Doctors Feel ‘Pressured’ to Let Young People With Gender Dysphoria Transition: Psychotherapist

Activists rally to support transgenders on the steps of the City Hall, in New York, on Oct. 24, 2018. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Medical practitioners have admitted to feeling intimidated into affirming young patients as gender dysmorphic even if they are doubtful, due to pressure from the gender transition industry, which could lead to unintended consequences says an Australian consultant psychologist and psychotherapist.

The comment was made after independent think tank Women’s Forum Australia on May 20 reported a growing number of people speaking publicly about their experiences of gender detransitioning.

The think tank noted that many detransitioners suffered from ongoing mental health issues “compounded by medical and surgical damage to their bodies.” They also share similar “feelings of bitterness” towards the therapists who had “failed to safeguard their welfare.”

According to the Women’s Forum many therapists have prescribed medication to young people who have alleged they have gender identity issues including those who are mentally ill without asking questions, investigating the cause of the patient’s distress or explaining in detail the risks involved in a gender transition.

“When patients are rushed onto hormones and surgery… the risk of prescribing medical solutions for non-medical problems increases,” Women’s Forum wrote. “The ‘affirmation only’ approach to gender transition will eventually produce a cohort of patients who regret their transition decision and rise up to condemn these practices,” the think tank added. “We can already see this happening.”

A similar finding was made in a March report backed by the UK National Health Service, which said that the current “unquestioning” affirmative model in helping patients with gender identity issues is “at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis” that the doctors have been trained.

Australian psychotherapist Dianna Kenny, who’s also a former professor of Psychology at the University of Sydney, told The Epoch Times that “a lot of the people working in gender clinics have been saying that they felt pressured to agree to let the young person transition even though that they weren’t sure and they often thought it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

She noted that as the children transition and as they grow up and mature a little bit and they deal with their mental health issues, they realise they’ve made a terrible mistake, and then they want to detransition.

“And for some of them, it’s a very traumatic situation because they’ve lost their fertility, they’ve lost their sexual function. They’ve had other complications from taking cross-sex hormones, and it’s a very, you know, painful and difficult experience for them to go through,” she said.

She observed that clinics want as many people to go through gender transition as possible because “it’s all about funding, paying wages and keeping the whole [business] going.”

“It’s worth billions of dollars,” Kenny said.

“The pharmaceutical companies are making a fortune selling synthetic cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers. The plastic surgeons, the cosmetic surgeons, the endocrinologist, the pediatricians, they’re all making a fortune out of this disgraceful practice of transitioning young people.”

A transgender individual shows a testosterone ampoule at a hospital in Santiago, Chile, on Jan. 8, 2020. Claudio Reyes/AFP via Getty Images

According to a 2017-18 report by LGBT Funders, global philanthropic funding for LGBT+ issues totalled more than $560 million, an increase of $57 million since 2015-16. In the US, the number of gender clinics has been booming across the country, going from one clinic in 2017 to 30 clinics over the past ten years. This comes as an increasingly large number of companies are covering transgender surgeries, drugs and other expenses.

Calls for increasing funding for the LGBT+ movement have also been growing louder in Australia with almost 150,000 people signing a petition to federal Parliament in 2021 asking for gender surgeries to be covered by Medicare.

Advocates argued that people identifying as transgender must pay up to $30,000 for such surgeries “so they can finally have their outward appearance match how they truly feel on the inside.”

In a 2021 evidence brief, Australia’s largest LGBT+ organisation ACON said that gender surgery “is a fundamental aspect of how many trans people affirm their gender and maintain wellbeing, with access often significantly improving quality of life.”

“People who have successfully accessed surgery overwhelmingly report an improvement in their wellbeing and a reduction in dysphoria (and even increase in gender euphoria,)” the group claimed.

Equality Australia described non-gender-affirming therapies as “conversion practices” that “attempt to change LGBTQ people.”

“We know that everyone deserves to live freely, no matter where they live, who they are, or whom they love,” the LGBT+ advocacy group said.

“These practices, underpinned by ideologies that see LGBTQ people as broken, instead of whole and human, cause great harm to LGBTQ people, especially LGBTQ people of faith.”

The newly elected Labor government previously said in its 2021 national platform that it wanted to ban non-gender-affirming therapies for people with gender identity issues. While this is not included in Labor’s election promise, the ban has been implemented in Victoria, Queensland, and the Australia Capital Territory.

Meanwhile, many medical experts have started to raise serious concerns about the high numbers of children who are exhibiting what is called rapid-onset gender dysphoria or ROGD.

ROGD is classified as a mental condition where those with no history of gender identity issues believe they have a different gender during puberty due to social influences and poor coping mechanisms.

According to a groundbreaking study about ROGD by Brown University professor Lisa Littman, ROGD may be caused by what she termed ’social contagion.’

This phenomenon, the author argued, is also observed in people developing symptoms of anorexia when attempting to conform to certain standards of one’s body image, which is set by their friendship cliques. In this group dynamic, the “best” anorexics—who are thinnest and display the most medical complications—are admired, while those who want to recover from anorexia are “maligned” and “ridiculed.

Littman’s study found that of the 256 parents surveyed who had trans-identified children, over 86 percent reported that their child either had an increase in social media/internet use, had one or multiple friends identifying as trans during the same period, or both. Among this group, female adolescents and those with mental health disorders made up the majority.

“Online content may encourage vulnerable individuals to believe that nonspecific symptoms and vague feelings should be interpreted as gender dysphoria stemming from a transgender condition,” the paper said.

What’s notable, however, is that most of these children (60.7 percent) enjoyed increased popularity after they declared themselves as transgender, and 60 percent of the friend groups were known to mock people who were not LGBTIA.