As a clinical psychologist I believe that no child should ever be allowed to socially transition, because this action simply concretises the lie that sex is mutable. Furthermore, social transitioning does not address the underlying psycho-social problems that might be leading a child to believe themselves to be of the wrong ‘gender’. Shockingly, this practice is widespread and has rapidly and with no oversight, embedded itself in schools across the West. But what does this mean for those caught up in it?
Here I mainly consider and question some impacts of socially transitioning a child who is attending primary or secondary school. I suggest that it is not a consequence-free, benign opportunity to offer a child time to think about their ‘gender identity’.
The perils principally arise because the nature of the word ‘social’ is being dangerously misunderstood and, perhaps, deliberately misrepresented.
In the Trans Upside Down, ‘social’ is seen as simply meaning ‘non-invasive’ and/or non-medical, involving only a change of name; change of uniform; change of pronouns; ‘packing’ or ‘binding’; use of opposite sex toilets and changing rooms; and involvement in the opposite sex’s sporting and other activities. However this approach only considers the narrow perspective of the child who is supposedly ‘transitioning’. The more important issue and question is how does the socially transitioning child in school affect those around them? I suggest that this practice also has a deeply negative and destabilising effect on the mood, behaviour and interpersonal relationships of everyone in the socially transitioning child’s orbit.
What impact on the child?
As the Cass Review points out, social transitioning has the effect of locking the child into their assumed ‘gender identity’. Puberty is a time of rapid neurobiological change during which executive functioning (ie the ability to plan and to understand the consequences of one’s actions) starts to develop.
At a time when the brain is literally re-wiring itself, when it is like a veritable bowl of porridge, a child’s naïve and youthful experimentation with their identity (in its old-fashioned meaning) should not be taken as an article of faith. Particularly not by those who are charged with the responsibility of teaching children to think clearly!
So, instead of adults firmly saying “no” and placing appropriate boundaries around the child and/or investigating what may be the underlying causes of wanting to ‘transition’, youngsters (encouraged by adults) are being speedily and unquestioningly inducted into the cult of gender, from which it is very difficult to escape.(See here for a wider discussion on the ‘transitioning’ from a neurobiological perspective).https://x.com/Psychgirl211/status/1830280563908894828
Because socially transitioning children is unsupervised and unregulated, we don’t know its intra-psychic and functional impact. We just take the child’s unevidenced word that they have found their “authentic selves” and are thereby happier. However, ideally (if social transition must happen, which it should not), a child’s depression, anxiety, social functioning, and strengths and difficulties should be regularly assessed and monitored for the duration of their ‘transitioning’. This could easily be done by school psychologists and counsellors.
Impact of ‘secret’ transitioning
Even more damaging than openly transitioning a child is the practice of secret transitioning, where the school actively hides the child’s new ‘gender identity’ from parents. In school the child uses a new name and different pronouns and wears the uniform and uses the facilities of the opposite sex. However, in correspondence and in any contact with parents, the child’s birth sex is recognised. I can hardly think of anything more damaging to a child’s psyche, especially given that trans identification is typically the manifestation of underlying dysfunction:
How is the child to manage the constant shifts in male and female, (and God help us), ‘non-binary’ identity, between home and school?
What are the stresses of maintaining such a blatant lie?
How does the child process having to constantly lie to their parents?
Are the child’s friends party to the deception?
Must siblings lie to their parents in order to maintain the relationship with their brothers/sisters, or do they tell their parents what’s happening in school, and thereby damage the sibling relationship?
Secretly transitioned children (and their siblings and friends) are placed in an invidious position, which must be unbearably stressful and emotionally damaging. Nonetheless, this dangerous practice is pervasive and is justified by schools under the mantra of “protecting” the ‘Trans Kid’.
What impact on other children?
Also to be considered is the effect the socially transitioned child has on their peers. Social transitioning is contagious. Learning Theory tells us that the more a behaviour is reinforced and rewarded, the more frequent that behaviour becomes. As the socially transitioning child is treated by schools like a cross between conquering hero and sacred vessel, the actions of one such child inevitably ‘infects’ others, until in some cases, up to a quarter of a year group identifies as ‘trans’ or ‘non-binary’. This is evidently nonsensical, but it is being accepted by schools as reality and is not only permitted but lauded and welcomed.
Thus, apart from the gross impact of imitation, we should be asking:
-Does socially transitioning one child in a class impact the levels of depression or anxiety of the other children?
-Does it interfere with their learning?
-Does it affect behaviour?
-Does it affect the quality of the relationships with their own parents and/or siblings outside of school?
-In what other ways does social transitioning affect the non-transitioning peer(s)?
