Cincinnati trans-teen custody decision: More than meets the eye

Posted on February 17, 2018 by 4thwavenow

by worriedmom

4thWaveNow contributor Worriedmom has practiced civil litigation for many years in federal and state courts.

Note: Bolding in the court decision (reproduced at the bottom of this post) is by 4thWaveNow, to draw our readers’ attention to certain aspects of the case which have been ignored (so far) by the mainstream press.

Update 2/19/18: We have just posted a more detailed legal analysis of the case here.

So, we now have the decision in the soon-to-be-infamous “Cincinnati transgender custody case,” which we have reprinted below in its entirety as a service to our readers. Does the case strike an amazing and courageous blow for the freedom of transgender teens everywhere? No. Does the case give jack-booted government thugs the ability to batter down parents’ doors and drag kids off to the surgical suite? Again, no. Should this case strike fear into parents’ hearts and cause them to re-think their views on the advisability of transition for their children and teens? No.

A reading of the case – which we plan to review in much greater detail in the coming days – shows that it is, by and large, a temperate decision, the primary effect of which is merely to maintain the status quo until the person at issue, “JNS,” reaches the age of legal majority, which will happen shortly.

In fact, it is abundantly clear that JNS’ impending 18^th birthday, which the decision characterized as occurring in a “few … months” is the over-riding factor driving this opinion. The Court has actually insured that nothing will take place in JNS’ medical care until JNS makes the decision, because the Court ruled that no treatment options can be pursued by the grandparents unless and until JNS has been evaluated by an independent medical authority. Practically and logistically, this will not happen until after JNS has turned 18, at which time JNS will be making the decision.

A few other points from the decision also raise interesting issues:

* The parents, while characterized as religious zealots and worse in the press, have supported JNS’ psychiatric treatment, both financially and otherwise.

* The Court noted that the parties’ claims about the likelihood or potential for suicide had constantly shifted throughout the history of the case; and

* The Court in fact expressed “concern” about the admission by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center that “100%” of its patients are considered “appropriate” candidates for gender treatment.

Particularly in view of the sensational coverage attracted by this case, we feel it is even more important than usual for our readers to know and understand the relevant facts for themselves. In our view, this is a highly unusual case, likely to be of limited precedential value and confined to its particular facts and circumstances, that should not occasion undue concern, or elation, on either side.

Court decision is reproduced below for our readers’ convenience.

HAMILTON COUNTY JUVENILE COURT

In re: JNS Case No. Fl7-334 X

JUDICIAL ENTRY

This case began on February 8, 2017, with the filing by the Hamilton County Department of Jobs and Family Services [hereinafter HCJFS].seeking an Interim Order of Custody of the child in question. Two days later an agreement was reached – specifically “to avoid a hearing on the motion”- whereby the parents agreed to abide by a pre-existing 11Safety plan,” thereby leaving the child in residence with the maternal grandparents. Parents further agreed to make the child available to participate in recommended therapy with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center [hereinafter Children’s Hospital]. The agreement included the warning that “Any breach of these orders of interim protective supervision should alert HCJFS that an emergency situation exists and a risk assessment should be done to determine whether emergency court action is needed.11 A Guardian ad Litem for the child was also appointed at this hearing.

In April of 2017, the situation had deteriorated to the point that HCJFS proceeded on the complaint alleging dependency, neglect and abuse and sought temporary custody of the child.

By stipulation, the parties agreed to an adjudication of dependency, and the allegations of neglect and abuse were withdrawn. Based upon the agreement of the parties, the child was placed in the temporary custody of HCJFS and ordered to remain in continued residence with maternal grandparents. The parents declined reunification services and all parties expressed their agreement with the permanency goal of preparing the grandparents to guide the child to adulthood.

Following that adjudication and disposition by stipulation, several case plans were filed, all stating that Children’s Hospital “would like” to begin hormone therapy with the child pursuant to a treatment plan for the diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

Parents objected to the plan and several hearings were held. On August 23, 2017, the Magistrate declined to expedite the matter as he found that no emergency, as previously suggested in the petitions, existed. Inexplicably, the case plan seeking hormone treatment was withdrawn and the case took the posture of a relatively routine post-dispositional hearing on the issue of who should be the custodian of the child, weighing first and foremost the best interests of that child. HCJFS filed a Motion to Terminate Temporary Custody and Award Legal Custody to the maternal grandparents. An in-camera interview of the child was conducted on October 2, 2017, by the Magistrate and reviewed in preparation for the post-dispositional phase of the trial by this Court.

On December 6, 2017, maternal grandmother filed a Petition for Custody, and maternal grandfather filed a Petition for Custody on December 8, 2017. The matter was before this Court for final determination of custody.

If only it could be that simple.

On December 12,2017, January 23,2018 and January 26,2018, the Court conducted a trial on the post-dispositional motions.

The following attorneys and parties appeared: assistant prosecuting attorney Donald Clancy representing Kody Krebs and Diedre Gamer (HCJFS); attorney Karen Brinkman and attorney Amanda Pipik representing mother and father; attorney Ted Willis (civil attorney for mother and father); attorney Paul Hunt representing Brenda Gray-Johnson (Guardian ad Litem) and Mary Ramsay (Court Appointed Special Advocate); attorney Tom Mellott representing JNS (child); attorney Jeff Cutcher representing maternal grandparents; and attorney Jason Goldschmidt representing Children’s Hospital.

Despite the withdrawal of the case plan calling for hormone therapy to begin, the testimony presented by HCJFS centered on the medical condition of the child and the function of the Children’s Hospital Transgender Program. While the child was first presented BY HER PARENTS to Children’s Hospital for psychiatric treatment of anxiety and depression, that diagnosis rather quickly became one of gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is defined as: discomfort or stress that is caused by a discrepancy between a person’s gender identity and the gender assigned at birth, and the associated gender role….11 (World Professional Association for Transgender Health, Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People, 7th Version). Treatment of that discomfort and stress can involve different degrees of intervention,and must be highly individualized and can range from psychotherapy, hormone therapy and ultimately surgical intervention to change sex characteristics. (It must be noted that the parents, while objecting to the administration of hormone therapy, have continued to financially support the ongoing therapy sessions for the child at the Children’s clinic.) The entire field of gender identity and non-conforming gender treatment is evolving rapidly and there is a surprising lack of definitive clinical study available to determine the success of different treatment modalities. One aspect, however, is constant in the testimony presented in court of all of the medical personnel, and in the sparse recognized professional journals available, and that is that the potential candidate for gender transition therapy must be consistent in the presentation of his or her gender identity. It is a concern for the Court that the statistic presented by Dr. Conard, the Director of the Transgender Program, in her testimony is that 100% of the patients seen by Children’s Hospital Clinic who present for care are considered to be appropriate candidates for continued gender treatment.

In this case, it is understandable that the parents were legitimately surprised and confused when the child’s anxiety and depression symptoms became the basis for the diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The child has lived until the summer of 2016 consistent with the assigned gender at birth. The parents sought appropriate mental health treatment when their child’s generalized anxiety and depression reached the point that hospitalization became necessary. The parents acknowledged that the child expressed suicidal intent if forced to return to their home. It is unfortunate that this case required resolution by the Court as the family would have been best served if this could have been settled within the family after all parties had ample exposure to the reality of the fact that the child truly may be gender non-conforming and has a legitimate right to pursue life with a different gender identity than the one assigned at birth.

It is not within this Court’s jurisdiction to intrude on the treatment of a child except in the very rare circumstance when the child’s life hangs in the balance of treatment versus non-treatment. The threat of suicide and the existence of suicidal ideation can never hold this Court hostage as it searches for proper outcome of litigation revolving around the best interests of that child. Despite the fact that the parents initially stipulated during the adjudicatory phase that the child had expressed suicidal ideation, the medical records in evidence indicate that at the time of the filing of the complaint, that ideation was not presenting as an imminent threat.

It is particularly troubling to the Court that the initial filings in this case indicate that suicide is a potential factor to be considered by the Court, when in the medical records admitted during trial it is clearly not. On January 31, 2017, the medical record clearly indicates “NO” to the question: Is the patient at risk for suicide? The complaint alleging the emergency nature of the facts was filed the very next week! The medical records admitted into evidence show that on February 10, 2017, the same response was entered to the same question. This was a mere three days after the filing of the complaint, and during the pendency of the 11emergency” posture of the complaint. The suggestion of imminent suicide alleges a fact pattern that requires this Court to act expeditiously in determining to what extent-if any-court intervention is appropriate. Should the Court take jurisdiction every time a minor threatens self-harm if he or she is unable to gain parents’ consent for some desired procedure, such as a rhinoplasty or similar cosmetic surgery? It is a sad commentary that the Juvenile Court system deals with the suicidal ideation of troubled adolescents on a regular basis but cannot let that threat govern the outcome or disposition of a case before it.

It now becomes the duty of this court to determine what is in the best interests of this child for the few remaining months of minority. Evidence was presented that the parents agree that the child should remain with the maternal grandparents and continue to attend the high school at which the child is excelling both academically and musically. The child wishes to remain in the care of the grandparents. The grandparents are suitable caregivers and have demonstrated an ability to meet the child’s needs. The Court Appointed Special Advocate and the Guardian ad Litem for the child recommended a grant of legal custody to the grandparents and advocated that the child’s best interest was served by the continued placement with the grandparents.

THEREFORE, it is the order of the Court that the Temporary Custody to HCJFS is terminated and Legal Custody of the child is awarded to the maternal grandparents, subject to the following conditions:

Grandparents shall have the right to consent to the child’s petition to change name filed in the Probate Court.
Grandparents, indicating in open court that they do not choose to pursue support for the

child, shall immediately cover the child with insurance for medical care.

Grandparents shall have the right to determine what medical care shall be pursued at Children’s Hospital and its Transgender Program, but before hormone therapy begins, the child shall be evaluated by a psychologist NOT AFFILIATED with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital on the issue of consistency in the child’s gender presentation, and feelings of non-conformity.
Parents are granted reasonable visitation and encouraged to work toward a reintegration of the child into the extended family.

In accordance with 42 U.S.C. Section 11431, the above-referenced child is entitled to immediate enrollment in school as defined by O.R.C. section 3313.64. The enrollment of a child in a school district under this division shall not be denied due to a delay in the school district’s receipt of any records required under section 3313.672 of the Ohio Revised Code or any other records required for enrollment. Northwest School District shall bear the costs of education, pursuant to O.R.C. sections 2151.35(8)(3) and 2151.362. Such determination is subject to re-determination by the department of education pursuant to O.R.C. 2151.362.

The Court would be remiss if it did not take this opportunity to encourage the Legislature to act in crafting legislation that would give the Juvenile Courts of this state a framework by which it could evaluate a minor petitioner’s right to consent to gender therapy. What is clear from the testimony presented in this case and the increasing worldwide interest in transgender care is that there is certainly a reasonable expectation that circumstances similar to the one at bar arc likely to repeat themselves. The Legislature should consider a set of standards by which the Court is able to judge and act upon that minor’s request based upon the child’s maturity. That type of legislation would give a voice and a pathway to youth similarly situated as JNS without attributing fault to the parents and involving them in protracted litigation which can and does destroy the family unit.

Judge Sylvia Sieve Hendon

February/16, 2018

The Tide Pod Challenge: How a teenage self-harm fad ought to be handled

Posted on February 8, 2018 by 4thwavenow

by Overwhelmed

If you haven’t heard, the Tide Pod Challenge is all the rage with teens and young adults. Unfortunately, many of them have bitten into, ingested, and accidentally inhaled the liquid laundry detergent packets, leading to serious medical consequences. Several young people have even died.

Why has the challenge become so popular? Well, this age group is not known for risk aversion or for considering the consequences of their actions. And many of them have a social media presence and strive to accrue “likes” and gain new followers. So when #TidePodChallenge started trending, some of them just couldn’t resist. They recorded themselves biting into laundry pods and uploaded it to various social media platforms. This in turn inspired more to join in the dare.

I’m sure 4thWaveNow readers can appreciate the parallels between the Tide Pod Challenge and Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. The same age group is involved. Both are spread by social contagion, which is greatly amplified by social media. And both cause medical harms.

Dr. Susan Bradley, longtime expert in childhood gender dysphoria, as well as autism, had this to say about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) in a recent article in the Canadian journal Post-Millennial:

In my own practice, I have seen a good many young women displaying the phenomenon known as “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” or ROGD, which overwhelmingly affects girls.

Typically, the ROGD teenage girls I see have, wittingly or not, begun to experience homoerotic feelings about which they are conflicted. They tend to be socially isolated, and somewhere “on the spectrum.” They may have histories of eating or self-harm disorders.

They have found companions with the same attributes on Internet sites, which diminishes such adolescents’ sadness over their social isolation, but which can also lead to foreclosure of reflective thinking about their own feelings and situation. Some of these girls are depressed, afflicted with suicidal ideation. Because of the initial euphoria they experience in finally “belonging” to a well-defined kinship group, they tend to embrace the idea of transitioning wholeheartedly as the solution to their other problems.

I’ve been impressed with the actions being taken to stem the Tide Pod Challenge (which I list below). It gives me hope that when the serious ramifications of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria are eventually acknowledged, steps will be taken to curb it as well.

So, how have responsible adults acted to reduce the number of young people being harmed by the Tide Pod Challenge?

Many journalists are reporting about it. The public is being informed of this trend, including the serious medical implications—seizures, chemical burns to the eyes which can cause temporary blindness, fluid in the lungs, respiratory arrest, coma, death.

