Trans Twitter Topics

Re the claims by Gender Critical Therapists to use psychotherapy to help people "reconcile with their bodies", this is from back in 1977

Young trans ppl have existed through the history of trans psych care.

Conversion therapy has been *known to be pointless* since at least 1977

I'm not a big fan of psych, but credit where credit is due, some of them stopped trying to fry the transsexuality out of us as early as the 70s.

Citation here if you want to read the article on sci Hub dot se.

psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-42…

Only 4 years earlier this study had been published.

They managed to show that if you subject a17 year old trans girl to electric shocks while trying to get her to imagine having sex with women and stop being effeminate, she will eventually butch up to stop the shocks.

The thing is, the only way, in the long run, to suppress trans existence, is violence. Frequently in the past until they realised it did not get the results they wanted, this meant institutionalised sexual violence against minors.

The lesson that psychotherapy won't fix "Transgenderism" (transsexuality, whatever) was hard learned, and it was learned to the cost of countless trans lives being subjected to hubristic psychiatric experiments aimed at correcting trans ppl towards a cissexist patriarchal ideal.

American journal of Psychiatry, 1969.

"Traditional psychotherapies have been unsuccessful in altering gender identity once it is established"

They spent literally years trying though.

That's the power of cissexism. There are still people, after all these years, still trying.

Affirmation and transition support was a last ditch effort to deal with the fact that we couldn't be normalised into cissexism.

They tried. Some trans people even willingly tried to be converted. Some still do.

Here's Harry Benjamin in 1969 talking about the failure to cure transsexuals through psychotherapy.

The "lady brain" hypothesis may be bullshit, but it is if nothing else, rooted in a history of trying to invent a biological account for the ineffectiveness of conversion therapy.

PS there was detransition and surgical regret back then too. That's life, and it doesn't change the fact that there wasn't a "cure" for being trans.

Yes this. Even the most supportive and benevolent psychiatrists and psychologists were bastards who abused their patients, or wished they could.

I'm pretty psych skeptical and my use of this historic clinical evidence isn't intended as an endorsement.

These people wanted us not to exist as trans people. None of them wanted trans people to be part of the fabric of humanity. Some recognised it wasn't in their power to stop us existing and would try to enable us so far as trans ppl were under an obligation to hide their transness

Shout out to my psych skeptical trans activist ancestors from 1969

Here's the results table from a cohort of British transvestites and transsexuals who were strapped to fucking electrodes to fry their transness out in 1970.

The transsexuals all stayed Transsexual.

I'm searching through this stuff because I feel like it's important that our predecessors suffering is not forgotten and repeated on our youngers.

Here's a chart showing the efficacy of attempts at aversion therapy. Everyone reduces their "deviant" behaviours in the first few months of it. The therapy looks like it's working. And then many of them return to average (most of all the transsexuals).

To be honest I'm willing to bet that the transvestites and so on were just better equipped to lie about carrying on doing what they do because I'm not sure there's a great history of therapy stopping people being transvestites either.

Unfortunately being transsexual creates the specific vulnerability of being forcibly visible in ways that transvestism and other things aren't.

1968

1) trans people didn't want to be cured

2) psychiatrists and psychotherapists working on ways to cure trans people were unsuccessful

1964, Harry Benjamin, back when they were injecting trans women with (poisonous) DES as an hrt.

"Formal psychotherapy is resisted very strongly and whenever attempted has failed at reversing the psychological trend".

I'm not even cherry picking these for evidence by the way, I posted that supposed positive result for a single 17yo trans girl being "cured" above because her story is an outlier (one with horrific implications, around the medicalised abuse of a minor).

"The volume under discussion takes a dismal view of psychotherapy for the transsexual. Although some transvestites may, under certain circumstances, profit from therapy, the transsexual "drive" is critical, and the disturbance may precipitate self-mutilation and suicide …"

This is bearing in mind this was also an era when people were claiming 50% success rates in turning homosexuals into heterosexuals

(and we know for an absolute fact you can not cure homosexuality with psychotherapy also)

Further in that study above with the 50% gay conversion therapy rate they fail to "cure" either of the two transsexuals in their patient cohort.

1967, psychotherapy didn't work on trans men either.

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Noone studying transsexuals in the 60s or 70s seriously held on to the idea that conversion therapy on trans people worked for very long.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.310…

New Zealand shrinks gave LSD and behavioural therapy to transsexuals in 1968 but only succeeded in making them unhappily tolerate not transitioning, rather than making them reconciled with their assigned sex.

Anyway it's nearly 4am here and I have work in the morning and I'm unable to sleep because of my absolute rage that people are still trying to push conversion therapy on trans people some 50 years after all this was published.

After 1964 when Harry Benjamin publishes on transsexuality you search for psychotherapy +Transsexual.

Before 1964, you search for "sex role inversion" to find Transsexual people.

Anyway, here in 1960, recording the failure so far to cure transsexuals with psychotherapy.

The earliest psychotherapeutic discussion of "sex role inversion" I can find is in the 1950s though, I think possibly because psychotherapy hadn't taken off in the English speaking world until then.

But we have evidence that for nearly the entire history of (English speaking) psychotherapy as an academic research field, there have been psychotherapists very candidly discussing the fact that they can not successfully cure being trans.

Also for science philosophy folks this feels like an object lesson in the problem of people not publishing negative results.

Countless notes in articles about Transsexuals saying "we've never successfully converted one to a cis person", and no actual data.

Another worthwhile takeaway point is that the idea that shrinks created trans people in order to have a captive population to sell prescription drugs to is utter bullshit. They were very happy drugging trans people up to try and prevent trans people being trans before that.

Commercially they would have done just fine carrying on with the stigma model and putting trans people on cocktails of pentothal, tranquillisers, Acid and whatever else seemed to tickle their fancy, along with the hypnotherapy, electroshock and behavioural therapy.

In fact the current crop of Gender Critical Therapists are quite happily advertising themselves for business to transphobic parents groups to repeat the same thing 50-60 years later. There's money to be made in hate and anxiety.

There are millions of ways for shrinks to extract money from desperate people one way or another.