These are all questions that psychologists and school counsellors should be investigating. But we don’t know the answers because nobody is even asking these or other related questions. There is no research data whatsoever on the impact of social transitioning to the child and the school community. What is now occurring in thousands of schools across the West is the equivalent of putting a new drug on the market without having run any clinical trials, but simply stating that it is safe to use.
Impact on moral development
There is also a wider danger of socially transitioning a child and in forcing their peers to go along with the lie that Susan is now ‘Simon’, when they can clearly see she isn’t. Moral development is the process by which people develop the distinction between right and wrong. There are many theories on how morality develops, but in general they describe a stepwise process wherein children move from being moral absolutists with ‘black and white thinking’, to a point where ‘goodness’ is gradually replaced by a more subtle understanding of ‘truth/justice’. This process lasts from about age five to mid/late twenties when the most mature form of moral understanding and reasoning is achieved. The later form of moral thinking is not however always reached. Psychopaths, for example, never develop this facility.
Into this stepwise process enters the ‘socially transitioning’ child. The child itself is a living lie and, equally damaging, other children are then being forced into the acceptance of this lie by the very people from whom, at this critical stage in their lives, they should be learning and modelling appropriate morality. But now, because of gender ideology and its sequalae of social transitioning, children are being sanctioned for not acquiescing to the obvious and blatant falsehood that someone has changed sex.
Children cannot develop proper moral reasoning if they are compelled to believe untruths, or if they are suspended from school, isolated from their friends, or told to “undertake reflection” (this sounds particularly sinister!) for merely holding their ground.
Schools which socially transition children are carrying out an in-vivo, unsupervised behavioural experiment and nobody has any idea of the broader consequences that may result from this enforced disruption to children’s moral development. The full picture may take years to unfold and we may yet all pay the price for it. (Generally, it is by such means of lax or non-existent moral rules placed by adults that sociopathy develops.)
Things are worse for children with learning disabilities or social-communication disorders such as Autism. Such children see and describe the world as it is. Dissembling is difficult, or even impossible for them. I believe that making an Autistic or learning-disabled child use wrong-sex pronouns, (or otherwise forcing them accede to the lie that a classmate has changed sex), is tantamount to psychological torture.
Impact on safety
As ever, the impact of socially transitioning falls heavier on females than it does on males. Girls have lost the privacy of their school toilets and their changing rooms. They are being sexually assaulted or worse, raped by boys ‘identifying’ as girls. They are developing urinary tract infections because they are scared to use the toilets. They are staying at home during their periods because boys are spying on them and making them feel embarrased. They are losing at sports and being deprived of scholarships because of the actions of boys who identify as girls.
As a result of the invention of ‘Gender Dysphoria’ in 2013, adults who should know better and who should be safeguarding children have instead entered a state of ‘Learned Madness’. They have developed a mindset where enforcing and protecting a child’s supposed ‘gender identity’ now supersedes all considerations of safety, fairness, morality, or common sense.
Teachers have seemingly forgotten they have a duty of care to all students, not just those who think themselves to be ‘trans’. It is truly an incredible and appalling state of affairs. (See here for a wider discussion on ‘Gender Dysphoria’.
Social transitioning is akin to taking an already disturbed and unhappy child to the top of a very tall building, pushing them off, then forcing all their friends and classmates to not only watch, but to help with the clean up. It is an unregulated, uncontrolled and incredibly powerful psycho-social intervention being carried out by gender ideologues and/or unqualified, uncritical or, perhaps pressured, teaching staff.
Nobody, except the ‘transitioning’ child (who is likely themselves suffering from psychological problems) has ‘agreed’ to be part of this social experiment and therefore this practice is also highly unethical. But, sadly as with all gender related madness, my profession of psychology has been deafeningly silent in calling this out.
TL:DR: Socially transitioning is an unethical and dangerous practice that schools should be having nothing to do with and whose long-term consequences are unknown.
“WPATH Members Causing Surgical Harm. p28-29 (my bold) “As well, there is evidence in the files of members doing surgical harm to severely mentally ill patients. In an undated message thread, a therapist expresses concern about referring her “trans clients with serious mental illness” for surgery due to difficulty in predicting their future stability, “in particular, given the extensive recovery period and ‘postnatal’ care required for vaginoplasty.”
“A California marriage and family therapist replied, saying it depends on many factors, such as how much support the mentally ill person has, whether they have a safe place to recover, and whether or not they understand instructions such as “dilate, wash, monitor.” She added that in the last 15 years, she had only declined to write one referral letter, and that was mainly because “the person evaluated was in active psychosis and hallucinated during the assessment session.” “Other than that – nothing – everyone got their assessment letter, insurance approval, and are living (presumably) happily ever after,” said the therapist, who has referred for genital surgery people diagnosed with major depressive disorder, c-PTSD, and who are HOMELESS.
