Once a Disorder, Now “Liberation”:
The Truth About Transgenderism
lore m. dickey
The American Psychological Association (APA) has just given a female-to-male transgender graduate student its prestigious “Award for Distinguished Early-Career Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest.”
They cite her example as a “distinguished scholar” for her promotion of gender transitioning. The award was announced in The American Psychologist.
In making such an award, APA is sending a clear signal to potential graduate students: anyone entering the field with a different understanding of human nature will not be welcome.
Yet Paul McHugh, M.D. Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital, recently testified to the Supreme Court that embracing a transgender identity is a problematic solution.
"Those who are affirmed in their gender beliefs," he said, "progress from social transition to surgical interventions at their peril. Indeed, if the evidence shows us anything, it indicates that those who progress all the way through surgery fare poorly....There is little evidence that social transition is the panacea that the American Medical Association makes it out to be." Dr. McHugh compares transgenderism to anorexia nervosa, where the patient perceives himself to be fat, when in fact, he is thin. Ideology rather than science is driving the A.M.A.'s support for gender transitioning, McHugh says.
A decade or so ago, when transgenderism was listed as a disorder, psychologists viewed the rejection of one’s biological sex as evidence of mental illness.
The American Psychologist details the troubled background of the student who received the award, lore m. dickey (no capital letters). Typical of persons with gender-identity confusion, she describes a traumatic childhood: an alcoholic father who had a secret gay life; she struggled with alcoholism, depression, suicidal thoughts, and lesbianism; and she later determined that happiness could finally be found by becoming a man.
But in the classic text Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents, Kenneth Zucker, Ph.D. and Susan Bradley, M.D. see the condition not as a path to liberation, but a disorder.
Both clinicians worked extensively with gender-disturbed children. In the backgrounds of males who wished to become females, they often found two types of mothers: those who clung to their sons to form a “blissful symbiosis” so that the boys were unable to understand “where the mother left off and they began”; and another type—the severely stressed, highly anxious woman whose small sons sought to develop a “defensive fusion” with the maternal figure as a means of maintaining psychological equilibrium.
The clinicians also found that the child was unusually sensitive— he or she had a “constitutional vulnerability to high arousal in stressful or challenging situations.”
Fathers of gender-disturbed boys were also not typical. They tended to step back and defer to their wives’ decisions, including her tolerance and/or approval of their sons’ feminine behavior.
In the case of gender-disturbed girls, the two clinicians found that 77% of mothers had a history of depression, and they posited that the girl may have felt an unconscious aversion to identifying with her mother because she perceived her as weak, incompetent and helpless. Either directly or indirectly, the mother communicated to her daughter that being female was unsafe.
With such a traumatic background, the researchers say, “Many girls with gender-identity disorder are preoccupied with power, aggression and protection fantasies.”
Yet rather than penetrating the psychological factors that drove this troubled psychology graduate student, lore m. dickey, into a rejection of her biological sex, the A.P.A. agrees that she is now a man, and presents her with one of its highest awards— and then promotes her into the ranks of their own profession.
New Research Finds Disorganized Attachment Style
A journal article published in Frontiers in Psychology (2018,9:60, “Attachment Patterns and Complex Trauma in a Sample of Adults Diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria”) investigated 95 gender-disturbed adults.
The researchers found that “gender-dysphoric adults showed significantly higher levels of attachment disorganization.”
A pattern which emerged with frequency for men was “more involving, and physically and psychologically abusive fathers” while the sons were “more often, separated from their mothers.”
What do these Findings Mean?
The authors of the latest research study are only willing to see these unusual family patterns as “risk” factors and were unwilling to suggest they could be causative of the condition.
However, clinical analysis would suggest that any family pattern which interfered with the child’s same-gender attachment would logically be problematic. In the above-mentioned study, the “involving” fathers could have been narcissistic— that is, fathers who used their children as narcissistic reflections of themselves.
Since these men were also reported by their sons as “abusive,” it would follow that their sons would be inclined to reject them as identification objects. The sons would thus reject the masculinity their fathers represented, and by extension, disown their own masculine bodies, and strive to “be” (i.e., attach to) the mother from whom they had been separated.
In the case of women who believed they were men, the study found more “involving” (potentially “narcissistic”) mothers, with separation from and neglect by their fathers. The autobiography of Chastity (now “Chaz”) Bono, who went from a lesbian identity to transgender, is an intriguing illustration of this pattern.
Psychodynamic Investigation is Abandoned
However, the American Psychological Association is unwilling to look below the surface at causation, which would anger a powerful, internal interest group-- the LGBT lobby. They have all but abandoned the classical mandate to "know thyself,” and are now affirming every bizarre condition without asking the first, and most fundamental question of psychology—“Why?”
A January 2021 research paper presented by two psychotherapists is attempting to counter this trend.
"The fantasy that the body can be 'changed and sculpted' as a way of being rid of profound psychological problems, needs to come under closer scrutiny," these clinicians assert. "Patients with gender dysphoria need services that are insulated from overzealous advocacy groups and political activists."
Stirring testimony from two people who abandoned their attempt to live as the opposite sex, told from a Christian perspective, can be found at https://www.focusonthefamily.com/episodes/broadcast/the-journey-back-to-my-true-identity-part-1-of-2/
—Linda A. Nicolosi