The Silencing of Dissent in the Mental Health Professional Community
It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around this.
As I’ve written about, a few weeks ago, I was booted from a group for local therapists on Facebook, not for anything I wrote in that group, but because a member who knew of my views complained to the admin about feeling “unsafe” due to the presence of a “transphobic” member in the group. When I suggested my supporters might want to write to that therapist to let her see what perspectives she was missing — eg. from parents and detransitioners — she DM’d me threatening legal action should I mention her name again.
Today, I discovered I’ve also been booted from TherapyDen.com and PortlandTherapyCenter.com, both of which are run by the same person. I went to cancel my PTC subscription — I was paying for it without any real need to do so — and saw that it appeared I didn’t have one. Then, I went to check on my TherapyDen profile, and saw that my account was suspended; I couldn’t log in. This must have happened shortly after I updated those profiles to more closely resemble this one, which is still active on Psychology Today. While the founder of TherapyDen and PTC has been known for railing against Psychology Today’s white-cis-heteronormativity, I see in them an institution that— despite its flaws, including, yes, the proliferation of white female models on their magazine covers — has not yet fallen prey to the same degree of ideological capture we see in many parts of the field.
It’s not surprising, given my knowledge of and interactions with this person. We’ve butted heads before. But I don’t know how much of his decision was personal. I’m guessing, by and large, that this was about saving face, refusing to have his websites be associated with an approach like mine, which would threaten the ability of those websites to virtue-signal.
People are free to do as they wish with the social media groups they form and websites they found. I don’t want to be where I’m not welcome. Plus, I have a full load of clients and don’t need referrals. But the phenomenon I see here is a very small number of people — in this case, two: the woman who admins the Facebook group, and the man who runs the therapist directories — making sure to eliminate any representation of viewpoint diversity in their respective domains. Along with this, I see a refusal to listen, not only to their fellow therapists with heterodox views, but, of greater concern, to would-be clients.
That’s the part that’s hardest to wrap my mind around. If it was just a personal issue of whether I fit into some club, fine, whatever. I can tolerate rejection, especially when I’m able to critically evaluate it as coming from a source with differing values from my own. But it’s not just me they’re rejecting — or, for that matter, any other therapists I don’t know of who might have been through the same. It’s entire segments of the population they are refusing to hear from, learn about, and figure out how to properly serve.
It’s hard for me to put myself in a frame of mind that would justify choosing, as a therapist, to turn a blind eye toward the experiences of detransitioners or the parents of ROGD youth — or for that matter, the evidence that ROGD is a phenomenon at all. It’s difficult as well to imagine refusing to allow the possibility to enter one’s mind that we as mental health professionals should consider the complex ramifications of significant body alterations and unprecedented endocrine disruption, especially during critical developmental periods. Or to ignore the role of social influence and peer contagion. There are just so many factors one has to ignore in order to dig their heels so firmly into the stance that anything other than unquestioning affirmation is “harmful to trans people.” I wonder about the cognitive distortions and logical fallacies one must adopt in order to do this. How do you convince yourself that these people don’t count? That they’re all somehow bad or wrong?
Despite how discouraging and disconcerting it can be to see this phenomenon in examples such as how these two people have conducted their leadership roles, we have to remember — these are only two people. Many, many other reasonable therapists — I’m guessing a significant portion, if not a majority — are either being silenced; quietly holding divergent viewpoints they only share carefully with the right audiences; or questioning where they stand on these matters as they see increasing evidence that there is reason for concern.
This is why I still want to encourage all my readers to contact therapists directly. There’s important work to be done here. Please, if there is one thing you can do this week to help with the gender crisis, consider spending some time writing a letter to therapists from your own perspective, whether it’s with ROGD, detransitioning, desisting, trans widowhood, questioning, witnessing a friend deteriorate, or whatever is in your heart to share. And share your fears and insecurities about reaching out for help, what is it that our community has done to lose your trust, what you’d like us to know and what you need from us. Then send it far and wide. Again, instructions can be found here.
I continue to believe that one day the therapists who are staunchly on one side of this issue will have to see the other side. From what I understand, it’s rare for a person who has medically transitioned to go too many years without suffering the medical and mental health consequences. At some point therapists will have no choice but to see how these interventions have backfired for their clients. That’s going to be really tough to face. For all our individual and collective flaws, therapists are caring, ethically motivated people. This crisis will hit them, too, at some point, and not in the way they are currently anticipating. As much as people like those who’ve silenced my dissent do frustrate me, I also continue to hold a degree of compassion for them, and care for what their experience will be down the line. I know what it’s like to leave a cult and feel your entire worldview and value system is disintegrating. I want to minimize harm for these therapists almost as much as I care about protecting adolescents. Any actions we can take to turn the tide will help mitigate the existential crises and complex guilt that is inevitably down the line for so many well-intentioned, ideologically captured individuals.
