Lost and Found

A former researcher of childhood gender dysphoria returns to the fray.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Hello and welcome to what is likely to be a sporadic Substack that shares information and analysis on issues relating to gender dysphoria. This first post provides an overview of my history with this subject so you can understand how I got here.

In 2004 I began postgraduate research on childhood gender dysphoria (or GID/C as we used to call it) from a sociological perspective. It wasn’t controversial back then, to explore how GD develops from a socio-cultural point of view. There was zero push back when I sought interviews with adults who had experienced gender dysphoria as children. But this climate of opened-mindedness would soon come to an end.

Sadly, I ultimately had to abandon my PhD due to chronic illness. After years of work, and a stubborn (perhaps idiotic) refusal to let my ill-health deter me, the dissertation was left unfinished. And I never published a damn thing.

Meanwhile, in gender land, shit got really weird.

Although at the time I was very much aware of the increasing pressure from trans activists to alter the standards of care to enable easier access to medicalised gender treatments for adults, adolescents and children. I never dreamed that the professionals in this field would concede any ground on children (man I was naive).

The research was overwhelmingly clear. Most children with gender dysphoria in the pre-pubescent age group would resolve their distress by adolescence, and most would identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual. This was especially the case for boys, who at that time comprised the majority of the clinical cohort.

Yet despite this established understanding, the activists got their way, and the door was swung open to affirming and medicalising gender nonconforming children in distress, most of whom were just gay.

And/or autistic.

Early on in my research when I was reviewing the case report literature, I came to realise - to my complete dismay, that a significant proportion of these kids were likely to have an ASD. Yet none of the leading researchers in the field had apparently suspected its prevalence. If they did, they had not published any dedicated research on the subject. Apart from a handful of case reports of GD/ASD comorbidity, and one letter to the editor from a clinician sharing his suspicions, there was almost nothing.

I couldn’t understand it. Surely I was barking up the wrong tree. How could a lowly sociologist with no clinical experience see what experts in the field were yet to reveal? I conferred with senior academics at my university who specialised in autism and they assured me I was not imagining things. This was indeed worth investigating.

The realisation that autism might be an integral part of the story put quite a spanner in the works for a sociologist investigating the emergence of gender dysphoria in children through the lens of symbolic interaction - how do children learn about gender, make meaning, and apply those meanings to themselves in the context of GD?

If that meaning making was mediated by the particular cognitive style of an autistic mind, then this potentially changed everything.

Just as I was getting to grips with how to account for this hidden issue, life blew up in my face and I retreated into the wilderness.

Anger, Understanding and Acceptance - Returning to the Fray

So here I am, many years later. No longer under the thumb of chronic illness and ready to get stuck in to help overturn this mess we now find ourselves in.

Although I’ve kept a keen eye on this unfolding disaster since I left academia, it’s taken a long time for me to feel able to return to the subject of gender as an active participant. I wish I had done so sooner - but I was angry. Absolutely livid. To the extent that there were long periods of time where I had to avoid the issue completely.

An affirmation approach to clinical care for gender dysphoria is obviously harmful to LGB and autistic people. Yet the Left has completely turned their back on them, sacrificing those they once championed to a cult of self-rejection.

I knew I couldn’t contribute to this debate constructively until I reached a place of acceptance of this absurd new reality. And by acceptance I don’t mean condoning. I mean in the Buddhist sense of accepting things as they really are. So that we can engage in actions that might actually achieve meaningful change, rather than actions that merely express our indignation (hi to all my friends on twitter).

Anger can be motivating, but in my case it was unwieldy. So I stayed in the wings until I could speak about this issue without rage steaming from my ears. Some people can harness anger in a beneficial way. But that’s not me, I’m no Charlie Perkins.

Now, I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I’m not normally an angry person, quite the opposite. But the serious harms caused by the catastrophic failure of our institutions regarding GD got completely under my usually calm and collected skin.

A further reason for my anger was that I simply couldn’t understand how this had happened. I was a little shell shocked by the whole thing. It shattered my faith in academia, the health care system, and the Left I’d spent my whole life aligned with.

As a curious person who likes to understand the world in which I live, not having even the vaguest hint of how to adequately comprehend this state of affairs was troubling.

Discovering the work of psychiatrist Dr. Iain McGilchrist was invaluable in this regard. Although he does not write about this topic specifically - his thesis helped me understand that delusional gender ideology is but one symptom of a wider societal problem - atomised, reductive thinking indicative of left hemisphere dominance.

Another factor that delayed my return to the fray - and the issue of clinical approaches to gender dysphoria in children has always been fraught, btw - was that I didn’t quite appreciate how insidious the spread of transgender ideology had become.

Although there are people in my life who have transitioned or identify as non-binary - as a self-employed person with no kids, I wasn’t as exposed to the far flung reaches of this ideology as those involved in schools, community groups and workplaces.

Apparently I didn’t get out much.

Of course I knew that the affirmation approach was wrong and that the Left had lost it’s mind on the issue, but wrapping my head around the fact that we are in a state of ideological capture and contagion on a macro scale (beyond the phenomenon of ROGD), took a bit longer for me to process. Perhaps this reflected my inclination to “do” sociology at the micro level, rather than the level of large scale systems.

I too wanted to “be kind”. Compassion for people with gender dysphoria is what drove me to research this issue in the first place. I was agnostic about whether medical transition (for adults) was a good or a bad thing.

Previously most transsexuals understood that their sex was immutable and were obliged to undertake extensive therapy. But today’s transgenderists believe that their gender delusions are real. Affirming a delusion is very different to offering transition as a last resort to address irretractable and debilitating distress about one’s sex.

This is not kind, this is patronising.

It’s not kind to lie.

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What to expect from this Substack

Kelly James / On Gender will share information and analysis on gender dysphoria. As I’m based in Australia, my writing will tend to focus on content geared towards assisting my fellow Aussies who are engaged in advocacy work here. However there will also be posts of interest to anyone who is caught up in the issue of gender, including reworks of my unpublished research material. I will also delve into the history of detrans activism in Australia from an earlier era.

Up Next…

The next post will outline case summaries of detransitioned Australians who have shared their stories with the media over the past 20 years. Please consider subscribing if you think this is of interest. Thank you.