A NYT worthy article. Well written and in need of mass publication. My son began a medical transition after a month with a 28 year old, newly licensed, ‘gender therapist’. Previously he had been working with mature, well trained therapists who were helping him understand his self hate in other ways and he seemed to be doing better. How do we get this information to the APA and other therapy training organizations? Desperate mom of an adult child, grieving. 😢
Excellent article. One day we will look back on these times and shake our heads at what was a dangerous fad. But by then, there will probably be some other nonsense for us to debunk. We have become like a panicky herd of sheep, running from one imagined fear after another.
Yes, yes, and yes. Having lived through both of these phenomena, I see so many parallels. The extraordinary and nonsensical claims, how can anyone believe this, I ask myself? The "children don't lie/kids know who they are"--have you met a child, I think? I fear it will end in a worse way, since it hinges on irreparable physical damage to bodies. We can't say we saw it coming in 2000, but this article told us that something was coming https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/
Great work. I made the comparison in several papers earlier this year. I lived through the Repressed Memory era. Many of those therapists had personality disorders, as today. Others just want to be virtuous. Others are scared because we have these insane Conversion Therapy laws.
I had two licensure Boards take me to task after I received a complaint from a trans activist therapist who disagreed with a video I had done that advocated watchful waiting. Thankfully both Boards dismissed the complaints because there were no clients.
The depressing aspect today is that the activist Left uses lawfare to stop dissent. They are communists.
Some of us with teens deep into this trans madness know to keep our kids away from therapists. It's really too bad because many of our kids have other things going on and maybe could be helped by therapy but we really cannot trust any, except maybe Lisa Marchiano and a few others.
Dec 7, 2022·edited Dec 7, 2022Liked by Colin Wright
This is excellent, and thanks so much for recognizing that feminists have been fighting these battles longest, on both sides. No article could be all-inclusive, so let me chip in with the name Diane Ehrensaft. Here is an article about her decades-long history as a therapy quack. She became famous in the 1990s for endorsing the Presidio "recovered memory" case long after it had been debunked, charges dropped, and lawsuits settled. Today, she is advocating for the "gender angels" among us. https://thedistance.substack.com/p/diane-ehrensaft-satanic-panic-woo
Dr Marchiano,Thank you very much for this excellent article. I wish I could give it to my 17 y.o. trans-identifying daughter. Not as a criticism, but I am genuinely curious: Why do you refer to Jazz Jennings as "She" in your article?
Interesting parallels. In both cases the doctors seemed to throw the “first do no harm” principle out the door at the outset.
One big difference is the huge political and legal impact that gender ideology has already made. It affects everyone and it feels like trying to turn an oil tanker around. I am still hopeful that reality prevails - eventually.
Dec 7, 2022·edited Dec 7, 2022Liked by Colin Wright
Great article, thank you! Much of this intellectual manipulation of the vulnerable is made possible by how our brains acquire and process information. Once established, these worldviews — irrespective of how irrational they are — become progressively more entrenched in our brains...
The anecdote about the therapist telling a girl she’s like pop tarts in a wrong package really illustrates how phony and deceitful this has become.
It’s so easy to turn this around and say: your body includes your brain, your sex and your sexual orientation, and it is who you are. How you dress and behave is the packaging you can change.
Some of the assertions of the children who were allegedly harmed by satanic daycare providers were so bizarre that it beggars belief that any adult would have been fooled. But if you start with an unlikely premise, you may have to make stuff up to "prove" it. "Trans kids" are another category of adult delusional thinking: https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/mass-hysteria-and-moral-panic
I wish number 12 was true, but the feminist movement, by and large, embraced both the Day Care Abuse panic and the Recovered Memory panic. I was a feminist who did neither, and fought back to both - but it was feminists that I was fighting. And both - plus the current panic and any accusation of sexual harassment - start from the same non-critical place: "Believe the Children" or "Believe the Woman". The Courage to Heal was a feminist book, written by and for other feminists. While, sadly, it moved on to more mainstream acceptance - it was widely embraced in the feminist community. I live in Santa Cruz, home of the authors, and they are considered - to do this day - heroes. They - and a huge number of feminists I know - still embrace their or their friend's "recovered memory". They still think the McMartin case (which was developed by coaching of the children by the feminist Kee McFarlane) is "real". Basically feminists in the main have embraced pseudo-science or, even, no science. They are the ones who continue to push back and claim "recovered memories" are real, that women/children don't lie or can't be manipulated. Just look at the Woody Allen case. The court at the time concluded that Mia Farrow coached her daughter and that Woody Allen - whatever you think of his relationship with her adult adopted daughter Soon-Yi - did not molest Dylan Farrow. And from everything I know about memory science, Dylan is one more victim of implanted memories. But feminist are the ones who want to - and to a large degree - have cancelled him. After 30 years of fighting feminists, I know that most random feminists you meet are much more likely to be on the wrong side.
