National Affairs Rory Leishman
Paul McHugh, University Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry in the John Hopkins School of Medicine, relates in Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash Over Meaning, Memory and Mind, that he has often put this question to himself and others over the past few decades, having “repeatedly witnessed how faddish misdirections of thought and therapeutic practice sweep across the field to dominate opinion and action for years, only to sink from favour and fade away, leaving wounded patients and public scorn in their wake.”
As one example, McHugh cites the “recovered memory” fad of the 1990s when psychotherapists used hypnosis, drugs and/or guided imagery to induce troubled patients into imagining they had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse such as having been fondled by their father when he was changing their diapers. Based on such uncorroborated testimony, scores of innocent parents were prosecuted and jailed on false charges of sexual abuse before this psychiatric craze was generally discredited.
Today, the latest psychiatric mania is transgenderism. Ryan T. Anderson has presented an illuminating account of this fad in his latest book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.
Until recently, the authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) listed Gender Identity Disorder as a mental illness characterized by a “strong and persistent cross-gender identification.” However, under pressure from homosexual activists in 2013, the APA dropped Gender Identity Disorder from the DSM and replaced it with Gender Dysphoria, a new illness defined as “clinically significant distress” with one’s “experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender.”
In plain language, the APA now maintains that little boys or little girls who are generally content to play, dress and/or think of themselves as members of the opposite sex are not mentally ill. Perhaps not. Transgenderism in young children is generally a relatively harmless and short-lived aberration.
However, if the delusion persists into puberty, it can lead to a life of misery compounded by the administration of dangerous, cross-sex hormones and so called sex-reassignment surgery. A recent peer-reviewed study in Sweden found that transgendered adults who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery were almost 20 times more likely than average to commit suicide.
Dr. Kenneth Zucker, an internationally renowned expert on transgenderism at the University of Toronto, headed the expert panel of the American Psychiatric Association that came up with Gender Dysphoria as a replacement for Gender Identity Disorder. At the time, Zucker was also Psychologist in Chief and director of the Gender Identity Clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), a teaching hospital in Toronto.
Under Zucker’s direction, the CAMH Gender Identity Clinic tried to protect transgendered children from a lifetime of suffering by helping them to bring their gender identity into conformity with their sex. This approach makes sense. As Ryan observes, several authoritative studies have confirmed that the great majority of transgendered children — 80 to 95 per cent — switch to identifying contentedly with their bodily sex before puberty.
Nonetheless, the now dominant view within the psychiatric profession is that therapists should help, not hinder, a transgendered child to maintain his or her delusional identity with the opposite sex, despite the potentially lethal consequences. On this basis, transgender activists in Toronto and their psychiatrist allies managed in 2015 to browbeat the supine leadership of CAMH into firing Zucker and shutting down his Gender Identity Clinic.
Still, Zucker, to his great credit, stands by his science-based convictions on appropriate treatment for transgendered children. Currently, he maintains a private clinic for transgendered patients in Toronto and retains his post as Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto.
In addition, Zucker is still in considerable demand as an expert speaker on transgenderism. Last year, he was invited by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to address a major conference on transgenderism in Los Angeles. Alas, the experience did not go well for Zucker: Transgender activists disrupted his first talk and so intimidated the WPATH board that it cancelled his further appearances and meekly apologized for having invited him to speak in the first place.
Meanwhile, the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at University of Western Ontario has invited Zucker to address a day-long conference for medical professionals and educators on May 4 in London, Ontario, entitled: “Understanding Gender Identity Development in Children and Youth.” Let us hope that the organizers of this conference will stand resolutely by their invitation to Zucker and make sure that the event proceeds peacefully.
Meanwhile, everyone with well-informed compassion for the suffering of transgendered adults can only wonder with McHugh how long it will take before most psychiatrists finally recognize that affirming the delusion of transgenderism in children is the latest of the faddish misdirections of psychiatric thought and therapeutic practice that is bound “to sink from favour and fade away, leaving wounded patients and public scorn in their wake.”
