Transgenderism
Transgenderism
Where does kindness meet truth?
(This article discusses sensitive topics such as discrimination, abuse, self-harm, and suicide.)
Hey beautiful human,
The mainstream media has become masterful at distracting and dividing people, but my experience talking to friends from all walks of life in real, face-to-face interactions is that most of us still have nuanced and complex views on most topics, including the topic of transgenderism.
My Intention
In exploring the topic of transgenderism, I want to use my brain and my heart, and strive for truth and kindness. I believe that “truth or kindness” is a false choice, because truth needs kindness and kindness needs truth:
the most watertight logic is unwise if it cannot take people’s emotions into account, and,
the most heartfelt desire to protect and nurture can harm if it is not informed by reality.
I know that truth and kindness are the work of a lifetime, so please don’t hesitate to give me feedback if you see that I have blind spots. When you prove me wrong, you help me grow.
There are two kinds of arguments I want to avoid: strawman arguments, and middle ground arguments.
A strawman argument is an intentionally misrepresented statement that one sets up because it is easier to defeat than the other person’s actual argument. Unfortunately, we see a lot of strawman arguments being made today on both sides of the trans debate. Echo chambers are formed. One’s position is reinforced. The other side is so grossly caricatured that one never gets to hear the actual good points being made and have a chance to chew on them.
To avoid this, I spent about a year immersing my brain and heart in pro-trans (for lack of a better word) ideas and life stories. I befriended trans and gender non-conforming people and interviewed them about their experiences. I watched documentaries and learned about gender theory, the discrimination and abuse trans and gender non-conforming people face, the mental health crisis among trans people in particular and the LGBTQ+ community in general, the human rights issues, and ways to help. I found the stories moving and the ideas stimulating.
Then, I spent about another year immersing my heart and brain in trans-concerned (again, for lack of a better word) life stories and ideas. I learned from people who have “detransitioned”, from traumatized parents, and from concerned psychologists. I also learned about the various political forces at play and the suffering caused by various trans-related policies. I also found the stories touching and the points made interesting.
I am definitely not an expert on this complex subject, so please take this article with a grain of salt, but as someone who cares about mental health and social issues, I will share where I am in my research and thinking.
I'm not saying this to be your typical, sandal-wearing, peace-promoting Buddhist monk (unless it's become job conditioning at this point and I'm just not aware of it anymore), but I sincerely believe that on both sides of the conversation are good people with good intentions making good points, and I hope my article will reflect the good points being made on each side.
At the same time, it is important to me to remain critical and independent.
If you're wondering where I stand on the political landscape, here's a map:
A middle-ground argument is one in which one tries to find a middle ground between two propositions at the expense of truth. One may think, “If some people think that 2+2=4 and others think that 2+2=5, then surely the answer must be somewhere in the middle”.
Except it doesn't.
In order to think clearly, I try to find the strength within myself to resist not only my in-group bias (most of the people around me are left-leaning, LGBT advocates), but also my inner desire to bring everyone together, the “tyranny of harmony”. I want to understand for myself what is right and what is wrong, what is factual and what is not. I try to put personal integrity before social integration.
Discrimination
I know this has been a long intro and I will get into the nitty-gritty in a moment, but please allow me to provide some context because this is really important.
We are all human.
And as much as we don't want to sidestep the important issues raised by the allies of the transgender movement and its opposition, we also don't want to let those issues distract us from the more fundamental humanity we all share. We want to see that the person with whom we disagree, or with whom we don't yet feel comfortable, is also a human being with basic human needs for safety, connection, and understanding.
If, as we think about others, we lose touch with,
our common humanity,
our own shortcomings, and,
the beauty of the other person,
we can be sure that our thinking is leaving the realm of wisdom.
What we need is discernment, not discrimination, and dehumanization is where discernment ends and discrimination begins.
It is important to note that this tendency to dehumanize, to discriminate, is not limited to any political party. If we catch ourselves thinking, “I'm a good person. I'm an inclusive, open-hearted person. I don't make hasty generalizations about groups of people and discriminate against them. Yes, that's how we are on my side of the political spectrum. We're not like those racist, bigoted, stupid people on the right”, we might want to meditate on our own hypocrisy and let it go.
With discrimination comes abuse, and I condemn all forms of abuse. Let me be more specific.
Clear verbal abuse
Telling someone, online or IRL, that they’re so messed up that they should kill themselves is abusive and I condemn that.
Calling someone a “freak”, “tranny”, or “woketard” is abusive and I condemn that.
Saying things like “God hates fags”, that LGBT people are “creations of the devil”, and the like, on pseudo-religious grounds and whether one is a member of the clergy or not, is abusive and I condemn that.
Calling someone “transphobic” who is not technically transphobic (more on that later) is abusive and I condemn that.
Asking someone you've just met, “But what's in your pants?” is rude and shows a lack of tact and social intelligence and I condemn that.
May be verbal abuse
If someone uses a transgender person’s biologically correct pronoun with respect in their heart, that is fine with me and I do not condemn that. But if someone uses a transgender person’s biologically correct pronoun with the intention of bullying them, making fun of them, or demeaning them in the eyes of others, I condemn that.
Physical abuse
Pushing or hitting someone, except in a clear self-defense situation, is abusive, and I condemn that.
The trans activist who punches a trans-concerned activist may be inwardly convinced that he is taking a clear stand to protect an oppressed minority and help society adopt a gender paradigm that is more progressive and inclusive, but the fact is that he is a human being hitting another human being, and I condemn that.
The trans-concerned activist who kicks a trans activist may inwardly be convinced that he is taking a clear stand to protect children, family values, and religious ideals against the decadence of society, but the fact is that he is a human being hitting another human being, and I condemn that.
Killing
I condemn killing, except perhaps in extreme situations of self-defense.
No one deserves to die simply because we don't like the clothes or makeup they wear, or because we are uncomfortable with them being in a romantic and/or sexual relationship with a consenting adult of the same sex.
No one deserves to die for hurting our feelings, for having a different opinion than us on gender and trans-related policies, or for exercising their constitutional right to free speech.
Discrimination breeds violence, and both are toxic to our well-being as a society.
There is another form of discrimination and violence that we need to talk about, and that is discrimination and violence against ourselves.
Self-Discrimination
We can all recall experiencing some form of self-hatred and mental health struggles in our tween and teen years.
Those of you who have followed my work know that I went through psychosis as a teenager, and one of the worst parts of it was self-discrimination. I discriminated against my body and my mind, and I don't wish that on anyone.
I had a girlfriend at the time named Charlotte. She was very kind and fun, and had long hair and almond eyes like Pocahontas. I had been dating her for a while when I noticed she had scars on her wrist. When I asked her about these scars, she said that her cat had scratched her.
But I found out later that she had been cutting herself.
There were a few times when Charlotte woke up in the middle of the night with the urge to cut herself. These were very painful moments for me too, and despite my own struggles, I think I did the right thing: I put my arms around her to prevent her from hurting herself, and I talked to her calmly, trying my best to reassure her.
Isn’t that what teenage years often look like — minimizing the damage as dark storms pass by?
She never resented me for restraining her.
Now, let us imagine that instead of restraining Charlotte, I had told her: “I affirm your feelings, honey. Whatever you feel is right, and it is important for me to support you in your choices. Here is a knife for you.”
Charlotte would have “happily” taken the knife, “happily” cut herself, and I would have “happily” celebrated with her: “You are so courageous, honey.”
Is this the kind of love we want to normalize?
Today, Charlotte is an adult, and I imagine that the scars on her wrists are healed. But even if they aren’t, the damage to the skin on her wrists is nowhere near the irreversible damage of a double mastectomy, a hysterectomy, a vaginectomy, or a course of puberty blockers.
Pathologization
I believe that the question of pathologization, that is, whether to treat “gender dysphoria” (previously known as “gender identity disorder”) as a mental disease or not, is not very important, for five reasons:
We don’t need a diagnostic to feel better. There are countless things we can do to feel better, and the vast majority of them don’t involve getting diagnosed. Sometimes, we don’t even need to do anything special for things to resolve themselves. In their 2010 paper “Desisting and Persisting Gender Dysphoria After Childhood”, Dutch researchers combined the results of nine studies and found that 84.2% of children suffering with gender dysphoria naturally desist if left untreated:
The prospective literature on gender dysphoric children shows that gender dysphoria in childhood does not irrevocably result in gender dysphoria or GID in adolescence and adulthood. Feelings of gender dysphoria persisted into adolescence in only 39 out of 246 of the children (15.8%) who were investigated in a number of prospective follow-up studies.
[…]
Although the persistence rates differed between the various studies (2% to 27%), the results unequivocally showed that the gender dysphoria remitted after puberty in the vast majority of children.
Looking at the history of psychiatry, we see that pathologization is a slippery slope towards abuse. This slippery slope goes likes this:
Group A (the powerful majority) feels uncomfortable with group B (the weaker minority).
Group A pathologizes group B.
Group A dehumanizes group B.
Group A feels morally justified to mistreat group B.
If you believe the words “abuse” and “mistreat” are hyperbolic, I recommend Robert Whitaker’s book Mad in America.
Diagnoses can be misused. Mental health professionals can make skilful use of diagnosis to maximize their therapeutic effect, and this is wonderful, but they can also give a diagnosis to,
hide their powerlessness — ‘I have no clue how you can get better but here’s something for you to focus on’,
establish dominance — ‘I know this complicated word and I’m the professional in this room’,
create dependence — ‘Since we established that you’re messed up and I know what’s up, you’ll need to book more sessions with me’, and last but not least,
sell drugs they know very little about.
What qualifies as a mental health problem is subject to changing cultural influences. For example,
A few decades ago, homosexuals were considered mentally ill. Today, they’re not.
In some cultures, hearing voices makes you insane. In other cultures, hearing voices makes you a shaman.
In a totalitarian regime, folks who express dissenting opinions are considered deranged. When the regime collapses, history vindicates them.
Not long ago, a kid who needed to run and play was just a kid. Today, he has ADHD.
You get my point.
Labels are unnecessarily sticky. If our brain does one thing, it is to create a story about who we are. But one of the differences between concepts and reality is that while concepts give an illusion of stability, the reality that these concepts point to is constantly changing. When trying to heal, it is more important for us to wake up to the conditions that help us get better than to reify the story we’ve been telling ourselves about what is definitely wrong with us, and in this regard, a diagnosis can be counterproductive.
To be clear, I am not against diagnoses per se, but I am against diagnoses that distract us from doing the things that can actually help us feel better. Like this.
It is interesting to note that in the transgender conversation, the temptation to pathologize is bilateral. While one side can see the other as mentally sick, suffering from “gender dysphoria”, the other side can see the first as “transphobic”, and while the term is not in the DSM (yet), the word “transphobic” also sounds like a psychological diagnostic and is definitely used as one.
While the less civilized throw tomatoes at each other, the more civilized prefer Greek words — equally splashy, and less expensive.
A phobia is “an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something”. For instance, arachnophobia is an extreme or irrational fear of spiders. One sees a spider and yells, runs away, or trembles in fear, even if the spider is small and inoffensive. I have no doubt that a lot of people have irrational fear of or aversion towards trans people, and would qualify, IMHO, as “transphobic”. But just like shouting their diagnosis to the arachnophobic cannot help them calm down and rationalize, calling a transphobic person transphobic cannot help them overcome their fear and open their heart.
Before we can help, we need to fill our body and mind with self-love and inner peace, because self-love and inner peace give us the mental clarity we need to understand a transphobic person's situation. Maybe they haven't met any kind, humble, and wise trans person yet and it's our job to be that first person for them. Maybe they feel threatened in their own masculinity or femininity and want to be reassured that, as a trans person, we’re not trying to convert them. If we think someone is transphobic, then, while protecting our own integrity, we should also relate to them with all the empathy, patience, and care that we would relate to an arachnophobic, because a (truly) transphobic person is suffering from an irrational fear.
If it is your case that you suffer from an irrational fear of transgender people, I hope that you can befriend a few, kind transgender people, and slowly but surely learn from your experiences.
One day, I asked a trans friend, “What is the number one thing you’d like everyone to know about trans people?” He said, “That we’re just that — people. Humans.”
I was very happy hearing his answer and I’m sharing it with you.
While I have no doubt that there are real transphobic people, I am also under the impression that, most of the time, the term is misused. We feel uncomfortable or are in disagreement with some of the things the other person says or does (eg. they refuse to call us by our preferred pronoun). We pathologize them (transphobic). We dehumanize them. And we feel morally justified to mistreat them. Same slippery slope.
Unfortunately, many trans activists seem to see the word “transphobic” as a joker they can throw out whenever they get stuck in the game of human interactions.
By pathologizing any resistance to their demands, rather than presenting as self-possessed people contributing reasonable arguments, the immature, TikTok-educated trans activists do a profound disservice to the trans community by painting transgender people as easily offended and unreasonable, when it seems to me that the vast majority of trans folks are very good people who just want to live healthy lives and contribute to society without being caught in the crossfire of a culture war.
Misused and overused, the word “transphobic” joins the ranks of empty neologisms like “conspiracy theorist” or “science denier”, versatile mumbo jumbo designed to kill thought and perpetuate cancel culture.
As a trans activist, instead of labelling someone “transphobic”, I suggest you say, “[This person] believes that it would be better to [do this] [for this reason], but I think that it would be better to [do that] [for that reason].” This way, you can show that,
you understand the other person’s point of view,
you are not willing to abase yourself by engaging in ad hominem attacks,
you trust that the points you make have enough value in and of themselves, and last but not least, that,
you respect your audience’s ability to think critically about the opinions they’re being presented.
The bottom line is, beyond labels are real people, and I’m just not a big fan of diagnoses.
Wanting To Be A Girl
As a child, I was extremely quiet and sensitive. I much preferred drawing, dreaming or writing poems rather than socializing or playing. Growing up, I spent much more time with my mother and sister than with my father and brother.
When I was ten years old, one morning at school, I saw two girls greeting each other with hugs, giggles, and smiles. For some reason, that day, that sight affected me deeply. It seemed like time had stopped. I felt profoundly jealous.
I must have stood on the playground for a long time, daydreaming about how wonderful it would be for me to be a girl.
Girls could be silly and sensitive, while, as a boy, I had to act strong and never show my feelings. Girls could have healthy fun and express care and affection, while I was not allowed to.
Or so I thought.
Fortunately, no one fed these thoughts. None of my friends believed that gender was a “social construct”. No teacher told me that I was only a few hormones and surgeries away from becoming a woman if I wanted to. And because, thank God, I didn't have a smartphone and a social media account, no creepy stranger could “protect me from my parents” and tell me how to turn my life upside down.
And my thoughts dissipated quickly.
Growing up, I slowly realized how societal gender stereotypes and expectations were looser than I thought, how I was the one responsible for defining my values, and how people actually adore folks who can be strong and sensitive.
Today, I love being a man, not because it’s better than being a woman, but simply because that’s who I am and that’s where, in this particular incarnation, life is for me. I am pleased to report that, as a 34 year old man,
I can go completely gaga when I see cute, funny animals — yesterday while walking around the countryside I came across and petted a tiny tiny tiny baby goat 🐐 omigooooood 😍,
I can have an artichoke heart 😊,
I can have feelings and I can share my feelings with my friends 💛💬,
I can hug people 🤗,
and trees 🌴,
I can be silly 🙃,
and last but not least, as a 34 year old man, if you’re not comfortable with me being this way, I can also let you know that I don’t give a sh*t 💪.
Hahaha.
Seriously.
In each of our cells is the wisdom of our ancestors, and we can trust the amazing innate intelligence of our body as we go through puberty. Yes, puberty is uncomfortable, weird, and challenging. And it's also a crucial time when we grow from a child into a young adult. All of our bones and organs are developing wonderfully, and the best thing we can do is be patient and let our body grow into the beautiful young adult it can be.
