YOU ARE FEEDING A MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS NOT A DELUSION.

If I had been my great-grandfather, and was able to place a 21st Century head onto a 19th Century man’s shoulders, when my first wife (my great-grandmother was his second wife) was sick and about to enter childbirth, I would have mounted my horse and ridden down to the local First Nations people and asked if their women could come to attend to her, and if I’d needed a doctor, and had the choice of the Chinese doctor in that direction or the Western doctor in that direction, unless it would have taken three days to reach the Chinese doctor, the Chinese doctor would have been my choice. Why? Well, a Western doctor would have arrived with a blood-spattered apron and bloodied hands, and it would have been seen as a sign of competence. A Chinese doctor would have been cleaner, and the local Aboriginal women would have dug a pit and lined it with bark and had my wife squat over it and the baby would have been born in the pit.

It was not until Joseph Lister, a man ridiculed by the medical establishment, proved that the Western way of presumed competence was actually spreading infections, that the medical establishment changed its view.

Similarly, if you had been diagnosed with a stomach ulcer in 1977, your doctor would have prescribed rest and a proton pump inhibitor. It was not until two Australian scientists had a theory that stress was not the cause, but it was actually a bacterium that people started to improve, and doctors did not condescendingly prescribe rest, rest and rest, but two antibiotics and a proton pump inhibitor (the latter to help the ulcer to heal) for eight weeks, that recovery from the ulcers could be complete.

Many like to point to the fact that it took a riot for homosexuality to be removed from the DSM, but that was what it took for the psychiatric establishment to realize that it was wrong, and that the barbaric aversion therapy was completely wrong! Now, we have the same issue with transgenderism, finally removed from the DSM.

Psychiatry has a strong basis in misogyny, with terms such as hysterectomy being used to describe the surgical removal of the uterus, because it claimed that women were hysterical. Terms such as “hysterical woman” were commonplace. When women complained of pain during the menstrual cycle, they were dismissed by male doctors with condescending remarks such as, “Part of womanhood,” “get over it,” “you have to grin and bear it.”

The right-wing carries on about transgenderism and claims that it has an obligation to not feed the delusion, but what we can see instead is this. Opposition to abortion has nothing to do with protecting the rights of an unborn child and everything to do with the subjugation of women. Pregnancy from rape must NEVER, and I mean NEVER, be legitimized by the likes of Pat Robertson or Rick Perry with, “A gift from God,” or, “God’s way of comforting rape victims.” While I say that it can be sad if a couple choose to abort if a child has an illness, what we have to consider is the life expectancy if the baby goes full-term. I say, it’s a parent’s choice, but a child with Down’s Syndrome may give their parents as much joy as one without.

Wanting to deny transwomen access to women’s spaces is not about protecting women but about punching down on transgender folks. I can understand women saying, “Oh, we had to fight for this, we had to fight for that, and now it’s being taken away,” (it’s not), but here’s something that we need to consider. For transwomen in women’s sport, I remember a quiz show series from the 1980s and 90s, and, yes, I remember it was nice when a struggling individual was able to win the entire showcase, and if they were driving a $500 car that they couldn’t afford to fix, and they won a brand-new Nissan Patrol and Pulsar, the same. The rules of the game were, $20 with which to begin, win $5 for a correct answer, lose $5 for an incorrect answer, and if you won, they had the prizes on the board, if you picked a matching couple, that was your prize for the night. If you returned the next night, and you won, you won another prize, but if you scored over 100, you could win the car, otherwise, you played for it on the seventh night. If you won on the seventh night, you could return to play for the cash jackpot which started out at $50,000. One man won on his seventh night, and he said that he had won the cars, which he wanted, but he’d play again. He won the entire showcase and the cash jackpot. Then, a woman won her first night, the next night and she came back and won the showcase, but in the last round, on her last night, she was beaten, and some said that it seemed as though they had given away the cash jackpot recently and weren’t keen to do so again so soon. I do remember an episode, in 1981, where a man won, and the host said to him, “Even though you won, tonight, the carryover champion will be back tomorrow night, because he was found to have a faulty buzzer.” That was fair. The thing is, a anti-trans activists are portraying it as a man decides to identify as a woman and suddenly can play women’s sports. Just like, if a swimmer swims very quickly, an official can say, “Piddle please,” to test for performance enhancing substances, before a transwoman can compete in women’s sports, she must be shown to have testosterone levels in the same level as a ciswoman. Yes, a ciswoman will require facial feminization surgery to look like a woman, and a tracheal shave, but that cannot be conflated with high testosterone!

What some vulnerable women also need to remember is a statement from Atticus Finch about climbing into someone’s skin and walking around in it to understand them. Think about what it was like for some transwomen in their youth, if they were being forced to play touch football at school, even though they hated it. Think about what it was like for transwomen, who, when forced to present as male in their youth, had to be like fish out of water. Think about what it was like when they started high school and the first words they heard from boys who clocked it were, “Hey, p-word for homosexual!” even though the boys who said it weren’t being eyed off by the boys they were abusing.

Anti-trans activists are feeding their own delusions that cruel psychiatric interventions will make transwomen cisgender men rather than accepting that physical medical interventions to align a trans person’s body with their mind are far more effective. They are trying to stop them from getting the help they really need and that’s effective, and contributing to mental health concerns in the process.