Approximately 100 years ago, G.K. Chesterton called common sense “that forgotten branch of psychology.”
Psychologists have been proving him right ever since, too.
The latest example is a California hospital chief psychologist who claims that children can identify as the “gender” version of a mythical creature and that such kids love mermaids.
Moreover, the practitioner often gets her guidance from small children, saying they know more than adults do about “being gender expansive.”
The Washington Examiner reports on the story, writing that these are the notions of
Diane Ehrensaft, a psychologist and the director of mental health for the child and adolescent gender center at UCSF’s Benioff Children’s Hospital.
Ehrensaft has advocated a “gender revolution,” which she said is being led by children, and outlined several ways that “gender creative children” can express their gender, according to Fox News.
In a slide titled “21st Century Gender Creative Children,” Ehrensaft said some children could be “gender hybrids” such as “gender minotaurs” or “gender Prius,” where a child is a half boy and half girl. Other hybrids mentioned were “gender by season” or “gender by location,” where a child claimed a different gender based on the time of year or current location.
“I totally agree we are in the midst of a gender revolution and the children are leading it,” Ehrensaft reportedly said at a 2018 talk. “And it’s a wonderful thing to see. And it’s also humbling to know [children] know more than we do about this topic of being gender expansive.”
According to the Benioff Children’s Hospital website, Ehrensaft specializes in “gender-affirmative care for transgender and gender-expansive patients; assessment and psychotherapy for children; and support for parents and children in families created through assisted reproductive technology.”
And anyone who fancies Greta Thunberg a climate expert will love this: The professor has actually “cited her conversation with a 7-year-old as proof that there can be [those] ‘gender minotaurs’ and hybrids,” relates Fox News. Take that, you science deniers!
Another source Ehrensaft mentioned was a boy who “twirled” in her office and said, “You see, I’m a Prius… I’m a boy in the front, and I’m a girl in the back,” Fox further informs.
(Pro tip: Many of these children are less serious than Ehrensaft is. Such kids are moving their make-believe beyond the child world because they can and because it’s a way of exercising power.)
The academic also makes an interesting assertion: She “believes the transgender revolution is the next phase of the 60s feminist movement, which featured challenging stereotypes about gender,” Fox writes.
Note that for years, as a voice in the wilderness, I have in fact pointed out that feminism laid the foundation for the MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender”) movement.
Of course, many will say that the MUSS agenda’s lunacy speaks for itself. Yet do note that ideology-driven pseudo-science has ever been par for the mental-health profession’s course.
Just consider a 2019 New Yorker essay, penned by physician Jerome Groupman, titled “The Troubled History of Psychiatry.” Citing a book by a Professor Anne Harrington, Groupman writes that this history “is a series of pendulum swings.” Touted “breakthroughs disappoint, discredited dogmas give rise to counter-dogmas, treatments are influenced by the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry, and real harm is done to patients and their loved ones,” he explains.
Does “gender theory” not perfectly reflect this, with the ’60s “gender neutrality” theory giving way to the current “gender identity” theory, with Big Pharma and hospitals making money off MUSS interventions, and devastating “sex change regret”?
Groupman continues with another most apropos line, writing, “One thing that becomes apparent is that, when pathogenesis [the biological cause of an illness] is absent, historical events and cultural shifts have an outsized influence on prevailing views on causes and treatments.”
Is this also not spot-on? I pointed out years ago already that, despite contrary claims, no biological cause for “transgenderism” has ever been established. And a cultural shift toward MUSS enablement — foolhardy and fearsome fashions — have governed judgments on causes and treatments.
In fact, prominent non-ideological mental-health practitioners have been rare enough that Groupman thought to mention them. To wit:
Adolf Meyer, a Swiss-born physician who, in 1910, became the first director of the psychiatry clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, advocated an approach he called, variously, “psychobiology” and “common sense” [reminder: that “forgotten branch”] psychiatry — the gathering of data without a guiding dogma. Meanwhile, in Europe, Eugen Bleuler, credited with coining the term “schizophrenia,” took a view somewhat similar to Meyer’s and incurred the wrath of Freud. In 1911, Bleuler left the International Psychoanalytical Association. “Saying ‘he who is not with us is against us’ or ‘all or nothing’ is necessary for religious communities and useful for political parties,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “All the same I find that it is harmful for science.”
This dogma-based psychiatry/psychology has only persisted, however. The result? “Today, around one in six Americans takes a psychotropic drug of some kind,” Groupman tells us. “The medication era stretches back more than sixty years and is the most significant legacy of the biological approach to psychiatry.”
So now, farther down the rabbit hole, we have the world’s Ehrensafts speaking of people having a “gender web,” which changes “as they age.” She’s right to use such a metaphor, too. For she and her ilk are like spiders spinning a web of deceit and ensnaring unsuspecting innocents, who then have their essence drained from them and are left mere husks of their former selves.