If we are very sensitive as a boy, we shouldn't mistake that for a weakness or imagine that it means we don't have our place as a male. Our sensitivity will help us be a complete man in a world where so many men struggle to know how they feel and how other people feel.
According to Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ:
People who are emotionally adept — who know and manage their feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with other people's feelings — are at an advantage in any domain in life.
“Sensitivity or strength”: this is a false choice, because sensitivity needs strength and strength needs sensitivity. If we are sensitive but powerless, we won't be happy. And if we're powerful but insensitive, we're going to make a lot of people suffer, including ourselves. What we need are strong and sensitive men, and I encourage all boys and men to develop both sensitivity and strength. Our world needs men who can cry when they see the suffering in the world...and then get up and go do something about it.
Over the past fifteen years, I have participated in a number of all-male discussion groups. One of the topics that men most often brought up when discussing their experiences as men was the topic of competition and the feelings of alienation that competition creates. As a former competitive chess player, I can relate to this suffering: the thrill of winning, the emptiness of losing, and the constant drive to be the best.
As a man, it’s easy to see life as a battle, and other men as mere competitors in one’s holy quest for… alphaness.
I put this picture (alpha gorilla) with a lot of love in my heart. It’s beautiful to be a male. And there is nothing wrong with masculinity, strength, or being an alpha.
I can say this honestly and confidently today, but I have not always felt this way. Growing up as a child, I was sometimes hit by my father and brother, and I promised myself that I would remember what it felt like to be hit, and that I would not reproduce those acts. But whether I wanted to or not, I had my own share of repressed violence. It took time and mindfulness to integrate this part of myself, to metabolize my own aggressiveness, and to see more clearly what masculinity is all about.
This is what I think unhappy and happy manhood look like:
And this is what could be the motto of sacred masculinity:
It's good to be a man. It's beautiful to grow stronger, to develop our talents and abilities. But in order for us to be happy, in order for the river in our soul to flow freely and clearly, we have to put our strengths, our talents, and our abilities to good use. Whether we're a fireman training to save people in dangerous situations, a father working hard to provide for his family, a poet refining his skills to inspire and uplift others, or an engineer learning new ways to solve problems for the poor and needy, we want to grow stronger to serve better.
It saddens me that a boy or a man would believe that he does not belong on team manhood just because he is gay or effeminate and we fellow men haven’t done a good job at including him and celebrating him. And it breaks my heart that such a boy or man would be willing to destroy his health and turn his social life upside down because of it. Come on, guys. We can do better than this. We can use our power to support others.
Part of being strong is knowing how not to laugh when someone makes a derogatory joke, and gently standing up when someone is being bullied. Being a complete man means cultivating healthy friendships that include emotional support. Being rooted in one's masculinity means having the confidence to extend respect and friendship to gay men, and to send the message to “effeminate” men (the quiet ones, the sensitive guys, the caretakers, and the artists among us) that,
we see you as a man,
we are glad you are here, and,
we value your sensitivity on team manhood.
Okay, another personal story. It’s about my mom.
My Mom is a Tomboy
My mom is a tomboy — short hair, jeans, and a personality as tough as nails. She met my dad in a karate club, and on the very first day, they fought.
My mom kicked his butt. And my dad fell in love 😍. Hahaha.
Growing up as a child and then as a teenager, my mom never felt like a “real girl”. She wasn’t gay, but she wasn’t a girl either. Or at least, that’s how she felt. She kept her hair short, played sports with boys (because, I quote, “girls are boring”, end quote), and got herself in lots of trouble at school. She was wild, brilliant, and boyish — a wonderful tomboy, a wonderful girl.
Had she been raised in a culture that promoted gender ideology, I may not be here to write these words.
My mom turned out to be a great mom. Despite regularly embarrassing us when taking us to the museum (lol), she was, overall, very caring and nurturing. She was tender and loved to hug us and kiss us and prepare gifts for our birthdays. She played with us, taught us many things, and did her best to raise us to be smart. Occasionally, she would also make us proud by displaying her badassery, like that one time she confronted a man with a knife at a park, when all the other moms were paralyzed with fear, or that other time she scolded a drug dealer in front of his gang because he had disrespected her 😅.
In her forties, my mom left her corporate job as the project manager of a programming team to work with children with behavior difficulties in a low-income neighborhood. She taught them meditation, qi gong, how to deal with their emotions, and how to better communicate with each other. The kids loved her. As a woman, her maternal instincts allowed her to truly care, empathize, and be there for them, and as a tomboy, she was able to deal with difficulties with independence and courage when others found it more difficult.
In her fifties, my mom went to Brazil and did an ayahuasca ceremony. (To be clear, I’m not advocating for anyone to do psychedelics!) To prepare for the ceremony, men went one way, wearing traditional clothes, searching for caapi vines, while women went another way, wearing skirts, searching for chacruna leaves. Women then sat in a circle, calmly sorting the leaves, while men continued to work nearby. My mom felt safe, surrounded by men’s protective strength. For some reason, she felt at peace being with other women. She could relax in her own womanhood, and found the experience healing and enjoyable.
Today, in her sixties, my mom is still a tomboy. She is a happy tomboy. A happy woman. A happy mom.
After receiving her permission to publish her story here, I asked her if she had any comments to add. She said:
I'm just me and that's it. The problem was never about me, it was about these ridiculous labels and stupid boxes.
😂 I love my mom.
As it turns out, these types of stories are surprisingly common. So many of us do not conform to stereotypes. Because stereotypes are just that — stereotypes, while we are beautiful, complex, living, human beings. And while I don’t want to diminish the suffering of gender dysphoric youth, or pretend that I understand their pain, I also want to encourage them to think about themselves in a way which is,
grounded in reality, and,
supportive of their mental health.
The way we frame our experience really matters.
John Money, PhD (1921-2002)
Dr. John Money was the professor of pediatrics and psychology who coined the terms “gender role” and “sexual orientation”, popularized the concept of a “gender identity”, pioneered research on transexuals, and co-founded the first gender “reassignment” clinic in the United States. Money’s work earned him about 65 honors, awards, and degrees during his lifetime, and his influence is still widely felt today.
Here are some key events in Dr. Money’s life and career:
1921 Born in New Zealand.
1929 His father, who had been physically abusive to him, passed away. From the age of eight, Money was raised by his mother and spinster aunts, whose regular anti-male diatribes will leave a deep impression on him.
1946 Money teaches philosophy and psychology as a junior lecturer at the University of Otago, New Zealand.
1947 At the age of 26, Money emigrates to the United States to study at the Psychiatric Institute of the University of Pittsburgh.
1951 Money becomes a professor of pediatrics and medical psychology at Johns Hopkins University, a work which he will hold until his death.
1952 Money earned a PhD from Harvard university with his thesis “Hermaphroditism: An Inquiry into the Nature of a Human Paradox”, in which he described the psychosocial adaptation of intersex individuals.
Hermaphrodites, or “intersex” babies, are babies born with abnormal genitalia. When an obstetrician looks at an intersex baby and the parents ask about the baby's sex, the obstetrician does not know what to say. This is a painful moment for parents who have to come up with an answer to the question that their relatives and friends will soon ask: “Is it a boy or a girl?” Most parents are too embarrassed to explain that their baby is intersex and decide, together with their obstetrician, to pretend (guess) that the baby is either a boy or a girl and raise the child accordingly. This is where the term “sex assigned at birth” comes from.
Money observed that intersex adults reported being equally happy whether they were raised as boys or girls. On this basis, he developed his theory of “gender fluidity”, which proposed that for the first two years of a child's life, their “gender role” is “neutral” and shaped only by their upbringing. But when children are about two years old, Money argued, they pass through a “gender identity gate” after which their gender is fixed for the rest of their lives. Money believed that his theory applied not only to hermaphrodite / intersex babies, but, and this is important, to all babies.
His dissertation won the Hofheimer Prize from the American Psychiatric Association.
We will return to John Money’s theory of “gender fluidity” in a bit.
1963 Money received a $205,920 grant from the National Institutes of Health, the first of several NIH grants that would support Money and his unit for the next 35 years.
The same year, two UCLA psychiatrists, Robert Stoller and Ralph Greenson, coined the term “gender identity” which they defined as “one’s sense of being a member of a particular sex”.
Soon after, Money abandoned his previous term “body-mind” in favor of the more easily understood “gender identity”, thus popularizing the expression which he defined as,
The sameness, unity, and persistence of one’s individuality as male or female (or ambivalent), in greater or lesser degree, especially as experienced in self-awareness and behavior. Gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is the public expression of gender identity.
1965 John Money and Dr. Claude Migeon established the first sex “reassignment” clinic in the United States, the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic.
The members of the Gender Identity Clinic knew that their newly established, unique clinic, whose nature and function was to provide individuals with cross-sex hormones and the surgical replacement of their healthy genitalia with fake look-alike genitalia of the opposite sex, was bound to attract harsh criticism. Most of the clinic's staff believed that the best strategy would be to keep their work quiet, but Money, a talented and fierce communicator, decided otherwise: they would let the American people know about their clinic and spread their ideas before their critics could. In a New York Times press release, clinic president John Hoopes presented the clinic's procedures as a humane and effective solution to an intractable psychosexual problem. The combined prestige of the New York Times and Johns Hopkins University, together with the well-crafted message, was powerful enough to move America's thinking in Money's preferred direction, and similarly approving stories soon followed in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report.
One cannot help but wonder how much of Money’s own gender dysphoria, which probably stemmed from a combination of the physical abuse he received from his father, the man-disparaging tendencies of the women who raised him, and his own bisexuality, influenced his thinking and work on gender and transexualism.
In Money’s own words,
I wore the mark of man’s vile sexuality.
[…]
I suffered from the guilt of being man.
[…]
I wondered if the world might really be a better place for women if not only farm animals but human males also were gelded at birth.
Unfortunately, these were not the only disturbances which occupied John Money’s mind in regards to sexual matters. A successor to the infamous Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956), Money also openly condoned pedophilia and never reported any case of child sexual abuse to the police. In a 1980 interview to Time magazine, Money said, “A childhood sexual experience such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely.” In another interview to Paidika, a Dutch journal of pedophilia, in 1991, he explained, “If I were to see the case of a boy aged ten or eleven who’s intensely erotically attracted toward a man in his twenties or thirties, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way.”
Money expanded the research on sexual perversions. A quick search on Google Scholar for “John Money” + “paraphilia”, not including citations, will yield dozens of results. Like his predecessor Alfred Kinsey, whose sick, falsified, and pseudoscientific report launched the sexual revolution, Money believed that “the only unnatural sexual act is the one that cannot be performed”, and that Americans should “liberate” themselves from “repressive and outdated” Christian values. Since all morality is constraint, and all constraint should be eliminated, Kinsey and Money reasoned: All morality should be eliminated for the individual to become free. (Or, as the law of cause and effect would have it, for the individual to become addicted, restless, and hurt a lot of people in the process, including himself or herself.)
Despite his fiery temperament, his strong intellect, and the prestige and recognition that his dedicated work had brought, Money still had many detractors in both the general population and academia. One of the many flaws in his work, some argued, was that his theory of gender fluidity was not based on empirical evidence.
Fortunately for Money, the opportunity to prove to the world that his theory was correct would soon present itself.
1966 Ron and Janet Reimer, a young Canadian couple, had a difficulty with their one year old baby Bruce. Bruce was born with a twin brother named Brian.
When they were seven months old, Janet noticed that her baby boys had trouble urinating. They were diagnosed with phimosis (a congenital narrowing of the opening of the foreskin so that it cannot be retracted), a rather benign condition that the doctor said would be relieved by circumcision. Bruce was to be circumcised first, but tragically, the doctor and the anesthesiologist, who were using a new type of procedure, accidentally burned off the entire penis. The panicked young parents went from doctor to doctor, all of whom confirmed that Bruce would never have functioning sexual organs. Ron and Janet Reimer fell into deep despair, wondering if there was any solution in sight for their beloved son.
One December evening, their prayers seemed to be answered when John Money appeared on their television set.
Janet Reimer recalls, in an interview with Oprah,
John Money was on there, and he was very charismatic. He seemed highly intelligent, and very confident of what he was saying.
The couple soon traveled from Winnipeg, Canada, to Baltimore, Maryland, USA, to find out what could be done for their son. Money told them this was their best option:
Castrate Bruce.
Construct look-alike female genitalia on him.
Give him a girl’s name, pretend he was born a girl, and raise him as a girl — because gender was, after all, a “social construct”.
The young couple understandably had doubts about the safety and efficacy of Dr. Money's suggestions. But who were they, uneducated as they were, to know better than America's No. 1 medical authority on gender?
1967 Ron and Janet Reimer agreed to fully commit to John Money’s therapeutic plan. They allowed their 22-month-old son Bruce to be castrated and to have a vaginoplasty. They began calling Bruce “Brenda” and using the pronouns “she/her”.
Dr. Money began documenting the exciting journey of his ideal subject, complete with a genetically identical case control who shared the same living environment. In his scientific articles, Money anonymized Bruce / Brenda by referring to him as “John / Joan”.
Out of respect for Bruce’s memory, as well as for ease of reading, I will continue to refer to Bruce as Bruce.
Bruce was made to wear dresses and offered dolls and a sewing machine to play with. Except for Ron and Janet Reimer, John Money, and a few members of the immediate family, no one knew that Bruce was a male. Everyone who met him was led to believe that he was a girl. His twin brother also believed that Bruce was a girl. And Bruce himself also believed that he was a girl.
Every year, Ron and Janet Reimer dropped off their twins at Dr. Money's sex “reassignment” clinic, in Baltimore, for the good doctor to follow up.
1972 Six years had passed, the twins were now seven, and Money published his first findings: it was a resounding success! Bruce was a happy and girly little girl, just like all other little girls.
Money’s theory of “gender fluidity” was confirmed, and the “nature versus nurture” debate about behavioral differences between the sexes was finally settled: gender was, indeed, a social construct.
1973 Money co-authored the book “Man and Woman, Boy and Girl”, in which he devoted an entire chapter to the Reimers, citing Bruce’s case as “dramatic proof” of the validity of his theory of “gender fluidity”.
In the book, Money wrote,
The child's behavior is so clearly that of an active little girl and so different from the boyish ways of her twin brother.
The New York Times Book Review described the book as “the most important volume in the social sciences to appear since the Kinsey reports” (sic).
Other media soon joined in to promote Money’s work. John Money’s ideas on,
“gender identity”,
the “fluidity of gender”, and,
how “gender” was “a social construct”,
spread far and wide.
And his now famous,
“twins case”,
legitimised the practice of sex “reassignment” surgery for children around the world.
Thanks to John Money, it seemed that,
our scientific understanding of gender, and,
gender-related medical procedures,
had just taken a giant leap forward.
But not everyone was convinced.
1969 A doctor named Jon Meyer became chairman of the Gender Identity Clinic. He wanted to understand for himself how effective the clinic's procedures were and began a long-term follow-up study of 50 trans patients.
1979 Ten years later, Dr. Meyer published his research in the scientific literature, which he summarized to The New York Times as follows:
To say that this type of surgery cures psychiatric disturbance is incorrect. We now have objective evidence that there is no real difference in the transsexual’s adjustment to life in terms of jobs, educational attainment, marital adjustment and social stability. Surgery is not a proper treatment for a psychiatric disorder, and it’s clear to me that these patients have severe psychological problems that don’t go away following surgery.
(Dr. Meyer’s conclusion was recently corroborated in Sweden. We will come back to that later.)
But what about Bruce Reimer?
1993 A sexologist named Milton Diamond, an academic rival of John Money, believed that the experiment on Bruce Reimer was fundamentally flawed:
the sample size was only one person,
the information gathered was, by nature, very subjective,
the information was collected by the researcher who had a strong interest in proving his theory, and,
the follow-up was stopped early.
