There Is A Big Discussion Going On In WPATH

Over the closing of CAMH, if you are trans you probably already know what CAMH is Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and what doctor worked there, Dr. Zucker who is loved by some and hated by others. Last week New York Magazine wrote an article about him saying the he was railroaded out and now there is an article in the Globe & Mail about him and CAMH.

Gender identity debate swirls over CAMH psychologist, transgender program
By Erin Anderssen
Published Sunday, Feb. 14, 2016

At a private Toronto gathering to honour psychologist Ken Zucker last December, days after he was dismissed from his job at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, colleagues stood to give warm tributes. Some of them had come with prepared speeches, expressing shock over the closing of the Gender Identity Clinic, which Dr. Zucker had run for more than 30 years.

The decision was made under a cloud; Dr. Zucker was called in, given the news by an HR staffer and escorted out the door. Officials at CAMH, one of Canada’s leading mental-health hospitals, apologized publicly that the clinic’s therapy was not “in step with the latest thinking” and released an external review that was critical of the way the clinic treated children and youth struggling with issues relating to their gender identity. By closing the clinic, CAMH also walked away from a $1-million grant that had been awarded to Dr. Zucker and his team to study the effect of hormone blockers on teenagers. Those grants, in a country stingy with research dollars, are not easy to get.

The article discussed both sides of the debate.

When it came his turn to speak, Dr. Zucker, 65, was composed, according to several people at the gathering. “There’s no crying in baseball,” the avid Blue Jays fan reportedly said, in his deep, gruff voice. He was quoting Tom Hanks from the movie A League of Their Own, which, as it happens, portrays a women’s team temporarily gender-swapping the role of male baseball players during the Second World War.

Dr. Zucker went on to share a story about his Jewish father, a graduate student of history in New York City in the 1950s, who had found himself out of work and blacklisted for his socialist views. Dr. Zucker’s family left New York, settling into a Chicago suburb, where his father was an editor for the Encyclopedia Britannica and his mother was the director of a nursery school. In a 2013 interview with the left-leaning magazine The American Prospect, Dr. Zucker explained his parents’ decision to “disappear from the scene” and take up a mainstream middle-class existence. “For the sake of their children,” he is quoted saying, “they needed to become conformist.”

The controversy is over his treatment of gender variant children.

The story Dr. Zucker told at the party is revealing on another level: The notion that conformity brings safety and clarity, and that difference is a risk, is a regular theme in his research. If one can find a way to live happily inside the boy-girl boxes that biology and culture have designed, wouldn’t that be better? Dr. Zucker believed this – he advised parents, for instance, to limit how much their sons played with dolls and dresses, and to hold off when their daughters wanted to change their names in elementary school.

Dr. Zucker’s approach made him a polarizing figure in an emotional debate about how to best treat children and teenagers not so easily pushed back into one box or the other. It put him at odds with a society increasingly willing to allow children to take the lead on how they define their gender. The other side of therapy says: Who cares, in the end, if a boy wants to wear a princess dress, or Martha wants to be called Martin?

And that is the heart of the matter. Trying to force the child into the gendered boxes and following the child’s lead on their gender identity. In one case parents let the child play whichever toys that “he” wanted and that was with Barbie, when “he” was bullied the parents went to see Dr. Zucker and he…

So, in late 2007, they went to see Dr. Zucker. After lengthy family interviews and tests, he laid out his recommended treatment. “It was not offensive or cruel to us,” recalls Carol, who detailed the family’s experience to The Globe and Mail, but asked their identity be protected “It seemed pretty flexible.” As Dr. Zucker explained it to Carol, his theory was to help kids value the “body they have.” In that case, it meant helping her son see that “you may want to be a girl, but it’s okay to be a boy.” Carol says she and her husband had only one agenda for their son: “It was 100 per cent about his happiness.”

For the next year, they visited the clinic twice a week, and then roughly once a week for nearly three years after that. Their son would have play therapy while Carol and her husband would meet with Dr. Zucker. At home, they slowly took away the dolls and pink toys, with their son choosing which ones. “He would be upset,” Carol admits, “and ask for them the next day.” But his favourites remained, and the missing toys were replaced with “gender neutral” options, such as Lego and toy animals. “Her son,” Carol insists, “never touched a truck unless he tripped over it.”
[…]
Carol believes that Dr. Zucker’s advice worked for her son, who is now a popular gay 13-year-old. He doesn’t talk about wanting to be a girl any more, though Carol says they are careful not assume his path is set. “The biggest and most important thing I hold on to as a mother, was that when he was young, he would never talk about his future, never talk about himself as an adult.” Now, she says, he is making plans. “This was a healthy outcome for us.” She gives Dr. Zucker the credit: “I know the positive impact his therapy had on the culture of our family.”

But…

A year later, their child told them what she had been feeling for years: She was transgender. This time, her parents took her to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, where the truth spilled out and she was given hormone blockers to slow puberty.

She finally told them: “Every birthday, every time I blew out the candles, I wished to be a girl.” She admitted to hiding costumes and wigs so she wouldn’t get in “trouble,” and expressed anger that her parents had not asked her more about how she was feeling, and that they had waited so long to start the hormone treatment.

What we need is more research to help understand how to identify trans children, we need long term studies to better understand the best treatment for trans children, that million dollars research grant could have gone a long ways to help our understanding, but CAMH was not the best organization to do the study.