Note: All screenshots in this post were taken from the publicly accessible WPATH Facebook page on 9/3/2016. Please visit the thread in question for full context and to see any edits and/or additions that have been made since this post was published.
UPDATE 9/4/16: Several allegations have been leveled at the writers of 4thWaveNow and Cari in the most recent comments on the WPATH Facebook page. We invite you to read our post, Cari’s survey results, and the WPATH thread, then decide for yourself whether there are any distortions of fact in our reporting.
4thWaveNow would like to address the fact that the parents who create and manage this blog use pseudonyms; we also protect the anonymity of our commenters. All of us are keenly aware that we have no right to expose our children–some of whom have a social media presence–to the harsh light of public scrutiny. Our primary concern is protecting their privacy. And in this age of the Internet, compromising our privacy will compromise theirs. One has only to look at the history of what trans activists have done in their attempts to silence critics in the past, which have included vicious attacks on not only the adults who have spoken out, but at times upon their minor children. We are simply not willing to expose our children to this risk.
If it were possible to have an “honest dialogue” with the activists and public figures who are having such a huge (and in many cases, deleterious) impact on the lives of our children, we would welcome that. If we saw, even once, professionals acknowledging that there is indeed a social contagion going on amongst teenagers; if we heard any of the points we make being honestly engaged, it would be different. Instead, what we get are unceasing ad hominem attacks, professionals and journalists who should know better yelling “TERF!”, and constant accusations that unless we get behind the medical transition of our own children, we are driving them to suicide. This is not an atmosphere for reasoned dialogue. And that is why this blog came to be in the first place.
We will continue to provide a platform for people like Cari and others who have been frozen out of the public discussion on the issue of pediatric transition. Until mainstream journalists are willing to present a more balanced picture of this very serious and increasing trend in Western society, that work will be left to bloggers like us.
Two weeks ago, Cari, a 22-year-old former teen client of TransActive Gender Center in Portland, OR, announced an online survey designed to better understand the experiences of detransitioned women. She has completed work on this phase of her project, and today posted the survey results, with a detailed interpretation, on her blog.
I won’t be going into exhaustive detail about everything the survey revealed; Cari’s blog post provides an excellent write-up and analysis. What I will be doing, instead, is reporting on the reaction (posted on the public WPATH page) of Dan Karasic, MD, top gender specialist and UCSF psychiatrist—which amounts mostly to minimizing the significance of Cari’s work and attempting to discredit several of her most important findings.
Cari’s survey ran for only two weeks, from August 16 – 31. Most surveys recruit participants for months or even years. That over 200 women responded in such a short timeframe should put to rest any notion that “desistance is a myth.” And the fact that the survey was shared on social media means that it likely reached a demographic that most trans activists deny exists: young women who became interested in medical transition due, in part, to social contagion (a phenomenon currently being studied by a researcher at Mt. Sinai). As Cari notes,
“Leaving aside all the other data this provides, the sheer number of responses is pretty amazing. Given that the survey was open for 2 weeks and was shared through a couple of Facebook groups, most of which were private, and Tumblr, I think we can safely say that detransitioners are not quite as rare as some would like to have us think.”
In his Facebook post, Karasic attempts to dismiss the 62% of respondents who said that “political/ideological concerns” were a factor in their decision to detransition– by implying that these concerns are on par with people who reject their own homosexuality due to religious beliefs!
To be fair, Karasic does say that “some exploration” of negative reactions to hormones is appropriate (albeit in the no-gatekeeping, informed consent model). But comparing these women’s thought processes to evangelical Christianity? This is an astounding leap. “Political/ideological” concerns could mean any number of things, including that these women began to think more critically; that they began to question some of the rhetoric of transgender ideology and came to realize that they were, in fact, women–no matter how fervently they once believed otherwise. In fact, this is rather the opposite of someone going back in the closet because their religion told them they were evil sinners.
But that’s not even the worst thing about Karasic’s opening volley: He fails to mention that respondents could choose more than one reason for deciding to detransition. It’s either a willful or clueless misinterpretation of the data to imply that the only–or even the main— reason these women detransitioned was because of ideological concerns.
Of at least equal significance is the fact that 59.4% of respondents found alternative ways to cope with their dysphoria. For any other situation involving drastic medical interventions, the possibility of an alternate solution or “cure” would be of great interest. But no one on that WPATH Facebook thread is celebrating; in fact, they don’t even mention this key finding.
Karasic also dismisses the survey as “skewed” because it was posted in forums where people critical of transition could easily find it. This is rich. The few studies we are beginning to see of trans children and teens are being conducted by researchers using their own patients—children who have been socially and medically transitioned by parents and clinicians heavily invested (ideologically and financially) in the business of pediatric transition. And Cari’s survey looked at detransitioned people who, by definition, are rather more likely to be critical of transition in general; such an obvious point seems to be lost on Karasic and the other commenters who pile on to say the sample is “unrepresentative.” Unrepresentative of what?
In a followup comment, Karasic plays the well-worn “they weren’t really trans” card with another misread of the survey’s data.
What? A whopping 48% of the women in Cari’s survey formerly identified as trans man/FTM—nearly half.
It’s odd to see how easily Karasic discounts this group of women, given that “informed consent” based on self-reported identity is the standard of care he and others at WPATH increasingly support.
But here’s where Karasic’s reaction gets really interesting. Cari’s survey found that 42% formerly identified as nonbinary or genderqueer. So that’s 90% who did not identify as female. Just from reading Karasic’s comment, we might think he would not support transition for those 42%. Yet only a few months ago, he argued that medical transition should be freely available, via informed consent, to people who identify outside the binary.
Which is it, then? These detransitioned women weren’t really trans, so they goofed—but how can they have goofed, when Karasic actively promotes medical transition for anyone who wants it? Because who could possibly be excluded from self-identifying as “nonbinary”?
One of the most important findings in Cari’s survey (utterly ignored by Karasic and the other commenters) is that the majority of respondents not only had very limited therapy (aka “gatekeeping” in current trans activist lingo), but also believed, after the fact, that the counseling they received prior to transition was inadequate—as Cari herself has said about her experiences at TransActive Gender Center. Cari writes:
“117 of the individuals surveyed had medically transitioned. Of these, only 41 received therapy beforehand. The average length of counseling for those who did attend was 9 months, with a median and mode of 3, minimum of 1, and a maximum of 60. I’d like to have something cool to say here, but I’m honestly just stunned at the fact that 65% of these women had no therapy at all before transition.”
Why is it that Karasic and the others on the thread have nothing to say about this key finding? Given that this is a survey of people who chose to detransition—many of whom were quite unhappy about their transitions and the services they received from gender specialists—wouldn’t it be worth exploring the idea that some were perhaps too easily granted the opportunity?
What’s more, these women have, by and large, a very negative view of their transitions.
But Dan Karasic, like most activist-clinicians, is not really a believer in gatekeeping. As he said in another post just a few days ago, easy access to medical transition and cross-sex hormones is something to be desired—hopefully at the first follow up visit.
Presumably, the young clients at Dimensions seek medical transition to relieve their dysphoria. Interestingly, Cari’s survey found that the majority of detransitioned women saw improvement in their dysphoric symptoms after beginning to detransition:
“…cumulatively, 88% of the individuals surveyed experienced physical sex dysphoria. Individuals who experienced only social dysphoria were more likely to report that their dysphoria was improved by detransition (91%, versus 73% for individuals with sex dysphoria), and none of these individuals indicated a worsening of dysphoria, however even among those with sex dysphoria, only 9% reported that their dysphoria had increased since detransitioning.”
The implications of this are profound. If 59% of the sample found “other ways to deal with their dysphoria” which led them to detransition—and then, having detransitioned, found their symptoms improving still more—one would think this data would keenly interest Dan Karasic and his followers. What if there are cheaper and less drastic ways to deal with gender dysphoria?
To Karasic’s credit, he does concede—while stopping short of admitting that “real” trans people might actually regret their transitions– that some formerly trans-identified women do end up feeling their medical transition “wasn’t right for them.” But he manages to minimize even that.
It’s apparent that that Dr. Karasic, along with other WPATH members (in the comment below, “liked” by Dr. Karasic), don’t really see what the big deal is if some women change their minds about the hormones and surgeries that have forever altered their bodies. 
They can just change back or quit hormones—what’s the worry? It’s all just an experiment anyway, kind of like tattoos and piercings.
These people seem not to be familiar with the growing number of detransitioned women who have their own blogs and websites, wherein they speak of their sadness at the irreversible changes wrought upon their voices; the body hair; the loss of their breasts; some have gynecological difficulties.
Activist-clinicians are invested in the idea that regret rates are low—even though this generation of young people is the first to experience medical transition. There is no data on long-term regret rates for these young people, and Karasic knows it, as do most other gender doctors. They don’t know. No one does. Cari deserves enormous credit for sticking her neck out to do this survey, because the gender doctors sure as heck aren’t going to do it for her and the other women who are in the same boat.
One wonders: How many of these women will it take for doctors like Dan Karasic to take them seriously? 500? 1000? Will there need to be 5, 10, 20, replicated studies, conducted over decades, thousands of women, before these gender specialists take their needs seriously, once they have detransitioned? (I will note that most of the studies utilized by trans activists and gender specialists to support what they’re doing consist of very small cohorts, with “low quality evidence,” as recently pointed out by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but it’s convenient to dismiss data that doesn’t fit one’s narrative.)
So, what would constitute regretters “per se”? How many? What percentage? What criterion will satisfy Karasic and the other activists and clinicians piling on the Facebook thread to essentially say that Cari’s data (and Cari’s own experiences, presumably) are bunk?
Update 9/5/16: One very telling answer to the “How many?” question comes from a WPATH commenter who pontificates:
Increase your sample size to 12,000 and follow the subjects for 20 years, then report back to me with your findings. Maybe then, I might value your study.
Cari (who has joined the conversation on the Facebook page) replies,
And who is writing NIH grants to study thousands of detransitioned trans men? Who has in the past? It’s easy to sit on a high horse and shoot down the efforts of a 22-year-old who suffered medical harms and is interested in delving more deeply into the experiences of women like her. Easier still to tell her those harms won’t be worth taking seriously for 20 years, until there are thousands of regretters “per se.” In the meantime? Business as usual.
It’s predictable that trans activists are loathe to admit that detransitioners may be more common than they they think. But medical doctors? Wouldn’t one think that MDs, psychiatrists, and other gender specialists would demonstrate appropriate concern about people who went through medical transition but expressed profound regrets later on? Even more importantly: Why don’t people like Dan Karasic see it as a good thing that the women in Cari’s survey found other ways to deal with their dysphoria besides drastically altering themselves with hormones and surgeries?
How about showing some respect for this one detransitioner, Cari, who cares so much about this issue that she has created and written a fine analysis of a survey about detransitioned women? Rather than glibly dismissing her work as just another worthless TERF thing that can be safely ignored, wouldn’t it behoove Karasic and his followers to take her seriously? Why would a 22-year-old woman who had undergone years of testosterone injections, a double mastectomy, and who is now speaking out publicly via YouTube go to this much trouble if there weren’t a real issue here?