To find out the truth of the matter for himself, Diamond set to track down Bruce. Diamond managed to get in touch with Dr. Keith Sigmundson, the psychiatrist who had worked with Bruce after he stopped seeing John Money. Soon after, Diamond met with Bruce Reimer, his wife Jane Fontane, and his mother Janet Reimer. At that time, the world had not heard from them for fifteen years.
The story that Diamond learned was horrifying. As Bruce later recalled, in an interview,
I was shocked when I heard that people thought that my case was a success story.
Jane Reimer recalled that when Bruce was a baby, she felt confident:
During the early years, I thought we had made the right choice. I thought it would work out. Dr. Money kept saying it would work out. And I thought well, he should know.
But as he grew up,
I could see that Brenda wasn’t happy as a girl, no matter what I tried to do for her. No matter how I tried to instruct her, she was very rebellious. She was very masculine. And I could not persuade her to do anything feminine. Brenda had almost no friend growing up. Everybody ridiculed her, called her “cave woman”.
I didn’t like dressing like a girl. I didn’t like behaving like a girl. I didn’t like acting like a girl. […] I was so pitifully lonely. I tried to put make-up on but I looked like Bozo the Clown.
Brian remembered that his brother Bruce always walked like a boy and behaved like a boy. Bruce tore his dresses because he didn’t like them. When offered a jump rope, instead of jumping on it, he used it to tie up his schoolmates and play prisoner. Because he got into so many fights, he ended up being homeschooled. And when it came to urinating, Bruce preferred to stand, even though he had been castrated as a baby.
Bruce was as boyish as a boy can be. Nature, as it turned out, had a word to say in one’s “gender identity” and “gender role”. And the story that the world had been told was a lie.
Unfortunately, the ongoing gender confusion was not the only torment that John Money had put the Reimer brothers through. (The following paragraph is disturbing. Reader discretion advised.)
During their annual visits to the Gender Identity Clinic, Bruce and Brian Reimers were asked insensitive questions about their sexual development. They were then forced to undress, “inspect” each other's bodies, watch pornography, and simulate sexual acts on each other while being observed and sometimes photographed by other adults. (These photographs are most likely kept in the archives of the Alfred Kinsey Institute, aka house of horrors.) When later confronted with these abuses, Money justified his actions by claiming that,
The game of sexual enactment in childhood is important to develop a healthy gender identity as an adult.
If you’ve just vomited reading this, you may not have a strong stomach, but congratulations, and this is what really matters, you have a good heart. 💛
The traumatized twin boys dreaded their annual visits. By the time they were twelve, Bruce was on estrogen at John Money's request. But that wasn't enough. Money wanted Bruce to have a second “bottom” surgery. Remember that Bruce, in addition to the constant terror that John Money was creating in him, was still under the impression that he was a girl, and his twelve-year-old brain could not comprehend how anyone could think that he might need surgery. When Money realized that he would not be able to convince Bruce to accept the surgery, he invited a trans adult to do so. When this trans woman tried to persuade Bruce to accept the surgery, Bruce ran out the door, climbed onto the roof of the Gender Identity Clinic, and threatened to kill himself.
This was the boys’ last visit to the clinic. After this incident, John Money tried to visit the boys at their home in Winnipeg, but when Ron and Jane Reimer saw their boys running to their room for shelter, they decided they’d had enough: Dr. Money was no longer part of the family.
1979 When Bruce was fourteen, he experienced suicidal depression, and his parents sent him to a psychiatrist named Dr. Keith Sigmundson. Dr. Sigmundson suggested that Ron and Jane Reimer tell Bruce the whole truth.
As you can imagine, the news came out as a shock. But it also explained so much.
Bruce decided to adopt a new name, “David”, in reference to David vs. Goliath, and a few years later, he asked to receive testosterone and undergo phalloplasty.
Milton Diamond convinced the Reimers to set the record straight about Money’s experiment at his Gender Identity Clinic, because their story concerned not only them but the entire pediatric community and the lives of all the children and adolescents it affected. John Colapinto would help them write the story.
2000 John Colapinto published “As Nature Made Him”, telling the true story of John Money, Bruce Reimer, and the Reimer family.
The book became a New York Times best seller.
John Money tried to forbid Diamond, Colapinto, and the Reimers from talking to the press, unsuccessfully. When publicly confronted, he never acknowledged that his “twins case”, which he presented as empirical proof of his gender theory, was an abysmal failure, riddled with medical and sexual abuse.
2002 Brian Reimer overdosed on alcohol and antidepressants.
2004 Bruce Reimer shot himself in the head. He was 38 years old.
(And, by the way, Brian’s phimosis had healed itself naturally as a baby, without any medical intervention — let that sink in…)
This was the tragic story of John Money and the Reimers. For the twenty-seven years between 1973 and 2000, it was Dr. Money’s version of the story that dominated the conceptual and medical landscape in the United States and around the world.
To think about transgenderism today, we should all know the true and complete story of John Money, his concepts of “gender fluidity” and “gender identity”, his Gender Identity Clinic, and his landmark “twins case”.
I know this was a lot to digest, so if you want to take a break from reading, this might be a good time.
Now I’d like to share some thoughts on specific questions in the trans debate.
Pronouns, Bathrooms, Is a Transman a Man?, Sports, Prisons
Pronouns
So far, I've called my trans and gender nonconforming friends by their preferred pronoun among “he”, “she”, and “them”. My experience with using the other person's preferred pronoun is that while it's easy for me to do, it means a lot to the other person. I use people's preferred pronouns because I want them to feel safe enough to allow me to get to know them for the full and wonderful person they are, beyond their feelings and beliefs about gender.
At the same time, I also strongly believe that the use of one's preferred pronoun should not be mandated. A teacher should not be fired for refusing to refer to a student by his or her preferred pronoun, whether for religious or other reasons. Trans people and gender ideology sympathizers cannot impose their ideology on other people. I use the word ideology deliberately because gender ideology is rooted in ideas, not in simple, observable, biological reality. Even if there were (and I can imagine that there might be) scientific evidence that, for example, trans women have more typically female neurological traits and trans men produce more male-related hormones, that doesn't change the more basic (and I'm not going to draw you a picture here) biological realities that determine manhood and womanhood and thus the appropriate use of the pronouns “he” and “she”.
You can be a man who displays more feminine traits, and that's beautiful and that's okay, and you definitely deserve to feel safe and seen and supported, but that doesn't make you a woman, and that doesn't give you the right to demand that everyone call you “she”.
You can be a woman who displays more masculine traits, and that's beautiful, and that's okay, and you definitely deserve to feel safe, seen, and supported, but that doesn't make you a man, and that doesn't give you the right to demand that everyone call you “he”.
As for pronouns other than “he”, “she”, and “they”, I think they're silly. No one has ever asked me to use them, but if someone does, my answer will surely be, “No, give me a break”.
It hasn't happened yet, but if I were to refer to a child or teenager (someone under 21) who presents as the opposite sex, I would call them by their name or their biologically correct pronoun instead of their preferred pronoun. More on that later.
Also, to be honest, I can't guarantee that I'll always call people by their preferred pronoun. Although it was my first intuition to do so, it also raised two questions:
Am I lying when I refer to someone by a pronoun that does not reflect their biological reality? As a Buddhist monk, I'm not supposed to lie.
Am I really supporting this person, or am I encouraging them to further alienate themselves from their body?
At writing time, I am still wrestling with these questions, and I can’t guarantee anything one way or the other. One thing is for sure though: I wouldn’t want someone’s beliefs about gender to prevent me from being respectful to them and wanting to know them for the full and wonderful person they are.
This journalist explains her interesting journey with using people’s preferred pronouns:
The following video is a cordial and enriching conversation about pronouns. The person on the left is a trans woman with a healthy sense of self-esteem and high levels of critical thinking. The person on the right is a well-informed conservative political commentator with excellent debating skills.
If you facilitate group activities and are used to asking people to introduce their pronouns, I would like to kindly suggest you to add, “You may like to introduce your preferred pronoun, if that’s something you feel is relevant and are comfortable with.”
“Preferred”, because it should be clear that a pronoun is not something we can impose on others.
“If that’s something you feel is relevant and are comfortable with”, because some people in your group will feel extremely uncomfortable if you were to only give them two bad options:
Giving a pronoun and betraying themselves by pretending to adhere to a gender ideology which they deem preprosterous and toxic, or about which they are simply unsure.
Not giving a pronoun when asked, which sends a weird vibe through the group and makes them appear transphobic when they have absolutely nothing against anyone.
When you specify “if that’s something you feel is relevant and are comfortable with”, you give them a 3rd option: to gracefully pass the question.
In this way, you can make your group truly inclusive.
Bathrooms
A trans friend told me about the constant nightmare it was for them to go out, because of the bathroom issue. At that time, they identified as male (now as non-binary they/them, which is why I use “they” in this article) but did not “pass” a hundred percent in public, and could not go to any bathroom without someone raising their eyebrows and looking at them strangely. As I listened to their story, I felt truly sorry. They went on to explain, “You know, I’m not a predatory weirdo! I’m just a human being who needed to use the bathroom to relieve myself. But wherever I went, I got stares, and it made any kind of outing stressful. I checked places in advance for single-person bathrooms, and when there were none, I often canceled my plans, or sometimes limited my water intake and timed my return so I wouldn’t have to use a bathroom.”
I found their story heartbreaking. Decent people should be able to participate in society and meet their basic human needs.
At the same time, many people, mostly women but also men, feel unsafe with someone of the opposite sex using the same bathroom block. Women’s fears are reasonable, and the transgenerational trauma of female sexual abuse is significant enough for everyone to understand and respect.
One-person bathrooms are a simple solution that can meet everyone’s needs, and I hope that public places can have a few one-person bathrooms, next to the typical men’s and women’s toilet blocks.
We’ve already done this in the monastery where I live.
Is a Transman a Man? Is a Transwoman a Woman?
If you asked me, I would answer you honestly: no.
A trans man is a trans man — a biological female who has changed her appearance to appear like a male. And a trans woman is a trans woman — a biological male who has changed his appearance to appear like a female.
If you are a trans person or gender non-conforming person reading this, please know that I do sincerely care about the reality of your inner feelings, and I do want to support you in feeling safe and supported. It’s just that I’m not willing to bend basic biology to make you or anyone else feel comfortable. I trust that there are plenty of ways for me to support you that don’t involve sacrificing my common sense, and I trust that you will help me find those ways. 💛
Sports
Transgender women, i.e., biological males, should not be allowed to participate in women’s competitions, at least in the vast majority of cases (see potential exceptions below). Divisions were created to provide equality of opportunities and reward the true values of sports: dedication, hard work, and skill development — not genetics. I don’t want to see a biological male beat a group of women in a sport for the same reason I don’t want to see a heavyweight boxer win the first prize in the featherweight division. Featherweights should be allowed to reach their full potential as featherweights and be celebrated for it. Female athletes should be allowed to develop their full potential as women and make a living out of it.
I hope that sport organizers can put sound biology back at the heart of their policies.
For the individual sports that do not involve physical contact, perhaps a compassionate way to solve the issue would be to have a special “trans prize”. A trans woman could be allowed to participate but not win a main prize — only a “trans prize”, depending on her performance in the tournament. For instance, let’s say someone organizes a women’s running competition. They open it up for trans women to enter, but make it clear that trans women can’t win regular prizes. Instead, if they perform within this and this time, they win this amount of money; this and this time, that amount of money; and so on. This way, trans women can participate and compete, but their unfair genetic advantage is taken into account.
One might argue that if we were to follow the same logic, all women should also have their genetic profile tested to factor in any unfair genetical advantage in the prize money, but this argument misses the whole point of our conversation which is: how we can keep women’s sports alive and well while also accounting for the recent surge in transgender athletes.
For individual sports that involve physical contact, I don’t see any way to make up for the unfair genetic advantage of transgender women. If they do not want to compete with biological males, I sincerely hope that trans women can organize competitions among themselves, find sponsors, and build an audience.
For group sports, I don’t see any way to make it work, unless some women would be happy to join a special trans-inclusive competition that would require an equal number of trans women athletes on each team. But of course that should be up to the female athletes, since not all of them might feel comfortable sharing a locker room with a biological male, or bumping shoulders with a biological male during, say, a hockey game.
We must protect women's sports and restore the dignity and livelihood of all (real) female athletes.
Prisons
This is a very difficult decision, because the prison environment is often hostile and predatory. It seems to me that the wisest way to go about this is on a case-by-case basis and determine, based on,
whether the convicted person “passes”,
the types of surgeries they’ve had, and,
any history of sexual predation,
which is most likely to protect their personal integrity while guaranteeing that of their future inmates. Safety concerns should trump ideological concerns. If a man suddenly claims to be a trans woman when he hasn’t medically “transitioned” and has a history of assaulting women, he should be incarcerated with men, regardless of how much he tries to use trans rights.
All the things we've talked about so far are important, but they don't come close to our next topic:
Children
I am totally against anything that has to do with children or teenagers (under 21) and transgenderism.
First, it should be illegal to medically “transition” children and teenagers.
If an African cuts off a girl’s clitoris, you call it “genital mutilation” and think it’s horrible and barbaric — and rightly so. But if an American gives a girl puberty-blocking drugs, cuts off her breasts, removes her uterus, gets rid of her vagina and replaces it with a fake, dysfunctional penis, leaving her totally ravaged, infertile, and medicalized for life, all because the poor girl was not able to accept her body just yet, you call it “affirming care” and think it’s cool and progressive.
Seriously, WTF?
If a child cannot get a tattoo, buy alcohol, vote, drive a car, sign a contract, or get married, how in the world can we believe that he or she can give consent to an unnecessary and irreversible life-altering medical treatment?
I apologize for the following photo, but to get a correct understanding, a picture is worth a thousand words:
Does this look like “affirming care” to you — cutting off the healthy breasts of a woman in the making, just because she is confused? Unfortunately, this is just one part of the massacre that many young ladies put their bodies through.
Now imagine, as a father, your heart sinking when your thirteen-year-old son comes home from school, wearing makeup and a skirt, and asks if you bought him his new course of puberty-blocking medication.
You conceived him with your wonderful wife. You thoughtfully chose his name. When he was a baby, you woke up countless times in the middle of the night to rock him back to sleep. You changed countless diapers without flinching. You worked hard to provide for his basic needs and education. Whenever your boss gave you a hard time, the thought of your son gave you the strength to persevere. You played with him, comforted him, and tried your best to raise him well. Your son is the love of your life, your hope for the future, and you and the whole world know that you could give up your life for him at any moment without blinking an eye. Yet, as he approaches puberty, you see the school system, social media, medical professionals, and your son himself slowly conspiring against his growing body. You are still his father. He is still your healthy and handsome boy. But when you try to object to his medical destruction, you are told that you are a bigot and a transphobe. Your child's psychologist threatens to call the Child Protective Services on you. Your son, brainwashed and confused, no longer thinks you're trustworthy. Your wife, who you thought would be with you through thick and thin, is unhappy with you. Your marriage is strained. You know you could lose everything. You think about killing yourself because the ongoing trauma, the moral dilemma, the grief, the fear, the sense of betrayal, and the rage are too much for your nervous system. But you don't want to give up on your son, even though he seems to have given up on himself. So you clench your teeth and pay the medical bills. You realize that you are complicit in your son's sterilization. You understand that you have set him on a lifelong path of medical dependency and uncertainty. You resign yourself to calling him by his made-up name. You wonder when his surgery will be, what side effects he will suffer, and how much it will cost you — not just financially, but emotionally and spiritually. You pretend that everything is fine, but you contemplate suicide every day. And through all this, the people around you continue to call this process “affirming care”.
This is what Dr. Myriam Grossman, child psychiatrist, and author of Lost in Transnation, says in an interview,
These parents are traumatized […] and our profession is demonizing them. […] I am so troubled by how these parents have been treated and are being treated by the mental health profession, the medical profession, [and] the media.
