The referenced outcomes to legislated road safety, smoking, suicide reporting etc were ‘at the time’ often seen as a government overstep, rights violation etc.
Of course, over time, the positive outcomes from the enforced changes have been embraced there’s no longer a whisper of dissent.
If only we had politicians who would take the heat:
Shut down the whole child gender meddling machine.
The outrage would eventually resolve and we’d have a lot less miserable children demanding the impossible.
I think it's difficult to underestimate the degree of ignorance and misconception in government about these issues. And this is partly the result of years of superficial and misleading media coverage.
I don't think the government has any undertaken any serious study of the question. I have spoken to many politicians and even children's commissioners who ask questions like, "What is the difference between sex and gender?" One said to me that my views were at odds with my professional associations and concluded that I was the one who must be wrong without considering that they are as captured as the government!
“ a combined public health and education campaign ”, an exemplary strategy ( to protect both future vulnerable minors… and many of their clinicians punitive legislation) but what will be the tactics to facilitate it being “ steered by government “??
Future legislators need to be made aware of an intuitively overwhelming majority of child and adolescent psychiatrists, paediatricians and perhaps even child psychologists have hitherto been silent out of the real fear of career retribution, and remain appalled at the clinical dominance by social activists. To obtain that majority opinion may be what it takes , i.,e., the tactic to see the strategy achieved?
Why expect anything to change for as long as the political leaders continue to be advised by the social activists, a noisy powerful, likely tiny, minority?
Perhaps my favorite writer Nabokov detested the professions of psychiatry and psychology, “the oneiromancy and mythogeny of psychoanalysis”, “the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world”, “the Freudian prison of thought”, and “the Freudian nursery-school of thought”, and “expensive confession fests”.
Those professions have had profoundly hideous impacts on lesbians and gays, and women. It’s not often discussed that on the US in the 50’s, the most frequently lobotomized people were women, though most patients were men.
Gays and lesbians were also fodder for lobotomies, as part of “conversion therapy”, which also involved bladder washing, rectal massage, electroconvulsive therapy, surgical castration, hormonal castration, nausea-inducing drugs, psychological torture among many “treatments”. We’re in 2024 and there is a still a medieval “debate” with psychologists and psychiatrists how to most effectively extinguish or excise sexuality in feminine boys and masculine girls.
In 2004 a survey of members of the American Psychological Association decided that torturing vulnerable gays and lesbians is “discredited" but qualified that as … should be interpreted carefully as an initial step, not as a final deliberation.
I think it’s time that psychology and psychiatry be banned globally as a collusive system of fraud based not on science but on “voting” - exactly as WPATH - which has sought for more than 100 years to torture the most mentally vulnerable people with treatments which are claimed to benefit, but elicit precisely the opposite of what what is claimed.
As people consider where did all this “trans” stuff come from, it had a single source, a single continuing point of propagation, and continues to be sanctioned torture for adults and children who need to cope with their existence in the world, not be subject to atrocity.
I foresee a day of reckoning with what psychiatry and psychology has done to women, gays, and lesbians derived from utterly fraudulent science.
Freud was a profound observer and interpreter of human behaviour and his work has influenced all subsequent therapies. He has some culture-bound misguided views on the nature of women and homosexuality, but that is only a fraction of his output and that part is now regarded as obsolete. But don't throw out his other profound insights because of these pockets of theory. He dabbled in dream interpretation but not oneiromancy, to my knowledge.
Sufeitzy, perhaps I am naive enough to want to believe that most medical graduates ( not so sure of the majority of our social science graduate colleagues !), certainly those whose career training and subsequent clinical responsibility is focused on children, are quite appalled with where social activism has taken so many vulnerable children. If that intuition could be confirmed, say, by a voluntary plebiscite/secret ballot, politicians may respond appropriately. First we need that evidence, with which to lobby future ( the ALP is welded to an ideological position, so will take a change of government ) legislators . Hard to believe it would not be a big vote winner in a federal election and so provide a real mandate for long overdue action.
I’m just amazed that in all that I’ve read in perhaps three decades. with three exceptions, it serves exclusively to propagate the fiction without a shred of evidence. Either the science corrects itself and extirpates the nonsense, or politics will do it as a protective impulse, or a legal system.
