier post featuring Dr. David Schwartz for another critical perspective from a psychotherapist.
I am extremely grateful to Lane and Dr. Schwartz for speaking up. Time is of the essence, since the American Psychological Association recently released new guidelines which will make it even more difficult for clinicians to step forward.
I am a licensed psychotherapist. I’m writing this post on my last day at a teen health clinic, where I’ve seen patients and their families for nearly a decade.
In the past year especially, it’s become increasingly clear to me that I cannot uphold the primary value of my profession, to do no harm, without also seriously jeopardizing my standing in the professional community. It’s a terrible and unfortunate conflict of interest. I’ve lost much sleep over the fact that, for a significant portion of my clients and their parents, I am unable to provide what they profess to come to me seeking: sound clinical judgment. Increasingly, providing such judgment puts me at risk of violating the emergent trans narrative which–seemingly overnight and without any explanation or push-back of which I am aware–has usurped the traditional mental health narrative.
When I am suddenly and without warning discouraged from exploring the underlying causes and conditions of certain of my patients’ distress (as I was trained to do), and instead forced to put my professional stamp of approval upon a prefab, one-size-fits-all narrative intended to explain the complexity of my patient’s troubles, I feel confused. It’s as if I am being held hostage. No longer encouraged or permitted to question, consider or discuss the full spectrum of my patient’s mental health concerns, it has occurred to me that I am being used, my meager professional authority commandeered to legitimize a new narrative I may or may not wish to corroborate.
It’s been perilous to simply admit to not fully understanding it all–let alone disagree with the trans narrative. There was no training or teaching. I was just suddenly told that some of my patients thought they were trapped in the wrong body and that was that.
After much soul searching, I felt I had no choice but to remove myself from this crippling work setting. Being told to exercise my clinical judgment with some clients, while ignoring it with others, made me feel like a fraud.
Throughout my career, I have come to my work with these thoughts in mind: that life is complex, that people are complex. But in one way or another, most people tend to balk at that kind of ambiguity. I try to assist people in flexing a little, try to help them find ways to manage life’s gray areas, and the occasional distress that comes from simply being conscious. But at the end of the day, I couldn’t deny it was a little weird for me to go on believing I could effectively teach others to be less rigid, more free people facing their lives head on, when I myself, their humble guide, was being exploited, tongue-tied by a new party line.
Unfortunately the culture war has done a number on the concept of critical thinking. I have considered myself liberal my entire adult life, and I still am. But for a long time I couldn’t find anyone questioning this trans explosion who wasn’t on the far right. It made me feel like only conservatives were allowed to think, to consider this issue, but ultimately their thoughts were rendered meaningless due to their branding by the culture war. It’s essential that left-leaning people model critical thinking for the masses in this regard.
It’s important to link people like us together, who have been silenced, so we can resume contact with our critical thinking skills and reduce our growing sense of self doubt. Divide and conquer is best accomplished through silencing, through calling into question those who speak out. There is so much of this attached to the trans movement. Even just wondering about a profound concept such as transgender is labeled transphobic. What I think has happened is that people are now phobic about their own gut responses to life. We are being systematically separated from our own intuition. This is fatal for a civilization, I think. Not that our intuition always tells the truth with a capital T, but it is a critical piece of who we are. Without it, we remain profoundly directionless, and more susceptible to coercion of all types.
What frightens me most about the trans movement is that the establishment has gotten involved and is leading it. I think that’s really weird. Clearly they are benefiting from it financially. So sad. It disturbs me to see how giddy my former medical director is to be part of this growing craze. We used to treat kids with mental health problems, but now it’s all about validating their emergent and shifting identities. As professionals, if we don’t loudly prioritize their identities as being the most important thing about them (and identities do shift constantly in kids and teens), we risk coming across as unsupportive and even immoral. Identity development has always been a teen task, but in the past it wasn’t necessarily supposed to become a lifestyle, or colonize the entirety of your existence.
Our world is in a profound state of flux. We can’t begin to comprehend what the Internet has done to how we see ourselves. People are looking for ways to belong, ways to understand who they are in place and in time. They are looking to reduce the anxiety that comes when too much change happens all at once. I try and look at trans folks as people who are seeking to answer the new questions that have emerged in this early 21st century. I have been trying to find a way to understand their urges to detach from their bodies, to undo that feeling of exile they experience in their own flesh. We all want to get back to ourselves; it is our duty to reconnect with those weighty parts that inevitably sink to the depths of us, the parts too heavy to remain on the surface of our lives.
From what I can see, the age-old human task to reclaim that which has gone missing appears to be manifesting with great prominence in the trans community. The problem is this: we all look for shortcuts to finding the lost treasure. It’s human nature to resist the long and serpentine journey to our own sense of personal truth. In our fear, in our self doubt, we calculate the risk and often decide it is preferable to be shown what another person–a “helping professional” or an activist–bills as a sure thing, a direct path to what we sense we lack. We all, on some level, hold a childlike fantasy that someone else has figured it out and can provide us a direct map to ourselves. And that’s what the trans narrative does. It promises to guide the follower to their essential, authentic self. But this, unfortunately, doesn’t happen, because the essential self, whatever that is, is not created from another’s road map, but can only be comprised of the trails we forge ourselves.
What saddens me the most is the way children are being trained to think their parents do not love them if mom and dad don’t jump aboard the trans train. To me, this is a brutal aspect of a near-dictatorship being foisted on everyone. The kids are too young to see that there are no other people who will have their backs, throughout life with lasting devotion, in the unique way their families will. They think these new friends they’ve made online understand them perfectly. And in believing this unquestioningly, they find themselves lulled by the frictionless experience delivered most powerfully by group think.
Of course, I’m describing the pull of all cults; that deep human desire to be known through and through and through.The cult experience seeks to end the frustration that naturally comes when we mature and begin to see ourselves as separate beings. In our separateness, we must do the hard work of truly learning to know another. Group think reduces the fear that comes when we are unsure if we will be located by another, when we remain unable to locate ourselves.
Cults and closed narratives neutralize and tame what we see as the unknown. I think somebody needs to put a refresher out there on the cult mindset and group think. People seem to have forgotten that we are all very easily influenced by each other. Carl Elliot wrote about this in relation to body dysmorphic disorder (people wanting to amputate their own limbs because they disidentify with them) in the Atlantic, “A new way to be mad.”
One common trait I’ve noticed in nearly all the trans kids I’ve met has been their profound sense of being different, and too alone. They often have had little success with making friends, or what I would call contact with “the other.” Because of their psychic isolation, they are prime targets for group think narratives. But in addition to looking for a way to belong, they are also craving protection and the stamp of legitimacy, perhaps because they feel a profound lack of it.
Now that the government and medical communities are involved in the creation of who trans folks are, this class of individuals have finally found their safe havens. Now, rather than being merely invisible and awkward, they have been transformed into veritable leaders of a revolution. Now, rather than cower in the shadows, they have commandeered the narratives of others into a similar dark and brooding place where they once were. The tables, as they lived and viewed them, have now turned.
It’s got to be dizzying for these formerly “ugly ducklings” to find themselves at the center of a flock of swans. To become a part of the movement, to finally be seen and found as whole, alive, and most importantly, wanted, all they have to do is renounce the very bodies in which they feel they have been imprisoned. In doing so, the promised payoff is very big, for they have finally found a way to render mute all those who once discounted and disbelieved them. Through silencing others who threaten them, they have unearthed a means of silencing their own self hate. Rather than being afraid of themselves, they make others fear what they have become.
Psychologically these interpersonal tactics would once upon a time have been categorized as immature, “primitive” defenses erected by an undifferentiated self that cannot see the self or others as whole creatures. But as I witness it in my own practice, this is the basic thinking underlying the psychology of the trans narrative. In her recent blog post, “My Disservice to My Transgender Patients,” Dr. Kathy Mandigo talks about feeling threatened by some of her MTF patients. Many of the trans kids I’ve worked with will joke about how they and their friends are dictators, “masters of the universe!” I find that clinically significant. This is something toddlers do when they are first discovering they are separate from their rulers (parents). Rather than fear the parent, they seek to control the parent, exert their will on the parent and co-opt the parent’s power as their own. In doing this they hide from view their terror at facing their own powerlessness. Ideally, the child will gradually outgrow this urge to control, will gradually relinquish the dictatorial need to create safety through controlling the external realm. When that happens, we say it is a sign of maturity. As our own sense of agency grows, we are better able to forfeit the habit of controlling others. We also begin to feel guilt at the idea of controlling others, as we begin to see them as separate from us, 3D human beings instead of mere props on our psychic stage.
Unfortunately some people have a hard time making this shift. They get stuck or addicted to manipulating their external environment, and will continue to create inner safety through the constant and relentless work of controlling others.
Last week in a team meeting, our medical director said he was meeting with a girl who identifies as FTM to discuss top surgery and testosterone treatment. Apparently, according to the director, the girl’s mom is slowing down the process of transition. Bad mom, right? The director added that the girl’s mom told her that 9 out of 9 of her daughter’s friends also identify as FTM.
At this point I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer. I said, “Can we not be honest and see that we are dealing with a trend?” Of course, everyone else at the table was mute. Considering I’m leaving my post, I felt bold enough to say that I found it infuriating we couldn’t discuss this topic clinically. More silent colleagues (except their eyes were wide as if they wanted me to keep talking and taking the risk for them). I said that what we were doing as a medical community was potentially very harmful, and made mention of some of the videos I’d watched featuring transmen who decided to go off testosterone. The medical director prides himself in providing special services for those patients he deems unjustly marginalized by society. But he can’t see how the medical community has become complicit in the oppression he earnestly seeks to remedy.
A large part of the problem comes with the revolution in health care. More and more, we are giving people the power to define their own treatments. This is good in many ways, but the trans movement is using this moment, and is actively recruiting young, psychologically undefined and frightened people to push their agenda through the medical community. It’s clearly not that difficult to do. These kids are just pawns. That’s how it looks to me anyway. The trans community needs more converts so that the narrative becomes more cohesive. I’m guessing the push for this comes from a need to further cohere so they will have more members to fully cement a fragile, constructed reality.