It’s important to know that despite what the most promoted trans-rights activists (/ Big Ph$rma shills?) would have us believe, many transgender people, including Generation Z, are totally opposed to the medical “transitioning” of children.
This is what Blaire White, a true transgender woman (not rapid onset) has to say:
People love thinking that there is some kind of hypocrisy in me saying that “Yes, I felt different at five, and yes, children should not be sterilized”, as if those two things can’t be true at the same time. I didn’t know I was “transgender” at five years old. I sensed that things were off. That has nothing to do with my ability to consent to life long medicalization.
[…]
I had no idea what “transgender” was until I was much older and I could actually comprehend it and decide “You know what, this actually is the appropriate stuff for me because I’m an adult now, and I can figure that out for myself.” Me personally feeling gender dysphoria at five years old has literally nothing to do with a child’s ability to consent to changing their sex. Children cannot consent to sex or changing their sex. And if you disagree, something’s really f*cking wrong with you.
Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old detransitioner:
My name is Chloe Cole, and […] I come to you today because our most vulnerable are being targeted by an insidious ideology that is silently and slowly propagated throughout much of Western culture. I fell victim to this ideology when I was only twelve years old, the effects of which have wreaked havoc on my entire body, and I’m still feeling the damage today, and I will for as long as I live. This is because I am a detransitioner, a former transgender child who has been through the medical transition process. […] I was fast-tracked by doctors (who behaved more like abusers and meat butchers than medical professionals) into a medical transition starting at 13, when I was given puberty suppressants like cross-sex hormones before they took my breasts away from me at 15 years old. I don’t know the status of my fertility. I don’t know if I can carry to term. I don’t know how many years this has taken off of my life. I have no idea, because the medical community has failed me repeatedly at every turn. I was just a child. I didn’t deserve any of this. But I have to live with chronic physical and psychological pain because of this. My voice will always be lower and weaker than it should be. Parts of my body have been masculinized permanently. And because my puberty was disrupted when I was barely a teenager, I stopped growing, and I will never develop quite like I was supposed to. I’m still suffering the consequences of the atrophy of my reproductive and pelvic organs. I will never be able to breastfeed, and I have no idea for how much longer these big wounds on my chest will be leaking fluid every day. After every morning and after every shower, I have to dress up these wounds with bandages, so that this fluid doesn’t stain my clothing and bedding. No child and no adult deserves to go through the pain that I have.
Kelly Cadigan, a 23-year-old trans woman:
I get a lot of hate for saying this but I really do feel like the trans visibility movement has negatively impacted our community. It meant so much more when a child would say, “I feel like I’m a boy / I feel like I’m a girl” back when they did not know what it was to be transgender. Nowadays, we’re teaching what this stuff means in elementary school, and that’s why the numbers are going up. They’re grasping onto this label because we’re teaching it to them. […] I guarantee you that in ten years, we’re going to be seeing so many videos of kids that need to detransition and it completely messed up their lives.
Lana, a 27-year-old Russian trans woman:
I don’t know how you can have children to go make surgeries and take these medications at such a young age, and you take away from them the choice of having children in the future. It’s so disgusting to me. I don’t understand it, to be honest.
Buck Angel, a Generation X trans man:
[Kids] are being led down the wrong path. This is not just clothing. If it was just clothing nobody would care. But when you start implementing things like medication, oh my God, that’s like so insane that you would do that to a child who might just not even be that. But the fact that you’re saying the child is trans because they say they’re trans, it has to be one of the most idiotic, the most destructive, the most non-positive, in fact, transphobic if you asked me, because you’re not giving this child an opportunity to actually find out who they are. […] I think it’s totally insane.
How many more children's body parts are we willing to sacrifice on the altar of gender ideology?
We must,
make it illegal for children and adolescents under 21 to receive cross-sex hormones and sex “reassignment” surgeries, and,
impose prison sentences on people who promote and profit from the medical “transitioning” of children and adolescents.
To be clear, I am not arguing that medical “transitions” are of no benefit whatsoever to anyone. I am arguing that,
the immaturity of childhood and the confusion of adolescence,
the profound and irreversible physiological damage caused by these procedures,
the extremely high emotional, social, and financial costs, not only for the child, but also for his or her whole family (let’s not forget the parents and siblings!), and last but not least,
the fact that the vast majority of these children will naturally overcome their gender dysphoria if left untreated,
make these procedures unacceptable from the point of view of basic medical ethics.
Medical professionals cannot prescribe puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to children while at the same time,
respecting their oath to first do no harm, and,
respecting informed consent.
They simply can’t, and that makes these procedures immoral.
I agree with Maria Keffler, author of Desist, Detrans, and Detox, when she writes:
The gender industry tells people that they feel unhappy / uncomfortable / in pain because their minds and bodies are mismatched and they require medical alteration.
[…]
This is not medicine. This is not therapy. This is not humane care of any kind. This is predatory profiteering off the most vulnerable people in society: children and people who struggle with their mental health.
I am happy that states such as Florida, whose declared goal is “to be the Healthiest State in the Nation”, are taking the lead to protect children. In their April 2022 press release called Treatment of Gender Dysphoria for Children and Adolescents, Florida Health reports,
Systematic reviews on hormonal treatment for young people show a trend of low-quality evidence, small sample sizes, and medium to high risk of bias. A paper published in the International Review of Psychiatry states that 80% of those seeking clinical care will lose their desire to identify with the non-birth sex.
[…]
Due to the lack of conclusive evidence, and the potential for long-term, irreversible effects, the Department's guidelines are as follows:
Social gender transition should not be a treatment option for children or adolescents.
Anyone under 18 should not be prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy.
Gender reassignment surgery should not be a treatment option for children or adolescents.
Based on the currently available evidence, “encouraging mastectomy, ovariectomy, uterine extirpation, penile disablement, tracheal shave, the prescription of hormones which are out of line with the genetic make-up of the child, or puberty blockers, are all clinical practices which run an unacceptably high risk of doing harm.”
Children and adolescents should be provided social support by peers and family and seek counseling from a licensed provider.
Children and teenagers should wait until they’re 21 to make a decision.
Second, don’t teach gender ideology in schools. This is toxic to kids, and, I would argue, falls into verbal sexual abuse.
Telling a five-year-old girl that there are a hundred different genders before asking her which one she is is profoundly disruptive to her psychic development. Telling a twelve-year-old boy that he is only a few hormones and surgeries away from womanhood is not only acting like a creep and a useful idiot for Big Pharma, it is also a lie that is deeply damaging to his fragile mental health.
In the words of Miriam Grossman, MD,
Kids are being told that there is something called ‘gender’ that is separate from sex, a sort of a psychological sex, and that a person can have a gender that’s at odds with their physical reality, and that is normal and healthy, and it’s in fact wonderful to explore what your gender might be.
[…]
It is not so. It is not fine and good to divorce one’s identity from one’s physical reality.
I don't see any way for transgender activists to salvage the integrity of their movement without openly condemning the indoctrination of children into gender ideology.
The argument that left-wing activists use to justify pushing gender ideology on children is that it will create a more 🏳️🌈 ⭐ 💛 ✨ inclusive and loving and happy society ✨ 💛 ⭐ 🦄. Yay! 🤗 Until you remember that these are typically the same people who, five seconds ago,
lock-downed and traumatized the entire world for a big flu 🤧,
required children to maintain a “safe social distance” from each other 🧟♂️ 🦠 ← 2m → 🦠 🧟♀️ and hide their innocent faces behind masks 😷😷😷😷,
denied school access to children who could not show proof of having received their government-sponsored experimental “vaccine” 🇨🇳💉 complete with all of its “boosters” 🧾🛂,
and canceled every adult who was not part of their covid cult 🚫.
The double standards and hypocrisy of the left are so beyond absurd at this point that one has to make a conscious effort to resist a cognitive meltdown.
When inclusivity becomes an end in and of itself, we sacrifice healthy boundaries and find ourselves in situations like this:
From their official website:
This is a sign posted in schools that instructs children how not to react to the presence of someone of the opposite sex in their bathroom:
In short, your child is being told,
There is nothing ‘wrong’.
Do not speak out.
Protect your intruder from harm.
Can you think of one example of this kind of messaging ending well?
Here is another example of schools pushing transgenderism on children:
This boy does not rely on his parents’ guidance to navigate his gender dysphoria. Instead, he gets fake breasts and high heels from school, and lots of “mentoring” from online strangers. What could possibly go wrong?
This is an official document from the state of New York:
School is telling your child: “You can be a boy at home and a girl at school, because don’t worry kid, we’re protecting you from your parents.”
The gender industry wants society to believe that the schools that facilitate a child’s identity confusion and medical destruction are “safe”, “supportive”, and “affirming”. One of the dark implications behind these glittery words is that parents who strive to protect their children’s mental and physical health from the ideological and medical predation of the gender industry, or parents who simply want their child to wait until they are an adult to decide whether they really want to live as a transexual, are, by contrast, “unsafe”, “toxic”, and “discriminatory”.
Is it unsafe to be skeptical of drastic, unnecessary, and experimental procedures on one’s child’s hormonal and reproductive system?
Is it toxic to support one’s child’s mental health by encouraging him or her to ground his or her self-image in reality?
Is it discriminatory to encourage one’s child to accept and love his or her body as it is?
According to the gender industry, the answers to these questions are “yes”, “yes”, and “yes”, and that morally impels them to “rescue” your children from your “toxic discrimination”.
Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, comrad’, our diirr liidderz, who are obviously here for the good of the people, want to take away your children if you don't submit to their newly made up rules:
And:
People get offended when I talk about the current global totalitarian drift. Meanwhile, their beloved government hammers propaganda over their heads and uses its sickle to sever their connection with their children.
There are many ways for schools to minimize the bullying of the small number of very effeminate boys and very masculine girls that don't involve violating the innocence of all children, confusing them, blurring their boundaries, alienating them from their parents, setting them up for abuse, and destroying the family unit. Schools can make their culture safer and more compassionate by running,
meditation workshops,
emotional intelligence classes,
cooperative games,
mindful communication seminars, and,
anti-bullying programs.
These initiatives may not make a lot of money for Big Pharma or give the government a lot of power, but they do make for happy children, happy parents, and a truly loving society.
Parents can address their children's questions about love and sexuality as they come up, and in a way that is respectful of their innocence and appropriate for their age:
But the twisted ideas of Alfred Kinsey and John Money have no place in education. To all the social justice warriors who teach gender ideology to children: you're not being progressive — you're being transgressive. And to all the cowards who put up with this crap: you're not being inclusive — you're being boundary impaired.
I don’t have children, but if I had, and the teachers were teaching gender ideology to them, I would,
make a mess at the school,
rally other parents against the program,
sue the school,
and if nothing worked,
pull my kids out of school.
Honestly.
Children are sacred, and as adults, it’s our job to protect them.
If you are a school administrator, a teacher, a pediatrician, a parent, a child psychologist, or even a student reading this, please, don’t cancel yourself trying not to be cancelled. Speak out.
Third, we need to get rid of “gender affirming therapy”.
The very name of that “therapy” is perverse in that it uses equivocation — the use of ambiguous language to draw undeserved adoption. “To affirm” can mean two things:
To offer emotional support — and yes, this is what therapy is about. Youths do need the support of adults to cope with their suffering, to learn to love and care for their bodies, and to cultivate resilience and mental wellness as they go through puberty and adolescence into adulthood.
To confirm the validity of something — and this is where things get stupid and ugly. As in, really stupid, and really ugly.
When an anorexic teenager, convinced to be overweight when they are barely more than skin and bones, goes to a psychiatrist, we do not expect the psychiatrist to “affirm” how terribly fat their patient is and “support” her with a prescription of emetics. When a teenage boy goes to a psychotherapist and claims to be Jesus, we do not expect the psychotherapist to throw his hands in the air and sing the praises of the Return of Christ. When a teenage girl explains to her psychologist that Justin Bieber is secretly in love with her but green Martians are preventing him from expressing his true feelings, we do not expect the psychologist to write to Justin Bieber urging him to stand up to the alien bullies and fulfill his romantic destiny.
We expect the psychiatrist to help her patient eat well again, the psychotherapist to challenge his patient to turn his bottle of water into a bottle of wine, and the psychologist to ask Mr Bieber if he is acquainted with Miss Sarah Brown.
We expect mental health professionals to draw a clear line between reality and imagination and to provide their patients with the healthy and compassionate pushback they need to make better sense of their situation. We expect mental health professionals to be careful, reasonable, and first to do no harm.
Why should it be any different when it comes to gender dysphoria?
As Dr. Grossman beautifully says,
You do not want to affirm an impossibility.
[…]
We have to live in reality. We have to teach our kids to live in reality. An emotionally healthy person lives in reality, even if it’s a painful one.
By “affirming” that a child really is of the gender they think they are, a therapist pushes the child and his or her entire family down a slippery slope toward irreversible emotional, social, financial, and physiological consequences.
This is unethical, irresponsible, and unacceptable.
This standard, “affirming” model of care for gender dysphoric youth is based on two premises:
A child or teenager will commit suicide if he or she does not socially and medically “transition”.
Medical “transitions” are safe and effective.
Let us examine these premises.
1. Suicide risks
Here are the main points of an article on PsychCentral:
What to do when someone is threatening suicide as manipulation:
Express concern for the person, but maintain your boundaries.
Put the responsibility for living or dying back in the hands of the person who is threatening you.
Don’t argue with the other person about whether he is serious about dying.
Remember that contrary to what the other person is saying, you don’t have to prove anything.
What is so different between a teen struggling with gender dysphoria and, say, a teen struggling with bipolar disorder who makes the same kind of threat that would warrant such a diametrically different response?
The really twisted thing is that the children and teenagers struggling with gender dysphoria do not seem to threaten suicide nearly as much as the mental health professionals who are supposed to help them. When a therapist tells a parent, “Would you rather have a dead child or a living trans child?”, that is what they are doing: using the threat of suicide to blackmail the parent into acquiescing to their child's social and medical “transition”.
Cognitively, the unprepared parent is on the receiving end of a two punch combination that is extremely hard to dodge:
The extreme fear (your child is going to die) captures their attention, narrows their field of possibilities, and impairs their ability to think critically, and,
The false dual choice makes them believe they only have
a really bad option: support the “transition”, or,
an even worse option: be responsible for their child’s suicide.
How can confused parents, who obviously do not want to lose their child, not choose the really bad option?
The emotional blackmail that gender “affirming” “therapists” subject parents to is not only morally wrong — it's also riddled with methodological errors. As a therapist, it's delusional to suggest, often on the first visit, that you can do a better job than a mother or father at assessing his or her child's suicide risk because you've read a few epidemiological studies since,
mental health is multifactorial,
every child or teenager is different, and,
parents know their children better than you do.
I really don’t see why a gender dysphoric child or teenager and his or her parents would want to know the suicide risk of gender dysphoric youth as a population. Why would they want to focus on a scary number when they could focus on doing the truly safe and effective things that they can do as a family to support their mental health?
But let's say they do ask. Then please: don't talk to them in terms of relative risk. Talk to them in terms of absolute risk.
According to Darrell Huff, in his best-selling book How to Lie with Statistics (recommended by none other than world lying expert Bill Gates):
The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify.
[…]
The crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defense.
This is an excerpt from an article on AtlasBioMed:
The media bombards us with relative risks all the time, saying things such as “X TRIPLES your risk for cancer”, but these statements can be deceiving.
[…]
Absolute risk measures the likelihood of a particular outcome, such as developing a disease, over a period of time. Whilst absolute risk measures the probability of something occurring, it doesn’t guarantee it will.Relative Risk measures the difference in absolute risk between two groups based on their behaviours, environment and physical conditions, such as:
“Smokers are 2 to 4 times more likely to develop heart disease than non-smokers”.
The media often reports relative risk, but divorced from the absolute risk, it says nothing about the actual chances of an outcome occurring.