“Here, the therapist’s use of the word “presumably,” like the previous surgeon’s “that I am aware of,” indicates no systematic follow-up of patients, which would be reasonable to expect from a surgeon who knows he or she is doing something risky, invasive and experimental. Without follow-up, there is no way to know whether the severely mentally ill person was able to cope with the arduous 2+ hours a day of post-op dilation, the long recovery period, and the lifelong impact of the surgery on the patient’s physical health and ability to form intimate relationships.
“WPATH-affiliated surgeons do not appear to have even the slightest curiosity about the outcome for such patients. While the therapist was right to be concerned about the level of support patients have during the immediate post-op period, her contribution demonstrates the myopic thinking of gender-affirming healthcare providers. “WPATH members typically focus on short-term patient satisfaction from the drastic, life-altering interventions they endorse and appear to have little concern for how the patient will fare in 20, 30, or 40 years.”
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Dr P says: 1. That WPATH members are even considering ‘GA’ care for people with serious mental illness shows the complete moral and regulatory vacuum in this area.
2. A person with any active mental health problem should not be referred for major, experimental life-altering surgery.
3. It is unconscionable that therapists have so profoundly lost their way.
4. These therapists are simply rubber-stamping any patient request. They are not conducting any type of mental health evaluation or assessment.
5. Who is regulating their practice? And that of the surgeons? Is anyone being regulated?
6. Maybe the homeless person needed somewhere to live, not to have his penis cut off? Just saying.
Transgender ideology is based on lies and emotional coercion. Very effective lies and coercion mind you – enough to make doctors forget about the “do no harm” part of their medical training and instead take up gender-woo and non evidence based medical practices.
So here it is – the beginning of the unraveling, and more importantly the beginning of the lawsuits for medical malpractice. The gender cult adherents are about to enter the FAFO phase of what happens when you let feelings supersede evidence based medicine.
Unfortunately, doctors, psychologists, and many other mental health professionals are deep within the folds of the gender-woo cult and will not leave willingly. The road ahead is long, but we are starting to make the trek back to reality and evidence based medicine.
March 4, 2024
Newly leaked files from within the leading global transgender healthcare body have revealed that the clinicians who shape how “gender medicine” is regulated and practiced around the world consistently violate medical ethics and informed consent. The files, which were leaked from within the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), were published today by the US-based think tank Environmental Progress.
WPATH is considered the leading global scientific and medical authority on “gender medicine,” and in recent decades, its Standards of Care have shaped the guidance, policies and practices of governments, medical associations, public health systems and private clinics across the world.
However, the WPATH Files reveal that the organization does not meet the standards of evidence-based medicine, and members frequently discuss improvising treatments as they go along. Members are fully aware that children and adolescents cannot comprehend the lifelong consequences of “gender-affirming care,” and in some cases, due to poor health literacy, neither can their parents.
“The WPATH Files show that what is called ‘gender medicine’ is neither science nor medicine,” said Michael Shellenberger, President and founder of Environmental Progress. “The experiments are not randomized, double-blind, or controlled. It’s not medicine since the first rule is to do no harm. And that requires informed consent.”
Environmental Progress has made all files available to read at the end of the report. The leaked files include screenshots of posts from WPATH’s internal messaging forum dating from 2021 to 2024 and a video of an internal panel discussion. All names have been redacted other than several WPATH members of public significance, such as Dr. Marci Bowers, an American gynecologist and surgeon who is the President of WPATH, and the Canadian pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Daniel Metzger.
In the WPATH Files, members demonstrate a lack of consideration for long-term patient outcomes despite being aware of the debilitating and potentially fatal side effects of cross-sex hormones and other treatments. Messages in the files show that patients with severe mental health issues, such as schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, and other vulnerabilities such as homelessness, are being allowed to consent to hormonal and surgical interventions. Members dismiss concerns about these patients and characterize efforts to protect them as unnecessary “gatekeeping.”
The files provide clear evidence that doctors and therapists are aware they are offering minors life-changing treatments they cannot fully understand. WPATH members know that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries will cause infertility and other complications, including cancer and pelvic floor dysfunction. Yet they consider life-altering medical interventions for young patients, including vaginoplasty for a 14-year-old and hormones for a developmentally delayed 13-year-old.
The WPATH Files also show how far medical experiments in gender medicine have gone, with discussions about surgeons performing “nullification” and other extreme body modification procedures to create body types that do not exist in nature.
A growing number of medical and psychiatric professionals say the promotion of pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments is a global medical scandal that compares to major incidents of medical malpractice in history, such as lobotomies and ovariotomies.
“Activist members of WPATH know that the so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ they provide can result in life-long complications and sterility and that their patients do not understand the implications, such as loss of sexual function and the ability to experience orgasm,” Shellenberger said. “These leaked files show overwhelming evidence that the professionals within WPATH know that they are not getting consent from children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults, or their caregivers.”
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.
