My daughter did not have comprehensive care of her underlying comorbidities. She demanded testosterone and breast removal, which she got with ease. No meaningful questions were asked of her. No therapy/counseling occurred for trauma, autistic trait influence, a mental disorder, eating disorder and much more including a ruptured parent-daughter bond and a shattered family due to her decisions and behavior.
My story is not unique. Thousands of families have not been helped by "psychology" professionals, who seem to think they are saving our kids from their parents with their ideological bias that only harms our children and our families. Real, holistic, comprehensive care needs to return to the profession. It may take more skills than affirmation only, but actually caring for kids and their families might be a worthy goal instead of pushing an ideological, medicalized pathway to kids.
I have long believed, even before gender ideology touched my family, that a person being transgender was due to them internalizing stereotypes and expectations about their sex that they felt unwilling or unable to meet. For example if you tell a little boy that boys don’t cry, don’t express emotions, are always tough and aggressive, then a boy who is by nature sensitive may feel he can’t meet that definition and therefore isn’t a boy. In fact, he is a boy, and it’s the stereotypes that are wrong, not him.
How different would it look if psychologists and therapists were helping their patients understand this, that feeling uncomfortable with acting out a role is natural, and that the solution isn’t to act out a different role, it’s to stop acting, recover from the shame you feel for failing to live up to toxic expectations, and learn to accept yourself as you are? Stop trying to turn yourself into someone you aren’t, whether that’s by acting out the expectations of your birth sex, or rejecting the self who couldn’t and then acting out the expectations of the opposite sex.
It’s a very immature belief that being tough and liking sports and rejecting beauty and emotion are the definition of man, and dresses and makeup are the definition of woman.
I agree that the point of psychotherapy is to help the person understand where their feelings are coming from and deal with them in the healthiest way possible.
As far as organic causes, I will agree that there are organic causes that may cause a female to have some psychological or physical traits that are more common in males, or vice versa. This could certainly contribute to a person’s feelings that they are unable to meet societal expectations for their sex. But I don’t agree there’s any organic “gender soul” that means that your body requires medical changes or that you are “really” something that you’re factually not. That doesn’t make any sense. It’s unfortunate that the psychotherapy profession has decided that’s the only allowed point of view.
I'm sorry that you won't look at the evidence which I referenced.
I am in correspondence with an Emeritus Professor of Psychobiology who has told me that he agrees with the views expressed in my book.
In fact he called my book 'superb' and commented that it was full of good scholarship and clear thinking.
I don't want to rely on an appeal to authority, but this should be sufficient to demonstrate that it is a reasonable hypothesis. Simply saying that you don't believe in a 'gendered soul' isn't really a satisfactory rebuttal.
My own experience had almost nothing to do with societal expectations, but everything about my own body.
In a recent post on my own Substack I have referenced a variety of theoretical approaches which might account for my own experience and the evidence these researchers have found. Also Rupert Sheldrake's Theory of Formative Causation may contribute to this.
I am mostly confronted with Left Brain dominant believers who dismiss a Whole Person theory such as PF Strawson (Professor of Metaphysics at Magdalene College, Oxford in the 1970s) proposed in order to exit the limitations and contradictions of Cartesian Dualism.
May I offer another factor affecting mental health professionals that is a lot less deep and ideological? First, I'm referring to the ROGD teens here, the ones with no history of gender distress or even gender nonconformity who suddenly become obsessed with a trans identity as part of larger mental health or social issues, very often the teen girls. Many of the professionals we encountered were overworked and burned out. They were frustrated and sometimes openly contemptuous of the challenging and hostile behaviors from the teens they had to deal with. These teens are challenging - they keep showing up in their ERs, getting admitted to their acute care psych hospitals or understaffed and overworked intensive outpatient programs. They make even the private paid therapists feel insecure in their skills because even most PhD psychologists aren't trained to work with truly challenging behaviors. We hardly encountered any "true believers" or people projecting their personal experiences onto her. Some of them clearly didn't even understand what "trans" or "gender identity" were supposed to mean (like the psychiatrist who thought the words "gay" and "trans" were synonyms and used them interchangeably in her notes). Almost all of them were people who were just looking to get through their shift with the least resistance and if that meant nodding along and saying "yeah, you're a boy. He/him. Yes, testosterone will solve everything and that's why you're still struggling. Your parents suck for not giving it to you," to get her to settle down in a chaotic group setting or to make that 50 minute therapy session less stressful for the therapist, they were fine doing it. There wasn't anything deep behind their affirmation. It was just taking the easiest way out to survive another day in their jobs and avoid having to deal with their lack of skills for challenging cases.
