Thoughtful article from a student councillor here www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14753634.2017.1400740?scroll=top&needAccess=true
which discusses how unconscious homophobia may be understood to be driving the rush to label people as being born in the wrong body.
An excerpt:
“Last year, I attended an excellent conference organised by the Birkbeck
Counselling Association on ‘An exploration of sexuality and psychoanalytic
thinking the in twenty-first century’. It was refreshing to hear the speakers
Alessandra Lemma and Leezah Hertzmann acknowledge that the psychoana-
lytic world has a long history of simplistic homophobic attitudes towards
LGBT people, which is now seen to be a largely outdated and shameful
legacy. Until recently, the psychoanalytic training institutions excluded LGBT
applicants on the basis of sexuality, seeing us as psychologically flawed, or at
least ‘immature’. Apparently, this no longer happens, at least not overtly. This
shift is to be celebrated; most right-minded people would be behind this. However, it did set me thinking about what happens when this kind of prejudice
that has to be repressed to fit with prevailing (external) social trends, when
personal (internal) anxieties have not been resolved. And this brought to mind,
a worrying phenomena I have recently become aware of, and that both speak-
ers referred to, which is in the rise of the transgender movement of the unin-
tended, perhaps unconscious intolerance of diversity that fuels demand for a
quick fix to a very complex issue.
There has been a big increase in my line of work, university counselling,
in the numbers of young people accessing services with issues around gender.
I have been concerned by what we are being asked to do as counsellors and
therapists in terms of unquestioning support for young people to make irre-
versible changes to their bodies, without exploring what’s happening at an
unconscious level. In my service, we have had complaints and accusations, that
we are trans-phobic, on the grounds that, rather than automatically accepting
that students who present with this issue are ready to start a process of gender
reassignment, we take a stance of helping them to think things through and
explore what it means to them. What they seem to want is for us to accept that
this is the right decision and to provide emotional support as they begin the
process. But for some of these young 18 and 19 year olds, this would, I
believe, be an ethically irresponsible stance to take. ”