October 23, 2023 - 4:35pm
Dr. Michelle Forcier, a blue-haired professor and paediatrician from Rhode Island, was the breakout star of Matt Walsh’s 2022 documentary, What is a Woman? In a bizarre exchange, Walsh asked, “If I see a chicken laying eggs and I say that’s a female chicken, did I assign female? Or am I just observing a physical reality that’s happening?” Forcier responded, “Does a chicken have a gender identity? Does a chicken cry? Does it commit suicide?”
As it turns out, chickens don’t cry but do come home to roost, something Forcier found out this week. Forcier — along with Dr. Jason Rafferty, another prominent gender-affirming clinician who authored the American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2018 policy statement on gender-affirming care; a psychotherapist named Julie Lyons; and a Rhode Island healthcare provider, Thundermist Health — faces a new lawsuit brought by Layton Ulery, a detransitioned woman.
The Daily Mail, which obtained a copy of the lawsuit, reports that Ulery was struggling with severe mental health issues, including symptoms of dissociation (at the time, she believed she had multiple “alter” personalities) and a troubled life history that included lack of social support, food insecurity and other material hardships, experiences of sexual abuse and bullying, substance abuse, membership in a controlling cult from childhood, and having undergone what Ulery describes as “conversion therapy” to change her sexual orientation. That was all before she started down the road to transition:
Ulery was subsequently referred to Rafferty, then Forcier, and alleges that both physicians prescribed testosterone despite her serious mental health comorbidities and concerns that Ulery raised, including “dangerous mood swings, fits of anger, more frequent bouts of depression, and feeling even more disconnected from herself and her sexuality than she was” before starting testosterone.
Rafferty’s clinical notes show that he saw her as a “high-risk” patient, citing the emotional and sexual abuse she had suffered and the precarity of her current situation with no income and not enough food to eat. Rafferty then specified that “current goals” of treatment included “masculinising hormones” and “top surgery” but that the patient was experiencing “internal turmoil between alters about [the] meaning of gender identity that likely requires additional support and exploration”. Yet apparently Rafferty saw nothing serious enough to delay the administration of testosterone injections.
These are shocking allegations. But this isn’t the first tangle “gender-affirming care” has had with dissociative identity disorder. At the 2022 World Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Montreal, a session was dedicated to helping providers transition patients who claim to have multiple personalities. These “alters” or “headmates”, presenters claimed, each possess their own sense of gender identity and desired gender presentation — identities and presentations that may be in conflict with one another.
One “headmate” may desire a masculine presentation, which may require testosterone and a double mastectomy. Another may prefer a feminine appearance. Dr. Christopher Wolf-Gould lamented that patients must often “choose” between their trans identities and their identities as “plurals”, since clinicians may balk at facilitating hormonal and surgical interventions for such complicated psychiatric cases.
Assuming that one buys into such a contested diagnosis in the first place, these cases raise difficult questions about the possibility of consent and the potential for medical harm and regret. How does a clinician adjudicate conflicts within the self about which irreversible interventions to pursue, when “headmates” disagree?
“If it’s a small system [with a limited number of ‘headmates’], it’s preferable to interview each headmate. But if it’s a huge system with thousands of headmates, interview a council [of ‘headmates’],” Wolf-Gould advised, before conceding that, “obviously, they share a body, so they have to make one decision.”
It shouldn’t take a legal case alleging serious medical harm to see that something has gone badly wrong in this area of medicine. The evidence of harm has been out in the open for years. Unfortunately — and tragically — this won’t be the last of it.
Eliza Mondegreen is a graduate student in psychiatry and the author of Writing Behavior on Substack.
elizamondegreen
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeEvery lawsuit is important. These people need to be held accountable for their actions.
Why do we now to have to run the experiment rather than deploy critical thought and the scientific investigative process to stop harms in advance. This society is demanding its sacrificial victims.and that, in my view, is unacceptable. So I wish her success and yes, they must be held accountable, but so avoidable.
This is the way. This they can understand. “A rod for the back of fools.”
(By which I mean, for the metaphorically- and morally-challenged, that the coercive nature of the judicial system can act as a corrective measure.)
As predicted by Abigail Shrier, who made the comparison between Gender Ideology as a medical issue and “Recovered Memory Syndrome,” which miraculously stopped being diagnosed as soon as the lawsuits piled up.
Always worth mentioning that senior figures in the World Professional Association For Transgender Health were found to have links to a fetish forum specialising in castration & the arresting of pubertal development. The story was uncovered by Reduxx and to my knowledge was never picked up by any other media outlet.
