"Gender Exploratory Therapy": A New Anti-trans Conversion Therapy With A Misleading Name
"Gender Exploratory Therapy": A New Anti-trans Conversion Therapy With A Misleading Name
You should know about gender exploratory therapy. This therapy seeks to "explore" why a trans person is trans while keeping HRT "several months away." They never intend to allow transition.
With transgender people being left out of conversion therapy bans and states passing bans on gender affirming care, you should be aware of the rise of a new form of conversion therapy for trans people: gender exploratory therapy. Gender exploratory therapy has a seemingly innocuous name - who would be against gender exploration? Even liberal, well-meaning parents can hear it and imagine it being a respectful and beneficial approach to psychological care for their trans youth. What they don’t know is that this form of therapy actually seeks to “explore” all of the reasons for dysphoria other than being transgender until they find one that convinces a trans person to no longer be trans while keeping hormone therapy just out of reach - they exclude being transgender as an end point. It’s important to note that there is no “stop” point - it keeps going until the trans person is “no longer trans” or ages out. This form of conversion therapy has appeared everywhere from Texas courts to Florida’s transition ban to the UK’s NHS. The growing promotion of GET from anti-trans forces worldwide should be frightening to all lawmakers and organizations and must be taken seriously.
Gender Exploratory Therapy was first coined in a paper by London psychologist Anastassis Spiladias in 2018 and later championed by multiple anti-trans organizations in 2020-2022 including Genspect, Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, Transgender Trend, Sex Change Regret, and dozens of others. All of these organizations have lobbied for a rollback of transgender healthcare protections. Many have ties to conversion therapists. The fake-science, anti-trans group Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, which has extensive ties to evangelical and conversion therapy groups, has pushed it heavily. Genspect, which has also pushed it, notably has advocated for restrictions on transgender care up to the age of 25. Experts from both were part of the Florida ban on gender affirming care for trans youth, with members from Genspect sitting on the board.
GET is primarily aimed at adolescents and teenagers. Though it can take on many forms, it often starts with a gender dysphoric transgender teenager wishing to start puberty blockers or hormone therapy. A gender exploratory therapist will then begin “psychotherapy” with the goal of finding any other explanation for a transgender person’s gender dysphoria. It is important to note that the transgender person being trans will never be an acceptable answer to most gender exploratory therapists - this is part of the point. Many times they’ll hold medical transition as something that they will allow, write a letter for, etc. only after “everything else has been explored,” a goal they never intend to achieve. Researcher Florence Ashley writes that some of the “explanations” the therapists explore for being trans are trauma, sexual abuse, internalized misogyny, internalized homophobia, social contagion, that it is a sexual fetish, autism, and more.
The goal of this therapy is sinister. By continuing to explore avenue after avenue, they run the clock out on puberty blockers and hormone therapy in the teenage years. Each avenue is a dead end for trans people due to the lack of acceptance that “being trans” is ever an adequate explanation - transgender identification is regarded as a “failure.” The purpose of gender exploratory therapy is to get a teen far enough into puberty that they feel transition is impossible - a traumatic experience. SEGM, which pushes GET, actively maintains the position that puberty will cause trans kids to desist. We already know from research that this course of action is extremely dangerous - youth who want gender affirming care but do not receive it have a 53% higher chance of suicide attempt. If they do not “desist,” they’ll continue until the teenager ages out of therapy. Both of these are successes to GET proponents, because the goal of the organizations that push it is “100% desistance” - an elimination of all trans identification among youth:
In many senses, gender exploratory therapy operates in a similar fashion to crisis pregnancy centers, which seek to delay abortion until abortion is no longer an option. Lee Leveille at Health Liberation Now! has documented how many conservative Christian groups have backed the push for gender exploratory therapy. Groups like the Catholic Psychotherapy Association publish information that link to the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association. Jason Evert, a prominent Catholic speaker, founded the Chastity Project linking to the GETA for psychological support - Evert is also a supporter of crisis pregnancy centers.
