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If you would like to learn more about Therapy First, to support our work, or to find a therapist for you or your child, please reach out: www.therapyfirst.org. Go to their website and check them out – they are mental health resource that puts therapy instead of the farce that is gender affirming care in the spotlight.
I have been a practicing psychologist for over two decades and this is, by far, the most difficult work I have ever engaged in. I can understand why many therapists do not feel equipped to work with young people who are convinced that the only way for them to live in their bodies is to transition socially and medically.
It is challenging to sustain a meaningful connection with someone who is stuck in a black/white mindset and who is exquisitely attuned to whether you participate in the culture and language of social justice and gender affirmation.
Depending on how committed an individual is to a transgender identity, he or she may not tolerate the slightest indication that the therapist questions or is agnostic with regard to the existence of “true trans”. They may see you as a good, kind, caring person for months and then, if in a moment of crisis, they don’t perceive you to be fully aligned with their belief system, they will reject you without hesitation.
At the same time, frightened and exhausted parents are putting their faith in you to loosen the vice-like grip that trans identification has on their child and, by extension, on every member of the family. Having been such a parent myself I feel enormous empathy.
I also know that most of the work has to happen at home, in the family. I am more than willing to offer guidance and support, and even clear instructions in real time on what to do and say when escalations happen.
When things go wrong, what rage parents and children cannot safely direct at each other will get directed at me. As a process-oriented clinician that’s what I sign up for.
In truth, I don’t possess skills or knowledge that any well-trained and experienced mental health practitioner doesn’t have or isn’t capable of acquiring. Therapy is still just therapy.
What’s different is the real damage that medicalized transition can do to young people who are in emotional pain and in need of thoughtful care and attention. What’s also different is the urgency with which families approach us hoping we might hold the key to pulling their children out of harm’s way. There’s so much on the line.
Clinicians who work with trans-identifying teens and young adults feel a pressure that we do not experience when faced with other issues that are no less serious than gender dysphoria. Moreover, we are doing this work in a professional and political climate that is hostile to the very ethical principle that we vow to live and work by, to first and foremost do no harm.
The good news is that since its establishment three years ago Therapy First (formerly GETA) has grown from a small handful of clinicians to now almost 400 strong. We are here for each other so that we can be there for you and your family. While the treatment of gender dysphoria has become weaponized, our aim is to move the focus away from the political and back to the clinic, back to the work we are confident and passionate about.
If you would like to learn more about Therapy First, to support our work, or to find a therapist for you or your child, please reach out: www.therapyfirst.org.
Nothing gets the juices flowing more than a little woke hypocrisy in the afternoon. Scrolling through facebook I saw a post for a choral get together with the goal of showing “the transphobes” how wrong they are.
My first reaction was one of exasperation because the individual who uttered it is currently kicking up a huge fuss in the choral community. The reason? She got in a disagreement with the conductor about whether wearing a “they/them” pronoun pin on stage was acceptable part of the dress code for a professional choir.
Pro-tip: It’s not. And she wouldn’t let it go – so Fing around and finding out involved not having her contract renewed with said professional choir. Play stupid games and win stupid prizes. Unfortunately, as it is with so many of the Woke zealots, she has an activist bent and has been wailing about how oppressive the decision was and how the ‘ENTIRE ORGANIZATION’ is transphobic. This is the standard tactic for the woke activist – you call something/someone transphobic until they relent to your demands or the organization crumbles. It’s bullshit and I hope the professional choir as the fortitude to withstand the struggle session it is being put through.
“They/them” othered their ideological opponents in a public comment and I found that to be infuriating because there is no sense of fairness in the statement. “Othering” is a one way problem.
People that meltdown when people are “othered” shouldn’t participate in the othering of their ideological opponents. Calling people you disagree with “transphobes” illustrates the strong lack of an ethical system behind followers of gender ideology.
So many people get taken in by the bullshit woke propaganda around gender ideology. People who usually ‘follow the science’ seem to turn off that part of their brain and go along with the “be kind, be inclusive” crowd without a second critical thought. Their behaviour boggles the mind.
The information is out there – heck – even in the Calgary Herald. Why are people suddenly so desperately incurious about issues they claim to be staunch and relentless defenders of?
From the Calgary Herald Dr. Roy Eappen Endocrinologist writes –
“As a practising endocrinologist who understands what these invasive and irreversible medical interventions can do to young people, I couldn’t be more supportive of Alberta’s decision to protect children. There’s not nearly enough evidence to justify their use on children, yet there’s plenty of evidence that they harm them.
Unsurprisingly, this move has come under swift attack from some in Canada’s “chattering classes” including journalists, some academics and a few politicians who are either unaware or don’t care about the realities of kids’ bodies.To that end, there has been a torrent of media coverage alleging that Alberta is endangering children and abandoning medicine. That’s false. Sex-reassignment interventions can do serious physical and mental damage, leading to lifelong health programs that would otherwise be avoided.
Besides, Canadians who uncritically support such physical interventions to children and teenage bodies would do well to broaden their horizons. They may be surprised to learn that international organizations and European countries that they commonly look to for leadership are urging the very caution that they oppose.”
Damn, I guess that would make the medical associations in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and France ALL SERIOUSLY TRANSPHOBIC.
