Transgender surgeries and cross-sex hormones represent downstream effects of a basic failure in therapy that sets patients up for long-term harm, warns a former trauma clinician who now crafts policy to protect people from these experimental “treatments.”
Therapists who try to treat people with gender dysphoria—the painful and persistent identification with the gender opposite one’s biological sex—often recommend patients undergo medical interventions to make a man appear female or vice versa. This represents a lack of hope, Dr. Jennifer Bauwens told The Daily Signal.
The decision to “medicalize” a patient, rather than trying to treat underlying psychological trauma, traces back to a therapist’s lack of faith in his or her own abilities.
“If you really have hope that your method could change [the underlying issues], you’d keep it in your clinical space, but the fact that there isn’t a lot of hope for seeing these people change who are struggling with this distress, it’s like we have to outsource it to other ways of handling it,” argued Bauwens, director of American Values at America First Policy Institute.
“I was trained to think that if I don’t have hope for a client, that’s time for a referral,” the former clinician explained.
“Goals of therapy should be, first and foremost, let’s reduce the distress that people are feeling over their bodies,” Bauwens argued. “It should not be, ‘Let’s transform their bodies to look like something else.’ We need to be about helping people to form their identity in what their biological sex is.”
“We don’t need people to become somebody else—that’s actually pathological,” she added.
An Ideological Echo Chamber
The medical industry has started to move against “gender-affirming care,” but the psychotherapy profession is likely to lag, Bauwens warned.
The Department of Health and Human Services has concluded that there is little evidence for positive impacts from transgender medical interventions on minors, but it found many documented harms.
A jury recently awarded a detransitioner $2 million, finding that the medical professionals who carried out sex-rejecting procedures on her were liable for medical malpractice.
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons released a statement recommending against transgender surgery for minors under 19, leading other medical associations to follow suit.
Even so, Bauwens expressed skepticism that therapy will follow this trend.
“When I went for tenure track positions, one of the things that I was told was that we want you to take your students out and do protests,” she recalled. While most of the protests at that time centered on the Black Lives Matter narrative after the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, her experience revealed the activist bias in these schools.
She warned that many programs act “like a sort of think tank—if you will—for some of the Democratic policies that are being pushed.”
A 2012 survey found that liberals outnumber conservatives in psychology by a ratio of 14 to 1. Studies in 2019 and 2021 found a similar overall bias. According to OpenSecrets, health professionals contributed $35.3 million to Democrat Kamala Harris and only $11.5 million to Republican Donald Trump in the 2024 election cycle. The three top contributors gave 100% of their donations to Democrats and left-wing groups.
Bauwens noted the profession’s political slant, saying, “that gives you an idea of the research that’s coming out of the field, and what the worldview is that drives it, and also the practice and the training.”
She argued that the profession “needs to be reformed.”
“It needs to be dealt with, so that people can actually get help in their time of crisis and not be led astray,” Bauwens said.
Combatting ‘Social Transition’
Last week, Bauwens released model legislation to protect children from “social transition,” the process of using female pronouns for a boy who identifies as a girl and treating him as a girl—or vice versa.
Psychiatrist Dr. Stephen B. Levine has argued that social transition “is a powerful psychotherapeutic intervention that radically changes outcomes,” making patients far more likely to take “puberty blockers,” cross-sex hormones, or full genital surgeries.
Bauwens cites research showing that without this intervention, 65% to 94% of minors who suffer from gender dysphoria will ultimately grow to resolve their discomfort with their sex.
Her draft legislation would designate social transition “a psychological intervention that lacks empirical evidence demonstrating effectiveness or safety as a treatment for gender dysphoria and has been documented to cause psychological and physical harm.”
The legislation would forbid adopting names or pronouns inconsistent with a minor’s sex; permitting access to sex-segregated spaces of the opposite sex; modifying school records or identification documents to contradict a minor’s sex; and providing resources to encourage a transgender identity.
In part by forbidding social transition, Bauwens aims to empower therapists to actually help patients resolve gender dysphoria, rather than encouraging them to go under the knife, altering their bodies to resolve what really is a mental struggle.
Giving therapists hope that they can resolve these problems for patients would go a long way toward a larger goal, she argued.
“We need to make therapy great again,” Bauwens said.
