Welcome back, workweek!Hey, you didn’t think I’d forgotten about the gender crisis, did you? Nope, never! A well-rounded life helps sustain the good fight. I do hope you’ve enjoyed some of my lighter episodes, like last week’s interview with Cindy Ngar — and that, like Cindy, you too have some pleasurable pastimes to immerse yourself in. But as long as there are victims of gender medicine who need our help, I’ll still be here to advocate for them and amplify their voices. Victims of gender medicine are a rapidly growing population that have suffered unique forms of complex trauma. They desperately need and deserve appropriate, culturally competent, trauma-informed mental health care. I believe we as therapists have a moral and professional obligation to learn about their unique experiences and needs. But many therapists aren’t doing so, because we’re not seeing in our offices the very folks our profession has scarred and scared away. Once we do begin to learn about this population, though, we can’t un-see what we’ve seen. It forever changes us, and forces us to question the standards of care we have been taught. When you listen to a woman who identified as transgender for 5 years, and believed so wholeheartedly in it that she permanently altered her body, emerge from that experience to call it a cult that nearly destroyed her life, you can’t just return to unquestioningly “affirming” young, vulnerable people newly identifying as trans. You worry about them. You start to want to change how entire systems — medical, therapeutic, educational, legal — approach gender questioning youth. Time to bring in the one and only Helena Kerschner, outspoken detransitioner advocate, to fill us in and set things straight.
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