Introducing the updated Genspect Glossary

Language is a hotly contested battleground on all sides of the debate about sex and gender.When trans activists aren’t inventing entirely new words (think ‘cisgender’, ‘genderqueer’ and ‘non-binary) they are trying to change the meaning of existing ones (think ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘sex’), often by shaming, cancelling and sometimes even suing people who disagree. On the other hand, critics of trans ideology have disputes of their own about language, including over whether the term ‘gender identity’ should be used at all.

To say that confusion arises when these divergent definitions meet in the real world would be an understatement. As a series of legal cases in the UK amply demonstrate, itis difficult to resolve disputes about issues like single sex spaces when each side has a different definition of ‘biological sex’. According to Dr Upton, the trans identified male doctor at the heart of the Peggie v NHS Fife case, sex is self-identified, and all humans are ‘biological’; therefore, he is biologically female. From the perspective of Sandie Peggie, the nurse who objected to Upton’s presence in the women’s changing room, sex is a matter of biology, and Upton remains male regardless of how he self-identifies.

As this example illustrates, grappling with contemporary debates about sex and gender requires an understanding of how terms are used in context, and how their meanings can vary according to the orientation and contingent beliefs of the speaker. The updated Genspect Glossary aims to provide this contextual understanding while clearly spelling out how Genspect uses these terms in our work. The Glossary was compiled by four people working together, and we didn’t always agree about how each term should be defined. Even so, we think this is a good working draft, and we welcome constructive feedback from Genspect’s followers.

Take, for example, the term ‘Gender’, the conflicting definitions of which have given rise to two opposing worldviews that regularly clash in the public square. Although gender is often used as a polite synonym for sex, it’s also the word used to describe sex based stereotypes associated with being either male or female. The term ‘Gender Identity’ takes things one step further by suggesting that we all have an inner sense of whether our gender is male, female, or something else, and that this innate gendered essence may be at odds with our sexed body.

Many people, not least feminists, take issue with the idea that we all have an identity related to where we fall on a spectrum of sex based stereotypes. Feminist campaigners have traditionally argued that such stereotypes are socially constructed and regressive. Still others straightforwardly reject the notion that they have a gendered inner identity that goes beyond simple recognition of their sexed body.

Belief or otherwise in the concept of gender identity intimately shapes the language choices and worldviews expressed in the wider debate about sex and gender. People who believe in gender identity are likely to accept the existence of a discrete class of ‘Transgender’ people, people who can objectively be said to have been ‘born in the wrong body’ due to having a gender identity that doesn’t match their biological sex. People who believe in gender identity are also likely to believe that it is literally possible to change sex, or that trans identified people automatically belong to the opposite sex class simply by virtue of their self-identified gender.

For people who reject the concept of gender identity, self-identified gender remains a subjective, unverifiable belief, much like a religious belief in the soul. On the other hand, for those who believe in gender identity the possibility of changing sex, or of being a female person with a male body, acquires the status of objective fact. Inevitably there are fireworks when these two worldviews collide in debates about access to single sex spaces and services.

According to Helen Pluckrose, author of Cynical Theories, we have the postmodern turn in academia to thank for much of today’s confusion over language. Pluckrose argues that activists informed by postmodern theory have come to view language as entirely socially constructed, a mechanism for upholding unequal power relations rather than a functional means of communicating shared concepts and describing reality

Ironically, one of the major consequences of this has been to distract attention from efforts to address the material causes of inequality. Convinced that controlling language is the most effective way to change society, activists informed by postmodernism often spend more time policing speech than they do trying to improve the lives of the minorities they claim to represent. Consider the energy expended over the last decade by trans activists trying to forcibly redefine the word ‘woman’, or mandate the use of preferred pronouns in workplaces and schools. Trans identified people might have been better served had that energy been directed towards expanding access to gender neutral spaces and services, working towards practical compromise rather than playing authoritarian language games.

Those of us who are critical of trans ideology must be careful not to fall into the same trap. It is tempting to believe that we can change reality simply by changing the words we use to talk about things, or by insisting that others communicate only in terms we find acceptable. Stamping out the use of the term ‘gender identity’ won’t stop distressed children who think they have one from seeking out dangerous medical interventions. Railing against the use of the word ‘transgender’ won’t magically disappear the cohort of people who believe they are the opposite sex. If only it were so easy.

Language is more than a political or ideological device that can be manipulated to limit the terms of debate. It’s a practical tool that we use to communicate about our shared world. While it might be important to clarify our terms, we should always be more interested in the ideas and experiences that someone is trying to communicate, rather than the individual words they use to make their point.

You can read the Genspect Glossary here.

The post The Language We Need appeared first on Genspect.

In Genderworld, everyone’s fighting a different fight on the same battlefield. The feminists are smashing the patriarchy, the academics are saving academia, the left are rescuing humanity from far-right fascists, and the right are gallantly saving it from left-wing loons. Meanwhile, influencers are selling merch, commentators are chasing clicks, professionals are marking their territory, and activists are stretching for their next moral victory on Twitter.

Perhaps that’s why, since Genspect’s launch in June 2021, people have been suspicious. Whose side are you on? they ask, narrowing their eyes as if we’re hiding a manifesto up our sleeve.

But Genspect has no hidden agenda. Our only interest is uncovering the truth about the trans phenomenon, not advancing a cause. Full disclosure: if Genspect fits anywhere politically, it’s within the classical liberal tradition — one that values open dialogue, individual freedom, and resistance to dogma. And just to be clear, that’s not “liberal” in the American sense.[1]

That’s why we welcome a range of voices – as long as they’re civil, well-informed, and willing to engage in honest debate, we’re happy to offer a platform. We’ve said the same thing since day one: the trans issue demands objectivity, evidence, and open dialogue. From our very first article, published on launch day, Genspect set out its mission clearly. We take an explicitly cross-partisan, evidence-based approach to one of the most divisive issues of our time.

Still, assumptions persist. So this year, we decided to test them.

We conducted a conference survey of roughly 300 participants in Albuquerque, New Mexico to finally figure out who supports Genspect. Not everyone filled the online survey out, yet enough did for it to be representative.

So what does the survey tell us about the Genspect community? You can follow this link for the detailed results, but here are some highlights.

To start with, the sex breakdown was roughly 76% women and 23% men. Around 39% of delegates were parents of trans-identified children, and 95.5% of those parents believed the term “ROGD” accurately described their child’s experience.

For 60% of participants, it was their first Genspect conference. Overall, the results reflected a group of people looking for sanity, clarity, and accurate information. When asked why they were interested in Genspect, 74% said they were concerned about youth transition, and 73% said they believed the world had gone mad and were looking for sanity. (Participants could tick more than one box.) Sixty-five percent were worried about women’s rights, 48% had a loved one who was gender dysphoric, and 21% were professionals working with gender-distressed individuals.

Now for the big one – politics. Apparently, we’re either a right-wing conspiracy or a left-wing plot, depending on who you ask. Everyone was convinced they were surrounded by the opposition. Republicans told me the place was crawling with Democrats, while Democrats wondered whether they’d wandered into a MAGA rally by mistake. It turns out – quelle surprise – they were both wrong, and both right. In reality, 35.5% described themselves as left of center, 28% as center, and 36.5% as right of center.

As the left-right divide is arguably an anachronism that no longer captures the realities of modern politics, we also asked delegates where they placed themselves on the libertarian-authoritarian scale. This proved especially revealing: 52.5% leaned libertarian, 41% were centrist, and only 6.4% identified as authoritarian.

Thus, the data suggests that most attendees lean toward a “live and let live” philosophy, whatever their place on the political spectrum. This was reflected in the finding that 77% supported gay marriage, 9% were unsure, and 13% opposed it. Likewise, 83% believed gay people should have employment protections, with 10% uncertain and 7% opposed.

When it came to transgender issues, however, the mood shifted. 43% supported employment protections for transgender people, while 32% were uncertain and 25% opposed. The message seems clear: most believe that people who have transitioned deserve the same protections as everyone else — no more, no less. It may also suggest that some attendees view medical transition as a mental health issue rather than an immutable identity.

Next up, religion. Genspect is apparently both too religious and not religious enough – depending on who you ask. At the conference, atheists grumbled about “too much God talk,” while the religious crowd sighed that there wasn’t enough. I took it as a sign we’d found the sweet spot: when both sides are complaining, you’re probably getting it right.

In fact, 27% of attendees were active members of an organized religion, 20% believed in God but didn’t participate in organized religion, 17% were agnostic, and 20% were atheist. A broad church indeed – and we like it that way.

As for worldview, 75% described themselves as gender critical, 73% as scientifically minded, 51% as classical liberals, 40% as feminists, 39% as TERFs, 8% as radical feminists, and 3% as detransitioners or desisters.