I remember the repressed memory movement and it touched my family, though thankfully not to a life-ruining degree. Psychiatry has made many, many mistakes and some weren't so long ago. It's hubris to think we've suddenly got it all figured out.
There are parallels between the butchery of gender affirming care and the worst practices "medical science" has ever offered humanity. Mengele, bloodletting, lobotomy, and trepanation all come to mind.
Dr. Henry Cotton, an early 20th century doctor who headed the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, performed hundreds of unnecessary and barbaric surgeries to remove healthy organs (stomachs, gallbladders, testicles, ovaries, and colons) in an effort to cure his patients of mental illness. None of his patients improved and 30% actually died. But Dr. Cotton claimed he had an 85% cure rate and held his position for many years. When he died, he and was lauded in a NY Times obituary that stated, "“[all must lament the loss of] this great pioneer whose humanitarian influence was, and will continue to be, of such monumental proportions.”
It highlights the way in which these widespread mental health “fads” (for lack of a better word — I certainly don’t intend to make light of them) are culturally created.
Seen through this lens, the daycare panics or the rise of “transgender” kids and teens come into sharper focus as forms of harm that we, collectively and unconsciously, are imposing culturally on vulnerable people.
Most people, even very pro-GAT people with whom I completely disagree, seem to have the best of intentions and yet they’re causing great harm. How do these enormous cultural blind spots develop, which fool so many and harm so many?
It’s really important that we understand the dynamics of how these mini-collective-insanities start and stop, so we can put a stop to them as soon as possible. After telling everyone who will listen for the last 4 years that our 21st century conception of “being trans” is a harmful cultural invention, with its narrative of “wrongness” needing to be “fixed,” serving as an idiom and emblem for all sorts of personal emotional distress, it’s a relief that these ideas are becoming a little less unsayable.
You mention that the daycare panic might have been tied to the cultural shift of mothers leaving the home and placing kids en masse in daycare, and the cultural and personal anxieties that resulted. That makes a lot of sense. Then you pose the question of what could have prompted the present widespread cultural panic.
I’d be interested to hear what you (or some of the readers) think. I’m not sure. Certainly there’s increasing isolation among teens, at a time in life when traditionally in our culture they’d be breaking away a bit from families and forming their own independent social lives and relationships. Now kids are increasingly scheduled and isolated. They socialize much more by phone and much less in person. They are much more likely to be tracked and monitored by family and less likely to go out drinking or dating or experimenting with sex. On the surface a few of these things sound positive (how many of us would like our teens out drinking and having sex?) and yet something for them has been lost. Breaking away and making their own mistakes and forming their own relationships are developmental tasks that have been denied them. In a sense, their childhood and dependency on parents have been prolonged, and the consolation prize is their phones. Many kids form (superficial? faux?) social networks via their phones.
At the same time, with the easy access to Internet porn (among other unhealthy content), a lot of kids get a very graphic and negative view of what sexual interaction (I hesitate to say “intimacy”!) involves. Earlier generations of teens and young adults didn’t grow up with the understanding that sex means being hit, slapped, choked, spit on, etc. No wonder so many kids (girls especially, or boys who are not stereotypically hypermasculine as depicted in porn) want to opt out of sex-role stereotypes. If that’s what sex is, no wonder so many kids consider themselves “asexual”—which was never a thing for earlier generations of teens, except perhaps for people who suffered trauma. Early exposure to violent porn indeed might be a form of trauma for a lot today’s kids.
Interested to hear others’ ideas on the possible origins of the present cultural madness.
