Diane Ehrensaft, 'Satanic Panic' Woo Peddler, Now Champions the 'Gender Angels' Among Us
Diane Ehrensaft, 'Satanic Panic' Woo Peddler, Now Champions the 'Gender Angels' Among Us
The dangerously consequential career of a quack
Diane Ehrensaft believes in “gender angels.” Really. She says so. Not only are they real to her, these invisible, ineffable gender angels express themselves to her from the very beginning of a child’s life. She can read them as easily as a children’s book.
A boy who unsnaps his onesie is not really a boy, you see, because he knows that skirts are for females and his “gender angel” is a girl. A girl who tears barrettes from her hair is not really a girl, either. It is a boy gender-angel communicating that it has been assigned to the incorrect corporeal form. Born in the wrong body, so to speak.
Failure to believe these children about themselves is not only harmful, but sinful, because this is not about children mirroring the anxieties of adults. Our faith in the children is being tested. Their angels are telling us a universal truth hidden behind a material illusion, revealing an esoteric knowledge of “who they really are” before they even learn to speak.
Now let us sing praise unto the “trans child” and be glad, for Ehrensaft is the high priestess of early “affirmation.” We can believe her. Why, the American Association of Pediatrics endorses her approach.
The preverbial trans child is “action oriented,” Ehrensaft says in the meaningless language of a horoscope. Toddlers are “uncomfortable if you misgender them.”
Left unsaid, of course, is that children so young are not yet capable of understanding object permanance; they still enjoy peek-a-boo. As a ‘developmental and clinical psychologist,’ Ehrensaft knows this. She just dismisses it as a concern because her faith in gender angels is complete.
She would have parents participate in this “preverbal communication,” affirm the child as a boy or girl according to their adult-stereotyped impression of child behaviors, and “see where they go.”
More to the point, all of us are expected to participate in this performance because any expression of disbelief will dispel the magic of the gender angels. As soon as they start talking, the whole of society must believe the toddlers when they say what they are, for they are definitely not children learning how the world works, but little god-beings with all the infinite knowledge of the universe hidden inside them. We are here to learn from them.
“Trans kids” are little prophets who can speak even before they ever learn to use their tongues, and as with any prophets, merely to doubt their slightest utterance is a sin.
Doubts, Ehrensaft says, are the whispers of the sinister “gender ghosts” flitting all around us. If we ignore the gender ghosts, and have faith in the gender angels of the prophet-children, then the whole world will be literally transformed by all the wonderful “gender-creativity” they produce.
A promised heaven of rainbows and glitter — as long as we have faith, and pray away the evil spirits. From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night, Gender Lord deliver us, amen.
America is a land of creative religious foment and Ehrensaft has always dabbled in the New Age psychobabble of her era. Her PhD adds an all-important sheen of respectability to what would otherwise be recognizable as pseudoscientific self-help and quackery. In that sense, she is a true American, an avatar of the huckster spirit of a nation, and her “Child and Adolescent Gender Center” is a direct descendant of the traveling preacher-and-patent medicine show.
“Gender creativity” makes no sense as a medical regimen. But analysis as a new faith formation elegantly explains Ehrensaft, as well as the broader “trans kids” phenomenon. “Trans kids” fill an important hole in the political psychology of the left and what is left of liberalism, a space from which traditionalist Protestant and Catholic religion has largely been banished. Borrowed influences are everywhere in this gibberish. Ehrensaft’s symbology is generically Christian; her “gender ghosts” function like the body thetans of Scientology; her prophetic vision is a retake on the Indigo Children. Remember them?
Indigo Children were supposed to save the planet with their psychic powers in the 1990s, but then they turned out to be the Adderall kids of the 2000s, and then a new generation of “Crystal Children” supposedly came along to replace them. Like gender ghosts, neither indigo-ness nor crystal-ness could be detected in a child by modern laboratory methods.
Rather, their existence was entirely known and confirmed by a small set of adults claiming to have psychic powers themselves — synesthesia, the power to see auras around human heads.
Ehrensaft also proposes the existence of an esoteric class of child that also cannot be detected by objective scientific means. However, she sensibly abandons the claim to have magic powers herself, projecting the magic power onto the children instead.
Her discourse about “trans kids” presupposes the intrinsic existence of gender angels causing certain children to behave in relation to adult stereotypes (“gender nonconformity”) within an ever-shifting spectrum of possibility (“gender infinity”). As medical diagnosis, it has no material basis, and yet this process now leads to medicalization of children with astounding frequency.
