Gender Dysphoria Versus The Talking Cure
Reading the 2021 book by two Tavistock whistleblowers
In order to convince the world that children needed endocrine disruption and the earliest possible surgical interventions to prevent ostensible suicide, clinicians extorted parents with reference to an evidence-based approach that does not exist. This campaign of gaslighting, circular citation, and institutional capture is now collapsing in the United States as the judicial system processes the results of two decades of increasingly systematic pediatric gender medicalization.
This fight also took place in the United Kingdom, in parallel, partly via the judiciary. We should never underestimate the courage of Keira Bell, who still lives with the iatrogenic harms of her medicalization. But it was Hilary Cass who ultimately recommended shutting down the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS) clinic in July 2022, and got her way. It is also a sign of how far we have come that Cass herself has come under review for her recommendation of a new puberty blocker “study” that is nothing of the kind, since there will be no control group.
Cass was correct to say that the existing single-provider model of care at GIDS was “not a safe or viable long-term option” for young people with gender-related distress. However, the conclusion that inadequate assessments, overwhelmed capacity from rising referrals, and risks to mental health could be circumvented in any future trial when anyone has yet to prove the ‘trans child’ actually exists, is risible. Britain’s Labour government seems determined to repeat the failed Tavistock experiment anew. Belief in the ‘trans child’ is politics-based, not evidence-based.
Like all the important British political scandals of our time, the whistleblowers have been proven correct while their reports were suppressed or ignored. One married couple of psychoanalysts, Susan Evans her husband Marcus Evans, himself a former governor of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, even wrote a book in 2021. Gender Dysphoria: A Therapeutic Model for Working with Children, Adolescents and Young Adults pits the medical solution to gender dysphoria against the talking cure — and finds that gender ‘identity’ resists examination because it almost never can survive a sensible conversation.
Censorship of that very conversation is therefore intrinsic to the imposition of the ‘trans child’ on the world through law and policy. For “we have observed, more recently, that patients with a history of serious and enduring mental illness or personality disorder have developed gender dysphoria” as a comorbid psychological condition, they write. “A common theme in their presentations is the patients’ belief that physical treatments will remove or resolve aspects of themselves that cause them psychic pain” — they pursue psychoactive chemicals and psychosurgery because they suffer from dysphoria.
But what even is ‘gender dysphoria’? The DSM-V offers a system of diagnosis, but no individual means of understanding. What even is ‘gender’ to the patient? To the therapist? These are subjective questions. “Our hypothesis is that the individual who feels their body or sex is wrong is likely to be defending against psychological traumas from the past: traumas which form part of their psychic structure in the present”, the authors write. Sigmund Freud has called from the lobby, he wants to sit in on the session.
