American Thought Leaders - How Therapists Are Failing Our Children: Pamela Garfield-Jaeger

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

“I felt like I was a Rip Van Winkle therapist. I left my profession due to a health condition in 2017 ... In 2021, I came back, and it was radically different,” says licensed clinical social worker Pamela Garfield-Jaeger. “All the teens that I had worked with before had never talked about being trans, and then the new program I was working at, half the girls were identifying as trans.”Known as “The Truthful Therapist,” she is the author of “A Practical Response to Gender Distress” and is featured in the Epoch Times documentary “Gender Transformation.”How has the mental health profession changed in recent years? What’s behind the spike in teens identifying as transgender? Why has “affirmation” become the norm? What alternatives exist? What impact is the widespread prescription of antidepressants and other drugs having on teenagers?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

I felt like I was a root-fan wrinkle therapist. I left my profession due to a health condition in 2017. And then in 2021, I came back and it was radically different. All the teens that I had worked with before had never talked about being trans. And then the new program I was working at, half the girls were identifying as trans. Pamela Garfield Yeager is a licensed clinical social worker, known as the truthful therapist. She's the author of A Practical Response to Gender Distress and is featured in the Epoch Times documentary, Gender

Transformation. If you are a parent looking for a therapist for your child, make sure that you are very involved. And if the therapist says, no, I need to, you know, have my special place with your child, that's a red flag. There's so many elements to the mental health profession that has shifted. And the prescription of psychotropic drugs has really heavily increased. They're just passed out like candy.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Pamela Garfield, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you. So you spent over 20 years working with young people in a clinical social work setting. Then you had to take a bit of time off. And you came back and you say things profoundly had changed. What happened? I felt like I was a root-fan wrinkle therapist. I left my profession due to a health condition in 2017. Things were starting to change, but I hadn't noticed. And then in 2021, I came back and it was radically different. There were all the teens that I had worked with before

had never talked about being trans. And then the new program I was working at, half the girls were identifying as trans. But what was most shocking was what the professionals were doing or what they weren't doing, which was exploring underlying issues and helping them recognize what was going on, helping them recognize that they were avoiding things that are natural for anyone who's struggling,

but especially for teenagers. They just weren't helping them address their issues. Really they were using it as a power move, the kids were, because they were saying, I'm transgender and if you don't go along with this then you're a transphobe, you're a bigot. And so then it felt like the adults were kind of held hostage by these kids. And instead of the adults saying, no, no, no, we're here to help you, we're going to help you figure things out. This isn't what's going on. Let's at least explore what this could be. They just essentially got really nervous and went along with it and then criticized other adults

that had questions like the parents. How is it that these kids suddenly had this strange power over their therapists that they didn't have before? I wish I fully understood that, but I think it's about all the messages that our culture were getting. It really came through during the lockdown period. People were separated, people weren't able to have conversations, And the adults that did have different opinions were heavily silenced. They were canceled. They were not allowed to keep their jobs. There are some prominent people even within WPATH, which I have some feelings about WPATH, but they're known to be the experts on the transgender protocols.

And even with NWPATH, those who just had simple questions and wanted to have some guardrails for youth were outstid, were pushed out. Like a transgender, it was a man who identifies as transgender named Erica Anderson was pushed out. There's a man named Kenneth Zucker, a Canadian. He was part of putting together the new DSM diagnosis in the statistic manual for psychology

disorders. In 2014, he was well established within this gender industry. And even him, because he believed in watchful waiting, he was canceled. He wasn't allowed to continue in his clinic anymore. He's won a lawsuit since then. So even people who had more moderate views on the transgender but still believed in the belief system that some people might be born in the wrong body

or that these interventions might be helpful, even then they were pushed out. So there was this sort of tyrannical process that happened and my profession, people within it, they're agreeable for the most part. They want to get along. I think that their empathy is weaponized. I think that they want to believe that they are accepting and open and they want to do the right thing.

And then they're also told this lie that kids will kill themselves if we don't give them these medications or at least affirm their pronouns and their identities. And so they believe it because they believe what experts and authorities say, they believe it. And it's hard when that's all the messages that they get because the dissenting voices have been taken out. I'm just going to comment briefly. You mentioned this watchful waiting. So there's a few different approaches to kids when you describe it as gender distress. So just maybe explain for the benefit of the audience what those approaches are. The mainstream thing is to automatically affirm, to not question a child, because they know who they are,

which fundamentally comes from a different cultural perspective, that kids know themselves and we need to hear what they have to say, that perhaps they have some kind of gendered soul within them and they're expressing that. It even gets to the point where they can express that when they're babies, even when they're pre-verbal. There's a psychologist called Diane Arentsaft

who said that boys who open up their onesies and dance around, they're expressing that they really want to be girls because that's like a dress. Or if a girl is pulling out the barrettes, a boy, girl, I'm getting it mixed up, pulls the barrettes out of her hair that she doesn't want to be a girl, right?