Genspect’s delegates tend to be experts in their own fields. Medical professionals once claimed ownership of this domain, but it’s clear that many have failed to grasp the broader social and political forces driving the crisis. Those drawn to Genspect understand these realities as academics, scientists, philosophers, lawyers, clinicians, teachers, parents, and thinkers who’ve watched the system fail in real time. Their insight is grounded in experience, knowledge, and the courage to ask the questions officialdom avoids.

It turns out that, far from being a tribe of ideologues, Genspect supporters come from every corner of the political spectrum. Ever since its inception, Genspect has had to navigate the tribalism of modern politics. We are proudly cross-partisan – open to speaking with anyone. Yet the hyper-tribal nature of today’s politics can make our classically liberal stance feel almost impossible.

In a bid to explore forward-thinking solutions, we asked survey participants where they saw potential for real progress — what kind of policies could steer us out of the ideological swamp. Regarding the availability of medical transition, 33.5% said it should not be available to adults “under any circumstances,” while 16.2% said it should be available only “with strict safeguards.”

Echoing our forthcoming Gender Framework, when asked how society should balance the rights of transgender people with the rights of women and children, 91% said we need to prioritize biological sex over gender identity.

On the question of funding for medical transition, 47.0% believed it should be funded only through private means; 42.4% said it should not be funded under any circumstances; 5.7% favored public or insurance coverage with strict safeguards in place; and 0.4% supported funding on request with informed consent.

Looking ahead, few delegates (just 2.8%) thought more research was the answer to the current crisis in trans issues. Most (38%) pointed to legal and policy reform, while 24% favored raising public awareness — my own preferred route, since there’s no policy fix for mass misinformation.

Many delegates spoke about a sense of relief during the conference — the freedom to speak felt like throwing open a window in a stifled room. Yet that same freedom has been shadowed by the threat of violence. The assassination of Charlie Kirk hung over the conference like a storm cloud. We spent tens of thousands on security — far more than we ever anticipated — and chose our venue largely for safety reasons. That’s the price of speaking freely in 2025: bodyguards, metal detectors, and endless, exhausting, expensive protocols. All to ensure that no one is shot dead for the “crime” of expressing an unpopular opinion.

It’s a grim measure of how far we’ve drifted that speaking freely now feels like an act of rebellion. The gender wars have worked a strange, dark magic, turning mild-mannered liberals into the new radicals. The same people who once trusted the establishment now get called fascists by the very institutions they once relied on — simply for using biological terms correctly. Many who once assumed free speech was safely secured, a battle long since won, now whisper for permission to speak the truth.

At Genspect, we pride ourselves on cultural humility — recognizing that we don’t know what we don’t know, and that none of us has a monopoly on wisdom. This spirit shapes everything we do, from the speakers we invite to the tone of our discussions.

Still, tribalists struggle to believe that we don’t have a hidden agenda. The more conspiratorial insist we’ve been infiltrated by one side or the other.

But the data tells a different story. The people drawn to Genspect aren’t extremists. We come from all sides, all backgrounds, all belief systems. We argue, we disagree, and we challenge each other — but always with respect and curiosity. As long as children and vulnerable people are being harmed, we’ll keep the conversation going.

[1] Note – Classical liberalism is not “liberal” in the American sense of the word. It’s a political and economic philosophy that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, emphasizing individual liberty, limited government, free markets, private property, and the rule of law. Rooted in Enlightenment ideas from thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith, classical liberalism prioritizes personal freedom, economic autonomy, and protection from state interference, viewing government primarily as a guarantor of individual rights rather than a provider of social welfare.

Meanwhile, in the contemporary United States, a liberal typically refers to someone who supports a more active role for government in addressing social and economic inequality, advocates for civil rights, environmental protection, and progressive social policies, and upholds individual freedoms within a framework of social justice. American liberalism, shaped by Roosevelt’s New Deal and various civil rights movements, contrasts with classical liberalism by favoring state intervention to promote equality and collective well-being.

The post Who Comes to a Genspect Conference?<br> <span style='font-size: 50%; line-height: 1;'>(The Results Might Surprise You)</span> appeared first on Genspect.

Since the launch of our re-psychopathologization campaign, important concerns about our choice of language have been raised. At Genspect, we welcome diverse opinions and constructive criticism. 

To be clear: the term re-psychopathologization is not an accident of phrasing, nor an unfortunate choice of words. It is a deliberate and necessary response to the catastrophic decision made by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) in 2010 to “de-psychopathologize” transgender identities. That move was not rooted in scientific discovery, but in political advocacy, and it removed essential psychiatric guardrails and discouraged psychotherapeutic exploration—casting ethical therapy as “conversion therapy” while elevating untested medical interventions as the default response. The result has been fifteen years of mounting harm: vulnerable adolescents and adults placed on a conveyor belt of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries without appropriate assessment or safeguarding.

Genspect’s call to re-psychopathologize transgender identification is therefore an effort to undo the damage caused by WPATH’s de-psychopathologization. It is not a call to stigmatize or marginalize, but to restore honesty and compassion to a field of medicine that has been led astray. To describe a condition as psychopathological is not a moral judgment—it is a clinical recognition that something is wrong, and that appropriate therapeutic intervention is needed. Without such recognition, there can be no safeguarding, no prevention of harm, and no genuine care.

We recognize that terms like “pathology” may be unsettling, particularly in a political climate where rhetoric is often weaponized. Yet avoiding clear language does not serve those who are suffering. We are now in the stage of the debate where society must acknowledge, without tiptoeing or euphemism, that the belief in transgender identities as innate and healthy is a dangerous medical fiction.

To say “trans is a mental illness” is not to deny anyone’s humanity; it is to acknowledge that those consumed by this dangerous false belief deserve ethical, appropriate, and compassionate psychiatric and psychotherapeutic support—not experimental medicine that destroys healthy bodies.

Re-psychopathologization is therefore not an ideological slogan, but a necessary course correction. By naming the problem clearly, we can begin to rebuild the guardrails, restore psychotherapy as the first line of care, and prevent another generation from being swept into irreversible harm.

Genspect believes truth, compassion, and clarity must guide us. That requires the courage to use accurate language. The time for ambiguity has passed.

The post Statement on the Use of the Term Re-Psychopathologization appeared first on Genspect.

To support the launch of our re-psychopathologization campaign, we have prepared these FAQs to explain the core concepts, address common questions, and clarify why Genspect is calling for a return to psychiatric clarity, compassion, and safeguarding in the care of trans-identified individuals.

1. What does “re-psychopathologization” mean?

Re-psychopathologization means restoring transgender identities to their proper place in psychiatry—as conditions of the mind requiring careful therapeutic attention, rather than celebrating them as healthy identities.

It is not a call to stigmatize or marginalize individuals who identify as transgender. It is a call to restore clarity, compassion, and safeguarding by recognizing that transgender identification is not innate or biologically determined, but an all-consuming pathological belief heavily influenced by culture.

2. What is an “Extreme Overvalued Belief” (EOB)?

An Extreme Overvalued Belief is a psychiatric concept first described by Carl Wernicke in 1892. Wernicke used the term “overvalued idea.” In 2019, Rahman and Abugel further elaborated on the idea, coining the term “extreme overvalued belief.”

• EOBs are rigidly held, false convictions.
  
  
• They are shared by others in a subculture or culture.
  
  
• They are relished by the individual and defended with passion.
  
  
• They appear rational to the person who holds them because they are reinforced socially.
  
  
• Over time, they become resistant to challenge and can drive destructive action—either outwards in the form of violence, or inwards in the form of medical interventions that severely impact health.
  
  

3. How do EOBs apply to transgender identities?

Transgender identification does not fit the definition of a delusion (idiosyncratic false belief) or an obsession (unwanted intrusive thought).

But it maps perfectly onto an EOB:

• It is shared and celebrated not just within trans subcultures but by the whole of western society.
  
  
• It appears rational because schools, media, and governments reinforce it.
  
  
• It hardens into certainty. To the individual, the trans identity feels very real.
  
  
• It drives action—not violence against others, but harm against one’s own body through hormones and surgeries.

4. Is there a difference between trying on a trans identity as part of youth culture and pursuing medical body modification?

Yes. It is normal for adolescents to experiment with identity through changes in clothing, hairstyles, pronouns, or by affiliating with subcultures. This is part of ordinary identity development and is not in any way pathological.

Pathology begins when a young person, caught up in the extreme overvalued belief that their body must be radically altered to match this identity, turns to medical interventions. Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries represent a drastic and irreversible response to what is usually a transient stage of identity exploration.

In short: youthful experimentation is normal; pursuing radical body modification in its name is pathological.

5. Does calling transgender identification an Extreme Overvalued Belief mean transgender people are violent or dangerous?

Absolutely not.

The EOB framework is most often used in forensic psychiatry to explain extreme acts of violence, but the concept applies to any rigid, pathological belief reinforced by a culture or subculture. In the case of transgender identities, the harmful action is turned inward: medical interventions that drastically impact health, often involving sterilization and the amputation of healthy organs, making them a danger to themselves.