Quelle Suprise!!!!!! The term “minor attracted adult” seems to have lost its attraction recently.I have no doubt that these links and associated behaviours are what is guiding the more extreme queer ideologues.Every few decades paedophilia rears its ugly head in an attempt to gain acceptability and gets shot down only to try again .I’m old enough to remember the carefully acronymed “PIE”..Plus ca change eh!!!!
What is it with the blue hair? Is there some kind of cultural significance to it apart from alerting potential mates to the fact that the wearer is very likely to be mentally unhinged?
It’s like the blue M&Ms: a signifier of artifice, of being created in a lab in defiance of all the laws of God and man, of something that does not, and should not, exist in nature. M&Ms are supposed to be in earth tones, dammit!
it makes them feel special
I remember reading years ago that real food dishes were never made with blue dye because no, or very little, natural food is a real blue; purple but not blue.
I suppose blue hair is similar, the wearer’s way of saying ‘I am unnatural, best to have nothing to do with me’.
Gad Saad mentioned an appropriate term – tongue-in-cheek I think, used for organisms with bright colouring = aposematic.
Similarly with food – blue tends to indicate food that’s gone off and therefore dangerous to eat. One of the exceptions is Stilton cheese with blue veins, but even that’s composed of (non-toxic) bacteria, i believe.
The “blue rinse” for elderly women with greying to white hair is nothing unusual: for half a century at least it has signified conservatism in dress and views. Who are often derided as the “blue rinse brigade”.
But wih the advent of the sickly pink and pale blue “trans” flag, the “meaning” of blue hair, especially among gender-affirming therapists and paediatricians, has probably changed: to signify sympathy with the cause that is providing their income.
It’ s impossible to see how such gobbledy gook is allowed to be accepted in the medical profession.
These people should be struck off and jailed for any actions they have participated in.
Experimenting on children and young people is an abomination which must be stopped and the perpetrators held to account.
“As it turns out, chickens don’t cry but do come home to roost”, great line!
Forcier responded, “Does a chicken have a gender identity? Does a chicken cry? Does it commit suicide?”
This is what it feels like when chickens cry.
As we suspected, gender clinicians are psychopaths in love with the power they exert over vulnerable younger people.
This is the blind certainty taking on its own life in the crude ignorance of others that breeds evil; recently seen in IS and Hamas.
I am thoroughly convinced that all these transition pushing doctors are either quacks or charlatans looking to make a buck off of people with serious mental illnesses.
I agree they are quacks and charlatans, but I don’t think most of them are in it for the money – unfortunately, because that would be an easy problem to solve.
I fear they are deeply, fundamentally convinced of the morality and rightness of what they’re doing. Their shockingly heinous actions can only be justified by an ideology so entrenched that they completely fail to see the individual they are experimenting on.
This is not a new phenomenon in medicine by any means.
This may be a radical notion, but if a young person doesn’t have enough to eat, isn’t that the issue which most needs addressing? Then safe accommodation, along with mental health care aimed at restoring stability and support to form healthy social relationships. Add in some training or volunteering opportunities, and you might get a healthy, reasonably happy adult. But for some reason, those resources are unavailable and an infinite budget for “gender affirming” mutilation is all too available.
These radical trans-promoting clinicians seem to see transitioning as a cure-all for every ill. But you are right, a patient’s basic needs must be addressed first. Indeed, I don’t think that any person with such serious problems should be able to transition. If transitioning is being funded but basic health-care is not, I guess that’s because being trans is the latest and greatest disorder.
“Will western societies ever rediscover the benefits of normalcy?” <– There is no such thing.
“seem to see transitioning as a cure-all for every ill” <– No such thing as that either.
Now that’s funny, someone supposedly on a”conservative” website in tune with complaining their isn’t enough socialism to suit them.
“If transitioning is being funded but basic health-care is not” <– So you aren’t aware of the usual years long wait time for it?
Just like a communist, you want to fix things with other people’s money. Go volunteer for what you want.
“This may be a radical notion, but if a young person doesn’t have enough to eat, isn’t that the issue which most needs addressing? Then safe accommodation, along with mental health care aimed at restoring stability and support to form healthy social relationships.” <– Prove any of that is at issue.
‘an infinite budget for “gender affirming” mutilation is all too available.” <– No such thing exists but in your twisted little mind.
