A Peculiar Contradictory Thing

The transphobes have come up with a new bullshit therapy to “fix” trans people. They named it “gender exploratory therapy” to trick well-meaning parents into sending their children there.

Here’s what this so-called “therapy” consists of:

Researcher Florence Ashley writes that some of the “explanations” the therapists explore for being trans are trauma, sexual abuse, internalized misogyny, internalized homophobia, social contagion, that it is a sexual fetish, autism, and more.

In short, they want to stall the transition of trans kids enough so that they’ll go through puberty, which will “cure them”.

Please tag any blogs you know that can reblog and share this

warning for a whole lot of discussion of transphobia.

I decided to do a bit more research so I looked at the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association (GETA) and oh hey would you look at that they have a "resources" section that includes clinical guidelines.

let's take a look at some of these folks just in case, just to get a feel for what they're really about.

What about Sasha Ayad. She's got a youtube channel, what's this about?

..... that is. Not great. "Your kid may be identifying as pansexual because they don't have a strong sense of self and/or a good understanding of their sexual attractions or interests and think that relationships are just friendships" and "your AFAB child probably just thinks boys are treated better" and "your AMAB autistic child is probably saying they're trans because claiming femininity allows freer expressions of anger for large and frightening emotional autistic boys" are some Ice Cold takes.

Okay. Let's look at someone else. What about Dianna Kenny?

Oh.

Okay.

Let's take a peek at those clinical guidelines.

I feel like this is not a promising start.

okay if for NO OTHER REASON (and there are actually lots of reasons) this section is fucked because of the hand-wringing over college students not needing parental consent to seek medical care.

hey okay here's a funny thing; earlier in this guide the authors note that the dutch studies are done on small cohorts and therefore need to be re-assessed. Then they say this:

Would you like to guess how many study participants support the possible higher than anticipated frequency of detransition?

It was twelve.

By the study's own definition. GETA is adding 4% on top of that just for shits and giggles, and it's also a small study (of adults! This is a study of adults seeking transition!)

There are other studies cited. One of them is a study with information gathered from 100 participants in an anonymous survey that was shared on social media. Another is a survey of 237 people who were directed to the survey by post-trans.com

It seems like! Perhaps! The quality of the research here! Is PRETTY BAD for people who are calling the dutch studies low quality!

You collected anonymous self-reports from r/detrans and are using it as evidence for your protocol! YOU DON'T GET TO ACCUSE OTHER PEOPLE OF BIAS IN THEIR STUDIES IF YOUR STUDIES COME FROM r/DTRANS AND ONE OF YOUR AUTHORS HAS A GUEST SPOT ON TERF TALK.

ah so this is significantly motivated by answering parents who are asking "why is my kid trans and can I fix it?"

Okay so both gender affirmation and conversion therapies are extreme, and exploratory therapy is a "moderate" road between these; it is not conversion therapy because it doesn't see non-normative gender ID as a pathology to be corrected, it only aims to help gender dysphoric youth find solutions to their dysphoria that are safer and more liberating than gender affirmation.

Putting aside that this is a totally unsurprisingly binary view of what gender affirmation looks like, it is just straight up looking for any "solutions" to dysphoria that are not affirming transness.

And it also says that "while data supporting the validity of gender affirmation is scarce, data supporting our method of treatment is currently a small number of case studies that may work for some people." Which. Uh. Just straight up seems to admit that this is even less supported than the treatment they're saying is extreme and too poorly studied.

"There is no evidence that the negative effects of conversion therapy experienced by gay people subjected to conversion therapy are similar to the effects that trans people subjected to conversion therapy would experience."

okay there is also a lot wrong with this, but very specifically the claim that "[minority stress theory has led some researchers to claim that] gender-affirmative care will successfully treat not only depression and anxiety, but will also resolve neurocognitive deficits such as autism spectrum disorders in gender dysphoric individuals" is SUCH a bullshit, disingenuous, bad-faith reading of the actual statements that Turban has made in various studies, as summed up in the abstract of the 2018 paper co-written by van Schalkwyk:

In addition, we posit that youth with cross-gender identification, because of a high prevalence of minority stress, poor peer relationships, and familial nonacceptance, might score higher on measures of social impairment owing to environmental factors related to social stress. This could represent a reversible condition, because these patients do not have the intrinsic social cognitive deficits that underlie ASD. In addition, all research in the area has been associational. There have been no data to suggest that GD stems from ASD itself.

suggesting that parents and children should be informed of the as-yet-unconfirmed and largely unstudied risks of social transition before a psychotheraputic gender exploratory therapist will assist with social transition is fucked.

Also this group sure does like citing that guy who got fired from his youth transition care clinic for providing outdated care (such as suggesting that children experiencing dysphoria not be allowed to play with cross-gender toys like dolls and basically doing conversion therapy) and who has seemed pretty willing to cheerfully tell the Daily Fucking Wire that maybe trans people are just autistic actually:

hmmmmmm that tasty, tasty ableism:

my friends they are laying the groundwork to push back the age of cognitive maturity to your thirties:

Anyway, yeah, it sure does look like gender exploration therapy is bad and also that this site in particular is bad.

The approach generally seems to be "transness does happen sometimes but it's rare and young people are transitioning because of social pressure/trendiness/because actually they are disabled and their disability or history of trauma in some way precludes them from real transness"

The ableism and essentialism on display are STAGGERING and my concluding thought on the matter is: fuck this shit.

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