Gender Food Thought

Food for thought; from a LCSW and medical social workers perspective.

I was also a former gender affirming medical social worker/therapist from (1994-2012).

I ceased being a gender affirming specialty in 2012, when I was consistently pressured by my colleagues (including physicians) to write letters to support gender affirming hormone treatment for some of my clients who I did not clinically believe we’re ready. Some had moderate to severe mental health issues. I was told that I just needed to write the letter and all their problems would go away, but I disagreed.

I wasn’t respected. I wasn’t listened to; instead I was ostracized and got a bad reputation among that group of colleagues.

(a few years later in 2015, a person no longer needed a therapist letter. )

More transparency is needed with the accelerated gender dysphoria medicalization of children/teens/young adults.

The first and most effective treatment is long term psychotherapy.

Personal: I am a 65 yrs old a soft butch feminist lesbian”

If I were a teenager or a young woman today, I know I would be very very influenced by social media and my peers affirming gender/trans ideology especialy if i heard that all I need to do was change my gender and be a boy/man and my body dysphoria would magically disappear.

My years of complex PTSD and cannabis addiction, self-hatred, self disregard, self abandonment would magically be healed and and I would feel whole and complete. I would love my new body and feel right in the right body as a man!

I was in my 40s before my body dysphoria begin to heal, and I begin to love myself, exactly for who I am. Still it was well into my 60’s that I truly began to completely love myself for who I am. It’s a life long journey this deconstruction of being raised as a girl and a woman and a patriarchal sexist, demoralizing society,

This is years of self affirming interveork some with psychotherapy and most with feminist goddess buddhist spirituality and the 38 yrs of recovery work of being clean and sober. All the while having the her story feed to me as a girl child and teenager woman that motherhood would save me; give me purpose give me an identity. Prove my womanhood. Heal my trauma from years of rape and sexual abuse which resulted in a pregnancy at the age of 12.

at the age of 13 after this trauma, I thought having another baby would save me and heal the grief & the trauma around my sexual abuse and the loss of my baby girl Carmelina. so I began my quest of compulsive heterosexuality, sleeping with as many boys and men as I could to prove that I wasn’t a lesbian with one intent, and that was to get pregnant . And also kind of figure what the big deal was was sleeping with men; I never figured that one out !

But in retrospect, as much as I love my children; my second pregnancy was the most naïve and delusional decision I ever made at the age of 16.

I choose teenage mother so I could prove that I was a woman, so I could emancipate myself from my abusive oppressive father , so I could prove that I wasn’t really a lesbian.

At least perhaps it might be better if I was a mother and a lesbian instead of just a lesbian?

Then my mother, sisters and aunts and society at large couldn’t completely reject me as a lesbian because I would be a mother.

But they did end up rejecting me & being repulsed by my lesbianism (all trickling down to most of the next generation of lesbian phobic nieces ) except for my nephews , the oldest of my three sisters Marie and my beloved mother; a latent lesbian herself.

A feminist who attempted to have access to birth control in 1955 and attempted unsuccessfully to have an abortion in 1960 in New York City.

As a Catholic Italian woman with no choice : She ended up with six children.

But now today in 2024 ; Lesbian is a bad word. Why is not ok for young girls to be butch, fems or androgynous lesbians?

Lesbian and Gay men have been transgressing gender boundaries and the social expectations of gender longer than any of the linguistics of gender ideology has ever been around.

Why has there been a 400% increase of tranboys and transmen in the last decade?

Why is it so terrible to be a woman?

Why is it so terrible to be a girl ? Why is so hard for butch woman to exist in world of patriarchy?

These are the questions?

Yes, Gender is a constructed patriarchal hierarchy; that has kept women in our place.