Which I think someone with common sense would just look at, well, these are fussy babies that just don't want to wear barrettes or don't want their onesie on, right? And that's sort of natural. The kids don't want to wear their shoes. They throw off their shoes. Does that mean they don't want feet anymore? But that is the philosophy. And a lot of people start to believe it because people with these fancy letters that come from these fancy institutions repeat that over and over again.

So that's become the mainstream narrative. However, there are people like me and several others, and I think more than I even know because they have been silenced, believe that kids don't really know themselves, that they need adults to guide them, they need to be grounded in reality. They need empathy and compassion, especially if they're struggling with being in their bodies, but to help them figure out their reality. Generally speaking, when they have distress over their gender, then we need to wait and see what happens. Usually, they do grow out of it. You argue that there's a social contagion at play, and that's a major cause of the increase.

In social contagion, it would seem, based on what you're saying, it's not just among the young people who start thinking they're in the wrong body or something like that, but among the adults, among the therapists, what are your thoughts? the adults among the therapists? What are your thoughts? Yeah. Well, academia, I think, has a major role in this. All of these therapists and doctors and teachers, they're being trained to believe that there are these special people that need to be affirmed, and if they don't, that they will die, that they will kill themselves, that they will be in more distress if we don't use the proper pronouns and we don't affirm them. And we ignore all the other issues because this becomes the priority.

And so it has become this top-down phenomenon. So yeah, between the adults and the kids. This is like a different type of social contagion. There have been other social contagions. In the 90s, there were eating disorders. Some of that, you could argue, came from entertainment and influences in the magazines. But the professionals, the institutions were not reinforcing it the way this one is. So it's a whole different level, I'd

say. Do you think the mental health professionals were taught that this is the correct route all along? Like, this is the part that I have trouble with. It takes some years to become a licensed social worker in a clinical setting. You have to earn your chops. I'm really curious how this suddenly exploded onto the scene like this. Well, honestly, as someone who's been in the field for so long since the late 90s, this wasn't a thing. We didn't learn about it.

It was very niche. There were the gender clinics that were the gender specialists, and those were the ones that were really mostly ignored because it was so rare. It wasn't something that the everyday therapist encountered. Now, you talk to any therapist, they have encountered it within their practice, no matter which field, especially if they're working with young people,

is way more prevalent among young people. I worked with young people for so many years, like I said, and never encountered a trans kid in the past. So I didn't have a lot of training. My training was just common sense, right? Back then, I just hadn't thought about it that much, to be honest. It wasn't, I never had a class on it.

It was just, there are a lot of disorders you don't encounter, and if it's something that you end up specializing in, maybe you learn more about it, but this is not something that Most regular people specialized in but now they've made it such a mainstream thing I think because of all this top-down influence that we're all encountering it, but no this is this was not mainstream I think I would say there was this yeah, let's be nice, but let's figure out what's happening, right?

There's this both and in the past. Now that I've learned more about it, now that I know how harmful the hormones and the surgeries really are, I didn't know that stuff before because it looks all glossy and pretty and you don't really think about it. If you don't meet anybody that's been through it

or you don't hear about it, hear those accounts firsthand, you don't know. Once you learn the truth, then all of a sudden your eyes open and you're like, wow, I can't believe that we ever thought this was okay to do. Explain to me, in a situation where a child is experiencing gender distress, what's the right way to deal with that in your mind? gender distress. What's the right way to deal with that in your mind? The right way to deal with it, usually a lot of it is about listening. A lot of adults want to start lecturing. We're talking about a child especially. They want to start lecturing the

person and saying, no, there are only two genders, stop it. But that will generally push them further away. And they want to feel heard. A lot of what this is about is wanting to be seen, wanting to be heard, which is natural within a young person's development, especially one who might be struggling with something. So a lot of it's about just sitting and listening to them. But you don't affirm the new identity. You don't use the new name or pronouns.

But in the early stages, you also would not be confronting it. Because if you do, then you're not going to be able to establish that trust. So a lot of, I mean, very basic therapy one on one, initially, when you're trying to work with somebody, especially a child or a teenager, is to establish trust with them so that they can work with you.

