LA Times reports that transgender psychologist is raising concerns

[PurgatoryOfPotholes]

Headline A transgender psychologist has helped hundreds of teens transition. But rising numbers have her concerned

This is VERY long. You need to read the full thing yourself. But here's part of the beginning

extract

BERKELEY—

Day after day, emails pour into Erica Anderson’s inbox from parents struggling to support their teenagers coming out as transgender.

“He’s been depressed and anxious since the pandemic began, and over the past few days he has shared with me that he’s pretty sure he’s trans,” said one message about a 17-year-old.

“I am very worried that my child is being pressured into wanting to take [puberty] blockers, ‘because that is the next step,’ ” said another. “We are supportive and have helped them to socially transition, but the medical part somehow for her at 13 does not seem right.”

“How do we decide whether an adolescent in the throes of so much turmoil can make such a medically consequential, irreversible decision?” another said about a 15-year-old’s pleas for testosterone injections.

The parents come to Anderson, 71, in part because she herself is transgender. Anderson also stands out because she is one of the few clinical psychologists specializing in transgender youth to publicly question the sharp rise in adolescents coming out as trans or nonbinary.

She has helped hundreds of teens transition. But she has also come to believe that some children identifying as trans are falling under the influence of their peers and social media and that some clinicians are failing to subject minors to rigorous mental health evaluations before recommending hormones or surgeries.

“I think it’s gone too far,” said Anderson, who until recently led the U.S. professional society at the forefront of transgender care. “For a while, we were all happy that society was becoming more accepting and more families than ever were embracing children that were gender variant. Now it’s got to the point where there are kids presenting at clinics whose parents say, ‘This just doesn’t make sense.’ ”

Her skepticism — and her willingness to speak directly to the public — puts her at the center of America’s culture war over trans kids.

(Continues)
The first U.S. gender clinic dedicated to youth opened in Massachusetts in 2007. Today there are more than 60.

In 2017, federal health researchers surveyed high school students in 19 school districts and found that 1.8% identified as transgender — 2½ times the best estimate made five years earlier.

Clearly, the decline in social stigma has allowed more teens to come out.

Anderson, though, began to wonder whether that was the full story. About 2016, when she began working with the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at UC San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospital, she noticed a growing group of transgender youth: adolescents who had not appeared to question their gender much, or at all, before puberty.

Some drifted from one identity to the other: gender-questioning, trans, nonbinary, gay. And many of their cases were complicated by anxiety, depression, autism, bipolar disorder or other mental health conditions that predated their desire to transition.

“A fair number of kids are getting into it because it’s trendy,” she told the Washington Post in 2018. “I think in our haste to be supportive, we’re missing that element.”

At the same time, she was careful not to overstate her point.

“I can assure you, transgender identity is not something one catches,” she said in an interview the following year after being elected the first transgender president of the U.S. arm of the World Professional Assn. for Transgender Health, or WPATH.

Continues: www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-04-12/a-transgender-psychologist-reckons-with-how-to-support-a-new-generation-of-trans-teens

It's pretty long, but very worth reading

Going to read this now, but I have had 3 children who have each questioned their gender and I have been accepting of it and promised them that should they still feel the same at 18 we would speak to specialists. I know it goes against the grain for many people, but it seems to be a trend that they literally outgrew.

Thanks, I really wanted to read this as a few on twitter are predicting blue ticks reverse ferreting as a result. It was pay walled every time I tried!

It was daunting to start dating as an older trans woman — Anderson’s wife made it clear she would not be with a woman and they eventually divorced. But Anderson was thrilled to navigate the world as her true self.

Anyone reading this should immediately check out transwidows.

The article is dripping in a certain condition.

And I think Anderson knows the difference between themselves and these kids.

At least there's a small conscious.

Or a worry that the backlash and law suits will be too harsh so "meet em in the middle."

Yes, I have noticed much musings of lawsuits coming and damage limitation but I have to ask, didn't they realise that would happen?

They must KNOW that you cannot literally change someone's sex and they must KNOW that the hormones and surgeries are largely experimental, with no evidence base, and they must have SEEN what can go wrong...... Or are they just so blinkered they can't see?

@rabbitwoman

Yes, I have noticed much musings of lawsuits coming and damage limitation but I have to ask, didn't they realise that would happen?

They must KNOW that you cannot literally change someone's sex and they must KNOW that the hormones and surgeries are largely experimental, with no evidence base, and they must have SEEN what can go wrong...... Or are they just so blinkered they can't see?

I suspect it's partly a belief in their own propaganda - that sex is a spectrum and not binary and that medication and surgery moves individuals along the spectrum.