Why doesn’t WPATH as a whole start earnestly figuring out how to provide services for people who regret their transitions, or who need help and support for re-identifying with their natal sex? After all, the gender specialists got these people into it; do they feel no responsibility whatsoever to help them get out of it? Is the “care” provided by gender doctors a one-way-street? Apparently, if you ever decide to get off the trans bus, you’ll have to find your own way home.
The activists and clinicians piling on the Discredit the Detransitioner Survey thread seem a lot more interested in denigrating and dismissing the reality of detransition than attending to the medical and psychiatric needs of people harmed by medical transition. Activists pushing an agenda? Yeah—don’t want to talk about this. But doctors? Where is their commitment to learning the truth, however inconvenient that truth might be?
But then, the line between activists and clinicians seems to be rather blurred. I’m not sure there is much of a difference anymore.
Whitewashing. It’s a thing.
Here’s another hit job that was published this evening.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/04/radical-feminists-and-conservative-christians-team-up-against-transgender-people.html
if the shoe fits. . .
Tell me, exactly, what parents here are doing that is terrible? Not believing that middle-aged and elderly men with a sexual fetish have no experience that correlates with our daughters?
Yes. Guilty. Your experience has no relationship to my teenage daughter. In fact, if you think it does, please explain. I bet you know ZERO about me or my family.
“What are these parents doing that is so wrong?”
Doing anything other than becoming a cheerleader for transitioning is “the wrong thing” as far as trans activists are concerned.
Honestly, where is the law firm to initiate a class action suit on behalf of these young women who were permanently maimed as teenagers and whose bodies now bear untold lifelong health consequences from these injections, let alone the psychological damage done to them? Yes, they signed an “informed consent” form but many of them were minors and their parents were following erroneous advice and specious, un-tested theories asserted by these doctors. If anyone knows a good personal injury law firm, this information should be sent on to them stat, and they should send out a call for a suit to compensate these young women who have been harmed. Until these doctors realize the kind of damage they have done through what are nothing short of Josef Mengele-esque experiments on children, with gross negligence in “gatekeeping,” more teens are going to suffer the same fate. And by the way, this has *nothing to do with Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. Most of us on this discussion who have had are families impacted by this, as far as I can tell, are not conservative/right-wing Christians — far from it.
Yep, that’s an avenue that’s yet to be explored, far as I know. I would not feel comfortable pressuring these detransitioners into such a class action, as they have trauma to deal with and healing to do. But it’s definitely worth consideration, overdiagnosis is obviously a reality that isn’t being addressed anywhere near well enough.
The Daily Beast article is contemptible and very much akin to MRA trolling. It’s actually possible to have honest conversations about gender. All they accomplished by publishing that piece is something akin to chumming for sharks.
Its got to up to them. Not parents like me, not radical feminists, its up to them.
But if they do I’ll dig deep to support them.
All victims of crime have trauma to deal with and healing to do. Without victims willing to come forward and offer testimony and evidence in a court of law, those who caused the trauma can continue on their merry way.
It might suck, but there are a lot of things that suck about being victimized – and there is a lot positive to be said for people who are willing to come forward and present their evidence in a court of law to stop other people to suffer what they have suffered.
Cari’s study was quite broad, but one question that was not asked was if the detransitioners had suffered trauma prior to transition, what kind of trauma and how this rate compares to the population at large.
This seems like such an integral component in information gathering for therapists. While pre-existing trauma is often mentioned, particularly in FTT populations, there does not seem to any data that I am aware of with regards to this ?
I am also curious about trauma FROM the transition – between the social effects to the recovery process from surgeries and mental health changes while on hormones, etc.
I will gladly support any effort with my wallet to get this message out
good luck with that. if you find one that will do that, ask them if they will sue on behalf of all the people who were born intersexed because of in utero exposure to DES.
DES lawsuits have already happened for a long time.
Perhaps we need to hear from the professionals dealing with detransitioners. The media love an emotive headline and stories that contradict previous. In retesting survey saw 17 as typical onset age and length of duration usually 2 – 4 yrs. many young people this age are away from home and exploring their identities at university. I would like LGBT student groups to vocalise concerns about medical testing on their student body. Essentially , this is what it is. Follow the money, it drives it, it will kill it – sue.
No one on a university campus anywhere dares say anything anti-transgender. If those students are happier injecting hormones without any prior counseling and mental health screening, well aren’t they brave! let’s celebrate diversity!
I wonder how many parents are refusing to pay their student’s expenses over this matter. I conscientiously object to medical transition without MH screening and counseling, with time allowed to first treat underlying issues (which my kiddo has). My child can always take out a college loan so I’m still unable to protect her from the ease with which a certain gender clinic in LA hands out hormone prescriptions. First visit. One measly visit. Brochures to this clinic are in the university counseling center. My daughter could have bipolar for all we know….but here is your T.
The anxiety you, me and many like us experience would be reduced if we could depend on the medical profession to gatekeeper. I am torn between pity and anger. I know young people transitioning who have yet to have a relationship, who live at parents expense and the reality of how the world greets them will come as a shock. They are not jazz or Jenner and away from tumblr and out of their bedrooms will find the world an unaccepting place.
One of the truly scary things about the transition free for all is that many mental health conditions –including bipolar disorder –can be exacerbated by increased testosterone levels: “Controlling for sex, we found that testosterone levels positively correlated with the number of manic episodes and the number of suicide attempts.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3810946/
Given the reported lack of mental health screening (which Cari’s survey illuminates), the chances of kids girls and young women with undiagnosed bipolar disorder being harmed via “transition” becomes much more likely.
punkworked
I don’t mean for this to sound mean so much as to sound realistic. If the not Jazz or Jenner trans teens find the world outside of tumblr an un-accepting place, maybe that has something to do with the fact that all teens find the world outside their bedrooms/trusted circle to be not what they would like the world to be. In earlier times, it was up to the teen to learn to fit in or find people to fit in with (I say this as someone who spent junior high and high school as pretty much an outcast)
It might also have something to do with the trans movement’s depiction as hateful anyone who has honest questions (about how this trans thing happens, & how you know it’s what’s happening to you), that not trans are only being fit to be “allies” whose prime function should assistants in promoting the trans agenda, and trans activists pitching screaming fits over anything in society that doesn’t conform to their narrative.
Even if an individual trans-identifying kid is a perfectly polite person in public, that kid is signing on to an “identity” (in the “identity politics” sense) that is associated in the public mind with being ordinary well meaning people being at the receiving end of accusations and demands that feel like unwarranted attacks. It might make members of the public who are neither trans nor self-identified allies wary of engaging with the trans kid.
On top of all the above, trans activists are happy to tell trans kids that the rest of the world hates them so much that they are at high risk for being murdered.
An aside: I’ve noticed that the trans relative in my family, though met with acceptance by everyone in the family (I have only shared my concerns with my husband, who understands, and two other relatives who think being supportive is going along with this stuff), seems to have become ruder, pushier and more self-centered in recent times. (It might be more obvious to me because I see this person less frequently than they do).
Karasic’s FB comment to the effect that some study participants were “exploring gender” and then realized transition was not for them (attempting to minimize the number of “truly trans” subjects) is risible. One does not “explore gender” by shooting testosterone or having major surgery. It is entirely obvious, and Karasic knows it, that by the time a woman is involved in medical procedures of that scale and severity, she is fully committed to the idea of gender change. The comment also begs the question of the quality of counseling or medical advice a woman could conceivably have received, prior to embarking on medical interventions, if her only object were “exploring her options” gender-wise.
Karasic’s response, together with reactions we’ve seen from other supposed “experts” in the field (e.g. Burleton), really ought to raise big red flags to any parent or potential patient. Never before have I seen an allegedly “scientific” field with such strong resistance to objective analysis and data. How difficult would it have been, really, to simply have responded “this study raises some interesting issues and indicates the need for further exploration.” It almost seems as if there is no sincere interest, at all, in investigating any of the many, potentially quite serious issues, raised by the pro-transition movement.
A huge “yes!” to this comment.
How odd is it that someone who is purportedly providing “life-saving” medicalized therapy to teens and young adults isn’t thrilled by the fact that Cari found so many young women who were able to overcome or mitigate their “gender dysphoria” without the harms of major surgery or damaging hormones? One would think that someone who wished to provide “best care” would be open and willing to explore HOW they did it and integrate that information into their practice so as to lessen suffering and unnecessary medicalization. Instead, Karasic dug his heels in and attempted to spin Cari’s results in a way that made it seem like he was more interested in selling a product than actually helping his clients.
Yes, and we are told over and over that transition is the “only” treatment for gender dysphoria, which is what makes it is OK for young people to undergo such risky, experimental, permanent procedures. Yet here are all these young women stating otherwise. Cari’s findings and the women’s responses are important, and doctors should recognize them as such. Doctors should take them a seriously, and thoroughly look into them further, rather than immediately dismissing them.
This is a very important issue. I will repeat this statement from fightingunrealty:
“One would think that someone who wished to provide “best care” would be open and willing to explore HOW they did it and integrate that information into their practice so as to lessen suffering and unnecessary medicalization.”
It’s proof that the most extreme and only offered solution doesn’t work for everyone. THAT is a major hit to the ideology. It refuses to acknowledge that medicine is littered with copycat/social contagion issues. These so-called “experts” should care more to protect people from themselves than supporting their own unproven theories.
COSIGNED.
The current “trans” ideology is founded on a biological impossibility: the notion that humans can actually* change sex through medical intervention.
This idea is a fantasy. It is fundamentally anti-science.
All the illogic and unscientific proceedings follow from that.
*(I would say “literally” but that word seems to have lost its meaning.)
It’s about aligning your body with your fantasy, and medicine can’t do that very well at all. Transactivists fantasize that advances in medicine will improve this process. This reflects the popular idea that medical resources are infinite and magical. They are neither.
.. wilfully ignoring this survey and trivialising the testimony of countless de-transitioners isnt going to look good in court when they have to defend themselves from accusations of profiteering from the deliberate creation of iatrogenic disease and mutilation of previously healthy individuals..
The results (as reported by 4thwavenow) seem to show that Cari has been trained to postgraduate level in an experimental science. She knows how to design and carry out her tests carefully and how to analyze rigorously the results which she obtained from them.
Can I suggest that Cari should submit her account for publication by a reputable journal in this field? That would be the best way to obtain scientific credibility and official recognition of the importance of her results, and to put her evidence out into the public domain.
Excellent idea! yes, I hope this survey gets published! thank you Cari and I hope you continue your excellent work in this field.
Given the methods I used to gather the survey (posted on my Tumblr), I don’t think this is nearly rigorous enough for publication. Stay tuned, though, will be working on a follow-up. 🙂
Don’t sell yourself short. Your methods are at least as good as those from the Williams Institute, the source of the constantly-quoted statistic about 41% of transgender people attempting suicide. They titled their survey “injustice at every turn” and invited people to participate with the explicit promise that the results would be used for political purposes.
Well done on your survey Cari but we would all be well served by an independent, peer-reviewed academic study by someone without a vested interest in either camp.
On separate point, is there any mileage in reporting a doctor who does not have the best interests of their client in their practice to their professional body? Does it need to be a class action lauwsuit?
One can report a doctor to the state licensing board. Therapists too. There are guidelines for prescribing HRT, and they include doing proper assessment. If this was not done, you can file a complaint.