This statement does not suggest that transgender people are criminals or violent—it stresses that they are victims of a pathological cultural contagion, deserving of compassion and truth.

6. What harm came from “de-psychopathologization”?

When WPATH and the American Psychiatric Association declared that transgender identities were “healthy”:

• Psychotherapy was reframed as “conversion therapy.”
  
  
• A social contagion spread unchecked.
  
  
• Medicalization was normalized—puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries became the default response.

The result has been widespread harm to children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults who needed psychiatric care, not experimental body modification.

7. Why is re-psychopathologization necessary now?

• To restore safeguarding: recognizing that these are vulnerable individuals, who in response to various psychiatric comorbidities or life challenges are susceptible to being consumed by this extreme overvalued belief.
  
  
• To restore clarity in medicine: psychiatry must address pathological beliefs rather than collude with them.
  
  
• To restore compassion: the young people caught in this cultural wave are innocent victims who need help and support, not experimental body modification in the name of a political ideology

8. Isn’t it stigmatizing to call transgender identification a psychiatric condition?

No. In fact, the opposite is true. WPATH’s campaign of “de-psychopathologization” was meant to remove stigma, but it did so by redefining trans-identified people as mentally healthy, thus implying that being mentally ill is something shameful. That stigmatizes mental illness itself. There is nothing dishonourable in acknowledging that someone is struggling with a psychiatric condition.

The answer is not to deny that transgender identification falls into a psychiatric category—in the form of an extreme overvalued belief—but to build compassion and understanding for mental illness of all kinds. Re-psychopathologization is about clarity, safeguarding, and care: recognizing what this condition is so that individuals can receive appropriate psychological support, not experimental body modification.

In addition, framing transgender identities as extreme overvalued beliefs highlights that the real pathology lies in society itself—for celebrating a harmful idea and urging vulnerable people toward drastic, unproven medical interventions in its service.

9. Is the field of gender medicine also acting in the service of the EOB?

Yes. WPATH and gender-affirming clinicians have acted pathologically since depsychopathologization launched.

They charged forward with a mass medical experiment on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults in the absence of evidence, while disregarding long-established research on child and adolescent development. They continue to ignore the systematic reviews that consistently showed only low-quality evidence of benefit, and WPATH even buried its own reviews when the findings contradicted their agenda.

Instead of correcting course, WPATH allowed politics—not science—to guide the development of their Standards of Care. In this way, they demonstrate the very dynamic of an extreme overvalued belief: consumed by the conviction that “trans is healthy,” they collude with the belief and act pathologically just as their patients do.

10. Does this mean banning care for transgender people?

No.

Re-psychopathologization calls for better care: ethical psychiatric and psychotherapeutic support, not hormones and surgeries on demand. It seeks to protect individuals from irreversible harm and to provide genuine treatment that addresses the root causes of distress. It recognizes that far from being a diagnosis for life that requires drastic, permanent medical interventions, transgender identities are typically a transient response that occurs after colliding with the extreme overvalued belief currently pervasive in Western society.

11. Why now?

In the 15 years since WPATH launched its de-psychopathologization campaign, the field of gender medicine has gone completely off the rails. It is now clear that the experiment of “gender-affirming care” has failed. Countries such as Sweden, Finland, and England have already reviewed the evidence and moved away from the affirmation model for youth.

It is time to recognize transgender identification for what it is: a pathological belief requiring careful psychiatric attention, not celebration and widespread medicalization.

12. What’s the difference between a mass delusion and an extreme overvalued belief in the context of trans?

A mass delusion is when large swathes of the population believe something absurd—normally due to not thinking too deeply about it, out of concern that doubting will make them seem cruel, or because they fear they’ll be persecuted if they question it.

An extreme overvalued belief (EOB) describes the smaller patient, activist, and clinical core whose conviction is so rigid and emotionally charged that it drives zealous, harmful actions.

In short, the mass delusion is passive acceptance; the EOB is the pathological zeal that turns belief into harm.

In Summary:

Genspect’s re-psychopathologization campaign is about restoring truth, compassion, and safeguarding to the care of people who identify as transgender. It restores psychiatry to its proper role: helping people caught in harmful beliefs, rather than colluding in the destruction.

We welcome constructive feedback. If you have further questions or suggestions, please email us at info@genspect.org — this FAQ will continue to evolve as we receive more input.

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Unified support for those navigating gender dysphoria, medical transition, and detransition—bringing together individuals, families, and therapists

In 2020, psychotherapist Stella O’Malley founded the Gender Dysphoria Support Network. What began as an online parent group quickly attracted thousands of families seeking balanced information. Soon, individuals questioning their medical transitions and therapists looking for alternatives to automatic affirmation joined the growing community.

This grassroots movement evolved into Genspect in 2021. Recognizing that people experiencing transition regret had nowhere to turn, Genspect launched Beyond Trans in 2022 as a dedicated support service.

Today, we’re proud to unveil the new Beyond Trans—a comprehensive platform bringing together free support groups, daily parent meetings, and our searchable therapist directory, creating the most complete support system available for anyone touched by gender dysphoria, medical transition, or detransition.

Find Your Support Group

We run multiple therapist-facilitated groups each week for anyone navigating gender dysphoria, medical transition, or detransition—all without pressure toward any particular outcome.

• Therapist-facilitated Open Support Group (Saturdays): For people with gender dysphoria, people who identify as trans, people who are ambivalent about their medical transition, people who have been harmed by medical transition, and people who are detransitioning
• Therapist-facilitated Support Group (Sundays): Exclusively for detransitioners
• Women’s Circle (Thursdays): Therapist-facilitated support group for female adults who are questioning or ceasing their medical transition
• Monthly groups: A support group for adults who transitioned as children and a separate support group for adults who transitioned as adults

Connect With Other Parents

Parent support groups meet every weekday, offering structured peer-led meetings where families facing gender dysphoria, medical transition, or detransition connect and share what works.

Available groups include:

• General family support
• Parents of desisters
• Parents in crisis
• Parents of medicalizing children
• Support for estrangement and bereavement

Discover Therapists Who Understand

Our Directory of Therapists helps anyone affected by gender dysphoria, medical transition, or detransition find therapists who provide compassionate, whole-person care through a non-medicalized model.

Search by location, specialty, or specific needs. Read detailed profiles about each therapist’s approach. Contact them directly through our platform.

Well-informed therapists who share our non-medicalized approach are welcome to join our growing directory – apply today.

Access Trusted Resources

The platform includes carefully curated materials for understanding gender dysphoria, medical transition, and detransition—documentaries, podcasts, books, and connections to trusted organizations worldwide. We also offer recovery support programs and paid opportunities for individuals willing to share their stories.

Everything You Need in One Place

The new Beyond Trans platform makes it simple: join a support group, find a therapist, access resources—all from one trusted source. No hunting across different sites. No wondering what information to trust. Just comprehensive support for anyone navigating gender dysphoria, medical transition, or detransition.

Start Your Journey

Whether you’re questioning your path, supporting someone who is, or you’re a therapist seeking a different approach—the new Beyond Trans platform is here for you. No ideological pressure. No predetermined paths. Just support that meets you where you are.

Visit Beyond Trans today.

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So, you might very well ask: why on earth do we need a Memorandum of Understanding to Protect the Role of Puberty in Adolescent Development? It sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But in today’s upside-down world – where we have to go all the way to the Supreme Court to establish that men aren’t women – we’re forced to defend the most basic biological facts and fundamental realities. It’s a mind-melting, maddening waste of time and energy. And yet, if this is what it takes to stop harmful medical experimentation on children’s bodies, then count me in.

The Memorandum of Understanding on the Role of Puberty in Adolescent Development does two things: it safeguards the crucial role of puberty in adolescent development and it highlights the responsibility of adults to protect children. Genspect has made the MoU available on this website where organisations and parent groups from around the world can sign up, download the compliance badge, and display it on their own sites and social media to show that they are informed, engaged, and committed to protecting children and teenagers from avoidable harm. We’ve also issued a Statement of Concern that applies the MoU’s principles by opposing the proposed NHS puberty blocker trial. Individuals can sign this statement and have their names displayed on the website.

Puberty is not an optional stage of development; it is a remarkable and transformative process. More than a biological milestone, it is a profound experience that helps shape our adult identities. While a small number of individuals with Differences of Sex Development (DSDs) may not undergo puberty in the typical way, these rare exceptions do not diminish the critical developmental importance of puberty for the vast majority of children and adolescents. The cognitive, emotional, physical, sexual, and social changes it brings are still not fully understood – a testament to the complexity and dynamism of this pivotal life stage.

