Very powerful Twitter thread from detrans trans man in mental health

[Awning10]

twitter.com/SourPatches2077/status/1351619619459526656

Wonderful thread, and sad.

Safeguarding cannot start with lies.

So refreshing to hear some pure honesty. Being trans, ultimately, is living a lie. That can't be good for anyone's mental health.

That's a great thread.

There's another ethical dilemma that can come up in mental health settings: how do you care for a teenage trans boy who needs help / supervision with intimate care?

It you use an affirmative approach, they would have a male adult 1:1. But then you are leaving a vulnerable (biologically) female child, who has perhaps suffered sexual abuse in childhood, alone with an adult man.

That was a very interesting & thoughtful read. One of the comments was, “welcome back to reality”, sometimes Twitter nails it.

So interesting! And thought provoking too that a natal female thought about the effect their presence was having on males ...

How very sad - but how reassuring to find someone with ethics and empathy for vulnerable children. So very different to some of the ''leaders' we currently see in rape crisis, the NHS, politics and and other organisations leading the demands for women to submit to the wishes of males.

Just one powerful quote from so many I could have chosen: "There is a reality to living a lie. The lie is not yours alone when it comes to something as big as your sex."

It's been talked about on here for a long time that someone in this role who was good at it, understood vulnerabilities, cared about their clients or service users and had their best interests in mind would surely not be able to do this. And here is just such an ethical and qualified worker showing that in their experience it did not work, for exactly those reasons.

Brave woman, I admire her honesty here and hope this is widely read. As she is clear: someone in this position cannot distress and escalate a vulnerable person they are caring for due to their own personal needs. She is absolutely right.

how do you care for a teenage trans boy who needs help / supervision with intimate care?

It's scenarios like this that show how this cannot ever be a one size fits all situation. It would have to be responded to sensitively and individually, depending on the teenager's feelings and preferences, the workers available and their views, and what systems you might use to try and help everyone in the situation feel as safe and as comfortable as possible.

If we could just switch the focus to being sensitive to the issues and looking for the best solution in the situation that takes equally into account everyones best interests and feelings, the reasonable adjustments approach, so many of the issues would disappear.

Michelle

Luckily, in my personal experience, the teams involved in caring for the children did respond to scenarios like this in a nuanced, individualised way. But do much of the discourse from activists on this space completely ignores complex edge cases like this in favour of unicorns and glitter.

Even though it seems that actually the majority of trans children have some kind of huge complexity like undiagnosed autism or historic abuse in their background.

It makes me so angry that the needs of extremely vulnerable children, who often cannot advocate effectively for themselves, are completely sidelined. Nobody wants to look at reality, because sometimes reality is an unpleasant mess. But pretending that things are not as they are doesn't actually change anything.

Invisible that's the same point the CQC have drawn about the Tavistock in today's news isn't it? Huge complexity, no nuanced, individualised approaches that were thorough or careful or even properly recorded. Very much agree. It would be absolutely possible to find ways through this that were win-win and met the complex needs of all if we could let go of the slogan based, black and white thinking This Is It And There Are No Alternatives approach. Where that approach comes from and what drives it is in itself something that hasn't been considered nearly enough.

Another interesting point from this thread by a commenter I'm thinking about a lot today as I read around the forum: to paraphrase (I think it was a TM tweeting) in TM, they observe that the harm often goes inwards, and in TW they observe that the harm often goes outwards. The impact on others is different.

What an amazing, honest thread.

Mental health practitioners who support the current mainstream trans activist dogma are deeply unethical, in my opinion, and risk seriously harming people's mental health.

I am constantly struck by how unhelpful this current mess is, for the average trans person. Think how much genuine support there could have been for trans acceptance if the lie and the dogma were removed. Accepting transmen as transmen and transwomen as transwomen.

I am constantly struck by how unhelpful this current mess is, for the average trans person. Think how much genuine support there could have been for trans acceptance if the lie and the dogma were removed. Accepting transmen as transmen and transwomen as transwomen.
Agreed. We could sort out a lot of the issues fairly easily if we were allowed to actually discuss openly. Insisting TWAW and shunning (or worse) anyone who dissents is toxic for everyone.

Brave woman to write about her experiences of negotiating these situations at work and I absolutely admire her thoughtfulness ethical stance for her service users and how she’s always factoring their needs in so fundamentally. I wish her the very best.

Good for her, that she put other people before herself.