We–people who don’t identify as trans–are the external realm that must be controlled to bring the trans community the inner peace they now lack. But they don’t get that they will never find calm or strength this way. You cannot find yourself through coercing others. You cannot extinguish your fears by turning from them. The trans community must face their own fears, face themselves and their own demons. They can’t wipe out their fear that they are not really transitioning by censoring the thoughts and expressions of others. If they believe they are trans, they shouldn’t need to spend so much effort foisting that belief on others.
The fact that they do dictate to others is to me diagnostic of their very condition. They are uncertain about who and what they are. No sin in that. That’s human. The transgression comes in refusing to accept this uncertainty, and in sacrificing the lives and consciences of others to nullify your own self doubt.
Reblogged this on Radfem Repost.
Reblogged this on GenderTrender.
It’s so true, the trans* kids are being used as pawns. I have said this so many times to rad fems, “I am so mad the transactivists attacking women, at the same time the trans* are mentally ill and they are just being used as pawns.” I just watched Kathy Mandigo on transition radio talking about how they are being used as pawns as well. Good to know that there is consensus here.
I’m not sure there’s such a thing as trans kids. There are male and female (and a very few intersex) children who are suffering as a result of trans activist adults forcing their fetish far and wide, and said activists being supported by gullible or attention/money seeking parents, medics etc.
And mental illness is not an excuse for any of it, it’s simply the age old mix of male perversions, woman-hating and money grubbing.
I agree, when I say the trans* kids, I mean “the trans* kids, ” those that society has labelled as trans* and in need of their help and fixing.
“Intersex” is, in the vast majority of cases, medspeak for “I am too lazy or cheap to run a karyotype on this infant.” It served the medical community in the pre-DNA-testing, pre-karyotype days when one HAD to sex an infant by looking at the genitals but there is no excuse for that anymore. You can have ambiguous genitalia and still be either male or female. Unless you’re a genetic chimera from fraternal twins and therefore have both sets of cells in your gonads, it’s going to be one or the other–potential for producing ova (female) or for producing sperm (male), whether that potential can ever be realized.
Agreed. The guidance that adult trans activists offer confused kids often amounts to little more than grooming. This is a horrible state of affairs that will continue unless more health care professionals like this brave woman speak out.
I agree Dana. It really is quite simple. Genetically it’s easy to figure out.
Perhaps there are more than two “genders”?. Maybe trans is it’s own gender. Perhaps people could one day be celebrated for being two spirited instead of encouraged to have body parts cut off and added on?
Reblogged this on shrikecentral and commented:
Got this from Gender Trender – please read and hope there are more doctors out there like this trying to help kids, not hurt them.
Reblogged this on Jill Gertrude.
Interesting, and I won’t say that you may not have a huge point, though I feel that point verges deeply into philosophy and possibly spirituality rather psychiatry / medicine in the strictest sense (which it perhaps ought to do). If I may quote…
“I have been trying to find a way to understand their urges to detach from their bodies, to undo that feeling of exile they experience in their own flesh. We all want to get back to ourselves; it is our duty to reconnect with those weighty parts that inevitably sink to the depths of us, the parts too heavy to remain on the surface of our lives.
[…] The problem is this: we all look for shortcuts to finding the lost treasure. It’s human nature to resist the long and serpentine journey to our own sense of personal truth. In our fear, in our self doubt, we calculate the risk and often decide it is preferable to be shown what another person–a “helping professional” or an activist–bills as a sure thing, a direct path to what we sense we lack. We all, on some level, hold a childlike fantasy that someone else has figured it out and can provide us a direct map to ourselves. And that’s what the trans narrative does. It promises to guide the follower to their essential, authentic self. But this, unfortunately, doesn’t happen, because the essential self, whatever that is, is not created from another’s road map, but can only be comprised of the trails we forge ourselves.”
Sounds compelling and plausible, but I would state that as a trans person who is some way down the NHS care path, the results in my life so far have been positive enough that I would be hesitant to backtrack based on a philosophical uncertainty. However, as a member of a co-transitioning couple I should obviously be asking myself all relevant questions and constantly challenging myself as to whether or not we are on a wise course, so if you don’t mind I will ask directly: if you had a patient who wanted to transition, and you had no constraints and protocols to follow other than your own conscience, how would you go about treating them?
It is not for me to know what a “wise course” looks like for any one person. My practice evolves around the approach that a person engages with their deeper self and comes to rely most heavily upon the authority gathered there This is not a speedy process, it takes time. It is a privilege to go through this process. Many many people are never given a chance to explore who they are outside of how they can benefit powerful others, which leads to emptiness and chronic searching. It leads to obsessions and compulsions to manage the emptiness.
This development of the self would be a process whereby a client is assisted in the difficult task of creating a kind of consolidated sense of who they are. Personally, I think these core parts of us should function, or ideally function best when they are functionally somewhat autonomous, yet healthfully interdependent with others. I guess what I’m saying is, if a person doesn’t really yet know who they are independently, if they have a sort of “empty center looking to be filled from without”, I would work with them until they were able to find some weight within their own psychic core before they engaged in any sort of drastic changes. Signs that this consolidation is happening would be the individual not requiring others to excessively validate who they are. Ideally the individual should not be excessively too dependent upon the thoughts and opinions of others to maintain their sense of self.
As I have worked exclusively with teens, I cannot speak to the adult experience of gender transition. Teens by their nature are seeking identity. They don’t tend to have strong core selves just yet, and those with mental health issues are often extremely deficient in having fulfilled this developmental task. Neuroscience now shows us that chronic Instability of affect and mood inhibits the development of the self, or the capacity to observe the self. Unstable folks are neurologically incapable of observing others outside of how these others can fulfill their immediate needs (think narcissism, which is basically a sign a person is too dependent upon external others to construct the self. In being overly dependent in this way, the empty person uses others to create an image of themselves, they use others to literally ” feel” who they are. Obviously, this is all unconscious. Most people with a lack of a cohesive self are not aware they are using others in this way, but they will feel the effects of this habit and often not understand why they continue to have poor interpersonal and disrupted relationships with others).
So, for me, to get back to your question, I would work to look at whether or not a person has accomplished basic psychological developmental tasks before I would encourage their transitioning. However, this is all a bit of a mute point, for my exploring such with people who come to me saying they seek to transition will now classify me as transphobic and out of compliance if I explain what I’ve here explained to you. The fact is, not one of the kids I met with who wanted to transition was manifesting psychological health. They were very hurt individuals and had attributed their very real pain to the theory that their bodies and gender brains were misaligned. The vast majority of them had severe deficits interpersonally, experienced profound social anxiety, suicidality, to name just a few of the issues I saw emerging. These were souls fearing psychic extinction, living with the terror of being too different, too alone. They nearly all found their new identities, along with a whole new slew of friends, in others who experienced similar or equal psychic terror. How could I take seriously their sudden belief that they were trapped in the wrong body? How could I not see that they had stumbled upon a very viable and critical path to locating themselves amongst similar others.
Of course, I could not say this to any of them as they would claim, as they had been schooled online, that I too didn’t understand and was transphobic. I am not transphobic. I really don’t care if a person finds life more meaningful, livable as transgender. All I’m saying is, the reasons, I witnessed that appeared to lead the kids who saw me to choose this path did conflict with how I conceptualized a hearty sort of mental health.
I also think the kids were using an oppositional narrative to serve to consolidate their emerging identities. You know, people do this all the time, its Us vs. Them. Cold wars come in all shapes and sizes, and I saw the kids using this narrative to find a premature and unearned sense of closeness with others who claimed a similar path. But you see this sort of thing playing out everywhere in our culture now. Everyone is against everyone, everyone is so sure they know the truth, we are a divided society because we have been lured by the easy and disposable intimacy that comes with joining a group.
I’ve always been a loner, not because I don’t love people, I do absolutely love people, sort of too much, and because of this love I have been unable to find my exclusive allegiance in banding with one group over another. It has come at a very high cost. My own self doubt comes when I think that perhaps most people are not designed for what I have experienced, perhaps most people are happier and more at peace in narratives that while closed, and limiting in some way, allow them to find others in place and time.
With this thought in mind, I find I need a kind of faith, not in a god or anything like that, but in the human spirit to find the other without words. I just read an incredible letter written by the poet Rilke. It blew my mind and made me think of myself and my own solitude and how even if I don’t buy into a prevailing narrative enough to feel the delicious puddingness (I just made that up, it means swimming in and amongst others in a viscous and sweet substance that keeps you all afloat together), I have my faith that there exists a greater reverberation between souls of all kinds, and I cannot sacrifice the immediate life in the pudding for that greater knowing.
http://carrothers.com/rilke1.htm
I hope this long response sort of answers your question a little. If not here’s a link to the Rilke letter.
Best,
Lane
Thank you for such an informative and very thoughtful reply, and for the Rilke reference that added additional texture. I couldn’t possibly reply with justice. So many things struck me powerfully. I also have great difficulty forming unconditional allegiances (the fact that I feel morally obliged to confess that I do have doubts about transitioning will probably earn me some very nasty monikers itself in good time…), which has made me continue almost though not quite as much of a loner since coming out as before. That might call into question the whole point of transitioning… only I can surmise I am probably not doing it for other people’s validation. For my own? Quite possibly, though I’ve no idea what that says about me. I will take your words on board, at any rate. I (and I would add, the NHS) am wholly in agreement that someone who is neck-deep in psychological trauma should not be enabled to transition until that trauma can be satisfactorily resolved. It is definitely not transphobic to suggest such a thing – simply professional. I am disturbed there are practitioners who would think otherwise. Accepting for the moment that transition – though drastic – is a correct treatment for some, one surely does not recommend a triple heart bypass at the first faint ache in the chest…
Addendum: just in case *my* psychiatrist reads this, I should probably clarify that my confessed doubts are all on the morality and ethics of transitioning. As far as personal aspiration goes, I’m afraid I have no doubts whatsoever that I want to transition, but to make a crude analogy, I have no doubts that I would love to drink absinthe on a nightly basis, and I know that desire does not mean the absinthe is either mentally or physically healthy for me, or that my resultant conduct would be healthy for society as a whole… which sort of explains why I am a pretty lousy trans activist. Scepticism seems to be hard-wired into me, and the fact that it would suit my personal wishes no ends to simply accept that the official (broadly trans-supportive) narrative is completely correct seems like a moral obligation to remain as sceptical as ever.