YouTube (owned by Google) has removed videos that show people taking bites of laundry detergent packets. According to a spokesperson: “YouTube’s Community Guidelines prohibit content that’s intended to encourage dangerous activities that have an inherent risk of physical harm. We work to quickly remove flagged videos that violate our policies.”

Facebook has followed suit, deleting content off its platforms (including Instagram), stating “we don’t allow the promotion of self-injury and will remove it when we’re made aware of it.”

Procter and Gamble, which owns Tide, is trying to turn the tide (sorry, I couldn’t resist) of this social contagion. According to a company representative, “We are deeply concerned about conversations related to intentional and improper use of liquid laundry pacs and have been working with leading social media networks to remove harmful content that is not consistent with their policies.” Tide has even enlisted a celebrity, NFL star Rob Gronkowski, to appear in a Twitter video informing people that Tide Pods are for washing, not eating. It has already garnered millions of views.

This is exactly how a socially contagious craze that is impacting young people SHOULD be handled. I dream of more journalists honestly covering Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria and its associated often-irreversible medical consequences. I wish pharmaceutical companies would speak up and condemn the inappropriate, non-FDA approved, off-label use of their products. I hope social media platforms will restrict content that glorifies tweens, teens, and young adults altering their bodies via binding, cross-sex hormones, double mastectomies, and genital surgeries. It could easily be interpreted that cheering on medical transition already qualifies as a violation of YouTube’s policy of encouraging “dangerous activities that have an inherent risk of physical harm” and Facebook’s “promotion of self-injury.”

But unfortunately, the transgender rights movement is overshadowing this epidemic. I think the majority of the public is totally unaware that kids are being influenced, especially by social media, to believe that they are transgender. They become convinced their bodies are wrong and in need of drastic life-long medical interventions. The adults who are aware of this contagion are often afraid to raise concerns because they will be labeled transphobic (and potentially lose their jobs). Of course, this seriously dampens the opportunity for rational discussion on this topic. Mainstream journalists, particularly in the United States, have been extremely hesitant to cover it.

I have no doubt that Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria will eventually become widely known as a disastrous medical fad. Steps will be taken to curtail the damages. It’s just a question of when. In the meantime, parents of ROGD kids and their allies will keep speaking out. They’re doing what they can to reduce the number of young people who may eventually regret how easy it was to medically transition.

Unlike the Tide Pod Challenge, the spread of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria has gone unchecked for several years now. Thousands of young people and their families have been impacted. It has gotten so out of control that serious efforts need to be undertaken to counteract the nearly insurmountable amounts of misinformation, and help control this social contagion. This effort needs to be more than parents speaking out. Medical organizations need to review the science (not rely on trans activist ideology), reevaluate their stance on pediatric medical transition, and rein in rogue practitioners. If we have any chance at stemming this, it will have to be done on a grand scale from multiple fronts.

Freed from the girl pen: Another mom and desister teen tell their stories

Posted on February 2, 2018 by 4thwavenow

This is another in our ongoing series of personal accounts by formerly trans-identified teens and their parents. Ash, age 16, identified as trans from ages 12-15 and has now desisted. We start with her mom Kelly’s account of her experiences, followed by Ash’s essay. Ash and Kelly are available to interact in the comments section of this article, as time permits.

4thWaveNow is always interested in hearing from desisters and their parents. Please let us know if you would like to guest post.

Mom’s perspective

By Kelly O’Connor

I didn’t take it too seriously when my daughter told me she was transgender. She had already told me she was gay, and she had ongoing anxiety and depression that I knew she was actively looking for relief from. She started puberty early, acquiring breasts which amplified her already frenetic mental state to the point that, like a wild horse, she could not tolerate most of the ropes society tried to hang her with. What young girl in her right mind wants to be culled from the herd and corralled into a ‘girl’ pen?

Prior to her identifying as trans, we had weathered a divorce, and I went back to being the single mom I had started out as (her biological father has never been in the picture). We began homeschooling soon after because there was bullying at her school. This brought the two of us much closer together, but she also began spending more time on social media looking for social outlets. That’s when the Trans Meme entered our lives in a big way. We were in a homeschooling group that had one kid who had trans’ed really young, but Ash’s biggest exposure was online on DeviantArt and Tumblr. Around the same time a close friend’s daughter, who was also on Tumblr, went on testosterone. Ash was now surrounded online and off by the idea that identifying as transgender was some sort of escape hatch.

Knowing that Ash was identifying as male online and wanted to do so IRL, I just kept up a non-committal, non-judgmental attitude about it. I never called her by a different pronoun, although she and her trans friend had made some attempts to get me to do so. I resisted because it felt like a slippery slope and reality was a pretty flexible concept for her at the time. She used to spin tales about people who didn’t exist or events that didn’t happen. She was into cutting and knives and horror films and intense, scary anime. Frankly, I didn’t have a big reaction to her coming out as trans because there were other, much scarier scenarios looming large in my mind. Her sexual/gender identity wasn’t a big concern for me. I was more focused on keeping her off of anti-psychotics. Looking back I think my non-reaction made it easier for her to change her mind. There was never a big line in the sand drawn by either of us and so nothing was ‘decided’ or set in motion. I’ve also always been very anti-interventionist. I don’t go to the doctor unless something is broken or the bleeding won’t stop. I once declined a D&C during a miscarriage – I didn’t want anyone scraping around in there – and the only drugs I take are ibuprofen, or antibiotics if necessary. Maybe that is why Ash never directly asked to be put on testosterone.

Having a child stand on the brink and stare into the maw of insanity was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. It was a years-long scream into the dark and I felt I could tell no one. I knew drugs or institutionalization would put her in a place she would not return from but I wasn’t sure others would see it that way. The possibility that she was transgender complicated matters for us and she was very vulnerable to the idea, as I can imagine any teen struggling with mental illness would be.

But we got through it. I listened to her when she would talk to me, I told her about some of the things I had been through at that age, I found her a therapist she liked and I trusted, we took lots of walks, and we got a great big dog. I kept encouraging her and trying to connect her with friends and the outside world. I took an interest in her world which was mostly anime, and horror films at the time, so we went to anime conventions and did cosplay and watched movies. I just kept holding on to her and didn’t let go. Eventually, she emerged from the other side of her darkness and slowly came to re-inhabit the body she had abandoned. Now, at 16, she’s learning to be better friends with herself, and finding ways to deal with her mental lows like exercise and diet. And the ‘girl-pen’ is just a place she left in the dust.

Ash’s account:

Ash is a 16 year old dual-enrolled college student who previously identified as transgender for 2+ years. She enjoys art/animation, games, and learning languages.

I am writing this essay because I want people to understand that mental illnesses aren’t being given the attention they deserve for many transgender-identifying teens and also that for females who are attracted to other females, we don’t usually get to see ourselves in popular culture.

From 12 to 15, I identified as transgender. I’m 16 now and I present as androgynous but I am a gender abolitionist in that I want people to be able to present however they choose, even though I also think gender roles are harmful.

Cartoon by Kelly O’Connor

Starting in 2012, around the time when the rates of trans people were just starting to spike, I was very much involved in the LGBT community online and beginning to realize that I was attracted to females. All of my friends were female and there was a lot of drama. That was difficult, being attracted to people who were mean. It seemed like being a guy would make everything easier.

There’s also a lot of pressure on girls to be attractive. On guys too, but it takes ten times more effort for a girl to be seen as attractive than for a boy. As a young teen, the thought of having sex with my female body repulsed me. But thinking of myself as male, with a new life, without my past trauma, was a lot more comforting to me. I didn’t want to associate anything about myself with being female because my body felt like a canvas of memories I didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to see anymore. I was molested when I was younger by an older male teen. Everything about my female body felt wrong and dirty and dangerous to me.

When female teens I know started identifying as trans, they instantly became more sexual. There are a number of reasons why: repressed emotions, “daddy issues,” negative body images, previous trauma, and some are also disabled. It’s completely unacceptable to be a fat horny girl, but it is more than acceptable to be a fat horny boy.

It’s safer and more socially acceptable in general to be a sexual boy than a sexual girl, especially a girl who is attracted to other girls. The word “lesbian” makes a woman sound gross for liking another woman but the word “gay” sounds completely fine and happy. When I was 12, I told some friends who are boys that I was attracted to girls. They basically said that’s not real, meaning it’s not possible for two girls to have a relationship. However, they also said it was hot, which made me see the label “lesbian” as a fetish term, unlike the label “gay” which is a legitimate form for a relationship.

Anime was a very big interest of mine, just like it is for many other transgender teens. That led me to fan art for shows like Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes as well. A good deal of the fan art focused on two male characters who were romantically involved, not in the show, or in canon, but in the fandom. Gay male relationships were glorified on all the art and social media websites I was using but it was very rare to ever see two women from the same show or two women from any show depicted as lesbians. Most of the females I knew were drawing gay male relationships, not female ones, because the desire was for what we thought that kind of relationship would be like (the gay male kind). My mom and I have talked about how different things were when she was a teen. She would have had a crush on the boys in the shows she liked but me and my friends wanted to be them.

I was drawing that kind of gay male relationship art when I started questioning my gender, and I received a lot of positive feedback for my art from people in the community. On social media, I set my gender to male and no one questioned it. As soon as I came out as trans, I started to receive a lot more attention. I felt happier and much more confident in myself than I ever had.

Things didn’t exactly change with my life, but I had much more confidence looking in the mirror. I used to completely break down because I hated myself so much. Once I had the word “transgender,” I had a better idea of what my identity was at the time and I was able to find information and resources to help with many of my issues: depression, anxiety, weight, etc. I truly believed I must be a boy because of how happy I felt coming out as one.

However, now I feel like the term “transgender” has become a coping mechanism for sufferers of abuse, trauma, emotional neglect, and mental illness. It’s not that big of a coincidence that many of the transgender people I’ve met have some kind of chronic physical or mental illness or come from a childhood where they were emotionally or sexually abused, or suffered neglect or abandonment. They need some way to cope and gain the attention and sense of control that they always craved and never received.

I used to feel incredibly dysphoric over certain parts of my body that a lot of transgender people also feel dysphoric over, such as my chest, my legs, my hips, etc. It is not exactly something I can explain but I have always felt very off about myself. I also struggle with quite a few mental illnesses that can make my mind not the most stable. I unfortunately mistook overall body dysphoria and the emotional results of trauma for gender dysphoria and came close to ruining/mutilating my body in an attempt to fix it.

I was the most dysphoric when I thought I was trans, I never wanted to leave the house. I was heavier and my boobs were larger and I was very obviously female. I had a binder for part of that time but it was uncomfortable and gave me breathing problems. My ribs were in severe pain from wearing it for hours a day. I almost fainted multiple times at an anime convention.

The dysphoria grew when I thought I may be a boy. I always wanted to come across as more masculine rather than feminine. I never wanted to be a tomboy, I wanted to be a real boy. When I thought I was trans, all I wanted was to have gender reassignment surgery but now, I’d never consider it, even though I prefer coming across androgynous. Part of the reason I would never consider surgery or hormones now is because I feel better about my body. I eat better now and exercise a lot. While you can’t control dysphoria, you can learn ways to get used to the feelings and those feelings get better over time as puberty ends. That’s how puberty works, it messes with you. When you first hit puberty, dysphoria spikes because there are all these changes you can’t control and in my case, didn’t like.

My boyfriend at the time, who was also identifying as transgender (I knew them as a girl for a few years beforehand), convinced me I should transition a few days after I mentioned I might be trans too. If I remember correctly, I told my mom a few months later, when we were sitting in the car at the drive through for Starbucks. We were pretty quiet until I turned away from her and said “Hey, I think I’m a boy. And I want to go by “Avery” (a name that I went by for awhile even after realising I wasn’t a boy). She turned to me and raised her eyebrow and said “Uh, alright. So you’re this now?” We got our coffee and it wasn’t spoken about again. I figured, since she didn’t freak out, that meant it would be OK to start some kind of process, but then the next day, she was talking to one of her friends on the phone, and she referred to me as “she” like usual.

During that time, I had no questions regarding the side effects of being on T; I just wanted it, none of the side effects mattered or seemed important. My mindset was just “if I do this, I will feel better about my body and I won’t feel suicidal anymore.” But, the thought that maybe I couldn’t get on T or blockers sent me into a much deeper depression than I was in before. No one was there to inform me about the side effects of hormone therapy and in the groups I was involved in, people only encouraged me to go ahead in my transition once I officially came out even though I was still a minor, still growing, and not yet receiving the mental health care I needed. They encouraged me to go ahead and do what I needed to do to be happy with myself.

Because I didn’t have much support in my life in other areas at that time, their support felt amazing. Up until that point, I had struggled with gaining friends for months, years even. The only person I really knew and talked to daily in my life was my mom and my ex boyfriend (who was severely mentally abusive towards me). All of a sudden, I had many new friends and I was getting a lot of attention for my new identity.

The next three years were me believing I was trans and my mom blowing me off. Thank goodness, because I would be close to getting my first surgery now at 16. I have a lot of transgender friends and the difference between me and them is their parents brought them to gender clinics or special gender therapists. Some of my friends self-harmed and threatened suicide so their parents would take them to gender therapists but I never did that. I did tell my mom I needed a therapist and she found one but her focus wasn’t on my gender identity. We never talked about that until this year.

While I realize now that I am not a boy and will never really be a boy, I’ve also come to discover the androgynous community. I still feel like there’s something missing and I may never find it but finding a nice balance between both genders has been better, healthier and safer for me. I’ve never supported gender roles and usually tend to ignore them and wear what I want, but the harsh reality is if gender roles weren’t so ingrained into today’s society then a lot of kids might not even be transitioning at all.