Also a belief that the "treatments" will get better with more experience and research. This has been the case in the past in medicine, However, it ignores two things - the failures (e.g. thalidomide) and the ethics of using human beings for experiments and research, particularly when there is nothing physically wrong with their health.

Anderson persisting in speaking about this is good to see. I cannot see them be able to use stronger language than they have, they obviously believe that there is a proportion of children who are trans and believe there is a need to transition and so on.

But they are continuing in raising the issue and raising the alarm to say something isn’t right here. If it means more reviews are done to track accurately the patients to determine treatment effectiveness that would be a great start.

It Anderson and Bowers speaking out gets affirming only changed back to explorative and a more robust therapy approach, even better.

If it means that charities and supposed support groups are punished if they continue to even look to be coaching would be patients and current patients in how to influence treatment to be put onto a hormonal and surgical treatment path, another bonus.

I hope that them speaking out will encourage others to do so as well.

It's quite key that Anderson transitioned late on.

Perhaps Anderson now knows that having a healthy male body for all those years was a luxury that the kids won't have.

And I think Anderson knows the difference between themselves and these kids.

It's horrific that any personal justification of what 'being trans' means to them is responsible for even one child thinking they're they wrong sex.

A doctor conveyor belting children through this system because they're upholding an ideology that's not true should have lifelong and appropriate consequences.

@Helleofabore

Anderson persisting in speaking about this is good to see. I cannot see them be able to use stronger language than they have, they obviously believe that there is a proportion of children who are trans and believe there is a need to transition and so on.

But they are continuing in raising the issue and raising the alarm to say something isn’t right here. If it means more reviews are done to track accurately the patients to determine treatment effectiveness that would be a great start.

It Anderson and Bowers speaking out gets affirming only changed back to explorative and a more robust therapy approach, even better.

If it means that charities and supposed support groups are punished if they continue to even look to be coaching would be patients and current patients in how to influence treatment to be put onto a hormonal and surgical treatment path, another bonus.

I hope that them speaking out will encourage others to do so as well.

Yes.

If Anderson and Bowers are correct the T are saying that a proportion of children are receiving dangerous treatment with potentially life altering consequences unnecessarily.

It has to stop immediately.

If they believe there are some children who will persist and will genuinely benefit from treatment they'd better bloody work out how to distinguish between the two groups before another child is harmed.

For 'the T are' read 'in', autocorrect.

@WarriorN

Thanks, I really wanted to read this as a few on twitter are predicting blue ticks reverse ferreting as a result. It was pay walled every time I tried!

It's on the web archive site and possibly some of the other popular ones.

It's worth finding.

Forcing transgender and gender diverse youth through extensive assessments while their cis peers are affirmed in their identity without question conveys to [them] that they are not ‘normal,’ ” they said.

Eckert also dismissed the idea that peer pressure is driving some teens to identify as trans: “Is it trendy to be one of the most marginalized and vulnerable groups?”

In conversation with an adolescent who is attempting to describe genders, the following emerges.

“A lot of the people I’m friends with experience gender more as like a specific vibe rather than a physical category,” he went on. “One friend says that their gender is the same vibe as a raccoon. They’re not saying that their gender is a raccoon. They’re saying that their gender has the same, like, chaotic, dumpster vibes as raccoons.”

“Dumpster?” Anderson asked. “What would the human version of that be like?”

“There isn’t one; it’s just the same chaotic energy that their gender has,” Cody said. “Which is why it’s, like, very hard to explain. It’s just kind of like a dialect — a way to talk about gender that just kind of builds up within groups.”
…

Some feel uncomfortable as girls but do not identify with cisgender men. Many opt for androgynous looks: baggy pants, hoodies, short hair. Sometimes they want top surgery but are not interested in hormones. Or they want just enough testosterone to lower their voice but not enough to grow body hair. Some, Anderson believes, construct gender identities so idiosyncratic that they struggle to develop shared meaning.

For fuck's sake. It's personality traits.

Sometimes I feel like, oh I don't know, the sole of well worn shoe. I don't have a footwear gender!

You could describe the way you feel at any given moment, and assign a bloody gender to it.

And then expect people to pay attention to it, and accommodate it, even if it's fucking annoying.

This is what the adult proponents of transgender ideology have done. They have made children think that personality traits require surgery.

“A fair number of kids are getting into it because it’s trendy. I think in our haste to be supportive, we’re missing that element.”

“I can assure you, transgender identity is not something one catches."

Which is it?

@JellySaurus

“A fair number of kids are getting into it because it’s trendy. I think in our haste to be supportive, we’re missing that element.”

“I can assure you, transgender identity is not something one catches."

