Jo Bartosch at Spiked talks to psychiatrist Dr Az Hakeem, whose book DETRANS: When transition is not the solution is just out:
Gender medicine, Hakeem tells me, has ‘been captured by trans lobby groups like Mermaids and Stonewall’. Consequently, for the past few years, the clinicians who have chosen to work at specialist services have taken an ‘affirmative approach’ to trans identities. Hakeem argues that affirming without question is ‘merely colluding in a form of grooming’. He compares it to a doctor enthusiastically agreeing with an ‘anorexic at critically low weight who believes they need to lose more weight’....
To him, ‘trans’ is not a useful term. There is a difference, Hakeem says, between those who might once have been termed transsexual and those who are transvestites. ‘The unhelpful lumping together of all these distinct categories as “trans” gives the false impression that transsexualism is on the ascent and that any man wanting to dress in female clothing is en route to a “sex change”’, he says. ‘Whereas, in reality, most are fetishistic crossdressers who are excited by wearing women’s clothes… it’s nothing to do with wanting to change their sex.’
As a former teenage goth himself, Hakeem believes that many of the new cohort of trans-identified youngsters are simply members of a new subculture. With tongue firmly in cheek, he has referred to the phenomenon of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) as ‘Goth Mark Five’.
Notably, he has also observed from his clinical experience that ‘males with gender dysphoria tend to be on the autistic spectrum, as opposed to males with transvestitism or who experience autogynephilia [arousal at the thought of being female], who do not’....
‘Psychological distress should be considered as psychological and treated as such. My experience of working purely therapeutically with gender dysphoria suggests that this approach is entirely successful, and I remain in disbelief as to why this is not routinely offered.’
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