Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist's Guide Out of the Madness

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DG:I’m glad you brought up these institutions. How have these and other medical associations across specialties, which represent people like you, been captured by extremists on this issue? How did Money’s bad idea capture the Western medical imagination? Dr. Grossman’s practice currently focuses on gender-distressed young people and their parents. She believes that every child is born in the right body. Dr Grossman has been vocal about the capture of her profession by ideologues, leading to dangerous and experimental treatments on children and betrayal of parents. Grossman, Miriam (August 1, 2009). You're Teaching My Child What?: A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Ed and How They Harm Your Child. Maryland: Regnery Publishing. ISBN 9781596985544. MG:So, if someone comes to me with OCD, for example, and I want to find the latest recommendations regarding new medications and so forth, I’m going to go to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and look it up. I’m going to trust what they have over there. Why not? Why shouldn’t I? Of course I’m going to trust them. MG:My book is not only for parents dealing with this issue immediately in their own lives, but for people who want to prevent this. One key, which seems small, is to challenge the statement that sex is assigned at birth. Sex is established at conception, not “assigned at birth.” Children are permanently established as males or females many months before birth. I want kids to hear this from their parents before they are exposed to the “assignment” language elsewhere. I want them to recognize the idea of sex being assigned at birth as the bizarre, anti-scientific myth that it is.

Secondly, I have been seeing these families for a few years now. I have patients who no longer have a penis or a so-called “vagina.” I have patients who have been made infertile, patients in their twenties, by surgeons who carved them up without taking a moment to explore their mental health. I have talked to too many young women who have had their breasts removed and now regret it, and it’s sinking in that they won’t be able to nurse one day. So I have been living it in this way. His idea was, put simply, that we are born “gender-neutral,” that we are all blank slates, and that our identity as men or women hinges merely on the way we’re treated during the first two and a half to three years of life. Given the debates at the time regarding nature and nurture, and what we knew and didn’t know about chromosomes, this seemed plausible.

DG:Thank you. As much as I was aware of what these surgeries and other physical processes entail, reading about them in detail in your book was, it was heartbreaking and just so difficult to get through. But I also appreciated that you shed light on the parents who I think are often the quieter actors in this. I think there are some detransitioners who are very outspoken, and courageously so, but parents dealing with their children’s crises occupy a strange role. But as you detail in the book, some parents protesting their children’s medical transitions have been legally challenged and even imprisoned.

DG:In the book, you quote Israeli child psychologist Haim Ginott as saying something like “children are like wet cement,” in that virtually anything can make a lasting impression. I wonder to what extent today’s gender activists appreciate or comprehend what they are doing to children, raising them in a world that is so different from the one in which they themselves were raised. Some of them feel they were wronged as children by being given fixed definitions of male and female, and they want to prevent that for coming generations. She writes that "(f)or twelve years, she was on the staff of UCLA’s Student Counseling Services, where nearly all her patients were students in their late teens and twenties. Because of this demographic, and no doubt also because of what’s now called the 'hook-up culture', many students who ended up in my office had a history of genital infections, one or more abortions, possible exposure to HIV, and other troublesome consequences of sexual activity, whether “protected’ or not." But no matter what, they cannot actually relate to being brought up in a world without those clear definitions. So they can’t meaningfully understand what children today are experiencing when they’re taught, as “wet cement,” these incredibly strange ideas. a b c "Heather McDonald, Esther Drill, and Rebecca Odes, authors: A chat about life as a "gURL." ". CNN. September 17, 1999. Archived from the original on May 9, 2015 . Retrieved June 26, 2021. a b c d e f g Angier, Natalie (November 19, 1999). "A Sex Guide for Girls, Minus Homilies". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 28, 2021 . Retrieved June 28, 2021.Anderson-Minshall, Diane (September 29, 2011). "Bookshelf: Banned Books Week". The Advocate. Archived from the original on July 4, 2021 . Retrieved July 1, 2021. So, in fact, we have this phrase or this term: identity crisis. It’s a cliché that men who hit forty or whatever experience a mid-life crisis, and go out and kind of lose themselves. But what is happening there? They are trying to answer questions: Who am I? Where do I fit in? Where am I going in life? But we call that a crisis.It is in its own way a real problem, a legitimate challenge to a stable identity, sometimes with humorous consequences, sometimes with devastating consequences to home life. This concept—that stable identity is a crucial springboard for success—is foundational in both child and adult development. MG:First of all, I’m at the end of my career. I’m not just starting off and having to worry about being rejected from job applications or being fired. So I don’t have that issue to deal with. Although I have been turned away from work because of my positions. But I survived. Roan, Shari (November 29, 1999). "Guidance on Tapping Into That Girl Power". The Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on July 1, 2021 . Retrieved June 26, 2021. Medical, educational, and government authorities advise us to support the “gender journeys” of still developing kids, including medical interventions with poor evidence of long-term improvement.