“We just need to queer our concept of what a good medical outcome is!” Yup, nothing escapes the steamroller of queering. Even children’s bodies. Even standards of care. Well guess what, I don’t want to live in a queered world and I am fighting this.
There is a definite push to reduce everything to a subjective opinion, with "reasonable" and "proportionate" relegated to history. No laws, no rules, other than "do as you will". No science, no facts other than "whatever you feel". It is the worst form of anarchy - no one able to be held to account for anything except for holding people to account.
One of my old friends is both a lawyer and a doctor, and he became a psychiatrist who specialized in treating borderlines and other Cluster-B disordered patients for over 20 years. We were talking about the insanity that is the trans ideology and he said this:
"American psychiatry has been slow to respond to various examples of mass hysteria (like "recovered memories ", "multiple personality disorder", "satanic cult abuse", and "sudden onset gender dysphoria") and that's a good thing. Trouble is that, in the meantime, poorly trained "therapists" and advocates occupy the field speaking psychobabble. They convince well-meaning courts and legislatures that a fad, driven by social contagion, is a serious form of individually experienced distress "ignored by the patriarchal medical profession". Eventually, the boat turns right side up when the right people start getting sued for the right things. We're on track for that turning point in the transgender social movement."
I have to say Eliza - you have identified some of the specific individuals who need to have these law suits filed against them for their criminal behavior. It may take more time to dismantle the ideology, but we can certainly intervene legally to reduce the perpetration of terrible physical harms caused by these people pushing irreversible surgical and chemical maltreatments upon vulnerable innocents. Thank you for doing what you do and being who you are.
Malpractice is malpractice. Plain and simple. I live in right next to Cambridge, MA and the college campuses are seas of rainbows and masks. For the longest time I was the only one of my friends willing to speak out against this generational travesty being done to children. That's slowing changing. I hope a generation of kids will forgive us.
There is a certain section of the mental health community (therapists, social workers, etc.) who engage in both active (that doesn't happen, let's not talk about that) and passive (I've never heard of/thought about that) denial about certain practices causing harm or even being suspect. When presented with evidence of harm, instead of saying "wow, this is something we need to examine" or "I'm going to hold off recommending this treatment until there's more/better evidence of it's success/safety", they say "I'm not aware of any harm" even if they were just told there WAS harm. I've seen this in doctors too, when I tried to report withdrawal symptoms from a medication and was basically told "that doesn't happen".
I felt a hint of it the other day during a meeting with colleagues in which we were discussing an investigative podcast series on abuse in the psychedelic therapy world. Several of us had listened to it and were discussing how troubling it was but some of the other therapists who hadn't listened to it seemed to have this reaction that I couldn't quite place--it was either disgust at the abuse or dismay that this new exciting treatment might not be that exciting after all. It was followed by some other reactions that seemed to be more sympathetic to practitioners than to patients which troubled me.
I may write a post about this when I've thought about it more but my point is--denial, gaslighting, and spin in the mental and medical health fields are absolutely real and it's not just clinicians towards patients, it's clinicians towards each other too.
Thank you. I’m a born-and-raised Californian who was held in extrajudicial punishment for 2 1/2 years by “social” workers at a private fraternal organization’s children’s facility beginning in 1984 (!). Mandated reporting laws went into effect in 1980, so they literally committed hundreds of felony crimes while they held me hostage. I’d been recommended for Gifted and Talented Education at my previous school district, but they forced me to repeat the schoolwork I’d successfully completed the year before with good marks by forcing me to attend public school when they had an on-grounds school. My father had died in 1982, and my religiously psychotic birth mother was caught up in the Satanic Panic, and started projecting sexual stuff onto me, saying I was “full of demons.” When she tried to take me out of there in 1985, she was convinced that her new husband (a bigamist) was going to impregnate her, though she had no uterus. I screamed and begged them not to make me live with her, and they said I didn’t have to live with her again if I didn’t want to, and could go to a private placement foster home, where I experienced sexual abuse at the hands of an adult acquaintance in the neighborhood. I have reports from their facility showing they acknowledged the man who was using me for sex, but redacted the reasons why I was being held hostage by them.
