Detrans person confronts their "gender therapist"

[RightsHoardingStegasaurus]

Just that, really. It's a harrowing listen but very important

This week I've been grateful for extremist activists showing the general population their 'post modern neo-religion' circular arguments . And in this thread I'm grateful for a post that has highlighted an important issue to raise in the consultation. You do not tell lies to children. If you're responsible for a child in someway (including as their therapist) and say nothing when other adults tell them lies, then the therapist is even more responsible for the lie because they are responsible for the child. Therapists may have had good intentions in this and been trained by 'experts'. They need the ability to see when adults have lied to children and the tools remove dogma from the therapy room and these children's lives.

And it is true that is what therapists aim to do - let the patient find their way and explore in a safe space. NOT advise them not to do something or give a strong opinion - that is conversion therapy.

So why, when my adult child told their therapist that they were self-harming, in a confidential session, did the therapist call me in to discuss how to safeguard their patient and try to prevent harm coming to them? Why did the therapist give their patient advice on how to prevent them self-harming? What conversion therapy was going on?

I think the problem in the gender distress field is that the therapist is working with an affirmation-only model for "treating" dysphoric individuals, and the endocrinologist is assuming that by the time the person gets to them the psych avenues have all been tried, otherwise, why would the therapist have sent the person for such a drastic thing as hormone treatment.

And it is true that is what therapists aim to do - let the patient find their way and explore in a safe space.

Without going through what is behind the patient thinking they may be the sex that they are not, there isn’t actually any exploration going on. A patient turning up saying they are ‘trans”, and the therapist responding by agreeing, is not exploration. There isn’t even a hint that there was any exploration of what the patient meant by ‘trans’.

As for a “safe space”. As the therapists is the one sending them on to the endocrinologist to be put on hormones, the therapists office is the least safe space for anyone to “explore” whether they have this ill defined condition called “transness”.

“A safe space to explore…” is just another meaningless platitude.

It's not true anyway that therapy is always a safe space to explore whatever the patient wants.

Within certain areas that's true. But when patients come in who have paranoia, or thought patterns that are false and causing them harm, or think they are Jesus, their therapists don't just let them explore that and go along with it.

It's subtle but there is a line between what we consider a possible, if odd belief, and what is outside reality and so harmful to the individual. My crazy Catholic aunt never had flack from her therapist about her Catholicism, or even her politics, but when God started to tell her to do rather odd illegal things in their phone conversations, that was a different story.

Spot on @Fallingirl. The surgeon Johanna Olsen Kennedy claims to have transitioned more people than any other practitioner of this legalised butchery. She thinks therapy is just a nuisance , slowing down business. ' After all , if I were putting a man on insulin I wouldn't send him for therapy.' Then again , listening to the therapy this poor lad received, you'd almost wonder is it such a loss.

* '*After all , if I were putting a man on insulin I wouldn't send him for therapy.'

False equivalence.

A man who needs insulin does so because of physical malfunction or damage in his body. Nobody who wants cross-sex hormones has any physical malfunction or damage in their body that can be repaired by administration of cross-sex hormones. CSH in the quantities prescribed for identity issues cause substantial damage to the body.

If you don't put a man with T1 diabetes on insulin his body will fail and he will die within a few days or weeks, whereas if you don't put a man on cross-sex hormones his body will not come to any harm but he will be distressed and requires emotional support and counselling.

And anyone put on insulin IS given counselling to help them cope with this massive life change.

What a painful childhood. I wonder if there was any therapy to help reduce the trauma, or to deal with the trauma. Now there is more trauma because his body has been damage more and he says the 'treatment' they dished out made him sterile.

It seems to be the wild west. I hope there is a class action of some kind. Even if the people doing this feel immune as they get their clients to state they understand it is all experimental, if the clients are unwell can they really be in a position to waive any rights to decent medical care?

'After all , if I were putting a man on insulin I wouldn't send him for therapy

The irony in his case being that oestrogen worsens his autoimmune disease.

It did for me when I went on the pill in my early 20s. Gps also at the time denied it; it got better when I came off. But then deteriorated.

And anyone put on insulin IS given counselling to help them cope with this massive life change.

Exactly. There are specialist courses and counselling on successful management and how to cope with the usual emotional consequences.

And, for some conditions like NAFLD, the early stages of CKD, pre-diabetes, pre-hypertension etc., there is lifestyle counselling with the intention of arresting the risk of progression (respectively) to liver cirrhosis, more severe kidney disease, NIDDM or hypertension.

And it is true that is what therapists aim to do - let the patient find their way and explore in a safe space. NOT advise them not to do something or give a strong opinion - that is conversion therapy.

This is where this new bill has the potential to enrage both sides - because as a therapist, my remit is to help a client choose for themselves, so I would neither affirm them as a woman if they were a man (or vice versa), nor would I affirm that transition is the wrong thing to do (i.e. because you cannot change sex, even if I believe that personally). The only "affirming" I would do would be to acknowledge their thoughts and feelings as their own.

Having said that, a large, significant caveat:

We as therapists are plunged into grey areas when it is clear that what a client believes is one thing is plainly something else - when a client believes that they can escape trauma and abuse through the deeply held conviction that they are "in the wrong body", for example.

When this is the case, it is my job to help a client address and process the trauma and its roots, not to pander to the client's maladaptive responses to trauma.

If I were to go along with everything a client believed? Well, that way is damaging to the therapist, and devastating to the client.

So in cases like this, I think that the phrase "watchful waiting" also applies to adults who are in the kind of abject physical, psychological and emotional pain that this man is clearly experiencing. To ask them to hold off on making any decisions; to try to stay with the process - including the pain; to walk with them through it. Also to refer appropriately in cases where a patient's life/health are at stake (I would not refer to a gender clinic in this case), and to make an intervention if I felt a crisis was so severe that the therapeutic environment wasn't enough.

Essentially, it is never about a blanket set of treatments/approaches or a particular path that a therapist commits to and then doggedly follows - sometimes to the peril of those in their care. It is about a moment-to-moment response to what is arising; close supervision; and knowing if and when that instant arises that more is needed, or where a therapist's ceiling of expertise has been reached.

The problem for the therapist is when most of the main institutions in society, commend a particular course of action. This immediately creates a clash between professional discretion and a zeitgeist which the client on this tape refers to as "helping people to dance around in their delusions". I would be interested in why people train to be "gender therapists" - its fairly clear from this that the training is rather one-sided. The therapist said she did other kinds of therapy too - I wondered if there were people who became solely "gender therapists".