Boeken
Hannah Barnes
TIME TOT THINK
The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children
The Times’ ‘best books of 2023’ and Financial Times’ ‘books to read’ for 2023
The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), based at the Tavistock and Portman Trust in North London, was set up initially to provide — for the most part — talking therapies to young people who were questioning their gender identity. But in the last decade GIDS has referred more than a thousand children, some as young as nine years old, for medication to block their puberty. In the same period, the number of young people seeking GIDS’s help exploded, increasing twenty-five-fold. The profile of the patients changed too: from largely pre-pubescent boys to mostly adolescent girls, who were often contending with other difficulties.
Why had the patients changed so dramatically? Were all these distressed young people best served by taking puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones, which cause irreversible changes to the body? While some young people appeared to thrive after taking the blocker, many seemed to become worse. Was there enough clinical evidence to justify such profound medical interventions in the lives of young people who had so much else to contend with?
This urgent, scrupulous and dramatic book explains how, in the words of some former staff, GIDS has been the site of a serious medical scandal, in which ideological concerns took priority over clinical practice. Award-winning journalist Hannah Barnes has had unprecedented access to thousands of pages of documents, including internal emails and unpublished reports, and well over a hundred hours of personal testimony from GIDS clinicians, former service users and senior Tavistock figures. The result is a disturbing and gripping parable for our times.
Print length: 557 pages
Stella O’Malley
What Your Teen is Trying to Tell You
Will be released on 23 March 2023
Leading psychotherapist Stella O’Malley has walked many miles on Planet Teen. She understands difficult teenagers – she was one herself, and as a psychotherapist, she has spent many hours working alongside unhappy adolescents. Stella takes parents inside the teenage brain and provides practical advice for each of the key milestones teenagers need to tackle to become happy, healthy adults.
You will learn how to navigate many issues, including obsession with technology, anxiety, body confidence, and the sexual self. You will be empowered to know when and how to intervene and when to allow your teen to work it out. Ultimately, you will understand your teen better and learn to rekindle the joy in your relationship.
Print length: 320 pages
Miriam Grossman, M.D.
Lost in TransNation
A child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness
Will be released on 13 Juin 2023
Throughout our country, atrocities are taking place in doctor’s offices and hospital operating rooms. Physically healthy children and adolescents are being permanently disfigured and sometimes sterilized. Those youth have announced they’re transgender, and we—their parents, teachers, therapists, and doctors—are supposed to at once agree with their self-diagnosis and take a back seat as they make the most consequential decision of their lives: to alter their bodies in order to, we are told, “align” them with their minds.
Medical, educational, and government authorities advise us to support the “gender journeys” of still developing, immature kids, including experimental medical interventions with poor evidence of long-term improvement.
This would not be acceptable in any other field of medicine. Indeed, the treatments our medical authorities and Washington call “crucial” and “life-saving” have been banned for minors in progressive Sweden, Finland, and Britain.
Dr. Miriam Grossman is a child and adolescent psychiatrist whose practice consists of trans-identified youth and their families. In Lost in TransNation, she implores parents to reject the advice of gender experts and politicians and trust their guts—their parental instincts—in the face of an onslaught of ideologically driven misinformation that steers them and their children toward risky decisions they may end up mourning for the rest of their lives.
The beliefs that male and female are human inventions separate from biology; that the sex of a healthy newborn is arbitrarily and often incorrectly “assigned”; and that as a result the child requires “affirmation” through medical interventions—these ideas are divorced from reality and therefore hazardous, especially to children. The core belief—that biology can and should be denied—is a repudiation of reality and a mockery of what hard science teaches about being male and female.
Dr. Grossman believes that parents know their child best; they especially know if they have a son or a daughter. But currently in our country when it comes to gender identity, everyone knows better than mom and dad. Schools hide information from parents and help students live double lives—Patrick at home, Patti at school. Activists tell kids their loving homes are “unsafe” when parents voice doubts about the child’s new identity. For refusing to see their son as their daughter, parents might be reported to protective services, a development that can lead to a family’s destruction.
