The Daily Signal - Transgender Series Part 2: Why Parents Can't Trust Mental Health Professionals

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

Unfortunately, parents can't trust mental health professionals on the issue of a transgender identity, a veteran social worker warns. Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, a social worker with decades of experience dealing with mental health professionals and vulnerable people, warns that the over-psychologizing of childhood is contributing to the rise of rapid-onset gender dysphoria and the trauma of kids mutilating their own bodies to pursue a transgender identity, rather than dealing with underlying psychological issues. Garfield-Jaeger, who lost her job because she refused to take a COVID-19 vaccine, now runs a practice called “The Truthful Therapist,” where she helps parents navigate the potentially fraught field of mental health. Many parents struggle to navigate mental health and find themselves demonized by the very professionals who they trust to help their kids. “I talk to parents who either are still in the thick of it, where their children are still identifying as trans, or where their child has desisted, where the time that their children felt the most distress is when they believed that their parents no longer love them or care about them or accept them because that's what the trans community and the therapists and the doctors” say, Garfield-Jaeger tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.” Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, February 8th. I'm Tyler O'Neill. I sat down with Pamela Garfield Yeager, who has a long track record as a social worker working in the mental health space with a lot of different therapists and spending time at a lot of group homes in California. And she raised the alarm because now she's no longer in that field. she's now working as quote unquote the truthful therapist advising parents on how they should navigate the mental health space today because what she's found and the main issue we spoke about was that mental health professionals have been caught up in this transgender ideology that really pushes kids to mistrust their own parents and to get on a path that.

will leave them stunted, scarred, and infertile if they pursue these medical interventions in the name of affirming a transgender identity. As Groundwork, this is the second podcast interview in a series on transgender phenomena, science, and the potential for medical malpractice lawsuits. And in my interview with Pamela Garfield-Yager, we spoke about the potential pitfalls with the mental health industry today. the way in which mental health professionals often make kids distrustful of their own parents, how that will exacerbate many of these mental health issues that might be undermining a sense of gender dysphoria or a sense that a child was, quote, unquote, born in the wrong body. And therefore, this ideology might be encouraging kids down a destructive path and separating them from the people who really know them the best, their parents. Please listen to my interview with Pamela Garfield-Yager right after this. Looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues from America's outpost here in

Washington? Sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. You'll get top conservative research, a rundown of important events happening here at Heritage that you can watch online and hot takes from our experts. Sign up at heritage.org slash agenda or at the Link in the show notes. This is Tyler O'Neill, a managing editor at The Daily Signal. I am honored to be joined by Pamela Garfield-Yager. She has 20 years of experience as counselor or therapist, and she now runs the truthful therapist. Pamela, it's great to have you with us.

Hi, thank you for having me here. So you made the decision. You live in California, and you stood up against a bill called AB-665. Can you fill us in about that and why you thought. it was so important to stand up against this bill. Yeah, there were two main elements to that bill. The piece that I was most opposed to was how they were going to, well, now they are, unfortunately, allowing for 12-year-olds to consent to their own residential treatment. So without parents' permission, 12-year-olds can now go to residential treatment. And really, the way that will happen as a school

counselor or some other adult will believe this child needs to go to a residential program and does not need parental consent for them to go. So a parent can find out their child has now been sent to a group home without their permission, which I believe is wrong and scary. And how does that relate to this transgender issue, this medicalization? Yeah, so in these group homes, a lot of them, most of them are government funded. The other piece of that bill is expanding Medi-Cal dollars for these residential programs and for mental health as a whole. The people that are controlling that money really believe strongly in this gender affirming care model, and they believe in children need to get on hormones

and have access to surgeries to be transgender really quickly. And without their parents there to safeguard them, I believe more vulnerable children will be turned into transgender incorrectly and not get their mental health needs met. Well, we've seen many people who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria, also having comorbidities, also struggling with depression, anxiety. You know, in many cases, they're also on the autism spectrum. And so do you see that as a major contributing factor to this misdiagnosis?

Yeah, 100%. I actually believe that gender dysphoria or gender distress or whatever term you want to use is really a symptom of something else. So the things that you just named, I also see a lot of, of this connected to people with attachment issues or people with trauma, usually sexual trauma. So that's why I believe, I don't know, they have studies, but, you know, they're shaky. But that's why I believe that the kids in foster care are running so quickly to become trans because they have these types of trauma and attachment issues and need a sense of belonging.