Over the past few years, I’ve worked hard to change my lifestyle. I recently registered at a community college, and I’ve been making more friends and getting involved in things outside of the house. I have a therapist who looks at my mental health issues instead of my identity. She helps me explore my feelings of dysphoria and repulsion over having a female body. I’ve come to understand that these feelings come from past trauma not because I’m really a boy.

Most of my friends are either transgender and/or gay. Some of my closest friends have struggled with their identities as long as me. I also have friends who I’ve watched go on testosterone, and while I may not agree with their decision, I support them no matter what.

For me personally, my identity doesn’t mean a lifetime of hormone therapy and it certainly doesn’t mean a series of surgeries. For me, I realized that if I had even one small doubt, it would lead to more and more doubt. That was a red flag for me and it should be a red flag in general. Once the process of HRT and surgeries starts, there’s no going back. I think it is very hard for teens who’ve made these choices to change their minds both because they’re afraid to lose the control they never had before and once they go back to being “cis,” they’ll be unimportant and nothing special in this world.

The sterilization of trans kids: Pesky side effect, or modern-day eugenics?

Posted on January 26, 2018 by 4thwavenow

by worriedmom

The first part of this series set forth a brief history of the eugenics movement in the United States, arguing that while the core principles of eugenics are thoroughly discredited today, during eugenics’ time in the sun, it was endorsed and ratified by the finest and most prestigious minds and institutions in our society. The parallels to juvenile transgenderism are patent.

Today, juvenile transgender theory and practice are considered established fact by virtually all of mainstream medicine, the psychiatric and therapeutic professions, academia, the educational establishment, and the media. It is easy to despair when considering the apparent total capitulation of all the most respected and authoritative voices in our society. Yet, as the case of eugenics makes all too clear, what is chapter and verse today, may suffer a sudden reversal tomorrow – and be shown a source of cruelty and evil, rather than the saving grace it promised to be.

A review of eugenics practice reveals striking parallels with juvenile transgender treatment. This article notes one of the saddest and most obvious similarities: that as applied, both theories result in the sterilization of people who are unable to give meaningful consent to the procedure. In fact, as we will see, the number of people ultimately sterilized by transgender treatment is likely to dwarf the numbers seen in the heyday of eugenics.

A recap of sterilization under eugenics

The eugenics movement advocated both “positive” and “negative” ways of achieving its objective of a “better, healthier race.” “Positive” and less intrusive methods included encouraging “good breeding stock” to reproduce and improve the American “germ plasm;” however, since these tactics were deemed unlikely to achieve improved population quality quickly enough, “negative” approaches, including sequestration of undesirables and coerced sterilization of unfit individuals, were also used.

Evidencing the extremely rapid adoption of eugenics ideas, by 1924, fifteen states had passed sterilization laws targeting individuals with “mental disease” which was “likely” to be passed to his or her descendants (and by 1937, 32 states had passed these laws). The American Eugenics Society hoped, in time, to sterilize approximately one-tenth of the United States population.

American eugenics had at least one avid pupil in Europe: forced sterilization was enthusiastically adopted in Germany after the Nazi regime came to power.

In “Mein Kampf,” published in 1925, [Adolf Hitler] celebrated the ideology. “There is today one state,” wrote Hitler, “in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of citizenship] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.” Hitler’s Reich deployed its own sterilization laws, nearly identical to those in the United States, within six months of taking power in 1933. (Source)

The Nazi sterilization program, conducted on an industrial scale, ultimately resulted in the sterilization of some 360,000 to 375,000 persons.

It may be surprising to learn exactly how many individuals were affected by forced sterilization laws in the United States. As discussed here, historians estimate that between 1909 and 1979, more than 20,000 men and women in California alone were sterilized pursuant to the state’s eugenics program. Overall, it appears that some 60,000 people were sterilized in the United States during this period, as a direct result of state-mandated eugenics programs. In the 2010’s, several states, including North Carolina and Virginia, compensated surviving victims of forced sterilization. As a historian working on a research project to restore the hidden history of eugenic sterilization in California noted,

Taken together, these experiences illuminate, often in poignant detail, an era when health officials controlled with impunity the reproductive bodies of people committed to institutions. Superintendents wielded great power and proceeded with little accountability, behaving in a fashion that today would be judged as wholly unprofessional, unethical, and potentially criminal.

Modern transgender treatment leads to sterilization

Unlike under eugenics, of course, juvenile transgender treatment does not deem sterilization as a positive good but treats it (to the extent it is discussed at all) as a pesky side effect. However, it is beyond dispute that the recommended course of medical treatment for transgender young people will, in fact, more than likely result in those young people becoming unable to bear children of their own. This is because the administration of “puberty blockers” and ensuing treatment with cross-sex hormones results, unsurprisingly, in the blocking of normal puberty and the attendant ability to procreate. Of course, removing a person’s natal sex organs (as is done in “sexual reassignment surgery”) also results in permanent sterilization.

By and large, the risk of sterilization for children who undergo the now-recommended course of juvenile transgender treatment is simply ignored or assumed away. A good example is a recent article in Vogue magazine, “How the Parents of Trans Teens Are Fighting for Their Kids’ Lives,” which contains sympathetic histories and styled photographs of transgender children and teenagers, and notes in fairly explicit detail the medical course for such children, which includes (as noted above) puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones.

Although the lengthy and seemingly comprehensive article seems comparatively forthright on the potential costs to families of having a transgender child (divorce, poverty, social ostracism), it curiously fails to mention destroyed fertility as a current or future consequence for these young people. This blind spot when it comes to sterility is common to virtually all mainstream coverage of these children. Is this because most reporters do not believe this is important? Or is it possible that the news coverage of transgender people and fertility, that highlights such far-fetched oddities as “pregnant men” and “womb transplants” has so thoroughly confused the issue? Or could it be that a full and fair discussion of these considerations might deter parents from pursuing this course on behalf of their children?

In a 2013 article, Sahar Sadjadi, a medical anthropologist and MD, drew attention to the stunning silence around the trans-child sterilization question:

It must be remembered that puberty suppression as the first step to medical transition, if followed by cross-sex hormones, which has been the case for almost all reported cases, leads to infertility due to the permanent immaturity of the gonads and the reproductive tract. The absence of the discussion of sterilization of children as a major ethical challenge … is striking. For any other group of children, such an intervention would be discussed extensively with ethics review boards. (What grounds might justify the permanent elimination of the child’s reproductive ability? Should parents be able to make such a decision for the child? Which futures are opened by the treatment and which ones are foreclosed? How might benefits be weighed in relation to the loss of reproductive capacity?) The media would likely react with investigations and questions about the long-term consequences of treatment. These “queer” children’s bodily integrity and reproductive rights should not be any less pressing than other children’s. Needless to say, children are not legally capable of consent, and 9–10 year olds are not capable of understanding all the health consequences of the treatment.

Discussion of this topic would not be complete without addressing the blithe assertions of some trans-activists to the effect that medical science or technology will somehow swoop in to save the day for future sterilized individuals.

This is a canard. First, of course, if a young person has not undergone normal puberty, he or she will not have the ability to provide tissue, eggs or sperm on which these procedures may be undertaken. Second, any analysis of fertility and sterilization that depends on the success of heroic, if not currently technically impossible, medical measures holds out a shaky promise indeed. It’s true that if a person’s heart is badly damaged by a drug, he or she might be able to obtain a heart transplant and not die, but simply because the “heart transplant option” exists does not make it the equivalent of not having taken the drug in the first place.

Modern transgender treatment leads to sterilization of gay and lesbian people

As discussed below, it isn’t easy to find reliable statistics about child or teen transgender medical treatment in the United States. One aspect of the field does, however, seem comparatively beyond dispute: that gay and lesbian young people are disproportionately affected. This is because “gender non-conforming” children – in other words, those often identified at a young age as potentially transgender – typically grow up to be gay or lesbian. (See an earlier article on this website for further explanation and detail.) A priori, the children most likely to be sterilized by transgender medical procedures are those who would otherwise grow up to be gay and lesbian adults.

A closer look at the numbers

As discussed above, that 60,000 human beings were sterilized over the 70 years that eugenics held sway in this country is now considered shocking, disgraceful and morally abhorrent. About how many children and teens are likely to be sterilized under transgender practice?

We start by noting that accurate figures for the United States of the numbers of children and teens undergoing transgender medical care are extremely difficult to come by, because the delivery of medical care is so fragmented. A family could take a child to one of the 40 gender clinics that currently serve children and youth in the United States, but that same family could also take the child to a private doctor for administration of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Remember that in the United States, any doctor with a valid DEA number can write any prescription for any drug.

Recent statistics for the United Kingdom show an average of 50 children a week are being referred to gender clinics, or a rate of roughly 2,600 per year (and if anything, there still exists a much higher level of so-called “gate-keeping” in the United Kingdom than in the United States). The population of the United States, 323.2 million, is roughly 5 times that of the United Kingdom, at 65 million, and given that both countries seem equally enthusiastic about juvenile transition, in the U.S. we would therefore expect to see about 250 children per week entering the transgender medical system, or an annual rate of 13,000 children.

If only half of those 250 referred children go on to medical transition, the annual number of sterilized children in the United States could be as high as 6,500. The rate under eugenics was less than 1,000 per year; so we are looking at a rate of sterilization potentially 7 times higher than it was under eugenics (and we could attain, in less than 10 years, the numbers that it took the eugenicists 70 years to achieve). Today, we rightly perceive eugenic sterilization as having been an “ethical wrong,” “horrifying,” and “deeply, almost physically, infuriating.”

Discussion of this topic would not be complete without referring to the fact that compulsory or forced sterilization is considered under international law to be a human rights abuse. As stated in an interagency report issued in 2014 by the World Health Organization, “[s]terilization without full, free and informed consent has been variously described by international, regional and national human rights bodies as an involuntary, coercive and/or forced practice, and as a violation of fundamental human rights, including the right to health, the right to information, the right to privacy, the right to decide on the number and spacing of children, the right to found a family and the right to be free from discrimination.”

In a display of breath-taking hypocrisy, the Open Society Foundation, a major funder of world-wide transgender advocacy, argued in a 2015 position paper that “[f]orced and coerced sterilizations are grave violations of human rights and medical ethics and can be described as acts of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Forcefully ending a woman’s reproductive capacity may lead to extreme social isolation, family discord or abandonment, fear of medical professionals, and lifelong grief.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

The question that should occur to every reader, proponent of pediatric and juvenile transition or not, is whether in some sense – even subconsciously – we are minimizing or discounting the horror of sterilization because its likely targets are people who would grow up to be gay and lesbian adults. It would not be the first time that a group of people has somehow been determined to be “less than,” and not “deserving” of the same rights and considerations as others in society. This should make us sad, but it should also make us furious.

I hated her guts at the time: A trans-desister and her mom tell their story

Posted on January 18, 2018 by 4thwavenow

Sarah R. is 19-year old lesbian from the US Midwest. She says: “From ages 14 to 16 I believed that because I was gender non-conforming, I was a transgender man. Gender critical theory saved me from potentially mutilating my body irrevocably. Today, I share my story in hopes that other young women can also overcome the hatred we are told to have towards our bodies, and to remain unapologetic about being gender nonconforming females.”

This post originally appeared in a different form on her blog, here. For 4thWaveNow, she expanded some sections, particularly to do with her thoughts about her mother’s role in her temporary identification as a trans man (and her eventual abandonment of that idea). We also invited Sarah’s mother to contribute her own views, which you’ll find in in this updated article. Sarah openly acknowledges how much she detested her mother when she refused to agree to transition, but things are different now.

Sarah R can be found on Twitter here.

by Sarah R.

Tumblr is a cool place: writers, artists, activists. Lots of people find solace there. I tried to, when I first made an account in 2013, when I was still in middle school. Actually, it wasn’t so cool back then. Hordes of young girls like me, with their newfound platform, curated ‘Black-and-white’ blogs (just check out some of the usernames), impressive collections of grey-scaled gifs, a smorgasbord of para-suicidal images: self-harm, handfuls of pills…

Thankfully, vices on Tumblr quickly find themselves replaced by new fads; gone are the days of glamorized self-mutilation– hello, fandom! (My own guilty pleasure was House MD, if anyone’s curious. Dark, dark days.) But like black-and-white blogs before them, these profiles were also quickly replaced. This time? by SJW blogs.

Now, granted, not everything about the new justice craze sucked. For one, it’s where most of my peers and I found Feminism 101, even if it got some things quite wrong (e.g. feminism is for men, too; makeup is empowering; kinky is progressive, etc.), and the general atmosphere of tolerance allowed for young gay teens like me the freedom of expression that wasn’t as safe on Twitter or Facebook at the time. Still, a lot of crazy shit came out of SJW tumblr.

When things like otherkin, fictionkin, and aesthetigender (for full effect, I’m going to have to ask you to go through the pain of scrolling through the whole list on that last one), are accepted as anywhere even near the realm of reality, it’s no wonder that ‘Woman’ has become distorted, conflated, and commandeered.

My own personal attraction to the booming trans trend is obvious in retrospect. Teen girls are taught to hate everything about themselves. None of us can win. Even the thinnest, most clear-skinned, prettiest of girls find an enemy in the mirror. Imagine my horror to look at my reflection and see a fat, short-haired, lesbian staring back. In a world where my style, my interests, and my attractions weren’t fit for a girl, transgenderism offered the perfect solution: Be a boy.

It wouldn’t work, of course. How could it, when all of my problems–the struggle to meet the expectations that society had for me, my depression, my anxiety, my dysphoria, and my dysmorphia, all of my unhappiness–had nothing to do with how I identified and everything to do with what I was: female. Of course, as a 14-year-old, this didn’t occur to me quickly. My transition to ‘boy’ was my ticket out of Self-hatred-Ville, and you’d better believe I was going to take it.