Which is it?

You're plainly misunderstanding and that's attributable to your outdated notion that words have meaning and play a role in effective communication.

It's all about the energy not the thing itself, if I comprehend this beyond PoMo mash-up of platonic forms (?) correctly.

@JellySaurus

“A fair number of kids are getting into it because it’s trendy. I think in our haste to be supportive, we’re missing that element.”

“I can assure you, transgender identity is not something one catches."

Which is it?

Quite. And if anyone is trans who says they are, what's the difference anyway?

Eckert also dismissed the idea that peer pressure is driving some teens to identify as trans: “Is it trendy to be one of the most marginalized and vulnerable groups?”

It can be trendy, because many teens now live in online bubbles and in small groups at school where being trans or non-binary raises the status of the teen.

Also, non-binary people on the whole cannot be clocked because most of them look just like anyone else. Girls would be in jeans and a t-shirt and have shortish hair. Quite safe among strangers, and would not make one any more vulnerable than other reasons (looking female to others, say).

They need to speak to kids in the wild then as one mum I know with 4 boys says her older ones inform her it's simply not trendy to be straight and not trans/non binary.

They're not marginalised or vulnerable.

It seems as though Anderson and the reporter use a lot of Abigail Shrier’s ideas and research- about social contagion and the peer pressure on teens to transition. It’s as though the paper wants to report on it as a medical scandal but is not allowed to. Anderson has provided a way to report on it and still be pro-trans while offering him a golden bridge to get out while the consequences are still bubbling under.
Other gender therapists must be reading the room too and perhaps the damn will break soon.

Someone on detrans twitter commented that there was around 100 new people a day on the Reddit detrans forum.

I have no idea if that's true or not but honestly wouldnt be surprised.

Anderson had never heard the word “transgender” when, at 12, she imagined being a woman, or at 14, sneaked into a sister’s room to try on her clothes.

^An avid Boy Scout and church youth leader, Anderson was attracted to girls and fit easily into the rhythms of high school life — dating, playing on the basketball team, serving as class president. But nothing could eliminate the thoughts of being a woman — not going to university, not getting married, not becoming a father.
Even as Anderson began to understand that she was transgender, she was tormented by the idea that transitioning would destroy her family and her career as a psychologist. She also worried that at 6-foot-1 with a low voice, she would never pass as a woman.^

Attitudes about transgender people were evolving in the medical community, but stigma was rife. When Anderson, at 45, finally plucked up the courage to visit an endocrinologist, the doctor shook her head and refused to prescribe hormones. Anderson walked away feeling deeply ashamed.

In the end, it took Anderson more than half a century to — in her words — “become a woman.”

At 58, she began hormone treatment to develop breasts and widen her hips. She found a doctor who had pioneered new techniques in facial feminization surgery to shave down her jaw, sculpt her nose and plump her lips. She legally changed her name, got a new job and moved to California. At 61, she had surgery to remove her penis and construct a vagina, clitoris and labia.

It was daunting to start dating as an older trans woman — Anderson’s wife made it clear she would not be with a woman and they eventually divorced. But Anderson was thrilled to navigate the world as her true self.

She embraced a public role specializing in gender, joining the field’s national and international associations of experts while devoting much of her private practice to working with teens with gender issues.

Often, that meant writing letters of support to get them puberty blockers or hormones.

“You don’t quite realize this yet,” she sometimes joked when she was getting to know a new patient. “But I am your new best friend.”

She wets her finger and lifts it up to test the direction of the wind?

The US situation is worse than the UK one. When the dam breaks, one day in the future, the people held responsible will be the therapists.

That is not quite fair as most of them would be canceled or perhaps even fired if they practised anything short of total affirmation. I sometimes read social media messages by young trans or non-binary people which suggest that many view the process of getting hormones (and of fine-tuning the quantities and mix) something they decide and simply order from their doctors. The latter are rubber stamps.

@WarriorN

Someone on detrans twitter commented that there was around 100 new people a day on the Reddit detrans forum.

I have no idea if that's true or not but honestly wouldnt be surprised.

Seems about right:

subredditstats.com/r/detrans

Anderson had never heard the word “transgender” when, at 12, she imagined being a woman, or at 14, sneaked into a sister’s room to try on her clothes.

Imagine actually admitting this about yourself. With your name attached. But it appears to be very common among some transwomen. In fact wasn't the artist formerly known as Bruce Jenner caught trying on his daughter's clothes?

It's fucking creepy and predatory. It's disgusting behaviour. Solidarity to any woman who has to live with a penis haver who does this to her.

Those stats are fascinating and horrific Nec.

Third key word "cult like"....