In 1993, in the “American Scholar” Paul R. McHugh wrote an essay “Psychiatric Misadventures”, where among many issues he decrys the dismissal of psychiatric patients to the streets, and that in the case of transsexualism the doctor totally abdicates their role of protecting the patient. A surgeon complains to him “how do you think it feels to cut into healthy flesh because a psychiatrist cannot figure out what is going on.” He worked to close the gender clinic at John’s Hopkins. He’s no friend of gays - against same sex marriage - but there’s no apparent effort to mutilate them. He likens trans surgery to liposuction for anorexics.
I have two other articles in 32 years of reading, one pointing out that autistic people are extremely gullible, and matched with trans they can be easily persuaded of fictions about themselves (I can find a reference somewhere), highly dangerous in a trans context.
And finally, someone who explored the idea that trans was very similar to body integrity dysmorphia, and person was crushed by the reaction - how dare they even consider anything is remotely similar to trans. The pile-on was staggering.
Three negative comments from psychiatrists in 32 years.
The Soviet system is psychiatry was used to abuse dissidents, claiming mental conditions which didn’t exist.
Paul McHugh, the psychiatrist who worked with Ken Zucker, psychologist at Paul Hopkins, is credited with the saying “ hell hath no fury like a vested interest in masquerading as a moral principle “. These two experienced clinicians were the earlier victims of the narcissistic compassion of the social activists which has metastasized from the social science- born ideology of gender identity/ fluidity, deep into medicine.
I spoke to McHugh a few years ago and he explained how he came to shut down the "sex reassignment" program at Johns Hopkins. There was a review and the finding was that the doctors were reinforcing a delusion and that the treatment did not bring benefit. Not long ago, the hospital reintroduced treatment, now in the guise of "gender-affirming care."
Did we hear from Dr Cass any details on the status of those many ( we heard earlier that some one hundred) class actions have been lodged, and who have been named? Have the class actions extended beyond individual clinicians and the GIDS ? Where ever the “ buck stops” in the U.K. might inform professional bodies here of potential exposure.
Bernard, would you be able to tell us whether Hillary Cass in the recent webinar had any comments on whether the U.K.’s equivalent to our statuary body, AHPRA, has been deemed to wear some responsibility for historical inaction and to be included in litigants’ claims over GIDS closure? I do understand, as you have mentioned, AHPRA looks to be comfortably quarantined against likely exposure while it sits as an agency of our federal government, rather than as an independent investigative body. If and when push comes to shove, litigants might reasonably think they have abrogated their charter, and, if such historic inaction was the result of ministerial control, where does that put the minister and the department? Where does the buck stop ?
Andrew, I guess the UK Care Quality Commission might be the parallel to Ahpra. It didn’t come up during the webinar. It was a bad rating of the Tavistock clinic by the CQC that contributed to the establishment of the Cass review. Ahora looks like part of the problem, not a solution.
Cass didn’t talk of litigation. The supposed class action against the Tavistock was announced in the media no doubt to try to attract members. Nothing heard since. The lawyers haven’t answered my emails.
To have it “ shut down “ will require legislation ( to ban both medical intervention in minors, and anticonversion therapy legislation) which would require action in each State, an ambitious goal, unlikely to happen given ALP dominance and policy of support of GAC, which is obligatory in all ALP State and Territory jurisdictions. Perhaps a change of federal government might provide the opportunity to introduce what is needed? Should the focus be on lobbying the current federal government opposition?
"A sane society governed by sane politicians, and assisted by expert public health professionals, will have made that decision a priori, that is, there will be no medicalised gender treatment for minors." Oh for a sane society governed by sane politicians - although it is refreshing to read a sane psychologist. We are a stupid (= willfully ignorant) society governed by clowns. So the only recourse is to fight to save kids from this madness and hope that one day the rest of the world will wake up. It is, in a way, similar to the resistance in Germany during WWII - many gave up trying to convince their compatriots that Nazism was bad and focused on saving Jews and defeating Nazis.
It’s taken me quite some time since I started taking notes on this, but the pattern is utterly clear and simple now.
1. The origin and continued propagation is via Psychiatry. Not media, not queer studies, not politics, not trans, not social media or the internet, and not postmodernism. Psychiatry is the only common factor in all problems relating to trans.