I’m glad you’re not dropping this. I think if you acknowledge the methodological shortcomings in your survey, your results have value even on a scientific level. Few studies can meet the gold standards while accounting for ethical concerns, and still come up with any usable data. That’s why we have many different study designs. I have been out of school for awhile, but it wouldn’t surprise me if statistics classes are teaching methods for conducting online surveys that provide worthwhile information. You probably know all this: the problem is double standards. It’s hard to get anything published or funded that goes against the narrative, so it has to be perfect. Still, I encourage you to pursue this and make the academics and journalists accept or reject your findings. It makes the powers that be uncomfortable, and puts them on record. Also, I think Tumblr was a good place to publicize your survey. That’s where your population is.
Hoping your results are also circulating on Tumblr already and reaching some of our daughters….
Cari, well done. You are certainly having an impact.
I have just read through the comment thread on the WPATH Facebook page. There is an important statement by Karasic on 4 September at 13.53: “Your survey … will be discussed … at the USPATH conference.” The conference will be held on 2–5 February 2017. Karasic is chairing the conference so this is a promise coming from the top.
Karasic also states that “WPATH is quite interested in all outcomes and providing care for all who present with gender dysphoria or otherwise seek care from our members.” Whether or not this has really been true in the past, it is true now: Karasic says so. And Karasic is on the WPATH Board of Directors, and has no doubt consulted with other members before making these statements.
You have WPATH’s attention, Cari; you and the 200 other women who completed your survey. What do you want from them? Advice and aftercare for detransitioners coming off hormones? Acknowledgement that there are other ways of dealing with dysphoria, and advice on this? Research? Proper counselling? Better ‘gatekeeping’? I am just floating some ideas; I would not presume to make suggestions. I am not a detransitioned woman. You may have priorities that haven’t crossed my mind.
How to pin WPATH down? If it were me, I’d consult and then put together a paper setting out concrete proposals for WPATH: what in your view WPATH can and should be doing. I’d send it to the WPATH Board, but also post it on the web. There is a lot of merit in spelling things out clearly and unequivocally. That is one thing.
Secondly: since your survey is to be discussed at the USPATH conference, you may feel that you would like to be present and take part in the discussion. Make a presentation, even. You may feel that it would be appropriate for several detransitioned women to attend and take part. Certainly it is not something I would advise anyone to do without some support. If you thought this was a good idea, you could suggest it to the conference organisers. You could put in a proposal.
Just some thoughts. All the very best.
Hats off to Cari! Great job on this very important survey. It seems to have the transition “doctors” a bit nervous…..Good!!
i’m the thomasa dan refers to here. an intersexed two spirit from lakeview, chicago’s historic gayborhood, living in tucson’s rainbow iron horse neighborhood today, i’m a counter culture community organizer and front line activist with a very long track record. hiding behind the beard and grungy clothes of a beatnik/hippie , i lived with chronic acute gender dysphoria that was the result of in utero DES exposure for almost sixty years, committing to living authentically on april fool’s day 2014 and starting HRT around may day 2015.
within the first two weeks, all of the panic attacks and rage melted away and i was able to be in the company of aggressive people without getting the shakes. i’ve never been more at peace with myself or have people react to me more favorably since starting HRT. all of my friends are reporting similar successes and from my vantage, it appears to me that the biggest problem in coping with gender dysphoria is from completely external stresses put on GD sufferers by outside forces such as our misguided parents , misinformed by prejudiced organizations such as 4thwavenow. .
certainly dr. karasic is being open to dialog with the opposition by inviting cari into the WPATH facebook group. modern medical thought says that sex is determined by the genitals, gender is determined by the brain, masculinity and femininity appear on a sliding scale and some people end up cross wired between their sex and gender. from there, some people are able to adapt to the transgender condition and others need medical intervention. for myself and many others, the HRT is adequate to quiet the chemical storm in our bodies resulting from the mismatch between our brain chemistry and our gonads. for others, gender reassignment surgery is required for people to feel comfortable in their skin. that there would be dissatisfaction among some patients is to be expected. the small numbers are not just cause to advocate against the procedures that are bringing relief to the majority of the patients receiving them.
My concern is strictly for my young adult daughter who doesn’t see herself as “typical woman” (whatever that is), with underlying mental health conditions, has not received due diligence medical testing and mental health counseling to help her work through her feelings, and was able to get hormones in a single visit to a gender clinic. And she is one of many.
Those of us active with 4thwavenow have never said that HRT is not right for some. Our concern is seeing careful care for our youth….identity questioning is a normal part of growing up, yet seems to be too easily taken to the extreme these days with the ease of gaining access to HRT.
It’s worth noting that many in WPATH (as noted in the post) consider it a positive thing for youth to obtain hormones at the first followup visit. Despite protestations to the contrary, “informed consent” usually means very few questions are asked, with very little “gatekeeping.” Also one cannot overestimate the amount of coaching that takes place online to help young people get hormones as quickly as possible. The site http://www.transgenderreality.com has been documenting this for at least two years. Teenagers are not stupid. They know what needs to be said and done to circumvent whatever gatekeeping does actually exist.
That’s nice that your transition is working for you. It’s also totally irrelevant to the issues Cari is trying to address, and your attempt to paper over her traumatized reality with your own satisfaction is callous beyond belief. “It appears to me that the biggest problem in coping with gender dysphoria is from completely external stresses put on GD sufferers by outside forces such as our misguided parents, misinformed by prejudiced organizations such as 4thwavenow.” Okay, but 203 respondents just told you differently. Your opinion of their reality is not important here. Don’t you care about trans people? Don’t you care about them living happy lives? Then perhaps you could exert yourself to care about their health outcomes, even the ones that don’t affirm your preferred narrative. If the fact that detransitioners exist in “small numbers” is an argument against caring about their health outcomes (which “smallness” is not at all proven, given the up to 1000% increase in referrals to gender clinics in the last few years as well as the new phenomenon of early pediatric transition which is swallowing up the roughly 80% of dysphoric kids who would have gone on to desist; you’re relying on very old, sketchy, and inapplicable data when you make this assertion about regret rates, as the CMS has recently confirmed in their refusal to issue a National Coverage Determination), then I believe you’ve just argued for your own irrelevance to health policy as well. So which is it? Does everyone deserve care, or not?
What a load of woo.
There is really no such thing as “gender.” “Gender” is simply a term for sex roles and sex stereotypes. The end. The only actual thing important about physical, biological sex is that it determines how an individual participates in the human reproductive process.
I am glad that you, an elderly biological man, are happy taking hormones and presenting as a woman. But that doesn’t mean that your experience has anything to do with my mentally ill teenage daughter or that “medical science” has proven anything.
Oh, I see you are identifying as an intersexed individual. My apologies. However, being intersexed is not the same thing as being trans. And, if you are NOT intersexed, but are trans and are coopting intersex to bolster your case? Shame on you.
And, this is why all of this is such a mess. We can’t talk about sexual orientation without talking about biological sex. Intersex is a physical anomaly, not a chosen situation or “proof” that transgenderism is a thing. Taking hormones and having reactions is not scientific proof that some woo-gender situation is a normal variation.
“the chemical storm in our bodies resulting from the mismatch between our brain chemistry and our gonads”
Please provide scientific references to back up your medical claim about this chemical storm.
Tommie Jayne Tooter,
There is a saying in science: The plural of anecdote is not data.
The fact that you report, in retrospect, that you felt worse before taking hormones and feel better now is not evidence of the efficacy of what you did. It could be you “feel better” because you expected hormones to make your life better, so you had a vested interest in feeling better once you started taking hormones. It could be that you are remembering your past as more miserable than it was so that life after starting hormones feels better in comparison. It could be that you were on your way to an emotional upswing already and the hormones had no effect on that.(People are most likely to initiate treatment when the symptom that troubles them is at its most severe)
Elizabeth Loftus has done massively important work that demonstrates how human memories can be distorted by natural processes. For a start memories change by decaying and mashing up with other memories and things people have told you. Also, the mood a person is in affects which memories they spontaneously call to mind – sad people remember sad events. But also, a sad person who is instructed to recall a happy event, say a birthday party, will report the event as sadder than the same person would report the same event on a day when that person is feeling happy.
These and other reasons (like if someone is using a drug bought off the internet, where purity and dosage can’t be assured) are why the only way to tell if a medical intervention works is by double blind placebo controlled studies.
“thomas is wore out. tommy needs to be on the surface in these troubled
times. i feel safer and like less of a target for my words as a
transgendered woman than a surviving 60’s radical rabble rouser. my
old friends are understanding me much better as an excitable chick
than an angry dude. especially folks who only know me online. i’m
feeling like a really sly bitch knowing i’m going to get my way a lot
easier with boobs than anything else i’ve ever tried. money doesn’t
rule the world. tits, ass, pussy, fuck me hairstyles and paint jobs
rule the world.” – Tommy Tooter
—————
“i’m definitely
better looking than that mess of plastic surgery that parades across
those stages for the miss thang universe pageants. i’d love to know
where the asians and brazilians are getting all those teens to pump
full of hormones and silicon i’ve been seeing as i cruise the
available shemale images. according to the scientists, transgenderism
only affects less than 1% of the population. the sheer numbers of new
models i see every year looks like a bigger number and a lot of them,
especially the phillipine and thai ladyboys look like they’re no more
than 15 years old. kim petras’s family and several others went through
a heavy four year legal thing starting at 12 until her implants and
SRS at 16.
there have to be 3000 transgendered teen prostitute for every kim
petras and all the young, straight t-girls on the web combined. i
think there’s heavy slave traffic in kidnapped kids for it. i’ve seen
a huge upsurge in very young models who are clearly being groomed for
prostitution with normal and transgendered sexual orientations. many
of the ones i see are obviously very unhappy and some frighteningly
horrified. way too scary for me to be wanting to spank my monkey
looking at them.” -Tommy Tooter
——————————————
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.gathering.rainbow/u6mJ9QL0HIU/uNd8LIYE-fwJ
The truth behind the blurry facade is always more disgusting than ever imagined.
I don’t believe you are what you say you are.
Congratulations on your original autogynephile excuse! .. DES eh? not heard that one before. you are a 60+ year old man and your opinions have no place here.Fuck off.
Social contagion, yes. In layman’s terms I’d call it a youth subculture, same as being a goth, punk, etc. Difference here is that none of the others involve extreme surgical changes to the body.
Absolutely a youth subculture, I agree! making a statement about gender stereotypes is fine, my daughter has gone overboard.
An anonymous blog? Oh noes!
Anonymity is fine. Pseudonyms are fine. Anyone who disagrees needs to have a quick look at the Federalist Papers, which argued for the adoption of the U.S. Constitution and which were published under pen names.
That’s all I wanted to say, but while I’m here let me offer a quick note on defamation, which is about saying FALSE things that are objectively injurious to one’s reputation. Commenting on an issue, especially one that implicates public policy and the law, doesn’t even come close. Indeed, such commentary is the very definition of the “marketplace of ideas” articulated in a dissenting Supreme Court opinion in which the majority of justices endorsed sending people to prison for opposing American involvement in World War I.
Well done, Cari!
