When you have someone who has huge difficulties dealing with who they are == be it their desire to a sex ideology forbids them (Feminists wanting to be heterosexual: Catholics wanting to be homosexual etc) or having difficulties with their ideas of self you don’t label this as something progressive and cool.

You help them cope. You don’t tell them that the pain they are in is great. Many years ago I counselled a Lesbian colleague NOT to encourage a very borderline woman to explore her homosexual tendencies — because when in the room with me I could not get any sense of an adult personality. Where there should be strong pillars, strength, and a basic sense of self there was jelly.

You have to be an adult to know what you are. And then deal with the implications, for good or ill. But… I’m not politically correct.

My patients ensure that I never have that temptation. I see too much pain.

And I really hope the federalist is misrepresenting the US government.

A December 2015 study suggests transgender brains have a marker for the existence of mental illness. The researchers attempted to find support for the idea that transsexuals have a brain that corresponds to their wished-for gender, but they found no evidence of cross-gender brains. Instead, they found an abnormality that suggests a link to psychological and behavioral dysfunction and mental disorders in the brains of transgenders.

These findings support the results of another study released in August 2014 that found 62.7 percent of those diagnosed with gender dysphoria suffer from psychiatric axis 1 comorbid disorders, or mental illness.

The presence of mental disorders has monumental implications for transgender treatment and should be taken seriously because of the link between some mental disorders and suicide. How can transgenders be properly treated when the transgender power brokers deny that psychological disorders may be a contributing factor?

Failure to provide psychotherapy for co-existing mental issues will keep the transgender suicides on the front page. With the backing of the White House, states and cities are criminalizing psychotherapy that explores and treats comorbid disorders in transgender and homosexual youth. The advocates have used the tragic death of a teen transgender to pass unnecessary laws to keep youngsters from getting sound psychotherapy that could prevent suicide.

A brief aside about brain studies: they do not prove anything. If you do serial MRIs on a woman during pregnancy, nursing and infant, and following weaning… her brain changes. If you take a depressed person and treat them with CBT (no medications, cognitive therapy) as they recover their brain changes. The bulk of our brain volume is synapses — nerve connections — and we make and unmake them all the time. Brain volume tells us our state, not our traits.

People who are gay, unfortunately, have (a) more mental disorders — using proper epidemiological tools, and (b) have more adverse events. In the NZ survey we found that men who have sex with men but who did not identify as gay had somewhat less adverse events than those who were gay. (As about 5% of women and 3% of men have been intimate with the same sex, when you have a 12 000 person dataset you can analyse these things safely, even in New Zealand).

But most people who are gay are comfortable with the fundamentals of who they are, and sex is one of those fundamentals. The gender dysphoric exist. And I have looked, frequently, at the data on assignment surgery, not looking at the immediate outcomes (“Are you happy with how you have been treated?”) but the long term data. Particularly suicide rate. I cannot see a difference.

And, to my knowledge, there is nothing, nothing, that stops you doing therapy with a gay person or gender dysphoric person. They are still people. When they are pricked, they bleed. They grieve, they have trauma, they have to find a way to cope in this world.

And, yes, I’ve treated my fair share. For those who are religious and want to find a way to celibacy, there are support groups.

But in my trade I look for depression and lack of coping skills. There is no rule that prevents helping there.

And if there is, because of some twerp thinking that these groups should not be encouraged to cope, and make choices informed by hard data and not feelings, then we are failing these people. We are indeed increasing their death rate. For ideology. And that is evil.