2. It is Psychiatry at a medieval level totally lacking in science, the kind of psychiatry which works with demonic possession and trepanning skulls.
3. Because of this it is the single mental illness requiring surgical removal of healthy tissue for “treatment”, and the only mental illness requiring the rest of world to conform to a patient’s delusion as “treatment”
4. Psychiatry will contend that only it can self-regulate this treatment. It acts above all human social systems because, via circular reasoning, it must label all criticism as unscientific, invalid, or hatred, or lethal as a method of self-preservation.
It works in 4 contexts.
1) Grooming parents. Parents of feminine boys and masculine girls are encouraged to physically mutilate and psychologically torture their child who is often, but not always, showing early signs of gay or lesbian orientation, in the name of “care”.
2. Claim of Authority. All adolescents have puberty anxiety, since all humans have anxiety as their body changes.
This is an ordinary instinct of self preservation.
This instinct and anxiety is ‘cared for’ with surgical mutilation and psychological torture instead of time-tested non-psychiatric social methods of helping adolescents adapt and cope with reality.
3. Misogynistic Complicity. For adult men who hate women, psychiatry encourages them to denigrate women by imitating the worst stereotypes, creating legal and social context for men to taunt and challenge women who object, and enable them get a sexual kick out of it via forcing women to accept it.
4. Abandonment. For adult men who are utterly delusional, the same type of delusion which makes them think they are Jesus Christ, or have someone else’s arms or legs, or are possessed by a demon, the treatment is to abandon all concepts of mental health care. At that point, along with surgical mutilation, psychiatry makes a futile attempt force the world to conform to the delusion, in a manner not dissimilar to abandoning those under clinical care to be “free” homeless.
The only path to elimination of this atrocity is legal regulation, which is enormously difficult.
1) Since politics, the law, medicine, philosophy, and hard science by consensus relegate all issues of mental health exclusively to psychiatry, any challenge is “unscientific” because the domain of mental health is only for psychiatrists.
2) The history of psychiatry is littered with instances of catastrophic failure to regulate, without penalty or accountability, from ECT to Lobotomy, from chemical and surgical castration to ejecting the mentally ill from care facilities to be free, to quote recent examples. Alan Turing and Jazz Jennings are example casualties.
3) Psychiatry was the origin, and continues to be the locus of propagation of the entire issue, and there has been no clear public systemic voice of reason from that direction for decades. It’s would be an abject admission of failure. The Cass report is a small example of precisely that complete admission of failure.
4) The problem is most acute where psychiatry is controlled through mechanisms of national regulation of medicine via insurance, as though the medieval treatments were equivalent to advanced oncology or organ transplant. This is Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and with one major change, the US.
The one major change which accelerated this phenomenon in the US in 2010 was not the iPhone or social media but was in the Affordable Care Act. In a form of legislative blackmail, section 1557 made paying for the diagnosis and treatment of medieval gender-related “care” a condition of being able to offer any federal insurance in the US under the plan.
It’s not that psychiatry or other medicine makes signifiant money off trans, it’s a blip, a tiny fraction of the population of the US. It’s that in the federally regulated and paid insurance markets, insurers would collapse financially if they were forced to withdraw.
Legal blackmail into funding medieval treatments.
That was the magic accelerant. I can’t believe I didn’t see that. The last puzzle piece drops into place.
. . . and let’s not forget the headlines on Australia’s publicly owned and funded Broadcasting Commission (the ABC) on their ‘Australia Story’ of Mary 24th 2021:
“Michelle Telfer has been a lifesaving advocate for hundreds of trans children but her work doesn't come without controversy”
The story goes on to include . . . . “She is credited with helping to save many children's lives without pulling out a single scalpel or tending to any life-threatening disease”
This is yet another nonsensical unbalanced report from ‘our’ National news source, and we wonder why the so many of those whose only source of news is the ABC read such stuff and actually believe it!
I agree, the mindless hagiography of this child transition proponent is very disturbing, as was Patricia Karvelas's attempt to discredit the Westmead researchers because they reported findings on mental health of gender dysphoric young people that did not suit the dominant messaging that medical transition improves mental health. Karvelas also gave most of her airtime to propagate the view that without transition, children will commit suicide (cf Telfer's "lifesaving care" trope). Currently, the media, especially the ABC, is part of the problem. Perhaps convincing journalists as well as politicians is required to turn this ship around?
