An Open Letter to the Mental Health and Gender Therapy Community
The importance of exploratory therapy and brave practitioners like Stephanie Winn
Dear Gender Health Therapy Community,
I am saddened to say that after instilling so much trust in you, I have lost faith in your ability to heal.
We came to you in need of help. Our child exhibited daily pain at being alive--slicing her arms and torso and talking about wanting to die. We were desperate. Our child was falling apart. We were falling apart. We would have followed any advice to save our child. We kept thinking, “if our child killed herself because we didn't try this, we would never forgive ourselves.”
When our child declared she was “trans”, we were skeptical about immediate affirmation, but our very credentialed mental health team assured us that this was the most suitable path for a child like ours. And of course, there was the suggested risk of suicide.
That year of social transition was our child’s worst mental health year. There were three hospitalizations for mental health crises, including one suicide attempt. However, we live in a state that has enacted a so-called “conversion therapy ban,” and affirmation is the only therapy option available to us. Even when the results proved to be harmful.
Talk therapy geared towards self-acceptance is not conversion therapy. You know this. But somewhere along the way, you forgot the objective of your profession—to take care of people and to help them find acceptance and peace in our material reality.
Most children presenting with dysphoria suffer from comorbid mental illnesses like depression, autism, OCD, ADHD, and more. They may experience dysphoria, dysmorphia, and distress directed at their bodies. These periods of distress are especially prevalent during adolescence. In most cases, gender dysphoria is a symptom of something deeper--something that should be worked on through exploratory talk therapy. After all, these feelings are not only expected, but they are also a healthy part of maturing into adulthood; they teach us self-acceptance, self-esteem, and most importantly, distress tolerance. When we fail to explore these issues before transition, we fail kids like mine.
What’s more, we know that people who transition have a 20x higher incidence of dying by suicide versus the general population. 20 times! And there are NO studies that look at the outcomes for people who have had exploratory talk therapies instead. It seems to me that allowing people to transition without ever engaging in exploratory therapy is like putting them into a boat with no oars and no rudder on the edge of a waterfall. You are denying them the necessary tools to learn to thrive emotionally. This is not only non-therapeutic but also wildly negligent.
The path to self-acceptance is not to treat distressed minds by distressing their bodies. As much as one may wish otherwise, we are not only our minds, we are also our bodies.
We engage therapists to help integrate mind and body so that we (or our children) may feel safe and happy in our healthy bodies, despite how we express or present ourselves in them. But healthy bodies do not need hormones and surgeries to be authentic and true. We cannot heal the mind by harming the body.
When someone suggests that the only path to authentic happiness is to become a lifelong patient, you have to ask, “who is making these claims, and why should you believe them?” as the marvelous transwoman Debbie Hayton keeps asking us.
One could possibly forgive the ignorance and maybe even the arrogance regarding the current treatment of these children. But from this moment forward we can no longer forgive the negligence.
Thank goodness there are professionals like Stephanie Winn, LMFT in Portland Oregon, who along with a fiercely brave group of mental health professionals, researchers, parents and concerned citizens all around the world are raising their voices and demanding change. They are demanding that we engage dysphoric children and adults in exploratory therapy; that our first lines of care are those that are least invasive, least restrictive and most directed towards self-acceptance.
The tides have turned, we parents are rising, and you now have an obligation to do right by kids like mine.
I beg you to engage with new, informed voices on the best pathways for children and provide support for amazing therapists like Stephanie Winn, Sasha Ayad, Stella O’Malley, and organizations like Genspect, SEGM, GETA and more listed below.
Sincerely,
Mom of a Dysphoric Kid
Here are some vital resources for your education.
Genspect, The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, Stats for Gender, Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans, Detrans Voices, Gender: A Wider Lens Podcast, Deborah Soh Lisa Littman, Post-Trans Transpsyche, TransparencyPod, The Detransitioners, Thoughtful Therapists
@SashaLPC @stellaomalley3 @ThoughtfulTs @MicllMackness@TaniaAMarshall @KnownHeretic @GDSNsupport @GETAtherapy @widerlenspod @Aaron_GDAC @sometherapist
Photo Credit: @andrewtneel
And therapists, if you don't know where to start (a lot is understood that you don't know yet), the information for clinicians at https://genspect.org/guidance/ is a really good place.
They're all good. Also the essays, and book by Susan Evans and Marcus Evans, which has composite case studies. And and and....
Thank you for this essay and thank you to all the therapists who are looking into this, researching it, supporting young people struggling with this by exploring, as therapy does!
I was going to share your essay, until I came across the phrase, "marvelous transwoman."
That phrase is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, and highly offensive to those of us who are battling this normalization of body dissociation for corporate profit which is severely harming children like your own.
1) No man who walks around in womanface and calls himself a female name, let alone a man who teaches schoolchildren while in womanface using a female name, should be described as "marvelous" or any other positive adjective. He is a groomer, grooming children (and gullible parents like yourself) to accept -- and then go out and promote the acceptance -- of men and women LARPing (live action role playing) as the opposite sex, of the normalization of autogynephila in public places, of the erosion of our right to speak and hear the truth in public discourse, and the very concept of what a "woman" is. He and the people who platform him are either knowingly or unknowingly engaging in grooming behavior, make no mistake. He is clearly a classic narcissist, putting his desire to act out his sexual fantasies on the public stage above everything else, including the feelings of his own three children, who were minors when he began doing it. Doesn't that bother you at all? How could that be considered "marvelous"?
2) There is no such thing as a "trans woman." These males are not a subset of women, they are a subset of men. When you use female language for males, or male language for females, you confuse children who are in the very process of learning about the world, about what women and men are, and how to navigate the world safely. Don't you see that this fake, made-up language contributed to the harm of your own child, and to the harm of all the children of the parents who contribute to and read this blog?
3) There is no such thing as "trans" anything -- "trans" is a corporate fiction, a fake made-up concept being used as an ad campaign to sell drugs and surgeries to children like yours, and to vulnerable adults. Why are we acting like there is a new category of human all of a sudden that we have to acknowledge, like a "Z" chromosome has suddenly been discovered? Who -- or WHAT -- does it serve to support this corporate fiction, to refer to anyone as "trans"? Is this helping your child or anyone else's child not fall into the grips of an unrealistic fantasy when you perpetuate the concept that this fantasy is a real thing?
Why in the world would you give unclear, confusing information to kids or anyone else? Again, who, or what, does this muddying of language serve? Does it serve kids and vulnerable adults? Can a man somehow be some sort of woman, or vice versa? Are you saying that boys have a pathway to "stunning and brave" womanhood, or that girls have a pathway to "strong and brave" manhood?
I say not, and I would question why you would want to promote this idea with fake terms and unclear language that obfuscates reality. The fact that Hayton acknowledges that he is a man does not earn him the honorary title of "woman." If you had a son who wanted to go down the same path as Hayton, would you like others to support his delusion and promote it to others by referring to your son as a "marvelous trans woman"? Or refer to your daughter as a "marvelous trans man"? It seems unwise to affirm someone else's delusion when you do not want your own child's delusion affirmed.