At ten years old, most children are still immersed in their immediate world – thinking about fun, sweets, Mammy, Daddy, their friends, and upcoming treats. As they begin to mature physically, sexually, and cognitively, their capacity for more expansive thinking grows. By their early twenties, they have typically emerged as fully-fledged adults, with a far more nuanced understanding of themselves and the world around them.

When a child is put on puberty blockers, it is not only their sexual development that is halted; their entire developmental trajectory is disrupted. They do not experience a sexual awakening, nor do they go through a romantic one. While their peers are navigating first crushes – just as young children play at house, teenagers play at love – these essential developmental rehearsals are missing. Yet it is through these early, often awkward experiences that we prepare for one of life’s most fundamental evolutionary tasks; to form intimate bonds and, ultimately, to reproduce.

Of course, some adults will choose not to reproduce, and others may be unable to, but puberty lays the biological and psychological foundation that makes this choice possible in the first place.

The loneliness of being human often strikes with full force during adolescence; this is when a young person first begins to feel the deep yearning to fall in love. It’s no wonder so many adolescents turn to poetry, music, and art for comfort. As the brain becomes more complex, teenagers confront their aloneness and embark on the long, often difficult search for a mate – a search that underpins our most fundamental human drives.

The first-love relationships that teenagers experience further complexify the mind as they begin to realise that they can love someone and hate someone at the same time. Few of us remain simplistic once we have experienced the pain of unrequited love – and for most, this rite of passage typically takes place during adolescence.

But none of this is open to the puberty-blocked teenager. Instead they remain frozen in a childlike state. Like Peter Pan, they are happy to have friends and go on adventures, but they don’t experience any deeper yearnings to find a mate or to grapple with life’s more profound emotional questions.

The Experimental Medically Constructed Adult

Puberty is a complex developmental cascade driven by the activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis. This intricate system initiates the maturation of reproductive organs, the development of secondary sex characteristics, the onset of fertility, and profound physical, neurological, and emotional transformations.

When a young person whose puberty has been suppressed reaches the age of 18 and moves on to cross-sex hormones – as approximately 98% do – they become what can only be described as an experimental medically constructed adult. Having bypassed natural puberty, their entry into adulthood is pharmacologically induced rather than biologically emergent.

Although some people with rare medical conditions may not go through typical puberty, never before in human history have people reached adulthood without undergoing some form of pubertal development. But this is now changing.

Puberty-blocked individuals undergo a chemically induced facsimile of puberty – a kind of partial sexual awakening disconnected from the natural maturation of their reproductive systems. For example, a teenage girl given testosterone may develop an increased libido, but because her ovaries, uterus, and other reproductive structures have not matured, the experience is largely pharmacological and not integrated into a fully developed adult body. It is a chemical reaction, not a holistic biological transition.

This startling example of medical technology offering bioengineered options may excite overzealous clinicians like Norman Spack – who has more than once described himself as “salivating” when he first heard about puberty blockers – but it is not good for humanity.

Facilitating meetings with detransitioners who never went through puberty has given me deep insight into the risks associated with these radical interventions. Through the Beyond Trans programme, I often meet female detransitioners who skipped puberty and are now fearful of reverting to their biological sex. Those who have undergone a hysterectomy or a bilateral orchiectomy are particularly fearful of reverting, as this would entail reintroducing a sex hormone into a body that never experienced natural puberty and no longer contains key reproductive organs.

These are experimental interventions, and we have yet to see the long-term outcomes for detransitioners who are now facing puberty in adulthood. Will the body fully “know” what to do with oestrogen or testosterone in this context – without reproductive organs and without the developmental groundwork laid during adolescence? We still lack long-term data. These detransitioners are understandably wary of further experimentation on their bodies and often feel forced to continue presenting as trans – despite deep regret – because they believe they have passed the point of no return.

The Case for Protecting Puberty

The MoU on the Role of Puberty in Adolescent Development affirms rights set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989), a legally binding treaty ratified by 196 countries. At its core, the MoU emphasises the protection of a child’s right to an open future – a principle it argues is undermined by the medical transition of minors experiencing gender-related distress. This position aligns with key articles of the UNCRC:

• Article 6(2) mandates the protection of “the survival and development of the child.” Puberty blockers disrupt essential developmental processes crucial for maturation into adulthood.
• Article 19(1) obliges states to shield children from harmful practices such as “injury or abuse” Medical transition is associated with significant risk of harm to the body, including reduced bone density, potential adverse impacts on brain development, and compromised fertility.
• Article 24(1) affirms the child’s right to “the highest attainable standard of health.” Medical transition violates this principle by transforming previously healthy children into lifelong medical patients.

The MoU advocates for non-medicalised support that upholds the UNCRC’s fundamental commitment to protecting children’s health, well-being, and development.

We’re delighted that all the leading organisations who are informed about the harms of medical transition recognise the vital role that puberty plays in adolescent development and have already signed the MoU. Groups such as Sex Matters, Can-SG, Transgender Trend, Our Duty, Thoughtful Therapists, Critical Therapy Antidote, LGB Alliance, and many others have all declared their support. Key figures in the field have signed the Statement of Concern, including Prof David Bell, Dr Az Hakeem, Marcus and Sue Evans, Dr Stephen Levine, Sasha Ayad, Dr Louise Irvine, Dr Stella Kingett, Dr Jillian Spencer, James Caspian, Bob Withers, James Esses, and Prof Dianna Kenny.

We invite all organisations to display the MoU compliance badge to publicly demonstrate their commitment to protecting children and adolescence. Organisations wishing to feature their logo on the MoU website can email info@genspect.org for consideration.

Throughout this process, we have become aware of certain groups and organisations within our movement who believe that further studies are needed before taking a firm stance. But having spent years examining the evidence, we do not believe this is a tenable or ethically defensible position.

Tragically, some gender-critical clinicians and academics – despite their concern about puberty blockers – still cling to the idea that some children may benefit from skipping puberty. It is the early-onset gender-dysphoric children who remain most at risk from this viewpoint. These are the tomboys who came out of the womb with a swagger and a boyish strut; the feminine boys who squeal with joy as they twirl in their princess dresses.

It is almost unfathomable that, after all the books, articles, podcasts, films, webinars, and conferences, there is still uncertainty about puberty blockers. What astonishes us most is that even within our own movement, clinicians and academics still wring their hands and ask, What should we do? But there it is – too often, strategy and careerism outweigh principle.

While others continue to believe they can somehow play God in the lives of vulnerable children, those who have signed the MoU are drawing a clear line. These medical interventions on children are deeply harmful and should be banned. The jury is in. We don’t need more medical experiments on children. We no longer need to apologise for holding this position, and it no longer matters that zealots try to shame us by calling us transphobic. Sometimes, doing the right thing must come before appeasing the mob.

Puberty is the essential bridge between childhood and adulthood. We must protect every adolescent’s right to cross it, so they have the best possible chance at a healthy and free future.

To be considered for inclusion in the movement to protect puberty in adolescence, visit the new MoU website, download the compliance badge, and email info@genspect.org to add your signature.

The post Why We Must Protect Puberty<br> <span style='font-size: 50%; line-height: 1;'>How Genspect’s Memorandum of Understanding is rallying a global movement to defend healthy adolescent development</span> appeared first on Genspect.

On January 28, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order provocatively titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” Since then, public discussion has focused almost exclusively on funding provisions and insurance coverage restrictions. But this narrow focus has caused nearly everyone to miss what may prove to be WPATH’s undoing: Section 3(a)(ii).

This overlooked clause came to Genspect’s attention during a meeting with HHS officials on Capitol Hill for #DetransAwarenessDay — and we are bringing it to public light for the first time here. Section 3(a)(ii) instructs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “publish a review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria” within 90 days.

We have since confirmed through reliable sources that a Cass-like systematic review will be published by April 28, 2025. This review has the potential to reshape the landscape of gender-related healthcare for children in the United States.

The Review that should end WPATH

While funding restrictions may shift with each administration, this systematic review represents something far more enduring: a rigorous, government-led scientific assessment. It will expose the hollow core of WPATH’s recommendations – already criticized by many analysts of the gender-affirming care approach, but this time the critique will carry the authority of the HHS. Anyone who has been following the trans phenomenon will welcome this with a sense of relief, recognizing it as a long-overdue step towards greater clarity, accuracy, and a more balanced discussion.

The executive order does not mince words, describing WPATH’s guidance as “lacking scientific integrity” and instructing federal agencies to “rescind or amend all policies that rely on WPATH guidance.” This directive marks a turning point. WPATH has long refused to address Europe’s increasing restrictions on pediatric transition, showing a willful disregard for the evidence behind those changes. But with a federal review now emerging from within the U.S. health system itself, that strategy will be far harder to sustain.

We’ve seen this story unfold across Europe. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the UK, Italy, and France have all restricted medical interventions for gender-dysphoric youth based on reviews of the same evidence WPATH uses in its guidelines. These assessments reached the same conclusion: medical transition on minors is a failed approach, supported by poor-quality evidence, substantial risks, and only theoretical, self-reported benefits.