Is normalisation of insanity a natural result of Liberalism? It seems to me that from Mill to Foucault, the arc of progress on this has been fairly consistent.
Some time ago, I came to the realisation that what we’re seeing today e.g. with Wokeness is not a perversion of Liberalism, but a natural result of it. Many things make a lot of sense from that perspective to say the least.
There was a time when being a centrist or moderate would mean broadly the same thing as being a Liberal – at least to my mind. Now I think we’re seeing a significant divergence as Liberalism takes off to a path of its own. Not sure it’s possible to go back to how it was now.
I don’t agree at all. I do think it is a perversion of Liberalism. I would consider myself Liberal and I have absolutely nothing in common with these people. This is all wrapped up in progressive ideology, which has more in common with Marxism than Liberalism.
Was Rousseau a marxist? Hume had to live with him to realise he was barmy, but at least we can see Rousseau’s offspring are deranged without enduring their company. As the US Republicans say: Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Historically, in America, Liberals were people who favored and promoted elements of the Welfare State: Public Health, Public Housing, Public Schools (not in the British sense), Pensions, regulations of business practices, and of course, Labor Unions. That was the meaning of Liberal until about 50 years ago, when after infiltrating the federal government under FDR, Marxist ideas found followers in academia as well, first among the students, and then inevitably among the faculty, because that’s all that those students who — between street demonstrations — majored in women’s studies and black studies and Queer studies, were good for. So today, although most of them may call themselves Liberals, their politics can be described as an obnoxious mix of Marxist ideology and Fascist tactics — just another kind of totalitarianism, and nothing resembling classical Liberalism.
When Liberals were herding people into barges and sinking them were they using “Fascist tactics”? Or did the Fascists employ Liberal tactics? There’s not a hair’s breadth of difference between the most milquetoast NYT-reading ‘liberal’ and the black-clad sans-culottes goons he supports.
Post Modernist Social Justice folk (who embrace critical race theory, gender theory, queer theory and the like) generally call themselves Progressives.
I agree. Up until recently I’d thought of myself as a centre-left mosty liberal with a few small c conservative views. I think the pot of ideologies from liberalism to communism got well and truly stirred recently and it’s turned into one very brown stew.
A test of this will be whether Liberalism can be pulled back into the confines of sanity. Given even the medical establishment went into this derangement head first, I’m convinced there’s no reliable anchor keeping Liberalism sane as a rule, but as the proverbial pendulum swings back perhaps things go back to a sense of normality again.
Doug Stokes (on Tri*germometry) says that it’s less Marxism (or neo-Marxism) which at least believed in a fact-based version of the world which we can observe and discuss, but rather Postmodernism and Social Constructivism.
This views everything as totally subjective and existence as a struggle between competing subjective discourses about how each of us subjectively experiences the world (at the moment).
So there’s no observable truth you can even refer to (see Megan Markle ‘s ‘my truth’ v the Queen’s ‘recollections vary’) and hence the therapeutic affirmation of the ‘headmate’ or ‘your inner chicken’.
It was Marx who produced the best one line description for all of this: “all that is solid melts into air”.
And there is good argument to be made that it is capitalism (at least in unbridled form), and the extreme individualism that goes with it, that is corrosive of all that was once taken for granted as “solid”.
In context, and sounding like he might be talking of our age, and not his own:
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Post-Structuralism is the intellectual framework that is used to justify the absurd denials of any kind of collective reality that allows statements like “a person with a p***s is not a woman” to be contraversial or even morally wrong, rather than a statement of obvious biological fact.
Woke is sometimes thought of as a new manifestation of expressive liberalism- a derivation of New Age culture and the celebration of the esoteric that glorifies extreme subjectivity and the elevation of the self above any challenges from external reality. It seems to drive the worshippers in the new Satanic churches and has a clear overlap with kink-based sexual practices celebrated in this fairly recent school of Queer social thought.
You should read Patrick Deneen’s ‘Why Liberalism Failed’. He comes to the same conclusions as you.
Yeah, I’m aware of his book, good reminder I should finally buy it.
Post Modernism is not any kind of liberal. It’s left-wing, but it’s authoritarian, and does not believe in Liberal principles, such as equality, and universal humanity. Martin Luther King Jr. was embraced by Liberals, because he embodied their values. The Post Modernists deride MLK as a sap.
Birds coming home to roost.
I have no sympathy for a set of doctors full of self importance with no common sense who are now feeling the ire of their arrogance.
Mentally and physically scarring children for life to build their careers.
