Would she be able to think critically?
A heart-rending and infuriating but perhaps ultimately hopeful thread:
Oh god. Four years old. It’s unconscionable.
I think we can feel Carol’s fury with her – I think the typos are a kind of fury thermometer. I’m pretty sure I start missing keys when I get wrathful.
Great, the therapist thinks telling a girl that girls can have short hair and wear jeans is confusing while telling her she’s a boy is not confusing. I think we need a new Theory of Confusion.
Thinking critically is a good thing, including for therapists. Affirmation and Validation are not always the best thing for people.
These stories are so heartbreaking. These decisions are irrevocable, and the damage these women are having done to them can’t be taken back. This sentence is illuminating, and disturbing: ‘No one likes looking at this, a butch woman. But yeah, wow! When I was a guy! Those doors sure swung open for me’–we haven’t come nearly as far, with respect to sexism, as we like to imagine we have.
Hellfire. Even if–even if–one accepts the notion that affirmation and validation are the primary duties of the therapist (and I agree, they ain’t), then the therapist was failing by that very metric. The obvious response to this woman’s story would be to say, “Regardless of the truth of the broader issues you raise, it’s very clear in your case that you were ill-served and misdiagnosed. The rage and sense of betrayal you feel are very real, and very justified, and we’d probably start with working through those.” Where the fuck was this woman’s “validation and affirmation”?
Ground to dust under the wheels of the trans dogma juggernaut, I guess.
I feel fortunate in my therapist. In spite of being one of the “woke” generation, she has been very helpful when I talk about the rage that comes up for me from the trans ideologists. I don’t know her opinion; I know she is supportive of me, and has certainly not grown cold in any way since I first talked about the problems I’m having with a relative who wants to transition.
The therapist had already said she had no experience with detransitioners, so what the hell is she doing bringing up her “experience?” She can answer the question by saying she’s worked with other clients like her (which she hasn’t) or she can answer the question by answering the question, and saying “yes” or “no.” She cannot answer the question by pretending she was asked another question.
Even if the whole transgender issue is set aside, this therapist demonstrates a lack of good listening skills. Not good.
The whole thread is so blood-boiling. There are a million things I wish I could say to that therapist. First and foremost being: “Take a look back. Don’t you realize that fifteen years ago there was no such thing as a trans four-year-old? Fifteen years ago there were just as many gender-nonconforming children as there are today and they managed just fine without transition. Fifteen years ago there was not an epidemic of gender-nonconforming children plunging off of balconies and hurling themselves in front of streetcars before we finally “discovered” how to stop the epidemic with drastic, expensive and painful lifelong medical treatment. Transition is a cure for a disease you just invented. Now look forward: fifteen years from now there will again be no such thing as a trans four-year-old. In all the possible futures in the multiverse, I believe this dangerous fad of transing children will no longer exist in any of them. Because this is inevitable: any minute now, the first wave is going to grow up and see the severity of what was been irreversibly done to them, and how unnecessary all of it was. And there’s going to be hell to pay.”
@6 this is one of the things that continually baffles me–that claim, in particular, doesn’t even pass the smell test. If there’d been that scale of child suicide, even irrespective of what motivated it, we would know.
To be fair telling a 4-year old girl she’s really a boy is probably less confusing than the alternative. I mean you’d have to start thinking about actual confusing material reality rather than confining your thought processes to the mental equivalent of shouted slogans. Oh wait, my mistake.
If you heard a two-year-old meow like a cat (they do that, and make other animal noises; it’s fun) and told her or him that the reason s/he liked particular toys, games and clothes was because s/he was really a cat, and that there are lovely doctors who can give her/him fur and a tail when s/he’s old enough, by the time s/he were four they’d be desperate to be turned into a cat. That is what ‘affirmation’ does.
The correct response to a small girl saying “I’m really a boy” is “Wow, really? Well, I’m really an elephant! Shall we go shopping for bananas?”