If I may ask, what is the address of your WordPress blog? I would be very interested to see it. To recap, whatever the ethics of transitioning may be, at least the official protocols over here are for psychiatrists to not recommend gender clinic referral for people who are clinically depressed, suicidal, actively self-harming, amongst other red flags. This seems eminently sensible, not recommending a treatment until the actual condition has been properly assessed, and I do not see how it of itself can (or should) be deemed transphobic.
Seems every time I visit this site I find a gem that’s been hiding here from me for years. Reading both the original post and this reply created such an aching in my chest–I can’t express how much I relate to your words, “I’ve always been a loner, not because I don’t love people, I do absolutely love people, sort of too much, and because of this love I have been unable to find my exclusive allegiance in banding with one group over another. It has come at a very high cost. My own self doubt comes when I think that perhaps most people are not designed for what I have experienced, perhaps most people are happier and more at peace in narratives that while closed, and limiting in some way, allow them to find others in place and time.” I’ve been pondering similar thoughts so often lately as I look around and see others squeezing their own individual narratives into the box they think will give them the most validation and comfort, or power? I even see myself attempting the same and then quickly developing a claustrophobic need to bust out of it when the inevitable sense of “nope, this doesn’t fit either” emerges. I tell those who can comprehend what I’m talking about that I have a high threshold for social rejection and must stand for the things that ring true whether or not the culture currently agrees with me. It’s lonely. And not–I have lots of conversations and occasionally find others who at least share that experience of being untethered to culture, but tethered to our own hard-tested (and constantly clarifying) values, even if those values differ from mine these rare souls seem as close as it gets to “my people.” All this to say, I’m here because I have a teen trans-identified daughter who I believe has inherited this “homelessness” from me, and is currently swimming in the pudding. I trust she’ll one day recognize the chosen box/pudding flavor isn’t working for her. We’re coming up on 18 and probably the most vulnerable 7ish years of pre-frontal cortex development mixed with age of consent, and I can only hope with all my heart that the physical damage she claims she needs to be authentic has less pull on her than the rebellious reverence of Nature’s way that I just hope I’ve modeled and built into her “mother complex.”
There have been enough “trans” people who turned out to have personal histories of child sexual abuse (as a victim) or who were otherwise consistently ill-treated in the realm of gender (and here I really do mean gender, not physical sex) that if I were a therapist I would start there, and just because someone denies a less than optimal history doesn’t mean they didn’t have one; sometimes a patient just doesn’t trust the therapist and doesn’t open up all the way at first, in fact I’d wager that’s the typical situation.
I won’t ask you what your background is because it’s none of my business but I will ask you instead to consider this from an evolutionary standpoint. How in the world could people have lived out desires to transition in the days when surgery was guaranteed to kill most patients, if it was available at all? Much less hormonal treatment which was unheard of for most people before, say, the 1940s or 1950s.
If you couldn’t have addressed it a hundred years ago without truly mutilating yourself–not just lopping off body parts and making the scars somehow look good–how on earth is it a normal biological state now?
It may be that if one is experiencing psychological distress that there are multiple routes for relieving that distress, some healthier than others. So then it becomes incumbent upon you to ask yourself, “Yeah, I feel better now, but did I choose the healthiest route in the long run?” I’ll tell you right now, if you’re on hormones, the answer’s probably “no”. It is one thing when your body makes its own and they fit your physiology, quite another when they’re cross-sex hormones and synthetic besides.
But all that’s for you to figure out. No one else can take that journey for you.
Oh, in previous ages I would have been a complete social drop-out. There is little question about that. I’d either have never left the parental nest, or if I’d ever dared to then I’d like as not have occupied some loathsome marginal status as a dragged-up sex worker. That has tended to be the “traditional” social lot of low-status trans people in history.
Me and trans hubby nearly took the drop-out option in this day and age, and built a pad out in the French sticks where we were hoping to drop oft the grid, but transitioning offered a way of being in society on terms that we felt better suited us… which I will admit probably says little enough about how palatable and tolerant the society we have built actually is. Having said which, I am useless at DIY in any case.
This is absolutely superb. What a travesty that this deeply insightful and empathic professional has been driven out of a job where she actually HELPS young people (both “trans” and not), per her job description, due to her questioning the trans narrative.
May I reblog to my wordpress?
This description matches exactly what I, and many other partners of “Trans”, have been struggling to have heard: These people hate their lives, and many for very good reasons, and they are subsequently grabbing at the “Trans” narrative as a way to have a do-over, an attempt to build a completely new, diametrically opposite life without addressing their root problems. As if all that history never existed and will never impact their new self. It’s all still there. Nothing changes. Nothing goes away.
Reblog away.
I am also a licensed psychotherapist, trained in child & family therapy and substance abuse, who has been dealing with this situation professionally for years in a very unsatisfactory way. I am not practicing now due to a work injury, but if I do recover I do not plan to go back into the profession. I have tried unsuccessfully to persuade my professional organization to listen to clinicians instead of automatically backing legislation pushed by LGBT organizations. After the last bush-off I decided to resign from the organization. They believe that echoing LGBT organizations makes them progressive and will not even facilitate discussion here. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t think I could practice with children in an ethical way and keep a license. I have had a lot of grieving over the decision to leave practice, but I will NOT be a part of this child abuse.
This is a stunning essay. It’s simply brilliant. In this comment, I wanted to highlight a few choice quotes, but there are so many I’d end up just re-posting it in its entirety. Thank you for this, and thank you for your bravery.
Reblogged this on Stop Trans Chauvinism.
Beautiful and devastating piece. Given the image and quote you include at the top of your blog, I find it so interesting the author writes of sinking, submersion, the search for lost treasure, and “weighty parts that inevitably sink to the depths of us.”
“Personal choice” has become a fetish that is taking authority away from caring professional such as this person, another casualty of the system. The “choice” is not a real choice.
“We are being systematically separated from our own intuition. This is fatal for a civilization, I think.”
CIVILIZATION separates us from our own intuition. Trans is a natural outcrop of civilization and its mission to control all life and fashion it into a machine. The only “third spirit” type people you see in any pre-civ culture are in those pre-civ cultures that already have rigid gender roles and misogyny.
Superb, simply superb, Dana. As I’ve said too many times before, trans is the logical outcome of our alienation and disconnection from actual life. What began that alienation? So-called civilization.
I believe it’s again a case of what a word means to you (or me, or anyone). For some reason, tens of thousands of years ago, humans decided to create some form of civilization. It must have been because it seemed like a good alternative to not having some form of civilization. I know it’s commonly asserted that civilization is a patriarchal construction, but why does it have to be? People like this caring professional are part of what I would consider to be a humane form of civilization that is being disappeared. The kind of “choice” that turns everyone into a customer takes away real authority from those who, while they don’t necessarily “know better”, do have education and training that enables them to help patients (not ‘customers’) make more informed choices.
Not tens of thousands of years. Civilization arose approximately 10,000 years ago in conjunction with agriculture. Agriculture (as opposed to horticulture, something practiced by many indigenous peoples) created surplus, and surplus made possible the rise of hierarchical society. Scholars believe that the Garden of Eden story — it’s difficult, but try to think of it for a moment minus the grotesque patriarchal construction — is a metaphor for the rise of civilization, a human structure which emphasized our separateness from the natural world.
I deeply believe one reason our species is so messed up is our longing for the connection we had prior to civilization. See Richard Sorenson, for example, about pre-conquest consciousness versus post-conquest consciousness.
I think the “archaic” meaning of the word civilization, as I read it in Mary Daly’s work, is very apropos – the act of making a criminal process civil.
I’m so grateful people are able to read these heavy thoughts of mine; these weighty bits that have fallen to the depth in me.
I started a blog at wordpress if anyone wants a place to just reflect and consider what is happening in our world today that is causing our kids to need these closed and dangerous narratives to feel safe in our world. It’s called Semantic Contagion. We need to become curious and remain kind in our efforts to pull our beautiful children back to the land of the living, the land where it is OK not to know. We want for our children their basic integrity.
Our lovely sons and daughters are searching and I do believe they wish to be brave, to make the world a better place, enlarge it, I believe, by donating the very fabric of their own precious bodies. They are like little soldiers fighting a new kind of war, freely sacrificing the history contained in their very flesh for what appears to them a higher narrative, a narrative that claims to make the world better for everyone.
These are very good children. But they are being sold easy answers, being promised payoffs that may not exist for their enlisting in this battle; a battle by which they seek to make themselves whole and fundamentally worthy. I wish this for them. I do. This is a human drive and we all must seek to fulfill it, although I’m fairly certain the current imbalanced narrative will not predictably deliver this to them.
If you consider who in our current world tends to enlist to fight wars, you will gain an understanding of who the kids are who now march out to greet the new enemy (we? are we who seek to shield them from their promised triumph and glory, now the new enemy?). The soldiers who enlist often feel they have very little to lose, they are perhaps less afraid of what will be taken from them in war. It appears as if they very often perceive themselves to have significantly more to gain than to lose in fighting, in turning from civilian life. Or maybe they know of no other way, and in enlisting they see a way out of their struggles, a way to enter the larger world from which they may have felt excluded.
As the military compensates those who choose to enlist, so does this current trans-narrative offer our children that which they feel they have little chance of acquiring elsewhere. Our kids need hope, and these brave young ones are doing all they can to get it, they are not bad children, they are, in many instances, but surely not all, recruits. They are seeking wise leaders, guides who can help them cross the treacherous threshold into this post-post modern world. If they have to sacrifice their bodies, modify their bodies, transform into something they believe is more workable in today’s world, they will do it. They are searching for meaning.