Isn’t the Hippocratic oath do no harm?
Regarding doctors. I heard one of the Genspect podcasts, where they interviewed Dr Julia Mason, a US pediatrician who has been trying to critique some very poor research that she says the American Pediatric professional body has been accepting for years. If you search ‘Gender:A Wider Lens’ she’s there describing her uphill struggle to challenge the ‘affirmation’ model of so-called care for children. She mentioned that there are multiple sources of funding for the professional body including pharmaceutical companies. I imagine that would include the providers of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones. I really wish that there were centrist and left leaning mainstream journalists who would do some of the work in finding out about these connections. Their lack of curiosity is so depressing. They could do so much good but choose not to.
There are no factual grounds on which to challenge gender affirming care. And of course, you don’t care about social conservative groups funding the persecution and abuse of transgender people.
“Does a chicken have a gender identity? Does a chicken cry? Does it commit suicide?”
Actually, I don’t know, Dr. Michelle Forcier.
Do you?
What is your point? It may be worth considering. Are you willing to discuss it rationally?
Or is this just obfuscation? Aren’t you in fact bullying and attacking anyone who questions your point of view?
(How much money do you make with this, by the way? You progressives sure do make bank off the problems of the disadvantaged, don’t you?)
To say that “something has gone badly wrong in this area of medicine” is the understatement of the century; this entire “area of medicine” is a crock. But then, it’s hardly the first.
In the 1980s we saw the “recovered memories of abuse” fad, the aftermath of which established firmly that the “professionals” — social workers, therapists of various stripes, psychologists — had engaged in a type of brainwashing, inserting gruesome “memories” of abuse into already-disturbed people’s brains. Then came the “Satanic abuse” fad, which specialized in doing the same thing to little children, sending many innocent day care workers to prison. And now the ludicrous cult of “transgenderism”, which for a King’s ransom turns perfectly healthy people into freaks.
And thanks to the overwrought “anti-racism” manias of recent years, we’ve also seen all kinds of people — mostly women — falsely claim they’ve suffered “racist” attacks, with others falsely claiming they belong to some racial minority, but for clearly self-serving purposes, like drawing fat salaries from useless college jobs that keep the anti-racist fever high.
Will western societies ever rediscover the benefits of normalcy?
“Will western societies ever rediscover the benefits of normalcy?” <– That is not what you talking about. You only want to abuse in law and policy people you don’t like.
There is some interesting information appearing online about the behaviour of some docters who, it seems, are putting videos of surgical operations made for “gender affirming care” onto porn sites.
“There is some … onto porn sites.” <– Blah, blah, blah, if there is any truth to it and they do not have the requisite legal releases — and reasonably likely even if they do — those surgeons if they exist will be “struck off”, in the UK parlance. So what?
To go by statistics, there “should” be about 10,000 detransitioners in the UK and US who went “all the way”. However, there are only handful of such lawsuits per year ongoing. This brings to 4 the number known to me and now 8 more rumored to exist. Keira Bell’s of course was initially successful but was reversed on appeal as her deceits and obfuscation became known to the higher court, and were Chloe Cole to sue anyone, they should sue their parents.
Four. Eight. Twelve. Whichever. It is many orders of magnitude off from supporting the Social Conservative narrative.
As accurately and delicately stated as possible, this is because the Social Conservative narrative, as all examples of progressivism are, is equine feces. [Progressivism being the certainty that your desire and design for all in society is best and can be legitimately enforced in law, the rights of others notwithstanding.]
The number of people who by whichever path they arrive there, are happily transitioned in their gender presentation with medical assistance, outnumber those who are unhappy with their decision to transition medically, by more than 99 to 1.
The argument supporting their preferred position, had from SoCons, boils down to a denial of that ratio and simultaneous discounting the worth of those who are happily transitioned — you don’t count them as really human. You lie to yourselves and say they do not really exist, but are a mental illness of some cisgender person no one has ever met or in fact will meet.
You are monstrous, you are reprehensible.
https://taliaperkinssspace.quora.com/People-are-born-transgender-they-are-not-mentally-ill-it-is-no-paraphilia-it-is-a-physical-variance-from-the-usual-at
&
https://www.quora.com/Do-you-feel-the-new-onset-of-medical-malpractice-cases-from-gender-transitioned-patients-as-minors-that-realize-the-harm-that-was-done-to-them-will-have-any-impact-on-the-new-medical-industry/answer/Talia-Perkins-5