You don't want to be combative, which I think is how a lot of people get in the way. They say, oh, they need truth. They need to know that they're made in God's image, and that might be true. However, if they're not in that head space, that's going to push them away. So you have to really be patient. But what you're really doing is you're So you have to really be patient. But what you're really doing is you're looking into what's really going on. You're trying to just look under the surface, which ironically is what therapists used

to do to a fault, right? Therapists used to analyze everything to a T. Oh, you're cranky, you have this disorder, you have that disorder. No, maybe I'm just hungry right now. Just give me a candy bar. So now we've gone to the opposite extreme where let's just affirm every feeling, every belief system, and that's not healthy either. So we need to figure out what's really going on. And it varies. So the gender thing is really more of a symptom of something else.

And you want to figure out what that is. And it could be in multiple things. So usually there might be some struggles within the family, maybe some communication issues with the parents. A lot of times it's like cultural clashes like a new family, a first-generation immigration family where you know the parents are much more traditional and the child is struggling, you know dealing with the culture clashes. So that might be something that you'd be addressing as a therapist. There are also some very common comorbidities that happen.

So one is sexual trauma. You want to usually rule that out or figure out if there's been some kind of sexual trauma. And you want to figure out are they dissociating from their body? Are they running away from something, from their sexuality because they're scared or they were hurt? Kids with autism tend to gravitate towards this and there are several reasons for that. A lot of it has to do with their sensory issues. They don't like dressing a certain way.

They also struggle socially so they want to feel like they fit in and they have more rigid thinking. And, of course, you want to assess for how much internet they're consuming, because most kids are getting these ideas from the internet. So those are a few things to consider when you're working with a child with transgender identity. It's very interesting that you mention the dissociation from the body. Something I've started covering on the show recently more is the over prescription of psychiatric drugs. And my understanding is that across the board, all age categories, it's very common as a first line treatment to give people SSRIs, including kids. This

is just something that's grown a lot as an approach in the last decade. I know one of the side effects of that is this sort of dissociation. Could there be a connection? I believe there's a strong connection. That's the other thing that's really changed. When you asked me earlier what's changed so much, I talked about the trans, but there are so many elements to the mental health profession that have shifted. And the prescription of psychotropic drugs has really heavily increased. When I was coming up the ranks, it was very rare for a primary care doctor to prescribe any kind of psychiatric medication. If they did, it was very temporary, and then they passed them on to a psychiatrist who was monitoring them and also really understood more of how

they can interact with other drugs. And also for a long time you couldn't even prescribe a psychiatric drug without counseling alongside with it. And there's several reasons for that. One is just the monitoring because when you start a new drug you're going to have usually mood and behavioral issues and that needs to be monitored closely. And then also, there are studies out there that show that drugs without any kind of counseling is way less effective.

But nowadays, they're just passed out like candy. So I think there's a huge, I'd say, drugs to trans pipeline that is happening right now. I mean, is someone researching this? I mean, it would seem to be an obvious place to look. I know RFK has mentioned that one of the things he's going to be looking at are antidepressants, SSRIs. There's a lot of controversy about SSRIs and how effective they

are, how they work. I think no one actually really knows how they work. It needs to be investigated. And of course, then all the uproar was he's just going to take away everyone's drugs and make them all suicidal instead of what he wants to do is do more research. So I hope there is more research because I don't think that there is good research on this. If you were going to suggest some specific studies, there are realms of study that should be done. It just sounds like there's just not a lot of work that has been done or is being done in areas that would strike me as incredibly important. Yeah, I would like if they're going to be prescribing all these drugs to children, it's kind of

confusing because I personally believe that less kids should be on drugs. So I don't like a study where we're kind of implementing putting more children on drugs to study them. However, if they're going to be youth on drugs, that we could study the outcomes of them and track them and track them more long term and try to tease out some of these variables that get in the way of knowing what is, whether or not they're helping, and then also looking at their function in the future, their relationships and how they're able to work and how they report their mood, and also looking at behaviors. So I feel like we need to look at the effectiveness of these drugs because I think that we're

making assumptions. It's like this marketing name, antidepressants. So that means they resolve depression. Well do they? I maybe sometimes. It's unclear. And then of course it's used a lot for anxiety. So they prescribe SSRIs for anxiety even if it's someone who's not depressed.

And they affect people very differently. They were prescribed very cautiously for young people because there's a black box warning, especially for teenagers, to be on an SSRI, that they become more suicidal. And that used to be- Across the board? Across the board. Wow. Yeah.