What the parent of a gender dysphoric youth may want to know is, based on the best epidemiological data currently available, what is my absolute risk of losing my child to suicide?
This recent study estimated the suicide rate among gender dysphoric youth based on information obtained through Freedom of Information requests to the world’s largest pediatric gender clinic, the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). The GIDS is located in London and is part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. It serves youth under 18 from various parts of the United Kingdom who are “experiencing difficulties with their gender identity development”.
The results: in terms of relative risk, each year, gender dysphoric teenagers commit suicide at 5.5 times the rate of their age-matched peers. This is high, of course, and each suicide is a tragedy, but this number does not take into account important comorbidities such as autism, depression, and eating disorders, which are known risk factors for suicide. Also, since you and I,
do not know the proportion of suicides among non-gender-confused teenagers, and,
are not trained to calculate an absolute risk from a relative one,
we still have no idea how likely the average gender dysphoric adolescent is to commit suicide.
Looking at the absolute risk, we get a more useful and sobering picture: in the eleven years between 2010 and 2021, there were only four suicide deaths among the 15,032 patients in GIDS.
The conclusion of the author is important and informative:
Data from the world’s largest clinic for transgender youth over 11 years yield an estimated annual suicide rate of 13 per 100,000. This rate was 5.5 times greater than the overall suicide rate of adolescents of similar age, adjusting for sex composition. The estimate demonstrates the elevated risk of suicide among adolescents who identify as transgender, albeit without adjusting for accompanying psychological conditions such as autism. The proportion of individual patients who died by suicide was 0.03%, which is orders of magnitude smaller than the proportion of transgender adolescents who report attempting suicide when surveyed. The fact that deaths were so rare should provide some reassurance to transgender youth and their families, though of course this does not detract from the distress caused by self-harming behaviors that are non-fatal. It is irresponsible to exaggerate the prevalence of suicide. Aside from anything else, this trope might exacerbate the vulnerability of transgender adolescents. As the former lead psychologist at the Tavistock has warned, “when inaccurate data and alarmist opinion are conveyed very authoritatively to families we have to wonder what the impact would be on children’s understanding of the kind of person they are...and their likely fate.”
2. Safety and efficacy of medical transitions
The longest follow-up study we have of individuals’ medical “transitions” comes from Sweden.
This team of medical researchers followed 324 gender “reassigned” individuals (191 male-to-female, 133 female-to-male) in Sweden for 30 years (1973-2003) and concluded that,
Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.
According to a 2021 survey, Sweden is the second country in the world with the highest rate of transgender and gender non-conforming people. This suggests that the social acceptance of transgender people in Sweden is as good as it gets, and that the mental health problems of people who have socially and medically “transitioned” cannot simply be blamed on social factors.
The results of the Swedish study confirm the findings of Dr. Meyer (chairman of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, the first gender “reassignment” clinic in the United States co-founded by Dr. John Money, if you remember) in 1979:
To say that this type of surgery cures psychiatric disturbance is incorrect.
It’s also consistent with a 2019 Finnish study on 52 teenagers which concluded that,
Medical gender reassignment is not enough to improve functioning and relieve psychiatric comorbidities among adolescents with gender dysphoria.
At the end of the “affirming” route of social “transitioning” -> puberty blockers -> cross-sex hormones -> and surgeries:
the mental health problems of gender dysphoric youth are still there,
they have caused their families a lot of pain,
they have lost a lot of time and money,
they have destroyed their body,
and they have become infertile.
Do you call that a therapeutic success?
I don’t.
Remember that the vast majority of children and adolescents will grow out of their gender dysphoria if left untreated.
Also, please remember that despite what the gender industry would like the world to believe, they do not have the technological means to change a man into a woman or a woman into a man. They simply don't, and that is why you will continue to see me put the word “transition” in quotes. Meanwhile, the profound damage to these young people’s bodies is real and irreversible.
As usual, Big Ph$rma dramatically overstates,
the danger of letting nature follow its course, and,
the therapeutic benefits of its products and procedures.
For example,
“Pain is so terrible, it should not be part of life. Take my opioids: they’re amazing and definitely not addictive!”
“COVID is an extremely lethal virus and there is no such thing as natural immunity. Take my vaccines: they’re perfectly safe and 95-100% effective!”
“Your daughter’s gender dysphoria will cause her to commit suicide. Give her my drugs and my surgeries, they work wonders!”
We want to apply Hanlon's Razor, which says, “We should not attribute to malice what might be attributed to incompetence”, but when confronted with enough evidence, we should also be able to call a cat a cat: these people are quacks, butchers, and criminals. They're disconnected from the consequences of their actions, and they're disconnected from their own humanity.
Investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek puts it well:
I don’t think drugs and puberty blockers and surgeries have anything to do with the sense of one’s identity. I think that’s all corporate propaganda.
[…]
They’re selling a product, and they’re doing a really really good job. And young people, they’re buying it. They’re just buying it.
One of the worst symptoms of our sick economic system is the corruption, bureaucratization, and standardization of medicine.
According to Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, aka The Truthful Therapist:
Most of [the therapists who see the problem with gender affirming therapy] are in hiding. They can’t speak out. They can’t do what I’m doing. […] [They can’t] say what the truth is, and how this gender ideology […] is harming children because they’ll […] lose their job. […] My field has been completely corrupted.
Fortunately, some parents dodge the punches of gender affirming therapists and save themselves and their child from the enormous financial, emotional, physical, and social costs of “transitioning”.
This is the story of Erin Friday, a California mother whose daughter was indoctrinated into gender ideology at age 11 through school and social media. At age 14, her daughter socially transitioned to present as a boy with the full support of the school and without anyone informing her. When Erin found out, she took her daughter to a therapist who insisted that she “affirm” her daughter's “transition” lest her daughter commit suicide.
But Erin decided to take the matter into her own hands:
I don’t know exactly, and I will probably never will, what the recipe was, because I threw everything at it.
At one point, you know, you’re counciled to keep having this relationship with your child, and that’s the most important thing. And I took kind of a different tact[ic] with that. Not that I wasn’t loving towards her, but I decided that I was going to set boundaries and I was going to hold the line on those boundaries and they were not going to be crossed.
I took the phone, and that was key. A lot of parents would say, ‘You can’t do that’. You can. And you must, if you want to get your child out of this. And your child will hate you, and you have to be strong enough, your love for your child has to be strong enough to take their vitriol, and it’s very very hard. I spent many nights crying myself to sleep. Some days I didn’t get out of bed. But you still have to do it, because now there’s not a day that doesn’t go by that my daughter doesn’t say that she loves me. So you can take the hate because you know what the end’s going to be. Hopefully. And even if my daughter didn’t come back to have a relationship with me, which I knew she would, but even if she didn’t, I saved her from being a lifelong medical patient, so I would do it again. So I took the phone, we dropped the friends, we moved to a private school, which wasn’t as helpful as I thought it would be, but just getting her away from the people who thought that she was transgender, which is a really important part of the parenting piece, is you have to give your kid an out, because they’re going to be embarrassed, and you need to pull them from the people who kind of concretized that gender identity, and you need to be the fault person, so I was the fault person. She wasn’t allowed to get her phone back until she went by her real name again. That way she can point and say, “My mom’s the jerk. I have to be called by my female name now.” So we did that. We sent her to some overnight camps, which I don’t think you can do anymore, because they’re all captured, but you know they were give-back camps, you need to help save the reefs, and so she is weeding, she’s working hard, she’s tired, she doesn’t have time to ruminate at night because she’s been working all day, and she’s also learning how powerful her female body is. So that I think was really important.
And then I hit this stuff straight on. I started to protest and I had all my protests signs around the house. I made it very clear, “I do not believe in this.” Your mother, who you used to respect, and who you used to think was intelligent, doesn’t believe in this. You know, I am not an activist by trade, but your mom is doing this crazy thing. You know she’s going out there with signs. And then I had books all over my house. Abigail Shrier's book was in every room, you could not miss it.
I’ve read this book and recommend it. The author, Abigail Shrier, is not transphobic. She cares about everyone, including children who are not yet able to love their bodies. She argues that the “transgender craze” is much more prevalent in girls and is due to social contagion:
Two percent of high school students now identify as “transgender,” according to a 2017 survey of teens issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In Britain, the increase is 4,000 percent, and three-quarters of those referred for gender treatment are girls. Clinics in Sweden, Toronto, and Amsterdam reported that their ratios of gender dysphoria had flipped, from predominately natal males prior to 2006, to predominately natal females from 2006 to 2013.
[…]
Psychologists who study peer influence ask what it is about teenage girls that makes them so susceptible to peer contagion and so good at spreading it. Many believe it has something to do with the way girls tend to socialize. “When we listen to girls versus boys talk to each other, girls are much more likely to reply with statements that are validating and supportive than questioning,” Amanda Rose, professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, told me. “They’re willing to suspend reality to get into their friends’ worlds more. For this reason, adolescent girls are more likely to take on, for instance, the depression their friends are going through and become depressed themselves.”“This female tendency to meet our friends where they are and share in their pain can be a productive and valuable social skill. Co-rumination (excessive discussion of a hardship) does make the relationship between girls stronger,” Professor Rose told me. But it also leads friends to take on each other’s ailments. Teenage girls spread psychic illness because of features natural to their modes of friendship: co-rumination; excessive reassurance seeking; and negative-feedback seeking, in which someone maintains a feeling of control by angling for confirmation of her low self-concept from others.
Erin Friday continues:
Erin Brewer’s book was in every room. Maria Keffler’s.
I recommend both authors. Erin Brewer gave a wonderful interview here. I will talk more about Maria Keffler’s work later.
Erin Friday continues:
I made it very clear (you know I had boxes of them) that we don’t believe in this, and I think that was an important thing. And then we did some… I call them “drive-bys”, because I would make her listen to cult podcasts with me. So we’d be on a long drive and we’d listen to the Moonies, we’d listen to this cult, and The Vow, and whatever. And after a couple of them, I would say, “You know, some people think transgenderism is a cult.” And I’d walk away, and let her think about it.
I did a lot of things like that, kind of coming around it in a different way.
[…]
You don’t want to have the battle. You just want to kind of leave little drops. She was in the car, she was a captive audience. I played a podcast with Helena, a detransitionner, and my daughter’s story was very similar to Helena’s in that my daughter was into anime, got into cosplay, shipping (?). You know, the parallels were there and so we were on a long car ride, she was forced to at least hear it in the background, and I know that she listened to it because when I started to play the second half, she said “Oh, we already heard this part.” So it’s just [about] starting to kind of unravel it for her, and make it come from her. Today, she’s sixteen, and the relationship is great.
Erin Friday didn’t stop there, though. As a parent, she is educating other parents on how to stand up against this dangerous movement, and as a lawyer, she is fighting legal battles against the ideological and medical predation on children going on in California.
In September 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics launched its American Academy of Pediatrics and Human Rights (sic) Campaign, “Supporting & Caring for Transgender Children”:
With affirmative care, the child determines their gender and when transition should take place.
According to the AAP, access to sterilizing cross-sex hormones and the surgical destruction of one's reproductive system is every child's human right, and every child should be able to determine when he or she will receive sterilizing cross-sex hormones and have his or her reproductive system medically destroyed.
As I have said before, the physicians who perform these treatments are not honoring their oath to first do no harm, and the children and adolescents who express interest in receiving these treatments are unable to give informed consent. Because of this, I would argue that the gender industry's so-called “affirmative care” is actually a human rights… violation. Yes, the exact opposite of what the gender industry claims.
If someone were to point their finger at 9 o'clock and direct your attention there, they would effectively blind you to what is happening at 3 o'clock. A word does the same thing: like a finger, a word directs your attention to a particular idea, and while you are contemplating that idea, you are deprived of the ability to contemplate its direct opposite. I think that by saying that open access to sterilizing cross-sex hormones and the surgical destruction of a child's reproductive system are “human rights”, the gender industry is actively trying to create a blind spot in people's minds so that they will not face the fact that their industry is actually violating human rights.
This is what Ariane Bilheran, PhD, a psychologist and philosopher specialized in diseases of civilization, manipulation, and power deviance, says:
Paradoxical language is the preferred language of perverts, because it creates knots in the other person's thinking. You're stunned, you don't understand anything, and because you're stunned, not only do you stop thinking, but you stop acting, you get stuck.
[...]
The work of deconstructing indoctrination […] must be undertaken with patience and pedagogy, by recalling the origin of words, the meaning of words, and the various paradoxes used […] to paralyze thought.
I invite you to consider the following model. On the left is what the gender industry calls it, and on the right is what I believe it really is:
“Gender education” ➡️ Gender indoctrination
“Being your authentic self” ➡️ Lying to the world about your gender
“Gender affirming therapy” ➡️ Gender confusion aggravation
“Gender affirming care” ➡️ Medical destruction of the endocrine system and reproductive organs
“Rescuing your child from abuse” ➡️ Kidnapping your child to abuse him or her
“Human right” ➡️ Human right violation
What do you think?
I hope you can take the time to think deeply about this model for yourself. As I said, I believe that personal integrity is more important than social integration.
In 2021, after a huge backlash from conscientious parents, transitioners, medical professionals, lawmakers, and citizens with a minimum of heart and common sense, Dr. Lee Savios Beers, director of the AAP, issued the following press release:
With alarm and dismay, pediatricians have watched bills advance through state legislatures across the country with the sole purpose of threatening the health and well-being of transgender youth.
Let us unpack this and appreciate the magnitude of the fallacies that Dr. Beers (or rather, whichever organization fed her her talking points) has managed to pack into her very first sentence. Dr. Beers, who pretends to represent all American pediatricians and is desperate to create an illusion of consensus where there is none, is also desperate to convince her readers that Americans who fight to protect children from being sterilized, butchered, and medicalized for life are doing so “for the sole purpose of threatening the health and well-being of these children.”
#accusatoryinversion #strawmanargument #gaslighting #socialengineering #followthemoney
I don’t like teasing family names, but between Dr. Money and Dr. Beers, I don’t feel so reassured about the health of children.
Dr. Beers insists:
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that youth who identify as transgender have access to comprehensive, gender-affirming, and developmentally appropriate health care that is provided in a safe and inclusive clinical space.
Yaaaaaayyy!! Hooray!!! 🏳️⚧️ Give all children access to safe 🤗 and inclusive 🌈 and appropriate 👌 (-and-any-other-✨-nice-buzz-word-✨-you-can-fit-in-here-🦄) spaces where they can be fully,
sterilized 💉🚫🤰,
butchered 🔪🩸, and,
medicalized for life 💰🥼💰.
Destroying a child's perfectly healthy body and fueling their self-hatred is so nice of you. You are a hero who is fighting for human rights! And remember, whatever your confused teenager wants* (*after we've brainwashed them 😅) must be good for them. Who are you to know better than your kid? It's not like you're their parent, hahaha!
All sarcasm aside, the gaslighting of the AAP is toxic AF and flies in the face of basic medical ethics to first do no harm.
From Wikipedia:
Primum non nocere is a Latin phrase that means “first, do no harm”.
[…]
Non-maleficence, which is derived from the maxim, is one of the principal precepts of bioethics that all students in healthcare are taught in school and is a fundamental principle throughout the world. Another way to state it is that, “given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good.”
Again, and at the risk of repeating myself, I am totally against anything that has to do with children and teenagers (under 21) and transgenderism:
No medical “transition”.
No gender indoctrination.
And no gender affirming “therapy”.
I hope we can put an end to this massacre as soon as possible.
We'll talk about what I think is a good therapeutic route for gender dysphoria, but first we need to put a few more nails in the coffin of gender ideology.
Gender Ideology
Not so long ago, “gender” was a purely linguistic concept. In some languages (such as French, Spanish, or Arabic), things are considered to be masculine or feminine. For example, in French we say “le soleil” (the sun is masculine) and “la lune” (the moon is feminine). Grammatical genders are arbitrary and, if you ask me, completely useless. It wasn't until the 1960s, largely with the theories of John Money, that academics began to suggest that people have a “gender” distinct from their biological sex.
