Therapist Lisa Marchiano covers some of the ways in which she sees the transgender child trend as similar to the made-up phenomenon of recovered memory and satanic ritual abuse of previous decades.
Marchiano relates the now infamous Pop-Tart analogy offered by Trans-Activist Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy.
Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy is the Medical Director at The Center for Transyouth Health and Development. At a 2017 conference sponsored by the US Professional Association for Transgender Health, Olson-Kennedy told the following story of how she offered a young girl an understanding of herself as trans using a Pop-Tart analogy. (You can listen to a recording of this excerpt here.) So at one point, I said to the kid, “so do you think that you’re a girl or a boy? And this kid was like…I could just see, there was, like, this confusion on the kid’s face. Like, “actually I never really thought about that.” And so this kid said, “well, I’m a girl, ’cause I have this body.” Right? This is how this kid had learned to talk about their gender…that it’s based on their body. And I said, “oh, so …and I completely made this up on the spot, by the way, but …I said, “Do you ever eat pop tarts?” And the kid was like, oh, of course. And I said, “well you know how they come in that foil packet?” Yes. “Well, what if there was a strawberry pop tart in a foil packet, in a box that said ‘Cinnamon Pop Tarts.’? Is it a strawberry pop tart, or a cinnamon pop tart?” The kid’s like, “Duh! A strawberry pop tart.” And I was like, “so…” And the kid turned to the mom and said, “I think I’m a boy and the girl’s covering me up.” This young patient had never conceptualized herself as trans before the doctor suggested this as a new way to understand herself. We don’t know if this new story made things better or worse for this child, but we do know it is possible that she was put on a pathway that led to medicalization that could have plausibly been avoided. [Read the whole thing!]
One comment at the end of the article from a “desperate mom” says it all..
Gretchen Dec 7
A NYT worthy article. Well written and in need of mass publication. My son began a medical transition after a month with a 28 year old, newly licensed, ‘gender therapist’. Previously he had been working with mature, well trained therapists who were helping him understand his self hate in other ways and he seemed to be doing better. How do we get this information to the APA and other therapy training organizations? Desperate mom of an adult child, grieving. 😢
+++
What Are We Doing To Our Children?