Making Amends for My Profession
Can counseling be redeemed? Fritha Robinson makes the case for moving Beyond Trans.
Mistakes are a part of life, yet some mistakes are more consequential than others. The counseling profession has made a mistake in promoting and endorsing gender affirming care and I have witnessed the harms that have befallen a group of vulnerable people as a result. I signed up to work with Beyond Trans in 2024 because I wanted to be a part of the solution and to make amends of the behalf of my profession. What I have learned is that the detransitioners I have worked with are very much haunted by the mistakes that the mental health profession has made, yet tragically they bear the burden and blame for it.
Since all the detransitioners I have worked with have been women, I will limit my scope to how this affects women. Before they transitioned these young women were teenagers who struggled with obsessions around perfectionism and fears of making mistakes; they were hard on themselves. Transitioning was pitched to them as a solution for their mental distress. They leapt at but soon realized it was not helping them, and left them feeling worse. Now these young people, who were already suffering from perfectionist obsessions, are reminded of how they made a mistake every time they open their mouths to speak.
We all make mistakes, but most of us are not reminded of them on an hourly basis. For young women who took testosterone even a few months of use is enough to permanently alter their voice. Yes, many can train their voices to speak higher and the ones I have worked with have done this successfully. I would not have realized they had been on testosterone simply by listening to them. But just as we cannot see that the swan gliding serenely on the lake is paddling energetically beneath the surface, we do not see the continuous effort that a woman who has detransitioned must make to raise the pitch of her voice when she speaks. This serves as a perpetual reminder of a painful mistake whenever she talks to another person.
Written on Their Bodies
Before I worked with detransitioners I made the mistake of thinking that a woman who took only testosterone would have an easier time recovering than one who had a mastectomy. The sad reality is the profound effects of administering testosterone to young women, when coupled with the mental processes characteristic of OCD, make it impossible to gauge the full extent of their emotional distress based on whether they ceased hormone treatment before escalating to surgical interventions. And while is sometimes hard to tell whether the women I see used testosterone, they live with the necessity of shaving to remove excess body hair, of how their voice cracks, the loss of their ability to sing and the painful effects of bottom growth. They must live with a medicalized body that worsens their OCD. This does not even touch upon how those who still live in the area where they were medicalized cope with the knowledge that people in their social group know that they transitioned and then detransitioned.
As anyone who has worked with someone with perfectionist obsessions will be aware, pointing out that mental health and medical professionals led them astray and made them false promises does not do much to alleviate their distress. The stories they tell of so-called professionals who aided and abetted their transition are scandalous and show how far many people in our field have deviated from their ethics. It is a wonder that these young women, who were just children when they reached out for help, and who were left with worsening mental health outcomes as a direct result of the snake oil peddled to them are brave enough to try therapy again. They deserve to receive the competent counseling that they were denied in the first instance. The road ahead lies with learning self-compassion, self-forgiveness, radical acceptance and how to cope with obsessions and compulsions in healthy ways. In short, they need all insights and strategies a good therapist can offer and not the mindless affirmation they received.
Making Amends
If you are like me and rightfully ashamed of the part that the therapeutic profession has played in harming vulnerable people, please consider joining Beyond Trans to help fix a problem our field has contributed to. They have been wonderful to work with, easier to deal with than insurance companies in the US and are working to restore care to our field.
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