You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Correspondence in response to ‘Transgender medicalization and the attempt to evade psychological distress’, by Robert Withers. First published 17 November 2020: doi.org
‘Gender dysphoria’ and ‘trans-identification’ are not the same thing. We need to think about a matrix of factors that affect a person's identity: biological sex, romantic attraction, sexual attraction, gender expression and gender identity are all separate aspects of self, and all are impacted by biology, society and personal choice. The reasons why and how people choose to identify certain ways biologically, sexually, romantically or in terms of personal identity are myriad (APA 2015; APA & NASP 2015; Wu, 2016).
To assume that gender dysphoria or identifying as transgender is necessarily linked to, or caused by, only ‘dysregulated affects, attachment trauma, childhood abuse, and ego-alien sexual feelings’ is an over-simplification of complex phenomena and in many cases incorrect (Erickson-Schroth 2013; Garg et al. 2020). Many young people today see their choices of how to be in the world and whom to love are just that - choices that reflect their own authentic selves. Many transgender people would argue that their distress is not from early trauma, but from experiences of not being understood or validated in their self-expression and being bullied and scapegoated by the larger culture (Becerra-Culqui et al. 2018; Reisner et al. 2016; Wilson et al. 2016).
To equate a transgender person to a male character in a poem who gets castrated by a goddess is a mischaracterization of how most transgender people would identify, and demonstrates a lack of understanding of what it actually means to be transgender. Most transgender people who enter therapy are actively striving to become the person they want to be (Wu 2016). This is consistent with Jung's teleologic perspective of the human psyche. Gender therapies are coined ‘gender-affirming’ or ‘gender confirming’ because the proced