Transgender tots? And ‘recovered memories’ hysteria

In the last few years, a new sexual liberation movement, transgenderism, has arisen.

It is complete with an ideology: A person can be born into the “wrong” sex and can correct that problem by amputations, hormones, change of name, pronouns and dress, demand for full public recognition as a member of the other sex, and punishment of those who simply do not believe it.

The ideology assumes that the mind can be at complete odds with the body and that the sex determination of every cell in the body in most humans is irrelevant. Recently, for example, we learned from a Dallas TV news outlet: “Marilyn, who was a boy at birth, returned to Cannon Elementary School in Grapevine this year as a transgender girl. The third grader says many of her classmates and teachers didn’t embrace the change.”

The trouble was that the children insisted that Marilyn was still really a boy.

We are also told, “A couple of weeks ago, the 8-year-old loved being the center of attention and even asked to be part of the Pride Parade in Dallas. But at school, she says she was alienated due to constant bullying from some of her peers about her gender identity.”

The child is being educated at home for now.

If you are wondering how likely it is that this transgender drama truly originated with and is continuously sustained by the child, you may find the “recovered memories ” movement of the 1980s and ‘90s of interest.

“Repressed memory” is a concept in Freudian psychoanalysis: According to the theory, when childhood sexual abuse happens, we store it in our unconscious, where we cannot access it.

Late poor functioning in adulthood is traced to a resulting dissociative disorder or multiple personality disorder also called “dissociative disorder.”

Many mid-life women who underwent recovered memories therapy at that time suddenly recalled having been sexually abused. Popular media jumped on the sensational stories emerging from therapy: Roseanne Barr was featured on People’s cover in 1991 (“A Star Cries Incest”), as was a former Miss America three months earlier. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Seventeen, Glamour, Newsweek, and Time weighed in. Continue reading

  • Denyse O’Leary is an author, journalist, and blogger who has mainly written popular science and social science.
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