Here are the key points that immediately popped out at me:
1. There are likely many more detransitioners (and/or those who have re-identified as female) than the medical and mental health professions realize. It is literally shocking that there were over 200 respondents in only two weeks!
2. Most of them felt they were not given adequate counseling and accurate information about transition. This should encourage professionals to reflect and rethink their stance on reducing gatekeeping.
3. A majority of respondents (59.4%) have found alternative ways to cope with dysphoria. This should inspire professionals to learn about these alternatives and present them as options to their gender dysphoric patients.
Unfortunately, many commenters on the WPATH Facebook page are not able to see the reality of what the reduction in gatekeeping has caused. They are blind to the fact that there are a growing number of people unhappy with their transitions. Believers of transgender ideology don’t want to consider that having little or no therapy prior to transition has anything to do with future dissatisfaction. And they don’t seem to be interested in alternatives that could help patients cope with gender dysphoria without the irreversible effects from cross-sex hormones and surgeries. To me this is a sign that WPATH Facebook commenters, including Dan Karasic, are the ones who are blinded by ideology, not the women of the study.
Seconded!
One question I’d love to see raised in any follow up work: is there any statistical difference with respect to transition satisfaction rates between people who did receive more extensive pre-transition mental health counseling and those who did not (or those who received no pre-transition mental health counseling whatsoever)?
If a difference exists and can be quantified, it would go a long way towards establishing the necessity of gatekeeping.
Given the reality that “gender dysphoria” itself is by definition a *symptom,* the failure by these supposed experts to consider causation/etiology and accept what can only be described as “self-diagnosis* by those so suffering is mind-blowing. Once someone for whatever reason –be it social contagion or internalized homophobia, etc. –self diagnoses as being “trans,” they see all of their emotional and social problems through that lens and become increasingly obsessed with obtaining what *they* think will be the solution to those problems.
It’s like Mark is saying; those people are NOT going to risk saying anything that might jeopardize the attainment of transition. Not only do they withhold information, but they can access any number of sites that coach them on the “right” things to say (including suicide threats) as well as doctors that are known to more readily dispense the desired diagnoses. Pasts are rewritten. Suffering is often exaggerated. “Successful” narratives become rote.
If these therapists and gender “experts” really cared about their clients they would demand stricter standards which could not be bypassed and which would allow them enough time to explore their client’s problems and know them well enough to be able to better discern the fact from the fiction.
So long as these self-diagnosed dysphorics can take shortcuts via clinical rubber stamping, they will not access the kind of care they really need.
The time is long overdue for biological males, whether they are involved in transgender medicine, are transactivists, or they are simply transgender people, to realize, recognize and accept that the reasons girls and young women desire transition are numerous and varied, and are much, much different than those of males, especially older males who transition later in life, as fully grown adult men.
Thank you, Cari, for your survey and the valuable information it is providing. Possibly more than you will ever know, you are helping girls and women with you information.
I have been called an abuser on this very blog. Why? Because I refuse to allow my child to take hormones which have not been tested and because I refuse to allow major cosmetic surgery. Also, because I have continued to try and get my daughter diagnosed and treated for major mental health issues. People who do not know me or my daughter or our entire story took it upon themselves to harass me, even when I use a pseudonym to protect me and my daughter and our family.
That is not the behavior of people who care for children. Frankly, I’m skeptical of people who promote themselves and their children publicly around this issue. Do they REALLY want this to follow their kids around forever?
I’ve had to fight our school district because they are so ridiculous that they allowed my kid’s HIPPA-protected information to be published in the school paper (and, because it’s the 21st century, on the Internet). Because, at the time, she was identifying as trans, I think they thought that meant they could do anything SHE insisted on. She gave an interview about her mental health status and then proceeded to give out all the details of her hospital stays, medications and dosages, treatment protocols, and treatment team’s names. Well, trans or not, she’s still a minor and she has rights to have her medical information protected. I was never contacted. Because now HIGH SCHOOLS think that they’re only responsible to communicate WITH THE KIDS and not the parents. Give me a break.
In the trans shadow world, there is NO ONE looking out for children and teens. Everyone should just give in to the demands of any kid, no critical thinking allowed. We know educators are crap already. One layer of protection gone. I will never fully trust another therapist ever again. Peel off another layer. It seems that psychiatrists, since they mostly aren’t providing therapy, are not completely over to the dark side, especially regarding children, because they still have to answer to the parents. A tiny thread hanging on. Oh, the insurance companies are already talking the transactivist talk. As are POLICE OFFICERS AND HOSPITAL STAFF.
So, mostly, it’s parents who haven’t swallowed the Kool-Aid. Parents who think they’re more informed and have more at stake with their children than activists and professionals. Here’s the deal: You want to change the world, you have to get rid of parents and familial love. And that is all that is happening right now.
Cari and the current small number of detransitioners are simply the canaries in the coal mine. The parents are waking up — society is waking up. I think that, for females, dysphoria can be caused by many different things — girls who are lesbians, girls who have been traumatized, girls who are neuroatypical, girls who have major psychiatric illnesses, girls who are very suggestible, even completely otherwise normal girls who are simply trying on identities like ALL teens do. It is the job of the professional not to throw up their hands and treat young women especially like middle-aged men, but their duty to investigate WHAT is causing dysphoria and working through various treatments from least-invasive to most. THAT is medicine. THAT is science. THAT is valid. THAT is exactly what is NOT happening.
Because of the transactivists’ push, we know that trends begin when people know something exists. This is a common thing. It is only exacerbated and spread more quickly because of the Internet. There is no diagnosis which is 100% accurate, there is no treatment which is 100% effective. All drug treatments have side effects. EVERYONE who has a functioning brain knows this. But, now, kids who were put on blockers and the line was it gave them time? It’s now to preserve their pre-pubertal appearance so they will better “pass” as the opposite sex. And 100% of these children now transition.
Except, now we’ve got detranstioners. They’re putting the lie to this practice. They’re the living proof of the ACTUAL evidence, gathered over decades, that most children and teens do, in fact, DESIST. Even when their childhood and teen impulses are treated as the last word. The proof that children and teenagers and young adults are not, in fact, done developing.
Those promoting chemicals and surgery to support the decisions of the young must also facilitate driving, voting, drinking, marrying,adopting, joining the armed forces, holding government office, appearing in porn movies, tattooing themselves, joining a religious order. If competent to decide your adolescent angst requires changing sex all else seems safe to let children do.
Yes.
Also, the whole “insistent, consistent, persistent” load? People are now applying it TO TODDLERS. And it apparently has been shaved down from an entire childhood to two years of toddlerhood. You know, toddlers, who make such great life decisions that we completely hold them to those for the rest of their lives.
Oh, wait — no we don’t. Except for THIS. Why? Shouldn’t we be, instead, telling our kids that they can’t BE the opposite sex and they’re great JUST THE WAY THEY ARE. That their biological sex has no bearing on their personalities and preferred activities or hair length or clothing choices or romantic interests?
We should be telling them and reassuring them but more than the world they look upon should make all things open to both genders and regardless of appearance. I passed a newspaper stand today with a story about gifted autistic singer Susan Boyle. (Found fame on xfactor uk) The headline read ‘Subo’s fears, a derogatory term daubed upon by British gutter press tabloids. My heart broke for larger girls not gifted or interested in preening unruly hair into blonde curls or starving down to size 8. The problem is a social and cultural one. Sometimes I think the cosmetic and porn industry run culture. We are dumbed down at all our costs.
I was absolutely stunned when I realized the person I know who transed her son did it when he must’ve been all of three or four! I felt tricked when I discovered her “older daughter” is really a boy. Something tells me this child’s “brave coming out at such a young age” was more like insisting he was a girl because his parents didn’t think a boy could play with certain toys or wear certain clothes. I’d hate to have been forced into following some life path I wanted as a toddler, way before my brain had finished developing.
Regarding the anonymity thing: As a parent, if you are trying to help a kid who is in a very oppositional stance with you and you do not want to terminate your relationship, you cannot be public about your situation. I don’t think it takes any great intellect or knowledge of human relationships to understand that.
I am mostly completely behind people owning their opinions and connecting them with their actual, real-life identities. But if the other side is NOT arguing in good faith and is doing everything to wreck other people’s actual lives, no way. Also, I am not trying to demonize or ruin other people — I’m trying to protect and raise my child. The completely different nature of the reasons and relationships here are of supreme importance. Activists need to acknowledge this instead of demonizing parents. Opposition is part of the parent/teen relationship. Forcing families to choose between complete acceptance of an unproven ideology and remaining connected to their children? Is evil. THAT is what makes us “against” the transactivists. Most people here, at the least, acknowledge that adults can do what they please. We are focused on our children. When activists do nothing but maintain that parents have NO INTERESTS in that stance and that we are using our children as pawns in some other endgame, well, that means that activists are using our children for their own motives instead of looking out for them as individuals.
hear, hear.
It makes me laugh when ppl try to wave off 4thwave’s supposed “alliance” with super-conservatives and (supposedly) evangelical Christians. Anybody who’s paying attention would know that these are not people (in general) participating in the work of the site.
I am no kind of conservative, as my voting record would attest. (Though now, like 4thwave, I feel a lot less respect than I once did for the progressive camp. I know too much to think that their opinions around this issue are based on reason and analysis of research. It’s the conservative media that, in general, is doing the heavy lifting here. Unfortunately.)
My objections to transing of minors (and I’d include ppl under 25 in that, generally, due to lack of well-developed executive function) are SOLELY based on my worry about the medical and psych risks entailed in long-term use of blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and surgeries. I’ve said it a bunch here, like a lot of other parents have — If you could prove to me that my kid was going to have a better, healthier life LONG TERM by transitioning, I’d swallow hard and say OK. I see zero evidence of this and a lot of evidence indicating that it’s just not true. Not long term, and not for natal females especially. Nevertheless, adults get to do what they want to with their bodies. Once my kid has assumed financial responsibility for herself, she’ll do what she does.
As for the anonymity criticism? Oh, detractors, I do so wish I were not real. I do so wish that this PROBLEM in my family and the difficulties we have all faced regarding this issue were NOT REAL. I wish I were some childless internet troll just playing politics. (Well, actually, I would not want to be that. But … you know.) Any parent who’s not backing the trans party line with their kid, but who still dearly loves the kid and who is scrupulous about guarding the kid’s privacy, is not going to be commenting online under their own name. I have only two priorities here: Protecting my kid from ill-reasoned decisions that have lifelong consequences before her BRAIN is mature, and preserving our relationship with each other. Anyone who cannot put themselves in the shoes of the parents who comment here is … at best, woefully lacking in insight about the way loving families really work, and at worst, not really giving a shit about real people as opposed to dogma.
I find the criticism that the author and posters on this blog are “hiding behind anonymity” to be almost entirely facetious. In sharp contrast to the “professional trans-parents,” who seem willing if not eager to share the most intimate physical, mental, and sexual details of their minor children’s lives with all and sundry, the parents on this blog are interested in protecting their children. (Need I add that is the reason we are here at all.) I would like my daughter to lead a normal adult life, including normal employment possibilities. I am well aware that if I were to disclose her identity online, she would then be “searchable.” for this, in perpetuity. Why on earth would I do such a foolish and reckless thing?