I didn't know that. And so it was very, prescribed very cautiously. When I was coming up the ranks, when I knew a kid that was getting these drugs, they were in a residential program. So they were being monitored 24 hours to make sure that they were safe. Now they're being given outpatient all the time and they're not being monitored at all. So we're talking about this mental health epidemic. I'm just thinking out loud. I'm wondering if some of this is just the drugs that are creating these suicidal thoughts.

We say, oh, if you don't affirm, they'll kill themselves. But we don't talk about, well, if you give them these drugs, they also might kill themselves. It's really very messy, to be honest. And that's the thing about the mental health profession. There are no clear answers, and people are individuals and react to things so differently. So I would love to see more long-term studies on these. And I think there are less on youth, because it's still relatively new that they're giving so many kids these drugs. They were designed for adults. Do the people prescribing them understand that there's this black box warning? That's serious, right?

Yeah, I don't know. I doubt it, but I don't know. I'm not sure what information they're given, especially teenagers. It happens. I know, I'm thinking back to your book, and one of the chapters in your book is about therapists manipulating parents. Tell me about that. Well, because I was out from the profession for so many years, and I came back and was like, what the heck is going on? I went and attended a few trainings. I went to a big therapy conference in California in 2023.

It's the main, maybe the biggest organization in the country, Camped California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. And they had several trainings on gender. This was in 2023. And so I went to, you know, just really learn what was going on. And then I actually wrote some articles and they've been published with the Epic Times actually for those listening. They can look those up. And one of them I think I called emotional manipulation. I think that and I think that's what's in my book, the chapter. And it was it was how they manipulate parents to believe that the right thing to do is to affirm their

child. And I knew that this was happening, but I was still shocked when I heard the training and, one, how nothing made sense, but also how they took old traditional mental health ideas like the Kubla Ra stages of grief and applied it to this transgender philosophy. So they were telling the parents that if you don't, that you are now grieving your cis child, the cis meaning like normal, that's another kind of word

that turns everything upside down. So they say your child is cis if they're just normal. And your child is no longer cis or normal, your child is trans if they're just normal. Your child is no longer cis or normal, your child is trans and you're grieving that. As opposed to the loss of a normal kid, because you now have to acknowledge that your kid is this special soul child that's trans that needs to take all of these hormones and surgeries that will sterilize them

and lead to all these health issues. So they don't acknowledge that part. They just say, well, I'm sorry you're grieving your cis child. So they act very compassionate. And I actually think that they mean it. I think they're sincere, because I think they believe it. They're true believers. It's like they're, you're going to their church and they're trying to get you to believe, right? And they feel like they have to in a way, like they're getting these children saved. And if you don't do it, the child won't be saved. They're going to end up in this like burning hell. And so I think that's what they believe with good intentions. However, you know, the...

Well, because they believe the child might commit suicide. Exactly. So they're trying to help. Because they believe the child might commit suicide. There's the suicide, which is the most obviously scary outcome, which is rather of a dead daughter or a live son. What is the reality around that? What do we know about that statement and how often that might actually happen? We know it's a lie. And there's no data that backs that up. And when they cite data, if you look at any of their studies, first of all, if you're a parent or you're somebody

that's been told that line, ask that person, show me that study. I want to see it. See if they even show you one. They probably will. They'll probably show you something, most likely maybe one from the Trevor Project. And the one from the Trevor Project will show a correlation. And what we'll say is all kids with LGBTQ identities have higher rates of suicidal thoughts

and suicide attempts. It doesn't even say suicide, the actual act. And then also they lump all those letters together, which are all very different. So like a gay man is very different than a transgender girl who thinks she's non-binary. So lumping that all together already kind of muddles the study. But it's a correlation. It's not a cause. And the truth is, people within these populations tend to have more mental health issues.

They tend to be on more medications. They tend to have more suicidal thoughts. And then also, they're being told, you're going to kill yourself if you don't get these hormones and drugs, right? They're told that. There are slogans all over the internet. Their own therapist has even said it.

They say that in front of the child to the parent. How is that not influential? Your child, I need to tell you and have the child sitting there that your child will kill themselves. Of course that's going to have an impression on a child and they might internalize that and believe that. So we don't have a good study that just shows without these control factors, we don't have a good study. Also, a lot of them have very small sample sizes. You mentioned that a lot of these kids have these comorbidities, and they have various mental health issues in addition to the gender

distress combined with it somehow. It makes no sense in that case to say that this is a causal reason, because just the whole population is people that tend to have these types of issues. The reason I think it works so well on parents, really smart, but very scared parents, is because their child probably did have a suicide attempt, and they see that their child is really struggling emotionally. And so because of that, that becomes weaponized, right? They're weaponizing something that is very real for this family. And they're scared, and they've come for help.