In this “affirmative” approach, adult analysis precedes verbal, physical, or mental development of an adult person in the child. This is necessary, Ehrensaft explains, because maturation kills the innocence of the child. Their creative gender-angel gives way to the sin of conformity in the throes of puberty.
Thus, Ehrensaft is totally fine with kids who are too young to talk about sex going through “sex change.” She is explicit about this, and waves it away as a concern, recommending that parents avoid explaining the adult impact of medical decisions being made in childhood to the affected child.
Act on faith, in other words. Muddle your language. “Let the child lead.” Quack quack quack, I can walk like a duck, I can talk like a duck, I can be a duck.
Ehrensaft does not want any poor “trans child” to question the existence of their inner, invisible gender angels, and perhaps live a longer, happier, healthy life in a fully-grown adult body.
To tell the kids what their “trans” futures really hold would be “giving them more information than they need or can handle,” in Ehrensaft’s words, because “tweens and young teens undergoing these treatments are not developmentally mature enough to comprehend the full magnitude of irreversible sterilization.”
There. Right there. Diane Ehrensaft calls it “sterilization.” Her own word for it.
This is the single most contentious word in the discursive construction of the “trans child.” Adamant supporters of “trans kids” will flatly deny that any child is being sterilized even though that is exactly what happens right now in pediatric “gender clinics” around the world. People just don’t want to admit that they are endorsing a child sterilization cult, for some reason. Much easier to scream “transphobia” and cover your ears and go lalalalalala.
Instead of waiting, Ehrensaft says, we must “move the child from gender dysphoria to gender euphoria,” which sounds like a religious experience, and in the sense that such experiences are entirely subjective and individual, that is exactly what she wants.
In most adult men who transition late, “gender euphoria” is the boner they get from walking down the street in a miniskirt and lacy underwear.
On TikTok, however, one can observe the rapture with which the mangled “trans boy” enjoys “his” very first time standing topless on the beach. “Trans kids” frequently speak of their experiences as transformative, using spiritual terms. Unitarian Universalist congregations hold affirmation ceremonies where children announce their holy pronouns.
Ehrensaft recommends that parents have the child “write a letter to their future self,” telling the adult who will actually live with the irreversible consequences of their childhood “gender angels” that it was all worthwhile, and to believe in themselves, hooray.
Any further discussion of the drawbacks might “stigmatize” the poor dears, Ehrensaft worries. There: a religious term has crept right into the “trans kids” discourse without even removing its hat.
After all, if a parent has to say something out loud to their child like “we want to sterilize you and amputate your healthy organs so you can have brittle bones and use a walker in your 30s,” it might cause that parent to heed their ghosts, and entertain doubt that gender angels exist.
In the gender industry, the approach in which children are encouraged towards body acceptance is called “watchful waiting,” and gender identity activists hate it. They call it “conversion therapy,” the discredited practice of some religious groups that try to change homosexuals into heterosexuals through prayer.
Ehrensaft is among the most notorious champions of early medicalization. What she calls “social transition” — clothes, pronouns, restrooms for preschoolers — creates cult-like incentives for the entire family to maintain the charade right into early puberty blockade and surgeries.
The living nightmare of Jazz Jennings is a case in point. Born to a Munchausen-esque mother who wished for “a little girl who would never grow up,” Jazz is now shorter than all “her” siblings, far heavier, an unhealthy and unstable mess. Jazz was four years old when he wanted to wear a sparkly swimsuit. As a result of their hyper-attention to this “gender expression,” the entire family is now constructed around the mother’s sincere belief that Jazz has a girl-angel inside him.
Worse, the only person allowed to be wrong about any of this is Jazz “herself,” who must simply try harder at “being herself.” None of this is healthy. Yet we cannot “stigmatize” Jazz by declining to participate. To wit:
That is the American Academy of Pediatrics, one of the most important public safeguards against woo peddlers of every description, attempting to duck responsibility for the harms of a medicalized New Age cult that captured their policy years ago. AAP has consistently rejected any notion that social contagion might be responsible for the current epidemic of “trans kids.” Talk shows, Tumblr, and ubiquitous violent pornography are all dismissed as explanations for surges in new cohorts of children, particularly young females, enacting self-harm as a progressive lifestyle.
Now the AAP are pretending it was never about shoving kids down a profitable medicalized pathway at all, but rather “destigmatizing” a class of children that is especially sensitive to sensible discussions of its characteristics and outcomes. AAP has still not rejected puberty blockers for dysphoric youth of any age. They just deny responsibility for recommending that treatment, citing Diane Ehrensaft when they say it was always necessary.