But even with these reviews in hand, the culture of trans ideology has remained in these regions. In the UK, the NHS has managed to maintain a gender service that remains deeply ideological, and provides gender-affirming care that relies on a flawed informed consent model for highly vulnerable adults. We must ensure the same does not happen in the United States.

From Buried Evidence to Federal Action

So why hasn’t this review clause made headlines? Perhaps because systematic reviews lack the drama of funding fights, or because many underestimate its significance. But this one is different. It could apply federal standards to the evidence base, with implications for healthcare regulations, medical liability, and insurance coverage across the country.

The “WPATH Files” have already exposed deep contradictions: internal emails showing leaders privately acknowledging evidence gaps while publicly asserting scientific consensus. Even more damning were court documents from Alabama revealing that WPATH had commissioned systematic reviews from Johns Hopkins—which found insufficient evidence to support pediatric transition—and then suppressed the results.

The upcoming HHS review will complete what those buried reviews started. This time, however, federal authority ensures WPATH cannot bury the findings.

Beware the Post-Cass Complacency Trap

What happens after April 28? If the UK experience is anything to go by, there may be a wave of complacency from those who believe “the science has spoken.” But scientific clarity alone will not undo entrenched systems.

As Genspect is a global organization we are learning from other regions. If we look at Great Britain, we will see that there could be a sense of relief from those who believe that the science will pull us through. Perhaps there will be a rush to publish papers supporting the HHS review, as the scholars will not be so timid as they have been until now. But the UK showed that even after a landmark review, harmful practices can quietly continue—the US must not let clarity be mistaken for closure. In Genspect we have come to understand that it is imperative that we get to the nub of the issue:

– we have never medicalized identities before.

– medicalizing the identities of vulnerable children is a reckless intervention —at odds with the evidence, rooted in unproven theories, and blind to the underlying causes of distress.

– the evidence suggests that the vast majority of children who undergo medical transition will be harmed by these interventions.

To medicalize the identities of children is a reckless medical experiment that is causing devastation across the western world.

Crucially, the executive order also mandates that HHS “increase the quality of data” guiding treatment for minors. This is a long-overdue admission that the current model has been built on lies, sustained by misinformation, and justified through shoddy, poor-quality evidence masquerading as science. We need rigorous, independent research that asks the right questions—research that compares gender dysphoria to conditions like anorexia, OCD, and body dysmorphia; that explores the role of internalized homophobia in same-sex attracted youth; that examines the profound impact of autism and ADHD on gender identity development. We urgently need studies into how online communities, social contagion, and peer dynamics shape adolescent identity. These are the complex, uncomfortable areas WPATH has long minimized or ignored—yet they are precisely where clarity is most needed.

When the HHS review is published, it will catalyze a transformation in American healthcare. Practitioners adhering to WPATH’s guidance despite documented evidence gaps will face new liability risks. Medical associations that uncritically backed the affirmation-only model will face a deepening credibility crisis—driven by internal dissent, public backlash, legal challenges, and a growing recognition that they abandoned scientific rigor in favor of political conformity. Insurance companies will reconsider coverage, and pediatric transition clinics will become financially unsustainable, becoming known as extreme body modification centers rather than legitimate healthcare providers.

WPATH’s Last Stand

WPATH will likely contest the review, but their position appears untenable as the HHS assessment will mirror other rigorous global evaluations. In this instance, WPATH cannot rely on their standard responses. When faced with the WPATH Files evidence, their president Marci Bowers brilliantly defended their position by announcing “the world is not flat” – apparently mixing up medical research with a third-grade geography lesson. Such cosmic wisdom will inevitably crumble when confronted with a comprehensive federal review carrying the full weight of governmental authority.

We predict their strategy will pivot swiftly. They’ll shift from relying upon science to emphasizing human rights, calling for an “informed consent” model as the new standard. They’ve already made this shift but they will lean more heavily into it now. But we must be clear: the informed consent model is inappropriate for children and vulnerable adults and it is meaningless without honest disclosure about risks, outcomes, and the lack of long-term data. WPATH’s Standards of Care were never scientific documents—they only claimed to be, and far too many institutions believed them. The gender-affirming care brigade never had the science to back up their retrograde interventions.

The fallout will extend far beyond WPATH. Thousands of young people have already been harmed by medical transition, and WPATH has offered no roadmap for detransitioners or those suffering complications. Genspect is the only organization providing structured support to this growing population.

As WPATH’s influence diminishes, there is growing recognition of the need for a broader range of perspectives in this field. Genspect aims to contribute meaningfully to the evolving conversation. Our first book, The Gender Framework, will be published this year by Pitchstone Publishing. It outlines how a non-medicalized approach to gender dysphoria that prioritizes biological sex over gender can work across healthcare, education, and wider society.

Where WPATH prioritizes hormones and surgeries, our Beyond Trans program offers something different: comprehensive psychosocial care that balances compassion with evidence-based support to people who are experiencing gender dysphoria. We believe this is what genuine and effective care looks like, and the forthcoming HHS review is likely to agree.

April 28: The Reckoning Begins

With the release of the HHS review, a transformation in American healthcare could begin. Clinics will hopefully face growing pressure to abandon ideology in favor of psychosocial care—or face regulatory consequences. Medical education could be forced to confront the failures of affirmation-only practices. Someday soon, people will come to see that socially transitioning children in schools without parental permission is profoundly inappropriate, and the practice will no longer be tolerated.

We also look forward to puberty blockers being acknowledged as failed interventions—never appropriate for vulnerable youth.

April 28 represents more than a policy milestone; it marks a long-overdue course correction. For parents who resisted medicalization, clinicians who urged caution, and detransitioners left behind, the federal government will finally acknowledge what many have known all along: vulnerable individuals were subjected to experimental treatments without sound evidence, while the psychosocial care they needed was sidelined.

Mark it in your diary. This won’t just be another day of press releases and policy briefings. It could be the moment the oil tanker finally begins to turn. In a right and just world, it will mark WPATH’s reckoning—and the collapse of gender-affirming care as we know it.

For those already harmed, it comes too late. But for those who may now be protected, it offers a glimmer of hope—and the chance to finally choose a better path forward.

Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash

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Dear Everyone,

It’s been an amazing year. From the WPATH Files, to the Cass report to the global momentum to ban puberty blockers, the times are a’changing. We hope this global look back on some of the notable developments of 2024 will show how much progress we have made and inspire us all for the coming year. See you in 2025!

Genspect

Ps. Check out our founder, Stella O’Malley on Genspect’s achievements and plans for the coming year.

TERF Island Leads the Way – Carrie Clark

What a momentous year 2024 has been for gender issues in the UK! The landscape has changed radically even in the four short months since I became Director of Genspect UK. While there is much to celebrate, I hope you’ll read this look-back on the events in 2024 as a call to take action in 2025. We have much more to do in order to protect evidence-based medicine and repair the damage done to young people in the name of so called ‘gender affirming care’. —Carrie Clark, Director Genspect UK

Any round up of 2024’s gender news must surely begin with the groundbreaking Cass Review, published in April and welcomed with relief by those of us critical of the affirmation only model of care. Four years in the making and informed by eight systematic reviews, the Review confirmed what many of us have been saying for years: transition treatments are experimental and poorly evidenced, with few benefits and a host of nasty risks.

The Cass Review has powerfully shaped events in the UK in 2024, but one of its most important findings has been somewhat overshadowed in the heated discourse following its publication. Much of the focus, understandably, has been on the poor efficacy of hormonal treatments and the alarming medical scandal involving vulnerable children and young people. However, the Review also charts a path toward a brighter future for those young individuals. While hormonal treatments for gender-related distress are increasingly recognized as both dangerous and ineffective, the Review points to promising evidence that psychosocial interventions can genuinely enhance the lives of these young people. In 2025, Genspect UK aims to amplify this hopeful message and advocate for more and better research into non-medicalized treatments

The Cass Review has notably reshaped the gender services landscape in the UK in 2024 through the introduction of a regional model for NHS gender services. This model aims to provide a more holistic approach to care, de-emphasizing medical pathways in favor of comprehensive assessments of mental health needs. Under the new referral pathways, a young person must now be evaluated by a mental health or pediatric specialist before referral to gender services, which is a significant and positive change. However, there are concerns that the focus might still lean towards eventual medicalization. In a recent debate in the House of Lords, Baroness Merron acknowledged that “there are no exact alternatives being offered” to hormonal treatments by the new regional clinics. Genspect UK believes we must ask why non-hormonal alternatives are not being provided and press for thorough research into less invasive treatments for gender-related distress.

One of the standout achievements of 2024 in the UK has been the ban on puberty blockers, initially implemented by the Conservative government in May and later made permanent by the new Labour administration. This is good news and shows the potential for cross party political support to act on the Cass Review’s recommendations and effectively closes loopholes that could allow private providers like Gender GP to prescribe puberty blockers to vulnerable young people with insufficient assessment or oversight.