I hadn't thought about it this way, but this is spot on. As a psych inpatient, I once had a front-row seat on mental health crisis treatment and the pressures it puts on the clinicians involved. I saw that those docs, nurses, and therapists -- like all of us -- prioritized getting through the day with their own mental health more or less intact. A few were saints who were capable of more. Most were not, and we can't expect them to be.
As a non-parent/layperson, I hadn't considered the scenario you describe, but it makes perfect sense. It adds another obstacle to providing effective care for adolescents who've been ideologically groomed in school and by peers, and may have specific expectations in mind.
What I didn't read here, but was expecting to, was some mention of the enormous pressure on clinicians to conform to ideological expectations, coming from the profession itself. Simply mentioning to a colleague that one has doubts about the affirmative model can lead to problems, if the colleague is a true believer, and many are.
I'm speculating, of course, but this issue has been with us long enough that therapists who consider themselves apolitical and focused entirely on their work must be aware of the risks to their careers of not conforming to pro-trans expectations. Simply asking questions can be interpreted as "conversion therapy."
This can influence the approach to treatment. It's not ethical, but it's understandable.
What do they do with anorexics, though? Those who want opioids? Those who plan severe self harm?
Destroying a young person's endocrine and reproductive systems through drugs or surgery because they can't see how to help the patient should not be a standard treatment on the table. It hasn't even been seen to reliably help psychological outcomes.
What else can they do? As Cass said, treat the distress.
There's not a massive lobby and movement telling the medical and mental health professionals that letting g people with those other issues do what they want is the new civil rights issue of our time. And they don't have state laws and program policies that give them cover for taking the easy way out. And unfortunately, if you talk to parents in the trenches with kids with the other issues you mention, you'll find the professionals are floundering there too and many of them don't have the skills to handle difficult cases. They just don't have the same option to take the path of least resistance. They're (mostly) not doing this consciously or with ill intent. They're struggling to work with extremely hard cases in challenging environments and without the skills to deal with it. You don't have to take your ROGD daughter to a gender clinic to have her completely screwed over and harmed by this stuff
What if the gender clinician's countertransference means they don't mind risking an emotionally demanding patient's health, if it means getting that patient out of the door quicker? If the patient has enthusiastically consented to the risky treatment, that makes it the path of least resistance.
I worry about that too. Have you ever listened to the interview with the Dutch researchers who pioneered the idea of puberty blockers and early gender transition on children on the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast? There's something very telling (and disturbing) they say during that interview. They see these children as inherently broken and dysfunctional. As a result, they don't expect them to be emotionally healthy and functional adolescents and adults after their transition and "gender treatments." Their expectations are so low for these kids that they consider what all the rest of us would see as poor outcomes to be successful for these kids because of they are low expectations. I wonder how common this attitude is among therapists and doctors. Add that to what you brought up about therapists willing to do whatever it takes, including knowingly engaging in countertransference, to get their difficult client out the door as quickly as possible. It's a a frightening thing to consider. What would the parents and young people think about what their doctors and therapist were doing and recommending if they knew how they actually perceived them?
Thanks for the reply. Looking at the history of the Portman Clinic which was the original home of GIDS when it came to the Tavistock, that was originally the Psychopathic Clinic. The Freudian idea of founder Edward Glover was that disturbed children would grow up to become sex criminals. On that basis, any intervention which kept those patients out of prison or a secure psychiatric facility might have been considered worthwhile. Not so much helping the transgender people, but protecting society from them.