I survived that, thinking I’d survived “Crazy Lady” and then in my early twenties for three years and nine years from 2009-2018 I experienced “nothing to see here” gaslighting from those who dare to call themselves “mental health professionals.” KEEP YOURSELF AND YOUR LOVED ONES THE HELL AWAY FROM THAT INDUSTRY. It’s an industry. The internist who examined me for Social Security Disability Benefits in 2010 said, “In my opinion, stay the hell away from psychiatrists. Only one in a hundred are worth their salt.” I’m here to say that psychologists weren’t any better, but had no ability to drug me, so I’m still alive, at least. I want to file this civil case in California by 12/31/22, but I don’t see how I can do this on my own, and would like a friend at least to help support me through this. I’m in a rural county, but two nice women from a family resource center have been meeting with me for 50 minutes up to twice per month, as that’s what’s available for rape crisis support here. (I’ve met with them thrice.) They’re unable to refer me to any legal assistance, and I’m actually going to need one of these psych “experts” for my civil suit.
The man who raped me is most likely a narcissist, became a chemical engineer when he stopped doing heroin and got out of prison, and needs to be exposed for what and who he is. I didn’t ask him to send me a picture of himself from prison, but he did, and if he wants it back, he can pay me an appropriate amount of reparations for it. I want these organizations, particularly one of them that gives money yearly “for helping children” to the rural county I live in, to pay me reparations that I will use to promote actual mental health to the population with. Do you know anyone who can and will assist a socially isolated woman who can help her fellow women by filing this civil case? The Department of Rehabilitation tested me and said that I scored high on tests that lawyers and legal researchers score high on, and also gave me additional testing and determined that my intelligence quotient is quite high and indicates I must’ve functioned in the three percentile or something like that. I’m socially untutored and isolated, but would really like to connect with women who could assist and support me through this civil case, as I want nothing more than to be an activist for the rights of women and children. Reparations will be very helpful for that!
I really don't know as it's not my area. Maybe search for free legal help in your area? Keep your comment up and maybe the right person will see it! Best of luck!
It's interesting that doctors in other fields complain that patients come in demanding a certain medicine or procedure, as if they knew better than their doctors because they saw it online. In gender medicine, patient demands are not only tolerated; they're celebrated.
Yes. I think that's due to the amount of bullying their gender identity patients and so-called LGBTQIA groups have pulled on their profession, and most of society. That's my impression. Your thoughts?
There's a real fear of doing anything that could conceivably be labeled "transphobic." As near as I can tell, the latest definition of "transphobia" is refusing to do *anything* a trans-identified person demands.
Aren't practitioners in the US currently required to provide so-called gender affirming care or risk ant-discrimination lawsuits? My impression is that they risk more by pushing back against patients' self-diagnoses of gender dysphoria than by transitioning them against their better judgment, that refusing to transition a patient is equivalent to "withholding life-saving gender affirmative care." I fear that that's the dystopia we are living in. Someone tell me it's not as bad as I think it is?
Yeah, it really is. The official stance of the APA is that exploratory therapy (rather than unquestioning affirmation) is "conversion therapy." I read some of the APA's guidance and couldn't believe it.
I think anyone's sexual orientation is his or her own business. What I'm against is encouraging children and teens on a path toward medicalization when they are too young to understand what that will mean for the rest of their lives, and when the risks and known harms are being withheld from them.
Here are a couple tidbits gleaned from a detransitioner subreddit that shed some light on why therapists are only affirming.
A detransitioner posted: "When I told my own goddamn gender therapist I was detransitioning, she confessed that SHE even thought my transition was misplaced and a bad idea, but she couldn't say anything without risking losing her career. The echo chamber is very real and very, very loud."
