Primal
One female throws another off her scent.
“I would be very concerned if anyone referred [her] for transition. I mean, there is obviously a lot of other stuff going on here. I just wanted you to know I’m not one of those therapists who...”
I’d seen the Cass Review.
Then I’d seen one systematic peer reviewed study after another.
The dominos of a protocol fell before our eyes.
And the building blocks of a Standards of Care began to topple as the sand beneath its foundation shifted with the changing tide.
Months went by.
I learned more about a toxic Theory: Delusion making waves in an attempt to subvert reality, cloaking itself in a credibility it could never earn, inverting truth with lies, and performing “liberator” while psychologically enslaving both its acolytes and its unwitting victims.
Meanwhile, the therapist lulled a vulnerable client within an ideological framework that reifies and deifies stereotypes, celebrates the regressive as progressive, and sacrifices lives and bodies on its alter.
One day, she invited me to a meeting.
Ostensible curiosity about my perspective.
She tried to convert, but it didn’t work. I’m inoculated against the virus.
Ostensible curiosity about a thought experiment.
“What’s wrong with someone wanting to grow a beard?”
A low growl forms in a mother’s throat.
I proffered up a list of possible harms.
“So what? Who cares? It’s their life!”
“So what? Who cares? It’s their journey!”
“So what? Who cares?”
I do.
Two females begin to face-off.
In rising anxiety, I said I valued staying grounded in objective reality.
She said my values didn’t count in this - that the responsibility to honor someone’s values only went in one direction. Her solution was an ultimatum that facilitates fantasy...or else.
A mother exposes her teeth. A rival’s eyes widen.
Her arguments fell flat, so she said she refused to debate. Then she fell back on the last resort of the scoundrel: ad hominem.
With a rising voice, I continued to point to the harms. With a trained, taunting, calm, she continued to point at my person, insinuating the go-to slur without stating it explicitly.
A mother roars. A rival retreats.
And the mother stands here shaking, trying to recover... knowing that the Predator still lurks, and that the prey is her daughter.
Powerful piece. The bit about the therapist insinuating a slur instead of adressing actual concerns really gets at how ideology short-circuits clinical judgement. I've seen this tactic used in other contexts too, where questioning a protocl gets reframed as attacking vulnerable people. The whole framing flips causality on its head.
Its telling that when their arguments fail they don't consider what you said but resort to personal attacks instead. "If you disagree you're transphobic", which they compare to words like homophobic, racist, hateful, bigot, abuser, nazi, whatever, to make it look like you're a bad person if you disagree. It is a thought stopping technique meant to villify those who question or disagree, a cult tactic. They think about their doctrine and their ideology, not about patients and not about these kids