We need to think psychologically about what is happening, to breath and keep the calm, to not get defensive and to know in our hearts that our children are still our children. We who have loved them, nurtured them, all that, it is we who must remember their faces, it is we who hold in our own flesh the history of that creature who unfurled from within us. We can only show our children what confidence and love is, not by arguing with them, but by managing to enter for even a moment their emerging presence, by witnessing them as we have for all these years done so unconsciously. No doctor can ever love your child like you do. It is virtually impossible to replace the years of caring you have poured into your child.
We know our children better than anyone else does. Even if they do go on and transition, we can never forget we know them, we will remain with them in spirit always. Our love and acceptance is manifest in the serenity of not being afraid of a foreign narrative. We must remember our knowing (if we don’t know ourselves, now is the time to do it). Parents! Know thy self. Transition isn’t the worst thing that could happen, it could be fine for your kid, or it could not, the bottom line is you want your kid to know she doesn’t need to sacrifice her bonds with you to become herself , however that looks.
I believe this trans-narrative is so powerful it is destroying parental peace and authority and bringing out only anxiety in parents. This is making parents something children feel they must flee and overcome, as anxiety is repulsive on a deep level, it is disorganizing psychologically. I myself doubt my own sense of what is happening all the time. Last night I was up hours past my bedtime unable to sleep trying to wrap my head around my own burgeoning doubt.
That doubt, I think, is coming because there is no contingent narrative over which we can safely transport ourselves from our pre-existing narrative onto the new one. It’s too big of a leap between the way we saw things up until last year when suddenly we were confronted with “the transgender tipping point” . What I witnessed at that time in the media and continue to witness is not people passing safely into a new narrative, but rather people being forced like lemmings off a narrative cliff (where is the Catcher in the Rye when we need him, huh?). Once the lemmings fell to their deaths, we just had a bunch of people wandering around incapable of engaging their previously functioning critical thinking skills. What a tragedy.
So…we are the few who managed to find a way not to be shoved to our deaths, and it seems we are all doing this stealthfully, using anonymous names just so we can continue to make sense of life by employing the intellectual traditions that for so long have provided our lives structure and meaning. I refuse to let go of my own intuition. My hope is to model this refusal to surrender, to not settle for a closed narrative than sends my heart, mind and soul straight into a piles of craggy rocks.
I don’t think these are “very good children.” I think these are terribly confused and narcissistic children. Too many mothers of these children seem quite involved in their children’s lives; these children do not appear to have been neglected. The child-rearing model of the nineties emphasized telling children how “very good” they are, how wonderful they are, how unique they are. This is not a model that encourages mastery of skills — which is where actual self-esteem is born — and engagement with the world in a meaningful way. In my family and my husband’s family, I have seen what happens to children who are told how smart they are, how great they are, what little geniuses they are: two entitled, arrogant people who thought they had nothing to learn from others and who indulged every whim that they had until one of them learned the truth through very painful lessons.
It’s possible, I feel, to be both psychologically/emotionally immature and also a very big-hearted, well-intentioned person who wants to change the world. Self-centeredness is a normal part of being young, and is to be expected to a point. It doesn’t neutralize other good qualities.
I do see your point, though, that self-centeredness does dominate a lot of these young people. I don’t think it’s from being loved too much, though. I think it has more to do with their responding to a heavily individualistic culture. I also suspect, despite not being a person who cares for religion at all, that religion’s usurpation by brands and branding has something to do with it.
Ah, the old “blame the mother”. Gosh, the patriarchy rears its ugly head in every corner of the internet.
Are men so powerless that they have no influence over their offspring?
Are men so powerless that instead of focussing on the current tragedy, the patriarchal narrative demands that we instead examine the failings of the female parent?
Invoking anecdote to prove a point is a weak one.
It’s too big of a fucking leap because what they are telling us we’re supposed to do involves sticking our fingers in our ears and saying “la la la don’t worry be happy” regarding MEDICAL procedures that actually entail risk. Undertaken by a kid who in no way has the perspective or self-knowledge to give anything like actual informed consent that would truly represent a mature weighing of the potential trade-offs. You know?
So … yeah, spend a lot of years keeping your kid safe, which is no easy task, and then sign off on something that goes against every deep intuitive reaction you possess. Spend a lot of years learning what makes your kid tick — and in my case, trying a whole lot of methods of helping this kid heal from stuff that happened to her before she ever came into my household — and then just meekly nod my head when some “expert” who’s under the influence of a powerful political movement tells me I just need to push all that down, forget all that history, and accept the accepted narrative so my kid can take the journey. Because, yeah, obviously her peers on youtube know a lot more about her psyche than the people who … uh, actually have LIVED with her and struggled with her and lain awake nights worrying about her.
It’s a complete mind-fuck, that being a good parent means we’re supposed to do this. Seriously. I can’t even. See, I don’t even swear. Only, now I do. (walking away from the keyboard. smoke’s rising from the keys …)
You have all my sympathy. My foster daughter was 13 when she moved in with us, and there was no way I could help her heal from the terrible things she had suffered, especially having to deal with a clueless caseworker, a clueless social worker (we were therapeutic foster), and a clueless social worker therapist. These three idiots seemed to know zilch about substance abuse and alcoholic family systems (which nearly every child in foster care grew up with), which frustrated the hell out of me. I quickly learned why DHS loses one-third of foster parents each year — it’s not the kids, it’s the social workers.
Did you adopt your child? How old was s/he at the time?
Your post really says everything that I’ve been thinking. Can you give us mothers any suggestions about what we could do to help our daughters who are caught up in this? I am desperate and think I’ve already made mistakes that I want to take back.
It’s interesting that you make a military analogy, because I’ve often wondered if our soft society gives children too little opportunity to fight for something. We are naturally both predators and social organisms. But in our rush to put safety goggles on everything we’ve relegated what should be a natural and potentially virtuous aspect of our character to a dark and forbidden realm. Once there, such things rarely take virtuous form; they tend to mutate and return to us in the language of metaphor and paradox.
There is a very profound moment in the documentary “Raising Cain,” in which some psychologists are called in to resolve a preschool controversy about “violence” in kids’ play. The teachers have convinced the little girls that they’ve been threatened by the little boys’ stories about guns and soldiers. When the psychologists get the teachers out of the picture and just let the kids talk to each other, it emerges that the little girls’ play is equally preoccupied with good vs. evil, and they don’t at all mind the guns and soldiers at all, as long as they kill the bad guys. The kids shake hands and get on with their pretend, as no doubt they have through the millennia.
When this madness hit our family, the most healing thing was to get our child into physical activity. One can’t hide from one’s own body or wear so-called gender-neutral clothes when fighting for one’s breath while crossing a pool against the heavy literal and existential pull of water. It’s a battle that can’t be won in the head. And it seems to (metaphorically) drown the warring voices in the head. I’ve heard similar stories from other families whose children have overcome the trans mania. I doubt it’s a coincidence. Children must be given the opportunity to physically grapple with the world, and hone their innate battle instincts in the light of day, or they will work their way into the shadows and pull us all under.
I dont know what to add that would not detract from your post but thank you and kudos for your honesty and your courage.
The psychotherapist picked a pseudonym first name that could be male or female, so he or she is doing his or her absolute best to stay anonymous. Which, says a lot about their ownership of their point of view.
Commenting with a pseudonym is one thing, but writing a piece under a pseudonym as a professional is a whole different thing. I see comments on this essay of “devastating,” “stunning,” “beautiful,” and “brilliant,” but in the end this piece will be ineffectual. If “Dr. Lane” wants to change the world, this essay isn’t the way to do it. The psychotherapist is preaching to the choir; he or she is influencing no one who can change anything.
“Dr. Lane’s” bravery extends to standing up on their last day of their employment to share his or her point of view with his or her work peers, so there was never employment put on the line. So, what has “Dr. Lane” exactly put on the line in writing this essay? Nothing. Nothing at all.
“Dr. Lane” will have zero impact in his or her profession with this piece. Nothing “devastating” or “stunning” about that.
It’s true the message would be more powerful if the writer came forward under her real name. But I think you grossly underestimate two things: the professional risk faced by people who openly question the trans narrative, and the reach of social media beyond “the converted.” Also, shooting or discrediting the messenger (even if that messenger is anonymous) does not weaken the message itself.
I want to second this. The amount of time and money that goes into keeping a license and staying on insurance panels, not to mention the dollars spent getting the education, means that professionals are risking a lot here. How many would spend years of their lives building a career and then throw it away (especially before the student loans are paid back). It’s not just a matter of losing a job. Also keep in mind that those who disagree with the trans narrative have been quietly lobbying their colleagues as this woman was before giving notice at work. People here may disagree with that strategy, but professionals tend to try to convert other professionals before going public with their disagreements. Not trying to defend the behavioral health field here; I just want people to see the whole picture.
@ “Freya”: Aw, u mad, bro?
I can tell you’re a MtT because of your complete ignorance of why a woman would have to protect herself online, particularly from the rage of trannies.
Also, I recognize your stupid avatar from GT. So, nice try at dismissing this brilliant essay. We women know better. And that’s your greatest fear, isn’t it? 🙂
Y’know, I think Dr. Lane has been and will prove to be very effective. Change generally begins with discretion, not bravura; with candid exploration rather than pre-packaged polemics. To draw out the concerns of others, to be free to share doubts and work through potential reforms in an atmosphere free from intimidation, that requires discretion and restraint, IRL and online.
Nobody has a duty to slate themselves to martyrdom. Radical feminists and generally women who have took position in similar issues, like gamergate, have been mercilessly and viciously harrassed. In this age of social medias, which the tranny spin machine has there is no peace, privacy or hiding
Oops, the previous post was sent before i was finished. Anyhow, this therapist has already had to give up on her career for ethical reasons. That is more than most would forfeit. She has every rights to her anonymity.
I applaud the Dr. for speaking her mind. Glad to see that some members of the medical field are expressing doubt about the transgender trend. It is understandable, but sad, that she has felt the need to leave her job. I have been fortunate to find a psychologist for my daughter that is helping her figure out why she feels disconnected to her birth sex, but I know other parents haven’t found help for their children. It scares me that transgender-skeptical professionals who may do these children and teens the most good, will be leaving the profession.