The methodology of blaming being transgender on many other things and denying that a transgender identity actually exists is wholesale lifted from gay conversion therapy in the 1990s. Often, gay conversion therapists blamed several different etiologies for being gay: poor family dynamics, sexual abuse, trauma, feeling of being an outsider, gender nonconformity, social contagion/grooming, borderline personality disorder. Many of these are directly found in anti-trans organizations who support gender exploratory therapy, such as Parents of ROGD Kids:
Ky Schevers, a famous ex-detransitioner who was once a major figure in the anti-trans movement, has since retransitioned and talked about her own experiences with gender exploratory therapy. She notes that gender exploratory therapists tried to link her own trans identity with past trauma. “Coming to see my transition, trans identity & gender dysphoria as being linked to past trauma increased my depression, self-hatred, shame, and suicidal ideation. It didn't help me heal from my past trauma & it didn't "cure" me from being trans, it just traumatized me further,” Ky tweets. This is consistent with most research on conversion therapy practices actually increasing negative mental health outcomes. Jack Turban’s research showed that transgender survey respondents who identified that they were exposed to gender conversion therapy were twice as likely to attempt suicide. The harms of conversion therapy are well documented and include suicide, depression, substance abuse, decrease self-esteem, and trauma.
Yet we continue to see gender exploratory Therapy pushed into the mainstream. The inflammatory Reuters article over puberty blockers parroted claims from supporters of gender exploratory Therapy like Dr. Erica Anderson that transgender identities are caused by mental health problems. In Texas after Greg Abbott declared that all parents of trans kids on puberty blockers would be investigated for child abuse, the state fronted arguments that alternative therapies for gender dysphoria should be used as a defense of their new policy. In Florida, the AHCA has advocated directly for gender exploratory therapy as they banned trans youth from gender affirming care. Just this week, the UK was found to be pushing gender exploratory therapy in the NHS. In all of these examples, gender affirming care is withheld.
Resaercher Florence Ashley has been extremely effective in showing how this therapy is anything but “exploratory.” In their article titled Interrogating Gender-Exploratory Therapy, she lists several purposefully leading questions for gender exploratory therapy proponents to answer. I have selected a few of them here to illustrate the way that gender exploratory therapy actually does not seek to explore gender dysphoria, treats transgender identities as a failure, and is not a value neutral therapy modality:
3.How do you distinguish, for example, trauma that caused someone to be trans from trauma that a trans person happens to have? Do you trust the client’s views? Would you equally trust clients’ view that their gender identity or gender dysphoria is and is not grounded in trauma? Why or why not?
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5.If clients eventually come to identify as cisgender, do you wind down gender-exploratory therapy, or do you continue at a similar pace to ensure that their reidentification is genuine and not itself a coping or adaptive/maladaptive response? Why or why not?
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8.If the psychotherapeutic attempt to treat gender identity and/or gender dysphoria proves unsuccessful, would you consider recommending gender-affirming care? Under what conditions?
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14.What pronouns and gendered terms do you use during gender-exploratory therapy? Do you use terms desired by clients or terms that reflect their gender assigned at birth, or do you avoid pronouns and gendered terms altogether? Do you see using terms reflecting the client’s gender assigned at birth as a neutral option? Why or why not?
Source: (Ashley 2022)
I suspect the answer to many of these would be obvious given what we I have covered. There are not efforts to distinguish trauma that “caused someone to be trans” from trauma that a trans person happens to have. The termination point, as mentioned before and advocated by organizations like Genspect, is when a transgender person desists and no longer identifies as trans. That is the only time gender exploratory therapy is winded down. Most gender exploratory therapists will never prescribe gender affirming care. Lastly, it is clear from reading the reports of those who have gone through gender exploratory therapy that their genders are not affirmed and pronouns are often neutral or of the patient’s assigned sex at birth.
Gender exploratory therapy is clearly a new form of conversion therapy, and it is gaining footholds in places where gender affirming care for trans youth are banned. It must be opposed like any other form of conversion therapy. The damage it causes is immense, and many people will suffer for a long time because of it. I solicited experiences from my own audience and received an outpouring of stories of trauma and abuse from people who had experienced gender exploratory therapy. I will leave you with a few of the nearly 100 replies I received:
This is such an abhorrent way of offering “help” to youth that are in need of understanding and legitimate medical care.
This is so fucked up…. They actually found a way to make conversion therapy worse. At least conversion therapy is honest about what it’s trying to achieve. And “enlightened” centrists will see this as some sort of sensible compromise on the “transgender question”. Any therapist who practices this has no business being in their field.