It is also patently obvious that revealing a child’s identity online in this context could have terrible ramifications for the parent/child relationship.
Once again, the trans-activists are setting as the sine qua non of good parenting – our willingness to disregard our children’s best interests. It’s all of a piece.
I’ve seen some of this criticism of 4WN being anonymous and hosting anonymous commenters as well, and I sympathize. Especially where children are concerned, you have an ethical obligation to maintain their privacy.
Adults are all in different positions with different levels of vulnerability. It’s not unheard of for people to lose their jobs because some angry trans activist contacted their employers. They have at times stalked women. Everyone has to make their own call on this one.
A number of my friends involved in the pro-science and pro-vaccination advocacy community have faced just that type of harassment. A few of them in particular are the targets of ongoing, truly obsessed and deranged campaigns by anti-science cultists who have nothing better to do. We’re talking doxxing, contacting employers to try to get them fired, stalking them in person, surveillance of their houses, stalking and doxxing their children, the kind of things which require police protection and action. It’s the same story with angry transactivists targeting women who dare not swill down the Kool-Aid and constantly remind everyone what good little handmaidens they are. (Although ironically, just about all of my pro-vaccine friends are trans handmaidens!)
Exactly! I think the parents on here are doing the right thing for their kids by remaining anonymous. Regardless of whether they’re in the trans trend or not, I don’t get parents who parade the details of their children’s lives around for everyone to see, especially when said children are still minors. A less political example is parents who film their kids having temper tantrums and put them on youtube. It’s like, why? That video is there forever and they’re humiliating their kid over something that’s pretty normal for kids to do.
And yes, stalking and harassment is a serious issue. Trans activists go out of their way to ruin the lives of anyone who disagrees with their views. And by anyone, I mean most likely women and women who are lesbians. That’s the reason I post anonymously. Hell, just having an opinion about something on the internet and being a woman can result in threats.
I’ve interacted in 4thwavenow comments with people who are religious and people who are atheists, people of right wing and left wing politics. What we share is the concerns about unfounded claims causing people we love to make irrevocable decisions about medical procedures that can’t possibly give them what they claim to want – to be the opposite of the sex they were born.
As for anonymity, I do it not only to protect my privacy, but to protect my relationship with my trans relative & relatives who are on board with trans claims, and to protect the anonymity of my trans relative – I have no right to reveal personal info about this young person.
I remain anonymous to protect my child’s right to privacy. She is dealing with her gender identity issues privately. She has not socially transitioned, and she simply doesn’t want people to know. If other people don’t like it, too bad.
Another good reason to protect the anonymity of our kids: if they are thrust into the public eye, even if only within our own communities, once they have been lauded as a “stunning and brave” transkids, it will make it so much more difficult for them to embrace their natal sex. Think about poor Jazz Jennings — his entire life, a good deal of his family’s income, and the transgender movement depend upon him being a “girl trapped in a boys’ body.” Unfortunately, Jazz is trapped, but not quite in that way. He is trapped in his female persona. Think how difficult it would be for him to denounce it all at this point, if he ever comes to regret being made by doctors into a “girl,” and decides to chunk all the hassles of being a lifelong medical patient and go “au naturel.”
Keeping ours kids anonymous gives them the gift of being able to grow, change, and try new things without ridicule or pressure from the media, transactivists, and the rest of the world watching, debating, fighting and making public judgement about our kids.
Right. And to out yourself in this context is to out your children. It’s really quite reprehensible to criticize parents who choose not to. I really don’t get it, these are people who should know better. It’s not so simple a matter as just “be yourself.”
Thank you Mark – your perspective on all of this will be helpful. I’m sorry for the difficulties you and your partner face. I hope my daughter will be open enough to listen to your message.
If these women were not really trans, as the doctor claims, that inescapably means that they were misdiagnosed and medically mismanaged. I hope attorneys are taking note.
Agreed. Either way, whether all these women/girls were misdiagnosed or were actually “true trans” but regretted it and detransitioned, Cari’s study sheds light on serious problems with transitioning women and girls from female to male. High rates of misdiagnosis or regret — neither are acceptable and the problem must be investigated and addressed by the medical community.
To all the transitioned men who are crying that “female hormones work great for me and all my male friends:” the issue here has nothing to do with adult males taking female hormones. Women and girls need to be studied separately and treated appropriately — the experiences of transitioned adult men should not be applied to young women and girls.
While I’m glad so many detransitioners are starting to speak out, it’s so frustrating and upsetting to see how the transactivists are continuing to deny them their stories. One of the first signs of a cult is to claim everyone else is lying, and you can only get the truth from a firmly-entrenched member of the in-group. Once again, they remind me of the anti-vaccine cult, constantly moving the goalposts when studies and facts fail to support any of their anti-science, ableist nonsense, or resorting to insulting and attacking those who dare not uphold their precious echo chamber. When so many people have very similar stories, or all left a group for similar, compelling reasons, it’s time to start listening instead of decrying them as bigoted haters. This also happens to people who leave cults (which includes Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses).
Now more than ever, I’m glad I decided to take a pseudonym when I was thirteen. Most of my writing friends use their real names, though I never wanted to write under my own name (for reasons too off-topic to get into here). The creep who’s been cyberstalking me since April apparently didn’t realize I blog under a pseudonym, and that he won’t be able to find any personal information on me by Googling that name.
Many people have suggested that there are many parallels between eating disorders and the alleged gender dysphoria in female teenagers. They also both often present themselves in girls/women with a history of trauma.
In the late 80’s/early 90’s a media superstar emerged, who ran a very expensive private clinic to treat eating disorders (Montreux clinic in Victoria, B.C.). The person at the helm of this clinic was a woman who had only completed a bachelor’s degree in Psychology. She “treated” her daughter’s anorexia, and then a clinic grew around her as her reputation spread. She appeared in glowing features on Oprah, 20/20 and all kinds of media. She claimed her clinic had a 100% success rate. The clinic operated in a cult-like fashion and isolated patients from their families, the founder kept publicly lying about her credentials, there was no controlled data about the clinic’s success rate, and there were many ethical violations of professional boundaries. Eventually it was scrutinized by provincial regulators after several staff blew the whistle, and was shut down when it could not conform to basic standards of care. Ignore the bad reviews for this book. I have been reading it and see many eerie similarities to those at the helm of trans politics and trans “care”. Those with nothing to hide, hide nothing.
https://www.amazon.com/Anorexias-Fallen-Angel-Barbara-Mclintock/dp/000200092X/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
I’m reminded of Bruno Bettelheim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Bettelheim
I urge reading subsection 3 about controversies surrounding him.
I was not familiar with B.Bettelheim – but wow.
It is one thing for a person to research a particular field of interest that deviates from their primary field – but another to falsify credentials on which their career is built. In both the case of Bettleheim and the Montreux clinic – they were both in somewhat uncharted waters, with regards to diagnosis and treatment. Rather than being forthright about their credentials, or disclosing that their approach was experimental, their narcissism was obstructive, and damaged many of those in their care, all of whom were vulnerable and without a voice. There also did not seem to be a free or open exchange of ideas or cooperation with their peers.
There are so many frightening similarities between this and what is happening in the current medical culture of trans. Late transitioners (MTT but not too many FTT as far as I know) are advising WPATH. But WPATH wishes to refute the research by Cari on women who have detransitioned. WPATH has collected no data whatsoever on detransitioners, and has only the most flexible of guidelines for gatekeeping.
It is as profoundly wrong as lobotomy and ECT. BUT – the recipients of lobotomy did not self diagnose and demand surgical/pharmaceutical intervention, which was then granted with a minimum of professional assessment. However, family members (ie husbands and parents) could easily convince medical professionals to do this procedure to deal with the “troublesome” individual.
Women have to jump through more hoops to get a breast reduction – and there IS a wealth of data about the surgical, recovery and social outcomes of these procedures. It can take several applications to insurance for a woman with H cup breasts, who has a years long history of back and neck problems, deep grooves in her shoulders, and breasts that are obviously very large to be approved ! Yet a flamboyant male 5 year old child who says he wants to be Beyonce is accepted at face value, as having a true and unquestionable gender identity. But women who have gone through the current, nearly unsupervised transition process, who have regretted and attempted to reverse this process are disbelieved, and have no research or data to refer to – except for what has been documented within their peer group ?
Johns Hopkins stopped doing SRS after their data demonstrated that the longterm outcome was poor. The 30 year Swedish study is the best study to date that supports and confirms this. But now there is a wave of POPULAR DEMAND for transing anyone who wants it so this data must not be spoken of ? And if the transing is not as effective as hoped, and the patient wants to stop they are simply SOL ? Appalling.
Here’s another history tidbit that might blow minds of people dealing with this gender stuff:
In the late 20th C, intersex people (who are extremely extremely rare) formed organizations to end the practice of assigning a sex and surgically conforming the external genitalia of infants with genital malformations. (similarly, genetic males born with a cloaca deformity – a mashup of intestines, bladder and urethra, who were surgically made to resemble females grew up to not be happy adult women)
In the meantime, the concept of “gender” (which is actually a word referring to certain aspects of language, while sex refers to one’s body being M or F) being something that can be at variance with biological sex was being promoted by John Money.
Guess who, in the 1950s, promoted the surgery on the ambiguous genitals of infants? Yep – John Money.
Money is also the guy who messed up the lives of the Reimer family by convincing them that their son David’s penis (damaged during circumcision) should be removed and he be raised as Brenda, which didn’t stick.
Money on the one hand wanted people to believe that genitals could be put on or taken off like humans are essentially Mr Potato Crotch, and the person could be trained to live with the results. On the other hand, he wanted society to believe that anyone who claims to “be” the opposite sex of their actual physical genitals (not to mention the DNA in every cell except for half of their sperm or eggs) is actually the opposite sex of their genitals and every effort must be made (and covered by insurance) to conform the external body and society’s treatment of that individual with the “real” (i.e., not physical) sex.
If I used the word that comes to my mind to describe John Money, it would probably fuel a whole new Francesca Ramsay video.
With regards to little kids/toddlers, they may be saying “I’m a boy/girl” but they’re not the ones demanding transing, are they? That’s the parents.
Everyone…..does anyone in this community have legal expertise? this is the only way we will get traction….follow the money….If we as parents/families/individuals who have been harmed/coerced into this madness which in so many instances is tax payer funded….we start filing lawsuits against these Dr.s, therapist abusers, and these non profits which enjoy tax free status. a good hungry lawyer could really put him or herself on the national stage, especially with Katie Couric and Nat Geo coming out with their 2017 series on ‘Gender Revolution’. We cannot let only one side of this story be told. If anyone has any ideas on how to set up a non profit for the gender skeptical community, please jump in so we can make our voices heard.
You could talk to Women’s Liberation Front. They have 501 (c) 3 status now and have filed a lawsuit in New Mexico against the Title IX interpretation. They may well be late to that party as cases have already reached the 4th Circuit Court, which has already proven itself amenable to deferring to the current administrative interpretation, and the Supreme Court may well choose to hear one next year after the election when a new justice is appointed and they have a full court. But they (WLF) do seem to be interested in pursuing legal options, and this does seem potentially a good approach, as long as the plaintiffs are completely okay with going through with it.