I read some of the newly released guidelines from the APA (linked at the top of 4thWaveNow’s post) and they are troubling. Any attempt to contradict the patient’s belief of being transgender may be seen as unethical:
“When addressing psychological interventions for children and adolescents, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care identify interventions “…aimed at trying to change gender identity and expression to become more congruent with sex assigned at birth…” as unethical (Coleman et al., 2012, p. 175).”
The correct approach is to affirm their delusions and put them on the path to transition:
“Nonetheless, there is greater consensus that treatment approaches for adolescents affirm an
adolescents’ gender identity (Coleman et al., 2012). Treatment options for adolescents extend beyond social approaches to include medical approaches. One particular medical intervention involves the use of puberty suppressing medication or “blockers” (GnRH analogue), which is a reversible medical intervention used to delay puberty for appropriately screened adolescents with gender dysphoria (Coleman et al., 2012; de Vries et al., 2014; Edwards‐Leeper, & Spack, 2012).”
Don’t be concerned if kids have no history of being gender-non-conforming, keep on affirming and “supporting.” And, don’t even bring up the influence of peers, pro-trans communities on Tumblr, reddit, and the plethora of Youtube transition videos:
“When working with adolescents, psychologists are encouraged to recognize that some TGNC
adolescents will not have a strong history of childhood gender role nonconformity or gender dysphoria either by self‐report or family observation (Edwards‐Leeper & Spack, 2012). Some of these adolescents may have withheld their feelings of gender non‐conformity out of a fear of rejection, confusion, conflating gender identity and sexual orientation, or a lack of awareness of the option to identify as TGNC. Parents of these adolescents may need additional assistance in understanding and supporting their youth, given that late onset gender dysphoria and TGNC identification may come as a significant surprise.”
And, don’t worry about those pesky mental health problems, they are just complications and could be causing the gender identity problems only in “extremely rare cases”:
“Mental health problems experienced by a TGNC person may or may not be related to that person’s gender identity and/or may complicate assessment and intervention of gender related concerns. In some cases, there may not be a relationship between a person’s gender identity and a co‐occurring condition (e.g., depression, PTSD, substance abuse). In other cases, having a
TGNC identity may lead or contribute to a co‐occurring mental health condition, either directly by way of gender dysphoria, or indirectly by way of minority stress and oppression (Hendricks & Testa, 2012; Meyer, I., 1995, 2003). In extremely rare cases, a co‐occurring condition can mimic gender dysphoria (i.e., a psychotic process that distorts the perception of one’s gender; Baltieri & De Andrade, 2007; Hepp, Kraemer, Schnyder, Miller, & Delsignore, 2004).”
“Psychologists are strongly encouraged to be cautious before determining that gender nonconformity or dysphoria is due to an underlying psychotic process, as this type of causal relationship is rare.”
I am sure there are more disturbing quotes I could pull from the APA guidelines, but honestly I couldn’t stomach reading any further.
It’s worth looking at who sits on the panel that developed these guidelines. I also note that they conflate gender nonconformity with being transgender. I saw little in the guidelines to support a young woman who is gender nonconforming to celebrate herself as a strong woman who could even be a role model for other girls who don’t fit gender stereotypes.
Guess that’s it then. Nonconformity is just a biological thing, and withholding transition treatment is like withholding chemo from a cancer patient or insulin from a person with diabetes. All settled. “Unsupportive” parents … eh, i guess we can expect to have our kids removed from our homes by child services in the foreseeable future?
Ai yai yai. How on EARTH did this stuff snowball like this? (I know how. But it’s infuriating.) “If the teen is a late-presenting ‘trans’ kid then obviously they were just suppressing it before. Any prior mental health issues were obviously caused by this suppression. Except in super-rare cases that aren’t really worht mentioning.”
This is nuts. Seriously. But I honestly think the horse can’t be locked back into the barn now. Only in a decade or two, when the early-transed people who are dealing with health issues attributable to what’s been done to their bodies, and start talking to the media and filing law suits. Then maybe there will be push back.
You know what? If it were something like dyeing your hair green or wearing all black or whatever the heck it is, I’d say, “yeah, kid, go for it, express yourself, work it out.” You can turn back from those things if they don’t work out. If you’re a female who’s dosed yourself with a lot of T and cut off your breasts… and then you still find that you can’t find a place to live in the world that feels right … that’s not so easy to turn back from.
I find it completely infuriating that these people act like medically, it’s all going to be fine fine fin. Like the science is there regarding the safety and effectiveness of the treatment. But the science is NOT there. The politics is there. The science, not.
“But hey, don’t worry your pretty heads, little mommas. You just need more time to get with the program so you can figure out how to support your child. Get yourself some counseling and in a few months you’ll be able to calmly change the bandages from the ‘top surgery’ or the arm wound from the phalloplasty … cos that’s what good moms need to do … “
This is a reply to puzzled. Exactly! The lawsuits will come. The exposés will come. It would be so nice if it was now and not 20 years in the future. 😟
I am a gender non-conforming femal who was raise by a gender non-conforming mother and a gender non-conforming father. I grew up often feeling alienated from my female peers, because I hadn’t be raise in feminine culture as much as they had. And because of that I always felt like a weirdo, who didn’t fit in. BUT….I never felt like I wasn’t female because of it. And I think that might of had a lot to do with the fact that I had my mom as a role model for being a gender non-conforming female who was no less of a female/woman. My mom and I always felt compelled to challenge the definition of “womanhood” with our non-conformity.
Holy macaroni! This is throw up making. This seems like a good time to mention in case anybody on this blog is unaware, the DSM (“psychiatry’s Bible”) is recognized by many mental health practitioners to be extremely dubious. There’s a cottage industry in studying how it’s a complete bunch of crap. And 2013 five, count ’em five, books on how it’s awful were reviewed in USA Today, of all places. A good starting place on this is an older book by Paula J. Caplan, They Say You’re Crazy.
How is the DSM related to the APA guidelines? The way the DSM is made sets a special unscientific standard for defining supposed mental disorders. Allen Frances, who worked on the previous addition of the DSM this time around wrote a book called Saving Normal which is about how the DSM pathologizes everyday life things. The example of this we always used is grief. Grief is a normal response in certain circumstances. The DSM/psychiatry try to make out that it’s a special psychiatric condition and conflate it with depression that doesn’t have some obvious cause. So we have every reason to believe ‘gender nonconforming youth’ is a category that will capture many many perfectly normal kids. And with the crazy stuff overwhelmed has posted from the APA guidelines we can see how a girl who isn’t a perfect Fembot could both be unhappy and then read about this junk on tumblr/see the YouTube videos and get ahold of this as an identity. The way some other kid will be a Goth. And when that happens the psychological Association’s standard is go with it. Tell them their subcultural identity is real. This is absolutely clearly malpractice.
Some psychologist or psychiatrist needs to start studying ‘Transgender Ideation’. Meaning thinking about, fantasizing about, gathering information to feed the fantasy that one is the wrong sex. And just like with anorexia all of the social messages that participate in that. That to be a woman this is to be very thin, very beautiful. And the online subcultural communities that encourage this.
One last point. “Gender Identity” is an idea made up by one guy, the scientific fraudster John Money, and there is not one shred of scientific evidence that it actually exists.
Hadn’t known about John Money — thank you for that name. Apparently I’ve got some interesting digging to do across the campus of Johns Hopkins from Money to Paul McHugh.
Cool. There’s a book, How Nature Made Him, about David Reimer. Who was the person that Money’s fraudulent John/Joan study was about. It should be in the public library. Money also agreed with NAMBLA’s idea that pedophilia is (shudder) about love. NAMBLA is a pedophile propaganda organization that lobbies to weaken anti-pedophilia laws.
Thanks for telling me about How Nature Made Him. It’s next up on my reading list.
Robert Stoller is actually the guy that took Money’s general ideas about gender and articulated them in “Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity.” 1968. Gender, to him, was “cultural or psychological” and “is the amount of masculinity or femininity found in a person.” “Gender Identity,” to him, “starts with the knowledge and awareness, whether conscious or unconscious, that one belongs to one sex and not the other,” though is “much more complicated.” Sigh. He topped it off with “Gender roles”: “the overt behavior one displays in society, the role which he plays, especially with other people, to establish his position with them insofar as his and their evaluation of his gender is concerned.”
Since social constructionism was in vogue, neither Money or Stoller at that time would commit to believing in innate gender, though they both frequently made reference to “developing science” which would potentially reveal such causes. He later went on to claim that one of the determining factors this “gender identity” was sex hormones. With the rise of social conservatism, his notion of “gender essentialism” gained traction and contributed to the genderist mess we’re in now.
Stoller, along with Money, also advocated normalization of fetishes, proposing that they were natural manifestations of revenge via “unconscious aggression” against those who had “threatened” their “gender identity.”
It does rather seem like we have a theme here, doesn’t it?
Every revolution carries within it the seeds of its own destruction.
This is a line from the movie Dune where a plantologist takes a desert planet and forces it to become a temperate rainforest. This was a quick fix for the population, so they could have all the water they wanted but it made their lives miserable.
Actually that’s a line from Marx and Engels’ 1848 “Communist Manifesto”!
Excellent! Thank you for telling me this. I’m not an expert on either of those two dudes. When I first heard it, it did sound kinda familiar but I couldn’t place it.
Not that I don’t appreciate a good Dune reference….you’ve made me want to read/see it again. 🙂
Safe and reversible! Safe and reversible! Unless they aren’t. Then the press will have a high old time tearing down what they are now happily supporting. A few people will get some good scientific publications out of it… Apparently we’ve learned nothing from the disasters of recovered memory, Satanic ritual abuse, multiple personality disorders, DES, Thalidomide. Sorry. I’m feeling quite bitter this evening. Great post and so many great comments, everyone, thanks.
…except very few kids will even think to “reverse” because everyone around them has colluded in the delusion that they’re “really” the opposite sex. This quote from Jack Drescher says it:
“What of the gender variant child whose social environment both accepts and encourages an early transition but may be unaware that the child, unwilling to disappoint, has had a change of heart ?”
http://4thwavenow.com/2015/07/30/one-psychologist-who-gets-it-trans-kids-and-their-parents-deserve-something-different/
Perfect. Of all those medical and pseudomedical horrors you mentioned you forgot lobotomy! How could you forget lobotomy?! Just teasing. You’re absolutely right.
