The ideological Capture of Psychotherapy

Basically, what drove his transition was the desire to be loved, and in a way that he thought women were loved, at a time when homosexuality was still a taboo.

Absolutely. Informed and enchanted by Hollywood and stereotypes.

I had exactly the same impression of Michael. The give away on the A was him saying that he really desired sex with women but when it was clear that women didn't desire it with him, the answer was to be one. As you say, he also had a non-sexual trauma based need to be loved.

Interestingly, Orlando's freedom seems to have partially come from letting go of stereotypes, whereas it is hanging on to stereotypes that helps to keep Michael locked in the prison of his troubled thoughts. He was so clear that he could only be a man when he was a manly man. He looked sympathetic yet also somewhat appalled at Orlando's take on "manliness". I suspect that the wisdom to see compassion here has only come with age and self reflection - it looked like he was fighting his homophobic instinct on that. A younger man in his position, who recognised their own internal homophobia, probably wouldn't have felt the need to attempt to temper it. That said, they may do nominally, because it's expected to be supportive of gay people under the full LGBT umbrella.

Between the two of them, where they agreed and where they vehemently yet respectfully disagreed, they seem to represent a very clear picture of the vast majority of men who identify as women. There will be a small number who don't fit in to either of these broad categories, whose dysphoria has a different origin, but they are lost amongst the rest.

I've just had a look and sadly it's no longer on Netflix but I'll try and find a way to watch that too. Thank you.

When I googled it, one of the first things that came up was the Guardian review. Unsurprisingly, they had a very different take on it - they see it as validation of an affirmation approach.

It's intriguing that the parents' bias that you picked up (similar to Jackie Green's dad, although different in so far as he didn't seem to want a gay boy) wasn't picked up at all in the review. It really does show how the lens of gender identity as belief versus fact changes everything from a psychological understanding perspective. In both the case of this mum and Jackie Green's dad, it was a welcome solution to a problem. They just couldn't see that because they either did believe or wanted to believe in gender identity.

Regarding the two Swedish men, I found it interesting that Orlando was happy with the idea that he was a man now but also that someone could be physically neither male or female (where this was his suggestion to Michael as a way to be at peace with himself), while still being a man. By contrast, Michael was adamant that he couldn't be a man again until he had his penis "back". Although Michael did now "identify" as a man, while waiting to "become a man".

This was particularly interesting in a way to unpick the cognitive dissonance of how to acknowledge a physical reality alongside a fervent belief that is effectively the opposite of that reality. I hadn't seen it discussed in that way before. Very thought provoking.

Guardian review

@NotHavingIt I came back on this thread to say that I watched Regretters last night.

That was a great recommendation, thank you.

It was fascinating how the two men interviewed each other. Their different viewpoints on why they transitioned and subsequently detransitioned really came through. As did their sensitive, yet critical approach, where they held each other to account and probed the others' views, in a respectful but challenging way.
It very aptly highlights the failings of the psychotherapy profession to follow this enquiring approach, by starting with the premise that gender identity is fact and social justice oppression needs to be at the core.
By contrast, their questions to each other were about the personal view of oneself from within.

This is a really interesting point.

I've never had therapy myself but some of my close friends have had a lot of it, and a common theme seems to be "don't rely on others for your happiness". Sometimes the therapist will suggest, or encourage the person to consider, that having certain people in their lives is not conducive to their mental health. So they may decide to end a relationship or a friendship, or go low or no contact with a family member. Or if the therapy is about an issue which affects that person's relationships more generally (as opposed to with specific individuals) then the therapist sometimes helps them to come up with strategies to overcome that. But the common theme is that it is up to the individual to take control of their own life, and either find ways of being more resilient with regard to other people in general, or avoid certain people who have a negative effect on their mental health.

The therapist would never tell the person concerned that everyone else in their life needed to adjust their behaviour, because the therapist has no control over that, and suggesting to the person concerned that this should/can/might happen would be setting them up for inevitable disappointment.

Similarly, any therapist helping someone explore their gender identity should be helping them find ways of being more resilient in the face of non-believers, because they are going to come into contact with non-believers whether that be their childhood friend, their brother in law or their boss, rather than telling them that of course they are a man/woman/non-binary person and that society needs to accept this.

Menopause does not affect all bodies, FFS! It affects around half of all bodies. Specifically, the female half.

😂😂
Did he dive under all the restaurant tables, reaching back to grab the hat that had fallen off his head and make his escape from the drunken man?