Also, I’m going to drop some unabashed, old school, radfem bars all up in here: A male doctor telling WOMEN how they experience their lives and reality and saying biological females are “assigned” at birth — like it’s a crap shoot?
That’s some epic mansplaining right there. Not to mention bad medical practice and non-scientific to boot.
I’d call it epic Transplaining
It would be great if someone like maybe the counselor who runs Third Way Trans would do a similar study of detransitioned men and boys out there. There are some YouTube videos of young men detransitioning, so they must be out there. I notice the comment above where someone mentioned hormones working out so well for men, but there are boys being permanently harmed and scarred by this as well. An additional study of detransitioned boys/men of the same age group might also elicit more notice medically, journalistically, and perhaps most importantly for change, legally . Teen boys who are questioning get put on cross-gender hormones rapidly now and their easy access to them is considered a human rights issue so that there are increasing instances of teens bypassing their parents in the courts. Other boys’ parents give in because they are told if they don’t, no hormones/no surgeries equals a dead son. I know the issues are different with girls and boys, but many of the same health-harming effects, the sorts of binds parents are put in, and the elements of social contagion, are similar. If there were a similar response to that discovered by Cari of boys who have also been misdiagnosed or medically mishandled, it would make the over-diagnosis and gross negligence in lack of responsible gatekeeping more difficult to deny. It would also create a critical mass for a class action suit. The only ways these experiments on children are going to stop is when it becomes too legally expensive to keep poisoning and, in many cases sterilizing, maiming, and further psychologically traumatizing them.
Here’s the main issue — the “experts” don’t want to pay attention to the extended, decades-long research that says that children desist. Because that’s old and things are so extremely different now or something. And, then they refuse to do any research except for insisting that anyone with dysphoria needs to move directly to hormones and unnecessary cosmetic surgery. They can’t even tolerate people like Dreger and Zucker who approve of transing KIDS and ADOLESCENTS, but acknowledge that without clear tests for determining which kids/teens are or are not trans, they should be cautious and insist on time and therapy. Which, hey, at least Zucker acknowledges that there are kids who are not going to persist in this and who would be harmed by transitioning, right? What did that get him? FIRED. And the only clinic to assist Canadian kids suffering from dysphoria closed.
So, they really are insisting on having their cake and eating it, too. You have to accept that when anyone says they have these feelings that they must immediately be set on the path to transition. When people are unhappy with that course of treatment? Well, oh well. Can’t blame us — it’s the protocol. Except there’s NO RESEARCH which supports the protocol. And the experts won’t do research to prove or disprove their stances. And, when they supposedly DO (see: Moser), it’s a much more muddled, imperfect surgery than Cari did.
If they’re going to make the imperfect the enemy of the good? They’re asking for a tremendous backlash when the deluge happens. By transitioning EVERYONE and saying they have no other options? They’re digging their own eventual graves. It’s lobotomies and recovered memories and Satanism all over again. Their lack of humility and refusal to practice good science and medicine is going to undo them. If you are going to appeal to your authority? You better be practicing the standards which cause you to be an authority. And, WPATH is being run by non-professionals and is arguing with people who have followed their protocols and are now unhappy with the outcomes that those people don’t understand their own experiences. How ironic.
We need to flood nat Geo and katie couric with this info via any social media available tell this side of the issue. Her expose on the new ‘gender revolution’ is being touted as ‘everything you didn’t want to know but were too afraid to ask’ Something tells me this piece will focus on the notion that this is simply ‘human evolution’ that we need to accept
Here’s a place where lack-of-evidence looks pretty telling to me. There is such a lack of follow-up data on people after transition surgeries. They just drop off the map.
In order to maintain their surgically/hormonally constructed “sex change”, it requires ongoing intervention – hormones that are normally sold via prescription. I know rx drugs can be obtained on the internet, but if a medical record exists to support the fact that the person has had a sex change, rx drugs would be easy to get AND covered by insurance. Also, surgical changes to genitals are not a simple one-off like an appendectomy. Surgically-created vaginas tend to try to heal up and close like any wound, and there are procedures to stretch them. Phalluses constructed surgically are also subject to problems that require further treatment.
One would think a population that requires life-long prescription drugs (whose cost is also lower if obtained by rx rather than by internet) would be easy enough to survey in the years after treatment commenced. Yet there is basically only one study that managed to follow post ops transsexuals for more than a short time, and that was the famous/infamous Swedish Study that was only possible because Sweden has national health and keeps records on all patients & medical care in the country.
Just wow with this mom!! It’s scary.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/06/29/hold-mother-cant-stop-doctor-from-mutilating-autistic-daughter-who-wants-to-be-a-boy/
I note that one of the nuanced and thoughtful FB critiques of the members of this community {snark} is that we are supposedly “obsessed” with our daughters’ fertility. Again, this says more about the person making the comment than it does about the parents, and betrays a critical lack of understanding of the nature of parenting itself.
First, it is fundamentally true that children and teens actually do not always “know best” about their own well-being. If they did, they could easily be raised in a box, or by wolves! So, this is why, as parents, we do things like invest in our children, and attempt to guide them into good and healthy choices. For instance, most of us would discourage a child from dropping out of school, or having a baby at a young age, or becoming involved with drugs or alcohol. We try to guide our children because we love them and want the best for them. We don’t always succeed but we certainly try!
Similarly, the vast majority of parents are concerned for their children’s health. Whether it is trying to instill habits of regular exercise and good diet, or vaccinations, regular check-ups, and preventive dental care, being concerned about these things is a hallmark of what most people feel is a “good parent.” This isn’t being “obsessed” with these things, it’s having your priorities straight!
Being able to have children of your own, if you wish to do so, is of incredible importance to most people on this planet. If it weren’t, the human race wouldn’t last very long! Of course, not everyone does want to have children, but I think it’s safe to say that everyone reading this has known of people, or has personally experienced, the sadness and grief that come from wanting to have children and not being able to. We all have friends (or have done so ourselves) who have had to go to extreme lengths to become pregnant. The pain of infertility is terrible and crushing to many people. Folks do adapt (or adopt) but none of these alternatives is cost- and pain-free. “Assuming it away” (like in the economics textbooks) doesn’t work in reality.
Finally, we also understand that a person’s view towards wanting to have children often changes over time. A young woman in her late teens and early 20’s often has other important things to do and having children is not on the agenda… but fast-forward 10 or 15 years and it’s a different story for sure. Being concerned to make sure these choices stay available for our daughters is such a far cry from being “obsessed” with the subject. Again, it makes me realize that so many of the people involved with the pro-trans movement lack the critical life experience that allows empathy and understanding for families and young people.
Yes. It can all be boiled down to something very simple: you don’t sterilize children. Full stop. Specious “arguments” about the demographics of who ultimately will or will not choose to have children are completely irrelevant, trans activist protestations to the contrary. To take an obvious analogy, just because most disabled people don’t choose to have children doesn’t justify sterilizing disabled children. For any other population of children, this is a no-brainer. But for the adult trans activists who brush aside the human rights violation of sterilizing minors, raising medical ethics concerns about sterilizing children = “obsessed” with fertility.
Additionally, some of the regular commenters here have had dialogue (in this blog’s comments) with the person who seems to most often be the one labeling us as “obsessed” with fertility, (cough-cough Lisa Toinen Mullin), and we have directly spelled out to Lisa exactly what our objections are to sterilizing kids, specifying that it’s not our own daughters supplying us with grandchildren we are worried about. We just want everyone to be able to make the decision for themselves when they are adults, rather than the abusive practice of sterilizing children when they are too young to understand all they are “consenting” to, and all they are throwing away.
And sure, adults who transition may choose to bank their sperm or eggs beforehand, but kids who are blocked from puberty and then go on to take cross-sex hormones never develop to the point that their bodies can even produce sperm or eggs.
Yet Lisa continues to plow away with the line about us being “obsessed with breeding.”
Sterilizing children is a human rights abuse. That’s all there is to it.
Another good topic for discussion — how can humans not learn the lesson that it is unethical to sterilize other humans without their knowledge or full consent?
There was huge controversy a couple of years ago over medical interventions on a grade-school aged girl in Seattle who has such a severe brain situation that she can’t move any part of her body or speak, and who will require nursing care for life (which is far easier to perform on someone of a child’s frame size and weight). The proposed interventions included removing uterus, ovaries & breasts, which would render the child infertile for life. Yet for “trans” kids, I have only seen such concerns aired on this site. (Thanks 4thwavenow!) In the process of reading about this case, I learned that medical procedures on healthy minors that would result in infertility are only legal with a judge’s permission – which seems to be being ignored by trans activists, parents who go along with minor-age trans hormones or surgery.
The trans relative in my family claims to want to have children, while also agitating for cross sex hormones, seeming to be oblivious to the mutually exclusive nature of these two goals (barring uncommon procedures like saving germ cells for later IVF)
I wonder if there might be legal precedent from the cases of Native American women who have been historically sterilized against their will. Yes, many of these women were forcibly sterilized by doctors without their knowledge or consent, but for others who *did* sign consent forms, this was still a gross violation since in many cases the women did not have sufficient educational backgrounds to understand what they were signing or its ramifications. Nor did they have the financial resources to hire a lawyer to explain the document to them. What’s more, doctors were telling them that they had to have the operation, much as doctors are now telling parents who sign consent forms on behalf of minors that their teens will die unless they sign those forms — their only choice is sign the forms or have a dead teen from suicide. In the State of Oregon, minors who have a tenth/eleventh-grade education and have not yet even taken their SAT’s are signing these complicated consent forms on their own. And they are doing so at a time when they are experiencing a lot of mental duress. In most cases, minors do not have the financial resources to hire a lawyer to explain it to them. Regardless, sterilizing children is internationally recognized as a human rights abuse and for good reason.
There are two sides to reproductive rights. There is giving people the option to choose not to have children. And there is giving people the option to choose to have children. This is about choice, future choice, and all of us old enough to be parents know that for many people how they feel about having children in their thirties is not the same as how they felt in their teens. For some people their feelings change in ways that are completely unexpected to them.
Furthermore, leaving aside girls who never go through natal puberty and therefore will never be able to produce viable eggs at all, egg freezing is a technology in its infancy. Lots of women have frozen eggs; a very small number have so far produced children. This is not a panacea. It is a technology which as things stand should only be used if you have absolutely no other option.
It’s more like sterilizing a marginalized minority group. If that does not raise any ethical red flags, I don’t know what would.
And if most of these children were left alone, they are statistically very likely to grow up to be gay and lesbian adults. The LGB organizations should be all over this issue instead of cheering every story that comes out about a “transgender child”.
While it isn’t EXCTLY compulsory sterilization, for all practical purposes it might as well be. And, seriously, haven’t we gotten past that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization
Thank you, Cari, for conducting this survey and publishing the results. I so appreciate you and all of the other detransitioned women who have spoken out publicly about your experiences. Your experiences help us as parents to understand the possible reasons WHY our daughters feel transition is the only option. We know their feelings of dysphoria are real. But figuring out what caused those feelings and finding other, safer treatments to try is critical. I think your work goes a long way in helping us help our daughters.