THIS JUST IN: Op-Ed in today’s Sunday New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/opinion/sunday/richard-a-friedman-how-changeable-is-gender.html
Excerpts:
“On a broader level, the outcome studies suggest that gender reassignment doesn’t necessarily give everyone what they really want or make them happier.
Nowhere is this issue more contentious than in children and adolescents who experience gender dysphoria or the sense that their desired gender mismatches their body. In fact, there are few areas of medicine or psychiatry where the debate has become so heated. I was surprised to discover how many professional colleagues in this area either warned me to be careful about what I wrote or were reluctant to talk with me on the record for fear of reprisal from the transgender community.
If gender identity were a fixed and stable phenomenon in all young people, there would be little to argue about. But we have learned over the past two decades that, like so much else in child and adolescent behavior, the experience of gender dysphoria is itself often characterized by flux.”
…”Whether the loss of gender dysphoria is spontaneous or the result of parental or social influence is anyone’s guess. Moreover, we can’t predict reliably which gender dysphoric children will be “persisters” and which will be “desisters.”
So if you were a parent of, say, an 8-year-old boy who said he really wanted to be a girl, you might not immediately accede to your child’s wish, knowing that there is a high probability — 80 percent, in some studies — that that desire will disappear with time.”
“Clinicians who take an agnostic watch-and-wait approach in children with gender dysphoria have been accused by some in the transgender community of imposing societal values — that boys should remain boys and girls remain girls — on their patients and have compared them to clinicians who practice reparative therapy for gays.
I think that criticism is misguided. First, there is abundant evidence that reparative therapy is both ineffective and often harmful, while there is no comparable data in the area of gender dysphoria. Second, unlike sexual orientation, which tends to be stable, gender dysphoria in many young people clearly isn’t. Finally, when it comes to gender dysphoria, the evidence for therapeutics are simply poor to start with: There are no randomized clinical trials and very few comparative studies examining different approaches for this population.
Given the absence of good treatment-outcome data, how can anyone — whether transgender activist, parent or clinician — be sure of the best course of action?”
***********************************************************************
Yeah. “Genderfluid.” Nonbinary. Demiboy. “They WARNED ME TO BE CAREFUL FOR FEAR OF REPRISAL.”
There’s more, pro and con, here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/opinion/sunday/richard-a-friedman-how-changeable-is-gender.html
Here’s the thing, how are they diagnosing ‘gender dysphoria’? If it’s stuff like a five-year-old boy says ‘I’m a girl’, that’s not evidence that he’s dysphoric about that. It sounds like they are attributing dysphoria, which actually means extremely mild and transitory depression, to any kid who does anything odd in a way that we can be construed as gender-ish. And of course lots/most? adults seeking sex changes are just asserting that they want this. That it’s who they are and therefore they must have it. That’s not severe unhappiness. So if the psychiatrists really aren’t determining unhappiness, they’re only determining a desire for the sex change, desire that could be coming from something very much not dysphoric, then it opens the possibility that this phenomenon doesn’t exist at all. If so it would hardly be the first time or even the eighth, that psychiatry invented some not real disorder out of whole cloth.
PS 4thWave, your blog is fab!
The comparison with sexual orientation is also misguided because most homosexual individuals don’t argue that they’re attracted to the wrong sex- just the same sex. There’s nothing to fix, medically. You can’t even compare “reparative therapy” to “let’s not inject our children with drugs that have unknown, questionable results”. And really, if there was a single pill/therapy that would make people with gender dysphoria(if it even exists) identify with their birth sex, then taking it would likely have far more positive results, mentally, socially, and medically than a lifetime of drugs and surgery and trying to pass as the opposite sex.
There is an argument to be made that transitioning, with hormones and surgery, is very similar in concept to reparative therapy.
To Katiesan, exactly! That’s exactly what it is. When you do it to gay kids. 😡 In Iran the government sort of internally banishes gay people. They can’t get jobs and other persecutions I forget what. And all that will be lifted if they have a sex change operation. And the government pays for it. 😧
Lots of questions… http://carolyngage.weebly.com/teena-brandons-inconvenient-truth.html
And there’s another, longer article which goes into more detail here. After I read this longer piece, it seemed to me that the insistence that Brandon was trans misses a huge part of the story–the story of the abuse that made her want to dissociate from her body. Why is it taboo to bring up these issues? The silencing and thought policing around this–the true life story of a person who met a tragic end–is shameful.
Gage says:
“As an adult, Brandon exhibited behaviors consistent with a diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a syndrome associated with incest survivors. Gender dysphoria has been clinically identified as a response to child sexual abuse and incest, and it is logical to question whether or not it was therapeutic in the case of Teena Brandon to diagnose transsexualism and recommend surgical reassignment in lieu of focusing on diagnosis and treatment of Complex PTSD. If healing from child sexual abuse and incest requires retrieval and assimilation of dissociated material, a strong case can be made that Brandon’s transsexualism diagnosis served to enhance her dissociation, impeding recovery from the incest and enabling an escalation of high-risk behaviors based on a dissociated identity. ”
http://www.triviavoices.com/the-inconvenient-truth-about-teena-brandon.html
There is so much of this narrative with which I find myself nodding in agreement,saying ‘Yes’ and wanting to say ‘Exactly…..this is how I feel’.
As the wife of a man who declared himself to be a ‘woman’ and who saw it as nothing but my duty to go along with the trans narrative and bring our children on board, I see very little difference between his behaviour and that of a teenager declaring the same thing. This paragraph resonates strongly with me……
” Unstable folks are neurologically incapable of observing others outside of how these others can fulfill their immediate needs (think narcissism, which is basically a sign a person is too dependent upon external others to construct the self. In being overly dependent in this way, the empty person uses others to create an image of themselves, they use others to literally ” feel” who they are. Obviously, this is all unconscious. Most people with a lack of a cohesive self are not aware they are using others in this way, but they will feel the effects of this habit and often not understand why they continue to have poor interpersonal and disrupted relationships with others).”
I read the APA Guidelines when they were published earlier this month and was appalled. The psychiatric profession has become nothing but a rubber stamp used to pass on patients with gender issues to clinicians as soon as possible.
I had no wish to reject my husband or to become a ”non-comprehending spouse”. My intuition told me that there was no middle ground, no discussion; he declared that he was a woman and I was expected to go along with this from day one. i see a man running away from so many things, who all his life has blamed others for his disappointments in life and who has never said sorry to his family for turning their lives upside down.
Thank you for speaking. I wish that there were more free thinkers in the psychotherapist profession.
Eloquent thoughts by an understandably frustrated writer. The current zeitgeist is complex in origins but simple in message: Transition because that is what is right, both psychologically and morally. The truth is more complex, but the most important aspects include:
1. In the past children who wanted to be the other sex usually adjusted to being happy in their own, original, skins. That was a good thing, avoiding serious medical intervention.
(See: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-vilain-transgender-parents-20150521-story.html)
2. The current zeitgeist favoring early social transition of children (you wanna be a girl? go ahead. Because you’re destined to be a girl….) will lock many kids into transition early. If they’d have been happy without transition, this is a bad thing. And most would.
3. Two types of males transition, for completely different reasons. The late onset type is motivated by autogynephilia, which is best conceived as inward directed heterosexuality–they are attracted to a woman they create inside themselves. Many activists are of this type, and they are trying to influence decisions about children they were nothing like. (See http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/JMichael-Bailey/TMWWBQ.pdf, part 3)
4. None of this is to say that it is simple to know what to do in any case, but assuming/believing things that are false.
Thank you for commenting here, Dr. Bailey.
I am heartened to see that Dr. Bailey has found this group and I hope he reads some of the past posts and comments so he understands that we are mostly parents, concerned at what is happening to our children, primarily daughters. And that we aren’t buying the current standard of care, pushing our children inevitably to transition.
Thank you, Dr. Bailey, for legitimizing the parents who are not following the current zeitgeist. We need your support because we are actually seen as the unsupportive mothers. Where has the common sense gone?
I’d just read Anne’s Lawrence’s account of the backlash you’ve faced, Dr. Bailey, so when I saw your comment I particularly appreciated your having openly joined the dialog here.
This morning, I began reading TMWWBQ, expecting a brick of turgid, distant academic writing that would nonetheless be informative. It is instead very readable and human, as well as very informative. Thank you for making it available as a PDF.
Was so eager to post that I didn’t finish my final sentence: “but assuming/believing things that are false cannot help.”
Yes, thank you for commenting on this blog, Dr Bailey, and for the links. I teach communication skills and write a weekly blog for parents and I know that most parents have absolutely no idea about trans issues. It worries me that if they seek information online they will only find what amounts to propaganda from the trans activists. It also concerns me that the parents publicly celebrated for ‘supporting’ their kids are only those who reinforce a child’s belief that it’s possible to actually change their sex. I think there’s a way of responding to kids which doesn’t go the opposite extreme of insisting that a boy (for example) plays with ‘boy’ toys and has boy friends, which is just as reinforcing of gender stereotypes; parents could just say ‘yeah you’re a boy who likes playing with dolls’ like it’s no big deal. We should all be like that with kids really, but the messages they get from their culture everywhere they look will be reinforcing the opposite. I do wonder whether the recent extreme gender stereotyping of toys has added to children’s confusion. I have written three blogs on transgender issues for parents, this one continues to be the most visited post on my site: http://communicatingwithkids.com/is-my-child-transgender/ Thanks again for your work.
Great post and it’s so true how the Trans community is even barging into the Intersex community as well. I have even seen how so many trans who have tried to use intersex people’s narratives to get whatever they want at the expense of Intersex people. It’s why many Intersex people who speak up are often times attacked, threatened and silenced. Which is why many Intersex people are afraid to speak up because of fear of being attacked or threatened. That’s why it frustrates me as an Intersex person to constantly see the younger trans and older trans trying to pass themselves off as Intersex without the medical testing and DNA testing. I can see the frustration in the doctor’s post and understand as well. When you can’t question anything, you lose your right to think critically and logically. In which the Trans cult is trying to pull on people.