However, the positive impact of the ban could be undermined by the NHS’s upcoming puberty blocker study, which is set to begin recruiting several thousand young people in April 2025. Details on the study’s methodology remain scarce, but if the reports are accurate, almost every young person on the NHS waiting list for gender services could potentially participate in this study and receive blockers. Genspect UK has voiced significant concerns about this study, particularly highlighting the ongoing focus on potentially harmful hormonal interventions when psychosocial treatments have demonstrated considerable promise.

You will be hearing more about this from us in 2025, but right now, we strongly encourage all our UK supporters to use our template letter to contact their MP and voice concerns about the study. Some people have advised us to wait until the study protocol is published or to allow the ethics committee to do their work before raising these issues publicly. We disagree. We believe that now is the crucial time to raise awareness and influence political consciousness. It is imperative to let our political representatives know that we will not stand idly by while an entire cohort of young people faces unnecessary medicalization. We hope you will join us on this and other issues in 2025!

The Gorilla in the Room – Nancy McDermott

When it comes to gender ideology, the United States is the Gorilla in the room: big, bad and out of control, but even here, change is palpable. The past year has seen a significant shift in attitudes in the United States, moving away from the rapid policy changes of the past decade towards a more cautious stance. This “vibe-shift” was triggered by changing public opinion, legal battles, and international developments like the UK’s Cass Review, which questioned the evidence supporting medical treatments for gender dysphoria in minors. — Nancy McDermott, Editor Inspecting Gender

The previous decade was shaped by the long march of trans activism through America’s institutions which led to the adoption of policies on bathroom access based on gender identity, simplified gender marker changes on legal documents, and changes to school policies to make it legal to hide information about child’s gender identity from parents. These changes, made at every level of government, were framed in terms of inclusivity, but soon sparked widespread concern about privacy, safety, and fairness, particularly with policies affecting women’s spaces like shelters and prisons. These came to a head to the fore in debates over the Biden Administration’s changes to Title IX, with mandated sports participation based on gender identity and may have contributed to Kamala Harris’s defeat in the presidential election.

The medical treatment of gender dysphoria, especially in children, also became a focal point for reevaluation. The UK’s Cass Review underscored the lack of long-term evidence for interventions like puberty blockers and hormone treatments, prompting a rethinking of these practices in the U.S. The increasing visibility of detransitioners raised additional concerns about consent, regret, and the ethical implications of these treatments. As part of the effort to make sure the concerns of detransitioners stay in the public eye, Genspect USA will bring Detrans Awareness Day to Capitol Hill on March 12, 2025.

Meanwhile legislatures around the country have begun to change course to protect minors, with 26 states passing laws to regulate or ban “pediatric sex change” procedures. These laws varied, with some states imposing total bans, while others set restrictions with exceptions for certain medical conditions.

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti was central to this recalibration, advocating for policies prioritizing biological sex. His actions led to U.S. v. Skrmetti, where the ACLU and Lambda Legal, supported by the Biden Administration, challenged Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. The Supreme Court heard arguments, with a decision anticipated by July 2025, leaning towards upholding the ban.

Medical ethics came under scrutiny after Dr. Eithan Haim* blew the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital, which continued to secretly practice gender medicine on minors after officially ceasing their involvement in pediatric sex change highlighted potential conflicts between profit and medical ethics. Despite facing federal charges for alleged HIPAA violations, Dr. Haim and his legal team remain confident.

It is worth mentioning the courage of political figures like former Texas State Representative, Shawn Thierry**, who courageously supported Senate Bill 14 in Texas banning transition care for minors. Thierry faced significant backlash, losing her seat and enduring abuse from within her own party, showing just how politically contentious these issues have become. Thierry ultimately switched from the Democratic to the Republican party.

Finally, too, the issue that could not be named it increasingly out in the open. Americans are pushing back against mandatory pronoun use which is increasingly seen as an infringement on free speech, signaling a broader reevaluation of how gender identity policies intersect with individual rights and societal norms. It is about time.

Inspecting Gender will be lifting the voices of detransitioners in the run up to Detrans Awareness Day, and we are especially pleased to welcome Aaron Kimberly and Laura Becker as regular contributors.

*Eithan Haim, MD is Director of Medical Ethics and Policy, Genspect USA

**Shawn Thierry, Esq – Director of Public Policy, Genspect USA

O Canada! – Mia Hughes

For Canadians engaged in the gender debate, year-end recaps often make for grim reading. As one of the last remaining strongholds of gender ideology, Canada typically offers little to celebrate and few victories to anticipate in the year ahead. However, as 2024 draws to a close, there are genuine reasons for optimism. — Mia Hughes, Director Genspect Canada

Canadians owe much of this renewed hope Alberta Premier, Danielle Smith, who announced in January bold plans to limit access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for adolescents, strengthen safeguarding in Alberta’s schools, and protect women’s sports. In November, these commitments were cemented through a series of legislative measures.

Smith’s move marks a truly momentous occasion. A whole decade since the epidemic of gender dysphoria began in earnest, a Canadian province has finally pulled its head out of the permafrost and taken action to protect the distressed children and adolescents caught up in this mad cultural moment. Smith’s courage breaks the paralysis that has gripped the entire nation on this issue, offering a glimmer of sanity amidst the chaos.

Predictably, the proponents of gender ideology are not going down without a fight. Several trans activist groups have launched legal challenges attempting to block the provincial legislation, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his supporters continue to dismiss any attempt to protect young people from the extremes of gender ideology as transphobic bigotry. Trudeau’s most recent Senate appointee, Kristopher Wells, has become a relentless source of trans activist propaganda, further polarizing the debate.

Yet, this resistance carries an air of desperation. Globally, the pendulum is swinging decisively, and the impact is finally being felt in Canada, where the momentum shift is palpable. Change feels inevitable. If trends hold, 2025 will usher in a Conservative federal government, and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre finally appears ready to confront gender identity ideology head-on and defend women and children from its harmful effects.

In this dramatically shifting cultural climate, all the groups that have been working tirelessly on this issue will finally have the chance to be heard. Genspect Canada, launched earlier this year, proudly joins the ranks of Canadian Gender Report, Our Duty Canada, and numerous women’s rights groups in fighting to protect our most vulnerable young people from the dangers posed by gender identity ideology. Even in Canada, 2025 promises to be a year of transformation—one that safeguards children, respects women’s rights, and restores a commitment to evidence-based care and common sense.

Growing Dissent in Deutschland – Anna Weber

Self-ID is now a reality in Germany, and new guidelines are enabling a medical scandal, but opposition is growing. — Anna Weber, Transteens sorgeberechtigt

Parents watched in dismay as Germany’s “traffic light” coalition passed the Self-ID legislation (Self-Determination Act) and medical associations agreed on affirmative treatment guidelines for minors this year.

In February, a group of researchers led by Prof. Florian Zepf from Jena published a systematic review titled “Beyond NICE, 2024,” examining the evidence for Puberty Blockers (PB) and Cross-Sex Hormones (CSH), supposedly bringing the 2020 NICE review up-to-date. A month later, the Guidelines Commission released new draft guidelines, six years after the previous ones had expired. These recommendations, heavily influenced by WPATH’s SOC 8 and without any age limits for invasive treatments, were formulated through a consensus by a commission seen as biased, comprising only affirmation-only clinicians from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Opposition swiftly emerged when 15 professors of child and adolescent psychiatry published a 111-page critique in Dt. Ärzteblatt and WELT, demanding a fundamental revision of the guidelines. Meanwhile, the German Medical Association responded by issuing two resolutions that heavily criticized the guidelines and Self-ID and the European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ESCAP) issued a statement that underscored the “first do no harm” principle and opposed experimental treatments with unproven psychosocial effects. Meanwhile, various medical associations pushed for the inclusion of the Cass Review, and SEGM (Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine) actively criticized the draft for its methodological flaws, deeming the consensus-based approach unreliable and advocating for evidence-based guidelines instead.

Despite this, Prof. Georg Romer from Münster, who heads the commission, and his supporters doubled down. According to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (faz) he unashamedly suppressed dissent by turning a planned debate into a lecture about the latest updates. The final guidelines are expected to be published any day.

Parent groups from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland expressed their concerns through an Open Letter published in DIE WELT, while German organizations like Transteens-Sorge-berechtigt and Parents of ROGD Kids wrote to the Federal Ministry of Health with their worries.

Evidence of a medical scandal is mounting rapidly. Statistics show that the surge in gender dysphoria diagnoses mirrors trends across other Western countries. Analyses of publicly available hospital data expose a dramatic increase in genital surgeries from 2005 to 2023, including on minors, despite these being legally prohibited. The independent media outlet NIUS uncovered that the Münster-based Center for Transgender Health has been advertising off-label cryopreservation for prepubertal children.

