by Andrew Amos, AusPsychReview
Gender affirming doctors cause a serious form of mental illness called shared psychosis. They stop children with developmental problems learning to separate reality from fantasy. Gender identity obscures this unethical behaviour. Fantasy: Trans women are women! Reality: Trans women are men who want to be women, which is impossible.
Like the rest of modern medicine, psychiatry is being transformed from a clinical discipline focused on optimising health to a commercial activity focused on maximising revenue. Once commercial medicine realised that responsibility for patient safety was doctors’ biggest financial risk, it started limiting their exposure by offloading the risk to patients using informed consent protocols.
Gender affirming medicine would not exist without this movement to limit doctors’ duty to guard patient safety. The oath to protect patients from harm is the foundation of traditional medicine. By contrast, affirming doctors claim that it is more important to promote patients’ right to choose gender identity than to protect their physical and mental health.
The whole medical profession shares blame for allowing gender affirmation to progress beyond the experimental phase. However, psychiatry bears greater responsibility for failing to correct the false claim that transgender identities are healthy variants of normal.
Any competent doctor with a basic understanding of human psychology knows it is impossible that healthy child development includes the desire for castration, hormonal sterilisation, and amputation of the breasts. I have written other essays which examine why gender affirming care is incompatible with competent and ethical medical practice.
This essay describes a specific harm caused by gender affirming doctors: the creation and maintenance of the shared delusion that trans women are women and trans men are men. While this belief is a self-evident absurdity to everyone but trans rights activists, it has been indoctrinated into vulnerable gender confused patients to leverage their distress for political purposes.