How I wish I could find a therapist with this integrity and professionalism to help my own child.
Thank you, Doctor. Your experiences and insights are very important and so, so welcome. It’s good to know that every mental health professional hasn’t forgotten to think critically and seriously about the current situation.
First of all, thank you for standing up and saying that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. More people in your profession need to do so to stop this Orwellian gaslighting.
Transgenderism is the only mental issue that I can think of where the recommended treatment is to enable the symptoms, rather than to get to the underlying issue that would cause a person to believe something that is biologically impossible – that one could possibly be one sex born in the “wrong” body of the other. Hormones and surgery for the transgender person is like performing liposuction and prescribing a diet for an anorexic person. In both types of mental issues, the person can’t or won’t see their body in realistic terms. But, the anorexic patient gets treatment that helps them to see their body in realistic terms and to make peace with it – why don’t transgender people get the same treatment?
I would say that a sizable amount of trans people likely have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, particularly the autogynephiles, considering that they go to pieces at even the slightest whiff of disagreement, debate, or dissension. If they were truly confident in themselves and in their beliefs about themselves, they’d not care what random strangers on the internet have to say about transgenderism and wouldn’t need the constant reassurance from everyone, including total strangers.
And with trans kids, surely those in the psychiatric community know that it takes around two decades for full cognitive development to occur and are especially prone to magical thinking; thus children cannot give informed consent about any sort of transition procedures, either hormonal or surgical. It is in recognition that human cognitive development takes so long that children are prohibited from an entire range of activities for their own protection: living independently, getting married, consenting to sex, drinking, smoking, driving, and so on. Nor are parents legally permitted to allow their children to engage in any of these activities contrary to the law. Why should it be any different for transition procedures, especially because it renders that child permanently sterile before they are old enough to even understand the permanency of such a decision? I see the transing of children,as nothing less than a human rights violation, little different from the eugenics movement of a hundred years ago that involuntarily sterilized countless numbers of people deemed “undesirable”.
Please keep speaking up about this issue and I hope that others in your profession join you.
this doesn’t contain much advice for parents from this individual. that might make a neat follow up post if you can get another article written by the op
From the new APA Guidelines linked at the beginning of this post:
“A non‐binary understanding of gender is fundamental to the provision of affirmative care for TGNC people. Psychologists are encouraged to adapt or modify their understanding of gender, broadening the range of variation viewed as healthy and normative.”
This is a serious evolution of the “Original Lie”, based on the fundamentally flawed conflation of gender and morphological sex. The APA which has a huge monetary interest in promoting this agenda driven “consensus of opinion”, NOT scientifically proven or tested FACTS, will of course “encourage” it membership to broaden their understanding of the …’spectrum of gender identities and gender expressions that exist and that a person’s gender identity may not be in full alignment with sex assigned at birth’. They then go on to conclude with only the weakest justification, NOT SCIENTIFIC PROOF, that…”psychologists can increase their capacity to assist TGNC people, their families, and their communities.”
In truth, as many here have already noted, this “consensus” of craven, agenda driven hacks, using pseudo-science, are causing irreparable harm, pain and unnecessary suffering to our young and easily impressionable kids and their families.
GENDER; From Wikipedia:
In 1926, Henry Watson Fowler recommended that
the word be restricted to this grammar-related meaning
only: “Gender…is a grammatical term only. To talk
of persons…of the masculine or feminine gender,
meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity
(permissible or not according to context) or a blunder.”[
13]
The modern academic sense of the word, in the context
of social roles of men and women, dates from the
work of John Money (1955), and was popularized and
developed by the feminist movement from the 1970s
onwards (see Feminism theory and gender studies
below). The theory was that human nature is essentially
epicene and social distinctions based on sex are
arbitrarily constructed. Matters pertaining to this theoretical
process of social construction were labeled matters
of gender.
59
T H E M U S I N G S O F M A R I A
The popular use of gender simply as an alternative to
sex (as a biological category) is also widespread,
although attempts are still made to preserve the distinction.
The American Heritage Dictionary (2000)
uses the following two sentences to illustrate the difference,
noting that the distinction “is useful in principle,
but it is by no means widely observed, and
considerable variation in usage occurs at all levels.”[
14]
The effectiveness of the medication appears to
depend on the sex (not gender) of the patient.
In peasant societies, gender (not sex) roles are likely
to be more clearly defined.
In the last two decades of the 20th century, the use
of gender in academia increased greatly, outnumbering
uses of sex in the social sciences. While the spread of
the word in science publications can be attributed to
the influence of feminism, its use as a euphemism for
sex is attributed to the failure to grasp the distinction
made in feminist theory, and the distinction has sometimes
become blurred with the theory itself.[2] A
recent Publication by the Australian Human Rights
Commission on “sexual orientation and gender identity”[
15] uses “sex and/or gender identity” as a broad
term to refer to diverse sex and/or gender identities
and expressions, including being “transgender, trans,
transsexual and intersex. It also includes being androgynous,
agender, a cross dresser, a drag king, a drag
queen, genderfluid, genderqueer, intergender, neutrois,
pansexual, pan-gendered, a third gender, and a third
sex. It also includes culturally specific terms, such as
sistergirl and brotherboy, which are used by some Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”[15]
Among the reasons that working scientists have
given me for choosing gender rather than sex in biological
contexts are desires to signal sympathy with
feminist goals, to use a more academic term, or to
avoid the connotation of copulation—David Haig, The
Inexorable Rise of Gender and the Decline of Sex.[2]
You can find a great deal more on this topic in Part 2 of this little book: http://themusingsofmaria.com/
!!!!! Fantastic! There is the ‘like’ button for your comment but I need a ‘love’ one! 💖 This sticker seems appropriate to 🎓 Wow. I like that Fowler guy. And it seems to me the first and absolutely least we can all do is stop using the flippin term g*nd*r. If we mean male and female, we say sex.
Was reading about John Money the other day and his gender identity concept. He’s the guy who invented it, for real! He is a known scientific fraudster. He was exposed in the late 90s. Unfortunately his reputation was not utterly destroyed as it should have been. Anyway it seems to me that Money’s concept of gender is basically taking the content of sex roles and turning it into a little piece of your soul. Taking what are really social conventions and making them metaphysical. Which incidentally is neither a scientifically or even a philosophically valid thing to do. I shall be reading and thinking more about John Money. He’s a fascinating creep.
At the very start of your comment you quote that weird junk from the APA. What I find the most funny about it is they talk about extending your understanding of gender beyond just male and female. Well tell it to the transgenders! The transgender ideology is obsessed with sticking to the “binary”. Or as it’s usually called in the academic world, a dichotomy. I’m a heterosexual woman who doesn’t wear make up, doesn’t shave, and has a simple easy care hairdo. The transgender world’s concept of gender doesn’t even extend to me!
Also, Transgenderism has TGNC? We can have TNC. Transgender Non Conforming. We don’t conform to the Transgender Ideology’s version of what does and doesn’t exist.
Reading this took my breath away.
Having spent 35 years with one of these men, I recognize so many things I could never describe or articulate but always felt in some gut-level primal way.
“What I think has happened is that people are now phobic about their own gut responses to life. We are being systematically separated from our own intuition.”
I agree.
Some have become so civilized they don’t even recognize primal fear anymore.
They quit listening to their instincts and lost universal common sense.
I never lost my gut response to life and have complete trust my intuition and instincts.
They have protected me and served me very well.
“They think these new friends they’ve made online understand them perfectly. And in believing this unquestioningly, they find themselves lulled by the frictionless experience delivered most powerfully by group think.”
Bullseye!
“Lulled by the frictionless experience…”
And to anyone who disturbs this fragile mirage of delusion, unleashes all their pent up rage.
In the case of the Trans population (not necessarily some young recruits, who though gender nonconforming might be mentally healthy butch lesbians, girlish boys, etc): are we perhaps talking about another psychiatric disorder altogether, but somehow losing the forest for the trees, because there’s such a strong collective “designated issue?”
If someone is dysphoric, self hating, and self mutilating, with an unstable sense of identity, great psychic pain, a trauma history and and suicidal ideation, feeling like they don’t fit in or belong, feeling like others look down on them… isn’t that the bullseye of BPD?
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An amazing piece. Thank you so much for this writing, and to 4thwavenow for publishing it. This piece and some of the commentary here are really exciting and revelatory!
I feel so glad to see such a rise in voices, even if we do have to stay anonymous or semi-anonymous. I hope this is a sign of a rising counter-narrative tide.
Re Dr. Bailey’s 3rd point above (many transactivists appear to be late-transing AGP men, shaping policy for kids who are not like they were as kids) — these natal men keep insisting a lot of us want them to be literally eliminated. And that just ain’t the truth. Look, life is short, and I think (as long as they’re not hurting other people or the planet) people have the right to do what they think they have to do in order to live in a bearable (and, one hopes, fulfilling) way. If these folks, and other trans people, think that transition was right for them — despite risks — then I’m all, “hey, OK, I wish you all the best.” (I might feel a lot of empathy with the people you’ve hurt on the way, but … you only get one life.)
I know they are seeing themselves as potentially having benefited so much from blockers and early transing, which would have allowed them to pass better, be more beautiful, make bodies more congruent with the ideals in their head, and more easily acceptable to society. (This I think is also true for some FTM people, though the main benefit of early action here seems mostly to do with height.) But for them to insist on a one-size-fits-all narrative, that trans is a pathology that has one clear cause (brainsex) and one clear medical treatment — I’m never going to stop taking issue with that, without some way better evidence to back it up.