Now that we've landed on the "desire" end of things, there's an interesting parallel chat that is happening on another thread.Lilly Wachowski thread

The archived article that is referenced partway down is particularly pertinent.

@NotHavingIt just to clarify, I'm not equating your appreciation of Damiano David with the inner workings of Lilly Wachowski's mind!

If you layer on the avatar too idea, the Wachowski story has a strong parallel.

Where it differs of course is back to the more "innocent" end of it all, such as the early days of a Han Solo style "identity alignment". I think back to my early famous person crushes and there was a definite innocence to them which crossed over later in to more of a "romantic fit", similar to the Han Solo description above. By way of Harrison Ford coincidence, India Jones was one for me.

It's a bit like the Jungians say, isn't it - men carry around this image of the ideal feminine, which is often related to the mother image as well as placed on potential lovers.

And actually I think plenty of young women do something similar around men. Not so focused, typically, on physical beauty, but on other characteristics that are associated with ideal maleness.

As far as relating to the feminine or masculine ideal, one way of possessing a thing is to become the thing. I was quite a tomboy as a child, and I really identified with a certain instantiation of that ideal maleness - the lovable rogue type, like Han Solo. That was very much what I wanted to be. It was puberty that changed that around - the male ideal became a romantic prospect, so something to be found externally in another person. And of course maturity meant that I learned that even if as a middle aged woman I find lovable rouges appealing, real men are more than an ideal, they are people with all kinds of failings and contradictions, and rouges sometimes aren't so lovable.

It seems to me that some of these young people are trapped in trying to turn themselves into a kind of idealized, abstract image of masculinity or femininity.

I have been struck by how often I have seen someone explain their transitioning desires as "wanting to be pretty/handsome/desirable" and not just as identifying as the other sex etc.

Dustin Hoffman did a very interesting interview about playing Tootsie. The first time he went in for the full makeover he looked in the mirror, laughed, and told the makeup person 'Very funny! Now do it properly.' And she said, no - this is properly, this is how you look as a woman.

He'd genuinely thought it was a practical joke to make him up as an 'ugly' woman. He said it made him rethink his attitude to women's looks - He'd previously somehow assumed that woman by default = attractive, and that any who weren't beautiful were either doing it on purpose or just not making enough effort somehow. It was only seeing himself as a woman, and realising that he wasn't naturally beautiful and changing (apparent) sex didnt make him so, that he understood that the same applied to women - they weren't somehow choosing the way they looked and deliberately directing their unattractiveness at him.

I suspect that type of belief is not uncommon among men. But being able to make the same leap of understanding, and examine their prejudices, when seeing themselves in a mirror is rather rarer.

All this is much more complicated, it seems, at least in some cases, than just some inner gender identity not matching someone's sex? Even for those who profess having such an identity.

Indeed.

The forum is not all gay men; though the gay men tend to be his biggest allies. The heterosexual men who have been witnessing his transition all of these years know he is male - hence the comments ( if they "didn't know differently"...they'd fancy him, sort of thing).

Ah sorry. I misunderstood. Makes sense.

I suspect we are a couple of decades away from a full retreat from genderism

Without trying to loop back over old ground too much, I would hope that we could retreat to a place similar to how we are now at a societal level with religion in the UK. We don't have any modern laws based on a belief in religion and we can all tolerate living together as a society where some people have no religious faith, while others have different religious faiths.

Also, nobody needs to change their body because of their religious belief. Ideally we'd get to that point too with gender dysphoria. However, this last point is a gross oversimplification as a comparison with religion. Gender dysphoria is where someone is out of sync with the physical reality of their own body, whereas religious belief is obviously not this at all. Some people will need to make physical changes to alleviate gender dysphoria if all therapeutic options are managed well and exhausted. But if we can get to some kind of inner faith level being good enough, rather than the reliance on validation from others, a differential diagnosis as standard practice to work on trauma or co-morbiditities and a proper awareness of the fetish side of things, I think that will all go a long way towards putting gender identity belief in to a sensible perspective. There will always be people who have a gender identity belief and there will always be transgender people.

Getting psychotherapy on to a neutral footing is a key part of effecting this change. Hopefully viewpoints like James Esses' will find effective ways to be heard at scale.

I have been struck by how often I have seen someone explain their transitioning desires as "wanting to be pretty/handsome/desirable" and not just as identifying as the other sex etc.

This seems to be linked to sometimes wanting, or seeing it possible, to transition into someone of an age not matching the person's chronological age, such as for an older man to be possible to become a teen girl, or for a woman in her thirties to become a young gay man ('twink').

