Unless you are living under a rock, it would be a challenge to avoid the constant barrage of discussions surrounding the idea that there are far more than two genders. For most of us, gender is a binary term where only two definitions honestly exist. It’s as black and white as the difference between the sun and the moon and the God given purposes they serve. The element of this conversation that I find most intriguing is the inability for many uninformed people to believe that the gender confusion discussion is anything other than a mental disorder that requires therapy. Likely, it is easier to just go along to get along because doing anything other than would result in insults from the woke crowd. But, what the uninformed individuals do not understand is that by affirming these neurotic thoughts and behaviors, they are keeping someone from receiving the mental help they deserve and living a happy, truly fulfilled life. Additionally, bystanders are hurt by this nonsense due to the fact that a young man can now compete in athletics against a woman, use a woman’s locker room and share the same public restrooms.
I used an analogy recently to educate an individual about the similarities of gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia and it helped this person to better understand why we should not just affirm destructive behavior. The person I was in conversation with is a Christian but did not see a problem with kids wanting to change their gender. I then asked her if she was talking with an anorexic, a woman whose bones might be seen through her skin and yet she identifies as fat, would she affirm this woman’s identity and tell her she was fat and should continue to diet? The person had no comment and that brought me to feel compelled to share my painful story. The following is a summary account of the hell I lived through and it gives me a level of understanding that someone on the outside cannot perceive. Fortunately for me, my parents did not affirm my dysmorphia. They recognized that I needed help and because of this I am one of the lucky ones to be alive today.
Gender dysphoria is a concept designated in the DSM-5 as clinically significant distress or impairment related to a strong desire to be of another gender. Body dysmorphia disorder is a mental health condition in which you can't stop thinking about one or more perceived defects or flaws in your appearance. This can come in many forms but likely the most commonly known is Anorexia Nervosa.
Growing up is hard! We all know this, we’ve all been through it. Some of us had a much more difficult experience than others. Experiences we never thought we’d be comfortable sharing in a public platform. Experiences that shaped and molded us to be who we are today. Experiences we never thought would need to be told in an attempt to help others understand the powerful grip a mental struggle can have on an individual’s life. I tell my story in an effort to bring some understanding to the confusion in the world that surrounds us. This account of what I lived through is a parallel to what is plaquing our young men and women today. I pray that this sheds light on the powerful impact of dysmorphic thoughts and the hell they can cause one to experience.
My story starts in a small town of Pennsylvania. My parents grew up modestly in the suburbs of Philadelphia. When my father graduated from dental school, he and my mother decided to move to a rural town not far from the Poconos for my father to start his practice and to raise their family. I was four days old when they moved into our two hundred year old farmhouse. The one that they would spend 13 years renovating, most of the work done with their own sweat, blood and tears.
Growing up in a rural town in a time before the internet, my sister had to be my best friend and playmate. My dad and mom spent their weekends working on the house while my sister and I had all sorts of adventures in the two story playhouse my father had built for us. We also would go fishing in our pond and make friends with our ducks, our pigs, our cats and our dogs. It was a fun childhood with lots of great memories.
When it came time for school, I was so excited for backpacks and lunchboxes. Excited for books, reading, music and art. Our school was small and everyone grew to know each other. My parents had done well for themselves but that was never something we discussed or considered to set us apart. But as most of us know, kids are mean and regardless of circumstances, if there is a way to bully, make fun or ostracize they will do it. This started mildly in second grade. I isolated myself with a best friend whose stepfather and mother owned and operated a chicken farm and in the summers they grew tomatoes and strawberries. My friend Lisa did not care about my family’s status, we were just honest friends who had a great time together.
When we moved to middle school (5th grade) it was the coming together of two elementary schools and the friend dynamic was about to change. In fact, everything was about to change. There were still the mean girls but I tried harder to fit in than I did in elementary school. These girls were beautiful and popular and by this point I wanted to be part of this crowd, or so I thought. Then there were the boys…if my experiences with girls had been bad, the boys were about to make it 1000x worse.
Back in the 1980s, we had our own form of grooming that occurred. There were constant barrages of magazine covers with super skinny female models. Diet drinks and diet pills were always being advertised on television. Every woman that I knew, from my dad’s staff to my mother’s friends was talking about how lose weight. And, there was the endless mockery of the fat kids at school. No one wanted to be overweight, it was a total killer to your social status. Between trying to fit in with the pretty and popular girls and the mean comments from the boys, I started to think that maybe I was fat. Maybe if I lost some weight the girls would like me and the boys would stop making fun of me.
I had just had my thirteenth birthday. I decided I would start cutting calories. I was about 5’ tall and 84 pounds. The first few pounds came off easily and people started to notice. The affirmation that I received helped me to know I was doing the right thing. I was finally being positively noticed. My parents had not yet realized what was going on but it would not be long until my identity as being fat would grip me into the psychotic notion that now at 80 pounds I was obese. Every positive comment from others was just fuel to the fire of my neurosis. But eventually my parents noticed how little I ate at dinner, that I would barely eat breakfast and I only packed a slice of cheese for lunch.
Mom and Dad became concerned and started to search for ways to help me. They read books and talked to friends but they were not getting through to me. How do you help a child that believes to be something they absolutely are not? A child so gripped by a fear and a desire to fit in that she is willing to harm herself for the societal affirmation.
My parents knew this was beyond their abilities and got me help with a child psychologist. When I went in for my therapy sessions, I was weighed before seeing the doctor. We started working together, meeting once a week but his efforts were lost on me. He had set a weight goal for me to maintain to avoid hospitalization. A couple weeks after we started our therapy, I was unable to eat enough per day to maintain the weight goal. My fear of staying fat gripped me with every ounce of myself and three months after I started my simple diet, I was about to be hospitalized in isolation. No TV, no phone, no books except school work and no visitation unless for my sessions with my psychologist and/or my parents.
