There is so much but there are two things I'd like to address today:

One, I want you healthy and happy.

Please listen to the conversation with Dr. Levine below. He was a pioneer in sex as a topic of psychology, starting the first clinic for this in around 1974.

Gender is an evolving sense Dr. Levine suggests.

What he is clear on is that the science is not settled, and for sure a psychiatric course of treatment to get to the heart of your issues should precede any intervention with medicine or surgery.

What this is is fashion medicine. The regret rates are high. In the last few years there are three studies starting to track the rate of desistance. They are finding that 30% of people who started on hormones, within five years, in some studies within three years, in some studies even shorter are detransitioning from hormones.

I get that most of the discussion is about younger people, but you are a part of this wave right now, and it looks like a lot of other waves that have crashed into the beach wrecking countless lives along the way.

I was listening to another program about psychological care today. What struck me is how much of a process it is. Anxiety and depression take time to address appropriately. Ten months with Nofar two years ago does not fit the bill.

You agreed to get the depression sorted first. You said you have been in a fog. You further said you still are not clear on what is attractive to you. Changing you physically, at significant risk and cost in health and well being doesn't make sense if you don't have the other questions answered.

Inside of that, you might want to do the Self-Authoring Suite, https://selfauthoring.com/, particularly the future portion, but I'd say all of it. I set you up with an account there years ago. The password I sent via separate message.

It's your story about yourself. You might want also to talk to people who went there. Find a trans person five years out, ten years out, twenty, thirty. I know it doesn't seem like it now, but ten years goes by in a blink. How does that life look? Is it satisfying for them? Is it a big hassle? Is it a hassle, but somehow worth it anyway? Is there love and play and joy? Are the psych problems that were there before handled, or obviated; was it the transition that made it so?

Two: Include Me, Your Mother, Your Family

If it is who you are, why are you not willing to share it? If it is true, it can stand up to scrutiny. if it feels weird to share, why would that be, and whose weirdness is that?

Add me and your mother on all your social accounts. Share with us the things you share with your friends. If you can't, then maybe again start with the therapy. And go to someone who is willing to challenge your assumptions. You can't grow from people who only say yes to you. That just grows delusion.

They say if you can't explain it to a kid, you don't get it yourself. Until you get it yourself, you certainly shouldn't be making dangerous changes.

That includes, by the way, picking up the phone when we call, and being here for the holidays.

We don't love you any less. We just worry a lot more.

References

The Winston Marshall Show: “Worst Medical Scandal In History!” Michael Shellenberger

Conversation with Michael Shellenberger about. Worth hearing.

Stephen B. Levine M.D. on the Science of Gender-Affirming Care

“Stephen B. Levine is a psychiatrist known for his work in human sexuality, particularly, sexual dysfunction and transgenderism. Levine earned his MD from Case Western Reserve School of Medicine and serves as a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry there.

“He was co-editor for the section on sexual and gender identity disorders in the professional text Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders. Although much of his work is written for other clinicians, Levine has also written books for a lay audience, including Solving Common Sexual Problems and Sexuality in Mid-Life (2004). Levine also served on the American Psychiatric Association DSM-IV Subcommittee on Gender Identity Disorders.”

from the show notes. Also see his 2023 article Current Concerns About Gender-Affirming Therapy in Adolescents

“Dr. Stephen B. Levine was the chair of the SOC5 committee in 1998 and recommended that the guidelines require patients to obtain two letters from mental health professionals before commencing hormones.35 Dr. Richard Green, HBIGDA president at the time, was unhappy with this requirement and so immediately commissioned SOC6, which was published just three years later and was almost identical but advised only one letter from a mental health professional.36

In the intervening years, activists began to overtake HBIGDA, and in 2002, Dr. Levine resigned his membership due to his “regretful conclusion that the organization and its recommendations had become dominated by politics and ideology, rather than by scientific process, as it was years earlier.”37 In 2007, the organization changed its name to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. This change was significant. At the stroke of a brush, a loose affiliation of people had appointed themselves as the leading international authority on gender medicine.” TWP p. 8.

Also go visit Genspect.

The Standards of Care and old DSMs are also online.

Look at them. Note Dr. Levine's criticism of how they have gone from medical to political.

You might also want to spend some time reading about Freire and Marcuse and Marx, Lance Logan's “The Queering of the American Child” The point is much of society has been compartmentalized by the various critical theorists to do nothing but foment unresst, creating more and more victim groups to be “oppressed” by the system, therefor seeking to undo it.

If you are not yet sure about your sexuality, why would you mess with your sex traits, at the potential cost of your health, or your life.

Parallels with past Fads of Care

Lobotomies - Past Medical Scandals and The WPATH Files - Part 1 The Washington Evening Star called Lobotomy “One of the Greatest Surgical Innovations of this Generation.” The New York Times quoting a neurosurgeon who called Lobotomy “a shining example of therapeutic courange” “surgery of the soul.”

And then there is Megan McArdle on the Oedipus Trap “When physician Walter Freeman died in 1972, he still believed that lobotomies were the best treatment for mental illness. A pioneer in the method, he was a deeply confident and charismatic man who eagerly spread the technique in America, long after the rise of alternative treatments that were less destructive. Listen as journalist Megan McArdle and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss what McArdle calls the "Oedipus Trap": mistakes that no one can live with, even if they were innocently made, and how admitting such mistakes to ourselves is nearly impossible. They also discuss the complexity of the credo, ‘Follow the science.’”