Az Hakeem : Yes, Some Parents Are Overly Invested in Their Child Being the “Wrong Sex”
- La Petite Sirène
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Az Hakeem - Presser
This essay is excerpted from the foreword to Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (vol. 2), which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Az Hakeem, FRCPsych, MSc, is a consultant psychiatrist and group analyst. He is author of DETRANS: When Transition Is Not the Solution.
As a psychiatrist in psychotherapy, I have specialized in the psychotherapeutic treatment of adults with gender dysphoria for over twenty years. Indeed, in the United Kingdom, I am the only psychiatrist who has offered such a service, with most psychiatrists steering well clear of patients with gender confusion, except for a small minority who work in gender identity clinics functioning as sex hormone prescribers and gatekeepers to surgeons offering physical castration and “‘sex change’” operations. It has always been my opinion that it is not possible to change one’s sex and that gender is a social construct, so one cannot operate on that.
For many years, I was led to believe that I was in the minority in my belief that there was something fundamentally wrong with a healthcare system that was colluding in what I, as a psychiatrist, believed was an “overvalued idea”—an idea or belief that a person holds with fairly firm conviction but that, with the help of a thoughtful clinician, can be made sense of. For example, a person’s fantasy of being able to transform themselves might be understood as a magical way of escaping something.
In psychiatry, we are familiar with patients investing in overvalued ideas and fantasizing that physical solutions can be an escape from psychological distress. The critically low-weight anorexic patient believes that their life will be better if only they were able to lose even more weight despite those around them trying to make them see how such attempts will endanger their lives. We are familiar with the severely depressed patient who believes that they must bring a physical end to their existence via suicide in order to relieve mental pain. In both of these cases, the role of the psychiatrist, psychologist, and clinician is not to collude with the overvalued idea, to agree with the fantasized physical solution, but instead to try and help the patient by challenging their overvalued idea and treating the underlying psychological distress and disturbance. I have always wondered how, as a profession, we have found ourselves treating those presenting with gender confusion differently.
Being “gender critical” means being critical of current “gender ideology,” which is an ideological off-shoot of social justice theory with roots in queer theory. Whilst many may be of the opinion that religion is dying in the Western world, I would argue that social justice theory and gender ideology are new religions gripping the West. Gender ideology argues against biology and science. It replaces scientific thinking with belief-based reality—what you believe to be true is true despite any scientific evidence to the contrary.
Surprisingly and worryingly, scientific, clinical, psychological, and medical institutions in the Western world, which until recently had prioritized evidence-based medicine, are now adopting gender ideology and have been captured by this new belief system. The belief system forms what we could understand as a cult, with cult-based thinking and beliefs drawing people in and keeping out those who do not believe.
Historically, there were only a very small number of people who believed they were born the wrong sex. This was formally called transsexualism as separate and distinct from those who did not believe they were the opposite sex but wanted to temporarily appear as the opposite sex for social or sexual pleasure; these individuals were referred to as transvestites, and there have always been a much greater number of transvestites than transsexuals. In my work, I have described eleven different subtypes of transvestites. Then there are the men with a sexual fantasy of having female sexual body parts. These men, for whom Dr. Ray Blanchard coined the term “autogynaephiles,” are again distinct from transvestites (more about clothing and overall appearance) and transsexuals (more about social and gender roles with the wished-for bodily changes secondary to that). In my clinical experience, autogynaephiles are often clinically mistaken for transsexuals. Unhelpfully, thanks to the cult of gender ideology, the umbrella term “trans” has replaced the distinct terms of transsexual, transvestite, and autogynaephile, resulting in the general public believing that they are a uniform group of people—all the same—all “trapped in the wrong body.”
Recently, we have seen a meteoric rise in children and adolescents identifying as being “trans” or “nonbinary.” There has been an 8,000x increase of trans-identifying girls. Today, every university and secondary school in the Western world almost certainly has a significant number of students identifying as having a gender dysphoria. So how do we account for this explosion of gender dysphoria in young people? It is not a viral contagion of pandemic proportions as we saw with COVID-19—of course not. No, it is a social contagion, for as those who are familiar with my work and writings will know, my clinical opinion is that “trans” is the new youth subculture, the new “cool.” Up until recent generations, youth subculture was based in music and bands. The role of youth subculture—whether hippie, rocker, mod, punk, or goth (of which I was one, and probably to a lesser extent still am)—is to subvert everything we are told to believe as a child and rebel against the frameworks we have been given (such as rules and uniforms, appearance, and behavior) in the transitional period between adolescence and adulthood (by which time we have usually worked it all out—or are on our way to doing so). Generation Z is the first generation to grow up in a world with social media—which has taken over from the role music and bands once played for us in older generations. Gen Z youth subculture is not based in music or bands, which may make it less obvious to recognize it as a youth subculture. But if one looks at the youth identifying as “trans” or “nonbinary” these days, they look no different from the emos, goths, and punks who preceded them. The only difference being that, whilst in our day our parents and teachers either turned a blind eye, ignored, or discouraged such external manifestations of our youth subculture, these days those around them may be positively encouraging them and colluding with their gender ideological cult beliefs and convincing them that they have a medical condition that needs correcting by chemical castration followed by physical castration or mastectomy, bodily reconstruction, and a lifetime reliance on hormones.
When I sat in on the now infamous Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic for Children, I was horrified not only by the lack of critical thinking in the staff team and their collusion with the children’s gender beliefs, but also by the attendant homophobia of such a position. Most gender dysphoric children, if let alone, end up being gay adults happy with their sex. At Tavistock, there seemed to be a belief that a trans outcome would be better.
I met parents whom I refer to as “transsexogenic,” more recently referred to as “transhausen by proxy,” who seemed overly invested in their child being the “wrong sex,” actively pushing for clinicians to alter their children’s bodies and taking their children to “transing factories” in pursuit of chemical and later physical castration. I was concerned and shocked. It was clear that some of these parents would have much rather have had a son or daughter rather than the daughter or son they had. I also wondered where the parents were who may not have bought into the gender ideology cult, but of course, parents grounded in reality were not voluntarily taking their children to the “transing” clinics.
Up until recently, such parents did not have a voice and were, in effect, “invisible.” It is thanks to social media platforms such as X, formerly Twitter, that gender-critical parents of children identifying as trans have been given a voice and have found each other to offer mutual support and a collective voice. It is thanks to X that I have connected with other gender-critical clinicians, parents, and others. Together, we are gathering a voice to counter the widespread cult-think that is potentially destroying the lives of young people. My work with gender dysphoria has included a great many post-op regretters and detransitioners (26 percent of my gender patients) for whom the realization that changing their bodies was not the solution, leading to a post-transition gender dysphoria. All of whom asked, “Why didn’t someone challenge what we were saying at the time?” With the huge number of children currently being placed on “transing” conveyor belts with no one able to question or challenge them for fear of being accused of transphobia or offering “conversion therapy,” we can expect to witness a tsunami of young adult post-op regretters and detransitioners asking why they have been so let down by the society around them for not challenging them, especially the clinicians who facilitated the irreversible changes in them.
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