On the day that I was hospitalized, I saw the numbers 69.96 pounds on the scale. I knew he wanted me to stay above 70 pounds and I thought this was close enough but it wasn’t. He told the nurses to prepare a room and I dropped to my knees in tears. I started screaming at my parents to not do this to me. Take me home and I promised I would do better. I was trembling with fear of isolation and punishment for not doing what I was told. I could see the tears in my parents eyes and I could almost feel their anxiety as they hugged me when the nurses came to take me to my room.
I was thirteen, perfectly healthy all things considered, and I was being placed by myself, alone in a strange room with no contact to the outside world. I cried myself to sleep, I prayed to God to help me and the next morning when my breakfast arrived I ate the entire meal because I was determined come hell or high water, I was getting out of this place. But shortly after the breakfast the fear that I was going to stay fat gripped me all over again. With nothing else to do all alone in my room I would exercise when the nurses weren’t watching (exercise was NOT allowed).
There was no privacy in the hospital…I was not allowed to close the door to my room (so they could catch me exercising). My bathroom door was locked and I was only allowed to use the restroom under the observation of a nurse. When my meals were delivered, a nurse had to sit and watch to make sure I ate everything on my plate. It took a month of this nonsense for me to gain the 10 pounds required to leave the hospital. A normal person, not gripped with the identity of something they were not, would have accomplished this in a week.
Once out of the hospital, knowing the pain I had just lived through, paled in comparison to the pain that I still identified as fat and continued to diet. In less than a year, I would be hospitalized two more times before I learned how to play the game to stay ‘fat enough’ to not go back to the hospital.
This identity crisis had its grip on my for over a decade. I saw countless therapists and worked hard on my faith to come to accept that I was perfectly and wonderfully made. To be content in who I was and to accept my identity in Christ as a Christian.
I share all of this now as so many families are suffering with a child who has a different form of identity crisis. For awhile there was cutting that many teens suffered from, we have always had drugs and alcohol to drown our identity issues. All harmful in their own way and often help is sought when individuals fall prey to these damaging patterns. But now we have the genital mutilation and hormone therapy to assist children in the gender identity crisis. Instead of seeing this dysphoria as a condition of a bigger psychological problem, we are fanning the flames of the neurosis. This is a far easier way out! Other identity crisis behavior have death as the potential fatal path but gender identity is more nuanced. Every step of their path to pretend they are a gender they are not, is lined with affirmation from the outside world. They think every step, every procedure to obscure their God given gender will be the one that brings them peace, brings them acceptance and brings them contentment. It never works, it never ends!
If you have not already seen “What is a Woman” by Matt Walsh, I highly recommend so that you can come to understand that this current fad is laden with a designed horror behind this movement. A brief summary of this documentary (written by a dear friend):
Did you know that this movement was started by serial child molesters and abusers who committed unthinkable crimes while publishing completely fraudulent studies? And did you know that each child who is convinced by their groomers (aka teachers, online groups, celebrities, etc.) to start the process of chemically altering their bodies to look more like the opposite gender will bring Big Pharma $1.3 million in revenues? Look up Lupron and the $874 million settlement that followed. We have no long term safety studies for these products, and they are not reversible as the doctors claim. Add the lifetime of repeat surgeries (~$70,000 each) that follow to address all the health complications caused by medical transition and the mental health crisis that is only exasperated by this child abuse, and so called health professionals (aka child abusers) rake in millions more.
Did you know the demographic with the highest suicide rates are these abused victims 7-10 years after transition surgery? Yet they emotionally manipulate parents into going along with it by insisting the child will commit suicide if they don't support medical transition.
When you consider the propaganda, lies, gaslighting, money trails, coercion, castration, mutilation, and abuse involved in this horrifying ideology, you'll see a lot of parallels with the way health agencies handled the latest pandemic.
This graph was provided by Bill Maher of all people! It demonstrates the increase we have seen from 1940 at 0.8% to today 41.6%. He jokes at the rate we are going, by 2050 we will al be LBGTQ.
If we love our children, if we want them to flourish and become the amazing child of God that they are, we need to do the hard job of getting them help. Don’t cave to their neurosis because it is the easier path and society is now saying it is normal. Help them find a therapist that can do the hard task of bringing to light what hurts so badly, what has gripped them with so much self hatred that they would choose a path of destruction. It’s not easy! There will be pain, there will be tears. Pray hard, pray often. Help the child to the other side, there is a world of love and acceptance for him or her just as God perfectly designed. God doesn’t make mistakes! Let’s not allow society to normalize a dysphoria that prevents a child from becoming who they were truly meant to be.
If you have a family member going through the hell of gender identity, may I suggest the author Abigail Shrier who wrote the book Irreversible Damage.
I want to close out this story to say how blessed I feel that God allowed me to recover. So many women (and some men) that fall victim to Anorexia and suffer from this identity crisis don’t live to see the other side. As I write this, having avoided thinking or even talking about this until recently, I know I am one of the lucky ones.
When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedoms. Confucius
What a powerful testimony! Thanks for sharing! It is such a massive parallel between body dysmorphia and gender dysmorphia/identity. I wish more people would wake up and get people help that struggle with this instead of affirming them.
Wow Dr. Jessica, what a story. I too am a child of the 8os and it was really tough for girls with that heroin chic look that fashion mags pushed. I am really sorry to hear you went through that hell but came out so strong on the other side. Being a boy in that era was tough too, being awkward and shy. For me one of the most powerful lessons was learning to not care what others think of you. I finally broke free of that trap and the irony is i think people find you more interesting when you stop trying to live up to some fiction and just be you. Thanks for sharing, and the world is glad you made it to the other side.