To give you an idea of how gender ideology has come to dominate the conceptual landscape of mental health care, here is what some of the most popular psychology websites say about gender dysphoria:
While individuals may be assigned to a sex at birth based on how they present biologically, their sense of their gender may differ.
Gender dysphoria refers to feelings of distress and discomfort that a person experiences when their assigned gender does not match their gender identity.
The term “transgender” refers to a person whose sex assigned at birth (i.e. the sex assigned by a physician at birth, usually based on external genitalia) does not match their gender identity (i.e., one’s psychological sense of their gender).
Gender dysphoria is distress felt when your assigned gender doesn’t match your internal gender identity.
These leading psychology websites all propagate John Money’s semantic spins of an “assigned” gender at birth that would be separate from our “gender identity”. According to Money, babies’ “gender at birth” is not observed but “assigned”, just as an obstetrician might “assign” a baby ten fingers, two eyes, or 3.2 kilograms. This semantic spin is not trivial.
To “observe” is to passively notice — whether one observes or not, that thing is there.
To “assign” is to actively allocate — without someone assigning it, that thing won’t be there.
According to psychiatry.org, without an obstetrician or a parent “assigning” a gender to a baby, that baby would remain genderless?! 😆 Seriously, guys?! This reminds me of a joke: How can you tell psychiatrists from their inmates? Answer: The psychiatrists are the ones holding the keys. Okay, but seriously, dear mental health professionals, obstetricians and parents may observe a baby's gender, but no, they do not have the power to assign a gender. Please stop lying. It's embarrassing.
Our (true) identity, our sense of who we are and the cognitive foundation of how we navigate the world, according to Dr. Money and his minions, is entirely dependent on our thoughts and feelings and need not be grounded in our body or in any shared, verifiable reality. One has a “gender identity” just as one might have a “height identity” which, good news, has nothing to do with our actual height and is entirely our own choice, or a “weight identity”, which, again good news, doesn't actually require us to eat well and exercise.
Even the less cynical among us would have to admit that John Money's semantic spins of a “sex assigned at birth” and a “gender identity” have the function of,
devaluing our biological reality, and,
fueling our imagination — imagination being defined as the capacity to form new ideas, images, or concepts that are not present to the senses.
From what I understand, devaluing reality and fueling the imagination is not conducive to mental health.
I find it alarming that academics have fructified John Money’s ideas and that mental health professionals now readily give patients semantic tools to further estrange themselves from their reality.
If you are a mental health professional reading this, I encourage you to put your own sanity and the sanity of your patients first, and to distance yourself from gender theory.
One would think that with all the academic material they have produced, the gender ideologues would at least have come up with a working definition of “gender”.
But don't hold your breath.
First, we are told that “gender” is completely separate from biology. Then, when asked to define what is a woman, Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson refuses to answer because she’s not a biologist.
Then, we learn that “a woman is whoever thinks of themselves as a woman” and that “a man is whoever thinks of themselves as a man”, and we are left to wonder, what is the point of using language if words cannot point to a shared, verifiable reality?
Then, we learn that “gender” is “just a feeling”, which begs the question, how could anyone know that they feel like a gender they never had?
Then some people argue that even though gender is just an “inner knowing”, gender still points to a verifiable reality (e.g., neurological activity)… and gracefully destroy their very own standpoint.
A commentator to an article astutely remarks,
Like most trans ideologists, you conflate sex with gender when it suits you and then say sex and gender are not the same thing when it suits you.
[…]
The reason gender ideology doesn't give a definition of woman besides a circular one is that it would be admitting that their definition of woman is “any human being who acts like, dresses like, talks like or conforms to regressive stereotypes typically and historically associated with adult human females.”
An important documentary film released in 2022 is Matt Walsh’s “What Is a Woman?”. If you haven’t seen it yet, here it is:
Since woke American academia has managed to shroud the concepts of “man” and “woman” in unfathomable aerial mystery, Matt Walsh decided to interview the “gender studies experts” so that they may bestow upon us, commoners, their immeasurable “wisdom”. Oh, gender studies scholars, intellectual pinnacles of our civilization, will you enlighten us? For the whole world needs to know: what is a woman?
I cannot guarantee that none of the highly (mis)educated gender studies experts Matt Walsh interviewed gave him a rational answer to his question “What is a woman?”. Perhaps some did, and he dishonestly chose not to include them in the documentary. If that were the case, I would be the first person to condemn that. What I can guarantee, however, is that in all the reading and listening I've done so far, I have not found any definition offered by gender ideologues to be intellectually satisfying.
I am not saying that people who suffer from gender dysphoria do not exist, or that their feelings are not important, or that we as a society should not care for them. I will be the first person to shout from the rooftops that these people do exist, that their feelings are important, and that we should care for them. I am simply saying that the conceptual framework that gender ideologues have proposed is… bogus. Still, a lot of people will be very offended if you say that.
As it turns out, gender ideology, like an electric eel, thrives in murky water and shocks the unfortunate souls that try to grasp it with a strong dose of outrage and cancel culture.
I’m already feeling the shock as I write this. Bzzzzbzbzbzbzzzzzz!! ⚡😝⚡
Wait, I can still type. Looks like I’m not fully cancelled just yet.
It’s important to note that many trans people do not adhere to gender ideology. For example, this is what Kelly Cadigan, a transgender woman, has to say:
I have no problem admitting that I’m a biological male. I mean, that’s what being transgender is. What else could it mean to be trans?
To which transgender man Buck Angel responds:
Haha, yeah. But remember, “biology is a social construct”. You people are so crazy. Haha. How can you forget? Are you kidding me? Like, the way they’re trying to manipulate reality — because that’s what they’re doing, they’re trying to manipulate reality. Trans women, and I really hope they don’t take offense in this, are trans women, and that’s not an offensive thing to say. I mean it really with much love in my heart. I don’t mean it in a negative way. It’s like, you know, I’m a biological female, right? I’m not a man.
Unfortunately, the algorithms of YouTube, FaceBook, Instagram, etc., which are owned by the same investment firms (BlackRock, Vanguard) that own pharmaceutical companies, tend to turn down the volume on these reasonable voices. For example, the documentary What Is A Woman? was censored by some platforms for “hate speech” because it contains, guess what... two instances of “misgendering”. So-called “hate speech” is increasingly becoming “speech that tyrants hate”.
While I believe that gender ideology is junk, I also believe that at the heart of the transgender movement are important emotional needs that need to be addressed. Unfortunately, this is not something that Matt Walsh and other right-wing political commentators have been doing well. Trauma, self-discrimination, internalized homophobia, depression, dissociation, anxiety about societal gender expectations, and the struggle to find one’s place in the world, are all important issues that need to be shone healing light upon, and I would like to see more conservatives show that they understand the emotional needs of gender dysphoric and transgender people and support them in meeting those needs.
We want to be tough on ideas, but soft on people.
Real Therapy
This is what Cat, a young detransitioner, has to say:
I don’t believe that anyone is born in the wrong body. I think that the goal of treatment for gender dysphoria should be self-acceptance.
I am a Buddhist monk, not a mental health professional nor an expert in gender dysphoria, but based on my work trying to understand what supports overall mental health, my training in emotional intelligence and mindful communication, the work of mental health professionals with an expertise in gender dysphoria, and accounts of gender dysphoric youth and their families, here are what I believe to be the ten aspects of a good therapeutic strategy for the parents and therapists caring for gender dysphoric youth: (in no particular order)
Empower with self-care practices
Protect the family unit
Respect the parents
Use the proper semantic framework
Restrict Internet use
Improve school and friends environment
Establish rules and relationship
Prevent self-harm
Uncover the emotional needs behind the dysphoria
Encourage critical thinking
1. Empower with self-care practices
Let's face it: most gender dysphoric kids eat junk food, don't exercise, have no real friends, and spend their lives on their cell phones. They don't take basic care of themselves. The Daily Wellness Empowerment Program (DWEP) is a program that empowers individuals with 10 daily practices for mental and physical wellness. All of these practices are do-it-yourself, easy, free, backed by science, and holistically effective. Check this out:
The Daily Wellness Empowerment Program is self-love made concrete. As someone who struggles with gender dysphoria, when you establish these habits, you send a message to yourself that you love yourself and are capable of showing up for yourself every day. When you eat better, exercise, abstain from intoxicants, and sleep on time, you show yourself that you love your body. When you cultivate meaningful human connections, you bring love and purpose into your life. When you consume media more mindfully, you show yourself that you love your mind. When you go out in nature, you feel connected and rejuvenated. And when you practice mindfulness meditation, you reconcile your body and your mind and make your experience of life much more peaceful and enjoyable. This program is life changing, and it’s 100% free. You can print your first DWEP Sheet here.
My healing philosophy is: fix the basics, and see what persists. Before dreaming about how hazardous chemicals and surgeries may help you, why not take the time to learn about diet, meditation, mindfulness, exercise, and true love?
You are not a victim. There is a lot you can do to take your wellness to the next level, and I truly believe that the Daily Wellness Empowerment Program is a great place to start.
As a parent or a therapist, before you share the Daily Wellness Empowerment Program with a gender dysphoric child or teenager, it is important that you first do it yourself. This program will help you feel better, think more clearly, and become a better parent or therapist. When you’ll share the program with others, you’ll do so from a place of confidence and personal experience. First, take care of yourself. Then teach self-care. First, take the Daily Wellness Empowerment Program. Then share the Daily Wellness Empowerment Program with the gender dysphoric child and his or her family.
You can learn more about the Daily Wellness Empowerment Program by watching this video.
2. Protect the family unit
When a child expresses gender dysphoria, it is an ordeal for the entire family. Younger siblings may be confused and traumatized when their older sister or brother tells them that something they believe to be as solid and fundamental as someone's gender is not real. They may make up a story about what they did wrong as a younger sibling to make their older sibling feel this way. Older siblings may receive unwanted comments from friends at school and on social media, not only from kids who make fun of their little brother or sister, but perhaps even worse, from kids who celebrate how “cool” “transitioning” is and are more interested in virtue-signaling how progressive and inclusive they are than in understanding the consequences of “transitioning” for their younger sibling's long-term mental and physical health. Siblings may feel neglected by their parents because their newly trans-identified brother or sister is getting so much attention. Parents may grieve for their beloved son or daughter, and their hearts ache every time their child asks them to stop using their “dead name”. They feel that their child is slipping away from them, and depending on their cultural environment, they may not even be allowed to express their grief. Depression, sleepless nights, and anxiety can affect every aspect of parents' lives, from their work performance to their ability to provide emotional stability and support to their family. Marriages can be strained when parents disagree on even the smallest trans-related policy because the stakes are so high — it's their child's mental and physical health. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors may have strong and differing opinions about what the family should and should not do. All of this can put a tremendous strain on the family, and as a parent or therapist, it's important to keep the big picture in mind and to protect and care for the whole family as a unit. A child's dysphoria should not be the reason for a family to break up. That would do more harm than good for everyone, including the gender dysphoric child. Family is sacred, and the family unit should be protected.
Needless to say, I do not recommend that therapists call Child Protective Services (CPS) on a parent for not supporting his or her child's “transition”. Defending one's child against gender indoctrination and medical devastation is the opposite of “abusive”. It's love. It's protection. It's responsibility. And it's good parenting. It's also clear to me that the therapists who call CPS on parents for refusing to “affirm” their child are the real abusers in this story. Please, if you are a therapist reading this, don't do this, even if your hierarchical superiors ask you to. Do not say, “I did it because I was asked to.” You're not Adolf Eichmann. You're a healer. You have dedicated your life to restoring people's mental health, not breaking up families. Do not call CPS on a parent just because they chose to protect their child from their gender confusion. History will not look kindly on therapists who do this — I can guarantee that.
3. Respect the parents
Except in extremely exceptional circumstances of (real) repeated abuse and/or neglect, it’s really the parents who,
love their children the most,
are most qualified to understand them and support them, and,
deserve the most respect and support.
Therefore, it’s the parents who should be in the driver’s seat making decisions for their children. Not the therapist. Not the government. Not school. Not the children’s online friends. And not the children themselves.
Please, do not be this kind of doctor, and do not associate with this kind of doctor: (12mn21 — 13mn06)
Kid’s driving the bus, right? The parents in the front seat going 😱…
If listening to her sends chills down your spine, it means your spine is still working. Take your child by the hand and run.
A child’s therapist should not disrespect the parents by pretending that the child knows better than his or her parents what’s good for him or her, by pretending that they themselves know the child better than them, by acting behind the parents’ backs, by keeping secrets from the parents, or by using fear and guilt to manipulate parents into accepting gender ideology and destructive medical procedures. The role of the therapist is to support the family as a unit, to show respect and humility to the parents, to first do no harm, and to consult and inform the parents throughout the therapy. From the beginning, the therapist should make it clear that he or she sees the parents as the No. 1 authority in their child’s life and that he or she will always respect that authority.
4. Use the proper semantic framework
Words have power, words have meaning, and words matter. I recommend against using a gender confused child or adolescent’s preferred pronoun.
Here is a skillful and non-confrontational way to do so:
Child psychiatrist Myriam Grossman recommends that you listen to your child with empathy, ask a few open-ended questions, reassure him that you hear his feelings and will always be there for him, and also tell him:
“You are a boy who feels like he is a girl, or who wants to be a girl, and that is okay. Feelings change. Feelings can change. You cannot be a girl. You will always be a boy. But you know what? There are many different ways of being a boy. And it could be that you only know about a few ways of being a boy. Maybe you need to learn more about all the different ways there are of being a boy. Boys don’t only love sports and rough play and love cars. There are boys who are much gentle and they like to play with dolls or they like to dress up, and that is fine, but it doesn’t mean that you’re a girl.”
I recommend using the child's or adolescent's birth name and biologically correct pronouns. It is also important to help the child or adolescent describe his or her inner experience and develop a vocabulary of feelings.
Here is the semantic framework I invite you to stick with, in your home or in your office:
“Male”, “female” = genders.
“Discomfort”, “disgust”, “self-hatred”, “confusion”, “sadness”, “alienation”, “disconnection” “anxiety”, and the like = feelings.
If the child says he feels “like a girl” or she feels “like a boy”, you may want to ask, what do you mean by that? And help him or her unpack his or her thought process and express himself or herself in terms of real feelings.
This is therapy based on solid reality — not the toxic ideology of John Money. Only reality can heal us. The more we feed our imaginations, the more we disconnect from life, and the more we suffer. To heal, to feel “whole”, we need to come back to our senses, to reconcile with reality, and framing and describing our experience with the right words is an important step in doing so.
It is essential to provide children and teens suffering from gender dysphoria with the proper vocabulary and cognitive tools to navigate their difficulties, while at the same time protecting them from the brainwashing they are being subjected to. Which brings us to our next point.
5. Restrict Internet use
First of all, kids and teens do not need smartphones. The reason you would never leave your child alone in the middle of New York City is because they could get lost and all kinds of weirdos would have access to them. What's the difference between that and giving them a smartphone? Can't they just get lost? And can't all kinds of weirdos have access to your child?
If you, as a parent, need to contact your child, I kindly suggest you give them an old flip phone. When your teen asserts that life is boring without its hourly game of MineCraft, complains that all of their friends make fun of them, or passionately argues that having a 24/7 monitoring access to their FaceBook likes is a matter of international geopolitical importance, you can look at them in the eyes, smile, and calmly say, “Honey… Hate me first. Thank me later.”
Because you’re the mama. You’re the papa. You’re the boss.
And when your teenager comes to the dinner table on time because nothing interesting is happening on his old flip phone, when you notice that her attention span is longer than 2 seconds, when you realize that his mental health is so much better than his friends’, or when you see that he was able to learn the piano with all his free time, and you think fondly of me: You're welcome 😉.
