I had a less inquisitive or critical response to the live son/dead daughter question in March 2020. My response was "Don't try to pull that emotional blackmail bullshit on me," and I pulled my kid out of there.
When I got this question from my daughter’s affirming therapist many years ago now I did the second to last suggestion. I asked what the difference was between a dead daughter and a dead son and how affirming was a going to treat her other issues? If she committed suicide as a result of one of those other issues going untreated how would this affirmation have helped? A dead kid is a dead kid.
The therapist sputtered. She was clearly not expecting any push back. It took us another few months to extract from her care. Going to her because she was touted as a gender specialist is probably my biggest regret in parenting.
While the general argument here is cogent, I'm in doubt about the nominal premise: that is, this “rather have a dead daughter or a live son" business. Was there really a fad of doctors and therapists saying this? Is it still going on? Have you heard this in practice, literally? It seems to me there can't be much of a critical mass of youngsters for whom it would even be applicable.
On a related matter, the claims about suicide are based on fuzzy, dubious numbers. People glibly claim to have wanted to kill themselves without ever having made the slightest move in that direction. (Did you ever think of suicide in your teens? It's very easy to say yes.)
And that long-term Swedish study is doubtful in yet another way. It's not a controlled study, because a truly controlled study would be unethical and near-impossible to devise. Instead of comparing like with like, they are comparing long-term clinical patients with the general population. Moreover those are clinical patients in a public-healthcare environment, where it's very easy to obtain psychiatric therapy and meds, as well as treatments for a host of other conditions, including ones that are iatrogenic. So here we're comparing a population that's about 98% under psychiatric care, with all sorts of diagnoses and therapies, with a "general population" that has a much smaller treatment profile. We logically *should* expect a higher rate of mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric illnesses among the clinical population. It's tautological.
"Conclusions: Clinical gender dysphoria does not appear to be predictive of all-cause nor suicide mortality when psychiatric treatment history is accounted for. "
"Conclusion: The proportion of individual patients who died by suicide was 0.03%, which is orders of magnitude smaller than the proportion of transgender adolescents who report attempting suicide when surveyed."
It is plain that we have taken an utterly irresponsible approach to these kids by willfully ignoring their psychiatric co-morbidities. Instead of asking why they want to transition, we have subjected them to experimental hormonal and surgical mutilations, adding sterility and sexual dysfunction to their woes. This is human vivisection on a grand scale, and it is hard not to notice that the majority of these kids were likely to have grown up to become happy gays. I thought we weren't supposed to be conducting conversion therapy?
As a retired LCSW (retired 2014 out of Alaska) I missed the madness you and other fellow social workers are dealing with today - both within the profession and within our professional social work organizations. I applaud your courage Pamela in standing up for both ethical analysis and practice. I'm appalled, and I must say it seems almost surreal at some level to see how many of the professional licensing bodies and professional organizations within the various "helping professions" have seamlessly embraced affirmation only thinking and practice - throwing rationality, critical thinking and ethics to the wind. Thank you for your work.
In the USA, 40% of kids appearing at the McGender clinics are already in treatment for at least one mental illness, taking handfuls of pills. But all this is ignored if that morning they ran into some “trans” activist and got talked into going to a clinic.
As an LCSW, you are already well aware that emotional blackmail is a baseline norm and always has been. Counterproductive and maladaptive, to be sure, but ubiquitous.
What is different now, is that so-called "licensed professionals" are using emotional blackmail as a coercive mechanism and are actively coaching the dysmorphic in its use as a manipulative technique.
I'd very much like your thoughts on whether the current zeitgeist now renders emotional blackmail adaptive.
"Maladaptive" has meaning beyond a simple label. The role of professionals is to assist individuals with adaptation to whatever milieu they operate within. Adaptive learning and behavior is contextual, with adaptive methodology varying according to environment. Thus, what selects for adaptation to a violent urban environment may be maladaptive in high-trust environs. I offer levels of hypervigilance as a case in point.
Still, a therapist may proffer iconoclasm as adaptive under one set of circumstances, and submission to group standards in another, both recommendations made to the same client.
Has the emotional and physical environment metastasized to a point where emotional blackmail is now an adaptive response to environmental stimuli?
The point about emotional manipulation is an important one. We should provide troubled teenagers with compassionate care, but allowing them to hold themselves hostage isn’t helpful to anyone.
Yes there were people saying this, see Helen Lewis's recent critique in the Atlantic of Andrea Long Chu's bizarre article.
There were also articles in the NYT intimating this, eg starting with:"Early in my medical training, I read a landmark case study about a 12-year-old boy who wrote a suicide note to his mother saying he would rather die than go through puberty. ...." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/opinion/transgender-children-medical-bills.html
Note that the recent Finnish study by Ruuska et Al (2024) found the suicide rate to be small (but it's still terrible) and correlated with comorbidities rather than other things like getting medical treatment.
It was a caregiver in a behavioral treatment center. She said nothing. I don’t think she expected my response. I can add that when I said I was taking my daughter home, I got pushback and they delayed the discharge by having a patient advocate try to persuade me to get with the program.
I had a less inquisitive or critical response to the live son/dead daughter question in March 2020. My response was "Don't try to pull that emotional blackmail bullshit on me," and I pulled my kid out of there.