To exactly nobody’s surprise, Tumblr was ecstatic at my ‘realization’. A plethora of congratulations, encouragement, and support was sent my way–something that girl-me never got for being exactly the same as boy-me, save having a different name and pronouns. So of course my new identity felt right. How couldn’t it, when my mannerisms and appearance, which had previously othered me, were now suddenly in congruence with my gender, and my ‘bravery’ was being applauded by all the people I looked up to– both bloggers online and friends in real life.

Something that I feel like a lot of adults get wrong about this phenomenon is that people like me were bullied into identifying as trans, but I don’t think this is the most accurate way to put it. There’s a very specific kind of mental mind-fuck that went on on Tumblr during this time that cultivated the perfect atmosphere for confused, self-hating teens (which is like, all of them) to somehow come to the realization that they’re transgender. First came a kind of twisted rewriting of history, women like Joan of Arc or Christina, Queen of Sweden (who once wrote she was “neither Male nor Hermaphrodite, as some People in the World have pass’d me for.” Interesting… maybe society has always been telling GNC (gender nonconforming) women that they aren’t true women…) now became ‘trans men who didn’t know at the time, because it wasn’t accepted’. By telling GNC women, who weren’t around to ‘defend’ their womanhood, that they were men, is it any wonder those of us who were around started to think we must be men, too? Another thing was the constant validation of trans people. In order for me to become instantly ‘valid,’ all I had to do was be a man. How could I do that? By feeling like one.

What did that feel like? I don’t know, since I didn’t feel like a woman, which I now realize is because I can’t; woman isn’t a feeling. The most harmful message to come out of the cultist ideology of trans rights is that you are x because you feel like x. But in the same way that I didn’t feel working class, or feel like a white person, or feel like a Midwesterner, I didn’t feel like a woman, which according to trans ideology, meant I wasn’t ‘cisgender’, and so from that the leap was easy for me to make: I must be a man. What’s glaringly obvious to me now though is that feeling didn’t play any factor into my status as any of the aforementioned descriptors. I simply was those things, and reality didn’t give a shit whether my feelings aligned or not.

It at the time all seemed very progressive: by ignoring history and biology, we could rewrite reality, and anyone could be anything they wanted (might I remind you of this list once more). What was really going on though was the complete opposite.

First of all, words didn’t have meaning anymore. According to new gender logic, even male and female were fluid. A trans woman was now female by virtue of identifying as ‘woman’. All attempts at any kind of discussion about gender and sex were rendered impossible, because 1. Any disagreement labeled you a transphobe and a TERF, and you were quite literally ostracized, and 2. gender didn’t mean anything anymore (save some mysterious, cryptic feeling that refuses to be defined, apparently).

By the time my mother figured out what was going on with me, I was in deep. Female-to-Male transition videos filled my Youtube suggestions, and I had already decided I would want a metoidioplasty over a phalloplasty (a decision that I now recognize as a desire for my maleness to be real, not a section of skin from my arm or leg, an impossible desire that could never be fulfilled, I know now, because I’m not male). I decided to take my first physical ‘transition’ step by getting a binder. Just one problem– being 14 meant I had no job, and no money. So, I improvised. As a blogger with several thousand followers (nope, I’m not going to link myself, as I would be chased off and/or doxxed in approximately .00023 seconds), I put out a quick plea for help in buying a binder. Within a few hours, a well-meaning follower asked my size and told me it would arrive in a few short days. Unfortunately, or so I thought at the time, I was unable to intercept the package before my mom did.

Accidentally being outed sucks. I remember getting a text from my mom while in school which said something along the lines of ‘We have something important to talk about when you get home,’ which, to nearly any teen, could mean a multitude of terrible things, and exactly zero good things. Throughout this whole story, my mom approached things really well, but I see that in retrospect only. I hated her guts at the time. She picked me up from school and let me marinate in the soul-crushing silence until we were about half-way home. She got straight to the point and told me that she had opened my package and found my binder. I immediately went into panic mode, so I don’t exactly remember how she coaxed a confession of transgender out of me, but it involved a lot of blubbering. She let me know from the get-go that she thought my ‘felt like boy’ spiel was all a load of crap, though to be fair, put it much less insensitively, but asked me to show her videos and literature about it. I did.

She wasn’t impressed.

I remember being afraid that this meant she was now going to make me grow out my short hair, or–god forbid– start wearing dresses, in an attempt to stifle my ‘transness’, but that wasn’t the case. It was hurtful to me that she wouldn’t use my new name or pronouns, but I was allowed to continue to be as GNC as I saw fit, something that I know helped my self-acceptance as a woman today. She made it clear that medical transition was not going to happen, which felt like the end of the world to me. In the same way you wouldn’t tell a schizophrenic that their delusions are real, she took no interest in pretending that male was something that I was, or ever could be. But most importantly, she let me know that that was okay. That I could be masculine, that I could like women, and that I could exist as myself, in my body and that pumping myself full of hormones and cutting off my flesh would change my appearance, but not me. My mom helped me understand that if I was ever going to be happy, it had nothing to do with my pronouns, or my genitals, I had to accept the female, and the woman, that I was.

As I was writing this piece, I asked Mom what she had to say about our journey together:

“When you first told me, I was really lost. I didn’t really even have any idea what [being transgender] meant. I mean, like if it had to do with you being gay or what. Of course the first thing I did afterwards was research it heavily. That scared me even more! The videos [of FTM transitions] you sent me were nice and the people in them seemed happy, but the first thing I thought was ‘what if I lost my daughter’s voice like those mothers did?’

I know at the time you thought I was prejudiced and that’s why I made the choices I did, but I didn’t have anything against transgender people, I just wanted to do the right thing as a parent, and letting you do things to yourself that you could never change even if you felt differently down the road was not the right thing for me to do. But your happiness was the only thing behind my decisions. If you ended up being genuinely transgender and that was the only way you could be happy then I would’ve been able to live with that. I just knew you were too young to be sure about something like that. If by the time you turned 18 and could do what you wanted [medically] you still wanted to get testosterone I wouldn’t have stopped loving you. Of course. I’m glad to still love my daughter more than you could know.

It still keeps me up some nights thinking about ‘what if I had given in?’. The only important thing though is that you are happy now.”

And her advice for parents in similar situations:

“I can’t tell anyone what is the right thing for their child. But it was hard to stay strong in my decision against what other people thought. It was made out like I hated transgender, or that I was abusing my child by not letting her make decisions to cut off her breasts. Stay strong. Wanting what is best for your babies isn’t prejudice. Also, be prepared to be hated by your kid too. Any teenager doesn’t like her mom. Not letting her go to a friend’s house that you know is bad news is enough to make her hate you. Not letting her change her entire body is even bigger.”

Our relationship is wonderful now, but Mom’s right about me hating her back then. And yeah, maybe I would’ve hated her anyways, at least according to her theory that all teens hate their parents, but in my situation, I could name directly and specifically why, and that gave it a lot of power. I remember posting all the time online about how abusive she was for deadnaming me, or not letting me bind, which I now feel terrible about. I didn’t feel like I could talk to her about anything (especially gender things) because I had made up in my mind that she thought my very existence (as a trans person) was invalid. Her resolve was beyond admirable, though, as well as her patience for my angsty bullshit.

Not everyone was so hesitant to accept my identity as my mom, though. As I mentioned, the internet was enthralled, but my friends in real life ate it up, too. Whether intentional or not, most young gay people are in social circles comprised of other gay people. Not all of my friends were necessarily gay, but even the ones who weren’t were into the same SJW ideology as I was. They readily accepted my new trendy name, and did their best to use my pronouns. Even though they messed them up a lot, I wasn’t accosted like when my mom didn’t use the right ones, because I knew that they still thought of my identity as real. In retrospect, their support didn’t help my journey of desisting, but I don’t think they hindered it much either. They were being good friends, and for that I’m grateful.

Almost immediately after my coming out, I was put in therapy. Despite my own desperate requests to go to a therapist who specialized in gender issues, so that I might acquire that coveted letter of recommendation for HRT, I instead was taken to the general therapist I had visited sometime earlier for self-harm issues. At the time, like so many other decisions my mother made, it felt invalidating, and upset me, but also like all of her decisions, I’m now grateful for it. Going to someone who would try to get to the root of my identity and dysphoria and resolving that cause itself instead of validating my mental illness and okaying a lifetime of hormones, mutilation, and sterilization was paramount.

For the first few sessions I was still angry about the therapist choice, but once I began to open up, I was surprised to find the doctor wasn’t dismissive of my feelings like I had thought she would be, but seemed to understand and coaxed a lot of more out of me about my transness than I had thought about myself. The most helpful thing she did for me was make me examine why I identified as a boy, and what that meant. By being asked to define what being a boy felt like without using anything that I already knew was only a stereotype about boys, and my subsequent failure to do so, I eventually came to terms with the fact that I couldn’t be one.

Freeing yourself from the task of climbing a mountain whose peak can never be summited is your only chance of ever actually being happy.

One of the biggest problems I think with being transgender is it comes out of an unhappiness, and that the impossibility of the accepted solution amplifies the unhappiness. Having short hair doesn’t give you an adam’s apple, testosterone injections won’t change your bone structure, a phalloplasty won’t let you produce sperm. The closer you get to the real thing, the bigger the gap between you and being a real male grows. Freeing yourself from the task of climbing a mountain whose peak can never be summited is your only chance of ever actually being happy.

I eventually stopped looking for validation as something I would never be, and started the process of loving myself. There’s no real how-to I can give for overcoming gender dysphoria and accepting your given gender, but there are some tips I can spare.

Firstly, be patient. Whether it’s you or someone you love who is trans, one conversation, experience, or epiphany is not going to change anyone’s mind. Secondly, and this is geared towards trans-identified females: Get into gender critical theory. Liberal feminism tells us that women are oppressed because of their gender, but that isn’t true. We’re oppressed because of our sex, by means of gender. It was hard for me to give up the imaginary solution to my oppression before I understood this. Thirdly, think long and hard about why you feel trans. What is the feeling? What would it feel like to be ‘cis’? If your answer is ‘comfortable with your sex/body’ then hardly a single woman falls under that category. Is it to feel comfortable with the expectations, limitations, and stereotypes of your gender? Once again, nary a single female applies. The hardest and final push for me to ‘detransing’ was realizing and accepting that whatever I was ‘feeling’, it wasn’t ‘boy’. It was dissatisfaction with the constraints of womanhood, as in the stereotypes, expectations, and roles that it accorded me. Understanding that is the most important step in becoming happy with your femaleness.

For a long time, I’ve been hesitant to talk about my experience with trans. I was embarrassed, for one, into being duped by an agenda that wanted to convince me I was something I’m not, nor would ever be. I was afraid, too, of backlash. The climate among my peers these days is such that disagreement of nearly any variance means public ridicule, and being shunned. I thought people might try to tell me that I wasn’t really, truly trans (though no one has seemed to come up with what that means), or that I was just unable to come to accept my transness. I’ve decided I have to cast these doubts aside, though, because there’s something more important at stake: young women learning to love themselves. If I can convince even just one girl to love her body for what it is, and to know that no amount of dissatisfaction with stereotypes, or love for suits and sports, or short hair, or discomfort with her anatomy makes her less of a woman, then any shit cast my way is worth it.

Your queer toddler knows all about pronouns, but how about gender expression?

Posted on January 12, 2018 by 4thwavenow

by Second Wave Dinosaur

About a year ago, we told you about the importance of pronoun etiquette for preschoolers, as taught by the geniuses at Queer Kid Stuff. QKS fans will be happy to know that Lindsay and her self-described genderqueer teddy bear are still at it on Youtube, busily indoctrinating preschoolers in the intricate and very important topics of identity, pronouns, and (to kick off 2018) gender expression.

Update January 14: Lindsay must have got some feedback on the video. She wants to make sure all Second Wave Dinosaurs are well-educated about the meaning of dress-up:

https://twitter.com/thelamerest/status/952548657475309569

Season 3 of Queer Kid Stuff just launched two days ago, and in the first episode, Teddy learns that gender expression (not to be confused with gender identity) is “just like dress-up!” And you can’t tell what someone’s pronouns or their identity is from their gender expression! But still, it’s really important that preschoolers be able to parse the difference between all these concepts.

Lindsay helpfully teaches us there are three categories of gender expression:

Masculine (seems to be about short hair, maybe a beard, but no lipstick),
Feminine (involves lipstick; the example given is a “femme presenting woman” who “never takes a picture without my lipstick” and likes “lots and lots of velvet”), and
Androgynous (may or may not involve lipstick).

Got that? Well, forget it, because everyone of course gets to define for themselves what their gender expression means, and every pre-verbal child should know all about it, no matter how you, me, or “they” express!!

But…but…as Teddy says, this is so…complicated.

Teddy: Lindsay, am I expressing my gender right now? I don’t know what my expression is!

Now if it were me, Second Wave Dinosaur that I am, I’d say, yeah, Teddy, nobody cares about your dang “gender expression,” just get outside and have some fun playing on the slides and swing-set and the mud, and don’t trouble your little head-‘o-fluff with all this gender malarkey. But Lindsay is far, far wiser than some Second Wave dinosaur like me.

Lindsay: You are totally expressing your gender, Teddy! Hm. To me, you look like you’re more androgynous. Does that seem right to you?

Teddy: Yeah. I like that. I think I’m starting to get it…but…it’s kind of hard to understand.