That truly concerning to think about comma that they would see children going through Gezer confusion because of other other stresses in their lives this way
What you describe is so utterly different from the process I went through when I approached my GP for professional help. It took about a year from first contact to prescription, which involved assessments from more clinicians than I can count in retrospect, including examinations from the Professor of Psychiatry and various consultants and registrars etc.
I knew several people decades ago who were screened out of treatment because of too vague a diagnosis or unrealistic expectations etc.
It became clear to me that some sort of extreme mission creep was taking place well over ten years ago, which is why I wrote my book 'The War on Gender (Postmodernism and Trans Identity)'.
As a long retired clinical social worker I find the now complete disintegration of reason and evidence based practice among Western mental health professionals absolutely Kafkaesque. One senses in today's Zeitgeist the irrational madness of the millennial cults of the past that sprang up as earlier civilizations declined and disintegrated. With today's professional embrace of gender theory it's a sort of barking-mad "Judith Butler meets St. Vitus Dance" vibe that finds both reason and material reality as not only unimportant, but really just sort of as annoyances to be dismissed as some quaint relics of a past less enlightened age. The current mass sterilization being justified as "self-actualization" is truly beyond rational analysis - because it's indeed beyond any and all rational, real-world, material justifications. It is based purely in "fantasy." This has left today's therapists and social workers living in their own fantasy worlds disconnected and reflexively adverse to anything that might be considered - "evidence based."
I know a professor at a prestigious university who teaches epidemiology, emergency medicine, and pharmacology. This person has government clearance and travels around the world educating medical students in remote locations. They have a resume of hundreds of published scientific research papers, and they act as a peer reviewer for the research of others.
And...they are an ardent supporter of transgenderism and the medicalization of children and adults. They believe that transgenderism is innate and that it is possible to be born in the wrong body.
It's one thing for therapists and social workers to live in their own fantasy worlds, but this person's state of delusion is in a category all its own. (Note: I've hidden their sex to protect their privacy. They're not trans.)
This is outstanding. I have restacked. Very proud to be a supporter of the Coalition through direct donation. I encourage all readers here who have the means to show your support through becoming a paid subscriber here, or through direct donation (I understand the latter option will become easier to do in the coming months).
“…psychodynamic thinking, which considers unconscious factors such as shame or trauma…” psychodynamic thinking also considers attachment dynamics, and unconscious adjustment confusion that needs to play out as part of the developmental, maturation and individuating process. Additionally, the common sense of adults’ personal adolescence experience should inform said adults about typical adolescent self consciousness, additionally magnified by the following: social media, overwhelm of childhood choices and adulteration of children in every aspect of society, combined with the infantilization of adults in many aspects of society.
This is why I let my application to a Gender Studies course lapse after my initial contact in 2008.
Over the next year or so I found out all about their promotion of 'Queer Theory' and a lot more.
I mention this in my book 'The War on Gender (Postmodernism and Trans Identity)'.
I had initially thought that their qualification might be of use in getting a position as a clinician in the local GIC but clearly it would have been of no use, it was doubtless a lot to do with the massive escalation in treatments that began shortly after about that time.
I keep rereading this paragraph below. There may be an editing error. It seems to say, “Homosexual clinicians project their own homosexuality onto children, ignoring the child’s homosexuality.” As in, they can’t imagine being ashamed of it so they don’t ask about that? Seems unlikely. I must be misreading this or there’s an error.
“Spencer and D’Angelo note that gay or lesbian clinicians may project their own orientation onto children, neglecting discussions of shame and same-sex attraction — a recurring theme in detransitioner accounts. This practice risks obscuring potential lesbian or gay identities, as many, or even most, gender-dysphoric children grow up gay or lesbian if given the proper support to become themselves.”
My daughter did not have comprehensive care of her underlying comorbidities. She demanded testosterone and breast removal, which she got with ease. No meaningful questions were asked of her. No therapy/counseling occurred for trauma, autistic trait influence, a mental disorder, eating disorder and much more including a ruptured parent-daughter bond and a shattered family due to her decisions and behavior.