And then of course they're going to believe the professional. So it's also very irresponsible. I've worked in a high school where there are unfortunately, there are several suicides that happened and everybody knew at that time that you don't go around and say you're gonna kill yourself, you're gonna kill yourself, you're gonna kill yourself. You don't do that to a group of people who've all been exposed to a horrible loss and something, you know something everyone's really scared of. And there were kids that were vulnerable.

You would never do that to a child that's vulnerable and say, well, if you don't get this thing, you'll kill yourself. In fact, that's something that someone with a personality disorder would do. I feel like they're actually teaching these young people to behave as though they have personality disorders. So it's like a threat. Like a more traditional thing before all of this trans stuff is if you break up with me, I will kill myself, right? That's how a lot of abusive relationships happen.

Someone's afraid to break up with that person because they'll feel responsible if something happens to their partner if they break up, right? Well that's obviously very emotionally unhealthy. And it doesn't work out in the long run because you're still, you're making this threat and you're not, you're kind of buying love, right? You're buying love with threats as opposed to someone who will really stay with them because it's the right thing, you know, it's the right relationship. So they're teaching kids to have this empty sense of connection,

because everyone will rally for me if I say I kill myself. This is how people will notice me. What's the most unhealthy message to give to kids? Presumably, someone studied using these gender affirming care approaches on suicidality. Presumably, someone has assessed that. Assessed whether using the gender affirming care approach actually stops suicide. Yeah, there's never been a real one where there's a control group of trans people who didn't get the affirmation and a group of trans people who did and then compared it. There was one study that was just...it was hidden.

Dr. Joanna Olson Kennedy had a big study that was backed by the NIH and it was millions of dollars. I can't remember exactly how much, but a lot of government funding that was supposed to show that puberty blockers helped improve the mental health of children. Well, her study didn't show that. It just didn't show there was any improvement. So she hid the study.

And the New York Times just exposed that several months ago. So that was shown. Of all media. Yeah. Yeah. I think because they know that the clock is ticking on the truth and they can't keep pretending, so they're now telling the truth. It drips out, right? But no, there's no study that shows that. What's the truth when you say the truth?

The truth. What's the truth here? The truth is none of it helps our mental health. What it does is it might give a short-term placebo effect of what they call euphoria or feeling high because you're getting what you want initially. It's like giving a kid candy and it's fun and tasty and the sugar high and then you crash. That's kind of what this is. So a lot of the studies too will show a short-term follow-up. I think there's one for two years.

There's a study on the double mastectomy and I think there's one for two years after. There's one that, there's a study on the double mastectomy, and I think they followed up for two years. And that's not enough time, because it takes longer than that for the person to realize that they maybe have made a mistake, or maybe they feel other side effects. Takes usually seven to eight years, and there are very few of those studies. And this cohort of young people,

they haven't been around yet for seven years for them to be studied. It's a new phenomenon, you know, this level of getting these drugs in these kits. So we really have no studies for that. What we do know though is that there's certain side effects with these drugs. The stopping of puberty with the puberty blockers, potential impacts on sexual function later, permanent surgery, all of this is, I guess, just highly consequential in people's lives. And the question is, is it for the good? I don't even call it side effects. I call them effects. That's just what happens. Those aren't side effects. We are sterilizing them. These are the drugs that they use to chemically castrate

criminals, Lupron. So that's not a side effect. These are the things that do happen. We're making a choice. And oftentimes when you're doing do happen. We're making a choice. And oftentimes when you're doing a medical intervention, you make a choice between one difficult thing between another, right, if there's some kind of really severe medical issue. However, we're taking health, physically healthy children and then giving them these effects. That's the difference. And then calling it medicine instead of helping

them with whatever psychological distress they're having. Or they might not even be having that much psychological distress. They might have just spent a little too much time on the internet. It's, you know, there's so many different levels to this. And we're told over and over again that these drugs are reversible. I just, I don't even understand that. That was the other weird thing when I came back. How can something that suppresses puberty be called reversible? Do we need a study to even see the common sense in that?

It's not reversible. You're stopping puberty. I mean, boys end up with these micro-pen these, a micro penis, and girls, they don't develop their bones, their bone density, it doesn't develop. They're not, you know, all of these horrible things happen. It's just, and you can't reverse the time. You can't reverse the clock. And there are things that a child goes through to grow up.

