Royal College of Psychiatrists Statement

[dorade]

What hope is there when respected scientific organisations uncritically adopt phrases like "sex assigned at birth" and use "two spirit" people as evidence for the need to mutilated bodies to a facsimile of the other sex?

Report here

It raises an interesting question in my mind. Most of the women I know identify as people. Is this true for the majority, I wonder, or are we the outliers. Do men identify as men or as people?

The RCoP has always had a tenuous grasp of female biology. Witness Prof J Studd's attempts to make them understand that PND is an hormonal, not a psychiatric illness.
www.studd.co.uk/postnataldepression.php
Good name, though.

The problem is, as always, that they’ve confused biological sex and socially constructed gender roles.

If we got rid of gender for children, then there’d be no Robles here about behaviour. Except for the deeply dysphoric young people.

I know someone in this situation - who will publicly say they wish they did not have a penis. Not presenting or braving in any kind of female or feminine way, just deeply deeply body dysphoric. Very painful, and from all I can see, genuinely so, but only makes me think that he needs careful and extended therapy (talking therapy probably) to be relieved of his unease with his body - much as a someone with anorexia would receive - not irreversible surgery.

For all the virtue signalling about the non-binary, how much more binary can you be than to divide the world into transgender and “cis”gender?

Depression is a "real" thing - it's a thing which we're pretty sure exists, and we can evidence that by the fact that lots of people report a particular feeling in conjunction with particular behaviours; that's how we know depression is a real thing. Similarly I suppose ASD or sensory processing disorder (I don't know about these things incidentally, it's just someone else mentioned ASD).

@rat In order to be diagnosed with the above, you generally need to tick a few boxes in the diagnosis criteria. Are these psychiatrists of yours sitting with a diagnosis criteria for the condition of womanhood that they check patients off against?

I am failing at quotes today.

'' I don't think that's what it means, is it? You don't identify with, you identify as. If you identify with that makes it sound like you're something other than that thing. ''

Let me try this. I identify as alive. I identify as 5'7'. I identify as long-sighted. I identify as a parent. I identify as a wife. I identify as an aunt. I identify as a sister. I identify as a daughter. If you went around saying you identified as the above, people would think you're bonkers and rightly so. How can you identify as a parent for example? Are you not a parent but you think you are, are you step-parent, do you act in a parental capacity to somebody who is not your child? These are the implications from using ''i identify as'', as opposed to '' I am''. In the words of the immortal creator who we now must all believe in on account of those who have a strong sincere belief in an immortal creator, ''I am that I am''.

I honestly think all these professional people and organisations hopping brainlessly onto this TRA bandwagon will end up getting sued by the people whose health and emotional wellbeing is going to be (possibly permanently) fucked over back in the real world as this idiocy becomes widespread service delivery.

@poster Kneedeepinunicorns
For me the Wessely school is not about proving that ME is psychiatric so that they can prove ME isn't "real", but about trying to prove that ME is psychiatric so that they can prove that psychiatric diseases are real. It's that way round, but unfortunately they picked the wrong horse in that even under the broadest most enlightened possible definition of psychiatry, ME is not psychiatric.

I have just read the document. As a parent of a trans-identifying teenager, I thought it was OK. Note that it is a not a document on medical treatment for gender dysphoria, it is about how to deal with people who regard themselves to be of, and wish to be accepted as, the opposite biological sex.

I expect the RCoP are treading a very fine line in the face of activism, and doing it very carefully. It includes the need to take into account "parental concerns"; calls out the rush to social transition for gender non-conforming young children; it objects to conversion therapy but is careful to single out certain aspects of conversion therapy as being abhorrent, etc.

However, it fails to even acknowledge the massive rise in adolescents identifying as the opposite sex (mostly girls) and also overlaps with autism etc which is a glaring omission.

I am hoping that my child comes to realise in their own time, and unpressured by anyone, that denying your own biology and being a lifelong medical patient is not the best way to life their life. If that doesn't happen, however, I do not want them to be considered for the rest of their life as mentally disordered simply for that fact alone.