My story is not unique. Thousands of families have not been helped by "psychology" professionals, who seem to think they are saving our kids from their parents with their ideological bias that only harms our children and our families. Real, holistic, comprehensive care needs to return to the profession. It may take more skills than affirmation only, but actually caring for kids and their families might be a worthy goal instead of pushing an ideological, medicalized pathway to kids.
I have long believed, even before gender ideology touched my family, that a person being transgender was due to them internalizing stereotypes and expectations about their sex that they felt unwilling or unable to meet. For example if you tell a little boy that boys don’t cry, don’t express emotions, are always tough and aggressive, then a boy who is by nature sensitive may feel he can’t meet that definition and therefore isn’t a boy. In fact, he is a boy, and it’s the stereotypes that are wrong, not him.
How different would it look if psychologists and therapists were helping their patients understand this, that feeling uncomfortable with acting out a role is natural, and that the solution isn’t to act out a different role, it’s to stop acting, recover from the shame you feel for failing to live up to toxic expectations, and learn to accept yourself as you are? Stop trying to turn yourself into someone you aren’t, whether that’s by acting out the expectations of your birth sex, or rejecting the self who couldn’t and then acting out the expectations of the opposite sex.
It’s a very immature belief that being tough and liking sports and rejecting beauty and emotion are the definition of man, and dresses and makeup are the definition of woman.
This is one possible set of causes. There are also organic causes as identified by the likes of Professor VS Ramachandran and Dr Milton Diamond.
The whole point of psychiatric/psychotherapeutic assessment is to help the patient come to understand where this comes from.
I agree that the point of psychotherapy is to help the person understand where their feelings are coming from and deal with them in the healthiest way possible.
As far as organic causes, I will agree that there are organic causes that may cause a female to have some psychological or physical traits that are more common in males, or vice versa. This could certainly contribute to a person’s feelings that they are unable to meet societal expectations for their sex. But I don’t agree there’s any organic “gender soul” that means that your body requires medical changes or that you are “really” something that you’re factually not. That doesn’t make any sense. It’s unfortunate that the psychotherapy profession has decided that’s the only allowed point of view.
I'm sorry that you won't look at the evidence which I referenced.
I am in correspondence with an Emeritus Professor of Psychobiology who has told me that he agrees with the views expressed in my book.
In fact he called my book 'superb' and commented that it was full of good scholarship and clear thinking.
I don't want to rely on an appeal to authority, but this should be sufficient to demonstrate that it is a reasonable hypothesis. Simply saying that you don't believe in a 'gendered soul' isn't really a satisfactory rebuttal.
My own experience had almost nothing to do with societal expectations, but everything about my own body.
In a recent post on my own Substack I have referenced a variety of theoretical approaches which might account for my own experience and the evidence these researchers have found. Also Rupert Sheldrake's Theory of Formative Causation may contribute to this.
I am mostly confronted with Left Brain dominant believers who dismiss a Whole Person theory such as PF Strawson (Professor of Metaphysics at Magdalene College, Oxford in the 1970s) proposed in order to exit the limitations and contradictions of Cartesian Dualism.
May I offer another factor affecting mental health professionals that is a lot less deep and ideological? First, I'm referring to the ROGD teens here, the ones with no history of gender distress or even gender nonconformity who suddenly become obsessed with a trans identity as part of larger mental health or social issues, very often the teen girls. Many of the professionals we encountered were overworked and burned out. They were frustrated and sometimes openly contemptuous of the challenging and hostile behaviors from the teens they had to deal with. These teens are challenging - they keep showing up in their ERs, getting admitted to their acute care psych hospitals or understaffed and overworked intensive outpatient programs. They make even the private paid therapists feel insecure in their skills because even most PhD psychologists aren't trained to work with truly challenging behaviors. We hardly encountered any "true believers" or people projecting their personal experiences onto her. Some of them clearly didn't even understand what "trans" or "gender identity" were supposed to mean (like the psychiatrist who thought the words "gay" and "trans" were synonyms and used them interchangeably in her notes). Almost all of them were people who were just looking to get through their shift with the least resistance and if that meant nodding along and saying "yeah, you're a boy. He/him. Yes, testosterone will solve everything and that's why you're still struggling. Your parents suck for not giving it to you," to get her to settle down in a chaotic group setting or to make that 50 minute therapy session less stressful for the therapist, they were fine doing it. There wasn't anything deep behind their affirmation. It was just taking the easiest way out to survive another day in their jobs and avoid having to deal with their lack of skills for challenging cases.