And the trans community really promises that they promise this one-size-fits-all solution. And they give that short-term relief that you do belong somewhere. This is your quote-unquote safe space. And they do feel good, you know, it's temporarily. But in the long run, it creates a lot of harm. And these kind of vulnerable people are the people you're used to serving that you spent, you know, 20 years working with. Can you tell me a little bit more? I mean, you mentioned that many of these communities, they didn't identify as trans before, but now they're starting to.

Yeah. So I worked for many years in group homes in California. in the San Jose area in Silicon Valley of California. And those were kids that, you know, a lot of them had trauma. They had issues with their families where their parents, for one reason or another, weren't able to be there for them.

And so they had some fractured attachment issues. And those kids really struggled with emotion regulation. Some of them struggled with substance abuse. They struggled with all kinds of mental health issues. But one thing at the time, this is, I'm talking around 2008, 2008, 2009, that era, none of them thought of being trans. But now that the internet and the medical community and schools and pretty much everywhere

you look, they're influencing kids. If you don't feel right in your body or even just in society, if you feel displaced, then you probably are trans. And I believe the foster kids are the number one prime target for this messaging. And it's really, it breaks my heart because those are the kids I really feel connected to, because I spent so many years working with them and knowing what they go through. And you worked for 20 years as a social worker and counselor, and then you lost your employment because of the COVID vaccine mandate that they had in California.

Would you speak a little bit about that? Yeah. So I actually spent several years on disability. I still do have partial disability. I have a nerve injury and I get chronic migraine. So I couldn't work a regular full-time job. But after the lockdowns, after we were all locked down, I had my own personal lockdown from my disability. I finally got back to working and being around my colleagues, being around my profession, feeling as though I was doing something, you know, useful, being a part of a community.

And then as soon as I really got connected and I was comfortable working there, and this is only six to eight months into the job. Governor Gavin Newsom put down this COVID vaccine mandate. and I had already recovered from COVID. I also had this health condition. I believed that I could get a medical exemption, but unfortunately, nobody in California could get a medical exemption due to the government putting a stronghold on doctors, and they were all being punished for people,

for writing medical exemptions, for people like me and other people who even have more severe conditions or have had direct adverse reactions to previous vaccines. So I made the choice to leave this job, I couldn't work full time anymore anyway because I still have chronic pain. But it was devastating, very devastating. And so now you have the truthful therapist. You talk to parents, you equip them to face this very confusing world. Can you speak a little bit more about that? Yeah, so the silver lining, I kind of said this like, okay, so you fired me from my job. I have all this experience.

You've now unleashed a weapon. Someone with over 20 years of experience. that is not afraid of losing their job. I unfortunately, I'm not able to pick up the career I used to have as a clinical supervisor and work full-time. So I decided I was going to speak the truth. I was going to go online and say all the things that my colleagues were afraid to say, you know, that affirmative care does not save lies and that we're harming children and that our profession is inducing victim mentality. And we're over-medicating children without discretion. And we're dividing families instead of helping them.

So these are all the messages that I've been putting out there. And, yes, I created a program called the truthful therapist. It's on my website, the truthful therapist.org, where I basically educate parents to understand what is appropriate mental health care so that they can better advocate for their children and also recognize that maybe they don't need to directly run to a therapist. We don't always need to go to these experts. These experts don't know everything. In fact, these experts don't know a lot.

And unfortunately, the education they're getting is getting worse and worse as the day goes on. And I actually have attended a few of these trainings to realize how radical the training has become since I went to school back in the 90s. So we've seen whistleblowers like Jamie Reed in Missouri come out and say that they're rushing kids on these experimental treatments without. do vetting like you were talking about do you expect to see many more of these whistleblowers and you know did you see a moment later in your time when you were full time where people started to be rushed on these things where they were throwing out the normal recommendations yeah when I was working full time this wasn't happening on a wide scale so I honestly didn't see it so much the last time I worked full time with kids was in 2016 and I think that was right at the cusp of when this was really starting to grow. I was working at a high school in Palo Alto, California, which is a very left-leaning area right near Stanford University, and there was one transgender child there.