Yes Dianna, the suicide threat has been marketed and exploited to a great degree by the proponents of the affirmative model of gender ‘care’.
I suspect that the tide may be turning, ever so slowly and there may be a glimmer of light at the end of this very dark tunnel. However, the challenge will be that the proponents have dug themselves so deep in commitment and irreversible damage that careers are at stake and that will represent a big disincentive to backpaddling.
I have worried for some time that the militant and anti-scientific push towards "gender affirming therapy" by gender activists would end up harming the very real and legitimate needs of transgendered individuals, and after reading this article, I fear my worries are confirmed.
The transgender condition was well researched, documented, and discussed among medical professionals decades before the postmodernists came along, claiming authority in the matter and seriously muddying the waters. Now from the opposite side there come voices like those of Dr. Kenny, pushing the view that transgenderism is a delusion, that everyone just needs a good dose of sanity, (and medical professionals a good slap upside the head in the form of fines and imprisonment for interfering with mother nature), and children taught that regardless of how they feel inside, they need to learn to think of their minds and personalities as all of a piece with their at-birth genitalia.
But from all I can tell (I took a somewhat cursory look at some of Kenny's published works, so take my view with a grain of salt), this view doesn't seem to be greatly informed by the decades of prior mainstream research, outside the "critical" tradition, which fairly clearly demonstrates that, like sexual orientation, sexual identity is an aspect of psychosocial development in which variation from the standard male / female binary occurs naturally if somewhat rarely. Sexual identity, "cis" or "trans", has a basis in the prenatal development of the brain, and while transgender ID may take years to be fully manifest, it is relatively stable over an individual's lifetime.
Quoting from a 1974 article by Milton Diamond, professor of neuroanatomy and sexology at the University of Hawaii and past president of the International Academy of Sex Research:
"... the external genitalia can be a good bioassay of the psychosexual bias of the (behaviour mediating) nervous system. Regrettably, for transsexuals, it is probable that they have a nervous system which has been potentiated toward a sexual identity opposite to that concordant with their genitalia. Benjamin,6 one of the foremost clinical authorities on transsexualism, also essentially maintains this view. After birth ontogenetic experiences will determine how far and in what manner the diasthetic potential of transsexuals (or anyone else) will be developed. The potential, however, cannot be transcended."
So while I concur with Dr. Kenny that the ROGD phenomenon has some characteristics of a pandemic, I believe that much more is needed than a good dose of sanity and some more laws. Among other things, we need the voice of scientists who really understand what they're talking about, not just therapists and "experts". Including experts who, like Dr. Kenny, have views steeped in the ethos of some form of "depth psychology" such as Freudian psychoanalysis (a theme I saw repeated in her publications), a tradition that is in my opinion little less mystical and pseudoscientific than the European philosophy embraced by the postmodernists.
(I probably shouldn't have added that last dig. It's just that, as the parent of a transgendered child, when someone tells me that no one is born that way, I get a bit testy....)
Lee, I agree with you - "variation from the standard male / female binary occurs naturally if somewhat rarely." I am not denying the existence of transgender people but I am seriously questioning the astounding increases in transgender declaring young people over the past 20 years. The DSM 5 estimates from 2013 were one in 10,000 boys and one in 27,000 girls. Now we are told that the estimates are 1-3% or higher - just not possible in such a short time frame.
Most of the young people I work with therapeutically are unable to provide an explanation as to why they would be more comfortable in a body mimicking the opposite sex. They just would. Their current body feels "wrong." It just does. According to WPATH, this justifies a process of medicalization that renders healthy young people permanent medical patients!
Surely you well described the core issue, that being a mature age need be reached before employing medical ( hormonal) intervention given what is known to be an irreversible path, once embarked upon and the absence of any way to predict the relief or the persistence of the dysphoria by the passage of a natural puberty. 18 yrs would be a good start, though a good argument can be made for mid 20s. Mature aged presenting individuals of course should plot their own life course with much psychological and medical assistance as requested or deemed appropriate.
The referenced outcomes to legislated road safety, smoking, suicide reporting etc were ‘at the time’ often seen as a government overstep, rights violation etc.
