How ‘Gender Dysphoria’ Brought Psychiatry Back From The Dead
When a dangerous and destructive force is let loose upon the earth people want to know where it came from and whether it was unleashed by nature or by man
During the Covid pandemic it was therefore a matter of great interest and concern whether the virus had sprung spontaneously from nature or had been leaked from a lab in China where scientists were doing gain-of-function research.
To all intents and purposes that question has been settled: given the unique features of the virus and the lack of evidence to the contrary, it was the latter.
The same cannot be said about another famous illness, the mental disorder now known as ‘gender dysphoria’.
Unlike the scientists who fabricated the Covid virus, those who introduced gender dysphoria to the world did so not by altering an existing biological organism, nor did they discover anything that until that time had remained hidden in nature.
On the contrary, this ‘professionally certified illness’ was dreamt up by a committee of psychiatrists sitting around a table.
Gender dysphoria, which was originally called ‘gender identity disorder’, first appeared in the 1980 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) along with 80 other new mental illnesses, all of which were conceived in much the same way: by a committee of psychiatrists conjuring up new mental illnesses based on scant or non-existent physical evidence.
Psychiatrists are medical doctors and as such, rightly or wrongly, are considered to be bona fide scientists.
Though several other medical specialities eventually became deeply involved in the transgender movement, psychiatry alone has the distinction of being the linchpin that provided the impetus to medicalise it.
Before psychiatry introduced gender dysphoria to the medical world, this illness was never even a glimmer in the imaginations of any other medical specialty. Without psychiatry the idea of fluid sex would have ended up on the trash heap of psychobabble.
Only because it is a member of the medical fraternity was psychiatry able to bring to gender dysphoria the authority and vast resources of the medical-industrial-complex.
The year 1980 when DSM-III was published was a watershed moment for organised psychiatry. It was the year that a dying profession managed to turn itself around and instead begin to burgeon.
In his consummate history of the explosive expansion of the psychiatric profession, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, Robert Whittaker has chronicled how during the 1970s, prior to the publication of DSM-III in 1980, psychiatry was experiencing a crisis of shrinking relevance.
A number of factors simultaneously came into play to create this crisis. First, psychiatry was getting significant competition from rising non-medical professions such as clinical psychology and social work that were offering alternative, non-drug-based therapies for mental distress.
Secondly, the drugs that psychiatrists had been prescribing were being rejected by patients for being neither safe nor effective and for causing very unpleasant side effects. Thirdly, fewer medical school graduates were choosing to go into the field.
And finally, Thomas Szasz’s book The Myth of Mental Illness had made a big splash by arguing that mental illness was not real but merely a social construct. Consequently, many psychiatrists were publicly expressing the fear that their profession might die out.
This crisis was the context in which DSM-III was created.
Despite intensive study of the human genome a palpable genetic basis for mental illnesses has not been discovered and therefore you will not find it listed among bona fide genetic diseases such as sickle-cell anaemia and Tay-Sachs syndrome.
Nor have brain scans revealed any physical pathogen that causes mental illness.
Under the circumstances one might be forgiven for thinking that, without the strictures of science, psychiatrists would be super-cautious about making diagnoses especially because modern psychiatric interventions use powerful drugs, dangerous shock therapy and, of course, in the case of gender dysphoria, hormonal and surgical interventions.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Being released from the discipline of science has meant that psychiatry has become the most politicised of all medical specialties.
Very few mental illnesses that were added to the DSM in 1980 became blockbusters. In fact, when it first appeared, gender identity disorder was a sleeper because back then gender-transitioning was still a rather fringe idea.
But including it in the DSM primed the pump for later explosive expansion. Before 1980 there was no state funding of the medical interventions used to treat Gender Dysphoria. The prohibitively expensive surgical and chemical interventions entailed in so-called gender affirmative care were not covered by any federal, state, or private insurance programs and therefore had to be paid for out-of-pocket by the patient who was always an adult.
It was only after Gender Identity Disorder was designated as a medical illness that state funding for gender affirmative care was made available. The flow of money for gender-affirming-care was again bolstered in 2010 with the passing of the Affordable Care Act.
Once the money was flowing the diagnosis of Gender Identity was given a further boost by giving it a different name. In 2013, shortly before the publication of the fifth edition of the DSM, the APA sent a note to practitioners announcing that in DSM-V the term Gender Identity Disorder would be changed to Gender Dysphoria.
In making this change organised psychiatry wanted to hide the fact that gender dysphoria is a designated mental illness. This was in conformity with the ideological narrative which insists that gender dysphoria is not a mental illness.
On the other hand, the APA explicitly states in the note that it did not want to delete this condition from its manual because it wanted to ensure that those diagnosed with it would continue to receive the care that the APA believed was appropriate.
With all of these contortions one cannot help but notice that there is a striking contradiction built into the narrative; that is, that a non-illness nevertheless requires heroic and expensive medical interventions.
Thus, by a stroke of the pen, the APA killed two birds with one stone; it legitimised the treatment and managed the image of this thing that was now called Gender Dysphoria.