Hi! A 4 year old was approved for sex change surgery!!!
http://www.inquisitr.com/3480381/4-year-old-approved-for-sex-change-gender-reassignment-operation-to-be-conducted-in-australia/
Fucking insane!
I’m pretty sure that article is wrong–I don’t think that 4-yr-old is undergoing surgery, but IS “transitioning” socially.
The journalist may just be confused, but if so it’s a pretty big screw up!
Here is another article that describes this more as you say:
https://au.news.yahoo.com/nsw/a/32501729/child-4-in-sex-change-bid-as-government-reveals-hundreds-of-kids-seeking-gender-reassignment/#page1
I would think this sort of thing would work, umm, slightly better with a person who wasn’t still growing?
One of my daughters was born without an adult tooth and she’ll eventually need to have an implant. She’s 17. We’ve been advised to wait until she’s at least 18 to do the implant to make certain she’s done growing.
That’s for a tooth. But to do massive cosmetic surgery, they seem to throw the stop growing thing right out the window. Even though for every other cosmetic surgery parents would be advised to wait until a child reached adulthood.
The trans stuff is all exceptions all the way down.
My daughter’s pediatrician said that there is no way she would ever approve hormone treatment or surgeries for any physically healthy child. She said she has teenage girls who go in all the time wanting boob jobs, nose jobs, etc. and she always tells them no. She said nobody should have cosmetic surgery until they are done growing, and that they should put off any decision to medically transition until about 25 when their brains are fully developed.
I had to educate her about the fact that the youth gender clinics at major hospitals are medically transitioning children as the first option, with real psychological therapy for underlying issues as an afterthought (if offered at all).
Alexis Arquette dies at 47: Actress and transgender activist – CNN
https://apple.news/Av-7aHfBqSSuPdWMBJUGnMQ
I have many questions after reading this article; rest in peace and comfort, Alexis.❤️
This seems like an awfully young age to pass away. It highlights the need for unbiased study of the impact of trans-related medical “treatments” on those receiving them.
Based on his sibling’s statement, it sounds like he was going back and forth between male and female identities. It appears that he was identifying as male at the end of his life. It’s obvious that his siblings loved him dearly. What a huge loss for his family.
I read that he died after a long illness. I hope he didn’t suffer too long.
Welcome back. I hope you have the support you need for your journeys home. Both of you.
Maritza– I wish you and Paul all the best in your journey together. I am glad you have each other for support. I wish that the so-called professionals could see that the best possible outcome is for people to find happiness and peace in their healthy bodies. There also needs to be some way to support people who decide to detransition through the process.
I don’t understand why trans activists do not want to admit that detransitioners and regretters exist. It seems to me that gaining a better understanding of all experiences on the spectrum would lead to better care for everyone. Then maybe only the people who really would be helped by transition will actually do it.
One of these days some savvy endocrinology practice is going to realize there’s a market out here for helping ppl who’ve been on opposite-sex hormones get back to functionality as their natal sex. I think it’s very irresponsible and unethical for docs (and WPATH!) to just maintain this “you did it, too bad, you’re on your own now” attitude, yeah? Hormones are powerful, and altering them has far-reaching effects; endocrinologists know that. There’s gotta be someone out there who sees the need for research and assistance. (Of course, if “no one ever detransitions” is the only narrative allowed to be discussed in public, then maybe they DON’T see the need.)
Best to you and Paul, Maritza. I hope the path becomes clearer as time goes on.
To be fair, many parts of the WPATH do believe they should provide care for detransitioners and have invited some of us to talk to them. The problem is they mostly see detransition as being just another part of the diversity of “gender journeys” and have yet to acknowledge the profound harm that many of us have suffered.
Good points, Third Way. From what I’ve seen in the comments on that (still active) WPATH thread on Facebook, there is some acknowledgment that people like Cari might have changed their minds, but it is essentially their own problem. “You figured out it wasn’t for you, oh well. That’s life. Experimentation is a good thing.” As you point out, Third Way, there is very little concern for the fact that the changes Cari experienced–which include double mastectomy, permanent laryngeal altering, and more–are somehow insignificant and part of that “gender journey.” The trivializing of major surgery and irrevocable body changes is callous, at best–especially, in Cari’s case, given the fact that she was only 17 when all of this began.
Even when detransitioners state plainly that they have experienced “profound harm” and hope that future young people will be given more alternatives than the medical transition they were offered, the responses pretty much boil down to indifference. If you read the thread that has occurred since this post was first published, Cari has been vilified by a few well known trans activists. It’s surprising that an MD like Dan Karasic hosts this sort of vitriol on the Facebook page he moderates.
Yeah, thirdway, there seems to be a lot of embracing of gauzy woo-style “life journey” in these ideas — that transition via meds/surgeries is another “choice” in the path to ultimate human freedom and development. One you can easily walk back if it turns out not to be for you.
Why the “experts” are so loath to admit that some of these choices come with a high physical (not to mention emotional) price tag is beyond me.
It’s not like wearing goth makeup and garb for a few years, for god’s sake. If that’s all that was involved, I’d be telling my kid “hey, babe, go for it.”
But that’s not the truth of the matter.
My words exactly!! Goth? Ok. Emo? Sure why not…. Body altering?? Ah no. Why couldn’t I have had an easy kid. It’s been too widely shown that “going back is an option” after hormones. Even my child has said this to me!!! Oh what little does she know on the damage… Oh wait, that’s because no one is honest and telling them. 😑
Here is some additional, pertinent information about Alexis Arquette from the Hollywood Reporter article featured on Yahoo today:
“Arquette remained fiercely private about her health struggles and obstinate about seeking treatments, ignoring her friends’ and family’s entreaties to take the life-saving AIDS drugs that were emerging every year. In recent weeks, the battle became a losing one: Arquette, 47, had developed an infection in her liver that spread throughout her body. […]
In 2013, amid increasing health complications, Alexis […] began presenting herself as a man again, telling Ibrahim [her friend] that “’gender is bullshit.’ That ‘putting on a dress doesn’t biologically change anything. Nor does a sex-change.’ She said that ‘sex-reassignment is physically impossible. All you can do is adopt these superficial characteristics but the biology will never change.’” That realization, Ibrahim suspects, was the likely source of her deep wells of emotional torment.”
So, yes, I do feel very sorry for Alexis. It seems (of course from this far-distant perspective) that the decision not to take AIDS drugs was, in many ways, a form of suicide. And, that towards the end of her life, her personal involvement with the transgender project seems to have caused her intolerable disillusionment and pain. As much as Alexis seems to have been a poster girl for the trans community while she was an enthusiastic proponent, it would also do her memory a service to let the community know of her ultimate insights. Although I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing too too much of that from the trans lobby…
And at such a young age. How terribly tragic for that family. Patricia, Alexis, and David’s mother died at just 58 of breast cancer. My heart goes out to them.
So, when someone says the words “I’m transgender” everyone in society must take that person at their word because it’s a “real thing”.
But when someone says, “I thought I was transgender, but I now realize I am not”, those words don’t count for anything.
Looks like using claims alone is not reliable. What we need is science. Oh, yeah, science can’t find all these nonphysical forms of “gender”, so science doesn’t count in the same way that “I’m not trans after all” doesn’t count.
I really appreciate your comments here ThirdWay and am so grateful for what both 4thWave and you are doing in your work, especially the scholarly, reasoned, supported approach you take to the topics that you discuss. This has really been a model for reasonable civil discourse. As much as the existence of “detransitioners” is denied and the harmful effects on some as a consequence of transition swept under the rug, it seems like the existence of detransition of those once FTM is denied even more vehemently. I have seen comments about Cari that claim she is exceptional because she started out as a woman, and transmen are sometimes known to detransition back to being women but that this never occurs with those who are FTM. Both family members and school counselors are often told authoritatively that this is a “done deal” and teens who become transwomen literally “never detransition,” or it is so incredibly rare that they know no recorded instances of it. (Just how rare is it? Or not?) The advice is to start the meds asap and get on with the show because there is never ever going to be any other option — that all the empirical evidence points to the fact that nothing will ever change for this teenager. Not sure what you are doing your master’s thesis on ThirdWay, but a study on FTM transitioned teens who later decide to detransition — how that comes about and why — both qualitative and quantitative study — would not simply address a glaring gap in the research but would generate original data and analysis that might help eliminate much pain and suffering in young people experiencing this kind of liminality, not to mention could potentially reshape the field and how detransition is recognized and understood. I know the human subjects protocol on such a study would be daunting, but it can be done. If not you, then I hope someone takes this up. I do think your own “connected knowing” to the experience of detransition would enrich your analysis, though, and bring a unique insider/outsider dynamic that would be quite valuable to the work.
This site is wonderful. I’m so grateful to the creator of it for all of the careful research and thoughtful reasoning. I’m also grateful for the insight provided by the many commenters. Here’s my question. I’m the mom of a beautiful 14 year old girl who has recently socially transitioned, and I live in constant fear that she will ask for testosterone soon. She was recently hospitalized for being suicidall so I dare not raise too many objections to her new identity. How do I walk the fine line between loving and accepting my child but being skeptical of this path she has started down? Also, I live in the northern Virginia area. Does anyone know of a support group in this area for like-minded parents?
I am located near Boston and have not found a local support group myself. I think it’s hard to kind of advertise since the backlash we tend to get regarding our skepticism.
As for your daughter… (mine is 13). We had gone through the wants for T and hormone blockers. My responses to her remain “when your of age good luck!” So that’s where it has remained and stands today. At least that gives us five years for her to come back to us. As time goes I do see her better and better. Boy does she act girly!!! But remains stuck still on the looks. At least lately she has used the girls bathroom when in desperation. The other thing that has helped is I have not allowed her to change her name and such. I named my child… was not going to rename you. It’s a wait and see game. We are still in search of a good psychologist to deal with issues…. but we have at least found a psychiatrist and have gotten her on some great Meds that are working. How I wish we had her on Meds before she found this crazy notion she was a boy.
Just beware! The medical field is crazy. We have had to screen people since certain incidences. Thankfully her pediatrician is finally on board. (We even had a councilor report us after she only met my daughter one time and saying we weren’t allowing her to transition 😳). It’s been an insane ride. Homeschooling has helped as well as she can’t indulge in the support groups. Also she’s been severely limited from Tumblr, YouTube and WattPad. Beware wattpad stories.
I’m sorry you’re here with us, BornSkeptic. I’m sorry your daughter is struggling so much right now. I don’t know why, but 14 seems to be a real turning point for a lot of these girls.
As far as I know, there are no local support groups anywhere for parents who are not buying in to transition. I think you’ve found the only group right here!
I assume since your daughter was recently hospitalized that she is seeing some mental health professionals. I suggest that you demand from those people that they get to the bottom of any underlying issues before there is any talk of transition. Whether your daughter goes through with medical transition one day or not, sorting out ALL issues with her mental health should be the priority. Transition solves nothing if there are other issues going on. I would kick to the curb any doctor who tells you that transition will solve your child’s problems. I think it takes a lot of therapy and hard work to decide that transition is the best option for anyone, and shortcutting that process won’t do any of these kids any favors. I know there are other parents here who have children in a similar situation to yours, so maybe some of them can give better advice from their own experiences. Long term health takes work, and there are no quick fixes in the form of testosterone or surgeries.