Of course, over time, the positive outcomes from the enforced changes have been embraced there’s no longer a whisper of dissent.
If only we had politicians who would take the heat:
Shut down the whole child gender meddling machine.
The outrage would eventually resolve and we’d have a lot less miserable children demanding the impossible.
I remember as a child travelling on smoke-filled buses! No nostalgia for it.
I think it's difficult to underestimate the degree of ignorance and misconception in government about these issues. And this is partly the result of years of superficial and misleading media coverage.
I don't think the government has any undertaken any serious study of the question. I have spoken to many politicians and even children's commissioners who ask questions like, "What is the difference between sex and gender?" One said to me that my views were at odds with my professional associations and concluded that I was the one who must be wrong without considering that they are as captured as the government!
“ a combined public health and education campaign ”, an exemplary strategy ( to protect both future vulnerable minors… and many of their clinicians punitive legislation) but what will be the tactics to facilitate it being “ steered by government “??
Future legislators need to be made aware of an intuitively overwhelming majority of child and adolescent psychiatrists, paediatricians and perhaps even child psychologists have hitherto been silent out of the real fear of career retribution, and remain appalled at the clinical dominance by social activists. To obtain that majority opinion may be what it takes , i.,e., the tactic to see the strategy achieved?
Why expect anything to change for as long as the political leaders continue to be advised by the social activists, a noisy powerful, likely tiny, minority?
Perhaps my favorite writer Nabokov detested the professions of psychiatry and psychology, “the oneiromancy and mythogeny of psychoanalysis”, “the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world”, “the Freudian prison of thought”, and “the Freudian nursery-school of thought”, and “expensive confession fests”.
Those professions have had profoundly hideous impacts on lesbians and gays, and women. It’s not often discussed that on the US in the 50’s, the most frequently lobotomized people were women, though most patients were men.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5962395/
Gays and lesbians were also fodder for lobotomies, as part of “conversion therapy”, which also involved bladder washing, rectal massage, electroconvulsive therapy, surgical castration, hormonal castration, nausea-inducing drugs, psychological torture among many “treatments”. We’re in 2024 and there is a still a medieval “debate” with psychologists and psychiatrists how to most effectively extinguish or excise sexuality in feminine boys and masculine girls.
In 2004 a survey of members of the American Psychological Association decided that torturing vulnerable gays and lesbians is “discredited" but qualified that as … should be interpreted carefully as an initial step, not as a final deliberation.
I think it’s time that psychology and psychiatry be banned globally as a collusive system of fraud based not on science but on “voting” - exactly as WPATH - which has sought for more than 100 years to torture the most mentally vulnerable people with treatments which are claimed to benefit, but elicit precisely the opposite of what what is claimed.
As people consider where did all this “trans” stuff come from, it had a single source, a single continuing point of propagation, and continues to be sanctioned torture for adults and children who need to cope with their existence in the world, not be subject to atrocity.
I foresee a day of reckoning with what psychiatry and psychology has done to women, gays, and lesbians derived from utterly fraudulent science.
Freud was a profound observer and interpreter of human behaviour and his work has influenced all subsequent therapies. He has some culture-bound misguided views on the nature of women and homosexuality, but that is only a fraction of his output and that part is now regarded as obsolete. But don't throw out his other profound insights because of these pockets of theory. He dabbled in dream interpretation but not oneiromancy, to my knowledge.
Speak, memory! is one of the best ever titles for a memoir.
Sufeitzy, perhaps I am naive enough to want to believe that most medical graduates ( not so sure of the majority of our social science graduate colleagues !), certainly those whose career training and subsequent clinical responsibility is focused on children, are quite appalled with where social activism has taken so many vulnerable children. If that intuition could be confirmed, say, by a voluntary plebiscite/secret ballot, politicians may respond appropriately. First we need that evidence, with which to lobby future ( the ALP is welded to an ideological position, so will take a change of government ) legislators . Hard to believe it would not be a big vote winner in a federal election and so provide a real mandate for long overdue action.
I’m just amazed that in all that I’ve read in perhaps three decades. with three exceptions, it serves exclusively to propagate the fiction without a shred of evidence. Either the science corrects itself and extirpates the nonsense, or politics will do it as a protective impulse, or a legal system.