We did kind of affirm her. We didn't question her. I wasn't treating her. So the school did accommodate her, but they also acknowledged that she was a girl and she couldn't change with the boys in the boys' locker room. And they really looked at it as a dilemma. They were trying to be compassionate,

but they were also still grounded in reality at the time. So things have really changed since then. But since then, yeah, I came back in 2021 and things were radically different. And I was just working, I was never working at a gender clinic. I worked in a program. It was a group therapy program. It's called an IOP individualized outpatient program at Sutter Health in San Mateo, California. And there, half the girls identified as trans, mostly non-binary.

and my colleagues were just going along with it. Not only were they going along with it, they were affirming it, they were shaming their parents that didn't go along with it. There was one patient where the therapist said that the child was born in the wrong family, that she was mismatched with her parents. And yeah, it was interesting because this one girl who had sexual trauma, only 12 years old, and that said, I know my parents really love me, and they're really good parents.

They're just transphobic. So she had this cognitive disson, and she was figuring it out. Oh, I still think about her, because if I was able to reach her, I think I could have reached her and help her recognize that it was her trauma. She was cutting.

It was her probably struggling through puberty and other issues. I don't know all the details because I didn't work with her one-on-one, but she was in my therapy groups. And she was very artistic and very talented and very articulate and very insightful.

But instead of working with her and working with her underlying issues, all the therapist did was affirm her non-binary identity. I don't know where she is today. This was in 2021. So this was a few years ago. And I hope maybe she's desisted, but I honestly don't know.

But yeah, my colleagues, they all went along with it. When we were in staff meetings, the first thing we would do to introduce a new patient into the program because this was short term. So we had, you know, kids, of revolving through the program, instead of even saying their name first, we had to go through and say what their pronouns were.

We didn't say what their diagnosis was. We didn't say what their family issues were. They got to those things. So it's not like we didn't talk about that at all, but it was always the initial thing was, what are the pronouns? And then everybody was tiptoeing around these pronouns. They were all really nervous. You could really feel the vibe.

And don't forget, just to visualize it, we're all wearing surgical masks in this meeting. I used to joke around and ask people for their scalples because I was like, are we about to have surgery here in our staff meeting? But I was new and I was part-time. I'd been on disability for four years, so I didn't feel comfortable confronting all of them. And really just when I felt ready to speak up more directly about it is when they put through the COVID vaccine mandate. So I wasn't able to. It's kind of by design, right? Somebody who might question government might question.

And the dogma has been knocked out so that I can no longer plant seeds with them because I did earn a lot of respect. And I got a really good review at this place too. So I want to hear from you, you know, with your experience serving these vulnerable populations, is there, you know, I think when you're dealing with someone who has mental distress of any kind and you suddenly encourage them to think along the lines of a way that. that alienates them from their parents. That seems to me to be a recipe for making the underlying distress worse. But would that align with your experience? Yes, 100%. I completely agree.

I think that adds to the distress. I have heard from parents, because I do talk to parents who either are still in the thick of it where their children are still identifying as trans or their child has desisted, where the time that their children felt the most distressed is when they believe that their parents no longer loved them or cared about them or accepted them because that's what the trans community and the therapist and the doctors, all the people that believe in this are telling this child,

oh, your parents aren't accepting you for who you are. We're the ones that accept you, we're the ones that know you best. And that's a really scary prospect for a child to believe that now, my parents don't know who I am, they don't listen to me, they don't believe me. and they don't care about me, and they don't love me anymore, which is a complete lie. All of these parents that I've ever met love their children dearly. They just want to live in reality. And they know for sure that this child has some other underlying issue that is causing them to believe that they are trans.

And it's not some magical spiritual belief that their brain is mismatched with their bodies. How much desistence have you seen? Because I think on one side of this issue, the pro, you know, quote unquote, gender affirming care advocates, they act as though either detransitioners were never trans to begin with or, you know, this idea that almost they're heretics who have to be silenced and ostracized. But how much have you seen while working with these parents in recent years? Yeah, I've seen quite a bit, especially right now is the timing because I think when this really peaked during the lockdown. or right after the lockdowns, because so many kids were isolated, they were home, they were on their screens, they were away from their regular activities, they weren't doing their sports or whatever hobbies that they would be doing or interacting with their friends. So they were

stuck at home on their screens and learning that perhaps that they're trans online. So that was when things really began to explode. So now that we're a couple years out of that, we are seeing a lot more desistence. I don't know how to put a number on that. Probably first from my personal experience. It's probably like 50-50, but it's just a matter of who's reaching out to me. And the people that are reaching out to me are the ones that are still in the thick of it. So I'm seeing a lot more of those people. But I am hearing just from being in these circles, a lot of people that have had kids that have desisted. It takes a while. It seems to take about two years or so. Like it's not an overnight process. It's not like you just tell the kid,

you're a girl, you're a boy, you know, snap out of it. And then they do. It takes a process. And it's different for each family. It's different for each kid because it depends on the situation, but it does take time. And so, yeah, we're now at a point a few years outside of those lockdowns and that heavy isolation. I think we are seeing more kids desisting from this. And you're Jewish, and you spoke to me briefly about being deeply affected, obviously, by October 7th and the events that have happened since then. do you see any connection between this transgender movement and the sort of, you know, weakness we've seen in confronting anti-Semitism at campuses like Harvard in the general culture at large? Yeah. And personally, I see connection with pretty much everything that we're struggling with right now. I think this is very connected to critical race theory.