A NYT worthy article. Well written and in need of mass publication. My son began a medical transition after a month with a 28 year old, newly licensed, ‘gender therapist’. Previously he had been working with mature, well trained therapists who were helping him understand his self hate in other ways and he seemed to be doing better. How do we get this information to the APA and other therapy training organizations? Desperate mom of an adult child, grieving. 😢
Excellent article. One day we will look back on these times and shake our heads at what was a dangerous fad. But by then, there will probably be some other nonsense for us to debunk. We have become like a panicky herd of sheep, running from one imagined fear after another.
Yes, yes, and yes. Having lived through both of these phenomena, I see so many parallels. The extraordinary and nonsensical claims, how can anyone believe this, I ask myself? The "children don't lie/kids know who they are"--have you met a child, I think? I fear it will end in a worse way, since it hinges on irreparable physical damage to bodies. We can't say we saw it coming in 2000, but this article told us that something was coming https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/
Great work. I made the comparison in several papers earlier this year. I lived through the Repressed Memory era. Many of those therapists had personality disorders, as today. Others just want to be virtuous. Others are scared because we have these insane Conversion Therapy laws.
I had two licensure Boards take me to task after I received a complaint from a trans activist therapist who disagreed with a video I had done that advocated watchful waiting. Thankfully both Boards dismissed the complaints because there were no clients.
The depressing aspect today is that the activist Left uses lawfare to stop dissent. They are communists.
Here is my Substack article about Old School Counseling: https://oldschoolcounselor.substack.com/p/what-is-old-school-counseling and the Trans Emotional Blackmail Weapon: https://oldschoolcounselor.substack.com/p/the-trans-emotional-blackmail-weapon
Some of us with teens deep into this trans madness know to keep our kids away from therapists. It's really too bad because many of our kids have other things going on and maybe could be helped by therapy but we really cannot trust any, except maybe Lisa Marchiano and a few others.
This is excellent, and thanks so much for recognizing that feminists have been fighting these battles longest, on both sides. No article could be all-inclusive, so let me chip in with the name Diane Ehrensaft. Here is an article about her decades-long history as a therapy quack. She became famous in the 1990s for endorsing the Presidio "recovered memory" case long after it had been debunked, charges dropped, and lawsuits settled. Today, she is advocating for the "gender angels" among us. https://thedistance.substack.com/p/diane-ehrensaft-satanic-panic-woo
Dr Marchiano,Thank you very much for this excellent article. I wish I could give it to my 17 y.o. trans-identifying daughter. Not as a criticism, but I am genuinely curious: Why do you refer to Jazz Jennings as "She" in your article?
Interesting parallels. In both cases the doctors seemed to throw the “first do no harm” principle out the door at the outset.
One big difference is the huge political and legal impact that gender ideology has already made. It affects everyone and it feels like trying to turn an oil tanker around. I am still hopeful that reality prevails - eventually.
Great article, thank you! Much of this intellectual manipulation of the vulnerable is made possible by how our brains acquire and process information. Once established, these worldviews — irrespective of how irrational they are — become progressively more entrenched in our brains...
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/hallucinating-your-inner-trans-reptile
The anecdote about the therapist telling a girl she’s like pop tarts in a wrong package really illustrates how phony and deceitful this has become.
It’s so easy to turn this around and say: your body includes your brain, your sex and your sexual orientation, and it is who you are. How you dress and behave is the packaging you can change.
Some of the assertions of the children who were allegedly harmed by satanic daycare providers were so bizarre that it beggars belief that any adult would have been fooled. But if you start with an unlikely premise, you may have to make stuff up to "prove" it. "Trans kids" are another category of adult delusional thinking: https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/mass-hysteria-and-moral-panic
I wish number 12 was true, but the feminist movement, by and large, embraced both the Day Care Abuse panic and the Recovered Memory panic. I was a feminist who did neither, and fought back to both - but it was feminists that I was fighting. And both - plus the current panic and any accusation of sexual harassment - start from the same non-critical place: "Believe the Children" or "Believe the Woman". The Courage to Heal was a feminist book, written by and for other feminists. While, sadly, it moved on to more mainstream acceptance - it was widely embraced in the feminist community. I live in Santa Cruz, home of the authors, and they are considered - to do this day - heroes. They - and a huge number of feminists I know - still embrace their or their friend's "recovered memory". They still think the McMartin case (which was developed by coaching of the children by the feminist Kee McFarlane) is "real". Basically feminists in the main have embraced pseudo-science or, even, no science. They are the ones who continue to push back and claim "recovered memories" are real, that women/children don't lie or can't be manipulated. Just look at the Woody Allen case. The court at the time concluded that Mia Farrow coached her daughter and that Woody Allen - whatever you think of his relationship with her adult adopted daughter Soon-Yi - did not molest Dylan Farrow. And from everything I know about memory science, Dylan is one more victim of implanted memories. But feminist are the ones who want to - and to a large degree - have cancelled him. After 30 years of fighting feminists, I know that most random feminists you meet are much more likely to be on the wrong side.
