How Pamela Garfield-Jaeger Responds To Gender Distress In Children

A reading of two books by one social worker, and what they mean for the field

Pamela Garfield-Jaeger had been a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) for two decades when a health crisis sidelined her from clinical work for five years. Returning part-time in 2021, she found that her profession had been taken over by a “powerful political and cultural machine that is working overtime to divide families and harm children.” She was “shocked at the changes I observed since my four-year hiatus from work” after “seeing a very different world than the one I knew prior to my disability.”

“When I returned to work, three out of ten adolescent patients identified as non-binary, and they were all girls,” Garfield-Jager writes in her 2024 book A Practical Response to Gender Distress: Tips and Tools for Families. More recently, she calls out the “asexual” identity label as a linguistic capture of anyone experiencing a lack of libido: people on psychiatric medications, histories of sexual trauma and porn exposure, autistic young adults, but most especially children.

I Would Have Been Asexual

“Most children do not feel sexual attraction. That’s because they are CHILDREN,” she writes at Genspect. “It’s very strange and disconcerting that they are declaring an identity over normal childhood development.” Garfield-Jaeger refuses to take part in the gender madness.

Libido varies from person to person and shifts and changes with age and life events. In addition, there are so many variables that can interfere with a person’s sexual desires. However, to call something as variable as a sex drive a fixed identity is simply wrong, especially while impressionable children are trying to understand themselves and their bodies as they grow to be adults.

Unlike most people in her profession, Garfield-Jaeger has not set aside all scientific knowledge and understanding of human developmental stages to ‘let the child lead’ as if they have adult agency. She understands that parental authority is a necessary part of growing up, that children naturally want to differentiate from their parents, that ideologies which promote estrangement are toxic to mental health and destructive to society. She is not without compassion: the kids are clearly in pain. But the last thing they need is any sort of medicalization. The only cure for growing pains is growth.

There is no rational difference between telling a child they were born as the wrong sex and telling the same child that they were born as the wrong species. They are equally insane ideas. ‘Gender critical’ kids’ lit is grounded in reality. It seeks to inoculate children against gender ideology by stressing embodiment.

Embedded below is a video by Garfield-Jaeger in which she reads her new kids’ book, Froggy Girl, due out on 15 July. (You can order it presale here.) Detransitioner Nicolas Blooms provided the illustrations. It is completely normal for children to imagine they are dogs, cats, frogs, or dragons. Gender ideology exploits this human developmental phase by introducing ideas of disembodiment.

A love-bombing social circle appears. “The girl began to doubt / but all agreed she was a frog, / so she couldn’t back out,” Garfield-Jaeger writes. Rather than cure her ‘frog dysphoria,’ the affirmation creates it. “She felt sad and alone because she couldn’t catch a fly. / That’s when she realized she was living a lie.” A wise turtle intervenes with a monologue. Then: “The little girl learned to love the way God made her, beautiful and smart and full of fervor.”

That express call to a theistic impulse will be controversial. Garfield-Jaeger is happy to embrace the controversy. Moreover, as we have examined here at The Distance in detail, the weakening of shared institutional religion has opened a vacuum of belief, a ‘God-shaped hole’ that ‘gender identity’ and ‘wokeness’ fill as ersatz, i.e. inferior substitute, religiosity.

In Practical Response, Garfield-Jaeger describes the idea that anyone can be ‘born in the wrong body’ as “an unsubstantiated spiritual belief” that “can be compared to a form of Gnosticism.” Put simply, removing an orthodox God from American life has made room for the gendered child-god to exist among us.

Males are diverse. Females are diverse. Human development has uniform stages but great diversity of timing. This diversity has been abused, garbled into unscientific woo woo. Garfield-Jaeger writes that “gender medicine can be considered ‘the modern-day lobotomy’.” It is a tragic cutting-off of normal human development, especially in children. She wants parents to know what is happening, why it is happening, and what to do about it.

“In summary, people, especially teens, experience forms of Gender Distress,” she writes. “Sometimes it is short-lived and sometimes it is long-term.” It is completely normal, whereas “long-term gender dysphoria is rare.” A supermajority of kids grow out of it, given time. Gender ideology seeks to steal that time from them.

Garfield-Jaeger advises parents to “question experts.” She wants to “empower you to believe in your intuition as a parent.” The promises of medical transition are false while the risks are high. No one, not even a grown adult, should enter into it without “a full understanding of the many risks.” Emphases are added:

Therapists working with a questioning child should do a complete assessment of the child. This includes a full history, looking at other mental health issues, reporting from the parents who knew the child when they were young, how and when behaviors changed, if there was a lot of new social media use, and other factors to determine the proper course of treatment. This should take more than one session and include an intake session with the parents.