If your child or teenager wants to access the Internet, it’s preferable he or she does so on a computer which is in a common room, and to turn off the router at night. It’s really a bad idea to leave a child or teenager with a computer with Internet access in his or her room 24/7. Now only she will get lost online, but it will affect her precious sleep and really destroy her mental health, studies, and relationships. For younger kids, I think it’s also imperative that parents have access to their social media and email accounts, and regularly check who they’re talking to, what they’re talking about, and who they’re following online. This may seem strict, but when you think about it, it’s really the strict… minimum. If you don’t know who your child is spending time with, how can you judge whether those people are a good influence?
Online friends must meet the same standards as IRL friends.
In summary,
Allowing TikTok, InstaGram, video games, and all sorts of online weirdos in your child’s room 24/7 and pray that they’ll somehow be okay = child neglect.
Not giving your child a smart phone, not allowing computers in his or her room, and monitoring his or her online activity to make sure he or she is okay, while filling his or her time with nurturing and constructive activities = child care.
Of course, there is no such thing as total control, and striving for it would not be healthy for anyone. Whether parents want it or not, the whole world is raising their child with them, and he or she will be exposed to cognitive toxins. But that should not prevent parents from doing their best to minimize the harmful exposure, starting with limiting and monitoring their access to the Internet, because he or she is still developing as an individual and still needs to learn basic, real-life skills as a human being. This is the “Mental Nourishment” practice of the Daily Wellness Empowerment Program, and an important part of any good mental health plan.
6. Improve school and friends environment
As a parent, there are steps you can take to protect your child from gender indoctrination. Here are the main points of an article named Keeping Your Child Safe in Public School, along with my notes:
• First and most importantly, talk to your kids about your family’s perspective on these issues.
You can share your beliefs about gender with your children in a way that is age-appropriate and respectful of their innocence, and engage their critical thinking skills (see point 10 below).
• Request the syllabus, reading list, and copies of all materials to be used in your child’s classrooms in advance, from every teacher.
You can obtain these materials through a Freedom of Information Act request. Some parents also send their children to school with a hidden microphone or camera to record the content of the toxic sex and gender “education” they are receiving. I think this is also a good idea that you may want to consider if it is legal where you live. Whatever material you have about what your children are being taught, please share it with other parents and ask them what they think about it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
• Send your principal and cc: your child’s teachers a Universal Opt-Out Letter
This beautiful and important letter formally asks your school to stop indoctrinating your child in sex and gender issues and to focus on his or her actual studies.
• Do your research on each of your child’s teachers
This means looking up each teacher online, following them on social media, and looking for an activist perspective on any topic you might be uncomfortable with.
• Sign up to volunteer in your child’s classroom
“The more you are there, the more you will see and hear what is really going on at your school. This is a sacrifice of your time and energy, but there’s nothing like your physical presence to keep the school aware that parents are paying attention.”
• Form a support network with other concerned parents at your school
You are not alone. Other parents also do not feel comfortable or agree with the sex and gender curriculum, but someone has to take the first step to start the conversation and gather like-minded parents. I think the most important functions of such a network are to expose what the school is doing for all to see, to share gender-critical materials (videos, books, and opt-out letters), to support each other emotionally, and to hold teachers and school administrators individually accountable for their actions.
If that doesn’t work, changing school or homeschooling are always options.
If your child is gender confused, you can make it clear to all of your family members and friends that you do not want them to “affirm” him or her by calling him or her by a different name and pronoun. You can write to each person individually to explain why you, as his or her parents, have chosen to continue to affirm his or her birth name and true biological identity, and ask if they would be willing to support you in doing the same.
If some of them do not respond or respond negatively, you may want to let them know that from now on they can only spend time with your child when you are present.
This may seem drastic, but we’re talking about your child’s mental and physical health. Most people “affirm” simply because they want to make others feel comfortable and be seen as “progressive”, but they most likely do not realize that by referring to your child by his made-up pronoun, they are encouraging him to further estrange himself from his biological reality and are effectively pushing him down a slippery slope toward chemical and surgical destruction and lifelong medicalization.
Based on the fact that 80% of gender dysphoric children naturally desist, it is statistically most likely that when your child will be an adult, looking back, he or she will deeply appreciate the effort you made to help him or her get through the teen years mentally healthy and physically intact.
Sometimes love sounds like a “yes”, but sometimes love sounds like a “no”. Which brings us to our next point.
7. Provide rules and relationship
One thing I love about the story of Erin Friday (our California mom, if you remember) is how she was able to offer both rules and relationship to her teenage daughter. Many parents can only offer one or the other:
Some parents just want to be the “commander in chief” of their children. They set very strict rules, but offer no warmth, appreciation, or emotional support, and their children will be tempted to look outside the family for love, including in unhealthy places.
Other parents just want to be a “friend” to their children. They lack the inner strength and/or clarity to set boundaries, or they may feel overly guilty every time their child is disappointed. But children are children, and they need their parents to set healthy boundaries for them to feel safe, even though they will naturally try to explore and push those boundaries.
Children need rules and relationship, and I encourage you, together with your spouse, to look at which area you can still improve as parents, and to come up with a shared plan. An example of such a parenting plan for your gender confused child could look something like this:
Rules:
Being called “he”: no way.
Teaching gender ideology to her siblings: no way.
Cutting her hair short: okay.
Dying her hair in an ugly color: okay, but she has to remove the dye when we visit grandpa because it would scare him.
Wearing boyish cloths: okay.
Wearing binders: no way.
Training MMA: okay, but no competition, she could get hurt.
Coming out as a lesbian and dating Shelly: okay, Shelly is a nice girl, but be sure to stay in touch with Shelly’s parents.
Taking cross-sex hormones or receiving any kind of surgery: no way. at. all. If she ever gets close to that, all hell will break lose.
As parents, once you've established the rules for your household, you want to communicate them clearly and regularly, explaining why you think the rule is in the child's best interest and in everyone's best interest. For example, “You are not going to take puberty blockers. I know you're struggling, and I care about you and want to support you, but it breaks my heart that you would harm your healthy and beautiful body. I know you don't think about having children yet because you're young, but believe me, as you grow up, things will change. There will come a day when you will consider starting a family, and I don't want your future self to resent me for not protecting you when I could. Also, you need to know that despite what the gender industry and your online friends tell you, these procedures, in addition to preventing you from having children and permanently damaging your health, are completely ineffective at improving the difficulties people feel in their hearts. I can show you the scientific articles if you're interested. I don't want you to wake up one day and have to live in a mutilated body, your mental problems still there, wondering why I and your dad didn't protect you. I want you and I to find better ways to meet your emotional needs and improve your mental health. I want you and I to work on this together, and I won't let you down. I promise. We're good? 🤗”
Relationship:
Look at her and wish her a good day before she goes to school.
Have dinner every day all together as a family, if possible with the first ten minutes in silence.
Celebrate her regularly in front of others, even if she tells me to shut up and that I’m gaga and embarrassing her.
As much as possible, only give feedback in private. Do not overwhelm her with requests, and make sure that each of my requests is concrete, doable, and constructive.
Turn off the TV when she talks to me. My daughter is more important than my TV.
Tell her that I love her.
Tell her that I keep a picture of her on my office desk. And another one in my wallet.
Follow my breath when listening to her and make an effort to not interrupt her, even when she blurts out stupid teenage stuff.
When it gets to the point where the things she says makes me want to strangle her, do not say or do anything, but ask her to resume the conversation later so that I can first reestablish my peace of mind. (Then, internally thank the universe that through my daughter, I am able to repay the bad karma that I created when I was disrespectful towards my parents. And maybe even earn extra credit, because she does blurt out a lot of stupid teenage stuff.)
Apologize when I make mistakes.
Ask her what she resents me most from the past and, more importantly, how can I make up my mistakes. See if any of her requests feel right to me.
Ask her how I can better support her. See if any of her requests feel right to me.
Ask her open-ended questions that do not have a simple “yes” or “no” answer. For example, “You're so good at math! What do you like about it?”
Speak more in terms of my own feelings and less in judgmental terms.
Tell her about my own past struggles as a teenager and how those struggles eventually passed.
Invite her to meditate with me, or go to church / mosque / synagogue / temple with the family.
Go on a weekly walk in the forest so that she and I can talk about life. Or so that she can be a cold, ingrate, “too cool for thee” kinda kid, but still know that I love her and want to spend time with her.
Take her to her favorite Mexican restaurant, even if every time she orders that extra side of overpriced guacamole I am assailed by the vision of a diabolic avocado intensely staring at my bank account and letting out an evil laugh that echoes through eternity. It’s her favorite restaurant after all. And if that’s what quality moments with my daughter must look like, it’s well worth the price.
Celebrate her talents by asking her if I can hang one of her paintings in the living room, or if she’d like to teach her younger brother to sing.
Find meaningful activities to do together. Ask her if she’d like to volunteer at the food charity down the road, or to pick up trash at the beach with me.
A child or teenager needs both rules and relationship. He or she wants you to make him or her feel both safe and loved.
8. Prevent self-harm
As a parent or therapist, you may also want to conduct a minimal self-harm assessment. The goal is not to become unnecessarily afraid but to have a correct understanding of what is happening with your child or patient:
Has the child thought about harming himself or herself? Has already been harming himself or herself, e.g., cutting, using substances, engaging in risky behaviors, attempting to cut body parts, banging his head against the wall?
Does the child want to run away from home? Has made a plan to do so? Has already done so?
Is the child struggling with suicidal thoughts? Has made a concrete plan to commit suicide? Has already attempted suicide?
These may be painful conversations to have, but they can also be wonderful opportunities to let the child or teen know that,
There is nothing that he or she cannot talk to you about, and that,
You’re a solid, stable, adult by his or her side, you are not afraid, and he or she can take your hand as you walk through the darkness together.
To be that solid adult, and at the risk of being redundant, you really need to take care of yourself. You need daily wellness habits. And a great place to start is with the Daily Wellness Empowerment Program.
Thank your child for being honest with you. Tell him that you are worried, that you love him, and that you do not want him to hurt himself.
Once you have identified your child's current or potential self-harming behaviors, you can find ways to remove his or her access to them. For example, if she has been cutting herself, confiscate sharp objects. If she has been thinking about overdosing on pills, lock the medicine cabinet. If she wants to run away from home, hide her shoes. You can also ask him how he would like you to help prevent him from hurting himself — he may have good ideas that you have not thought of.
It may also be an excellent idea to sit down with your child when he is calm and work out a strategy for better recognizing and managing his crises. You can ask him:
What are the signs that a crisis is coming?
What do his crises feel like from the inside?
How can you, as an outsider looking in, sense that he may be going through a crisis?
How can he let you know, in the way which is easiest for him, that he is in crisis?
How does he want you to respond when he is in crisis?
Instead of his self-destructive behavior, what better behavior would he like to experiment with to meet his emotional needs and feel better?
He may find inspiration in the Daily Wellness Empowerment Program. For instance,
Instead of ruminating on how he is the biggest loser in human history, he can go for a run in the park (Nature),
Instead of drinking alcohol, he can call his grandmother on the phone (Meaningful Human Connections),
Instead of cutting, he can watch something funny and inspiring on the Internet (Mental Nourishment),
Instead of contemplating what’s the best way to commit suicide, he can lie down and focus solely on his abdominal breathing (Mindfulness),
Instead of binging on sweets, he can enjoy a vegan nice cream (Whole Food Plant-Based Diet Before 7pm).
You can help your child to set the wellness goals that make sense for him.
Another strategy to minimize self-harm is to keep busy doing meaningful things. If you can afford it, enroll your child in a club or after-school program. Whether it's drama, dance, photography, volunteer work, or volleyball, I think the most important thing is that the teacher is able to provide empathy and discipline, instill values, and create a safe environment where children can connect authentically and meaningfully with one another. Such teachers are a treasure for their students and a wonderful support for parents.
9. Uncover the emotional needs behind the dysphoria
As a parent or therapist, you can compassionately help your child or patient better understand his or her own dysphoria. You can slowly and respectfully uncover,
how the child first heard about gender ideology,
if the child has been the victim of sexual assault(s) that caused him or her to no longer want to be in his or her body and to get rid of the sexual characteristics that he or she believes caused the assault,
if the child has a history of other trauma (death, loss, parental divorce) that caused him or her to dissociate from his or her body, making him or her particularly vulnerable to the transgender narrative,
if the child has been bullied in the past and believes that presenting as the opposite sex will stop the bullying,
if the girl is afraid of growing into a woman because it would mean receiving unwanted sexual attention and conforming to a porn-depicted idea of female sexuality,
if the boy is afraid of becoming a man because that would mean becoming violent, mean, or selfish like his father or other male figures in his life,
if the child has feelings for people of the same sex, judges themselves for it, and believes that everything would be easier if they were of the opposite sex,
if the child believes that being a tomboy or an effeminate boy automatically means that they have no place as a girl or boy,
if the child believes that becoming transgender will help them improve their social status and be seen as “cool” and “interesting” by their peers,
if the child believes that becoming trans will help convince the world that their suffering is real,
if the child has friends who have taken steps to appear as the opposite sex, and the child believes that “transitioning” would strengthen their friendship, and,
if the child believes that appearing as the other gender would help them to affirm themselves as adults and emancipate themselves from parental authority.
The best way to do this, I believe, is by:
Asking open questions — no one, especially teenagers, likes being told how we feel, what to think and what to do, but most people appreciate receiving compassionate attention and open-ended questions. As a parent or therapist, we can say, “I care a lot about you, and it seems like gender is an important issue for you, but there are some things I don't understand yet. Can I ask you something? If my question makes you uncomfortable, please feel free to pass. I'm wondering, do you often judge yourself for having feelings for [boys/girls] and think things would be easier if you could just be the other gender?” An undistracted, quiet moment (without electronics or other people), our practice of mindful breathing, the kindness in our eyes, and our willingness to accept whatever answer comes up will all help to soften and untie the knots in the child's heart and support his or her healing journey.
Giving time to think — if you feel that the question you have asked has started an important cognitive process in the child, it is important that you give the child enough time to continue thinking and processing it on his or her own. Please do not try to solve the question for the child if he or she can do it on his or her own. In other words, do not “help” a child at the expense of his or her self-confidence. The answers have to come from him or her. Do not overload the child with other difficult questions while he or she is still thinking about your last question. Sometimes a teenager reacts immediately to what we say because it helps him or her feel a sense of sovereignty. This is normal and will not prevent him or her from thinking about your question. Be patient, play for the long haul, and save your other questions for a later time when the conditions are ripe.
Being a soft landing space — realizing that we have been confused or wrong about something is painful, especially for teenagers who are desperately trying to find who they are and emancipate themselves from adult authority. It is therefore crucial for the parent or therapist to establish themselves as a stable, loving adult figure throughout the process so that the child feels that they always have a soft landing space. While you shouldn't be afraid to set healthy boundaries for the child and compassionately challenge his or her beliefs, you also want to make it clear that his or her feelings are valid, that you care about him or her, and that you are there for him or her. You can bring important context to the situation by affirming that yes, adolescence is a very difficult time for everyone, that yes, it is unfortunate that he or she is growing up in a world so full of propaganda from the gender industry, and that yes, you are by his or her side through it all.
10. Encourage critical thinking
There are many ways to encourage critical thinking in your gender-confused child, some more confrontational and some more gentle. While I believe both approaches are good, you may prefer one over the other, depending on your parenting style and how receptive your child is. On the more confrontational side, like Erin Friday, you may want to expose your teen to cult indoctrination tactics. You may want your child to hear from someone who regrets taking cross-sex hormones or undergoing so-called sex “reassignment” surgery. You can also invite him or her to watch gender-critical documentaries with you such as “What Is A Woman?”, “Trans Mission: What's the Rush to Reassign Gender?”, or “Affirmation Generation” before having a conversation.
