Essence Of Thought has a new video out about the harm caused by attempting to convert trans youth to cis gender.
Only last year we got clear results from the “Trevor National Survey On LGBTQ Youth Mental Health” on the matter. 42% of LGBT+ youth who are the victims of so called reperative therapy attempt to commit suicide, compared to 17% who aren’t victims.
This actually increases for trans youth to 57%, suggesting that people are more sensitive to attempts to change their gender than attempts to change their sexuality.
It’s about ten minutes long and worth a view.
If I were forced to undergo reparative therapy that attempts to turn me into a woman, I would perceive it as torturous. And I am an adult right now, I am much more resistant to emotional abuse than I used to be back when I was a child. Nowadays, I have learned to filter out verbal abuse and at least partially ignore some of it.
Doing such shit to children is horrible.
When I was a child, adults mostly tolerated my tomboyish behavior expecting me to grow up from this phase. But they still encouraged me to be more feminine in various subtle ways. Even these subtler attempts to make me more feminine felt annoying back when I was a child.
“Reparative therapy” [sic] is really just a more targetted version of the sort of bullying that most LGBT kids, and trans kids in particular, get all the time. It’s no surprise that it’s even better at getting them to commit suicide than the 24/7 bullying they endure normally.
And they don’t have to say that they’re LGBT to catch hell for it. It’s enough to not conform to society’s expectations.
I never thought of myself as trans as a kid (it wasn’t exactly a concept in those days, and even the idea of somehow accidentally falling into the girl category filled me with terror — cf. Tip becoming Ozma.) But my failure to adequately act out the role of a good little male- and white-supremacist was enough for me to be ostracized and “picked on” (that’s what they called bullying in those days) by both children and adults, to the point that I thought about suicide every day.
Oh, and I was frequently called “queer,” for whatever that says about me.
My favorite thing about this kind of pseudo-scientific bigotry is that it is self-refuting.
Remember what these folks, TERF or otherwise, are actually saying under deflection: that there is something immutable about biological gender.
Great! Then that will be obvious to all. No need to correct anything with “therapy”. If sex is as immutable as breathing oxygen, it will reimpose himself.
It is exactly because it isn’t that the “therapy” is even needed.
It’s just like the Nazis and others who advocate for racial and ethnic separatism. If they were right that people always naturally prefer homophily, there would be no need for debate. It’s only because they are wrong that in fact they need to impose cultural and institutional technology to force what they claim is natural.
Can you imagine how much more time we would have if we did what TERFs suggest and stop imposing gender?