The Most Important Piece of Activism You Can Do Today
TL;DR: this is a call to action with a long preamble. Feeling impatient and want to get to work? Skip to the next section.
To my over 200 Substack subscribers and over 2,000 Twitter followers,
I’m citing those numbers right off the bat because those numbers have the potential to make a huge difference.
One of the main reasons I am so vocal is that I believe it is my professional community’s fault that we have found ourselves in this collective mass hysterical epidemic of permanent bodily harm. I am deeply disappointed in my therapist colleagues for the role we have played in allowing this to happen. So I see it as my responsibility to help, even though it’s stressful.
I also believe that the solution is in our hands as mental health professionals. But there are a few key shifts that have to happen for mental health professionals to recognize the need to turn this ship around.
I couldn’t have gotten here on my own. Not as a left coast liberal; a resident of Portland, Oregon; a lifelong friend and ally to the community formerly known as LGBT; and, at one point, one of the wokest members of a large group practice. Not as someone who’d unwittingly attended one of those brainwashing trainings, swallowed the kool-aid with reservations pushed far to the back of my mind, and joined in the crowd that sang the glories of the emperor’s new clothes. Not as a therapist under pressure from my clients to accept and agree with their beliefs about sex and gender as a foundation for our work, so that they could trust me enough to talk about… well, anything. Not as a therapist who once kept copies of the Genderbread Person handout in her office drawer and showed clients the Refuge app. Not as a human being who wants as much as anyone to belong, to be liked, to be seen as good; and who is vulnerable to the natural process by which the people who surround us tend to define the terms and conditions of such approval.
That all set me up for what I now view as moral failure.
But now I’ll tell you what set me up for success:
Having been bullied growing up, so severely that I learned to withstand a life in which being liked and accepted is not an option.
Having been in cults and abusive relationships before, going through the incredibly difficult process of coming to terms with what had happened to me, deciding to leave, and suffering the short term pain and inconvenience of turning my world upside down in order to escape.
Being intelligent, thoughtful, introspective, curious, and analytical.
Listening to my inner voice. Trusting my instincts. Allowing myself to pay attention when something doesn’t feel right.
Being isolated by the pandemic. My social world shifting.
Witnessing the mental health of trans clients deteriorate, and observing the complex psychopathology & comorbidities involved in each case.
Seeing the problems with woke ideology, its inherent cognitive distortions & logical fallacies, its destructive influence on my city, and its negative impact on mental health, when it comes to other topics besides sex and gender. (I’m not going to get into that right now, but I could write a book on it, although I think between John McWhorter and Jonathan Haidt we have adequate literature.)
Finally, but perhaps most importantly, with all of this as a backdrop, the events that peaked me did not take place in my therapy office (whether physical or virtual), but outside of therapy. Being isolated by the pandemic gave me a lot of time to watch and listen to videos, podcasts, and audiobooks that exposed me to different perspectives. This is how I became interested in the stories of detransitioners. That was a huge wake-up call for me. From there, I read the works of Deborah Soh and Abigail Shrier - having, by that point, found the curiosity and courage to hear the perspectives of controversial intellectuals (such as Shrier and Jordan Peterson) for myself, rather than dismissing them because of someone’s secondhand account of how terrible of a right-wing bigot they were. Then I read stories from ROGD parents, trans widows, and so on. I learned from the younger generation about the online climate and narratives about sex and gender, thought about my own adolescence, asked myself if I would have thought I was trans if I grew up in this environment, and came up with an earth-shattering, “oh my goodness, yes, I would have. Holy shit.” I started having personal conversations with detransitioners, and bingeing Gender: A Wider Lens podcast. On it went from there, to the point where now I have spent at least a dozen hours each week for more than half a year researching these issues in depth, have found my community, and feel confident in my voice, even if my views get me kicked out of therapist groups on Facebook and attract a flurry of threats from TRAs on Twitter.
Of course, now that I’m out of the closet as what some would call “gender critical,” others would call “transphobic,” and I just call “rational, independent minded, brave, and professionally responsible,” I’ve found my own version of a glittery rainbow family. I feel more welcome than I ever have anywhere else - and more importantly, welcome as my true self, for what I actually think. I’m not pretending anything to gain social approval. I didn’t even realize how much I had been pretending to gain social approval until I really truly gave up the charade. Now I know there is massive support for the views I hold, and I’m far from alone. I won’t see the support in the therapist groups on Facebook, because those groups either dogpile, scare off, or kick out anyone who doesn’t agree with them. But I see it in the tremendous amount of encouragement I receive through Twitter and Substack, as well as the abundance of emails from parents around the world who are desperate to see more therapists like me.
This support is coming from many sources, including parents, teachers, scientists, doctors, detransitioners, desisters, transition-regretters, lesbians & gays, and yes, fellow therapists — some of them who are out of the closet like me, and others who are afraid to come out, but find strength in seeing me, and might be on their way toward coming out themselves.
Here’s the thing, though. Those thousands of therapists who haven’t peaked yet, have barely seen any of this. And they won’t, until you show them.