Of course, if you don’t keep telling little girls that only boys get to like, do, wear, and play with certain things, then you won’t get little girls thinking that you must be mistaken about their sex. If you don’t tell little boys that they aren’t allowed to play with dolls, or experiment with makeup, or get to prance around in their mum’s high heels with one of her skirts over their shoulders as a cape because only girls do that, you won’t have little boys thinking that they must really be girls.
There was no epidemic of ‘trans kids’ in the eighties. Have you seen adverts aimed at eighties’ kids? All the children, boys and girls, wore T-shirts, dungarees and trainers. All the children played with all the toys. My sons as well as my daughter had My Little Ponies (which actually looked like ponies back then, and not weird big-eyed, muzzle-less anime characters, and came in both sexes); my daughter, as well as my sons, had action figures, toy vehicles, train set elements (they each owned enough train set stuff that, when they combined their pieces, they could fill the ground floor. It was fun), bicycles, footballs, skipping ropes, jigsaw puzzles, books, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum.
I never told any of them that they couldn’t do something because they weren’t members of the opposite sex, and no-one else was telling them that, either. And they’re raising their kids the same way.
This is also why I don’t believe in the labelling of generations. My parents (born early thirties) were comparatively progressive, so my generation was (born mid to late fifties) and so are my eighties children; but the ‘in-between’ generations? The parents who were about ten years older than mine (born in the early 1920s) were often very strict about gender roles, and so, in their turn, were their forties’ children (the ones about ten years older than me). Their children, about ten years older than mine, are the ones transing their teens for being gender non-conforming, and the parents in their twenties are the ones transing their toddlers.
Of course, there isn’t anything definitive about the above. But I sometimes think that the resentment against Baby Boomers is fed by the behaviour of those in the first half of my generation who spent their early childhood in austerity in the form of rationing (which ended in 1954) and surrounded by bomb sites (which had mostly been cleared and re-built with shiny new housing, shopping centres and offices by the time I was old enough to take notice), and with fathers who were either dead from the war, or traumatised (my grandparents were too old to be sent to fight). These early Baby Boomers often responded to the comparative misery of their childhoods by becoming greedy and selfish, in case it was all taken away again. My parents, who were old enough to live through the horrors of WWII but not old enough to fight, were relieved by the end of the war so the fact of continued rationing and the existence of devastated cities was nothing compared to hiding in bomb shelters and listening to the bombardment. They grew up with a sense of hope that things could always be better (because they had been so much worse) and that the best way to accomplish that was to fight for equality for all.
tiggerthewing – my son and my nieces all played together as children; their favorite was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and no one was telling the girls that Mutant Ninja Turtles were for boys. They all enjoyed carrying around those ghostbuster packs on their backs, and no one said ghostbusting was for boys. When they were done with that, all of them trooped into the house and dug through the girls toyboxes for the old cast off clothes my sister gave them to play dress up, and my son would put on ‘girl’ clothes with the girls. My parents, ultra conservative, ultra fundamentalist, ultra homophobic, took pictures and said “isn’t that cute?” They had six children, a mix of boys and girls, and knew that allowing the kids to play with the “wrong” toys wasn’t going to screw them up. (Not that they weren’t gender-stereotyped in the way they raised us, but they weren’t horrified when I started wearing jeans to school or when my sister got hooked on cowboy boots – both for herself, and those on the drugstore cowboys in our town).
As for the Baby Boomers, I think you are spot on, but I also think there’s another thing about it. I think the most progressive, the activists who took over colleges to protest a war, tend not to be the ones that rise to positions of power. The power players in each generation tend to be those who are at least conservative enough to appeal to the mass of voters. So all those people who were thinking in the 60s that our generation was going to change things in a more progressive direction (which back then was assumed to be a catastrophe) turned out to be wrong. Just as they will likely be wrong that the world will become a progressive paradise once the Boomers die off and the millennials are running things. They have some nasty xenophobic, misogynist, libertarian members, just like every generation, as well as a number of Neo-Nazis. I hope the Neo-Nazis aren’t the ones that rise to power, but at this point, I wouldn’t bet the farm on them not. I would just about bet the farm (if I had one to bet) that it will tend toward the conservative end of the spectrum that will rise to power in this generation as in most others.
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