In 1993, in the “American Scholar” Paul R. McHugh wrote an essay “Psychiatric Misadventures”, where among many issues he decrys the dismissal of psychiatric patients to the streets, and that in the case of transsexualism the doctor totally abdicates their role of protecting the patient. A surgeon complains to him “how do you think it feels to cut into healthy flesh because a psychiatrist cannot figure out what is going on.” He worked to close the gender clinic at John’s Hopkins. He’s no friend of gays - against same sex marriage - but there’s no apparent effort to mutilate them. He likens trans surgery to liposuction for anorexics.
I have two other articles in 32 years of reading, one pointing out that autistic people are extremely gullible, and matched with trans they can be easily persuaded of fictions about themselves (I can find a reference somewhere), highly dangerous in a trans context.
And finally, someone who explored the idea that trans was very similar to body integrity dysmorphia, and person was crushed by the reaction - how dare they even consider anything is remotely similar to trans. The pile-on was staggering.
Three negative comments from psychiatrists in 32 years.
The Soviet system is psychiatry was used to abuse dissidents, claiming mental conditions which didn’t exist.
We’ve reached that point.
Paul McHugh, the psychiatrist who worked with Ken Zucker, psychologist at Paul Hopkins, is credited with the saying “ hell hath no fury like a vested interest in masquerading as a moral principle “. These two experienced clinicians were the earlier victims of the narcissistic compassion of the social activists which has metastasized from the social science- born ideology of gender identity/ fluidity, deep into medicine.
I spoke to McHugh a few years ago and he explained how he came to shut down the "sex reassignment" program at Johns Hopkins. There was a review and the finding was that the doctors were reinforcing a delusion and that the treatment did not bring benefit. Not long ago, the hospital reintroduced treatment, now in the guise of "gender-affirming care."
Did we hear from Dr Cass any details on the status of those many ( we heard earlier that some one hundred) class actions have been lodged, and who have been named? Have the class actions extended beyond individual clinicians and the GIDS ? Where ever the “ buck stops” in the U.K. might inform professional bodies here of potential exposure.
Bernard, would you be able to tell us whether Hillary Cass in the recent webinar had any comments on whether the U.K.’s equivalent to our statuary body, AHPRA, has been deemed to wear some responsibility for historical inaction and to be included in litigants’ claims over GIDS closure? I do understand, as you have mentioned, AHPRA looks to be comfortably quarantined against likely exposure while it sits as an agency of our federal government, rather than as an independent investigative body. If and when push comes to shove, litigants might reasonably think they have abrogated their charter, and, if such historic inaction was the result of ministerial control, where does that put the minister and the department? Where does the buck stop ?
Andrew, I guess the UK Care Quality Commission might be the parallel to Ahpra. It didn’t come up during the webinar. It was a bad rating of the Tavistock clinic by the CQC that contributed to the establishment of the Cass review. Ahora looks like part of the problem, not a solution.
Oh. I wish!
Cass didn’t talk of litigation. The supposed class action against the Tavistock was announced in the media no doubt to try to attract members. Nothing heard since. The lawyers haven’t answered my emails.
To have it “ shut down “ will require legislation ( to ban both medical intervention in minors, and anticonversion therapy legislation) which would require action in each State, an ambitious goal, unlikely to happen given ALP dominance and policy of support of GAC, which is obligatory in all ALP State and Territory jurisdictions. Perhaps a change of federal government might provide the opportunity to introduce what is needed? Should the focus be on lobbying the current federal government opposition?
"A sane society governed by sane politicians, and assisted by expert public health professionals, will have made that decision a priori, that is, there will be no medicalised gender treatment for minors." Oh for a sane society governed by sane politicians - although it is refreshing to read a sane psychologist. We are a stupid (= willfully ignorant) society governed by clowns. So the only recourse is to fight to save kids from this madness and hope that one day the rest of the world will wake up. It is, in a way, similar to the resistance in Germany during WWII - many gave up trying to convince their compatriots that Nazism was bad and focused on saving Jews and defeating Nazis.
It’s taken me quite some time since I started taking notes on this, but the pattern is utterly clear and simple now.