Lost in TransNation arms parents with the ammunition to avoid, or, if necessary, fight what many families describe as the most difficult challenge of their lives. Parents will learn what to say and how—at home, at school, and if necessary, to police when they appear at the door.
“Don’t be blindsided like so many parents I know,” warns Grossman, “be proactive and get educated. Feel prepared and confident to discuss trans, nonbinary, or whatever your child brings to the dinner table.” Whether it’s the “trans is as common as red hair” claim, or the “I’m not your son, I’m your daughter” proclamation, or the “do you prefer a live son or a dead daughter’ threat, says Grossman, no family is immune, and every parent must be prepared.
Parents are led to believe a consensus exists about helping trans youth, but as Lost in TransNation demonstrates, there is a severe lack of knowledge, the science is far from settled, and a debate is raging. Professional standards and treatments are all over the map, and they’re being disputed in court cases and medical journals. Dr. Grossman reviews what the experts (on both sides) are arguing in those venues—parents have a right to know.
No child is born in the wrong body, Dr. Grossman reassures us, their bodies are just fine; it’s their emotional lives that need healing. Whether you’re facing a gender identity battle in your home right now, or want to prevent one, you need this book to guide you and your loved ones out of the madness.
Matt Walsh
What is a Woman
One Man’s Journey to Answer the Question of a Generation
Is this even a question? What is a woman? But all of a sudden, way too many people don’t seem to know the answer. Is a woman a woman just by feeling or acting a particular way? Aren’t gender roles just a “social construct”? Can a woman be “trapped in a man’s body”? Does being a woman mean anything at all?We used to think being a woman had something to do with biology, but the nation’s top experts keep assuring us that is definitely not the case. So Matt decided to do what no man (whatever that means) had done before. He sat down with the experts and asked them directly.In What Is a Woman?, our hero:
- Discovers that no one–not doctors, therapists, psychiatrists, or politicians–can actually define the word “woman”
- Hilariously convinces a radical gender therapist that Matt is questioning his own gender identity
- Uncovers the shocking and horrifying roots of radical gender ideology
- Learns exactly how activists and ideologues are trying to brainwash our kids
- Reveals a strategy to defeat the collective insanity that has taken over our societyJoin
Matt on his often comical, yet deeply disturbing, journey as he answers the question generations before us never knew they needed to ask: What is a woman?
Publication date: 28 July 2022
Print length: 240 pages
Dr. Debra Soh
THE END OF GENDER
Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society
International sex researcher, neuroscientist, and columnist Debra Soh debunks popular gender myths in this scientific examination of the many facets of gender identity that is not only eminently reasonable and beautifully-written, it is brave and vital (Ben Shapiro, #1 New York Times bestselling author). Is our gender something we’re born with, or are we conditioned by society? In The End of Gender, neuroscientist and sexologist Dr. Debra Soh uses a research-based approach to address this hot-button topic, unmasking popular misconceptions about the nature vs. nurture debate and exploring what it means to be a woman or a man in today’s society. Both scientific and objective, and drawing on original research and carefully conducted interviews, Soh tackles a wide range of issues, such as gender-neutral parenting, gender dysphoric children, and the neuroscience of being transgender. She debates today’s accepted notion that gender is a social construct and a spectrum, and challenges the idea that there is no difference between how male and female brains operate. The End of Gender is conversation-starting required reading (Eric R. Weinstein, PhD, host of The Portal) that will arm you with the facts you need to come to your own conclusions about gender identity and its place in the world today.
Publication date: 31 August 2021
Print length: 336 pages
Abigail Shrier
Irreversible damage
The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021 BY THE TIMES AND THE SUNDAY TIMES
“Irreversible Damage . . . has caused a storm. Abigail Shrier, a Wall Street Journal writer, does something simple yet devastating: she rigorously lays out the facts.” —Janice Turner, The Times of London
Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria—severe discomfort in one’s biological sex—was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively.