A therapist added to the thread, explaining that mental health practicioners fear losing their license if they do anything other than affirm, and she posted two APA documents, Resolution on Gender Identity Change Efforts and Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People. I posted links to both documents below.
Interestingly, Guideline 10 of the Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People states: "Psychologists strive to understand how mental health concerns may or may not be related to a TGNC person’s gender identity...." Really????? Most of the document carries the "Would you rather have a trans child or a dead child?" message. https://www.apa.org/practice/guidelines/transgender.pdf
Even in Spain, doing exploratory therapy with gender dysphoric patients carries risks:
"An Andalucian psychologist had to pay €100,000 because she claimed for most teenagers it would be more beneficial to fight gender stereotypes rather than going through hormones and medical procedures in order to change their body." (link to article in Spanish) https://www.newtral.es/terapias-de-conversion-andalucia-expediente/20220205/
WHY is gender nonconformity suddenly a psychological issue? There’s some serious mission creep here, from gender dysphoria to clothing preferences.
And who will help people through the regret when a psycho-logist convinces them that they need to carve up their bodies to match gender stereotypes? This is wrong. This industry needs to be sued into oblivion. I can’t think of any other way to stop them and also get some justice for their victims.
I remember when I was ten, I thought I’d like to have twenty wives. Luckily, it was just a phase, but intentions matter. As professionals, this flimsy excuse for morals just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Brilliant, Eliza. So much so, it was hilarious - your skewering of these "gender clinicians," who should have their licenses pulled and their worldly fortunes awarded to those they've harmed while acting as merely helpful tour bus operators on their young patient's "gender jouneys."
Thank you.
You have such a wonderful way with words. My mother loved witty writing. Your article made me think of her. She would have loved your piece, even though she died 40 years ago, long before any of this was much in the public eye. I wish she were here to share it with her.
“We just need to queer our concept of what a good medical outcome is!” Yup, nothing escapes the steamroller of queering. Even children’s bodies. Even standards of care. Well guess what, I don’t want to live in a queered world and I am fighting this.
There is a definite push to reduce everything to a subjective opinion, with "reasonable" and "proportionate" relegated to history. No laws, no rules, other than "do as you will". No science, no facts other than "whatever you feel". It is the worst form of anarchy - no one able to be held to account for anything except for holding people to account.
Well said. Unaccountable medicine. - yikes.
One of my old friends is both a lawyer and a doctor, and he became a psychiatrist who specialized in treating borderlines and other Cluster-B disordered patients for over 20 years. We were talking about the insanity that is the trans ideology and he said this:
"American psychiatry has been slow to respond to various examples of mass hysteria (like "recovered memories ", "multiple personality disorder", "satanic cult abuse", and "sudden onset gender dysphoria") and that's a good thing. Trouble is that, in the meantime, poorly trained "therapists" and advocates occupy the field speaking psychobabble. They convince well-meaning courts and legislatures that a fad, driven by social contagion, is a serious form of individually experienced distress "ignored by the patriarchal medical profession". Eventually, the boat turns right side up when the right people start getting sued for the right things. We're on track for that turning point in the transgender social movement."
I have to say Eliza - you have identified some of the specific individuals who need to have these law suits filed against them for their criminal behavior. It may take more time to dismantle the ideology, but we can certainly intervene legally to reduce the perpetration of terrible physical harms caused by these people pushing irreversible surgical and chemical maltreatments upon vulnerable innocents. Thank you for doing what you do and being who you are.
Malpractice is malpractice. Plain and simple. I live in right next to Cambridge, MA and the college campuses are seas of rainbows and masks. For the longest time I was the only one of my friends willing to speak out against this generational travesty being done to children. That's slowing changing. I hope a generation of kids will forgive us.
There is a certain section of the mental health community (therapists, social workers, etc.) who engage in both active (that doesn't happen, let's not talk about that) and passive (I've never heard of/thought about that) denial about certain practices causing harm or even being suspect. When presented with evidence of harm, instead of saying "wow, this is something we need to examine" or "I'm going to hold off recommending this treatment until there's more/better evidence of it's success/safety", they say "I'm not aware of any harm" even if they were just told there WAS harm. I've seen this in doctors too, when I tried to report withdrawal symptoms from a medication and was basically told "that doesn't happen".
