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A thread. The Scottish govt wants to enshrine the concept of 'gender identity' in law. But what is 'gender identity' and where did this seemingly innocent idea come from? Welcome to a dark tale of scientific malpractice, psychiatric abuse and...an epidemic of amputations.
2./ In 1955 Dr John Money borrowed the word 'gender' from linguistics to describe what had till then been known as 'sex'. The science of sexology was dominated by biologists and if an ambitious psychiatrist like him was ever to shine he knew he needed to elbow out the biologists.
3./ He was also frank that 'sexology' was unlikely ever to be fully respectable if it sounded like it was obsessed with the S word. Money went on to invent the terms 'gender role' and our friend 'gender identity', as he became the global go-to expert in transsexual studies.
4./ I came across Money when my colleagues at BBC Horizon made a heart-rending episode on the story of David Reimer. As a baby David lost his penis when his circumcision went wrong. His parents were sent with David to John Money.
5./ Money argued 'gender identity' was a social construction that you could change in any child before the age of 2. He decided to give David hormones, create a surgical vagina and told his parents to bring him up as a girl. Here's the script for the show. https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/boyturnedgirl.shtml
6./ Money later made 6 year old David and his twin brother strip naked and play sex games which he photographed. Research apparently. He wrote the case up as a huge success and said it helped explain 'transsexuality'. A transsexual's identity he said was fixed socially..
7/ ..at an early age just as he'd fixed David's and doctors should do what he'd done: affirm the identity & make the body fit it. What Money didn't reveal was that David actually hated his 'girl' identity and later committed suicide. When this came out Money's career was ruined.
8./ But rather than David's case being seen as proof biological SEX was immutable experts now tweaked Money's view of transsexuality & argued instead that our inner sense of 'gender identity' was not formed by society but entirely innate. So innate you could never change it.
9./ Cue another disaster. 20 years ago I was called in to help on a Horizon that was the strangest I've ever worked on. I flew out to Germany to interview a man who wanted to have a perfectly healthy leg removed. The man believed his inner innate identity was as an amputee.
10./ His psychiatrist was an erstwhile student of Money, Russell Reid. Like Money he'd long been fascinated by people who were sexually aroused by the idea of being amputees (amnepotophiles) but by the 90s he began to argue this wasn't a fetish. It was their core inner identity.
11./ He compared this to 'gender identity'. Reid was at the time the UK's biggest expert in transsexual care & provided influential expert testimony during the passage of the Gender Recognition Act (2004). Reid argued doctors should always affirm transsexuals' gender identities.
12./ Otherwise he said they would commit suicide. He now took the same approach on 'Amputee Identity', referring the German & another patient to a surgeon to remove their chosen limbs. Reid's argument was if medics did not make their bodies fit their inner identity...
13./ ..they too would commit suicide. It's true a few people did try to self-amputate and some others threatened suicide. But even Reid drew the line at a woman who said she was always meant to be quadriplegic. Her story opens this gobsmacking Horizon. https://ok.ru/video/281953962725
14./ The concept of an inner immutable 'identity' had now gone AWOL. When Reid's first patient had a leg amputated the press created a storm & the Hospital Board apologised & made clear no more such operations would be done. For my poor German this was a disaster, or so he said.
15./ I was with him in Edinbugh when he heard his longed for operation was cancelled. But as he drowned his sorrows he opened up about his life story and it sounded very different from Russell Reid and John Money's take on things. He explained his parents back in Germany..
16./ ..had owned a factory that made prosthetic limbs. As a boy he'd watched injured soldiers being fitted with artificial legs. "My father and mother never had time for me. They gave all their love to those soldiers". I'm no genius but this didn't sound very innate.
17./ Reid had argued no amount of counselling could ever change these patients. But is it psychiatry's job just to affirm every obsession patients have or help realise every fantasy or fetish? After the show went out Reid's colleagues & the discipline in general were horrified.
18./ Experts became concerned about the sudden boom in wannabe amputees and worried that it was psychiatry's fascination that was fuelling it. Here's the Atlantic arguing insightfully about how a pathology was being normalised by science. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/
19./ Psychiatrists realised they'd made a huge mistake, & there was a clampdown. But somehow Russell Reid's views on transsexuality were unaffacted, despite them and the concept of 'gender identity being the driving inspiration for his stance on "elective" amputees.
20./ Reid developed much of today's approach to trans care. He pioneered the use of cancer drugs like Goserelin as puberty blockers. He'd used them first to dampen the libido of paedophiles, a use for which the manufacturer complained it wasn't licensed. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/anger-as-paedophile-moves-to-victims-village-1173683.html
21./ This risky attitude eventually though came a cropper. He was found guilty of Serious Professional Misconduct by the GMC for inappropriately prescribing hormones. Among other breaches he'd given them to a woman who wanted to be a man because she believed she was Jesus.
22./ Maybe he thought this fantasy deserved affirmation too. So what have we learned? For one thing, the vague ever-morphing notion of 'gender identity' has dubious roots and its pioneers were deeply suspect. But their approach of unquestioning affirmation has been hard-wired..
23./ ..into today's 'gender identity' clinics. And as psychiatry has indulged its growing obsession with 'gender identity' so it has fuelled the epidemic of people claiming to have one, just as experts worried it would with amputee 'identity'. Clinic staff are leaving in droves..
24./ ..convinced psychiatry is failing to safeguard children. The concept of 'gender identity' has left a trial of destruction and is now endangering children's mental and physical health. It's the last thing Scotland should be enshrining in legislation. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/23/child-transgender-service-governor-quits-chaos