I was a strong proponent of the Harm Reduction strategy until more data has come out about its effectiveness and benefits for society versus other methods. There might be a case for Harm Reduction, but as currently implemented in BC it is a like a 4 legged stool that is missing three legs -harm reduction, law enforcement, prevention and treatment – just focusing on harm reduction and not the other areas is a recipe for social disaster.
The Alberta rehabilitation model has been modestly more successful in dealing with the problems of addictions. Both systems require overlapping programs working together to get people out of the drug abuse loop – whether Alberta has been more successful in coordinating the synergy of anti-addiction programs or that rehabilitation programs are just more effective remains to be seen. Initial data points to the Alberta method being more successful.
The divergent policies and politics of B.C. and Alberta have played a major role in determining the public perception of Canada’s opioid crisis. Left-leaning media outlets have tended to laud B.C.’s harm reduction as being more compassionate, while conservative voices point to Alberta’s focus on treatment as more practical and realistic. What Canada had lacked until recently was an impartial, data-driven assessment of the two competing systems.
Advantage Alberta: The Stanford Network on Addiction Policy’s 2023 report (depicted above) observes that, “Alberta is currently experiencing a reduction in key addiction-related harms,” while “Canada overall, and BC in particular, is not yet showing the progress that the public and those impacted by drug addiction deserve.” At middle, a typical street scene in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside; at bottom, a therapy session at Alberta’s new Red Deer Recovery Community. (Sources of photos: (middle) Ted McGrath, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED; (bottom) EHN Canada)
That problem was partially solved last year with the release of a report from the U.S.-based Stanford Network on Addiction Policy. Entitled Canada’s Health Crisis: Profiling Opioid Addiction in Alberta & British Columbia, the document offers an even-handed review of the differing policies of the two provinces, summarizes the latest available data (which it criticizes as inadequate) and cautiously evaluates the results. B.C., the report notes, emphasizes harm reduction, “safe supply” of illicit drugs, decriminalization of possession and reduction of addiction stigma. Alberta, by contrast, is focusing on “investment in rehabilitation beds and spaces, such as therapeutic communities,” while moving away from “safe supply” of opioids and instead providing addicts with medications.
Using these differences as a natural experiment, the Stanford report comes to a few key conclusions. First, it observes “a lack of policy innovation in BC on the issue of drug addiction.” Obsessive attention to harm reduction appears to have blinded politicians and public health officials to the longer-term consequences of their favoured policy. “Enforcement against drug crime has [been] reduced in recent years,” the report notes, “indicating a general lessening of criminal justice enforcement against drug offences in Canada during the escalating health crisis of opioid addiction.”
Second, “Of the two provinces studied for this report, Alberta is currently experiencing a reduction in key addiction-related harms.” The province’s rate of overdose deaths declined by 17 percent from 2021 to 2022 (B.C.’s remained almost unchanged), although it was still Alberta’s second-worst year on record. Using the most recent data available, the Stanford researchers point to B.C.’s higher death rate as suggestive of the two approaches’ relative effectiveness: “Our research indicates that Canada overall, and BC in particular, is not yet showing the progress that the public and those impacted by drug addiction deserve.”
The very real threat of nuclear war hasn’t been on the radar since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Yet the capacity for self-annihilation remains. Consider the question raised by Daniel Ellsberg:
“When I say that there is a step that could reduce the risk of nuclear war significantly that has not been taken but could easily be taken, and that that is the elimination of American ICBMs, I’m referring to the fact that there is only one weapon in our arsenal that confronts a president with the urgent decision of whether to launch nuclear war and that is the decision to launch our ICBMs.”
He went on to stress that ICBMs are uniquely dangerous because they’re vulnerable to being destroyed in an attack (“use them or lose them”). In contrast, nuclear weapons on submarines and planes are not vulnerable and
“can be called back — in fact they don’t even have to be called back, they can… circle until they get a positive order to go ahead… That’s not true for ICBMs. They are fixed location, known to the Russians… Should we have mutual elimination of ICBMs? Of course. But we don’t need to wait for Russia to wake up to this reasoning… to do what we can to reduce the risk of nuclear war.”
And he concluded: “To remove ours is to eliminate not only the chance that we will use our ICBMs wrongly, but it also deprives the Russians of the fear that our ICBMs are on the way toward them.”
It would be a great step toward securing the world from a nuclear extinction level event, but the geopolitics of the situation make the move a contested one at best.
If the death of everyone can still be maintained with bombers and submarines do we really need the extra death (and extra threat) of ICBM’s? Is it even rational to consider the move as it might embolden the Russians and Chinese with even the perceived move away from MAD?
It is a calculus that makes sense in terms of lowering the threat to the entire world, but are the corresponding consequences (real or perceived) worth the risk, as it would have to be the US that would stand down first.
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