But we need Teddy to understand, don’t we? Teddy must choose and then understand “their” gender identity and expression so they can impose it on everyone else–as well as understand everyone else’s identity and expression (which, Lindsay helpfully tells us, don’t necessarily match). Got it?

Lindsay: That’s because there’s not one definition for how someone can be masculine, feminine, or androgynous. Every person’s gender expression is unique to them! So it’s fun to experiment with how you look and dress so you can find out what works and feels best to you!

Teddy: Like playing dressup?

Lindsay: Exactly like playing dressup!

Second Wave Dinosaur (me, sotto voce): So then, great! Now can we go outside and play trucks or dolls in the mud??? Or…dressup?

But nope, it ain’t recess time yet.

Lindsay: Another thing that’s really important to know is that you can’t always tell someone’s pronouns or their gender identity just from their gender expression.

Second Wave Dinosaur (me): OMFG (or since we’re watching a toddler show, oh my gosh!)

Teddy: Yeah! You can’t tell someone’s pronouns from what they look like.

Lindsay: So even if someone is feminine, they might not use she pronouns.

Teddy: Yeah! That makes sense!

Second Wave Dinosaur (me, sotto voce): Huh, that stuffed bear grasps this crap way better than I do.

Teddy: Talking about gender is my favorite thing!

Luckily for Teddy and “their” preschool viewers, there’s lots more to come. Come back every other Wednesday, kids! Oh, and don’t forget to donate to our Patreon page, “supportive” moms and dads who are forcing this delightful propaganda on your kids [check the comments on the video to see the damage…and before they get deleted, a few remarks from the sane among us].

Don’t worry if you don’t have sufficiently deep pockets to donate to the QKS Patreon. At least one ~~LGB~~T organization is funding this crucial educational program:

https://twitter.com/thelamerest/status/951939706807377920

For now, you can watch the whole episode right here. Better than just playing boring cis dressup, for sure!

The woman much missed

Posted on January 4, 2018 by 4thwavenow

by SunMum

SunMum is a UK parent with kids who have been affected by gender ideology. She can be found on Twitter @Mum3Sun

One of the poems Thomas Hardy wrote after the death of his wife Emma in 1912 is called ‘The Voice’:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

We instantly recognise voices – whether those of our loved ones or an actor we vaguely know doing the voice–over for a commercial. I still sometimes hear my mother’s voice, even though she died almost twenty years ago. A voice seems to contain the essence of the person.

Maybe that’s why when my son tried to talk like a woman (rather, like the parody of a woman in his head), it hurt. I hated his altered voice. I would tense up at once. But I also knew I was lucky because oestrogen does not change the male voice, and his effort to sound like a woman never lasted long. How much harder must it be for mothers of trans-identified girls when testosterone begins to change their voices? Do they hear the voice of a lost daughter, as Hardy heard his wife, ‘Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, /Saying that now you are not as you were’?

I started this piece thinking about the mothers I know who have daughters affected by the trans ideology. But then I read Mary Beard’s pamphlet, ‘Women and Power: a manifesto’ (Profile Books, 2017) and a penny dropped. I realised that the voices of women who speak in public have been criticised, since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans to today.

According to a familiar story, Elizabeth the First had to deny her own femaleness to ensure that her troops would take her words seriously: ‘I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman’ she is supposed to have said, ‘but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too’. Margaret Thatcher, Beard reminds us, ‘took voice training specifically to lower her voice, to add the tone of authority that her advisers thought her high pitch lacked.’(p. 39) In the second century, a lecturer called Dios Chrysostom asked his audience to imagine what would happen if

‘an entire community was struck by the following strange affliction: all the men suddenly got female voices, and no male – child or adult – could say anything in a manly way. Would not that seem terrible and harder to bear than any plague?’ (p. 19)

And then I remembered something I had forgotten for several decades: that I had hated the sound of my own voice as a young woman. Hearing my voice on an answerphone would make me curl up with embarrassment. As a student in the 1970s I used to wonder how women could possibly be taken seriously when they spoke in public or addressed a crowd – those squeaky high-pitched voices, I thought, were inevitably ridiculous. Maybe young women still share these feelings.

voice man with beard

Given the negative associations of high voices, it’s not surprising that boys and men attract criticism for voices that don’t sound sufficiently male. Shon Faye reveals in his video for Tate Britain that he was bullied as a child for his ‘shrill’ voice. Dios Chrysostom would have sympathised: ‘Would not that seem terrible and harder to bear than any plague?’ For men trying to transition, hormones don’t help and although gender identity clinics offer voice training, leading trans women now seem not to bother. Listen, for instance, to Riley J. Dennis, whose voice has nothing of the acquired high tone of Christine Burns, a trans woman from an earlier generation heard here in conversation with gender clinician Stuart Lorimer. ‘Have you heard how low my voice actually is?’ asks Shon Faye. And then he answers his own question: ‘Yes, of course you have, because now you never stop mentioning it. Yes, suddenly I’m no longer a girl, I’m a man, a thug in a dress.’

Shon Faye’s voice reads as low within a female range rather than high in the male range. But as a trans woman he was invited to make a film for Tate Britain’s 2017 exhibition “Queer British Art 1861-1967.” Mary Beard noticed that Elizabeth I had to claim to be a man to be heard by her troops. Tate Britain offers the same quotation as an example of queer identities in history. Call it queer and we won’t notice that the female voice has disappeared:

‘Under Elizabeth, English drama flourished and often reflected this idea of gender as a role to be performed. According to the conventions of the time, in the theatre all parts were played by men, but this very restriction prompted playwrights – most notably Shakespeare – to create plots in which boys play girls who play boys to win boys.’

That’s right: ‘all parts were played by men’.

It cannot be coincidental that the ‘brilliant trans voices’ that Owen Jones wrote about in the Guardian in 2017 were all natal males: Shon Faye, Paris Lees and Munroe Bergdorf. Has the ‘onward march’ of history taken us back to the 16th century?

Maybe our trans-identified daughters (and sons) are onto something. With their hormonally lowered voices, our daughters hope at last to be heard. Our trans-identified sons tell us not to complain that their low voices don’t sound feminine. They know that they will still be heard.

How can women’s voices be heard, asks Mary Beard: ‘rather than push women into voice training classes to get a nice, deep, husky and entirely artificial tone, we should be thinking more about the fault-lines and fractures that underlie dominant male discourse’. But some of our daughters can’t wait for that uncertain future time. Hormones allowed Alex Bertie to publish ‘A brave and ground-breaking first-hand account of [his] life, struggles and victories’. Would his struggle have gained a publisher if his voice had not broken? The trans voice mirrors age-old assumptions about the voice of authority. What disappears is the voice that is known and loved, the irreplaceable sound of the woman much missed.

Not plural-phobic: USPATH psychiatrist promotes transition for multiple personalities

Posted on December 29, 2017 by 4thwavenow

This is another in a series of posts examining statements made by top gender specialists at the inaugural USPATH conference in Los Angeles in February 2017. (See here, here, and here for more.)

Note: The audio recordings linked in this post, as well as the presentation slides, were provided by an attendee at Dr. Karasic’s USPATH presentation.

Dan Karasic, MD, plays an important role in the area of transgender health care. He is clinical Professor of Psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco, and a practicing psychiatrist for the Transgender Life Care Program at Castro Mission Health Center, as well as at his faculty practice at UCSF. He is also the co-chair of the recently formed USPATH, on the Board of Directors of WPATH, and, as such, has been instrumental in the ongoing development of WPATH policies and standards.

With so much experience, as both a clinician and trans advocate, Karasic’s statements and clinical judgment carry a lot of weight. So it’s of particular interest that his presentation at a mini-symposium entitled DEVELOPMENT OF GENDER VARIATIONS: FEATURES AND FACTORS at the inaugural USPATH conference last February should focus on a topic as controversial as this: medical transition for one or more “alters” of people with multiple personalities (MPD)—also known as dissociative identity disorder (DID).

MPD/DID had its diagnostic heyday in the late 20^th century, peaking in the 1990s. The public was fascinated by the idea that one human being could comprise more than one identity or personality, and novels, films, and breathless media coverage proliferated. The disorder was thought to be the result of trauma or abuse, but has since that time been subjected to the same skeptical reassessment as the now widely debunked recovered memories and satanic abuse diagnoses (MPD/DID was, in fact, often associated with/comorbid with both).

There is something eerily familiar in this excerpt from a 1999 book by Joanne Acocella about the rise and fall of the MPD diagnosis .

Another important circumstance in Carlson’s case, as in other MPD histories, was the media. During the period of Carlson’s therapy, magazines and newspapers were retailing utterly unskeptical stories about MPD. So was the evening news. MPD experts went on TV with their patients in tow. Bennett Braun, of the nine-hour abreactions, appeared on the Chicago evening news with his star patient. At his bidding she “switched” on camera—now she was “Sarah,” now “Pete”—thus providing early training for prospective MPs in the television audience.

More important than the news were the talk shows. Phil Donahue was apparently the first talk-show host to present a program on MPD; he was followed by Sally Jessy Raphael, Larry King, Leeza Gibbons, and Oprah Winfrey. Meanwhile, celebrities were coming forward with their tales of childhood sexual abuse: Roseanne Barr, La Toya Jackson, Oprah herself. Some of them claimed to be multiples as well. Roseanne, who had unearthed twenty-one personalities within herself—Piggy, Bambi, and Fucker, among others—made the rounds. Again and again on the talk shows it was stressed that MPD was not rare; it was common, and becoming more so. “This could be someone you know,” said Sally Jessy Raphael. Oprah’s program was called “MPD: The Syndrome of the ’90s.” Today, as people are sifting through the wreckage created by the MPD movement, many therapists are blaming the media for spreading the epidemic. They are passing the buck, but still they have a point.

In the late ’90s and into the present day, a number of critical papers appeared in the clinical literature, and the verdict from many clinicians and researchers was that often cases were at least partly iatrogenic:

Although the relative paucity of data on the role of iatrogenic factors in DID renders a definitive verdict premature, several lines of evidence converge upon the conclusion that iatrogenesis plays an important, although not exclusive, role in the etiology of DID:

(a) The number of patients with diagnosed DID has increased dramatically over the past several decades (Elzinga et al., 1998); (b) the number of alters per DID case has increased over the same time period (North et al., 1993), although the number of alters at the time of initial diagnosis appears to have remained constant (Ross, Norton, & Wozney, 1989); (c) both of these increases coincide with dramatically increased therapist awareness of the diagnostic features of DID (Fahy, 1988); (d) a large proportion or majority of DID patients show few or no clear-cut signs of this condition, including multiple identity enactments, prior to therapy (Kluft, 1984); (e) mainstream treatment practices for DID patients appear to verbally reinforce patients’ displays of multiplicity and often encourage patients to establish further contact with alters (Ross, 1997); (f) the number of alters per DID case tends to increase over the course of DID-oriented therapy (Piper, 1997); (g) therapists who use hypnosis appear to have more DID patients in their caseloads than do therapists who do not use hypnosis (Powell & Gee, in press); (h) the majority of DID diagnoses derive from a relatively small number of therapists (Mai, 1995); and (i) laboratory studies demonstrate that nonclinical participants provided with appropriate cues can successfully reproduce many of the overt features of DID (Spanos et al., 1985). Given the high rates of preexisting mental conditions among DID patients (Spanos, 1996), however, it seems likely that iatrogenic factors do not typically create DID in vacua but instead operate in many cases on a preexisting substrate of psychopathology, such as BPD.

As the authors of this article attest, some patients diagnosed with MPD got worse instead of better as they underwent treatment, and not a few came to realize that their deepening troubles were at least partly the result of the misguided efforts of their psychotherapists. Some high-profile cases ended up in court, like this suit brought by Pat Burgus, who settled for $10.6 million against her psychiatrist, Bennett Braun. Burgus had once believed she had 300 different “alters,” and she “recovered” memories under hypnosis that she had eaten human flesh and–among many other horrors–sexually abused her two sons. She blamed her therapist for convincing her these memories and personalities were real.

Before her ordeal was over, Pat would develop 300 personalities, attempt suicide twice, cut ties with her family in Iowa, and go to court to regain custody of her children. She would spend more than two years in the hospital; her children would spend three. And her insurance company would pay $3 million for a treatment regimen that today seems utterly fantastic….

… Since 1993, more than 100 patients nationwide have sued therapists over treatment for MPD, which was diagnosed in explosive numbers throughout the eighties. “In many of these cases, we see a situation in which the poor training and instability of the therapist, coupled with the vulnerability of the patient, creates a situation fraught with the potential for a folie à deux”—that is, a delusion shared by therapist and patient, says R. Christopher Barden, a lawyer and psychologist who served on the Burgus legal team.

MPD/DID remains today a controversial diagnosis. In a 2004 review paper, “The Persistence of Folly: Critical Examination of DID. Part II. The Defence and Decline of Multiple Personality or DID,” authors Piper and Mersky, make the crucial points bluntly.

Concerns about the validity of MPD/DID raised by skeptics in the psych literature seem to coalesce around the following: only a small group of therapists have been involved in diagnosing it; the condition often worsens and more identities/personalities arise after treatment has commenced; and its close association with the widely debunked notion of “recovered memories” of childhood abuse further undermines its validity.

Given the precarious legitimacy of the MPD/DID diagnosis, it seems clear that–if it’s going to be made at all–it should be done with extreme caution and, above all, with an awareness of the potential for iatrogenic conditions that might exacerbate it—most importantly, the influence of the treating clinician.