1. The origin and continued propagation is via Psychiatry. Not media, not queer studies, not politics, not trans, not social media or the internet, and not postmodernism. Psychiatry is the only common factor in all problems relating to trans.
2. It is Psychiatry at a medieval level totally lacking in science, the kind of psychiatry which works with demonic possession and trepanning skulls.
3. Because of this it is the single mental illness requiring surgical removal of healthy tissue for “treatment”, and the only mental illness requiring the rest of world to conform to a patient’s delusion as “treatment”
4. Psychiatry will contend that only it can self-regulate this treatment. It acts above all human social systems because, via circular reasoning, it must label all criticism as unscientific, invalid, or hatred, or lethal as a method of self-preservation.
It works in 4 contexts.
1) Grooming parents. Parents of feminine boys and masculine girls are encouraged to physically mutilate and psychologically torture their child who is often, but not always, showing early signs of gay or lesbian orientation, in the name of “care”.
2. Claim of Authority. All adolescents have puberty anxiety, since all humans have anxiety as their body changes.
This is an ordinary instinct of self preservation.
This instinct and anxiety is ‘cared for’ with surgical mutilation and psychological torture instead of time-tested non-psychiatric social methods of helping adolescents adapt and cope with reality.
3. Misogynistic Complicity. For adult men who hate women, psychiatry encourages them to denigrate women by imitating the worst stereotypes, creating legal and social context for men to taunt and challenge women who object, and enable them get a sexual kick out of it via forcing women to accept it.
4. Abandonment. For adult men who are utterly delusional, the same type of delusion which makes them think they are Jesus Christ, or have someone else’s arms or legs, or are possessed by a demon, the treatment is to abandon all concepts of mental health care. At that point, along with surgical mutilation, psychiatry makes a futile attempt force the world to conform to the delusion, in a manner not dissimilar to abandoning those under clinical care to be “free” homeless.
The only path to elimination of this atrocity is legal regulation, which is enormously difficult.
1) Since politics, the law, medicine, philosophy, and hard science by consensus relegate all issues of mental health exclusively to psychiatry, any challenge is “unscientific” because the domain of mental health is only for psychiatrists.
2) The history of psychiatry is littered with instances of catastrophic failure to regulate, without penalty or accountability, from ECT to Lobotomy, from chemical and surgical castration to ejecting the mentally ill from care facilities to be free, to quote recent examples. Alan Turing and Jazz Jennings are example casualties.
3) Psychiatry was the origin, and continues to be the locus of propagation of the entire issue, and there has been no clear public systemic voice of reason from that direction for decades. It’s would be an abject admission of failure. The Cass report is a small example of precisely that complete admission of failure.
4) The problem is most acute where psychiatry is controlled through mechanisms of national regulation of medicine via insurance, as though the medieval treatments were equivalent to advanced oncology or organ transplant. This is Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and with one major change, the US.
The one major change which accelerated this phenomenon in the US in 2010 was not the iPhone or social media but was in the Affordable Care Act. In a form of legislative blackmail, section 1557 made paying for the diagnosis and treatment of medieval gender-related “care” a condition of being able to offer any federal insurance in the US under the plan.
It’s not that psychiatry or other medicine makes signifiant money off trans, it’s a blip, a tiny fraction of the population of the US. It’s that in the federally regulated and paid insurance markets, insurers would collapse financially if they were forced to withdraw.
Legal blackmail into funding medieval treatments.
That was the magic accelerant. I can’t believe I didn’t see that. The last puzzle piece drops into place.
. . . and let’s not forget the headlines on Australia’s publicly owned and funded Broadcasting Commission (the ABC) on their ‘Australia Story’ of Mary 24th 2021:
“Michelle Telfer has been a lifesaving advocate for hundreds of trans children but her work doesn't come without controversy”
The story goes on to include . . . . “She is credited with helping to save many children's lives without pulling out a single scalpel or tending to any life-threatening disease”
This is yet another nonsensical unbalanced report from ‘our’ National news source, and we wonder why the so many of those whose only source of news is the ABC read such stuff and actually believe it!