I remember the repressed memory movement and it touched my family, though thankfully not to a life-ruining degree. Psychiatry has made many, many mistakes and some weren't so long ago. It's hubris to think we've suddenly got it all figured out.
There are parallels between the butchery of gender affirming care and the worst practices "medical science" has ever offered humanity. Mengele, bloodletting, lobotomy, and trepanation all come to mind.
Dr. Henry Cotton, an early 20th century doctor who headed the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, performed hundreds of unnecessary and barbaric surgeries to remove healthy organs (stomachs, gallbladders, testicles, ovaries, and colons) in an effort to cure his patients of mental illness. None of his patients improved and 30% actually died. But Dr. Cotton claimed he had an 85% cure rate and held his position for many years. When he died, he and was lauded in a NY Times obituary that stated, "“[all must lament the loss of] this great pioneer whose humanitarian influence was, and will continue to be, of such monumental proportions.”
https://allthatsinteresting.com/henry-cotton
Really excellent piece — thanks for writing it.
It highlights the way in which these widespread mental health “fads” (for lack of a better word — I certainly don’t intend to make light of them) are culturally created.
Seen through this lens, the daycare panics or the rise of “transgender” kids and teens come into sharper focus as forms of harm that we, collectively and unconsciously, are imposing culturally on vulnerable people.
Most people, even very pro-GAT people with whom I completely disagree, seem to have the best of intentions and yet they’re causing great harm. How do these enormous cultural blind spots develop, which fool so many and harm so many?
It’s really important that we understand the dynamics of how these mini-collective-insanities start and stop, so we can put a stop to them as soon as possible. After telling everyone who will listen for the last 4 years that our 21st century conception of “being trans” is a harmful cultural invention, with its narrative of “wrongness” needing to be “fixed,” serving as an idiom and emblem for all sorts of personal emotional distress, it’s a relief that these ideas are becoming a little less unsayable.
You mention that the daycare panic might have been tied to the cultural shift of mothers leaving the home and placing kids en masse in daycare, and the cultural and personal anxieties that resulted. That makes a lot of sense. Then you pose the question of what could have prompted the present widespread cultural panic.
I’d be interested to hear what you (or some of the readers) think. I’m not sure. Certainly there’s increasing isolation among teens, at a time in life when traditionally in our culture they’d be breaking away a bit from families and forming their own independent social lives and relationships. Now kids are increasingly scheduled and isolated. They socialize much more by phone and much less in person. They are much more likely to be tracked and monitored by family and less likely to go out drinking or dating or experimenting with sex. On the surface a few of these things sound positive (how many of us would like our teens out drinking and having sex?) and yet something for them has been lost. Breaking away and making their own mistakes and forming their own relationships are developmental tasks that have been denied them. In a sense, their childhood and dependency on parents have been prolonged, and the consolation prize is their phones. Many kids form (superficial? faux?) social networks via their phones.
At the same time, with the easy access to Internet porn (among other unhealthy content), a lot of kids get a very graphic and negative view of what sexual interaction (I hesitate to say “intimacy”!) involves. Earlier generations of teens and young adults didn’t grow up with the understanding that sex means being hit, slapped, choked, spit on, etc. No wonder so many kids (girls especially, or boys who are not stereotypically hypermasculine as depicted in porn) want to opt out of sex-role stereotypes. If that’s what sex is, no wonder so many kids consider themselves “asexual”—which was never a thing for earlier generations of teens, except perhaps for people who suffered trauma. Early exposure to violent porn indeed might be a form of trauma for a lot today’s kids.
Interested to hear others’ ideas on the possible origins of the present cultural madness.
Wow such a good piece!
And remember, Diane Eherenstadt appears in both False Memory and 'Trans' parts of this story!