I hadn't thought about it this way, but this is spot on. As a psych inpatient, I once had a front-row seat on mental health crisis treatment and the pressures it puts on the clinicians involved. I saw that those docs, nurses, and therapists -- like all of us -- prioritized getting through the day with their own mental health more or less intact. A few were saints who were capable of more. Most were not, and we can't expect them to be.
As a non-parent/layperson, I hadn't considered the scenario you describe, but it makes perfect sense. It adds another obstacle to providing effective care for adolescents who've been ideologically groomed in school and by peers, and may have specific expectations in mind.
What I didn't read here, but was expecting to, was some mention of the enormous pressure on clinicians to conform to ideological expectations, coming from the profession itself. Simply mentioning to a colleague that one has doubts about the affirmative model can lead to problems, if the colleague is a true believer, and many are.
I'm speculating, of course, but this issue has been with us long enough that therapists who consider themselves apolitical and focused entirely on their work must be aware of the risks to their careers of not conforming to pro-trans expectations. Simply asking questions can be interpreted as "conversion therapy."
This can influence the approach to treatment. It's not ethical, but it's understandable.
It seems their framing is off, though.
What do they do with anorexics, though? Those who want opioids? Those who plan severe self harm?
Destroying a young person's endocrine and reproductive systems through drugs or surgery because they can't see how to help the patient should not be a standard treatment on the table. It hasn't even been seen to reliably help psychological outcomes.
What else can they do? As Cass said, treat the distress.
There's not a massive lobby and movement telling the medical and mental health professionals that letting g people with those other issues do what they want is the new civil rights issue of our time. And they don't have state laws and program policies that give them cover for taking the easy way out. And unfortunately, if you talk to parents in the trenches with kids with the other issues you mention, you'll find the professionals are floundering there too and many of them don't have the skills to handle difficult cases. They just don't have the same option to take the path of least resistance. They're (mostly) not doing this consciously or with ill intent. They're struggling to work with extremely hard cases in challenging environments and without the skills to deal with it. You don't have to take your ROGD daughter to a gender clinic to have her completely screwed over and harmed by this stuff
Really helpful insights here. Thank you.
What if the gender clinician's countertransference means they don't mind risking an emotionally demanding patient's health, if it means getting that patient out of the door quicker? If the patient has enthusiastically consented to the risky treatment, that makes it the path of least resistance.
I worry about that too. Have you ever listened to the interview with the Dutch researchers who pioneered the idea of puberty blockers and early gender transition on children on the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast? There's something very telling (and disturbing) they say during that interview. They see these children as inherently broken and dysfunctional. As a result, they don't expect them to be emotionally healthy and functional adolescents and adults after their transition and "gender treatments." Their expectations are so low for these kids that they consider what all the rest of us would see as poor outcomes to be successful for these kids because of they are low expectations. I wonder how common this attitude is among therapists and doctors. Add that to what you brought up about therapists willing to do whatever it takes, including knowingly engaging in countertransference, to get their difficult client out the door as quickly as possible. It's a a frightening thing to consider. What would the parents and young people think about what their doctors and therapist were doing and recommending if they knew how they actually perceived them?
Thanks for the reply. Looking at the history of the Portman Clinic which was the original home of GIDS when it came to the Tavistock, that was originally the Psychopathic Clinic. The Freudian idea of founder Edward Glover was that disturbed children would grow up to become sex criminals. On that basis, any intervention which kept those patients out of prison or a secure psychiatric facility might have been considered worthwhile. Not so much helping the transgender people, but protecting society from them.
That truly concerning to think about comma that they would see children going through Gezer confusion because of other other stresses in their lives this way
What you describe is so utterly different from the process I went through when I approached my GP for professional help. It took about a year from first contact to prescription, which involved assessments from more clinicians than I can count in retrospect, including examinations from the Professor of Psychiatry and various consultants and registrars etc.