The loudest transactivists in their heads/hearts have a core of this ‘not passing’ thing, as a natal man doing woman, as far as I can tell. Meanwhile, ex-FTM females have a whole bunch of different narratives that just get dismissed as irrelevant. Narratives that have to do with body dysphoria stemming from trauma/abuse, or with a sense of powerlessness foisted upon females in a patriarchy, or with internalized homophobia and lack of nonconforming role models, or other stuff that is not primarily about ‘not passing.’ The voices of Jenn and Zoey and Andrea James are so emphatic, who can really hear the voices of 23xx and redressalert and Lynn Cadin, of Markitza Cummings and Maria Catt, Violet Irene, hotflanks …. women. To me, their analysis of the stuff that was making them feel ‘not female’ needs to be weighed in any decision regarding the treatment of my natal daughter. I don’t think the voices of the transwomen, or of high-profile transguys such as Aydian Downling. (geez, if it’s not trend-influenced, why do they all have to pick some variation of Aidan or Cayden? but I digress), are the only voices worth listening to. I don’t think the lived experiences of a natal male who transitioned later in life have a helluva lot to do with the lived experiences of my internet-soaked teen daughter who was revolted by her early menarche, who has relationship and brain development issues based on early-life institutionalization, and who’s still trying to come up with some integrated self after upheavals I won’t go into here.
I’m giving these trans people the benefit of the doubt, or trying hard. But I think the least they can do in return is dig up some shred of humility, and acknowledge that what was so right for them is not necessarily right for every nonconforming kid/teen. It’s not right of those voices of theirs are the only voices shaping public policy regarding treatment of sex-role-nonconforming people. If therapists and parents are locked into a treatment box based on the lived experience of these people — and not on scientific analysis — that’s not a good model. If we’re going to let medicine be that patient-driven, resting on shaky data, I say just … open the pharmacies and let everybody pick what they want, and give us all state-funded body modification surgery so we can all look like whatever ideal we might be lugging around in our head. ugh.
For some reason the “Like” button doesn’t appear to be working for me. I just want to say this is a great post, puzzled. I agree with every word — my thoughts and feelings exactly.
I agree so strongly with this, and wish you all the best with your teen daughter. I hope you have some good support, and I admire how reasonable, even generous, your post is, given your circumstances.
For readers unfamiliar with the detransitioned FTMs/women Puzzled mentioned, several have blogs of their own. They are well worth reading to better understand how a teen or young woman can dissociate from her own body, to the point of injecting testosterone or having surgery…and yet manage to find her way home to her original self again.
I’m giving these trans people the benefit of the doubt, or trying hard. But I think the least they can do in return is dig up some shred of humility, and acknowledge that what was so right for them is not necessarily right for every nonconforming kid/teen.
They (these men) never will acknowledge that, as it is crucial to their whole warped and twisted belief system. If they had the humility, or even any decent humanity they wouldn’t be calling themselves “women” and they would not be so driven to force themselves on everyone the way they are doing.
Bingo. 👌🏽
I shouldn’t even say ‘pathology’ above … I think they would term it a ‘natural variation on a spectrum.’
That was superb. A good point that I had not thought of. What DO autogynephiles have to do with teenage girls? It shows how far outside of anything scientific this whole mess is.
Something that may be relevant to teenage girls, both lesbian and not, is this wonderful song from Alison Bechtdel’s cartoon memoir The Fun Home. That Gender Trender posted.
https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2015/08/22/fun-home-ring-of-keys/
I would like to point out that everyone should go and read the guidelines for treatment — and pay particular attention to the ones for children and teens. The introductory information is all good stuff — most children grow out of their dysphoria with no need for any treatment, most teens present with other mental issues and being teens complicates things because they want instant gratification and have developing brains. All good, right?
Then there’s a big, “HOWEVER” and we get told how professionals shouldn’t worry about any of the previous stuff because kids know and teens know and they deserve to have whatever they demand. And, yeah, parents may not be happy, but screw THEM. YOU, the professional, are the one in charge. It’s your unsupported FEELINGS which matter, not the fact that there’s little research or extended studies supporting doing whatever a kid or teen demands. We want all you therapists to feel good about YOURSELVES, and ignore all those dumb parents. What do they know? What do they care?
There is SO much in the original post that needs to be amplified and discussed. There is just so much of value. I think that the key point is the active and downright intimidating efforts at silencing any opposing thoughts or even simple questions. My question is how/where can we voice our reasoned opposition? The energy and passion is obvious in the many heartfelt comments….” It’s not right of those voices of theirs, (those men in dresses), are the only voices shaping public policy regarding treatment of sex-role-nonconforming people. If therapists and parents are locked into a treatment box based on the lived experience of these people — and not on scientific analysis — that’s not a good model.”
I agree wholeheartedly. There IS a better way.
But what is a parent to do in practical terms? Our 15-year-old daughter was abandoned at birth by her bio mother in Russia, was adopted by me at 13 months, has a prominent facial scar due to plastic surgery to reduce a birthmark at the age of 7, lived 9 years with my husband and me and a live-in babysitter in Italy, then moved with me and the babysitter to Hungary because husband`s work would not permit him to relocate with us, shortly after which the live-in babysitter resigned and went home to the Philippines . . . In other words, she has no shortage of reasons to have identity issues. At about 14, she and her best friend both decided they were “trans” and now, two years later, neither one has desisted. I don’t need to describe the aggressivity, disrespect, and other nightmares we have been living through since then. We have been to three therapists — one a family therapist who finally said she didn’t have enough experience to help her, and two others who were so enthusiastically pro-transition that we cut short the counseling as soon as we understood what was happening. Where can these children receive the real professional help they need to explore their traumas and other issues? It seems the profession is no fully populated by pro-trans soldiers all marching in a straight line. The therapist who wrote this original post is exactly the sort of person we would like to have helping our daughter, but she has been driven out of the field! Like Dr. Zucker in Toronto . . .
Illinois just passed a conversion therapy law applying to minors. OH, NJ, DC, and CA also have passed laws. In every case, the laws conflate therapy aimed at switching someone’s sexual orientation with therapy designed to explore ideas about gender identification. Therapists who do the latter in these states are in danger of being sanctioned. There’s a consumer fraud provision in the Illinois law, as well.
Illinois’ law is the most comprehensive; here is the text:
http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/publicacts/fulltext.asp?Name=099-0411
Notably, it starts out firmly talking about sexual orientation of LGB people, but then the gender identification language slides in. It doesn’t even show up until Section 10 of the bill. And then it talks about ‘sexual orientation change’ for trans youth. I think these legislators really had NO clue regarding what they were voting for here, or that there was any distinction between LGB and T, whatsoever. The last paragraph in section 15 seems to indicate a therapist could POSSIBLY help a young person with gender issues explore those, as long as they’re not setting out with a goal of trying to change them, as a goal. But the language just keeps cycling round to ‘sexual orientation.’ Being trans (or thinking you are) is not ‘sexual orientation.’
The country is going to be full of sloppy legislation like this unless the psych industry and concerned outsiders make a lot more noise than they’ve been making. Even if the language is sloppy, it will have a chilling effect on any therapists who might want to ask kids and families to spend more time exploring what is actually going on with the kids’ sex-role-nonconformity before sending them off to endocrinologists.
The supreme irony is that hasty transing of minors is going to ‘straight-I-fy’ a lot of kids who would have turned out to be gay/lesbian if left alone to develop and mature. As has been mentioned here, many times.
Very interesting you should mention the “straight-i-fy’ angle. On Facebook this morning, someone posted one of the now-familiar stories about a teen girl who has suddenly decided she is a guy. The Facebook poster said she lives in a conservative “Bible Belt” area, and this is the third girl she’s seen doing this. She also mentioned that all 3 girls had previously tried to identify as lesbian. This stuff is so obvious. Why won’t the media cover it? In fact, therapists DENY the link between girls wanting to transition and homophobia. The first therapist I called regarding my daughter actually said this: “OH, it is very, very rare for a trans person to ACTUALLY be gay or lesbian.” Really? Many detransitioned women would stringently disagree.
Actually gender expression is introduced in section 5.9 of the Illinois bill, with quotes from a 2012 APA position statement. …
These laws are a direct result of that unholy alliance between the trans-activists and the self interested APA. In my uneducated opinion, the APA is much like the teachers union or the Teamsters. Their, (the APA), stated loyalty is to their dues paying membership, NOT our kids or their patients whom they ostensibly serve.
What better way for the auto-gynephilic fetishists to legitimatize their bizarre behavior and outlandish claims than to claim/assert that theirs is ‘medical’ problem, conveniently “treated” by their enablers, the APA.
This is the trans-narrative. Sadly, as you are all so well aware, those who oppose it, much less speak out against it are relentlessly and brutally demonized. Again this begs the question as to what is an effective means of countering this madness.
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We should never be telling a child that he or she will have to have a sex change before they can manifest the way they would like to. IMHO parents who make a big fuss about their transgender child are abusing that child to seek attention. It is called Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
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As a transwoman myself I just wanna say that the alleged “trans narrative” has been usurped by cultural Marxists (many are 4th wave feminists). I think if you really wanted to be objective you would open channels of discussion with genuine transwomen and help put an end to trans-misogyny. Some of us really are women and your relentless persecution is targeting the victims and not the perpetrators.
Only a trans activist would call thoughtful critical discussion about the wave of kids being transitioned “relentless persecution.”
I oppose what said “trans activists” are doing. It is a cultural Marxist plot to achieve trans erasure.
WPATH says 6 out of 7 M2F children will cease identifying as trans during puberty. I’ve argued about it before with the rest of the trans “community” and I’m far from the only one who opposes telling kids to block puberty and transition.
All you need to realize is that us transwomen do NOT have a hive mind. This issue is one of OUR problems… not your problem, but you are welcome to help if that is your genuine intention …. OK?
Oh, shut it, Angelica. This isn’t about YOU. It’s not YOUR problem. This is about our kids and the lack of critical thinking in trans-ing kids. And the increase in trans-identification in teenage girls.
Go away.
“This issue is one of OUR problems… not your problem, but you are welcome to help if that is your genuine intention …. OK?”
It sometimes amazes me how people reading this blog can see it as an attack on themselves and not what it is–trying to get the word out on how the transgender agenda is convincing many children (without history of gender dysphoria) that they need to medically alter themselves.
Angelica, it may have started out as one one your community’s problems, but it has spilled over and is affecting OUR children. Believe me, parents like myself don’t relish becoming involved, but it has become a necessity.
Reblogged this on A Thinkers Delight.
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