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.