Yet MPD/DID is apparently very much alive in WPATH circles. Returning to Dr. Karasic’s presentation about “trans plurals” at USPATH, he offered several case studies, all of which involved medical transition of all or some of the “alters”:

In the case of this 20-year-old “AMAB,” as seems to be typical with gender affirmative practitioners, medical transition is reported as curative (or at least palliative) for a host of other problems apart from gender dysphoria; in this instance, the patient’s Bipolar Disorder 2 and Alcohol Use Disorder were “treated simultaneously” with the T-blocker spironolactone and cross-sex estrogen. The patient “did well,” and the 7 alters (including 3 in “co-conciousness,” 2 agender, 1 female) seem to have reached consensus about gender surgery later on–presumably the requested “genital nullification” .

Then there is the 27-year-old who identifies as a genderqueer “system.” Diagnosed with autism in childhood, this “AMAB” with a primary “front” female alter, has undergone hormone therapy and presently has 85 “headmates” that include alters, tulpas, and fictives.

Headmates, tulpas, “fronting,” co-consciousness: Dr. Karasic seems well versed in the insider jargon used by the trans plural community.

“So I’ve had several patients who identify as trans and plural

…and I guess I had a reputation as a psychiatrist who was not plural phobic.”

After discussing several cases of successful medical transition of alter identities, Karasic reported on an online survey of 250 self-identified “trans and plural” subjects conducted by three self-described members of the trans plural community, over a one-month period. From the data gathered, there seems to have been a plethora of different alter types reported by survey respondents.

Did these alters include “furries,” an audience member wanted to know?

Q: “…What are “damiens?” [sic] The other thing is, were all the alters human, or were there some alters that took on another form?

Karasic: …I think there are people who have alters that take different forms. And I have had somebody with a wolf, you know, and sometimes fictional characters who might not be human, who can become a headmate, basically.

Q: Separate from furries? We’re not talking about furries..

Karasic: No, no no, this doesn’t have anything to do with that. This is just different people’s identities, but there are people who may have within this a system with headmates. There can be kind of a variety of …headmates.

Last August, 6 months after the USPATH symposium, Dr. Karasic discussed his experiences with transitioning multiple personalities in a thread on the public WPATH Facebook page.

Dr. Karasic does acknowledge here the importance of mental health care for people with multiple issues, but per the informed consent model that Dr. Karasic subscribes to (evidenced by his many public statements, as well as the fact that his trans health clinics operate on the informed consent model), comorbid mental health problems are not seen as a barrier to medical transition instituted before treating other comorbid issues.

In the era before informed consent became the preferred approach , particularly in the United States, clinicians were often reluctant to initiate hormonal or surgical intervention in patients with comorbid, severe mental health issues. But in the age of gender affirmation, withholding medical transition is seen as restrictive—even immoral– “gatekeeping”—even if one runs the risk of one alter ego disagreeing with medical treatment and suing the provider in court for “violating the rights of one or more personalities“, as a commenter on the same thread hypothesized.

Taking this a step further, might one trans-plural headmate sue not only the surgeon or gender therapist, but one of the other headmates for forcing medical transition (or not) on the others?

Time will tell if the spectacular court cases brought by aggrieved clients who were diagnosed with DID/MPD in the 1990s will play out in a similar fashion within the labyrinthine world of trans plurals.

Meanwhile, the reader may find the concluding paragraphs of the previously cited Piper and Mersky paper relevant when weighing the plight of “trans plurals” and the clinical approach taken by at least one prominent WPATH clinician:

Wherever we look—whether at the posttraumatic model; at theories of repression; at the epidemiologic uncertainties and aggrandizements of the disorder; at the persistent proliferation of personalities; at the elusive data that attempt to sustain the claims of exceptional abuse; at the bland presentation of breathtaking assumptions such as cross-sex, cross-species, or cross-ethnic alters; or at the impossibility of proving almost any of the basic claims of the disorder—we encounter propositions that appear to be founded on beliefs and not on facts or logic. That such beliefs could prosper in a society or a discipline represents an embarrassing weakness of the academic and professional establishment of psychiatry.

Perhaps the closest example of another culture-bound movement that resembles the modern DID–MPD movement occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when mediums and spiritist practices were popular. Hacking notes that “multiple personality has long had close links with spiritism and reincarnation. Some alters, it has been thought, may be spirits who find a home in a multiple; mediums may be multiples who are hosts to spirits” (79, p 48). Much of the best turn-of-the-century English-language research on multiple personality was published by the London- or Boston-based societies for psychical research. However, After 30-odd years of high times around the turn of the century, mediumship, spiritism and psychical research went into radical decline. A zone of deviancy that was hospitable to multiple personality severely contracted (79, p 48).

When it becomes suspect to recommend MPD as part of psychiatric evaluation or treatment, the condition is diagnosed less frequently. For example, Pope and colleagues (80,81) and others (82) have shown that North American psychiatrists and psychologists are abandoning the notion of MPD–DID as an acceptable diagnosis. In these circumstances, we expect that the condition will revive momentarily and die several times before it finally ceases to be a ripple on the surface of the psychiatric universe. In the end, it is likely to become about as credible as spirits are today. Having attempted to rationally analyze the claims of MPD–DID, we trust that we have shown sufficient evidence to predict a steep decline in the condition’s status over the next 10 years and a gradual fall into near oblivion thereafter.

The boy with no penis: David Reimer & the question of what is innate

Posted on December 17, 2017 by 4thwavenow

Carrie-Anne is a thirtysomething historical novelist, historian, and lover of many things from bygone eras (except for the sexism, racism, and homophobia). She can be found at Welcome to My Magick Theatre, where she primarily blogs about writing, historical topics, names, silent and early sound cinema, and classic rock and pop; and at Onomastics Outside the Box, where she blogs about names and naming-related issues. Her only “child,” a 17-year-old spider plant named Kalanit, has thankfully never had any issues with her gender identity!

Carrie-Anne can be found on Twitter @Anyechka and is available to interact in the comments section of this post. Her previous article for 4thWaveNow was “Transing the Dead: The erasure of gender-defiant role models from history.”

by Carrie-Anne Brownian

Though many people today have wholeheartedly accepted the theory claiming “gender identity” is innate, such an idea developed very recently in the grand span of human history. The word “gender” itself also only came to be used in reference to the state of being male or female (or some new-fangled “identity” such as “agender” or “femme demiboy”) very recently. A predominant reason for this sharp shift in language is the work of Dr. John Money (8 July 1921–7 July 2006). But before I embark on a discussion of the most infamous exemplar of Money’s legacy—the case of David Reimer–some etymological explanations are in order.

The word “gender” entered the English language in the year 1300, by way of the Old French gendre and genre, meaning “kind, species; character.” In English, the word had almost the exact same meaning, “kind, class, sort, a class or kind of persons or things sharing certain traits.” The Old French word in turn comes from the Latin genus (genitive form generis), “race, stock, family; kind, rank, order; species.” Its ultimate etymological root is the Proto–Indo–European *gene- (give birth, beget). Other words formed from this ancient root related to familial and tribal groups, as well as procreation.

Though “gender” is attested as referring to biological sex in English as early as the 15th century, this wasn’t the most common usage of the word. Even the Victorians, cast in the modern imagination as extremely prudish, and, well—Victorian–used the word “sex” when referring to the state of being female or male. It was only in the last few decades of the 20th century, after the word “sex” came to be the common parlance to refer to sexual relations, that the switch began. (On an interesting side note, the phrase “making love,” now seen as a softer, romantic way to refer to sexual relations, only referred to sweet-talking or other attempted wooing until the earlier decades of the 20th century.)

Instead, the word “gender” was by and large used to refer to grammar. Though English isn’t a particularly gendered language, many other languages are. Nouns, adjectives, definite articles, and pronouns are all feminine, masculine, or neuter. Some words in some languages will always maintain their grammatical gender, while others are modified based upon whether, for example, a cat, teacher, or baby is female or male. Not just the nouns and pronouns themselves, but also the accompanying adjectives and definite articles, are subsequently gendered to agree with the main object. Some languages, most famously many of the Slavic languages, gender surnames and patronymics based upon the sex of the bearer. Grammatical gender also includes verb forms. The example most readers will probably be familiar with is the French née/né (she was born/he was born), used to refer to a birth name.

All this changed with the appearance of Dr. John Money in the mid-20th century.

John Money

John Money was born in Morrinsville, New Zealand, to an English mother and Australian father. He had quite a dysfunctional childhood.

Money was raised in a very strict, religious home, where anything related to sex was repressed and portrayed as dirty and sinful. From his first day of school at age five, he was marked by bullies not only as someone who didn’t fight back, but who took shelter in the girls’ play-shed. Later in life, he wrote about his father “with barely controlled venom,” describing him as an extremely cruel man who shot birds in his fruit garden and administered a brutal, abusive whipping and interrogation to his son on account of a broken window. At age eight, his father died, and he wasn’t told for three days [Colapinto, John, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl, 2000; also see Colapinto, John, “The True Story of John/Joan,” Rolling Stone, 11 December 1997, pgs. 54–97)].

After his father’s death, Money was raised in a house full of women, whom he believed despised all things male and viewed him as wearing “the mark of man’s vile sexuality” (i.e., the penis and testes). In the 1997 anthology How I Got into Sex, in an essay entitled “Serendipities on the Sexological Pathway to Research in Gender Identity and Sex Reassignment,” Money described how this led him to reject the role of “man of the household,” and “wondered if the world might really be a better place for women if not only farm animals but human males also were gelded at birth.” (This is also related in Colapinto’s book.)

After graduating from high school early, he attended Victoria University in Wellington. In 1944, he earned a double master’s in philosophy/psychology and education, as well as a teaching certificate. Because New Zealand didn’t grant doctorates in psychology in that era, Money immigrated to North America in 1947.

Money worked at the Psychiatric Institute at the University of Pittsburgh for awhile, and was later accepted into Harvard’s PhD program in the Department of Social Relations. In 1952, he earned his doctorate, with a thesis entitled “Hermaphroditism: An Inquiry into the Nature of a Human Paradox.”

During the 1950s, Money began studying intersex people, who were then referred to as hermaphrodites. Most famously, in a 1955 paper, he expounded upon six variables which he believed defined biological sex. Though all these variables are identical in the average person (as all are either male or female), things aren’t so cut and dried with the intersex.

Money identified these variables as:

Assigned sex and sex of rearing.
External genital morphology.
Internal reproductive structures.
Hormonal and secondary sex characteristics.
Gonadal sex.
Chromosomal sex.

He also added a seventh factor applying to people for whom there were mismatched combinations and permutations of the above-mentioned six factors: Gender role and orientation as male or female, which he posited were established while growing up [Money, John; Hampson, Joan G.; Hampson, John, “An Examination of Some Basic Sexual Concepts: The Evidence of Human Hermaphroditism,” Oct. 1955].

Money defined “gender role” as:

[A]ll those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to sexuality in the sense of eroticism. Gender role is appraised in relation to the following: general mannerisms, deportment and demeanor; play preferences and recreational interests; spontaneous topics of talk in unprompted conversation and casual comment; content of dreams, daydreams and fantasies; replies to oblique inquiries and projective tests; evidence of erotic practices, and, finally, the person’s own replies to direct inquiry. [Ibid.]

As compared to the earlier definition of gender as referring to the state of being female or male (usually in a grammatical sense), Money expanded it to refer to personality, self-definition, behavior, social role, and cultural role. He believed gender is something one learns, irrespective of reproductive biology. Money further distinguished between “gender identity” (the internal experience of one’s sex) and “gender role” (social expectations of female and male behavior).

Money’s research on the intersex led him to researching transsexualism. From 1964–67, he was part of a research team led by famous sexologist and endocrinologist Dr. Harry Benjamin. Because of the team’s research, the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic was founded in July 1966. At the time, almost no one else offered so-called “sex reassignment surgery.”

Into all this stepped Janet and Ronald Reimer of Winnipeg, Canada, desperate for someone to help their young son Bruce.

On 27 April 1966, eight-month-old twins Bruce and Brian Reimer were scheduled for a medically-necessary circumcision to correct their phimosis. The first twin to undergo the procedure was Bruce.

David Reimer

Because the attending general practitioner (not the usual urologist) elected to use a Bovie cautery machine (an electrical needle) instead of a more traditional method, very serious complications were visited upon Bruce. His penis was severely burnt, and the urologist who was called couldn’t insert a catheter in the urethra. The catheter had to be inserted through the abdomen and into the bladder, in an emergency suprapubic cystotomy. Over the next few days, Bruce’s penis dried up and broke off in pieces, with only the urethra left like a dangling piece of string [Colapinto, John, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl, 2000].

After the Reimers realized the damage was irreversible, and that Bruce wouldn’t just have a tiny penis but none at all, they were desperate for something, anything, to help their son live a somewhat normal life. All the doctors had told them Bruce would never have a sex life or be part of society without a working penis. The Reimers felt a new wave of hope when they saw Dr. Money on the TV program Tis Hour Has Seven Days in February 1967, being interviewed with Diane (né Richard) Baransky, a male-to-female transsexual whose reassignment surgery he’d performed [Ibid.].

The Reimers brought Bruce to Johns Hopkins, and Dr. Money told them he could live a happy, normal life if he were surgically altered and raised as a girl. At the age of twenty-two months, Bruce received an orchiectomy (castration) and rudimentary vaginoplasty. He was also renamed Brenda. This was the same course of action Dr. Money recommended for all intersex children, with the parents being the ones to decide which sex it would supposedly be easier for their child to be raised as.

Dr. Money saw in these young twins the potential to test and prove his theories about gender identity. Brian, the other twin, hadn’t been maimed, and so was still an anatomically normal male. He would be socially and culturally raised as a boy, while his pretend sister would have no memory of having been a boy, and also had no intersex abnormalities. “She” was still young enough to develop a gender identity as a girl, if she were strictly raised as one. With the right environment, gender identity could successfully change, with the child none the wiser. Identical twins provided the perfect paired test subjects, with a built-in control subject (Brian).