Somethingweird
it objects to conversion therapy but is careful to single out certain aspects of conversion therapy as being abhorrent

The comments about conversion therapy with regard to transgender people include the statement:
Conversion therapies ... may include barriers to gender-affirming medical and psychological treatments.

and in the glossary it gives this definition of conversion therapy:
Conversion treatment
These include any approach that aims to: ... persuade or pressurise trans people to accept (or align their gender identity with) their sex assigned at birth

This is the problem that others in your position have mentioned, that trying to convince a child to accept their body as it is, rather than affirm their trans identity is seen as conversion therapy. They also say that the use of conversion therapy (as they define it) may be an act of discrimination under the Equality Act (2010). So this document is unhelpful in terms of getting therapy for a child who is confused about their gender.

Bloody hell. 'Accepting that you are your birth sex' is conversion therapy?

Why not 'accept that you are your birth sex, would strongly prefer not to be, and therefore intend to appear more like the [stereotypes of the] other sex'?

Why the dishonesty?

trying to convince a child to accept their body as it is, rather than affirm their trans identity is seen as conversion therapy

No it isn't, I think you misunderstand.

If I try and convince someone a trans person to accept their birth sex I'm not administering conversion therapy.

I'm not administering any therapy.

Although I may be trying to convert them.

For it to be "conversion therapy" it first has to qualify as treatment or therapy. If it were illegal you wouldn't be guilty of a crime for trying to talk someone out of being trans, but a psychiatrist doing so in their appointments I assume would be.

RatRolyPoly
That quote was taken from the document advising psychiatrists how to handle treatment of "transgender and gender-diverse people".
What do you think I have misunderstood?

Conversion treatment
These include any approach that aims to: ... persuade or pressurise trans people to accept (or align their gender identity with) their sex assigned at birth

I've highlighted the phrase from the quote. Any approach. The word "approach" refers to a therapy or treatment, the type of which is then defined.

So if it couldn't be called a therapy it can't be called a conversion therapy.

To be fair they haven't spelled it out, although the clue is in the name.

RatRolyPoly
So conversion treatment includes persuading trans people to accept their sex assigned at birth.

Their grammar is appalling, but apart from that, I'm at a loss to see how it can be interpreted any other way.

No, if a treatment involves persuading a transperson to accept their birth sex then it is a "conversion" treatment.

Simply persuading someone to accept their birth sex isn't any sort of treatment at all, let alone a conversion treatment.

But yes, their language is less than helpful.

No, if a treatment involves persuading a transperson to accept their birth sex then it is a "conversion" treatment.
Which is the statement that I said was problematical, particularly in respect of children and young people who are confused about gender issues. If you can't try and persuade a young person to accept their body as it is, and just go with affirmation leading to a lifetime of medication, that is letting those young people down.

Simply persuading someone to accept their birth sex isn't any sort of treatment at all, let alone a conversion treatment.
You have contradicted your first sentence here. I agree that this is not a conversion treatment, but the document says it is.

Okay, well I don't think the document does say that, because of the phrase that I highlighted in my 14:47 post. But the very fact we're discussing it shows they could have been clearer!

A male child who likes kicking a ball is currently gender conforming in Brazil, the UK or Germany. If he spends time in other less-football-centric societies, e.g. the USA, he is at risk of being assessed there as gender non-conforming, because different gender stereotypes prevail in those societies. Nowadays, he is at risk of his behaviour in less-football-centric societies being used to diagnose him as transgender, at least for the duration of his visit. If he then returns to his home country, he is suddenly gender conforming again. At home, is he still transgender or is he not transgender again, or is he something else? How will scientists control their experiments to cover such scenarios? Supporters of gender identity expect brain studies to explain this gender conformity and non-conformity as "nature" not "nurture".

This is nonsense, because trans identity is not something that's bestowed by a third party. It requires the individual to volunteer with a subjective experience, of which most of us have no experience and yet feel entitled to expound upon with as much confidence as if they were declaring that a person is not a lizard. Which I assure you is a lot clearer cut a determination to make.

I can only comment directly from the period I was under assessment by psychiatrists and psychologists for being trans - about 2 years or so prior to being sent to transition via the then only Gender Identity Clinic. This was 45 years ago so it may be quite different now.

