Editor’s Note: This post is an anonymous guest post. It is the second piece on this topic by the same author, a licensed psychologist who provides therapy to gender-questioning/dysphoric adolescents and adults and/or their families.
You are open-minded. You love that, in modern times, people feel free to fully express themselves. You love the idea that everyone can develop and nurture an identity that is their own, that they define, that they decide, that they express. You value bodily autonomy, have great empathy for the underserved and marginalized, and typically root for the underdog.
You are me.
But you and I, we have limits. We have to draw the line somewhere.
Or so I thought.
I keep wondering where the line is.
Sterilizing children? No, not there…
Double mastectomies for teenage girls? No, not there…
Disfiguring surgeries such as vaginoplasty and phalloplasty for teens and young adults? No, not there…
Removing testes and ovaries from teens and young adults, rendering them a medical patient (i.e., completely reliant on exogenous hormones, at the very least) for life? No, not there…
Men in women’s sports? No, not there…
A eunuch being formally recognized as a “gender identity” (in the WPATH SOC8)? No, not there…
Male rapists in women’s prisons and shelters? No, not there….
Grown men allowed in YMCA women’s locker rooms with young girls? No, not there…
Sado-masochistic enactments – along with total nudity – at “family-friendly” Pride events? No, not there…
A revision of Title IX such that one’s proclaimed gender identity (i.e., a male saying he feels like a woman) is now as protected as is (was) biological sex? No, not there…
Men breastfeeding infants? No, not there…
Thousands of US children are currently on puberty blockers; tens of thousands are on cross-sex hormones. Such drugs and surgeries – in minors, no less – would have been almost completely unheard of no more than 15 years ago.
There is no way that his sudden increase in gender-questioning “trans” kids and the now 80+ “gender identities” that exist is biologically-driven. There do not exist 80+ different types of bodies that any one of us “should have been born as.” You, like me, believe in evolution over Creationism, so you know this: we don’t evolve that quickly.
Maybe this thought is creeping into your mind: something very wrong is happening in our society.
You’ve probably also seen the headlines that many countries in Europe have conducted thorough systematic literature reviews of the evidence and arrived at the conclusion that the medical transition of minors (and, arguably, young adults) is not supported by the evidence. In other words, any possible benefits that medical transition could provide are not offset by the harms.
Furthermore, very recently here in the U.S., a pending lawsuit’s discovery proceedings unearthed emails between WPATH, the Biden administration, and Johns Hopkins University that revealed that Dr. Rachel Levine, current assistant secretary of HHS, pressured WPATH to fully remove any age restriction recommendations for hormones and surgeries from its 8th edition of their Standards of Care; and also WPATH pressured Johns Hopkins not to publish systemic reviews that they completed in 2020 that concluded there was weak evidence for medical “transition.”
But, then, how could doctors keep doing this? you wonder. Do they not adhere to evidence-based medicine and abide by “First, Do No Harm”? Don’t they conduct a thorough evaluation and carefully consider a variety of different potential treatments? I wondered this too. For over a month after I read this, I grappled with – and grieved – the reality that physicians weren’t – aren’t – always who I thought they were. A very close family member of mine is a physician, and much of my work experience has involved working with physicians, many of whom I deeply respect. So the notion that they – collectively – might have gotten this wrong, or been led astray, has been deeply upsetting to me.
But.
Once you know that decades of long-term research studies show that over 80% of young kids who had gender dysphoria naturally outgrow it at some point in adolescence, and that many of these youth later realize they are gay, you start to wonder why medical and mental health providers (along with politicians, the media, academia, etc.) seem so fixated on “treating” the gender dysphoria by changing the body, rather than just letting kids be kids.
And then you understand that we, as mental and medical health providers, have no earthly way of predicting which kids will persist with severe gender dysphoria through adolescence and well into adulthood.
It may have hit you already: these kids are being “transitioned” unnecessarily. And further: maybe there is no necessity to any of this.
At its most legitimate, gender is a sociocultural construct that can be considered an aspect of one’s personality. It literally is a scale (“Masculinity-Femininity”) on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which was developed in the 1940s.
There is nothing new under the sun.
The APA describes gender as “an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression, or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.” Gender identity refers to a person’s internal sense (i.e., feeling) of being male, female, or something else. By these definitions, anyone could “be trans”.
For me, the line was crossed quite some time ago.
Whenever your line is crossed, there is an off-ramp. You can take it. It’s ok to admit that you once believed something that does not exist in material reality, that is - at best - an invented social construct. You wanted to believe. So did I.
It’s ok to realize that doctors are human; they have emotions, they make mistakes. These particular mistakes are egregious, yes, and I hope they are held accountable. But no amount of holding them accountable will make up for the young bodies that have been irreversibly harmed and scarred, the emotional trauma experienced by these young people who were led down a path of deceit, and the destruction of families.
Who is really to blame? Fingers will be pointed all around, and some individuals and entities are arguably more guilty than others, having played a large role in driving this sham. Everyone else has been swept along - perhaps blissfully unaware of what their colleagues have been doing now for years - for the ride.
It’s time to get off.
You cannot understand this in terms of the topical content. It will make you crazy -- which is the intent. It is a relational disruption scheme that counts on playing on stated beliefs in low empathy professions, leveraging their ethics against them to cause social havoc, and opening the door to sexual abuse, which then creates more of the same kinds of brains. Until we come to terms with this statement, we're pretty much lost, because we allow the psychopaths to use our values against us.
Here's my demographic categorization of transgenderism. https://empathy.guru/2024/01/21/transgenderism-and-its-context-in-society/