'Saving Normal' Describes How Trans-Mania Evolved, Before It Started
Big Pharma and doctors will literally say and do anything commercialist propaganda tells them to. La plus ça change.
Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharms, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life, by psychiatrist and DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) contributor Dr. Allen Frances, was published in 2013, during the infancy of the social media-induced transgender mania we see today.
Therefore, transgenderism isn’t mentioned at all, but it’s interesting that he didn’t think to include it in Chapter 6, Fads of the Future, in which he predicts the next targets of overdiagnosing, overtreating medical doctors and Big Pharma drug peddlers. He thought to include mood dysregulation disorder, formerly known as ‘tantrums’ in small children, neurocognitive mental disorder, formerly known as ‘normal slight mental decline in people who age’, ‘binge-eating disorder’, formerly known as ‘overeating’, adult ADHD (real, but overdiagnosed) and major depressive disorder, formerly known as ‘customary grief’.
By 2013, the early signs of transgenderism had been around since the late oughts, but maybe he didn’t spend enough time on the Internet to notice that Tumblr was pioneering all the goofy labels to describe every maladaptive ‘gender difference’ unemployed, unemployable, infantilized young people could imagine.
Frances argues that psychiatry is guilty of over-medicalizing, over-diagnosing, and over-treating what are often normal life stresses and problems for which they slap on some silly-ass label (perhaps there’s a coterie of unemployed psychiatrists on Tumblr?) to sell treatments and drugs to people who don’t actually need them.
He argues for a return to recognizing that certain stresses and unpleasant feelings are perfectly normal and don’t require specialized treatment. He laments how psychiatric profession abuses have fueled the over-negativity of certain anti-psychiatry groups. He defends his profession when warranted, but the book is about all the crazes psychiatry has fueled over the years, and a pill-popping society trained for addiction with promised, but rarely delivered, quick fixes.
He recounts the mental illness fads of years and centuries past: the ‘neurasthenia’ fad of the late 19th and early 20th century (vaguely, ‘weak nerves’, which served to ‘explain’ everything wrong with female complaints about anything), hysteria/conversion disorder from the same time period, the ‘70s and ‘80s MPD fad (Multiple Personality Disorder, which psychiatry now regards as bullshit) and the late 20th-century child sex abuse scandal witch hunts (unfounded ritual abuse allegations such as the McMartin Daycare and the Wee Care Nursery School cases, and overall ‘Satanic Panic’). The public was willing and ready to jump on any fad promoted by doctors eager to make a name for themselves and to make a quick buck from neurotics.
Saving Normal describes the rise of Big Pharma and how it gained the power to medicalize anything negative a human being could feel. First they lobbied to change laws allowing them to market drugs directly to consumers, then by doubling the life of their patents by making only minor changes, like by tinkering with existing compounds a bit, to create a slightly different but patent-friendly drug to extend monopoly protection. When they needed a new market, the medicalization of children germinated. Primarily for behavioral issues.
Frances says Big Pharma’s claims to putting billions into research is mostly bogus; where they put their dollars is marketing and lobbying for friendly changes to the existent laws prohibiting them from untethered profit-making. Gender critics will recognize the blueprint: Buying politicians; hijacking the medical profession to influence or pressure “doctors, patients, scientists, journals, professional associations, consumer advocacy groups, pharmacists, insurance companies, politicians, bureaucrats and administrators.” That certainly answers the question so many gender critics have asked: How did so many institutions get hijacked by the transgender revenue-driven complex? It happened before most of us had ever even met a so-called ‘transgender’ person. ‘Gender dysphoria’ is the new autism, ADHD and ‘aging as a disease’.
As I read about the ways Big Pharma and the medical profession have vastly overblown the very real diagnosis ADHD, I considered how gender doctors are handling puberty as though it was some sort of mental disease. Normal life milestones are not ‘conditions’ to be treated. I remembered something my doctor said to me twenty years ago when I worried I might be hitting early menopause. “Don’t worry,” he said, “when the time comes we’ll be ready to treat you.”
What had concerned me was that I was approaching forty and misunderstanding the normal signs of aging as something amiss. I came to realize his comment offended me. Why did menopause need to be ‘treated’, unless one was having very severe and life-impacting symptoms? I bought a book, instead about how to treat menopausal symptoms naturally through herbal and other natural products. As it turned out, I never needed it; I got lucky and my eventual menopause (perfectly on schedule) was remarkably easy.