Does anyone have info on boys who want to transition? Same scenario… Out of the blue while at college and in an LGBT women’s studies class to fulfill a requirement. I’m not on board so he will have nothing to do with me. He is seeing a psychotherapist who is not gender biased
Any info would be much appreciated
Thanks to all
Hi ScaredMomofTeen, you say “but we have at least found a psychiatrist and have gotten her on some great Meds that are working”. I am trying to pull together information on what all mental health issues end up getting sidestepped/overlooked/unexplored once a person insists they are transgender. You may or may not wish to comment here, I totally understand, but I’m curious what the psychiatrist diagnosed and what the meds are that are helping.
I am in boston too and would be happy to talk with you. Perhaps the webmaster can share our emails and we can talk. Perhaps we could find some sort of group together.
Clt, I recommend you look at the blog Third Way Trans – he recently posted a very helpful video explaining his story, and you might contact him directly. https://thirdwaytrans.com/
I sent this to my son. Big mistake. He says it has nothing to do with his story. He now no longer will communicate with me
Clt, maybe your son might be willing to explain to you how his story is different. Maybe send him a card and say something like “I’m sorry I hurt you by sending you that website, it must feel bad that your Mother doesn’t understand how you feel, can you tell me how your story is different from his, I would like to try to understand better how you feel?”. And then just wait and give him some time. I think us parents will need to be patient, to recognize that our kids are hurting and to listen to their stories. Taking the time to listen is important. The trick however is getting our kids to talk to us and explain how they feel. I’m sure not a therapist, just another parent who has struggled through this issue for a year with my daughter. There is no quick fix.
I agree with ScaredMomofaTeen: in-person support groups for skeptical parents will likely be difficult or impossible to find. As far as I know they nonexistent, except for this wonderful website. It is likely the only in-person groups you’ll find are those which will guilt, shame and pressure skeptical parents, while cheering your child’s new identity and encouraging her to seek out body modification treatments.
I recommend getting help from a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and interviewing them in advance to make sure they are with you in your stance that your daughter is in no condition mentally to be allowed any sort of body modification treatments whatsoever, or even be encouraged to transition. If your daughter is/was suicidal, she needs extensive therapy before anything else (IMHO; I am not a doctor).
Sometimes these girls are following the “trans playbook” which tells them to say they are suicidal in order to get what they want, so it is important to get an accurate reading on your daughter’s mental condition and get to the root of what is bothering her. Why does she want to end her life? Why does she feel like she should be a boy? If she can make progress with these two questions, with time, patience and professional help, she may eventually come to understand that becoming a transboy is not the answer to her problems. Or, with time, she may outgrow being a rebellious teen and find another trend to follow or interest to fill her time.
Also IMHO, social transition leads to medical transition. If your daughter can eventually get to the point where she backs off from the social transition, this may be helpful in preventing a double mastectomy and testosterone. Since she has already socially transitioned, this may take some time and patience. Also it can be tricky to get stubborn or embarrassed kids to the point they’re willing to admit they were wrong about being trans. Often it seems to be a gradual process and the parents don’t dare say a peep to encourage it, for fear their rebellious kid will dig their heels right back in.
Welcome and best wishes to you and your daughter.
Hi there Born, glad you are here but sad you have to be.
I will not echo the sage advice you have been given above… only add a few more pieces to the puzzle from my experience.
As someone who worked as volunteer coordinator for the national GLBT parents’ group for over 10 years, I do second the advice to … avoid them. A lot of the people in that group are wonderful, caring individuals but they have definitely bought “the trans line” hook, line and sinker. Many of the parents involved need validation that they’ve chosen the right course for their children and teens and so a disinterested discussion of risks and benefits will not be in the cards. Finally, at least from what I’ve seen, many of the local chapters have now essentially been hijacked by the trans lobby. Many local meetings are now “all trans, all the time” rather than dealing with GLB concerns as had been the case in the past.
One of the things your daughter has no doubt heard is that your concerns are the product of trans-phobia. IOW, nobody could possibly have any health issues about the psychological or medical impact of transitioning because, after all, it is as safe as houses. Any negative input you may have is solely because you are phobic and for no other reason. This is why it does not even make a lot of sense to try and reason with her, or show her studies or blog posts or anything… she has already been conditioned to believe that any “resistance” on your part is just because you are a bigot.
Finally, I’m going to share something with you that might sound a little harsh. I am in a support group (Al-Anon) for people who are involved with addicts (not my daughter who brought me to this board). Every single parent in that group, including myself, has experienced threats of suicide on the part of “our” addicts. Without exception. It has been described to me as “go-to behavior” for addicts.
I have no way at all to know anything about your daughter’s mental state, and would never ever say to ignore or minimize or leave untreated, suicidal thoughts or contemplation, or, God forbid, behavior. But, it is a whole lot more common than you think. One of the ways that people in my group have found to handle it is to be very matter of fact. “Okay, you say you are feeling suicidal. I am going to call 911 for you.” And then do it. Even if the person then says, no, actually I’m okay… you don’t push the panic button in front of them, you don’t get hysterical, you just call 911 and things will unfold from there. Usually that is the last time there is a threat, because what does NOT happen is some huge dramatic scene, you know?.
Especially since there seem to be so many issues of possible suicide or self-harm among the teenage trans population, this can be one way of dealing with the problem that is simultaneously compassionate but which does take some of the chaos out of it. The person can get the help they need, while at the same time coming to understand that threatening suicide isn’t a way they can manipulate people.
Thanks to all of you for your responses. It helps to feel less alone in this struggle. I fear that you may be right, SkepticalMom: that social transition paves the path for medical transition, but my hands were tied. Over the summer she decided she wanted to begin the school year using male pronouns. I asked her not to, and at first she agreed. Then the week before school started she came to me and asked to be taken to the hospital. Fighting back her emotion, she told me she was feeling suicidal. Earlier in the evening she had locked herself in the bathroom with a bottle of nail polish remover, intending to drink it.. My husband and I had no choice. We took her in, and she was hospitalized for more than a week. She attributed her suicidal feelings to two things: Having read media accounts of the victimization that trans people experience (which made her despair about her own future) and my inability to accept her as my son. So in the end she got what she wanted–she’s using male pronouns at school and her father and I use male pronouns in her presence.
And although part of me feels that she manipulated us to get what she wanted, at the same time I recognize that she is in genuine pain. She absolutely hates having breasts and rarely goes anywhere without a binder. (At home she seems to be comfortable without one.) She frequently talks about her feelings of dysphoria. And, unfortunately, I think she believes this is the surest sign that she is “really trans.” I tried to explain to her that, as a young girl, I was extremely self-conscious about getting breasts and hated having to wear a bra. But with the exasperation that only a teenager can summon, she informed me that what I had experienced was not dysphoria. Dysphoria is feeling you don’t belong in your body, she told me. Nothing I could tell her could convince her that anyone other than a “truly trans” person could experience dysphoria.
In our last highly charged conversation on this topic, I tried to challenge the notion of innate brain sex because I realized that she believed the science was conclusive on this point. I actually shared with her the results of the study out of Tel Aviv last year that cast further doubt on the premise that there are male and female brains. She was furious with me and dismissed the study as failing to support the argument I was making.
Unfortunately, this notion of brain sex may be the biggest challenge to helping our kids become comfortable in their own bodies. And it is ubiquitous–not just among kids but among professionals. A few months ago, as I sat tearfully discussing my daughter’s desire to transition, my psychiatrist explained it like this: Most people are born with bodies that match their brains, but a few are born with brains that match the opposite sex. Only time would tell if my daughter was one of these few. I recognized hogwash when I heard it, and I was furious with this doctor for spouting this nonsense, but I realize that if she believes this, there must be thousands of doctors just like her.
BornSkeptical, I’m so sorry you’re going through this. As far as the social transitioning, I probably would have done the same thing in your shoes. I guess what I was trying to say is to give her plenty of room and time in case she ever wants to back away from trans. Once a kid has gone through a big “coming out,” they may feel embarrassed or as if they are causing problems for their family if they change their mind.
I have certainly had my share of heated conversations with my daughter, and they usually begin with me attempting to present some bit of science to her. I have learned the hard way not to do this very often. These kids just won’t hear it, which is really crazy when we consider how many of these girls are so smart and terrific at science. They’re swallowing the trans junk science lies hook, line and sinker. My kid is so cynical and skeptical, yet she completely believes that she is a boy simply because she says she is one and is more comfortable portraying a boy persona than performing stereotypical femininity.
The world is a scary place when even psychiatrists are repeating the “wrong brain” nonsense. I hope you are able to find some good professional help for your daughter. I’m glad she’s doing well on her medication. That alone is a huge step in the right direction!
Thank you for your reply, SkepticalMom. Do you mind my asking– How old is your daughter? And has she asked for hormones? If she does, how to do plan to respond?
SkepticalMom (or as we would say in the UK “Sceptical Mum”!) my daughter is exactly like your’s – now off to university as an 18 year old boy to study Biological Sciences (ffs), and when I tried to state the science that “you will always be female, however you look”, I was accused of being transphobic. Having not slept properly and worried constantly for the last 3 months, we are now left simply hoping for a) the passage of time and maturity, b) ongoing effective treatment for her pre-existing anxiety and depression c) a medical profession which will act professionally and not accept a self-diagnosis on first presentation, e) some actual real life experience what being a man actually is and f) that however this turns out (including if transitioning permanently is the right thing for her) she will come out of it with as little emotional and physical damage as possible. I am no expert so don’t want to be guilty of diagnosis by internet either – but other things that strike me as possibly relevant – autistic traits – she has no formal diagnosis but is definitely on the spectrum, and also, a bit like in anorexia, the use of control to manage anxiety. I think there is also a powerful psychological process of identity formation in adolescence which may have been hijacked, hence not a question of “changing one’s mind”.
Sorry for just jumping in here if someone has already covered this, but if dysphoria is feeling you don’t belong in your body, then she would not be comfortable at home without a binder any more than she is comfortable going out without one. A feeling you don’t belong in your body doesn’t magically go away just because there’s no one else around to see you in the “wrong” body. Your daughter’s position on dysphoria is inconsistent with her observed behavior.
I’ve had this thought re my kid, who also only wears a binder when she’s out & about in her public persona and can’t wait to get it off when she’s not. I honestly don’t think she has “dysphoria” — she has “I don’t want the world to see me as female.” She is tiny and terrified of many things and I really think a LOT of the gender-defiance in her case has to do with disguise/safety, plus deep distaste for all the slut/princess ideas of what she thinks a female is “supposed” to be like. I can see some logic to that though I hope she’s going to grow out of it enough to realize that binding isn’t a smart thing to do to your body.
I think there is a LOT of this going on with pubescent girls now. I don’t think the prevalence of porn and the skyrocketing of young females presenting at gender clinics are unrelated phenomena.
I agree, Branjor, that her position is inconsistent with her behavior, and that is a great source of comfort to me. It tells me that her discomfort with her body doesn’t run as deep as she thinks it does. I’m just hoping that, if I give her some time, she’ll come around. I’m trying to be patient. In the meantime, I’m trying to educate myself as much as possible by reading blogs like this one. Thank you for your comment.
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