Living in the Glare of the gaslight

“Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person makes someone else doubt their own perceptions, memories, or understanding of reality. The term, which originated from the 1938 play and subsequent film Gas Light, describes tactics like lying, denying events, triangulation (projecting faults onto a victim), using confusion, and minimizing the victim’s feelings to gain power and control.”

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The term “gaslighting” has become ubiquitous in recent years. I hear it applied in all kinds of contexts, but I can think of no context in which it applies better than discussions around gender.

Those of us who are parents of trans-identified adolescents and young adults have been gaslit by so many professionals—doctors, therapists, journalists, teachers—who tell us that our children were born with a brain-body mismatch. They tell us that we need to pursue medical interventions that arrest their natural puberty and alter their bodies, leaving them infertile and at risk of known and unknown risks and complications.

They tell us (and our children) that this is the only effective way to treat distress over one’s sex. Then they up the ante by telling us that if our children don’t receive this care, they are at high risk of suicide. “Would you like to have a dead daughter/son or a living son/daughter?” is the question commonly posed to parents who hesitate to affirm this diagnosis.

When we point out that our children showed little or no distress with their sex until they were introduced to the concept of gender identity, these professionals ignore our observations, telling us that we simply missed the signs all along that our children were distressed. They tell us that our children were afraid to reveal to us their distress for fear of rejection. They tell us this even though many of us are lifelong liberals. We did not model conformity to rigid gender roles and expression, and we certainly didn’t expect it of our children.

I’m writing this essay because one of the worst effects of gaslighting is the self-doubt it engenders. Parents—mothers especially—are already prone to second-guessing themselves. And now we have a whole society that is trying to undermine what we know we have observed in our own children. Like the character played by Ingrid Bergman in the film whose title lent its name to this distressing experience, we parents are left questioning ourselves and feeling isolated.

But the gaslighting affects more than just us parents. It’s broad and insidious, affecting our entire society. If anyone pushes back on the narrative, they are told to educate themselves. If anyone has concerns about fairness to female athletes, they are told to be kind. If anyone wants to keep biological males out of female-only spaces, they are accused of rightwing bigotry.

The threat of the true believer

Unlike many persons critical of gender ideology, I do not view the professionals who have gaslit us as villainous because, unlike the villain in the Bergman movie, many of them are true believers. Not only has gender ideology duped impressionable children who are looking for a way to explain their distress and awkwardness at puberty, it has duped the very professionals who are gaslighting us parents.

They see themselves as righteous defenders of vulnerable children and youth. They accept without question the premise that “gender-affirming care is life-saving.” And since there is no sound evidence that this is true, not to mention no sound evidence that one can indeed be born with a brain-body mismatch, the premise that gender-affirming care is life-saving is essentially a religious belief. And as Blaise Pascal wrote so many years ago, “men never do evil as completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

Where were all the transgender children 15 years ago?

These true-believer members of society don’t stop to consider the fact that, until the last 15 years or so, they had never heard of a transgender child. And yet, according to the 2023 data from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, more than 3.3% of U.S. high school students are transgender, and another 2.2% have at one time or another questioned whether they were.

If this is truly a condition with which a child is born and this many children are affected, wouldn’t these professionals have encountered at least a few individuals in past decades who were distressed about their sex? Wouldn’t they have read stories written before 2010 about suicide notes whose authors couldn’t bear to live a moment longer with the incongruence between their minds and bodies? 4thWaveNow published an excellent article years ago about the complete absence of this kind of distress in the historical record.

Do these professionals ever stop to reflect on the fact that suicides have actually increased in recent years just as gender-affirming care has become more widely available? If it’s truly life-saving, wouldn’t we expect the reverse?

“Gender-affirming care”: A perfect example of iatrogenesis

Iatrogenesis (unintended harm that results from medical treatment) is neither a new nor a controversial concept. Why do these true-believer professionals not stop to consider the possibility that the sudden availability of so-called gender-affirming care could be driving the growing desire—in fact the desperation—for it?