This is why I’m concerned about the mania to ‘trans’ kids who have to ‘put off’ puberty or they’ll ‘become suicidal’. Puberty, like menopause, is a perfectly natural physiological milestone; it doesn’t usually need to be ‘treated’ although it certainly requires plenty of guidance as it’s not an easy time for anyone. Puberty marks the end of childhood and a permanent push into adulthood, whether it’s welcome or not, and I suspect a lot of kids are agreeing to the highly damaging puberty blockers simply because they don’t want to grow up.
Dr. Frances warns about paraphilias, which will one day contribute heavily to the transgender craze, as ‘a minefield of unintended consequences’. While he contributed to the DSM-IV, his concern was that the section on paraphilias (primarily male), was poorly worded and ‘allowed the widespread unconstitutional abuse of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization’. Since publication of his book, he has little to say about the transgender craze, which of course begs the question of whether he’s afraid of subjecting his family to physical threats by hateful transactivists.
Can you blame him? For pete’s sake, science mag Nature is doubling down on trans pseudoscience, terrified of new research scientists are supposed to pursue, it’s their friggin’ job, but the woke social justice kiddies who manage Nature are afraid certain scientific inquiry might ‘pathologize’ and ‘harm’ the trans community.
Read: Shed further light on uncomfortable truths that will permanently halt the Trans Train at the Zanyville station. Researchers are looking for a biological basis for trans-identity, and what if—they don’t find one?
Interesting how terrified Team Trans is of exploring this theory, since a positive link would be very much in transactivists’ best interests if they could argue ‘incontrovertibly’ that ‘people are born trans’. It would be a mega-boon to the medical industry which is making untold billions off butchering children in service to The Boardroom. Team Greed is setting their financial futures for life: Creating permanent dependent patients of all ages with treatments and required supplements, never mind that one day said patients may find they can no longer pay for it themselves if Republicans take over and stop forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for genderwoo delusions.
It will be too easy to argue that most of these people were born into perfectly healthy bodies, and made the decision to butcher themselves and render their bodies largely broken.
I do wish Dr. Frances would speak out on this issue but he’s at retirement age and perhaps he’s hoping for a nice quiet life which he and his wife will never have if they have to field death threats and other harassment by speaking out on a subject backed by real science.
Another issue Saving Normal acknowledges that bears directly on the transgender craze is how historically doctors have often ignored or not even bothered to explore the psychological problems or conditions a presenting patient may have, often in service to the fad du jour. He describes Mindy, a young woman during the Hippie Sixties who was institutionalized and treated for the then-faddish schizophrenia by a young doctor who only realized after she was discharged that her problem wasn’t schizophrenia, but the street drug abuse quite common at the time. Mindy was put through hospital hell with some similarity to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Dr. Frances admits that the young doctor prone to all-the-other-doctors-are-diagnosing-schizophrenia-so-it-must-be-cool was himself.
Mindy didn’t have a childhood filled with trauma, but she turned into the moody, self-conscious, self-critical teenager many children do. Her problems with drug abuse stemmed from what appears to be the normal challenges of adolescence, and an ‘overpowering’ mother. If she wasn’t traumatized before, she was after she got drunk or high and passed out in stairwells only to find filthy toughs shoving their hands down her pants.
“She taught me,” Frances writes, “to look for what’s fundamentally normal in people, not just what appears to be sick.”
Frances decries how quickly doctors are willing to shove pills at their patients rather than take any time to explore issues in their lives. Is a doctor’s job only to do something, however quick-fix or piecemeal, to make someone feel better, or should it also include telling someone what they’re feeling is normal and that it will pass? Could G.P.s, I myself wonder, be better-trained in recognizing the difference between genuine psychiatric problems versus people who simply don’t know how to handle their emotional responses?
Instead of trying to ‘treat’ puberty with blockers and other often permanently harmful snake oil, why not recommend resources for children to explore to ensure they’re not making a very bad decision from which there are no do-overs?
Not likely something doctors are willing to do when TransPharma is selling and indoctrinating them to uncritically treat ‘gender dysphoria’ with pills and blockers and here, have some free samples! Give them to your young patients and tell them to come back for a prescription!