Those are very important developmental years both physically and emotionally. That's not reversible. You can't ever get your childhood back. How does one go about finding a therapist in your mind if they feel they need one for their kid? Yeah, I mean, I'll tell the truth, it's not easy. Especially if you want one in person. And I don't think Zoom therapy is the greatest, especially for kids.

It's become very widespread and I don't think it's, oh, it's cracked up to be. People use it for convenience, but I don't know how much it, how effective it really is. And sometimes that can be dangerous depending on the severity of the situation. But there are some websites out there. There are some lists, some directories.

There's one directory called conservativecounselors.com, and they will not affirm your child. There's also a group called Therapy First, and that's therapyfirst.org, and they run some alternate trainings, and they don't believe in affirming children instantly. Although, it depends on what you believe, because some believe that maybe eventually you should affirm. Some believe that you should never affirm. So it really depends on what you believe as a parent.

So I think when you're looking for a therapist, you should always screen very carefully and don't be afraid to ask questions. And also, stay very involved in the process. No therapist can ever fix your child. Even the best therapists in the world cannot fix your child without you, because they're only in your child's life temporarily.

And their goal is to help you connect. And they need to know what's happening with you and with your family and your child's history. They need to really be involved to be able to help your child. So that's also a big shift in the profession is just pushing the parents away. So if you are a parent looking for a therapist

for your child, make sure that you are very involved and if the therapist says, no I need to you know have my special place with your child, that's a red flag. I mean they do need to have some connection with your child of course, but they should be talking to you and they should be communicating with you. They should be talking to you at the very least about what are the treatment goals, what are they seeing or the concerns, how are they conceptualizing the case, what do they think is wrong, what do they think could help, what are the things that they think you could do as a parent. So they should

be working with you. You should be working as a team with that therapist. And that's a lot more work. And with these overworked, over-stressed therapists, even those that are honestly, I'd say very ethical, it's still difficult to do all that, to work with kids and have all that involvement. But that's really the best way. Overworked and over-stressed therapists and overworked and over-stressed parents working together for the benefit of the kid, which is the future, right? Yeah. That's often a trend too with the kids. It's loving parents, but they've been working really hard or they've been consumed with something else, sometimes something out of their control,

like a crisis within the family, or their job just put on some big demands on them. Or maybe the parent is having their own health issues. And this is what happens, families go through things. And that's oftentimes when this trans agenda gets, you know, swoops in to the family because the child is left to their own devices, physically their devices, the phones and the iPads. We need to step back and pay attention and notice what the kids are needing. What do you make of these executive orders

related to this topic? Men and women's sports is one that just comes to mind, but there's more out there already. I'm happy with them. I think in some ways, it's kind of silly that we even need to have them. There's an executive order that there are only men and women. That's an executive order. It's kind of weird that we have to—I mean, it's not legislated, but we have to put that into the government and proclaim that. And that's how kind of crazy our culture has become. But I think they're great. I would like to see them really passed as legislature and not be executive order so that they would stay.

I don't like in general, I'd say, that everything is, not everything, but so many things are being done by executive order. I don't like that process. I know that that process came long before Donald Trump. But I think it needs to be done. I think this is just about safety. This is about maintaining our union and reality. Sports, the integrity of sports and the child safety, I think it's great we're doing this and I hope that we can do more.

But there's still honestly, as much as they're doing, I'm watching under the behind the scenes that the mental health profession, they're doubling down. The people, the true believers are doubling down hard. Some of them are being a little less vocal, a little less prominent, because they're feeling a little less confident to be able to say that they'll sign letters in an hour

to give someone a surgery to remove their healthy breasts. That's not as prominent. That's happened in an hour? Oh yeah. Yes. Right, it's so radical. I know it's like, if I heard myself talking, even just five years ago, I would think I was crazy right now.

But that is what has been happening. Yeah, there's a, I don't even know if it's a man or woman, but a man named, I think, Van Levy, Van Ethan Levy. He has a website where you can go and get trained in like one workshop so you can write a letter for someone within an hour to get surgery. Affirming letters, they call it. And those still exist. There's been no consequences, not yet. I hope that comes. I think it will. But yes, this is the first step.

I think it's the first step in a lot of things. And in the end though, the culture needs to shift and the institutions need to be changed. I'm still baffled by the speed with which this approach was adopted by so many therapists. Me too. I think we need to understand that mechanism. I know. I don't fully understand it either because it happened while I was on disability. I've just been observing it and trying to understand.