I knew several people decades ago who were screened out of treatment because of too vague a diagnosis or unrealistic expectations etc.
It became clear to me that some sort of extreme mission creep was taking place well over ten years ago, which is why I wrote my book 'The War on Gender (Postmodernism and Trans Identity)'.
As a long retired clinical social worker I find the now complete disintegration of reason and evidence based practice among Western mental health professionals absolutely Kafkaesque. One senses in today's Zeitgeist the irrational madness of the millennial cults of the past that sprang up as earlier civilizations declined and disintegrated. With today's professional embrace of gender theory it's a sort of barking-mad "Judith Butler meets St. Vitus Dance" vibe that finds both reason and material reality as not only unimportant, but really just sort of as annoyances to be dismissed as some quaint relics of a past less enlightened age. The current mass sterilization being justified as "self-actualization" is truly beyond rational analysis - because it's indeed beyond any and all rational, real-world, material justifications. It is based purely in "fantasy." This has left today's therapists and social workers living in their own fantasy worlds disconnected and reflexively adverse to anything that might be considered - "evidence based."
I know a professor at a prestigious university who teaches epidemiology, emergency medicine, and pharmacology. This person has government clearance and travels around the world educating medical students in remote locations. They have a resume of hundreds of published scientific research papers, and they act as a peer reviewer for the research of others.
And...they are an ardent supporter of transgenderism and the medicalization of children and adults. They believe that transgenderism is innate and that it is possible to be born in the wrong body.
It's one thing for therapists and social workers to live in their own fantasy worlds, but this person's state of delusion is in a category all its own. (Note: I've hidden their sex to protect their privacy. They're not trans.)
How can I still be shocked????
I hear you.
Unfortunately this whole subject has become too polarised.
The job of psychotherapists is to help the client understand themselves.
Unfortunately too many see it as either
A) Reinforcing and affirming the young person's presentation or
B) Forcing the child to give up and renounce their feelings.
Neither is satisfactory.
"It's a sort of barking-mad 'Judith Butler meets St. Vitus Dance.' "
Brilliant!
This is outstanding. I have restacked. Very proud to be a supporter of the Coalition through direct donation. I encourage all readers here who have the means to show your support through becoming a paid subscriber here, or through direct donation (I understand the latter option will become easier to do in the coming months).
Excellent article. Thank you.
“…psychodynamic thinking, which considers unconscious factors such as shame or trauma…” psychodynamic thinking also considers attachment dynamics, and unconscious adjustment confusion that needs to play out as part of the developmental, maturation and individuating process. Additionally, the common sense of adults’ personal adolescence experience should inform said adults about typical adolescent self consciousness, additionally magnified by the following: social media, overwhelm of childhood choices and adulteration of children in every aspect of society, combined with the infantilization of adults in many aspects of society.
The points about masking clinicians’ discomfort with negative emotions, and masking feelings of despair -- eye-opening!
This is why I let my application to a Gender Studies course lapse after my initial contact in 2008.
Over the next year or so I found out all about their promotion of 'Queer Theory' and a lot more.
I mention this in my book 'The War on Gender (Postmodernism and Trans Identity)'.
I had initially thought that their qualification might be of use in getting a position as a clinician in the local GIC but clearly it would have been of no use, it was doubtless a lot to do with the massive escalation in treatments that began shortly after about that time.
I keep rereading this paragraph below. There may be an editing error. It seems to say, “Homosexual clinicians project their own homosexuality onto children, ignoring the child’s homosexuality.” As in, they can’t imagine being ashamed of it so they don’t ask about that? Seems unlikely. I must be misreading this or there’s an error.
“Spencer and D’Angelo note that gay or lesbian clinicians may project their own orientation onto children, neglecting discussions of shame and same-sex attraction — a recurring theme in detransitioner accounts. This practice risks obscuring potential lesbian or gay identities, as many, or even most, gender-dysphoric children grow up gay or lesbian if given the proper support to become themselves.”
Good 👀 thank you, it’s corrected. I shouldn’t edit late at night 😞
🌈 about diversity & inclusion, pink & blue trans flag not.