‘Disturbing Gibberish’: New Trans Textbook For Psychiatrists Could Harm Millions Of Kids, Critics Say
Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times
A new “cutting-edge” textbook on transgenderism written with the help of activists will be used to train psychiatrists and could harm millions of children in the future, some experts have warned.
“Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care,” just released on Amazon at $58, is a textbook printed by American Psychiatric Association (APA) Publishing.
The textbook signals early on that it’s more subjective than objective, quoting a feminist studies professor saying, “Scientific neutrality is a fallacy.”
The content has prompted some critics to question the textbook’s reliance on a mix of transgender-identifying professionals writing about their experiences, limited scientific studies, and neo-Marxist critical theories.
“This is a huge issue; millions more kids will be harmed,” said Dr. Lauren Schwartz, a psychiatrist in Oklahoma, speaking out against the rush to “transition” children.
The textbook’s introduction says the book is based on an “evidence-informed approach” instead of an evidence-based approach, which is more scientific, she told The Epoch Times.
The 26 chapters are written by 56 authors, 50 of whom are in the transgender community, according to the textbook’s foreword.
Chapters include affirming “two-spirit people,” a term used to refer to someone who believes he or she is both sexes, and one about “double queer” people—or people who identify as transgender and have a mental disability.
The book’s editors are listed as an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and investigator at the National LGBT Health Education Center; and a transgender-identifying psychiatry resident at the University of Pennsylvania, whose work is influenced by her background as a “non-binary/trans, queer, neurodivergent, chronically ill, Jewish person.”
Dr. Schwartz noted that the authors were chosen by “prioritising lived experience, diversity of perspectives, and the community impact of prior work over academic titles.”
The problem is that the textbook will be perceived as authoritative because it was printed by the APA’s publishing arm, she said.
“Anyone wanting to practise gender-affirming care, any attorney wanting to defend it, and any legislator who wants to protect it, now they have a new peer-reviewed textbook, not just ‘evidence’ in a journal or a study,” she said.
Alan Hopewell, a prescribing neuropsychologist in Texas who saw transgender-identifying patients decades ago, called the textbook “disturbing.”
“This is nonsensical gibberish that has no foundation whatsoever in science,” he told The Epoch Times.
Hospitals could demand doctors go by the textbook because the APA put it out, or it could even be used to remove the licence of doctors who don’t go along with it, he said.
“This reminds me of brain-damaged hippies free-associating at a commune,” Mr. Hopewell said.
The book foreword says that most of the contributing authors recognise they are “obscenely privileged” as English-speaking doctors with access to elite schools.
It asserts that the psychiatric field was built on “the work [and assumptions] of European, white, cisgender men, including their colonial, Anglo-centric, cis-heteropatriarchal worldview and pathologization of experiences that did not fit their own ‘norm.'”
“For millennia, outside of European colonial influences, gender diversity has flourished to varying degrees among hundreds of indigenous communities around the world,” the foreword reads.
The idea that Western countries were colonising land stolen from indigenous people is part of critical race theory (CRT), which critics say is rooted in neo-Marxism.
CRT and gender theories see white people and heterosexuals in Western civilization as “oppressors” of minority identity groups, who are viewed as victims.
Activists are encouraged to dismantle oppressive societies in order to right the discrimination of the past, according to ideology architects such as Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote “How to Be an Antiracist.”
Proponents of CRT and gender theories contend that discrimination against identity groups such as white people and heterosexuals is needed to right the wrongs against racial and sexual minorities.
“The entire document is predicated on an uncritical acceptance of queer theory, which is more accurately queer Marxism,” conservative author James Lindsay told The Epoch Times.
Queer theory is a gender ideology advocating the destruction of traditional sexual norms. Some queer theorists support sexual acts such as paedophilia and bestiality that aren’t accepted by society.
The textbook describes heterosexuals as cisgender people who are part of a “cultural and systemic marginalisation” of LGBT people who don’t align with societal norms.
To prove the point, the authors object to the idea that only women can have babies.
“For example, naming an obstetrics and gynaecology practise a women’s health centre is cis-normative because it assumes the practise will only serve patients of one gender,” the foreword reads.
Mr. Lindsay, author of “The Marxification of Education,” said the idea of “treating” gender dysphoria with hormones or surgery is akin to performing lobotomies on the mentally ill decades ago.
History teaches that communist theories applied to the real world have deadly results, he said.
Mr. Lindsay pointed to the forced application of Trofim Lysenko’s Soviet agriculture programme based on pseudo-science as an example of a communist idea gone bad.
The programme caused millions of innocent people in the former Soviet Union to starve by forcing them to plant seeds close together in the belief that plants from the same class never compete with each other. The theory contributed to widespread famine.