In April, the German Parliament enacted the Self-ID law, enabling changes to gender markers and first names for individuals aged 14 and above. Parents have the authority to decide their child’s gender from birth until they reach 14. Once a child turns 14, they gain self-determination rights; if parents withhold consent for legal transition, a family court intervenes to make the decision. Registry offices began accepting applications for gender changes on August 1st, with these changes taking effect on November 1st. By that date, 15,000 applications had been filed, greatly surpassing the government’s anticipated 4,000.

The post Looking Back to Look Forward appeared first on Genspect.

Genspect has covered in detail how experiments on people with gender incongruity have led to today’s transition industry, but why do many people seek an alternative gender identity, and how did the idea become mainstream? 

True believers give inconsistent answers: gender has always existed, yet cannot be understood by anyone over the age of 30; gender is a social construct and also innate; gender is fixed by hormonal balances in the womb, but also fluid in adults; gender is not a choice, but choosing it is a deliberate act of liberation.  

In speaking with young people experiencing difficulties with gender, it becomes apparent that few, if any of them, have much awareness of the academic or clinical theories about these identities. They have not, for instance, read Judith Butler — and who can blame them? Their explanations are third-hand interpretations of gender theorists.  

I believe gender identity is primarily a cultural movement, not a medical, psychological, or philosophical one, which is why achieving consensus on treatment options for people with gender distress has been so difficult. This is not a coherent ideology. It is a memeplex, an assortment of related, replicating ideas, upstream of any theory.    

What’s in a Meme?

A ‘meme’ is a loose genetic analogy for cultural transmission, or social contagion, first popularised by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.1 Memes are simple ideas that appeal on some basic level. They pass from one person to the next, like a virus attaching to the receptors on a cell. Memes about gender transition have been around much longer than most people realize, but before we look at these agents of cultural transmission, let us pause to consider what makes memes about gender identity so “contagious”? 

The Russian psychologist, Sabina Spielrein, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud suggested an intriguing answer. In her 1912 paper, Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being, she challenged Sigmund Freud’s conception that the human ego is driven by pleasure-seeking. She wrote:  

In our depths, there is something that, as paradoxical as it may sound, wills self-injury while the ego counteracts it with pleasure. A wish for self-injury, a joy in pain, is, however, thoroughly incomprehensible if we believe merely in the existence of an ego that only desires pleasure. 

She identified a close relationship between sex and disgust. Acts that would be repellent in another context become desirable in the context of sex. Just as the drive for sex ultimately ends in death, as one generation gives way so the next can emerge, the desire for pleasure is also a desire for self-destruction. What would happen if the circle of life became broken for some people so that only the drive for self-destruction remained? Spielrein believed this instinct for destruction is expressed in the person of Thanatos, the death god of classical Greek myth. “Close to our desire to maintain our present condition,” she wrote, “there lies a desire for transformation.”2

Are there people who fit this description? In attempting to understand why gender identity was so readily accepted in the West over the last decade or so, I have looked at the cohort I am calling the ‘mid-boomers’. This group, which has been noticeably open to radical ideas about gender, consisted of teenagers in the 1960s and 70s and occupied senior roles in institutions by the 2010s. It is my belief that this cohort was primed to accept gender identity through a memetic cultural transmission from their formative years. We can see this if we look at some of the key memetic cultural influences of the 60s and 70s. 

Gender Bending in the 70s

In 1970, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones was probably the biggest rock star in the world. He was also one of the first to play with the idea of gender transition, in the surrealist movie Performance (1970), (later retitled Sadismo for the Italian market). Jagger undergoes several transformations, from man to woman and eventually into an entirely different person.  

Unlike other examples of the man-dresses-as-woman-to-hide-from-gangsters subgenre, notably Some Like it Hot (1959) or Nuns on the Run (1990), Performance is not a comedy. In one line of dialogue, Jagger’s character says, “The only performance that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness”. Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble is often credited with the idea that gender is a performance, but it was published a full twenty years later, an example of an academic theory well downstream of the gender memeplex.  

The film Cabaret (1972) is another example. Based on the Broadway play I am a Camera (1951) based on Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 memoir/novel Goodbye to Berlin. Liza Minnelli plays an entertainer in the Weimar Republic’s club scene. Her character, Sally sings: 

I used to have this girlfriend known as Elsie  
With whom I shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea 
She wasn’t what you’d call a blushing flower 
As a matter of fact, she rented by the hour 
The day she died the neighbours came to snicker: 
”Well, that’s what comes from too much pills and liquor” 
But when I saw her laid out like a queen 
She was the happiest corpse I’d ever seen… 

The movie’s depiction of the Weimar Republic is something like the way today’s radical trans rights movement envisions its situation. It is the story of the Fall: on one side there is an Eden peopled by genderqueer performers. On the other side of the stage curtain there is a hostile world — peopled by National Socialists. In this febrile, imagined history, gendercide is imminent; the evidence of transgender people’s existence has been looted from Magnus Hirschfeld’s library and burned in the streets. Of course, this origin story has nothing to do with the historical facts of the period, as Malcolm Richard Clark has documented, but the memeification of the Weimar period through films like Cabaret might help to explain why men who punch women at feminist rallies now justify their violence on the basis of a supposed ‘anti-fascism’. 

Gender also plays a part in John Water’s Pink Flamingos (1972). It is hard to describe what goes on in the film, starring drag artist Divine without a content warning. The film was so transgressive that Variety called it “one of the most vile, stupid, and repulsive films ever made” — which was exactly what Waters was aiming for. “I wouldn’t call us a happy-go-lucky bunch,” Waters recalled at the film’s 50th anniversary. “We were all influenced by radical politics and rioting, so we were driven, but we were also looking for trouble.” Balenciaga, a fashion house which might also be described as looking for trouble, (their 2023 ad campaign featuring photos of children holding teddy bears in bondage gear) ended their 2022 show with an homage to the Water’s film featuring a man wearing a copy of Divine’s red dress as the film’s theme played. 

Andy Warhol was another artist and filmmaker interested in gender. He collected ‘interesting’ gender-incongruent people around him, including actor Candy Darling and psychopathic androphobe Valerie Solanas (the latter would repay Warhol’s attention by shooting him). Candy Darling had a central role in the film Warhol produced. Women in Revolt ( 1971) is a satire of women’s liberation. In a foreshadowing of the current enmity between drag queens and feminists, the female characters are portrayed by men in drag. A review of the film by Jeanne Miller stated “The acting is embarrassing, the dialogue absurd and the photography atrocious. Mercifully, the soundtrack is so poor that a great deal of the conversation is totally inaudible.” 

Rock-n-Roll

Rock legend, Lou Reed, another member of Warhol’s circle, deserves special attention. Reed formed The Velvet Underground, in 1965 naming the band after journalist, Michael Leigh’s 1963 expose of sexual deviance in the USA. Reed, always up for the risqué, had already written Venus in Furs, taking its name from an 1870 erotic novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (where we get the word ‘masochism’ from). One of the Velvet Underground’s more infamous gigs and their first with androgynous singer Christa Päffgen a.k.a ‘Nico’, was at the annual dinner of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry in 1966, where Warhol and his acolytes asked the unsuspecting psychiatrists lewd questions then chided them for their embarrassment.  

The band’s songs about the delights of bondage and scoring heroin were not considered radio-friendly, and their record sales were low, but they gained a following among musicians. One such performer was a British musician and mime artist named David Bowie. Bowie wrote a song in 1971 about Warhol and his associates: “Dress my friends up just for show, see them as they really are”.  

The following year, Bowie invited Lou Reed to record a solo album in London. The songs on Transformer were about Warhol’s circle in New York. The best-known song, and Reed’s most iconic hit was Walk on the Wild Side a song about drugs, cross-dressing, (“shaved her legs and he was a she”), prostitution and oral sex. The album’s artwork featured drag poses, with some fans speculating that these images showed Reed himself. In fact, they show Gala Mitchell and Ernst Thormahlen, and yes, that is an enormous banana in his pocket. Ernst died of a heroin overdose some years later. 

David Bowie’s own album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was also released in 1972. Ziggy is a gender-diverse character, with big hair, make-up and heels. Arguably, David and Angie Bowie were the original queer straight couple. The opening lines in Bowie’s hit Rebel Rebel from 1974, “You’ve got your mother in a whirl. She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl” could be the Genspect theme song were it not for copyright.  

Bowie enjoyed reinventing his identity from album to album, his imagination assisted by his copious drug intake. Two years later, he was wearing a black leather overcoat, being driven around Berlin in a presidential Mercedes, and praising a well-known German dictator as “one of the first rock stars.”  

