Trans activists and their influence,
Has the transgender movement gone too far? It began, commendably, as activism for the rights of that very small number of people who experience persisting discomfort with their biological gender. But it has evolved into an ideological movement to normalize the practice of changing genders — and in the process is crossing ethical lines with a particularly vulnerable subset of young people struggling with issues of gender identity.
A recent article by Elise Ehrhard in Crisis Magazine, a Catholic periodical, addresses the aggressive approach by adult trans activists in recruiting adolescents with Asperger’s Syndrome or other types of Autism Spectrum Disorder ( ASD) to their cause.
Ehrhard has Asperger’s. As is typical among Asperger’s girls in their adolescence, she preferred the company of boys, with whom she identified cerebrally, a tendency encouraged by the bullying she experienced from other girls.
Ehrhard is not transgender — she doesn’t see herself as a male — but, citing a social media campaign featuring the hashtag #AutisticTransPride, she can see why Asperger’s and other ASD adolescents nowadays come to believe they are. This disturbs her. Adolescents struggling to deal with their quirky cerebral wiring do not need to be told they are “a girl trapped in a boy’s body” or vice versa, she says. Nevertheless, Ehrhard notes, many parents are buying into this completely unscientific hypothesis.
As a child psychiatrist with experience in both ASD and gender discomfort, I share Ehrhard’s concern and can substantiate her claim. In her account I see a familiar story of a youth with ASD who feels socially isolated, and confused about sexual feelings as she moves into adolescence. As I well know, involvement in internet chat sites offers adolescents with ASD a sense of belonging, but also can lead to foreclosure of reflective thinking about their own feelings and situation.
Over the last few years I have been asked to consult around three biologically female teens with no prior history of cross gender wishes. In adolescence, these three individuals became aware of homoerotic feelings, but were uncomfortable about them. After searching the internet to find others like themselves, they began to feel that the issue was not their sexual orientation, but that they were in fact “trans.”
In interviewing them, their history revealed prolonged and intense feelings of rejection and loneliness and a sense of “not fitting in” with their female peers. As with many girls and women with ASD, they pretended to conform socially, but failed to have close confiding relationships and had often felt bullied and rejected. Some were depressed by adolescence and often had suicidal thoughts, if not overt behaviours. Further assessment in all three cases led to my diagnosing these high- functioning individuals as having ASD.
Their parents felt confused at what appeared to them to be a sudden change in their daughters. Fearful of the risk for suicide, they struggled with their own responses. In two cases parents expressed anxiety over the speed with which the gender professionals involved accepted their teenagers’ self- diagnosis, demonstrated by recommendations for puberty blocking agents after a single visit. Their experiences align with accounts by parents of “trans” kids on the blog, 4thwavenow.com, described as “a community of parents and friends skeptical of the ‘ transgender/child/teen’ trend.”
In my work with the Child and Adolescent Gender Identity Clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health ( CAMH), we regularly did a very thorough assessment with these teens to ensure that the path they seemed to be choosing had been thought through, sometimes a difficult task for ASD teens because of their difficulty with self-reflection and abstract thinking.
When a sex change seemed the only realistic option, we referred them to an endocrinologist for assessment regarding puberty blockers; if prescribed, we continued monitoring their progress to ensure their ongoing safety. (Even so, we had qualms, given a lack of evidence of long-term impact.)
However, we also felt strongly that irreversible medical intervention such as hormones and surgery should be postponed until we could be certain that the individuals were fully able to understand that there would be no going back. We were quite willing to accept that individuals might change their mind or wish to slow the process down. In short, we did what is considered best practice in the field of ASD and gender discomfort.
Activists would have the public believe that anyone who expresses a wish to be the other gender should be allowed and encouraged to do so. Credulous politicians have translated their demands into law. To date, however, there is no evidence that there is such a thing as a “true” trans, just as there is no marker that would identify a “false” trans. To accept the thinking and wishes of those with ASD at face value, without understanding why they feel the way they do, is not a kindness, and may in fact be extremely damaging.