I agree, the mindless hagiography of this child transition proponent is very disturbing, as was Patricia Karvelas's attempt to discredit the Westmead researchers because they reported findings on mental health of gender dysphoric young people that did not suit the dominant messaging that medical transition improves mental health. Karvelas also gave most of her airtime to propagate the view that without transition, children will commit suicide (cf Telfer's "lifesaving care" trope). Currently, the media, especially the ABC, is part of the problem. Perhaps convincing journalists as well as politicians is required to turn this ship around?
Yes Dianna, the suicide threat has been marketed and exploited to a great degree by the proponents of the affirmative model of gender ‘care’.
I suspect that the tide may be turning, ever so slowly and there may be a glimmer of light at the end of this very dark tunnel. However, the challenge will be that the proponents have dug themselves so deep in commitment and irreversible damage that careers are at stake and that will represent a big disincentive to backpaddling.
I have worried for some time that the militant and anti-scientific push towards "gender affirming therapy" by gender activists would end up harming the very real and legitimate needs of transgendered individuals, and after reading this article, I fear my worries are confirmed.
The transgender condition was well researched, documented, and discussed among medical professionals decades before the postmodernists came along, claiming authority in the matter and seriously muddying the waters. Now from the opposite side there come voices like those of Dr. Kenny, pushing the view that transgenderism is a delusion, that everyone just needs a good dose of sanity, (and medical professionals a good slap upside the head in the form of fines and imprisonment for interfering with mother nature), and children taught that regardless of how they feel inside, they need to learn to think of their minds and personalities as all of a piece with their at-birth genitalia.
But from all I can tell (I took a somewhat cursory look at some of Kenny's published works, so take my view with a grain of salt), this view doesn't seem to be greatly informed by the decades of prior mainstream research, outside the "critical" tradition, which fairly clearly demonstrates that, like sexual orientation, sexual identity is an aspect of psychosocial development in which variation from the standard male / female binary occurs naturally if somewhat rarely. Sexual identity, "cis" or "trans", has a basis in the prenatal development of the brain, and while transgender ID may take years to be fully manifest, it is relatively stable over an individual's lifetime.
Quoting from a 1974 article by Milton Diamond, professor of neuroanatomy and sexology at the University of Hawaii and past president of the International Academy of Sex Research:
"... the external genitalia can be a good bioassay of the psychosexual bias of the (behaviour mediating) nervous system. Regrettably, for transsexuals, it is probable that they have a nervous system which has been potentiated toward a sexual identity opposite to that concordant with their genitalia. Benjamin,6 one of the foremost clinical authorities on transsexualism, also essentially maintains this view. After birth ontogenetic experiences will determine how far and in what manner the diasthetic potential of transsexuals (or anyone else) will be developed. The potential, however, cannot be transcended."
So while I concur with Dr. Kenny that the ROGD phenomenon has some characteristics of a pandemic, I believe that much more is needed than a good dose of sanity and some more laws. Among other things, we need the voice of scientists who really understand what they're talking about, not just therapists and "experts". Including experts who, like Dr. Kenny, have views steeped in the ethos of some form of "depth psychology" such as Freudian psychoanalysis (a theme I saw repeated in her publications), a tradition that is in my opinion little less mystical and pseudoscientific than the European philosophy embraced by the postmodernists.
(I probably shouldn't have added that last dig. It's just that, as the parent of a transgendered child, when someone tells me that no one is born that way, I get a bit testy....)
Lee, I agree with you - "variation from the standard male / female binary occurs naturally if somewhat rarely." I am not denying the existence of transgender people but I am seriously questioning the astounding increases in transgender declaring young people over the past 20 years. The DSM 5 estimates from 2013 were one in 10,000 boys and one in 27,000 girls. Now we are told that the estimates are 1-3% or higher - just not possible in such a short time frame.
Most of the young people I work with therapeutically are unable to provide an explanation as to why they would be more comfortable in a body mimicking the opposite sex. They just would. Their current body feels "wrong." It just does. According to WPATH, this justifies a process of medicalization that renders healthy young people permanent medical patients!
Surely you well described the core issue, that being a mature age need be reached before employing medical ( hormonal) intervention given what is known to be an irreversible path, once embarked upon and the absence of any way to predict the relief or the persistence of the dysphoria by the passage of a natural puberty. 18 yrs would be a good start, though a good argument can be made for mid 20s. Mature aged presenting individuals of course should plot their own life course with much psychological and medical assistance as requested or deemed appropriate.