I felt a hint of it the other day during a meeting with colleagues in which we were discussing an investigative podcast series on abuse in the psychedelic therapy world. Several of us had listened to it and were discussing how troubling it was but some of the other therapists who hadn't listened to it seemed to have this reaction that I couldn't quite place--it was either disgust at the abuse or dismay that this new exciting treatment might not be that exciting after all. It was followed by some other reactions that seemed to be more sympathetic to practitioners than to patients which troubled me.
I may write a post about this when I've thought about it more but my point is--denial, gaslighting, and spin in the mental and medical health fields are absolutely real and it's not just clinicians towards patients, it's clinicians towards each other too.
Thank you. I’m a born-and-raised Californian who was held in extrajudicial punishment for 2 1/2 years by “social” workers at a private fraternal organization’s children’s facility beginning in 1984 (!). Mandated reporting laws went into effect in 1980, so they literally committed hundreds of felony crimes while they held me hostage. I’d been recommended for Gifted and Talented Education at my previous school district, but they forced me to repeat the schoolwork I’d successfully completed the year before with good marks by forcing me to attend public school when they had an on-grounds school. My father had died in 1982, and my religiously psychotic birth mother was caught up in the Satanic Panic, and started projecting sexual stuff onto me, saying I was “full of demons.” When she tried to take me out of there in 1985, she was convinced that her new husband (a bigamist) was going to impregnate her, though she had no uterus. I screamed and begged them not to make me live with her, and they said I didn’t have to live with her again if I didn’t want to, and could go to a private placement foster home, where I experienced sexual abuse at the hands of an adult acquaintance in the neighborhood. I have reports from their facility showing they acknowledged the man who was using me for sex, but redacted the reasons why I was being held hostage by them.
I survived that, thinking I’d survived “Crazy Lady” and then in my early twenties for three years and nine years from 2009-2018 I experienced “nothing to see here” gaslighting from those who dare to call themselves “mental health professionals.” KEEP YOURSELF AND YOUR LOVED ONES THE HELL AWAY FROM THAT INDUSTRY. It’s an industry. The internist who examined me for Social Security Disability Benefits in 2010 said, “In my opinion, stay the hell away from psychiatrists. Only one in a hundred are worth their salt.” I’m here to say that psychologists weren’t any better, but had no ability to drug me, so I’m still alive, at least. I want to file this civil case in California by 12/31/22, but I don’t see how I can do this on my own, and would like a friend at least to help support me through this. I’m in a rural county, but two nice women from a family resource center have been meeting with me for 50 minutes up to twice per month, as that’s what’s available for rape crisis support here. (I’ve met with them thrice.) They’re unable to refer me to any legal assistance, and I’m actually going to need one of these psych “experts” for my civil suit.
The man who raped me is most likely a narcissist, became a chemical engineer when he stopped doing heroin and got out of prison, and needs to be exposed for what and who he is. I didn’t ask him to send me a picture of himself from prison, but he did, and if he wants it back, he can pay me an appropriate amount of reparations for it. I want these organizations, particularly one of them that gives money yearly “for helping children” to the rural county I live in, to pay me reparations that I will use to promote actual mental health to the population with. Do you know anyone who can and will assist a socially isolated woman who can help her fellow women by filing this civil case? The Department of Rehabilitation tested me and said that I scored high on tests that lawyers and legal researchers score high on, and also gave me additional testing and determined that my intelligence quotient is quite high and indicates I must’ve functioned in the three percentile or something like that. I’m socially untutored and isolated, but would really like to connect with women who could assist and support me through this civil case, as I want nothing more than to be an activist for the rights of women and children. Reparations will be very helpful for that!
Like your newsletter. Keep up the great job!