All this is much more complicated, it seems, at least in some cases, than just some inner gender identity not matching someone's sex? Even for those who profess having such an identity.

But yes, sometimes it seems that the definition of 'woman' many men seem to use when discussing trans women is based on sexual desirability, as seen from the male gaze angle. If there are wolf whistles (or being asked for phone numbers by men in supermarkets), then the person is a woman. If not, then the answer is?

That all sounds so depressingly.... inevitable 😔😞

I understand that the euphoria can last for anything up to 10 years after transition, before dissonance and more difficult realities start to impinge.

I have read similar. There was a really powerful interview from Shape Shifter on another thread and I remember him saying "I lived as a woman for 10 years before I realised I wasn't one".

I really hope that some curious gender affirming psychotherapy professionals come across this thread. Or journalists even - if their interest is sufficiently piqued to explore and expose the psychotherapy industry. It feels like we have unpacked a lot on it all in one place, with the social justice inspired therapeutic techniques from the article that Arabella shared and the conversations either side of that.

If he receives affirmation and applause, without challenge the euphoria is inevitable and so is him wanting more of it.
If any professionals are keeping him as the victim, with all of the social justice and oppression messaging, he'll be even more drawn towards the happy feeling he gets from the community. Even without any professional support he's on a totally unbalanced and biased pathway. This is very consistent with some of the examples in the Evans' gender dysphoria therapy book, where they are very clear to point out why respectful challenge and reflection on why are so important. Mostly though, they focus on the other presenting factors of the co-morbiditities. That's why I took the approach that I did with my daughter.

Even red flags that are there in plain sight, like the "enjoyment" of wolf whistles can't be picked up if any non-validiating voices are shut down.

Receiving wolf whistles is a pretty complex issue for girls and women anyway. From my own experience, I was a very awkward and gangly teenager (so I was desperate for them for the same "validation" that my friends got) then when they eventually did happen, I was old enough to feel a bit of a buzz but also quite scared about what these men wanted (I was still very awkward). I'm at an age now where it still occasionally happens (generally I assume because they don't quite see my age e.g. from behind 🤦‍♀️) but mostly I just watch younger women getting that attention. Suffice to say I'm not remotely jealous these days as I see it for what it is: objectification, a basic sex urge and the Andrew Tate style of "female as property/trophy". Not the "validation of my feminity" that I naively thought it was when I was younger. Throughout all of it, until I was mature enough to understand it better, I was going through so many emotions about my place in the world alongside what it meant to be desirable (and why that was or wasn't important). Aside from the nuances, I can imagine my journey was pretty typical for many women.

Instead he's getting an atypical lens on all of this. The mixed emotions that women experience are replaced by a simpler thrill. It's a fast forward version that's built on an approximation of what a group of men think it's all about, from a man's perspective e.g. (BTW I assume you mean if they were heterosexual i.e. they are gay and they now think he is becoming a woman):

The guys tell him that if they were not heterosexual they might fancy him ( he definitely seems to like that), or that he looks great.

That's such a simple view of what being a woman is. With no professional challenge or guided reflection "I identify as a woman" seems to logically pivot back to the woman as a sex object.

There will be transwomen who don't see it that way at all - I'm as certain as I can be that the transwoman I spoke to wouldn't, for example. Her awareness that she still looked like a man to everyone speaks volumes on this. But it's pretty clear why the Evans were right to put Freudian concepts at the centre of the male side of gender dysphoria. I did go back and read that section later but when I first came across it, it seemed so unrelated to my daughter (well, it is!) that I had no interest in it.

Hopefully the psychotherapy industry can have a complete direction change. It needs a critical mass of therapists and that seems depressingly far away with the current prevailing wind. Perhaps when the litigations start this will be a catalyst. Patients/insurance companies suing hospitals leading to hospitals suing therapists. With some good legal work, therapists won't stand a chance of blaming patients or hiding behind the fact that patients were acting under their own free will. They clearly aren't.

😔😔😔😔 Heartbreaking to watch it unfold, even if you don't know the person in real life.
Especially so as you've tried to carefully provide an alternative viewpoint.

Given so many people do have a vulnerability and fear that leads them to question forums about whether they are making the right decision (detransitioners reporting this consistently), it's so sad that there isn't anything that can break through the fog of the gender euphoria.

Oops. Genuine accidentalb use of her instead of his. Sorry Buck!
Easy to do when typing quickly and writing about a vagina..

Ah, just realised you may or may not not know him. "Observing from a distance" could also be online with lots of info shared by him.
Apologies if I misunderstood on that one.

*do anything medical