A Practical Response to Gender Distress: A Review

Review of A Practical Response to Gender Distress, by Pamela Garfield-Jaeger LCSW, MS

Oh, how I wish I had this book when our daughter proclaimed she was trans five years ago. I would have been much better prepared to protect her from misguided friends, teachers, and doctors who cheered on her social transition. It’s been a torturous, unremitting period of suffering for her and for our family. While A Practical Response to Gender Distress by California-based social worker Pamela Garfield-Jaeger (The Truthful Therapist) is not (nor does it try to be) a one-size-fits-all treatment protocol for gender distress, families in situations like mine will find a broad array of tips, stats, quotes from detransitioners and other experts, resource lists, and an impressive trans-English glossary. The author manages to briefly explain the societal context, causes, and dangerous misconceptions that are impacting a generation of vulnerable youth. It’s all simply articulated and ready for readers to employ as they trudge through the gender minefield in schools, therapists’ and doctors’ offices, dinner conversations, and long dark nights of the soul.

Written with compassion and a firm grasp on the science, Garfield-Jaeger begins the book with her own “Rip Van Winkle” story: A licensed clinical social worker in a variety of settings since 1997, poor health forced Garfield-Jaeger to take a break in 2016. She didn’t return to work for four years. Her absence from the mental health profession spans the explosion of gender ideology & trans rights activism in our society, not to mention the COVID-19 shutdown. Garfield-Jaegar discovered upon her return that, when it came to gender-distressed young people, her colleagues were failing to provide any kind of therapy and were instead allowing the patients to lead the direction of their treatments, which were invasive and often harmful. The social influence was obvious, but nobody seemed brave enough to speak up against the narrative of a sudden wave of kids “born in the wrong body.” Luckily for parents everywhere, Garfield-Jaeger couldn’t keep quiet. In 2022, she began to publicly air her concerns about the direction of the mental health field, and she has since been featured in three documentaries about the harms of gender medicine.

Throughout reading A Practical Response to Gender Distress, I caught myself audibly concurring with Garfield-Jaeger. Point by concise point, she nails so many of our family’s experiences and observations—things it took us years to figure out on our own, laid out in an organized, calm, highly readable manner. In a chapter called Why are Kids Doing This? I recognized my daughter’s underlying issues in Garfield-Jaeger’s descriptions. Elsewhere, she offers warning signs that a child is being lured into gender ideology, complete with a list of online influencers she recommends parents familiarize themselves with. There’s a plainly worded section on the alarming harms of the affirmation model including side effects of binding, hormones, and surgeries. Later, she addresses the suicide myth and how parents can counter it with doctors/therapists/schools, and she provides a script of questions parents can use to screen therapists. I particularly loved her chapter on pronouns, and her reasoned dissection of why they do matter so very, very much, along with a list of statements adults and kids can use to respectfully decline participating in pronoun culture. Garfield-Jaeger covers all this and more. Reader, I am wowed.

A Practical Response to Gender Distress is an invaluable new addition to a thankfully growing body of literature supporting a measured, do-no-harm approach to treating gender distress. I will be buying extra copies to give to parents, teachers, and other concerned humans I know who sense something has gone terribly wrong around this issue but can’t put their finger on how. I’m doubtless Pamela Garfield-Jaeger will help many people crystalize their thinking and talking points, which is precisely what’s needed to move the culture to a healthier place.