What I make of it is it's a lot of followers, a lot of people who don't want to rock the boat, people who really think this is the compassionate thing to do. It's a lot of people who really believe in authority and institutions are the same people that believe in a lot of the COVID measures. I think there's a lot of parallels there. Doing what's kind, doing what's right for the greater good, and having that mentality. I didn't realize I was so different, that I was a therapist that didn't follow the rules all the time. I didn't realize I was such a rebel. But I think the temperaments of therapists, they're rule followers. They're the good girls, honestly.

But you've portrayed this, for some people, at least, as kind of quasi-theological, right? Yeah. So does that happen overnight? I think there are levels. There's the inner circle of the real believers, and then I think the general population of the people that just haven't thought about it enough, and they haven't heard the other side. And they've been told from the professionals that supposedly really know that this is how it's right, this is the right way, and if it's not done that way, there would be very terrible consequences for these poor kids. Exactly. I think they've been fear-mongered,

just like the parents had been. And therapists really want to do it right. I think more than the general, they really want to believe they're the better. They care more. Therapists care. For better or worse, they care. So that's what's been weaponized, is this real caring and desire to help in a situation where obviously there's a lot of very serious issues happening. I don't think anyone would dispute that aspect, even if they're sort of what you call antigenic, even if they're created by the profession more than just being there inherently. And then the other thing that another dynamic that happens, and it's something that when I was coming up the ranks, I needed to learn this, where you wanna help so bad that you get over-involved,

and you kind of project, like, I need to help this kid, and they call that a rescue fantasy. And I remember feeling this, and we all feel it, but I was trained, and I learned to check that. You know, you wanna almost adopt all these kids that are in foster care, right? You want to take them home. You want to hug them all.

And you want to do all these things. But I was trained to have some boundaries. I hate even using that word, because all this therapy speak has been, I think, hijacked. But to have some limits, right? And to recognize you can't rescue them. And I think now our profession doesn't have that type of training anymore and doesn't have the kind of guardrails to recognize when people do that overly to the point where it's

unhealthy they're not stopped anymore. So a lot of people who were really bullied when they were young, a lot of people who really felt like they were misfits, maybe still do feel like they're misfits, they feel like they need to help these poor children and they need to rescue them. So they're projecting really their needs onto these kids. And they think maybe even a lot of them had, you know, the therapist had very challenging relationships with their parents and they wish they had an adult to help them like get away from their parents or, you know or set their parents straight for something.

And so now they think they need to do this with all the other parents, right? That's why when you talk about parental rights, these trans activists don't seem to care about parental rights because they're imagining in a lot of cases their own parents or other parents that they know that weren't up to snuff or were difficult and caused more pain for these children. So they feel like they need to rescue the children from these bad parents. However, even the bad parents need therapy. They shouldn't be pushed out. In the foster care system, one of the major interventions is to give the parenting classes

and to give the parents support so that they can reunify in the future. Those philosophies that were long standing have been thrown out the window. I think your book is an incredibly valuable resource. Where can people find it? What will they find in there? It's a practical response to gender distress. It's available on Amazon. It started off just as a 10-page thing that was on my website. I have this website, the truthfulltherapist.org, which I call the Parents Guide to Mental Health. On it's, I'm there, it has a whole bunch of things. Just to understand what was appropriate mental healthcare

before things really got more radical and taken over by ideology. And I had a little section on gender in there. And that was obviously the most popular one because it was such a hot topic. So I thought, oh, I'll make a little booklet and print it out. Well, it expanded into a book.

And what this book has is all these different chapters and print it out. Well, it expanded into a book. And what this book has is all these different chapters that with very succinct but thorough facts on the different lies that the transgender movement has pushed without much push back. So all the different things they say, for example, that intersex proves that that means we have multiple genders. Well, it doesn't. That is, we still have two gametes.

We're still male and female. Even those who are intersex are still male and female. But they have a birth disorder, right? And you can't always tell at birth whether they're male or female. So we don't have some special third or mysterious types of gender. And then clownfish, the males lay the eggs, but I mean, I don't know all the biology on the fish, but it doesn't matter because human beings aren't fish, right?

So it's things like that for people to just stop and think. Because you get bamboozled real easy, because they say it with confidence. They have these scripts and they say, so when you have a teenage child that has been listening for hours and hours on all these different talking points and you're like, well I know what they're saying is nonsense, but I don't know what to say right now

or I don't even know what to think, my book will help you with that. It debunks the suicide lie and explains in lots of different reasons why it's a lie, both through the data and then also just clinically, it's not clinically sound, to be talking about suicide with teenagers. What's also special about this book is the detransitioners allowed me to print their art inside. So I have their art.