To the best of my knowledge exactly what inspired the psychiatrists on the taskforce which created DSM-III to include gender identity disorder is obscure. But for the decades preceding their discussions there was some prominent theory and research in the air that almost certainly influenced their thinking.
Professor John Money was a sexologist at Johns Hopkins University who was interested in the extremely rare anomaly, now known as intersex, wherein a baby is born with both male and female genitalia.
Notwithstanding well-established knowledge of genetics as well as commonplace wisdom about the relationship between nature and nurture, he theorised that sex differences were learned rather than innate.
And then he got lucky. A couple of subjects fell into his lap with which he could test his theory.
His subjects were twin boys, Bruce and Brian Reimer, who were born in Winnipeg in 1965. Bruce’s penis had been disfigured by a botched circumcision and his parents were naturally concerned about how this might affect his future well-being.
In 1967 they saw a television show in which Money claimed that sex was a matter of nurture rather than nature, and they naively contacted him. Bruce was renamed Brenda, was castrated and given hormones, dressed in girls’ clothing, and encouraged to play with girls’ toys.
After the medical interventions Brenda and Brian endured over a decade of experimenting by Money to try to prove his theory. The experiment consisted almost exclusively of forcing the twins to role-play the sex act because Money’s perverse idea was that the sex act was the primary foundation of gender identity formation.
To the boys’ parents he spoke of the experiment in calm and gentle terms but he was cruel and angry when forcing the unwilling boys to perform sexual play-acting. The boys were tormented and miserable throughout this process, while Money published papers claiming that his theory was being vindicated.
At the age of 14 Brenda finally informed his father about what was going on and told him that he had never felt like a girl. The boys were promptly withdrawn from the experiment.
Brenda underwent surgeries to try to reverse those used to reconfigure his genitalia and took the name David to make a fresh start. But both boys had been so traumatised that despite their efforts to live normal lives – for a while David was even married to a woman who had children by a previous marriage – that they were too broken to be put back together.
They were stressed and depressed and had trouble holding down jobs. The tragic upshot was both committed suicide in their late thirties, first Brian by an overdose of psychiatric drugs and, after visiting his brother’s grave every day for about a year, David shot himself.
It is noteworthy and not just a little ironic that just around the time that David Reimer renounced the failed experiment that he and his brother were forced to undergo that the DSM included Gender Identity Disorder in its Manual.
Moreover, it is very likely that Money’s decades-long published scientific fraud influenced the decision to include it but to be fair, at the time they probably didn’t know that Money’s work was rubbish.
This fact came out only in an academic critique in 1997 by the sex sociologist Milton Diamond and a couple of years later in a widely read exposé by John Colapinto in Rolling Stone magazine which was later expanded into a New York Times best-selling book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who was Raised as a Girl.
When confronted with this evidence Money feigned ignorance. Meanwhile his ideas had developed a life of their own.
It was Money who coined the terms ‘gender role’ and ‘gender identity.’ The misplaced terminology ‘sex assignment’ is also derived from Money’s work with intersex children. It may have been appropriate for children born with the intersex abnormality but of course never had meaning in the case of normal children whose sex was never ‘assigned’ but rather simply observed.
Despite the known failure of the experiment, Money’s framework has persisted in academic and medical institutions. It shaped the policies of organisations such as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP), and gender clinics worldwide.
Today, debates surrounding ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors simply omit the origins of this ideology. And they omit the fact that John Money’s theory – that gender is socially constructed and malleable – was founded on scientific fraud.
Much has been written about the social contagion that fuelled the rise of the trans epidemic but the whole ecosystem that fuelled it would have been harmless psychobabble if not for the actualising of gender transitioning in medical practice.
Once something physical and organic is happening, once it is sanctioned not only by the medical fraternity and paid for by the state and insurance companies, then it at once rises to an astronomically high level of legitimacy and credibility and that in and of itself increases its contagiousness by orders of magnitude.
If doctors weren’t there to legitimise doing these interventions and the money from the state and the insurance companies was not there to pay for them, they would be very rare among adults as was the case before 1980 and non-existent among children.
The world has been shrinking away from sexual transitioning of children and adults first in Europe and more recently in America. The Trump administration through executive orders has been trying to staunch the flow of government money for these interventions but the resistance is strong in the way of court challenges and state interventions.
Dedicated clinics that specialise in these medical interventions such as Tavistock in England have been closing, legislation has been passed in some jurisdictions banning them, and lawsuits have been launched for malpractice against medical practitioners who have been administering them and recently a case in New York brought by Fox Varian has resulted in an award of $2million in damages.
But for the APA the march goes on. One cannot imagine them ever deleting gender dysphoria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
If sanity prevails and the funding dries up and the sex-change interventions are finally stopped except in the case of a small number of adults who will be forced to pay for them with their own dime as elective procedures like cosmetic plastic surgery, society will look back on this movement as one of many barbarities cooked up by those with strange ideologies.
One cannot help thinking that it would have been better when psychiatry was in decline in the 1970s for it to have folded its tent and died a natural death.
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