On the less confrontational side, you can express curiosity about your child's beliefs about gender: “Thank you for telling me what you think. That's interesting, but there's one thing I still don't understand:” followed by your question. There are so many great questions to ask. If you're looking for inspiration, here are Maria Keffler's favorites:
Is gender fixed, or is it fluid? If it’s fixed, when is it fixed? If it’s fluid, can it go either way, from transgender to “cis-gender” and back again?
If gender is fixed, why would we ever give someone cross-sex hormones or surgery before (or after) the age at which gender is definitely fixed?
If gender is fluid, why would we ever give someone cross-sex hormones or surgery at all, because what if he or she changes gender identity again?
If gender is fluid, why do transgender rights activists say that people who detransition were never actually transgender?
If gender is on a continuum, doesn’t that mean that everybody is transgender?
What does it mean to be not-transgender, if we’re talking about a continuum?
What is the definition of woman/man? What allows someone to belong to one category but not the other?
If all transwomen are women, are all women also transwomen?
How do we know for sure that someone is transgender? What is the standard by which we know that it’s fair and appropriate for a person to use the girls’ restroom, or compete on a girls’ sports team?
Why is the right of a transgender-identified girl (who was born a boy) to use the girls’ locker room more important than the right of a girl (who was born a girl) to not have a male-bodied person see her undressed?
If people can self-select what gender they are, can people also self-select what race they are? What about age? Height?
Should an employee at an amusement park believe a 4’3” five-year-old who says he’s actually 5’7” and 16 years old? Should that child be allowed to ride a rollercoaster that’s made for people who are at least 5’4”? Why or why not?
Is it okay for a college-aged man to identify as a high school boy, and play on the high school soccer team? Why or why not?
Why do you have to wait till you’re 21 to drink alcohol legally, but in some states a girl can have her breasts removed when she’s 13?
Can I identify as a doctor and perform surgery on you if you have, say, appendicitis?
Can you give me a definition of transgender that doesn’t rely on sex-role stereotypes?
Just as in our last section (“Identify the emotional needs behind the dysphoria”), after asking a question, I also encourage you to give your child enough time to think, and to make sure you are a soft landing space.
Please be patient, kind, and play for the long haul, but don't stop engaging your child's critical thinking skills. As Ariane Bilheran tells us, “The work of deconstructing indoctrination must be undertaken with patience and pedagogy.”
Again, I am a Buddhist monk, not a mental health professional or an expert on gender dysphoria. The ten points I have just presented do not come with the confidence that only first-hand experience can provide, and they do not constitute medical advice. I humbly offer them only as a buffet of ideas for your consideration, in the hope that you will find at least some of them helpful in the difficult work you do as a parent or therapist.
My heart goes out to all the parents and therapists who are doing their best to preserve the mental health and physical integrity of their child or patient. My heart also goes out to all the young people who are struggling not only with their body image, but also with the powerful messages of an industry that is as seductive as it is destructive.
I kindly ask you, dear reader, to take a few seconds now to send your loving thoughts to these parents, therapists, and youth.
💛💛💛
Thank you.
As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and if you have children who have not yet expressed gender dysphoria, I still encourage you to take a look at these ten suggestions and see if there are any that you might find supportive of your family's long-term health and happiness.
To further support you, my dear beloved readers, I would like to donate five digital copies of my favorite book on the topic of gender confusion in children, Maria Keffler's “Desist, Detrans, and Detox”. As a monk I only get 40 Euro pocket money per month 😆 but I don't really need it and it would make me very happy to support you while also supporting her work.
Maria Keffler’s wonderful book will introduce you to the web of actors that form the “gender industry”, the cult-like tactics they use, and how to protect your children from them. It will offer you hard-learned lessons from parents of gender confused youth and detransitioners. Even more importantly, it will provide you with life-changing advice on true love, parenting, family life, and mindful communication. If you are a parent, a future parent, someone who knows a parent 😅, or if you work in mental healthcare or education, and are interested, you can reply to this email and I’ll send you a digital copy.
I also encourage you to check out,
for additional resources.
Okay, dear reader, now, if you really want to read the next section, go get your flashlight 🔦 because we’re going to dark places.
Dark Forces Surrounding the Trans-Rights Movement
Yes, trans people have always been there and will always be there. But how has there been a 5,000% increase in the number of trans-identified teenagers in the United States in about ten years? How did we go from 1 gender clinic in 2007 to 300 today? How is it that 1 in 10 teenagers now reject their biology?
How has the transgender movement been able to spread like wildfire...if it wasn't for the financial and political lobbies blowing on it?
A trans man says:
I don’t believe in [the trans] community anymore. I don’t believe we are all in this to help each other. There is some agenda attached to some things now.
I’d like to suggest some possible explanations. I am aware that even me just considering these will trigger some of you and I apologize for that. To be clear, I am not completely convinced that all of these are happening, but I do think they are highly plausible and worth considering. Also, very importantly, I am not suggesting that trans people, who I believe, and I repeat, for the vast majority are good people who just want to live their lives without being caught in the crossfire of a culture war, are at the center of these agendas. I think that they are more like victims, and that their movement has been infiltrated and is being used as a Trojan horse (we might even say, a Trojan unicorn!) for other, dark agendas. My goal in offering the following hypotheses for the rise of transgenderism is therefore not to encourage further discrimination against trans people, but to encourage trans people to be vigilant, to draw a line, and to distance their movement from these other agendas. I hope I made myself clear. 💛
Chemical contributors?
I can’t help but wonder if some endocrine disruptors in the air, water or food are contributing to the growing number of children confused with their gender. I haven’t researched this, but I know that Atrazine has been suggested as one of them. I also cannot help but wonder if these chemicals have been intentionally released by our dear financial elites, who obviously love to play pyromaniac firemen before laughing all the way to the bank.
Psy op?
If you and I were ultra-rich sociopaths intent on further expanding our power, our most important battlefield, to quote journalist James Corbett, would be located between people’s ears. The more we can get into people’s brains, the better we can engineer society to make decisions that will benefit us. If you and I could get society to believe that,
a man is a woman,
a woman is a man,
women can become men and still get pregnant,
men can become women and have no biological advantage in sports,
a male sex offender should be housed in a women’s prison if he so desires, so as not to offend him,
male genitalia have an honorable place in women’s bathrooms,
and if you disagree with any of the above, you’re regressive, bigoted, and a danger to society,
we would have effectively broken into everyone’s mind, and we would be ready to reshape the collective consciousness to our liking.
In this digital age, we are exposed to unprecedented levels of psychosocial engineering, and so in this Mental Health Revolution, I'm going to continue to talk about our own cognitive biases and the manipulation techniques that industries use, so that normal people like you and me can make our brains more bullshit-proof and tyranny-proof, and live the healthy, happy, and free lives that we deserve to live.
In this day and age, everyone needs to know a little intellectual self-defense.
Big Pharma?
Big Pharma makes about $1,000,000 for every child who medically “transitions”. Where there's big money to be made, there's going to be propaganda. If you thought pharmaceutical propaganda only happens during commercial breaks on TV, sorry to wake you up, but it doesn’t. It's in the education system that promotes gender ideology. It's when CNN refers to ivermectin as “horse dewormer”. It's in the new official WHO recommendations. It's in political “lobbying”. It's when a pharmaceutical representative sponsors your doctor to a "conference" in Honolulu. It's in the revolving door between Big Pharma executives and the FDA. It's in what the fact checokers tell you to think. It's in what the YouTube algorithm recommends. It's when your Aunt Lucie tells you that you need to get “vaccinated” in order to celebrate Thanksgiving with your family. It's when your teenager's favorite social media influencer raves about her “top surgery”. It's when your cousin Joe argues that his type 2 diabetes, obesity, and mental health issues are genetic and that he doesn't need to change his diet — please stop bothering him, don't you understand he's already taking all his medications? Pharmaceutical propaganda is everywhere. A small number of highly paid, expert propagandists create the narratives. The mainstream media, corrupt politicians, and greedy influencers are paid to spread it. But the vast majority of people work for the pharmaceutical industry for free, faithfully repeating their lies, inwardly convinced they're being scientific and progressive, when in fact they're acting as useful idiots for a sick industry. With so much money to be made from every gender-confused child who "transitions”, you can be sure that Big Pharma's marketing war machine is running smoothly and that they're not playing by the rules.
Pro-pedophilia movement?
The transgender movement may be pushed and/or infiltrated by pro-pedophilia lobbies, and while we should definitely not confuse trans people with child molesters (please!), we should also understand that the vehemence with which the pro-trans movement has been pushed sets an important precedent in the collective consciousness and sends the message to the world that it is very hard to speak out against new policies without getting in a whole world of trouble. As the WHO (World Hell Organization) and the pro-pedophilia lobbies wage their cognitive and legislative war to normalize the sexual abuse of children, anyone who opposes child sexual predators (“a poor, oppressed minority who were born that way”) and the sexual consent of minors (“you're depriving children of a basic human right!”) will be labeled a “pedophobe”, a bad bad person and an enemy of “inclusivity”. We must stay strong and awake and hold the line for children. Over the past fifteen years, I've participated in mindful, therapeutic talking circles with several thousand people, and I've heard enough life stories to be convinced that child sexual abuse is one of the most profoundly destructive types of trauma, and that we should do everything in our power to prevent child sexual abuse. I encourage my trans and LGB friends who read this to speak out against child grooming.
Depopulation agenda?
There has been an agenda of the WHO (World Hell Organization) and other global entities to reduce the world’s population. When the WHO bullied governments into locking everyone in their homes to watch their fear porn while quietly redistributing the world’s wealth, many people committed suicide. Many COVID patients were also killed by the hospitals that were supposed to help them. Some people also died from the deep state’s lab-engineered virus. But at the height of the pseudo-sanitary crisis, the excess deaths were actually not that high compared to after the Faucis of the world rolled out their “perfectly safe and 95-100% effective” Kool-Aid. Right now, there is an explosion of excess death and infertility, but the mainstream media is silent about it. These crimes against humanity are still unfolding and many people are too traumatized to even consider what is happening. As I understand it, the chemical sterilization and the butchering of children’s reproductive organs fits perfectly well into the elites’ plan to reduce the world’s population in order to better control it.
Anti-gay and anti-autistic eugenist agenda?
Given that being homosexual and being on the spectrum are two of the main risk factors for gender dysphoria, and that most children with gender dysphoria eventually grow out of it, what the ultra-rich (many of whom have ties to the eugenics movement) may actually be doing is sterilizing autistics and homosexuals. Meanwhile, the socially engineered trans rights activists cheer on at the medical mutilation of their homosexual and autistic friends, fully convinced that they are loving, inclusive, supportive, and progressive, not realizing that they are on the front lines of what could very well be a nightmarish eugenic agenda.
Transhumanist movement?
Globalists at the UN, WHO, and WEF, who, again, have ties to eugenism (Nazism), have too much money, and read too much Sci-Fi, want to create a Human 2.0. They call it transhumanism, and define it as the merging of man and machine and the tweaking of human DNA. By promoting the idea that “you can be any gender you want” because “science can make wonders, it can completely redefine who you are”, especially to the younger generation, they are paving the way for transhumanism. Throughout all of this, you and your children are obviously supposed to remain docile guinea pigs, disposable cannon fodder for their sick eugenist / transhumanist agenda.
Genderless society?
At a very fundamental level, what most of us are hardwired for, is for a man and a woman to come together, make babies, and care for these babies. While the woman naturally takes a more nurturing role with the children, the man naturally takes a more aggressive role to protect his wife and children from the world. By promoting gender confusion, globalists are eroding the family unit. At the same time, destructive ideologies disguised as feminism affirm that masculinity is fundamentally toxic, sending many men down a perilous path of internalized man-shaming. With the erosion of the family unit and the emasculation of society, people are deprived of meaning and strength, and the totalitarian government can more easily spread its ideology and extend its control. This “degenderization” of society has historical precedents in the rise of totalitarian regimes, as shown in the recent documentary The Great Awakening.
Anti-religious propaganda?
At the heart of gender ideology is the idea that one can be “born in the wrong body” because “God made a mistake”. As Maria Keffler rightly points out, “The only three corollaries that can flow out of the idea that God might err are,
God is cruel,
God is incompetent, or,
God doesn’t exist.”
By selling young children the narrative that God messed them up and that science will save them, the gender industry may be trying to effect a cultural shift from traditional religious values to transhumanism. To quote Yuval Noah Harari (the adviser to the president of the World Economic Forum)’s book, “We will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo Deus.”
I am aware that each of the above hypotheses is a can of worms in itself, but at this stage it seemed more important to me to give an overview of the possibilities I am considering than to delve deeply into any one of them.
I don’t think it’s unfair to think in conspiracy lines here. I would argue that it’s the most sensible and logical thing to do when you consider that:
The indoctrination and medical destruction of children and adolescents that we are witnessing is a crime against humanity.
When investigating a crime, the No. 1 question to ask is, who benefits from it?
What do you think?
Questions to Think About
Dear friend, thank you for reading this far.
I will continue to reflect on trans-related issues, and I would like to invite you to reflect with me on a few questions:
How can we support children and youth to accept their bodies, cultivate daily wellness habits, and find their place in the world?
How can we support trans activists in drawing a clear line between their movement and other, darker agendas?
How can we help make our world more supportive of everyone's mental and physical health?
How can we raise awareness of the crimes the gender industry is committing against youth — from school indoctrination, to the “affirmation” standard in mental health care, to the destructive and irreversible medical procedures we are subjecting youth to?
How can we win the legal battles we need to win to preserve the innocence and health of youth?
How can we overcome discrimination against transgender adults and ensure that they can participate fully and meaningfully in society?
Thank you for thinking with me about all of these questions. I really appreciate it.
Despite what some immature activists may say, I am not anti-anyone or anyone-phobic.
I am pro people,
I am pro truth and kindness, and,
I am pro health and happiness for all.
And because I believe that there are better ways than others to support people, that there are truer and kinder ways than others to achieve health and happiness, I will continue to share those better ways.
There is no love without courage.
We do not want to be intimidated into silencing what we believe to be true and helpful. Every time we do so, we hurt our souls and we hurt the world.
Executive
The transgender movement is expanding, bringing with it important questions in the areas of ethics, politics, and mental health. In this article, I've shared what I think is a healthy, critical stance for navigating the conversation about transgenderism. I’ve also shared my current positions on various trans-related issues, of which my three main takeaways, in order of importance, are:
#1: Let kids be kids. No medical “transitioning”, no social transitioning, no gender affirming “therapy”, no gender indoctrination, and separate bathrooms for boys and girls. We should ask children and teenagers struggling with gender dysphoria to wait until they are 21 before they can make any decision.
#2: Let adults be adults. If an adult wants to socially and/or medically “transition”, that is their choice. And if another adult wants to use a transgender person’s preferred pronoun or not, that is also their choice.
#3: Everyone deserves basic respect. If we can’t be loving towards a transgender or a transphobic person yet, at the very least we should not attack them physically or verbally. Everyone is human, everyone is struggling, and everyone deserves basic respect.
Hope this helps.
🙏💛
PS: If you would like to talk about my views on transgenderism to someone, please give them the link to the full article so they can read it and come to their own conclusion by themselves. Otherwise, I will consider that you intentionally misrepresented me. Thanks.
This newsletter is free and will remain free. It is 100% written by me. I only use AI to help me with the spelling, grammar, and word use. I welcome concrete and specific suggestions for improvement.
The #1 thing you can do to get started on this Mental Health Revolution is to print a Daily Wellness Empowerment Program (DWEP) Sheet and get going.
Transgenderism
Excellent article bien documenté, c'est en effet un sujet qui mérite une réflexion approfondie pour générer de la justesse tout en préservant la bienveillance, c'est courageux de s'y pencher de façon si exhaustive. Merci beaucoup!