Literature Updates:
Parallels Between Lobotomy and Childhood Gender Transition
(a new piece on my blog)
Before sharing this piece I want to clearly state my perspective on a few key issues:
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- Adults who chose to medically transition deserve the best care medicine can afford them. Well-researched interventions with thorough long-term follow-up and robust informed consent are necessary.
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- Advocates for ethical care of transgender and gender dysphoric patients such as Buck Angel, Scott Newgent, GCCAN, and UK Tavistock whistle-blowers like Marcus Evans and Dr. David Bell are key players in creating greater accountability for gender clinics, doctors, and surgeons. However, the regulation of largely experimental procedures shouldn’t be the responsibility of the patient or the practicing clinician through litigation and whistle-blowing, respectively.
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- Drugs and surgeries should be well researched before being publicly touted as “cures” for children’s gender dysphoria.
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- In writing this, I do not imply that the provision of transgender medical care should be stopped or completely discarded. Instead, this piece serves as a warning about medical hubris, media sensationalism, and overselling experimental medicine as a cure for a condition with a weak theoretical basis that is likely spread through social contagion.
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- This piece is about the quick adoption of a radical medical procedure and it’s use in a vulnerable population. It is not an implication that individuals who undergo and regret medical transgender treatment are harmed to the same extent as lobotomized patients. Detransitioning individuals, even when they regret some or all of their medical transition, still have very bright and hopeful futures with great potential for healing and meaning-making.
My source for research on lobotomy:
Elliot Valenstein is an expert in the field of brain stimulation and psychosurgery. In addition to being an author, Valenstein is a psychology and neuroscience professor. Psychosurgery is a broad category of brain surgeries that aim to alter mental illness, mood, or personality by destroying brain tissue. During his research in 1981, Valenstein discovered that lobotomy (a radical and devastating type of psychosurgery developed in the 1930s), rather than having been practiced in the margins, was part of mainstream psychiatry in the late 1940s. Becoming interested in how this came to be, Valenstein researched the rapid rise of lobotomy and published his book in 1986.
As I read this heavily researched and horrifying history, I was struck by many parallels between lobotomy and childhood gender transition. In this post, I lay out some of these similarities.
I will include hyperlinks to all sources and include images from the book’s text.
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