The idea that we're being taught that there are oppressors and they're oppressed. And a lot of reasons that kids are identifying as trans is because they tend to be in that oppressor category, like the cis, white, whatever. And so they're the ones that are being attracted to becoming trans because they can sort of identify into being now in this oppressed category. They're now like a minority. So I certainly see that connection. And then, yeah, once they're in that trans community, then they're in this, I don't want to call it, brainwashed. or this, you know, this loop of telling them that there are certain people who are oppressed and certain people that are oppressors. And unfortunately, Jews are looked at as an oppressor class.

And I think that's what's happening in these campuses. I think that's why there's a rise in anti-Semitism. And I think that's, I think there's just, yeah, it's just a really bigger picture thing going on. Yeah. So that sounds like the social contagion view where, you know, there's, when you're a distressed teen and you're going. through puberty, which can be confusing to anyone, but specifically to young girls. And you also have this ideology that says you're part of an oppressor class, but you can become an oppressed class and you can therefore join like the cool people. Do you think that's largely what's going on?

Yeah, for sure. And I think the reason girls especially are attracted to this, because girls are sensitive and girls don't want to be oppressors and girls can't shake that. That, They want to, they're nice. We're more nice as a whole, you know, I guess not all of them, but we all seem mean girls. In general, girls don't want that, especially young girls. They're growing up, they're trying to learn who they are. They're trying to, a young girl wants to know that they're a good person. And if they're told just by how they're born, that makes them a bad person, that's a pretty

awful thing to tell a young person, I think. And now you've got this magic way to opt out of that, which is becoming trans. and then you get rainbows and you get parades and all the movies show the trans person as being cool and fun. Why wouldn't you want to opt for that? And then one other point about the puberty. And so, yes, puberty is hard for a lot of girls. But I also think there's this messaging that we're actually telling girls to be afraid of puberty. And I think we're reinforcing that.

We're in some ways making it more worse than it even actually is. when I was growing up back in the day, I wasn't told my puberty was going to be horrible and scary, and I was told what a period was. I mean, I was told it could be uncomfortable, and these are the things that could happen. But I was never told, like, to fear it. And I've looked at Planned Parenthood,

and they've had some horrible graphics of, like, the bloody pads and tampons. It's just, that would horrify me. if I were a young girl. Like, no way would I want to ever face that as a woman or becoming woman. And these are the messages that girls are getting. I've talked to a mother of an 11-year-old girl, and she told me her, her daughter said to her, I'm afraid of puberty.

I asked her, where did she get that from? She couldn't have gotten that on her own. Somebody made her afraid of puberty. So even before they even have the challenge in puberty, a lot of them are anticipating it, and they're already ready to opt out of it. So I think that's also adding to this contagion. Thank you so much for joining me, Pamela. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

And where can people follow you? I don't know what to add. I mean, there's so many things. I'll say this, though. Please don't blindly trust experts. Trust yourself. Therapy is not the end-all be-all. I do believe therapy is necessary for certain people

and can be very helpful, but it's also not the end-all-be-all. There are other ways people can get help. or they can help themselves. Sometimes just nutrition and sleep can do the trick. I mean, it's not always that simple. But the point is everyone's different. We're all individuals and we all have different needs.

So please stop looking at experts as these, you know, they have these magic wands. They're going to fix everything. The best thing is to live a healthy life and to be connected, be present with each other. So that's really one of the big messages. And where can they find me? I'm on my website is the truthful therapist.org. I'm pretty active on Instagram, which is the dot truthful therapist. My Twitter is truth therapist.

And I have a substack, substack called Pam the truthful therapist. So if you Google my name, Pamela Garfield-Yager, or the truthful therapist, you'll probably find stuff about me. A lot of truth, a lot of therapy. Thank you, again, so much for joining us. You're welcome. Thank you so much. And that was Pamela Garfield-Jager. Again, this is Tyler O'Neill.

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