She has been helping shape their policy for a long time. “If a mental health issue exists” in the pediatric transition victim, they insisted in 2018, “it most often stems from stigma and negative experiences rather than being intrinsic to the child” (emphasis mine). And with that, all concern for the high comorbidity of “trans” with trauma history, mental health issues, internalized homophobia, and Autism spectrum diagnoses was set aside as “transphobia” (the aforementioned “stigma and negative experiences”).
Like “gender ghosts,” transphobia is an insidious, invisible force that cannot be detected or measured by objective laboratory methods. No stable or coherent definition of transphobia exists; the term is simply applied to whatever a transgender person might find upsetting, or that someone might find upsetting on their behalf.
Since that public statement four years ago, AAP members have presided over unknown thousands of pediatric transition cases around the country, all citing their organization’s approval, while a global medical scandal was emerging. Over the last year, Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have all shut down pediatric transition programs. The creators of the so-called “Dutch protocol” have criticized the way their regimen has been applied to cohorts that were not in their original study. Detransitioners are suing. A class action is planned in the UK. American law firms are already litigating the harms of the “gender angels” cult.
“Trans kids” is not the first moral panic to twist the minds of children and turn adults into gibbering zealots. It is not even the first moral panic that Diane Ehrensaft has amplified or turned into profit. It is simply the most successful moral panic of our time, or hers.
Ehrensaft’s name is all over the discursive construction of a “human rights” cause in the form of a “trans child.”
For example, the Human Rights Campaign — another key organization in deep capture to gender ideology — declares that access to puberty blockers and amputation surgeries as a form of “medical care” for children is a “human right.” AAP cited an HRC report making that claim in their Twitter thread. Authored by a staffer named Gabe Murchison, Diane Ehrensaft’s name is prominent among the voices in it calling for early puberty blockade for tweens and the full set of “sex reassignment” procedures for adolescents, all on demand.
The report, “Supporting & Caring for Transgender Children,” makes much of suicide rates in transgender populations. This increased risk of suicide, and higher rates of suicidal ideation, are blamed on the harmful specter of transphobia rather than the intense psychological pressure of prophethood in a child-sterilizing cult.
Setting aside the fact that these statistics are bogus, as emotional blackmail they have tremendous effects on parents. “Nice trans kid,” they imply. “Would be a pity if something happened to them.”
Following Ehrensaft, Murchison casually dismisses concerns that dysphoric gay and lesbian and “gender nonconforming” youth will be harmed as adult sexual beings by removing healthy sex organs in a vain attempt to resemble the opposite sex. “Watchful waiting” is deprecated. Affirmation is required. Anything less is a human rights violation against the invisible gender angels.
Hospitals across America are hosting this horror show.
All of this is anticipated in an earlier report by Ehrensaft. During the late throes of the “satanic panic,” a legal team hired her to look at one of the most notorious cases of “satanic ritual abuse” prosecutions: the Presidio day care scandal. She published her views in 1992. They are ridiculous.
“Using process notes and evaluation records from the assessment and treatment” for two girls(!) and “anecdotal evidence from other cases,” Ehrensaft affirmed absurd “recovered memories” of satanic ritual sexual abuse. Even as she admitted that the children were clearly inventing their most improbable stories, they “did not invent the contents of the fantasies; these were fueled by actual external events,” Ehrensaft insisted.
Mind you, she published this nonsense two whole years after the stories of satanic ritual abuse at both the McMartin preschool and the Presidio had been completely debunked and all charges dropped, with lawsuits ultimately settled out of court. Those scandals remain sources for conspiracy theories to this day. They are mentioned in the opening paragraph of her report, but without any of that context.
While she was very focused on blaming the US Army, which had the deep pockets in the Presidio case, it is striking how Ehrensaft attacks mental health providers for, get this, asking the girls questions instead of affirming their alleged experiences.
Questions were “stigmatizing” to the poor children, you see.
Their sharpest memory of the abuse and immediate postabuse experience involved the sec-ondary invasion by the mental health assessment: “The worst part of the experience with Mr. G was talking. The talking with the doctor. He asked me so-0-0-o0 many questions.” “I hate having to go to all these doctors who ask me questions. I don’t want to have to answer them again. The questions those stupid doctors asked were worse than anything that happened with Mr. G.”
It is hardly surprising that children who made up stories to please one set of adults would get upset when a different set of adults questions them.
Ehrensaft is particularly impressed by one girl who denied any abuse happened, but then began “a spontaneous recollection of a baby-sitter who let her fall out of her high chair when she was a baby and showed the therapist the scar.”
“It was as if she were speaking in ‘tongues,’” Ehrensaft marvels, taking it as evidence of a hidden truth. She has been doing this for a long time. She’s the acknowledged expert at it.