Janet Reimer began putting the renamed Brenda in “girls’ clothes” such as skirts, dresses, and blouses, studiously avoiding pants. Though Winnipeg has some of the most frigid winters in North America, Dr. Money didn’t want Brenda to wear pants like her other female classmates. Any deviation from the strict gender roles he insisted upon would ruin his experiment.

Dr. Money also insisted the Reimers not let Brenda play with “boys’ toys,” and ordered them to treat her “like a girl” (e.g., gently, sweetly, softly). Brian meanwhile was raised exactly the opposite, in the stereotypical gender role of a boy.

The Reimer twins

The twins regularly came to see Dr. Money, so he could see how the experiment was working out. During these visits, according to several sources, the children were forced to take their clothes off, engage in sex play as he took pictures, view pornographic films and photographs, inspect one another’s genitals, and many other things which were beyond inappropriate and unethical. Dr. Money also interviewed them to see how secure they were in their respective gender identities. The twins routinely gave him the answers they knew he wanted to hear, just so they could get out of his office as soon as possible. These interviews also included very graphic, inappropriate questions. At home, he ordered their parents to walk around naked in front of them, so they could see the differences in biological sex illustrated in real life. Another aspect of his experiment involved having sex in front of their children, which they wisely refused to do. (Sources bearing this out include Colapinto’s book, the 2004 BBC Horizon documentary Dr. Money and the Boy with No Penis, and the 2000 BBC Horizon documentary The Boy Who Was Turned into a Girl. As adults, the twins also stated that they firmly believed this information is in files which Dr. Money donated to the Kinsey Institute, files which the institute refuses to release to the public.)

Money believed his experiment was a success, and he published several papers on what he called the “John/Joan case.” In particular, he publicized these findings in his 1972 textbook Man & Woman, Boy & Girl. These findings were used, for many years, to support surgical sex reassignment for intersex children, and children with conditions such as micropenis and an enlarged clitoris.

But behind the scenes, the experiment was never a success. Brenda always had an unexplainable feeling something wasn’t right, not least because her genitals didn’t look like those of other girls. She often fought with her brother at home and boys at school; found it very difficult to be friends with other girls, even the so-called tomboys; wanted to play with “boys’ toys,” like cars, and do “boys’ things,” like pretend to shave; didn’t like the stereotypical trappings of femininity; and urinated standing up. Brenda also repeatedly refused to undergo surgery for a more detailed vaginoplasty, and fought against taking estrogen pills. Both she and Brian were terrified of having to see Dr. Money ever again, and Brenda in particular experienced a suicidal depression [Colapinto, ibid].

When the truth came out when she was about 14, Brenda immediately reclaimed her natal male sex and took the name David, inspired by the warrior spirit of King David. Even though he couldn’t fully understand what his pull towards maleness meant, he instinctively understood something wasn’t right, and that he wasn’t like other girls, even the most tomboyish. This went far beyond merely being a very stereotypically masculine girl. The fact that his body had been surgically altered added to his sense of not being normal, and not belonging to the female sex class.

Though he wasn’t socialized as male, he knew who he was. Whatever the relative contributions of nature and nurture to stereotypical “male” pursuits—toy trucks, sports, rough-housing, and tool sets—David felt called towards the physical, biological aspects of maleness, and fought against the attempts to pretend he was a girl. He never felt female.

Unfortunately, modern-day transactivists regularly use his story to try to prove gender identity is innate, when it truly proves the opposite. David was born a normal male, suffered a freak accident, and was unsuccessfully raised as a girl. He wasn’t a natal female who always felt male, nor was he a boy who was able to adopt the stereotypical persona of a girl and never consider himself male in any way.

Dr. Money was still pretending the John/Joan experiment was a success as late as 1997, and using his pretended findings to recommend the same course of action to intersex children and children with genital abnormalities. It was then, in a 2000 interview with the CBC program The Fifth Estate, that the twins finally went public about the unethical experiment and counseling sessions they’d been subjected to. Their story was also told on a 2001 episode of NOVA, Sex: Unknown. They wanted to save other children from suffering the same fate, which had already been visited upon thousands.

For his part, Dr. Money believed the experiment had failed only because of the delay in Brenda receiving an orchiectomy and rudimentary vaginoplasty; Brenda’s knowledge of being an identical twin, and having this twin with whom to compare her genital self; various post-traumatic stresses; parental ignorance; intrusive outsiders threatening to give away the secret; having a trust fund while her twin didn’t; and not presenting lesbianism as a viable possibility.

Sadly, the childhood traumas never left either of the twins, and they had serious psychological problems as a result, including depression and a strained relationship both with one another and with their parents. Brian, who’d developed schizophrenia, died from an overdose of antidepressants in 2002, and in 2004, David committed suicide a few days after his wife told him she wanted a separation.

In spite of how Money has, in recent years, been rather clearly brought to light as someone who wasn’t exactly the world’s most ethical doctor, many people continue to sing his praises and tout his studies as proof positive of gender either being innate or able to be taught. On the contrary, if his research proves anything, it’s that biological sex is the only thing which is innate.

For those who claim David’s lifelong gravitation towards stereotypically male things means gender roles and expected interests are inborn, another explanation is that David, instinctively sensing he was first different from the others and then coming to realize he was male, was also influenced by society’s stereotypical gender roles. In another era or culture, he may have gravitated towards things considered feminine in the modern West.

David also knew something wasn’t right about his body. When he was living as Brenda, he realized his genitals didn’t look like those of other girls, and his own parents acknowledged this. They told her Dr. Money was pressuring her into a more detailed vaginoplasty because, when she was a baby, “a doctor made a mistake down there,” and it had to be corrected. Brenda then asked her father if he’d beaten the doctor up [Colapinto, ibid].

In addition to abnormal genitals, Brenda never menstruated, and had to be forced to take estrogen in order to grow breasts. Other abnormalities about her supposed female body were that she developed an Adam’s apple, never had a very feminine voice (not even the type of husky voice some women naturally have), and didn’t have a female bone structure or muscle mass. All these strange things about her body led her to feeling a disconnect from the gender role she was being raised as. This was far more than merely preferring certain toys and being rough-and-tumble [Colapinto, ibid.].

People nowadays who believe no lasting harm can come from socially transitioning a child, or a teen or twentysomething embarking upon that path oneself, need to take a long, hard look at what the true moral of this story is. Even if the child or young adult realizes it was a mistake, fueled by a myriad of underlying causes, and returns to living as the natal sex, there may be great confusion, a sense of betrayal, or deep-seated psychological damage, which can’t completely be undone. At best, it can be minimized, but certainly not overnight.

Today, Money’s legacy takes the form of transitioning children, or claiming a trans identity, because one’s personality and interests don’t match what society has decided is acceptable for members of one’s biological sex. Instead of surgically altering babies because of a micropenis, botched circumcision, or enlarged clitoris, gender-atypical children are socially transitioned, told their bodies are wrong but their brains are right, and given sterilizing drugs and irreversible surgeries by their teens or early twenties.

Though Money styled himself as a progressive, his theory of gender identity is anything but. It’s built around the idea that girls must always wear dresses, be spoken to softly, and play with dolls, while boys are the ones who play sports, wear pants, and study science.

One’s interests and chosen appearance (hairstyles and clothing) really amount to one’s personality—however atypical for one’s sex. Biology doesn’t dictate whether one likes a certain hair length, color, or item of clothing. In fact, many people have gender-atypical interests and personalities, particularly lesbians and gay men.

Even aside from gender roles, what person has never developed any interest independently of socialization and parental influence (whatever population norms may be for male/female typicality)? For example, my own passion for silent film didn’t come from anyone in my family or earliest circles of peers. It’s just something I’ve always been deeply enamored of, since my first exposure to it as a preteen.

Wouldn’t it be nice to return to the society we enjoyed all too briefly a few decades ago, when children of both sexes experienced far less pressure to pick between the blue and pink boxes, and when people realized biological sex was purely about biology instead of a collection of stereotypes?

Wanting to protect my daughter’s health does not make me a bigot

Posted on December 13, 2017 by 4thwavenow

By Susan Nagel

Susan Nagel is the mom of a 17-year-old girl who identifies as transgender. Nagel wrote this essay as a way to educate people who assume she is transphobic because she is unsupportive of her daughter’s desire to medically transition. She hopes others may find this essay helpful if they are trying to educate friends, family members, teachers, doctors, therapists, or journalists. Nagel is using a pseudonym to protect the identity of her daughter, and is available to interact in the comments section of this post.

A PDF version of this article is available here.

About a year ago my then 16-year–old daughter told us she believes she is transgender. Soon after, she began begging to take testosterone, to wear a breast binder, to have others call her by male pronouns, and to legally change her name. Nothing about her childhood prepared us for this; she always had stereotypically feminine interests and tastes. She loved stuffed animals, preferred skirts over pants for school, chose bright pink paint for her room, and experimented with makeup and curling her hair. When she was little. I joked that I had to add a pink load to laundry day in addition to lights and darks. Over the course of a month or two after coming out, she changed from a generally cheerful person to a morose one who spent hours crying and who told me to hide the knives.

Before I go further, I think you should know the lens through which I view things. I am a liberal, and I fully support equal access to housing, employment, education, and healthcare for all marginalized people, including transgender people. I do not think being transgender is immoral or that gender diversity is disturbing. Still after spending many sleepless nights researching the transgender movement, I have come to be very afraid for my daughter. My fears are about the rush to turn physically healthy teenage girls and young women into permanent medical patients and to do so before their brains are fully developed and with almost no oversight by mental health professionals.

I encounter many well-meaning people who believe the transgender movement is simply a civil rights movement. They do not understand my concerns and assume I am ignorant or a bigot. I think it is because most people’s knowledge of the transgender movement is limited to mass media accounts focusing on discrimination against transgender people or on an individual’s struggle to be true to his or her self. Below are some things I wish people understood about how the transgender movement is impacting the health of children and young people along with some questions I would like people to ponder.

Few children who experience gender dysphoria grow up to be transgender.

Gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort or distress with a person’s own biological sex, is a temporary issue for a sizeable majority of the children who experience it. Studies show that only between 6% and 27% of children who experience gender dysphoria will grow up to be transgender. These statistics do not come from a conservative source. They are from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care.

The drug regimen used to treat pre-pubescent children with gender dysphoria causes permanent sterility.

Some parents whose young children experience gender dysphoria place their children on drugs called puberty blockers to stop the onset of puberty. The rationale: postponing puberty will give a child time to decide which gender the child is. If the child later decides to transition, the child will more easily pass as a member of the opposite sex because the normal development of secondary sex characteristics was blocked. If the child decides not to transition, the child stops the puberty blockers, and normal puberty occurs. Those wishing to complete medical transition, must follow puberty blockers with the hormones of the opposite sex. When puberty blockers are followed by cross sex hormones, the child never undergoes puberty for his/her birth sex and will be unable to produce viable ova or sperm as an adult.

Sterility is not the only problem caused by the typical treatment route of puberty blockers plus cross-sex hormones . The drugs being used to block puberty are being used off-label; i.e. they have not been approved for this use by the Food and Drug Administration. According to Eli Coleman, a psychologist who heads the human-sexuality program at the University of Minnesota Medical School quoted in The New Yorker, “We still don’t know the subtle or potential long-term effects (of puberty blockers) on brain function or bone development. Many people recognize it’s not a benign treatment.”

Puberty blockers have been used for a number of years to treat precocious puberty and to allow short kids more time to grow. The FDA is currently conducting a review of nervous system and psychiatric events as well as deadly seizures among pediatric patients using GnRH agonists including one of the most common puberty blockers, Lupron. Over 10,000 adverse event reports in relation to Lupron usage have been filed with the FDA. According to Kaiser Health News, “…thousands of women have joined Facebook groups or internet forums in recent years claiming that Lupron ruined their lives or left them crippled.” Complaints include osteoporosis, degenerative disk disease, and deteriorating joints.

My questions are: How can it possibly be ethical to sterilize children before they are old enough to give informed consent? If your child had a medical condition with a 73 to 94 percent chance of remitting without treatment, would you agree to experimental therapies with known serious side effects? What parent can predict whether his/her child will prefer to be fertile or to pass as the opposite sex as an adult?

3. Not every person who medically transitions stays transitioned.

Although trans activists claim otherwise, it is not uncommon for transgender people who have transitioned, medically and/or socially (social transition includes adopting the dress, hairstyles, names, and pronouns of the opposite sex) to eventually change their minds and detransition. For example, a 2016 survey on detransitioning that was posted online for only 10 days collected over 200 responses from detransitioned women. Blogs and videos of detransitioners are easy to find online.

There is little research on the safety of the long-term use of cross-sex hormones for the purposes of sexual transition.

Using testosterone for the purposes of sexual transition is an off-label use of the drug. One observational study of the immediate impact of testosterone treatment on females transitioning to male showed that testosterone impaired mitochondrial function and created a state of oxidative stress in the subjects’ white blood cells. Oxidative stress is associated with neurodegenerative diseases, gene mutations, cancers, heart and blood disorders, and inflammatory diseases among other pathologies. Research on the long-term effects of using testosterone for transition is sparse. Given the effect testosterone has on the white blood cells of women, it seems reckless to me to prescribe this drug without further studies of its long-term effects.

