In February 2017, I met with a woman I knew privately and who happened to be a psychotherapist (with a background in systemic family therapy and depth psychology).
We didn’t meet because of my trans son but because we happened to be in the same town and hadn’t seen each other for many years. After we had talked for a while about how life was going, she asked me about my transgender son, and I told her the story and made it clear that I supported him.
At that time, Finn’s coming out had been about six months ago, and he didn’t even have the medical certificate yet for the new name at school. We were in the early stages of his transition, checking out various psychotherapists.
After the meeting, she asked me via email whether I would like to have some thought-provoking nudges from her.
I wrote back, yes, why not? I needed help with my own situation. How could I handle feeling overwhelmed by the sudden onslaught of appointments? How could I handle my son when I needed to talk to him about the next steps, but he was resistant and defensive and in his typical teenage mode of behavior? I would welcome self-help strategies. Or did she have anything else in mind?
As it turned out, she did have something completely different in mind. She wrote me a long email detailing her view of the transgender phenomenon and how to deal with it, which I summarize as follows:
She thought that the wish to cut off one’s breasts was highly autoaggressive.
According to her theory, being trans was just a body dysmorphic disorder, like anorexia, for example. And the root cause of those dysmorphias was inner tension, anxiety, sadness, and disorientation in life. In order to alleviate the feelings of unbearable inner tension, the children could choose symptoms like anorexia or something else like being trans to feel powerful and in control and have some orientation in their lives.
Then she proceeded with some questions that seemed to come from her background in systemic family therapy and depth psychology. What unresolved issues in our family caused my child to have symptoms of being trans? And what were the early childhood causes for being trans–looking at everything like the pregnancy and birth; my rheumatoid arthritis; whether I felt guilty because I couldn’t take care of my child that well due to the RA; considering that RA was an autoimmune disease and that meant autoaggressive, had there been autoaggressive traits in the family which manifested in my case as RA and in my child’s case as trans? She asked whether I had been too lenient and didn’t set enough boundaries, thus causing my child to grow up without orientation in life which in turn caused tension and then being trans. How was my child traumatized in childhood or maybe even from generations before?
She also had some suggestions for how to deal with the transgender symptom. According to her, we should not give in to our child’s wish to transition and use a new name and pronoun. As a result of these boundaries, of course, the child would feel sad. Her recommended approach was to deal with the resulting sadness. The child should describe the sadness. Learn to accept the sadness. As a mother, I should find support to help my child deal with the sadness. The process of grieving could lead to healing and help my child through puberty. That was what she suggested.
She tried to encourage me by saying that I didn’t need to position myself as a mother by supporting my child in his transition. I could just as well position myself as a mother by setting boundaries and thus giving my child orientation and stability. (-WTF? As if I only helped my child because I needed to position myself as a mother? Heck, I was worn out from the marathon through all the psychotherapists at that time. I did it to help my son and not to “position myself.” That was an implicit allegation, and I felt angry about it.)
My first, spontaneous inner reaction to her long letter was, Whoa! What an elaborate, utter $%&@, What an interesting point of view!
How was I going to answer that email? How detailed should I respond? Was it worth debating with her? And was it my job to try to educate her? How could I answer without letting my anger flare up?
Of course, there can be cases where transidentity or gender dysphoria was a symptom to cover up some deeper issues, and of course, these cases should be found out before major irreversible steps (like surgery) have been taken. But her assumption that gender dysphoria in general was highly autoaggressive and could be treated like anorexia was just completely wrong.
I tried to think that the entire encounter must have been good for something. Maybe I needed to be shown how the mind and its intricate reasonings worked in the case of a psychoanalyst.
Being trans is not something like anorexia. Therefore, it cannot be treated with the same set of tools that would be used for anorexia.
Being trans is more something like being left-handed or being homosexual. A bit unusual. A bit impractical maybe. But not an illness that can be treated.
Left-handedness is not treated by working on childhood trauma, suppressing the use of the left hand, then learning to accept the discomfort and sadness of having to use the right hand, or setting more boundaries for the child. And neither is transidentity treated by that.
I guess it is like in the saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. When the only tool psychotherapists (especially those with a background of depth psychology and psychoanalysis) have is their approach of looking for unresolved traumas in the past, then every patient looks like a case of unresolved traumas to them.
I managed to write a polite reply to the psychotherapist, thanking her for her effort and that I knew she only meant well, and she only tried to help and fix us, but I also stated firmly that transidentity was not an illness.
She only meant well. And she probably hasn’t learned anything about gender dysphoria in her studies at the university and not taken any classes about it since. The phenomenon of transidentity was rare back then and doctors didn’t know how to treat it.
A year after this encounter with the psychotherapist, the World Health Organization announced in 2018 that Gender Incongruence was no longer classified as a mental disorder (https://www.mentalhealthjournal.org/articles/gender-incongruence-is-no-longer-a-mental-disorder.html).
And in 2020, Germany passed a new law which stated that it is illegal to try to “cure” homosexual and transgender people who were younger than eighteen years old with conversion therapy.
The progress in society is slow, but it does exist.
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This post is part of an online book about my journey with feminism and my son’s transgender journey. You can access the table of contents with links to each chapter here: TOC.