Along with the hypocrisy the usual woke tactic is to call everything they disagree with as “insert slur here” rather than presenting an argument or compelling evidence.
Dr. Eappen continues:
“Consider the World Health Organization (WHO). Last month, the WHO declined to issue guidelines for transgender procedures for children, on the grounds that “the evidence base . . . is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes.” The words “limited” and “variable” are significant and cautionary. The first, “limited,” means it’s far from clear that so-called “gender-affirming” medical interventions are beneficial. The second, “variable,” hints at the evidence that children who get these interventions suffer. Coming from the World Health Organization, that’s quite a statement indeed.
Or consider Europe. A growing number of countries have already banned or severely restricted children’s access to transgender interventions, based on systematic reviews of the science. That includes England, Sweden, Finland and Norway, while Belgium, France, Ireland and Italy have raised concerns. We’re talking about countries that are generally aligned with Canada, ideologically. They’re looking at the science and seeing red flags. What’s wrong with Alberta doing the same thing?Canadians who reflexively see gender transition as an extension of previous advocacy for gay civil rights should know that it’s not. Instead, “gender-affirming” care for children is essentially gay conversion therapy.Multiple studies have found that most kids who are confused or distressed about their sex end up realizing they’re gay — nearly two-thirds in a 2021 study of boys. Yet if they go down a transgender road, they’ll lose sight of who they really are.
Before England started taking child safeguarding seriously, clinicians at the country’s main transgender service referred to prescribing puberty blockers as “transing the gay away.” They also joked that “there would be no gay people left” if they continued helping kids medically transition. Is that really what Canadians want for our country’s gay and lesbian kids?
The fact is that about 80 per cent of children who believe they’re transgender eventually come to terms with their sex without surgical or pharmaceutical intervention. The worst thing we could do is prevent them from discovering who they really are by pushing them down the road of irreversible medical interventions.
Alberta has joined Saskatchewan and New Brunswick in doing the right thing. Now the rest of Canada should follow suit.”
So it looks like evidence based medicine is transphobic, material reality is transphobic, and really the truth must be at least doubly transphobic.
Link to the Calgary Herald – hhtps://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/opinion-alberta-is-right-children-should-be-protected-from-transgender-procedures
Link to the paper cited – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11930-023-00358-x
Sorry folks just tired of the fact free hyperbole surrounding the issue. We need to get back to reality based arguments. The sooner the better.
This was the first AI iteration. I’m suitably impressed. :)
. The FAFO factor often involves the highest of stakes. The people who support Hamas really ought to give their head a shake because most of their activities place them firmly in the useful idiot category.
These excerpts from Susie Linfield‘s essay on called The Return of the Progressive Atrocity.
“In 1979, leftists who supported the Iranian Revolution had a rude awakening when the mullahs came to power and promptly executed them, along with secularists, union organizers, intellectuals, feminists, and everyone else who fit into the enormously capacious category of a counterrevolutionary. There was a lesson here: Activists have the responsibility to know who and what they support, and to separate themselves—openly and decisively—from programs and regimes that are predicated on violence and repression. Similarly, those who imagine that Hamas’s slaughters may have promoted “liberation,” “justice,” and “freedom” for Palestinians, as the banners demand, have a big surprise in store.
Unlike Iran in 1979, though, there’s no mystery as to what kind of state Hamas (an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement) aims to create; we need only look at what it already has created. This time, no one can plead ignorance. There’s little liberation, justice, or freedom to be found in Gaza, where there are no opposition political parties, no elections, and no freedom of religion, the press, or protest. Opponents are arrested, tortured, and sometimes executed. (Yahya Sinwar, a head of Hamas’s armed wing, was known as “the butcher of Khan Younis” for his brutality toward other Palestinians.) Abortion and homosexuality are outlawed (what are those protestors with “Queers for Palestine” signs thinking?); mentioning trans rights would be unwise. It is legal for husbands to beat their wives, and so-called honor killings go unpunished. The ruling clique is notoriously corrupt, and though Gazans are very poor, Hamas is a very rich organization. “I Stand with Palestine!” demonstrators and writers proudly proclaim while lauding Hamas for having “rejuvenated a sense of political possibility” and hastening “the hour of liberation.” But what, exactly, are they standing for? And what kind of liberation will this be? Aside from the Taliban, Hamas has established the least progressive pseudo-state on Earth. The lesson of Iran has apparently not been learned; history is repeating itself not as farce but as tragedy.”
[…]
“Oppression is not a carte blanche for severing heads from bodies, shooting hundreds of young festival-goers, bludgeoning people to death, murdering children in front of parents and vice versa, killing naked women point-blank, and kidnapping babies and the elderly; there is no universe in which these are revolutionary, emancipatory, or anticolonialist acts, much less “beautiful” ones. Sadism and violence are not synonyms. Sexual torture cannot be anti-imperialist—nor is it an understandable, much less inevitable, response to oppression. An eliminationist program is not a freedom charter. History has proved, again and again, that terrorists and freedom fighters aren’t the same, which is why the former never achieve anything approaching either liberation or justice. There is no room for “yes, but.” Why, when it comes to the deaths of Israelis, is this so hard to understand? “
I’m chilled when I see so many members of our intelligentsia support and excuse heinous crimes against humanity. The Left when blinded by power-dynamics can be just as bloodthirsty as the Right.
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