Below are just a few items from a consent form that girls and women wishing to take testosterone must sign:

“I understand that it is not known exactly what the effects of testosterone are on fertility…,”
“I understand that brain structures are affected by testosterone and estrogen. The long term effects of changing the levels of one’s natal estrogen through the use of testosterone therapy have not been scientifically studied and are impossible to predict. These effects may be beneficial, damaging, or both.”
“I have been informed that using testosterone may increase my risk of developing diabetes in the future because of changes in my ovaries.”
“I understand that the endometrium (lining of the uterus) is able to turn testosterone into estrogen and may increase the risk of cancer of the endometrium.”
“I understand fatty tissue in the breasts and body is able to turn excess testosterone into estrogen, which may increase my risk of breast cancer and decrease or impede the desired effects of testosterone therapy.”
“I have been informed that testosterone may lead to liver inflammation and damage. I have been informed that I will be monitored for liver problems before starting testosterone therapy and periodically during therapy.”

My daughter sees nothing scary about this list. She is a teenager, and teenagers believe they are invincible. She reassures me that she would receive the treatments from a doctor, so in her mind, nothing could go wrong. She lacks the life experience that has taught me all medical treatments entail risks and side effects, many drugs are withdrawn from the market when they are later found unsafe, some medical professionals are motivated by profit, and that doctors make mistakes. In the study of detransitioned women mentioned above, the average age of transition was 17, and the average age of detransition was 22. I suspect the timing of detransition had something to do with young women reaching sufficient maturity to calculate risks versus benefits.

In addition to the health risks, testosterone causes irreversible cosmetic changes. Male pattern baldness, facial hair, and a deepened voice follow transmen who detransition to reclaim womanhood.

I am shocked by how readily some friends accept the idea of using synthetic hormones for the purpose of transitioning teenagers. Some of these people avoid drinking milk from cows treated with bovine growth hormone and avoid eating inorganic vegetables or food tainted by genetically modified organisms. If teenagers ingest risky chemicals for politically correct reasons, is the harm is somehow reduced?

A thorough evaluation and therapy from a mental health professional are not required before a young adult medically transitions.

Several people have told me not to worry that my daughter might transition unnecessarily because a person must have a thorough evaluation by a therapist to assure he/she is truly transgender before receiving medical treatments. That may have been universally true at one time, but unfortunately it is no longer the case. In the survey of detransitioned women mentioned above, 117 of the surveyed women had medically transitioned. Only 41 (35%) of those women had received any therapy beforehand. The vast majority (68%) felt they had not received adequate counseling and accurate information about transition before transitioning.

Some trans advocates say evaluation by a therapist should not be required for medical transition because they say being transgender is not a mental illness. Consequently, there has been a move toward informed-consent clinics. Under this scenario, any adult claiming to be transgender is allowed to receive medical transition treatments with a letter from a therapist stating they have been informed of the risks involved in transition and are capable of giving consent.

The website of RECLAIM, a St. Paul, Minnesota mental-health center for transgender youth ages 13 through 25, explains that the informed-consent process may take as little as two sessions to 10 or more. It also explains that the resulting letter to medical providers “…does not involve the evaluation of readiness…” for medical transition by the therapist. Call me old-fashioned, but I think most 18-year-olds could benefit from an evaluation of readiness.

The website of a St. Paul therapist specializing in gender issues, Bystrom Counseling and Consultation, tells potential clients that a number of Minnesota physicians “…are now comfortable prescribing hormones without written documentation of completion of (the) Global Review of risks and benefits from a therapist.” The website goes on to list the medical clinics most often accessed for this purpose.

University of Michigan Professor of Social Work Kathleen Levinstein wrote about her autistic daughter’s medical transition for 4^thWaveNow. Her daughter was a special-education student, who as an adult, qualifies for disability payments and is not capable of managing her own finances. She functions at such a level, that her mother had to explain to her that women who take testosterone do not grow penises. The day after her 18^th birthday, the daughter‘s gender therapist approved a double mastectomy for the daughter after only two sessions together. The daughter began testosterone treatments several months later. The daughter who also suffers from Crohn’s Disease has been hospitalized three times due to adverse reactions to the hormone.

If transgender people are not ill, doesn’t that make their treatments elective and therefore ineligible for insurance coverage? If transgender people are ill, don’t they deserve a thorough evaluation and a diagnosis before undergoing medical treatments?

When children and teens experience gender dysphoria, they are often allowed to diagnose themselves as transgender.

Parents who convince a child to seek therapy before pursuing transition should know that many mental-health professionals especially those calling themselves gender therapists use an identity approach to treating gender dysphoria, also called the gender affirmative approach. Lisa Marchiano, a Philadelphia social worker, wrote an essay contrasting the identity model of therapy to the traditional mental-health model. Under the identity model, gender dysphoria can mean only one thing: that someone is transgender. Therapists are not allowed to use their own clinical judgement to analyze whether there might be other reasons people are feeling uncomfortable with their bodies. Marchiano states, “Our role as therapists becomes limited to enthusiastic affirmation only.”

I witnessed the prevalence of this model in my own search for a therapist to help my daughter. I interviewed approximately ten therapists by phone before finding one who understood that teenagers experiment with identities and that teenagers’ beliefs about who they are may change over time, something that used to be common sense and common knowledge.

In contrast to the gender-identity model of therapy, Marchiano says the mental-health model sees gender dysphoria as a symptom. The therapist’s job is to help the client “…explore the symptoms without making assumptions about what the symptoms mean. In fact, while identity therapy knows what gender dysphoria means – i.e. that the client is trans – mental health therapy will start with the assumption that we have no idea what the symptom means. We must be open to the meaning that emerges for patients as we explore their experience with them.”

What besides being transgender could cause gender dysphoria? In a letter to the American Psychological Association, Marchiano says the survey of detransitioned women in addition to the online writings and videos of detransitioners indicate “…that many who underwent transition feel that they were doing so as a maladaptive coping mechanism to deal with trauma, anxiety, social difficulties, or other issues. The majority of detransitioners speaking out online now identify as lesbian, and many of them feel that internalized homophobia played a part in their believing that they were men.”

As a woman, I fully understand the impulse to transition to stay safe and sane in a misogynistic world. But please, let’s not view women attaining better camouflage through transition as progressive. Progress occurs when women no longer feel a need to hide.

Studies show most children no longer feel gender dysphoria as adults. It is easy to find examples of people detransitioning. So why do gender therapists assume that every instance of gender dysphoria indicates that a person is transgender? We used to require people to have advanced degrees and licenses to make mental-health diagnoses. Why are we, in effect, allowing children and teenagers to diagnose themselves?

There is no persuasive evidence that gender transition reduces suicidality in children with gender dysphoria.

One of the scariest things a parent in my position encounters is the widely reported increased risk of suicide among transgender people. Many people believe transition is the only way to prevent suicides among transgender youth. A common sentiment is, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?” I encourage anyone with this concern to read a recent essay by Michael Bailey and Ray Blanchard. Their key take-away is, “There is no persuasive evidence that gender transition reduces gender dysphoric children’s likelihood of killing themselves. The idea that mental health problems–including suicidality–are caused by gender dysphoria rather than the other way around (i.e., mental health and personality issues cause a vulnerability to experience gender dysphoria) is currently popular and politically correct. It is, however, unproven and as likely to be false as true.” There are, in fact, some studies that show higher suicide rates for transgender people who have transitioned compared to those who have not.

While there is no proof that transition reduces suicidality, teenagers are coached by others on sites such as reddit and Tumblr about how to use suicide threats as a bargaining chip. In one of the more chilling reddit exchanges reposted on the website Transgender Reality, an 18-year-old whose father is concerned about the wisdom of hormone therapy is asked by a commenter, “Are you ready to talk to him (the father) about the possibility of suicide? Or do you want to couch it more gently, and say you ‘can’t go on living like this’ etc.?” In another post, a 14-year-old is told, “…communicate to your parents that this is not optional. It is either this or depression, isolation, suicide.” Finally, a 13-year-old is told to tell his parents, “If you don’t help me like you need to as the parents who made me, I’ll wind up bitter, miserable or dead.”

Some psychologists and mental health professionals believe teenage girls and young women are experiencing a new type of gender dysphoria caught from peers and through exposure to the concept online.

Up until about 7 years ago, more boys than girls presented with gender dysphoria at gender clinics in western countries. Around 2010, the number of girls started to exceed the number of boys and began to increase significantly. Many girls experiencing gender dysphoria in the past decade have a different profile than they did in earlier years. In the past, girls with gender dysphoria began expressing discomfort with feminine clothes, interests and toys during preschool. Most would eventually become comfortable with their biological sex while dysphoria would persist into adulthood for some. Now many girls are first experiencing gender dysphoria suddenly in adolescence. Some researchers are calling this phenomenon rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) and theorize it may be a kind of social contagion spread among friends and through the internet.

A 2016 survey of 164 parents of transgender adolescents and young adults demonstrates the current contagious nature of gender dysphoria among young women. Eighty-five percent of the parents surveyed had transgender youth who were biologically female with an average age of 15. In the general population, less than one percent of young adults would be expected to be transgender, however, many of the parents in this survey said that multiple members of their child’s pre-existing friend group were also declaring themselves transgender. To be exact, 50 percent of a youth’s pre-existing friend group became transgender in close to 40 percent of the friend groups described in the study. The average number of friends becoming transgender was 3.5.

Psychologists Ray Blanchard and Michael Bailey recently reported that young people with ROGD (primarily girls) falsely come to believe that all their problems are due gender dysphoria. Girls with ROGD often become obsessed with the idea of transition, and their mental health and social relationships deteriorate. The subculture surrounding ROGD includes attributes found in cults including an “… expectation of absolute ideological agreement …and encouragement to cut off ties with family and friends…” who do not agree with them.” Since ROGD is “…based on a false belief acquired through social means,” Bailey and Blanchard believe transition will not help youth with this condition. They pull no punches: “If knowledge is power, then lack of knowledge is malpractice. The ignorance of some leading gender clinicians regarding all scientific aspects of gender dysphoria is scandalous.”

My own daughter’s experience of gender dysphoria matches the description of ROGD closely. She first began experiencing gender dysphoria as a teenager. Four member of her pre-existing friend group also began identifying as transgender in their teens. Because I have expressed doubts about her transgender identity and voiced opposition to medical transition, she refuses to talk to me about those subjects much as a cult member refuses to listen to anything that contradicts his/her beliefs. Her mental health and relationships with family have suffered.

Many people stand to gain financially by the boom in children, teens and young adults seeking medical transition.

Quite an industry has built up around the treatment of transgender people. In 2007, there was one transgender clinic that served children in the United States; now there are 40 . Transgender people who medically transition become permanent medical patients. To maintain their transitions, they must take hormones and have regular blood tests for the rest of their lives. Puberty blockers, hormone treatments, blood tests, genital electrolysis, facial electrolysis, laser body hair reduction, breast augmentation, facial feminization surgery, orchiectomies, vaginoplasties, colovaginoplasties, metoidioplasties, phalloplasties, and double mastectomies are some of the expensive treatments that may be pursued by transgender people.

Additional treatments may be needed to address complications resulting from medical transition treatments. The Truth About Transition Tumblr blog has compiled posts by female to male transitioners who have experienced difficulties. One trans man posts a video about multiple doctor visits he made recently to correct his testosterone levels and stop bleeding, leading him to 1) increase his testosterone dosage, 2) start taking progesterone, and 3) to go on Lupron, usually used as a puberty blocker. Another young trans man expresses his weariness anticipating his 20^th transition-related surgery. The latest surgery is a third attempt to treat an abscess that developed during his surgical pursuit of a penis.

Revenue from testosterone sales has increased dramatically in recent years. Testosterone sales generated $2.4 billion in revenue in the United States in 2013. The projection for 2018 sales is $3.8 billion, a 58 percent increase. While testosterone is used for purposes other than sexual transition, the increase in revenue correlates with the proliferation of gender clinics.

In addition to risky medical treatments, many girls and women use binders to compress their breasts and make their chests appear flatter. Binders have side effects such as back pain, shortness of breath, and rib fractures. When I Googled the term, “binder risks,” the first site that popped up was a plastic surgery clinic that does “top surgeries” for girls/women who want to transition to male. Yes, the folks who will profit by cutting off girls’ healthy breasts want to make very sure girls and their families understand the risks of binders.

What other civil rights movement has involved supporting body modifications for minors and young adults?

I have never felt so alone. People who would normally be allies for parents of a troubled child including therapists, doctors, teachers, and friends support this madness. I can only assume it is because they believe some or all of the following:

Only transgender people experience gender dysphoria.
Being transgender is always an innate and permanent condition.
People with gender dysphoria receive careful evaluation and therapy before being allowed to medically modify their bodies.
Transgender minors are not being allowed to make permanent changes to their bodies.
Transition-related medical treatments are well-tested and proven safe.
Children, youth and adults always fully understand why they are feeling dysphoric.
Physicians and drug companies would never experiment on children or put profit ahead of patients’ best interests.
Research has proven that transition prevents suicide.

None of it is true.

A friend told me recently that I have nothing to gain by resisting my daughter’s desire to transition. I strongly disagree. If resistance means my daughter postpones medical treatments until she can weigh the risks versus the benefits with more maturity, I gain plenty. If I can buy more time for her to discern whether her dysphoria really means she is transgender or whether something else precipitates her discomfort, I gain plenty.

I feel genuine rage toward the therapists and doctors who are complicit in the pursuit of medical transitions for kids, teenagers and young adults. You swore you would first do no harm. You should be ashamed!

If anyone working in the malpractice insurance industry happens to read this story, I have one final question specifically for you. Is it wise to cover the therapists and doctors involved in the transition of children and youth? When the lawsuits begin, I hope the settlements are breathtaking.