There's pictures. It makes it an easy read. As we continue a bit, tell me about when you say the detransitioners. What do you mean? I should explain. Detransitioners are people who used to believe they were trans, and they went through the medical interventions to look the opposite sex or look like a different gender. And they since realized that they made a mistake or that they've now gone back to their normal sex. And many of them have become public to a lot of harm,

like a lot of risk of their lives even, because the trans movement is so harsh and doesn't allow for anybody to start saying, actually there's some regret here. So that's who they are. I have a drawing from Chloe Cole, who's maybe the most prominent detransitioner. She's 20 now. And then the other thing that's different about my

book is because it's written for me, a therapist, a mental health professional that has so much experience with teens and work with so many acting out teens, teens that I actually had to sometimes even restrain because their behavioral issues were that extreme. I know how to talk to them, I know how to deescalate them, I know how to talk to them in a way that's not going to say, well, you know, F you. Well, sometimes they do, but that's okay. But I have a section in the back that has ideas

on how to open up a conversation with a child. Who might be ready to talk about it, that's not confrontational. They're more open-ended questions so that the adult who really cares about that child can talk to them and really do a lot more listening, but also ask leading questions so that they can maybe figure out for themselves eventually, plant some seeds. For example, what does it mean to be trans? Because it's ever-changing and it's such a broad term. And then just asking more follow-up questions.

What does it mean to be a boy or a girl? How do you know? Some of them are kind of obvious, but- Applying the Socratic method here. Yes, exactly. So there's actually some prompting questions, but I also really emphasize in this book that there is no script, there is no exact formula for you because there are so many different situations within the family and a lot of it is about figuring out what is happening within your child and with your family. There's a whole section with ideas of what could be the underlying issues here.

And then I do have a section on how to screen for a gender critical therapist, we call that that, someone who's just not going to affirm your child, and all kinds of questions and asking them what do they think about internet use with kids, how do you work with families that have different police systems as you? How often do you talk to the parents in a situation? What secrets do you share and don't share? All those things. And then my book also has a really comprehensive list of all different resources.

There are so many different organizations out there that are doing this work. And they do it all differently. Some of them have different backgrounds and philosophies. Like there's the radical feminists and then there's the Christian conservatives and all of their different ways of approaching it. And I'm not here to say which one is the best for you and your family, but what I did was I listed them all so you can look through them and see what would be a fit for you and you can read about it and use your discretion.

My overall message, I'd say to families about mental health and maybe about everything, is to think for yourself and question experts and use your gut. Don't just go along just because you're scared because they have some kind of authority. And just very briefly, you've also just recently written a kid's book that's going to be coming out soon. And so very briefly about the Froggy Girl. Yeah, Froggy Girl is a little children's book and the art is done by D.

Transitioner. He's a man who used to believe he was a woman trapped in a man's body. So that makes it extra special. And I saw so many books out there. If you look on it, because I published that other book, I was ranked a lot in the teen LGBTQ section on Amazon. And I just saw so many children's books and teen books that were pro-transition, that

were teaching kids to hate their bodies, to hate themselves, and to not accept themselves. I decided I wanted to write something to teach them to accept themselves for who they are and that it's okay. So this is a little story about a little girl who wishes she was a frog. And she thought she could hop and she wanted to be with the froggies and have fun with them. And then in the book her parents affirm it and the teacher affirms it and her friends affirm it and she thinks it's cute at first but then she actually gets really sad.

And then she meets a wise turtle that teaches her to accept herself as a little girl. So it's just a cute little story and it rhymes. And I just wanted to put it out there. I'm just one person and I just wanted to put one more thing in the ether among all the other books that teach them. There's like one where like In My Daddy's Belly and there's all these radical books out there that confuse kids and teach them that they could be whatever they want and confuse them on their identities. I want to help them be grounded in reality.

Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. Emma, any final thoughts as we finish? Oh gosh. Two things. One, I encourage everybody to question authority, question institutions and to not be intimidated, especially by therapists, even when they act nice because they often are very nice and I think they usually mean well. But if something doesn't sit right with you, to ask more questions and don't just go along with it. So that's my main message. Then two, to remember that I'm just one person. In fact, I was on disability for four years

and thought I'd never have a voice and here I am talking to you. Anybody could be out there. You could make a book or you could do anything. If this is an important topic for you or some other topic, you don't have to sit back and wait for someone else to do it. You could do it too. What a fantastic message. Well, Pamela Garfield, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Pamela Garfield and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek. MUSIC