A couple of years ago I read a book by Nir Eyal called “Indistractable.” In chapter 5, Eyal describes a research study in which two groups of flight attendants who smoked were sent on two separate flights from Israel. One was a three-hour flight to Europe; the other was a 10-hour flight to the United States. Keep in mind that neither group could smoke during flight.

Both groups of flight attendants were asked to rate their cravings at set times during and after their flights. “If cravings were driven solely by the effect of nicotine on the brain,” Eyal writes, “one would expect that both groups would report strong urges after the same number of minutes had elapsed since their last cigarette; the more time passed, the more their brains would chemically crave nicotine. But that’s not what happened.”

Instead, the flight attendants who were over the Atlantic Ocean at the three-hour mark reported weak cravings, while their colleagues who had just landed in Europe reported their strongest cravings. Only later, when the U.S.-bound flight attendants were nearing their destination did they report their strongest cravings.

“It appeared that the duration of the trip and the time since their last cigarette didn’t affect the level of the flight attendants’ cravings.” What affected their desire was how much time was left before they could get their next cigarette. In other words, it was the close proximity of the relief of their cravings that intensified those cravings. The closer they got to that first satisfying inhale, the more desperate they were to get it.

I immediately saw the parallel to “gender-affirming care.” Until medical interventions became available that allowed people to look more like the opposite sex, people who were uncomfortable with their sex had to come to terms with the reality of their bodies. They didn’t pine for and obsess over something they couldn’t have. They got on with the business of living, and in time the distress disappeared or at least abated. This is consistent with a study published in 2013 by the Dutch showing that, in most cases, children who expressed discomfort with their sex grew out of this discomfort by adulthood. (Many trans-rights activists have tried to “debunk” the results of this study, but the evidence it provides remains strong and compelling.)

So-called gender-affirming care is a perfect example of iatrogenesis because it is the existence of these interventions that creates the distress—or greatly increases it. The gender-dysphoric of the past were like the flight attendants bound for America. At the three-hour mark, the discomfort of the flight attendants was manageable because they were not anticipating imminent relief. And until kids were told they could undertake medical interventions to “change their sex,” the pain and distress of puberty usually went away on its own.

Upping the ante with the specter of suicide

Unfortunately, kids are not just told that their distress could be removed by undergoing medical procedures; they are told they may commit suicide if they can’t get them. That’s essentially the message that is drilled home in every article published in the mainstream press about states that ban “gender-affirming care.” The recurring narrative is that these bans are putting the lives of vulnerable children at risk. But the reality is that it’s this oft-repeated narrative that is putting their lives at risk.

I think of Josh (Leelah) Alcorn, who committed suicide in 2014, as ground zero in the narrative around suicide and gender-related medicine. Alcorn’s parents refused to allow him to obtain gender-related medical interventions. According to one social media post I read, Alcorn was told online that if he couldn’t get medical interventions as an adolescent, he never stood a chance of passing as a woman, and passing was key to a good life. After reading messages like this, it’s not hard to imagine how a 17-year-old could feel hopeless enough to step in front of a fast-moving semi.

So who is at fault? Is it the parents who withhold the medical interventions that children crave? Or is it the people who suggest that kids will commit suicide without them?

Both medical professionals and journalists should know betterthan to broadcast such a narrative. It’s widely known that suicide contagion is real. Journalists even have special guidelines on reporting about suicide to guard against contagion. The Samaritans, an organization formed more than 70 years ago to help prevent suicide in the United Kingdom, developed these guidelines in 1994. The third item on their Do’s and Don’ts list is “Avoid over-simplification.”

Approximately 90 per cent of people who die by suicide have a diagnosed or undiagnosed mental health problem at the time of death. Over-simplification of the causes or perceived ‘triggers’ for a suicide can be misleading and is unlikely to reflect accurately the complexity of suicide. For example, avoid the suggestion that a single incident, such as loss of a job, relationship breakdown or bereavement, was the cause.