But today whole groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as “transgender.” These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans “influencers.”
Unsuspecting parents are awakening to find their daughters in thrall to hip trans YouTube stars and “gender-affirming” educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls—including medically unnecessary double mastectomies and puberty blockers that can cause permanent infertility.
Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, has dug deep into the trans epidemic, talking to the girls, their agonized parents, and the counselors and doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to “detransitioners”—young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves.
Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status, Shrier finds, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back. She offers urgently needed advice about how parents can protect their daughters.
A generation of girls is at risk. Abigail Shrier’s essential book will help you understand what the trans craze is and how you can inoculate your child against it—or how to retrieve her from this dangerous path.
Publication date: 30 June 2020
Print length: 276 pages
TRANS
When Ideology Meets Reality
Gender identity ideology is about more than twitter storms and using the right pronouns. In just ten years, laws, company policies, school and university curricula, sport, medical protocols, and the media have been reshaped to privilege self-declared gender identity over biological sex. People are being shamed and silenced for attempting to understand the consequences of redefining ‘man’ and ‘woman’. While compassion for transgender lives is well-intentioned, it is stifling much-needed inquiry into the significance of our bodies.
Publication date: 7 September 2021
Print length: 320 pages
Material Girls
Why Reality Matters for Feminism
A clear, concise, easy-to-read account of the issues between sex, gender and feminism . . . an important book’ Evening Standard ‘
A call for cool heads at a time of great heat and a vital reminder that revolutions don’t always end well’ Sunday Times Material
Girls is a timely and trenchant critique of the influential theory that we all have an inner feeling known as a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our biological sex. Professor Kathleen Stock surveys the philosophical ideas that led to this point, and closely interrogates each one, from De Beauvoir’s statement that, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’ (an assertion she contends has been misinterpreted and repurposed), to Judith Butler’s claim that language creates biological reality, rather than describing it. She looks at biological sex in a range of important contexts, including women-only spaces and resources, healthcare, epidemiology, political organization and data collection. Material Girls makes a clear, humane and feminist case for our retaining the ability to discuss reality, and concludes with a positive vision for the future, in which trans rights activists and feminists can collaborate to achieve some of their political aims.
Publication date: 6 Mai 2021
Print length: 320 pages
Susan Evans and Marcus Evans
Gender Dysphoria
A Therapeutic Model for Working with Children, Adolescents and Young Adults
In recent years, there has been an explosion in the number of children and young people who diagnose themselves as gender dysphoric, or trans. In the UK, and worldwide, there is a growing tendency to refer them on to ‘specialist gender services’ almost as soon as they express any confusion or distress about their biological sex or gender identity. Due to the rapidly rising numbers and various pressures on the system, patients are increasingly likely to be offered life-altering medication and/or surgical treatments, often with little exploration of their emotional world.
As so little is yet known or understood regarding this increase in gender incongruent patients, it seems precipitous to proceed onto physical treatments before any assessment work is undertaken. Many who present as gender dysphoric have complex needs with comorbid problems such as autism, histories of abuse or trauma, social phobias, depression, eating disorders, and other mental health symptoms. Therefore, all aspects of the individual’s life deserve thorough assessment and therapeutic work.
This book is aimed primarily at clinicians working in the field to provide a model for understanding, assessing, and treating gender dysphoria. The model uses a psychoanalytic framework to help explain disturbed states of mind and how psychic defences can be enlisted unconsciously to avoid overwhelming psychic pain. This offers professionals a way of trying to think with, and offer understanding to, their trans identifying clients. Clinical examples are given to illustrate these processes and promote the understanding of transgender children, adolescents, and young people and their internal worlds, their thinking, and their interpersonal relationships. As well as clinical exploration and understanding, the book includes an overview of the current political, social, and clinical environments which have all impacted on the clinical care of trans identifying individuals.
Publication date: 30 April 2021
Print length: 272 pages