When I got this question from my daughter’s affirming therapist many years ago now I did the second to last suggestion. I asked what the difference was between a dead daughter and a dead son and how affirming was a going to treat her other issues? If she committed suicide as a result of one of those other issues going untreated how would this affirmation have helped? A dead kid is a dead kid.
The therapist sputtered. She was clearly not expecting any push back. It took us another few months to extract from her care. Going to her because she was touted as a gender specialist is probably my biggest regret in parenting.
What type of social movement threatens suicide if they don't get what they want? The answer is a harmful, dangerous cult.
The use of this live son/dead daughter phrase should be treated as criminal extortion.
While the general argument here is cogent, I'm in doubt about the nominal premise: that is, this “rather have a dead daughter or a live son" business. Was there really a fad of doctors and therapists saying this? Is it still going on? Have you heard this in practice, literally? It seems to me there can't be much of a critical mass of youngsters for whom it would even be applicable.
On a related matter, the claims about suicide are based on fuzzy, dubious numbers. People glibly claim to have wanted to kill themselves without ever having made the slightest move in that direction. (Did you ever think of suicide in your teens? It's very easy to say yes.)
And that long-term Swedish study is doubtful in yet another way. It's not a controlled study, because a truly controlled study would be unethical and near-impossible to devise. Instead of comparing like with like, they are comparing long-term clinical patients with the general population. Moreover those are clinical patients in a public-healthcare environment, where it's very easy to obtain psychiatric therapy and meds, as well as treatments for a host of other conditions, including ones that are iatrogenic. So here we're comparing a population that's about 98% under psychiatric care, with all sorts of diagnoses and therapies, with a "general population" that has a much smaller treatment profile. We logically *should* expect a higher rate of mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric illnesses among the clinical population. It's tautological.
Yet we do now have large studies showing the "transition or die by suicide" line is a myth.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38367979/
"Conclusions: Clinical gender dysphoria does not appear to be predictive of all-cause nor suicide mortality when psychiatric treatment history is accounted for. "
and
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10508-022-02287-7.pdf
"Conclusion: The proportion of individual patients who died by suicide was 0.03%, which is orders of magnitude smaller than the proportion of transgender adolescents who report attempting suicide when surveyed."
It is plain that we have taken an utterly irresponsible approach to these kids by willfully ignoring their psychiatric co-morbidities. Instead of asking why they want to transition, we have subjected them to experimental hormonal and surgical mutilations, adding sterility and sexual dysfunction to their woes. This is human vivisection on a grand scale, and it is hard not to notice that the majority of these kids were likely to have grown up to become happy gays. I thought we weren't supposed to be conducting conversion therapy?
As a retired LCSW (retired 2014 out of Alaska) I missed the madness you and other fellow social workers are dealing with today - both within the profession and within our professional social work organizations. I applaud your courage Pamela in standing up for both ethical analysis and practice. I'm appalled, and I must say it seems almost surreal at some level to see how many of the professional licensing bodies and professional organizations within the various "helping professions" have seamlessly embraced affirmation only thinking and practice - throwing rationality, critical thinking and ethics to the wind. Thank you for your work.
In the USA, 40% of kids appearing at the McGender clinics are already in treatment for at least one mental illness, taking handfuls of pills. But all this is ignored if that morning they ran into some “trans” activist and got talked into going to a clinic.
They get their first hormones that same day.
As an LCSW, you are already well aware that emotional blackmail is a baseline norm and always has been. Counterproductive and maladaptive, to be sure, but ubiquitous.
What is different now, is that so-called "licensed professionals" are using emotional blackmail as a coercive mechanism and are actively coaching the dysmorphic in its use as a manipulative technique.
I'd very much like your thoughts on whether the current zeitgeist now renders emotional blackmail adaptive.
"Maladaptive" has meaning beyond a simple label. The role of professionals is to assist individuals with adaptation to whatever milieu they operate within. Adaptive learning and behavior is contextual, with adaptive methodology varying according to environment. Thus, what selects for adaptation to a violent urban environment may be maladaptive in high-trust environs. I offer levels of hypervigilance as a case in point.
Still, a therapist may proffer iconoclasm as adaptive under one set of circumstances, and submission to group standards in another, both recommendations made to the same client.
Has the emotional and physical environment metastasized to a point where emotional blackmail is now an adaptive response to environmental stimuli?
The point about emotional manipulation is an important one. We should provide troubled teenagers with compassionate care, but allowing them to hold themselves hostage isn’t helpful to anyone.
Yes there were people saying this, see Helen Lewis's recent critique in the Atlantic of Andrea Long Chu's bizarre article.
There were also articles in the NYT intimating this, eg starting with:"Early in my medical training, I read a landmark case study about a 12-year-old boy who wrote a suicide note to his mother saying he would rather die than go through puberty. ...." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/opinion/transgender-children-medical-bills.html
Note that the recent Finnish study by Ruuska et Al (2024) found the suicide rate to be small (but it's still terrible) and correlated with comorbidities rather than other things like getting medical treatment.
Gender Affirming surgery is Elephantoplasty:
https://youtu.be/SnDm3HaCQeg
It was a caregiver in a behavioral treatment center. She said nothing. I don’t think she expected my response. I can add that when I said I was taking my daughter home, I got pushback and they delayed the discharge by having a patient advocate try to persuade me to get with the program.
Take a listen to this.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-glenn-beck-program/id620967489?i=1000649401494