Sex Affirming Care Vs Gender Affirming Care

[SingleSexSpacesInSchools]

https://stellaomalley.substack.com/p/sex-affirming-care-vs-gender-affirming?r=6gk1mt&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

Excellent counter point to the conversion therapy ban arguments.

Maybe I've misunderstood the purpose of this table, but I feel calling a more open approach 'Sex affirming care" isn't the best strategy when trying to advocate for it within organisations and institutions that have been captured for so long. It sounds as if the objective of the therapy would be to affirm sex, not to explore the feelings of distress and take a holistic approach to supporting someone through it.

I agree it's a bad label, do people go to therapy to have their sex affirmed?

more in the article - I think the idea is to use language that in some way aligns with the activist language

the problem is that right now they are trying to label it conversion therapy and that rightly has connotations

what Stella is looking for here is nothing like conversion therapy, it is affirming ones actual sex and encouraging a person to be comfortable with that

I think the idea is to use language that in some way aligns with the activist language

I think that's a mistake, we need to change the terminology so that it makes sense and clarifies the situation they have sort to obscure. We need to stop playing the activist's at their own game.

This is really an open discussion, how do we phrase it positively in a way that people can get behind and understand?

I don't know, what is Sex Affirming Care about? Is this children who are having trouble coping with puberty, if you take the gender bollocks out, what is it that's causing the problem that the therapy is suppose to be addressing.

Biology Affirming Care?

Why not “body affirming care” because is helps someone be comfortable with their own body. And can link to help for anorexia and other dysmorphias.

Great article thank you SSSIS. Agree it’s a bad label but I didn’t spot that until you brought it up Enfys - I’m clearly too immersed in the sex/gender debates. Why not just call it therapy? This is what therapy used to be before trans exceptionalism came along. Just plain old therapy. Just like we need plain old safeguarding and plain old evidence based medicine.

I'm not so sure. The conflation of sex and gender has been at the root of this madness.
Setting out the difference in terms of care is an important part of the push back.

thats what I was thinking

I do get that, I suppose it is because it's the perverting of language that got us into this mess (or rather, how it passed unnoticed for so long). If "therapy" only means "affirming therapy" and anything else is "Conversion therapy" by default, where do you go?

But it obviously is conversion therapy, especially when you go around giving it a name that makes it plain the purpose is to prevent someone identifying as trans, which is the very definition of conversion therapy. You couldn't stick a label on it that made it more clear, if O'Mallay's intention was to obfuscate that she's scored a massive own goal.

Genuine exploratory therapy should be open-minded, patient-led, non-judgemental, and not come with a fixed intent towards a certain outcome, especially not if that outcome is the aim of the therapist rather than the patient.

It's not conversion therapy, 'trans' is not the default settings for humans, therapy that validates a delusion is the conversion therapy, and should indeed be banned.

tell me you didn't read the article without saying you didn't read the article

I did read the article, but please, do point out the part that proves anything I said wrong.

The level of delusion here is gobsmacking. Of course something called "sex affirming therapy" is not only conversion therapy, it is extremely obvious from the name that it is conversion therapy, so even if O'Malley's aim was to sneak in conversion therapy on the quiet, she's failed at that. This seems like an example of someone who's so deep in the echo chamber they've lost all sense of perspective or normality.

Superb article, thanks.

'...therapy, at its best, is a discipline that gently but persistently brings people back into contact with what is real.'

Seems pretty sensible to me.

The faster the TRAs jump on a thread, the more I rate the idea that they are trying to shut down.

I have read the article. The sex affirming therapist is bringing in the therapy space the reality of the body, and a realistic view of the medical interventions. To me this isn't conversion therapy, but looks very similar to the therapeutic approach that was offered to adult transexuals (as they were called at the time) before the shift to consider medical interventions a matter of civil rights.

On the naming, I would go for 'Gender Understanding Care' as a direct contrast with 'Gender Affirming Care'.

It immediately highlights the weakness of GAC as being affirming rather than understanding, avoids the triggering word 'Sex' and acknowledges that the client has an internal sense of gender that is causing them pain.

I like that one a lot

This is a neat rhetorical trick, but it doesn’t work.

Affirming someone’s actual sex is not “converting” them to anything. Sex is not a belief system, a sexuality, a religion, a political identity or a lifestyle choice. It is the material reality the person already has. You cannot convert someone into being the sex they already are.

What you are doing is smuggling in the assumption that any therapeutic approach which does not affirm a claimed gender identity must therefore be “conversion therapy”. But that is precisely the contested point. It is not an argument. It is just a demand that everyone accept the gender-affirming model as the only morally permitted model.

A therapist saying, “I accept that you feel this distress, let’s understand it carefully before drawing conclusions,” is not conversion therapy. It is therapy.

A therapist saying, “Your distress proves your gender identity is true and everyone else must affirm it,” is not neutral care. It is an ideological commitment dressed up as clinical compassion.

The phrase “sex-affirming” may or may not be the best branding. I’m not especially attached to it. But the idea that acknowledging someone’s actual sex is “conversion” is absurd. Conversion requires changing someone from one thing into another. Recognising reality is not conversion. Helping someone live with their own body is not conversion. Refusing to immediately validate a self-diagnosis is not conversion.

What is actually gobsmacking is the confidence with which you treat your own premise as proven. You haven’t shown that anything here is conversion therapy. You’ve just declared it, then insulted everyone who doesn’t accept your declaration.