GenderLife Forum: The Information Exchange

Yes, but quacks like Ken Zucker don't really care how we feel. As long as they can collect their nice big fat fee from parents who are overwrought that their child is Different, they could care less they help the child live a lie. They don't even think about what happens when that child grows up, forced to fit into a male role, and does the best she can to live up to that role, even marrying and producing children, only to have even more lives thrown into chaos when the inevitable transition happens — assuming "Dad" doesn't slowly commit suicide with substance abuse, or all at once.

The Zuckers probably never once stop to consider the overall moral implictions of their reparative "therapy" because they are utterly convinced we are Sick, and if we kill ourselves, quickly or slowly, because we're miserable living the lie, they will count that as "evidence" we were mentally ill all along, never even slightly wondering if perhaps they had a hand in how their patients tragically wind up.

Christine - you're dead on right. The quacks don't care about us, only about lining their pockets. And due to their rectal-cranial inversion, a mental illness all unto itself, they are unable to see the havoc that they reek upon people who are coming to them for help. "Oh great Doctor, please help our child to be NORMAL..." What ever happened to unconditional love and acceptance, like what being a parent is really about? I'm a parent and Zucker's ideas are the last thing I would want for my kids.


As I was leaving the electrologist's office this afternoon, I pointed the office computer at that NPR article and asked her to listen to it and let me know what she thought. This was her e-mail:

Amy,

I would love to slap that Zucker dude up side the head and then adopt that
little girl to give her a chance at some sanity. I mean he's been in "the
business" and "helping people" for 30 years and still doesn't get it!!!! I
can only image the suicide rate for the children stuck working with him.
Thank God that there are people like Jona's parents and therapist. I hope
that type of thinking and insight spreads like wildfire and the old cronies
die off.

Smiles,
WXXXXXX

Some people outside of our little circle also get it. We need to reach more people. And we need to do something to get idiots like Zucker out of positions of power over people's lives.

Letters to write, letters to write, I've got letters to write.

I wonder, how might various facets of american culture respond about a person if they became aware that someone changed their race? How might american culture respond if they discovered that an african american person chemically bleached their skin, changed their hair, surgically changed their facial features, and assimilated into society as a european american, believing that they felt they should be european american?

After listening to the first part of the report I fired off an email to NPR because they didn't get several points right. I backed-off some from my usual accusatory self because I just knew they were trying to appear 'fair and balanced.' Then, when I heard Carol (the mother who sent her child, Bradley, to Zucker) tell mournfully how Bradley is still obsessed with his girl toys and the color pink I knew that she was telling the world that she knew that Zucker was a fraud, and that Alex Spiegel (the reporter) was making her thinly-veiled editorial judgment through her. I felt confirmed by the overall tone of the second half of the report.

Things are slowly turning our way. The parents who take their kids to the Zuckers of this world do so because they simply don't want to face up to the truth but I believe they come to realize in fairly short order what the truth is. They may stick it out but once the insurance money runs out and they're faced with having to pay for Zucker out-of-pocket I believe it's a safe bet that they bail.

I am not giving up the fight but after listening to this report I am more confident than ever that Zucker et al. will be defeated, and soon.

The Cluck Institute set out, in the 1960s, to "prove" that SRS was an ineffective treatment for GID and "did" by selecting the 10 most screwed-up people they could find, doing SRS, and watching them crash and burn. Their objective have not changed and they continue to operate in a manner consistent with their beliefs.

What kind of doctor where they that were doing those things?

Some more insight on the story in the Torontoist

I would say Zucker is getting some very bad press.

Part two of the series was a much more uplifting piece, with support for the compassionate treatment methods and what they mean for the future of the individual.

Yes, it's a wonderful article. The author (unnamed) "gets it." And these articles are proliferating. 2007 was a banner year, with 2008 promising to be even better, even as we suffer occasional setbacks, like the naming of the new DSM V revision committee.

Organizing transsexuals is a bit like herding cats so one of the problems will be organizing an effective response. But things are moving quickly. Yesterday at 1:53 PST Arianna Davis (co-chairperson of TransMission International and president of the California Chapter of TAVA (Transgender American Veteran's Association) started an email to publicize Lynn Conway's newspost last Saturday of the APA's press release. Logically, the addressees were persons who signed-on as DSM/GID pathologization opponents on Kelley Winters' GID Reform Advocates website. A flurry of emails back-and-forth ensued. People I'd never heard of, many of them therapists, came online in support. By 4:21 PST Ariana morphed the email into an ad hoc Yahoo group she named the "Gender ID Coalition." It now counts 23 members.

Joe Ippolito is a member of the group. He's co-chair of the Trans-Health Conference that will be held in Philadelphia May 29-31 and he just added the DSM V/GID revision to the conference May 30th Friday afternoon agenda. Kelley Winters and Jamison Green will co-moderate. I'm planning to be there. It promises to be a defining moment.

Suppose you were a clinician and a 4-year-old black kid came into your office and said he wanted to be white. Would you go with that? ... I don't think we would.”-Ken Zucker

So to Ken gender is like skin color or ...... genitals .


"Whenever Zucker encounters a child younger than 10 with gender identity disorder, he tries to make the child comfortable with the sex he or she was born with."


No, he tries to make them uncomfortable with the gender they are.


"Zucker said that all of these activities were dangerous to a kid with gender identity disorder. He explained that unless Carol and her husband helped the child to change his behavior, as Bradley grew older, he likely would be rejected by both peer groups. Boys would find his feminine interests unappealing. Girls would want more boyish boys. Bradley would be an outcast."- Ken Zucker


Blaming the parents for their child being feminine.They took everything girl away.


"As his pile of toys dwindled, Carol realized Bradley was hoarding. She would find female action figures stashed between couch pillows. Rainbow unicorns were hidden in the back of Bradley's closet. Bradley seemed at a loss, she said. They gave him male toys, but he chose not to play at all."


"We would ask him, 'Bradley , can you draw a boy for us? Can you draw a boy in that picture?' ... And then he didn't really want us to see his drawings or watch him drawing because we would always say 'Can you draw a boy?'" Carol says. "And then finally after, I don't know, a month or two, he just said, 'Momma, I don't know how. ... I don't know how to draw a boy.

Carol says she finally sat down and showed him. From then on, Bradley drew boys as directed. Male figures with anemic caps of hair on their heads filled the pages of his sketchbook.'"


This is fucking brutal.


"Today, however, the APA's position is that therapies that try to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals are unethical. Homosexuality is now considered to be a normal variant of human behavior, so though a therapist might treat a person because they struggle with the stigma associated with homosexuality, therapists who practice in accordance with the guidelines established by the association don't treat the behavior itself."


"Zucker has come to believe that taking the view that kids are born transgender ultimately produces more transgender people"


"Bradley has been in therapy now for eight months, and Carol says still, on the rare occasions when she cannot avoid having him exposed to girl toys, like when they visit family, it doesn't go well.

"It's really hard for him. He'll disappear and close a door, and we'll find him playing with dolls and Polly Pockets and ... the stuff that he's drawn to," she says.

In particular, there is one typically girl thing — now banned — that her son absolutely cannot resist.

He really struggles with the color pink. He really struggles with the color pink. He can't even really look at pink," Carol says. "He's like an addict. He's like, 'Mommy, don't take me there! Close my eyes! Cover my eyes! I can't see that stuff; it's all pink!' "