I really don't know as it's not my area. Maybe search for free legal help in your area? Keep your comment up and maybe the right person will see it! Best of luck!
It's interesting that doctors in other fields complain that patients come in demanding a certain medicine or procedure, as if they knew better than their doctors because they saw it online. In gender medicine, patient demands are not only tolerated; they're celebrated.
Yes. I think that's due to the amount of bullying their gender identity patients and so-called LGBTQIA groups have pulled on their profession, and most of society. That's my impression. Your thoughts?
There's a real fear of doing anything that could conceivably be labeled "transphobic." As near as I can tell, the latest definition of "transphobia" is refusing to do *anything* a trans-identified person demands.
That is truly frightening. No one should be able to bully MDs into doing things against their best medical judgment.
Aren't practitioners in the US currently required to provide so-called gender affirming care or risk ant-discrimination lawsuits? My impression is that they risk more by pushing back against patients' self-diagnoses of gender dysphoria than by transitioning them against their better judgment, that refusing to transition a patient is equivalent to "withholding life-saving gender affirmative care." I fear that that's the dystopia we are living in. Someone tell me it's not as bad as I think it is?
🤷♀️it is that bad.
Yeah, it really is. The official stance of the APA is that exploratory therapy (rather than unquestioning affirmation) is "conversion therapy." I read some of the APA's guidance and couldn't believe it.
I think anyone's sexual orientation is his or her own business. What I'm against is encouraging children and teens on a path toward medicalization when they are too young to understand what that will mean for the rest of their lives, and when the risks and known harms are being withheld from them.
Here are a couple tidbits gleaned from a detransitioner subreddit that shed some light on why therapists are only affirming.
A detransitioner posted: "When I told my own goddamn gender therapist I was detransitioning, she confessed that SHE even thought my transition was misplaced and a bad idea, but she couldn't say anything without risking losing her career. The echo chamber is very real and very, very loud."
A therapist added to the thread, explaining that mental health practicioners fear losing their license if they do anything other than affirm, and she posted two APA documents, Resolution on Gender Identity Change Efforts and Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People. I posted links to both documents below.
The Resolution on Gender Identity Change Efforts equates exploring causes of gender dysphoria with conversion therapy. The message is basically "Would you rather have a trans child or a dead child?" https://www.apa.org/about/policy/resolution-gender-identity-change-efforts.pdf
Interestingly, Guideline 10 of the Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People states: "Psychologists strive to understand how mental health concerns may or may not be related to a TGNC person’s gender identity...." Really????? Most of the document carries the "Would you rather have a trans child or a dead child?" message. https://www.apa.org/practice/guidelines/transgender.pdf
Even in Spain, doing exploratory therapy with gender dysphoric patients carries risks:
"An Andalucian psychologist had to pay €100,000 because she claimed for most teenagers it would be more beneficial to fight gender stereotypes rather than going through hormones and medical procedures in order to change their body." (link to article in Spanish) https://www.newtral.es/terapias-de-conversion-andalucia-expediente/20220205/
WHY is gender nonconformity suddenly a psychological issue? There’s some serious mission creep here, from gender dysphoria to clothing preferences.
And who will help people through the regret when a psycho-logist convinces them that they need to carve up their bodies to match gender stereotypes? This is wrong. This industry needs to be sued into oblivion. I can’t think of any other way to stop them and also get some justice for their victims.
I remember when I was ten, I thought I’d like to have twenty wives. Luckily, it was just a phase, but intentions matter. As professionals, this flimsy excuse for morals just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Brilliant, Eliza. So much so, it was hilarious - your skewering of these "gender clinicians," who should have their licenses pulled and their worldly fortunes awarded to those they've harmed while acting as merely helpful tour bus operators on their young patient's "gender jouneys."
Thank you.
You have such a wonderful way with words. My mother loved witty writing. Your article made me think of her. She would have loved your piece, even though she died 40 years ago, long before any of this was much in the public eye. I wish she were here to share it with her.
Thanks again.