Just repeat the hoary lie, “They’ll commit suicide, like, yesterday, if you don’t!”
Saving Normal was published eleven years ago but proves itself as trenchantly critical of the newer transgender psychiatric fad as any previous ones. It’s well worth a read if you want to understand how the medical professions, both physical and psychiatric, were so easily hijacked by one of the most scientifically bankrupt medical crazes in centuries. The mentally ill were often treated with torture and execution in times past but at least the ancients could argue they didn’t know demons didn’t exist or that the human brain is the most complex creation ever. We moderns in the 21st century have reams of data from the Scientific Revolution and the lessons of the same mistakes made over and over and over again.
And yet we fall for it Every. Single. Time.
The medical and psychiatric professions weren’t so much ‘hijacked’ by transactivism as guided down a familiar path, and each new fad cements the process of uncritical thinking further. Fads come and go, but the psychiatric community abides by over-treatment and misdiagnosis forever.
The real crime, as Frances notes, is that when ‘normal’ is pathologized, people who don’t need help receive treatment that harms rather than helps, and those who need psychiatric help the most don’t receive it. I think of the crazy indigent guy wildly accusing my friend of following him around every Toronto subway station a few years ago when he saw us talking. He turned threatening and I was scared for both of us as he is exactly the sort of person who’s not getting the help he desperately needs.
Meanwhile, around the city, countless children and confused young adults are being ‘transitioned’ by medical professionals who vow to ‘do no harm’, but do— aided, encouraged, and pressured by large pharmaceutical companies whose prime directive is not to explore pre-existing psychological co-morbidities and address them, but to make quicker, ever-more insane profits.
According to a new research study, the sex reassignment surgery market is expected to grow from $2.90B in 2022 to $6.3B in 2030.
I wouldn’t invest just yet, though, if you’re a human psychopath seeking to strike it big in the stock market no matter how; the WPATH Files, the Cass Review, and the dialing-back of transgender medicine in Europe points very strongly toward a North American Day of Reckoning, always behind the rest of the Western world. It’s highly questionable just how lucrative this industry will be in a few more years, especially if there’s a Republican takeover in the U.S. in November. I predict bad times ahead for the transgender industrial complex.
I don’t think transgenderism is going away entirely, nor do I think it should; I’ve argued in the past it can be undertaken for various good reasons, including even genuine but, I suspect, exceedingly rare gender dysphoria. Right now I’m reading a fascinating book by a trans-identified woman on what it’s like to become a man. (Expect an article eventually). He apparently is a quite passable man but ironically, still writes like a woman. So far, it’s not rah-rah-transgender-I-hate-TERFs, mostly because he transitioned before today’s trans-fashionistas were born. In fact, I chose to read it because it’s not political; I’m hoping for some interesting insights into the neuroscientific and cultural differences between men and women from someone who’s played both sides of the field.
What I want to see tamed like a wild horse is the deeply dysfunctional, horribly harmful transgender medical industry, which has ruined so many lives already, and split up so many families, and often on the taxpayer’s dime.
Let the delusionals pay for it themselves. Although honestly, a good shrink, an honest one still in possession of their critical thinking skills, divorced from the ‘woke social justice’ madness with which so many have already been infected, would be a better investment.
I’d be more willing, as a taxpayer, to pay for that!
When I’m not thanking Goddess I was born forty years too soon for this genderwoo crap, I help women and others reclaim their power here at Grow Some Labia.
We did a great disservice to the mentally ill when we closed rather than reform our antiquated mental health hospitals in the last century. The streets in many of what were once our most beautiful cities are now impassable for normal people because mentally unstable drug addicts are allowed to live there rather than being kept under mandatory custodial care. We simply refuse to say no. No you can't camp in the city.
No you can't shit in our streets. No you can't discard your used needles where children play.
What the fuck is wrong with our leaders who l, as a lifelong Democrat, must admit are mostly of my party? Enough. Perhaps it's time to elect some politicians who will say no.
Thank you. You describe this madness better than anyone I have read, including the academic brainiacs at Quillette. One day everyone will see the obvious and move on to a different anti-rational craze. Until then, children and teens will continue to be harmed psychologically and physically.