Therapists need to hear from you. Yes, you.
Unless they’ve already peaked — or are nearly there, and are secretly searching for a couple more straws in order to break that diseased camel’s back — therapists are not going to listen to me. They quickly write me off as one of the bad guys. They just take one look at my website, profile, blog, or whatever, and categorize me as “transphobic” without hearing a damn thing I have to say. Maybe they report me to the board. Or they share my profile in therapist groups on social media to get me dogpiled, DM’d and banned.
I’ll tell you who therapists listen to: clients.
You know what the problem is? They’ve scared off all clients except the ones who are searching for therapists like them. But how would they know who isn’t reaching out to them for help?
Yeah, I get it, some therapists are terrible and have treated kool-aid-abstainers like garbage. I hear the stories of the therapists who tell parents after two visits that their child is trans and needs cross-sex hormones and if they don’t support this they’re bigots. I get it: you can’t trust these folks to listen. But some hopeful part of me thinks that’s really not what the majority are doing.
I get that it’s vulnerable to reach out to therapists you can’t trust. So I’m not asking you to actually seek counseling with anyone. I’m just asking you to write them.
Here’s what I want you to do:
Write a letter that describes why you don’t feel you can trust my professional community to provide you the support you might need. Then, send it to every therapist in your area, and your state’s licensing board.
What I’m suggesting you write is not an attack, but a plea.
You should already have plenty to say if you are a parent of an ROGD youth; a detransitioner or desister; a butch woman or feminine man; a trans widow; or a lesbian who has witnessed her community deteriorate. You may also simply be a person from any walk of life who would like to be able to speak openly with a therapist about your concerns around these issues however they are showing up in your world, perhaps even if that would only make up a small portion of what you went to therapy to talk about. Likewise, you may be a political conservative or a religious person who feels understandably concerned that my left-leaning professional community has failed to understand how conservatives think with any degree of nuance or compassion.
Whatever your situation may be, if you can’t trust therapists and really wish you could, I highly encourage you to write about it.
Then, I want you to send this letter to every therapist in your area. You can use common therapist directories such as PsychologyToday or TherapyDen.
Start with your city. Then, if you have more time, branch out toward the rest of your state.
Then, send your letter to the board in your state that is responsible for the licensure of therapists. In Oregon, it’s the OBLPCT; in California, the BBS; and so on. Just google “licensing board of therapists in [your state].” Feel free to send them a copy of my letter to the OBLPCT. Of course, there are many other resources you can send as well: Genspect, The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, Stats for Gender, Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans, Detrans Voices, Gender: A Wider Lens Podcast, and references to Deborah Soh and Lisa Littman, to name a few.
If you’re feeling extra generous, you can do the same for your elected representatives.
While you’re at it, you might as well contact the guy who runs TherapyDen. (Don’t tell him I sent you. He’s tired enough of me as it is. We’re kind of frenemies. Oh, are you reading this, Jeff? Hi, ’sup.) Or take your pick of therapists who are public figures and industry leaders. I’ll tell you one thing, regardless of which therapist(s) you contact: when you email a therapist in their professional capacity, you are not going to get a verbally abusive response. You won’t get exposed, doxxed, threatened, blocked, or reported. The worst that can happen is nothing. I’m pretty sure the same goes for your elected representatives.
This is a much lower risk activity for you than it is for me. I am actually facing being professionally ostracized and possibly having to defend my license in a long, drawn out, anxiety provoking legal battle. But for you, you can rest assured that therapists and licensing boards will keep your messages confidential. As long as the people you are messaging aren’t people you would otherwise cross paths with — like a therapist whose child goes to the same school as yours — you have nothing to lose.
Peaking therapists is one of the best uses of any concerned citizen’s time and energy right now. Please, if you are at all in a position to do so, take an hour that you would have normally spent tweeting with your mutuals who already agree with you, and use it to do this instead.
If all 200 of my subscribers or 10% of my 2,000 followers were to take this action, that would be 200 letters, or an average of four per US state. Imagine if each therapist in a given state were to receive four different emails like this. I think that could make a huge difference.
Let’s do this.
Thank you.
PS: Share your letters below!
Oh, and! For anyone who doesn’t mind taking the extra steps and outing themselves, it would be so delightfully encouraging to see copies of the letters you have sent in the comments, and any details you’d like to share about who you sent them to (not necessarily therapist names, but “every therapist in the Chicago metropolitan area” for instance. I understand some people won’t want to take this step because they’ll forget, or it’s extra work, or they’re remaining fairly anonymous. But for those who can share, please do! Alternately, you can email or DM me your letter for me to post it without your name attached.
Edited to add, January 5:
This resource from PITT, offering a template for a letter you might send in a similar, but not identical, situation. This article suggests not what you might say to therapists, but what you might message to an organization or business you patronize that has fallen prey to institutional capture.
A recommendation from a colleague that you check out the work of Drs. Laura Edwards-Leeper, Erica Anderson, and Marci Bowers. This may also help your letter.