This CNN article about Alcorn from 2014 is a flagrant violation of that guideline. So too are all the articles suggesting that recent state bans on pediatric care will lead to more suicides. Can journalists not see how telling a vulnerable child that a state law puts them at risk of suicide in itself creates a suicide risk? Beware the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Physical sensations arising from psychological stimuli

Let’s go back for a moment to the study cited by Eyal. The study authors do not suggest that nicotine has no role in the distress of addiction and the intensity of cravings—it’s just not the only factor and perhaps not even the greatest.

Similarly, it’s not that Alcorn didn’t feel distress over his sex and a keen desire to change it; it’s that the availability of interventions made him fixate on his sex, and this fixation in turn amplified his distress. There’s a good chance that if Alcorn had been born 10 or even 5 years earlier, he would have survived adolescence and grown into a mostly well-adjusted (likely gay) adult.

It’s simply a fact that our physical state is subject to psychological stimuli. When I was a kid, teachers would occasionally send notes home to parents saying that a child in the class was found to have lice. That created an immediate “contagion” of itchiness. We all started to imagine things crawling on our scalps. Since the phenomenon of physical sensations arising from psychological ones is common, why do people dismiss the possibility that gender dysphoria could arise or intensify based on suggestion?

Puberty is a time when your body is changing—you’re developing secondary sexual characteristics: facial hair and deepening voices for boys, breasts and periods for girls. At a time when you feel awkward and shy, your body is changing in ways that make you stand out. And this makes you vulnerable to the idea that, if you aren’t comfortable with these changes or with the idea of growing up in general, you may well be transgender. Then you dive deeper. You read descriptions of gender dysphoria—the “dis-ease” with your changing body—and you begin to ruminate and fixate on these changes in your body.

Is it any wonder that children and young people become convinced that they have a brain-body mismatch for which there is only one solution? Is it any wonder that they become desperately distressed at the thought of not getting the medical interventions that they are told will remove their distress?

You are not crazy or evil

I wanted to write this essay as an antidote to the gaslighting parents face. We are neither crazy nor evil for recognizing that social contagion is a far more plausible explanation for the distress our kids have experienced and the disruption it has caused to their lives and our families.

When this issue upended my daughter’s (and my family’s) life a decade ago, the gender identity narrative was the only one in town. But I knew immediately—instinctively—that my daughter had latched onto gender ideology as a way to explain to herself why she felt so awkward and isolated at puberty.

My daughter was the classic ROGD child. She was never really gender nonconforming, but she has always been delightfully quirky—highly sensitive, intelligent, with some autistic characteristics. When she hit 13, she started having friendship troubles. Meanwhile, we had made the mistake of giving her a smartphone and not monitoring what she was doing online. She was on Discord a lot and Deviant Art. That was when she encountered the idea that maybe she was trans. To her, it made sense.

I, however, had broader experience. Having already run the gauntlet of puberty, I knew it was a time of great turmoil. I knew her distress was a normal part of coming of age. But she was on her smart phone constantly, listening to voices that told her that her distress meant her body was wrong and needed changing. Unfortunately, those voices prevailed over my own.

I spent most of her adolescence trying to dislodge this idea from her mind, to show her that puberty sucks for many people, whether they show it or not. She wavered some in her trans identification, at one point announcing she no longer saw herself that way. But her friend circle then consisted largely of kids who were to some degree questioning their gender. By the time she was 17, she was clearly identifying as trans again, and at 19 she announced she was starting testosterone. She has since paid a surgeon to amputate her breasts, but I remain ever hopeful that she will one day recognize that she doesn’t need this identity, that she can accept her natural body and live her life in peace and freedom.

If you are a parent of a trans-identified child, I hope this for your child, too. And if we as parents do not live to see our children find their way out of the morass of gender ideology, I hope we can be comforted in knowing that we saw the lie for what it was, we did our best to protect our kids, and never stopped loving them.