To be clear: “Affirming” a child’s “social transition” is a form of social-psychological treatment, one with very little research behind it, and one on which no school counselor, teacher, or parent should embark lightly. Some medical experts and researchers worry that this treatment might make it harder for a child to accept his or her body later on and might also put them on a pathway to irreversible medicalization.
Throughout history, especially in psychiatry and psychology, there have always been superstitious and ideological people pushing dangerous agendas at a great cost to others. But at least they believed that what they were doing was right. Recently, a potentially important source told me that though she finds this agenda terrifying and wrong, she wants to “keep [her] mouth shut.” She offered, in all seriousness, to speak to me about it in “15 to 20 years.”
Recall the Reimer brothers: baby boys, twins, who were the subject of a famous “gender identity” medical experiment in the 1960s. Medical professionals waited decades to bother finding out what had happened to them and journalists in publicizing the truth. Our neglect of the evidence may well have contributed to their misery which, in the end, led to their suicides.
How many more people must be needlessly hurt before we decide to dismantle activist tricks and “techniques”?