The truth is that there are many influences that may cause a child to believe (or want to believe) they are a different gender, and it takes a thorough investigation to figure out how each individual should be treated. I believe affirming a child’s gender identity without further exploration is poor therapy, bordering on malpractice. Historically an adult transgender patient had to go through many months of therapy before medical intervention.

The word “believe” should always be complementary to information, i.e. evidence. Cultic belief in the transgender child preceeded evidence that such a class of child exists. To date, no diagnosis, even a lengthy and comprehensive one such as Garfield-Jaeger describes, has proven capable of determining which persons, let alone which minor children, will persist in their dysphoric feelings and who will grow out of them.

There is no scientific evidence for the existence of the ‘trans child’, much less a coherent material source for ‘gender identity’ in the ‘trans person’. The mere existence of detransitioners dispels the myth of immutable transgender identification, which is why transgender activism is so eager to deny the very existence of detransition.

These are articles of faith. The history of transgenderism is a patent medical fraud empowered by ardent faith. There have always been some people who wanted to be the opposite sex, or believed they were. Today, there are doctors pretending they can make the fantasy real. Nothing else has changed.

Contrary to all the clickbaiting articles about alleged ‘transgender brains,’ MRI machines are not used in gender clinics, either. There is simply no way to know which children will desist or detransition, or regret their transition. Instead of integrating feminine males and masculine females into our society as men and women, gender ideology pathologizes, medicalizes, and traumatizes them.

It also bends all of society to its ends. Social control is intrinsic to the adopted transgender identity. “The kids discovered they could use their new pronoun status to control adults and control their world, a world in which they otherwise felt very powerless,” Garfield-Jaeger writes. They are encouraged to adopt a victim mentality, a diagnostic identity, a narcissistic view of the world. “This is especially enticing for a child who has a trauma history and already feels very powerless.”

Garfield-Jaeger writes about the role of homophobia in transgender identification, the grooming in schools, the society-wide effort at “getting ‘em on the bus.” In 2023, Garfield-Jaeger attended a class by Kinda K. Reeves, a licensed marriage and family therapist with pronouns as well as a WPATH-certified Gender Specialist. Reeves “spoke about soft approaches for much of the presentation, however, she continued to instruct the class that if parents do not affirm their child’s transgender identity therapists should call Child Protective Services.”

Reeves was speaking to the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapy. “She also directed the room full of therapists to keep a child’s transgender identity secret from the parents if the child is not ‘out,’ and to always favor the affirming parent in custody situations.” Every parent who has had the experience of “gender affirming” court, police, and CPS interventions with a minor child has felt the impact of this ideological instruction in their lives.

The capture of the social work profession is deeply troubling to Garfield-Jaeger. “Throughout modern therapy, threatening suicide to get something (in this case gender affirmation) was recognized as maladaptive and considered unethical to be reinforced by a therapist.”

This behavior is often learned from online influencers, but sadly, it is deliberately practiced by many therapists and school personnel, particularly those who hold themselves out as ‘gender therapists.’ Kids are coached to say, “I will kill myself,” to get hormones or other components of affirming care. Previously, this threatening behavior was typically done by those with conditions such as borderline personality disoder.

Indeed, BPD has been correlated with transgender identification for a long time. Garfield-Jaeger knows the history of her profession. A therapist for ten years, she also knows that it is difficult to find “therapists who do not immediately affirm transgenderism” because they must necessarily “keep a very low profile.”

When interviewing a therapist for your gender-distressed child, she recommends “a thorough pre-screening.” Start “by ruling out all therapists that have flags, pronouns, or anything about supporting the LGBTQIA+ community in their bio.” Watch out for rainbow flags and ask questions about anything the slightest bit woke. “Under no circumstances seek out a traditional gender therapist or gender clinic.”

Garfield-Jaeger has a list of suggested questions for evaluating a therapist as well as advice on red flags in their answers. “Some therapists, in a misguided effort to ‘help’ a child, may attempt to hide their true positions,” she writes. Parents of children caught up in the transgender cult know the truth of her words all too well.

A Practical Response To Gender Distress is written in short chapters. Garfield-Jaeger is not prone to lenghty prose, preferring short, self-contained arguments for each point she makes. While it is not the most thorough book for a parent going through this experience, it is really only meant to be the first-aid reading. She knows that she cannot fix every child with a book their parents read. Contrarily, Froggy Girl is meant for parents to read to their children, before gender distress ever reaches a crisis level, to prevent that outcome.

Pending a Supreme Court decision, 2025 could very well see the end of pediatric ‘gender medicine’ in America. Professional organizations which persist in continuing with captured policy would then face crippling legal exposure, increasing the selection-pressure for non-affirming therapists like Pamela Garfield-Jaeger. There is reason to hope she will present a panel of her own to the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, someday, so that she can remind her profession of important truths that it has tried to forget.