For the first extensive period (which even preceded the two years as I started seeing doctors when at school having known I was trans at primary school in the 1950s) the entire basis of what was done WAS to try and reinforce your sense of who you were as being aligned with your biological sex and not out of alignment.

Many methods were used - from trying to treat the symptoms of dysphoria as a depression with medication. To public shaming in front of others to make you feel horrified at what you were saying you were. To pushing you down traditional gender stereotype behaviour paths that you had not followed.

These I guess are what would now be called 'conversion' therapies.

Having been deeply trans for years when these were done I tried to go along with them, but they were always doomed as they were trying to force me in a direction that I just 'knew' innately was wrong.

I actually enjoyed some of them, in that I became good at one in particular. They wanted me to play football. I didn't but compromised on training to be a referee and became good at that. But enjoying it never made me feel any different. Other than a little happier that I had succeeded. The sense of gender dysphoria never changed in any way.

Once I was put into a psych unit for deeper study things got more serious in what they tried. Testosterone injections. I was set for electro therapy to try to 'blast' me out of it, when a gender specialist arrived and took control of my case and stopped it following a week of testing and observation.

I think the psychiatrists gave up trying to persuade me to 'be who I should be' at that stage as I got forwarded to Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic and transition began.

Where all the other treatments failed, that worked very quickly indeed.

I don't know how or why to explain this. Just that this is how it felt and how it was dealt with then. They certainly did not just 'accept a delusion'. Far from it. They were dragged to transition kicking and screaming pretty much as a last resort.

Jayceedove - absolutely - what you went through sounds horrible and clearly ineffective. The trouble is that now there is a whole cohort of teenagers and young adults who have adopted a trans identity very rapidly. It is highly likely that many of these are using the trans identity to cope with other stresses in their lives - autism, anxiety, not wanting to grow up, fear of sex, personality disorders. The fear is that by banning conversion therapy, all the professionals coming into contact with these young people will not try and deal with the underlying causes, thereby leading to misdiagnosis with gender dysphoria and inappropriate treatment.

We should try to help any child that presents with gender dysphoria in any way possible. And I think that seeing a doctor, being psychologically assessed and exploring other options first is very much the right approach.

I saw enough people during those years when I was being assessed who had all sorts of problems. These might have been causes or consequences of their dysphoria. I doubt there was one cause or one consequence then and in a quite different cultural climate today there are quite likely more things going on still.

Some patients were not ready to transition and were wisely deterred.

I was told that only about one in ten patients presenting then were then so forwarded.

Nobody should be rushing into anything, but all should be assessed and helped in the way that best suits them.

It seemed to work well back then as the success rate of transition was high and there were few regrets.

But I suspect more caution was applied because transition meant in pretty much every case irreversible hormone treatment and surgery. Which seems much less true today.

They don't define gender.
Take a moment to think about why this is.
They define sex.
They use the phrase "gender identity" without explaining what they mean by 'identify as' or what gender is, and how it relates to sex.

Gender is not sex.
But it is used like a magician's decoy: here it is, gender, we mean sex here, and here it is again, meaning something different from sex, and now once more we're back to conflating it with sex.

I've noted this TIME AND AGAIN that glossaries from the main trans'gender' organisations fail to provide a definition of gender.
They skip straight to 'gender identity', never quite explaining what gender means, if it isn't sex.

There is a reason that all of these organisations employ sleight of hand with this term. They need to switch between two opposing meanings without people noticing.

If gender means sex, then to fail to accept one's immutable reality is unquestionably a delusion. This means it is a psychological disorder that needs treating as such.

If gender means social stereotypes, then it is unrelated to sex and should never be confused with terms like male or female, nor should it require medical treatment.

If it means an internal psychological sense of ones reproductive sex, then the onus is upon science to prove its existence in each sex and quantify how it manifests. And, it still precludes a person with testes from being validated that they have a sense of their phantom ovaries without resorting back to being a medical disorder.

The reason that no definition is ever given is that any truthful possible explanation of gender destroys completely the assertion that transgender is a genuine, verifiable state.

A whole medical industry and social movement built upon a word 'gender' that IS NOT DEFINED by its proponents.

It's like watching a magic act when you can see how the trick works.