The cover for Antony and the Johnsons album I Am a Bird Now (2005) featured a photo of Candy Darling on her deathbed in 1974, a direct link to Warhol’s circle and the theme of Thanatos. Lou Reed makes a guest appearance on the recording. If you don’t know this album, I recommend that you seek out a copy. Like Lou Reed’s Transformer, it is a personal account of gender identity but also a great album. The lead singer and pianist of the group is transgender and has gone by the name Anohni since 2016.  

I believe that cultural figures such as Lou Reed and David Bowie have had a greater influence on the public understanding of sexuality and gender than any theorist. I think we are witnessing a revival of 50-year-old conceptions of gender because the generation which has overseen the institutions regards these figures of their own time as highly culturally significant.  

Drugs

While many of the artists of the period died due to drug misuse, others continued to struggle with the legacy of addiction, as their creative output dwindled. The Velvet Underground’s singer Nico went from heroin to methadone and died in 1988. Marianne Faithfull, the singer and muse of the Rolling Stones who is related to Sacher-Masoch via her aristocratic mother, ended up living on the streets due to her drug habit. 

During the 1980s, the British government responded to increasing levels of opiate addiction with its “Heroin Screws You Up” campaign, showing unhealthy-looking young people with various negative outcomes of drug misuse flagged. This campaign proceeded from the rational assumption that young people would not take heroin if they were educated about the side effects. The campaign was considered a failure, as heroin continued to be abused. Lou Reed had already informed the heroin user about what they could expect many years before, in the Velvet Underground’s song I’m Waiting for the Man: “Feeling sick and dirty, more dead than alive”. Thanatos has a lot to answer for.  

Perhaps we make the same mistake when warning young people about the side effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. We assume a rational standpoint which enables an even-handed balancing of risks and benefits, but people inhabiting self-destructive memetic cultures do not operate that way. The addict knows that opiates are bad for their health but continues their misuse regardless. And gender-affirming ‘therapists’ assume that someone figuratively killing their old self, refusing the use of their ‘dead name’, knows who they really are. 

Where does this leave agency, and informed consent? If people cannot be assumed to make decisions in their own best interest, because of their conscious or unconscious desire for self-destruction, is it ethical to give them choices which could result in harm? That question may be uncomfortable for people who are used to a consumer healthcare paradigm, in which the patient gets whatever they want if someone pays. 

Saving Us from Ourselves?

We are told that social transition can only be positive, but the destruction of identity that this must entail is usually unacknowledged. Is it ethical to enable, and cheer for, the patient’s symbolic self-destruction, just because they claim to be sure it is what they want? Shouldn’t we first establish why the patient wants to destroy their existing identity? 

We are now living in the world Lou Reed chronicled, of junkies and drag queens. Only instead of being limited to the environs of Andy Warhol’s Factory, this is the anti-normative normal that all of us are supposed to accept. The problem with cultural outlaws is they have no idea what to do next after their memeplex becomes the establishment view, endorsed by governments and corporations alike. We might need a more humane counter-counterculture which is not predicated on self-destruction. 

As Spielrein put it in her paper of 1912, we should not “thrust an imbalance of destructive images exclusively onto children or highly emotional people. In neurosis, the destructive component is predominant and, in every symptom, voices its opposition to life and genuine destiny.”  

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

1 The American Humanist Association withdrew its ‘humanist of the year’ award from Dawkins, twenty-five years later, because of his wrongthink on gender. 

2 Freud took note and adopted Spielrein’s ideas in his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, referring to it as the ‘Todestreib’, or death-drive. Spielrein’s ideas about self-injury changed his mind and he acknowledged that “there might be such a thing as primary masochism — a possibility which I had contested”. He expanded the idea in “The Economic Problem of Masochism”(1924) where he wrote “libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfils the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards… The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power.”

The post A Trip Down Meme-ory Lane: Trans Tropes are Older Than You Think They Are<br> <span style='font-size: 50%; line-height: 1;'>What is it about culture that leads people to seek an alternative gender identity?</span> appeared first on Genspect.

The term conversion therapy strikes a note of fear in many people’s hearts, calling to mind barbaric practices such as electric shock therapy, forced watching of porn, and even “corrective rape.” All decent people denounce these awful, outdated practices, and there is consensus among reputable therapeutic and medical bodies that such abhorrent interventions should never take place.

Given this consensus view and the absence of evidence that conversion therapy is being practised, why are conversion therapy bans suddenly being tabled in so many legislatures and governing bodies worldwide? A scoping paper prepared by the Irish Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth analysed research from Ireland, Europe and the USA and found no evidence of conversion therapy being practised by medical or mental health professionals in those areas. The scoping document did include some evidence of religious practises aimed at changing a person’s sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual, but none at all among medical and mental health practitioners. So why the “urgent” call for new conversion therapy bans?

Passing a conversion therapy ban provides politicians with a powerful messaging tool. We’re the good guys because we passed this bill outlawing some truly heinous practices! Never mind that no one actually engages in those practices – it still looks good. To illustrate the point, the scoping paper mentioned above, which found no evidence of conversion therapy practices, was never published; apparently, the politician who instigated the study, Roderic O’Gorman, cared less about discovering whether there was an actual problem than bringing forward an unnecessary bill that would make him appear “progressive.” For voters, too, supporting such a bill or candidate is an easy way to signal virtue. Unnecessary conversion therapy bans that cost nothing feel like a win for everyone.

Of greater concern are bans that expand the meaning of conversion therapy to cover much more than barbaric and obsolete practices aimed at changing sexual orientation. Increasingly, these legal bans will define conversion therapy in broad terms, such as: “any practice or treatment that seeks to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of a patient or client, including mental health therapy that seeks to change, eliminate, or reduce behaviours, expressions, attractions, or feelings related to a patient or client’s sexual orientation or gender identity.”[1] Such language is so broad as to exclude even basic insight-oriented interventions that promote growth and development, if result is confused with intent.

The shift from narrow conversion therapy bans to ones with more encompassing language is a product of trans rights activists (TRAs) working to exploit sympathy for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals and their long struggles for acceptance. Liberal-minded people don’t want to be on the “wrong side” of history this time around, and so when TRAs say “, we deserve the same protections as the LGB community,” everyone enthusiastically agrees. Thus the bans now make it illegal to try changing a client’s sexual orientation OR gender identity. TRAs have appropriated sympathy for the LGB community and made it their own.

They enlarge upon their claim for sympathy by painting trans people as the most marginalised and persecuted minority in the world as if they currently hold no legal rights even in modern democracies. In truth, trans people have the same human rights and legal protections as everyone else in the West. But TRAs loudly proclaim that they are persecuted, and the media dutifully support their demands for further legal protections and more robust conversion therapy bans. Leary of public disapproval and being labelled a bigot, politicians have complied with those demands and passed ill-considered, overly broad legislation to ban all forms of “conversion therapy.”

Appropriating sympathy for the LGB cause depends on the false assumption that protecting gender identity and preventing coercive efforts to change one’s sexual orientation are no different, and legislators should therefore cover them in a single bill. This forced alignment of gender identity with sexual orientation obscures the fundamental differences between them and the very different goals of their advocates. The campaign for gay rights argued that those who are same-sex attracted should be accorded the same rights as those granted by society to heterosexuals; it asked for freedom from persecution and the right to live one’s life married to the person of one’s choosing. Gays and lesbians never challenged the reality of biological sex, binary in nature, or the long-accepted belief that one’s sex is immutable.

By contrast, TRAs have a long list of demands, all of them implicit in the expansive language of these new conversion therapy bans. First of all, in addition to the protections they already possess under existing anti-discrimination laws, TRAs require everyone else to adopt a new belief system that has no scientific support – that each human being possesses a unique gender identity knowable only to that person, independent of and overriding her or his biological sex. They demand that we suppress the verdict of our own senses and align our internal responses to conform with their expectations. They insist that we forget their former names and consistently use their new ones, along with their “preferred pronouns.” Anything less than full compliance is transphobic.

In short, the expansive new bans which seek, on their surface, to shield minority groups from persecution actually enforce a dramatic revision of biological reality and force every last one of us to alter our own perceptions and beliefs. It has been a highly effective sleight of hand, sneaking enforcement of a new ideology into law by inserting only two words: gender identity. The audacity is breathtaking.

Because TRAs insist that validating a person’s self-identification as trans is “life-saving,” they advocate for “affirmative care” – an approach compelling therapists to agree with and affirm a client’s self-perceptions. Affirmative care has been in existence for little more than a decade, with no long-term studies conducted to demonstrate its efficacy, but TRAs have nonetheless convinced many governmental bodies to ban anything outside their preferred approach. If you examine the legislative code section quoted above, you will see this pernicious intent at work. The language is so comprehensive as to define virtually everything other than affirmative care as “conversion therapy.”

Abiding by these new guidelines, how would a therapist work with LGB clients, afflicted by internalised homophobia, who identify as “trans” in a bid to escape from it? A 14-year-old girl might initially come out as a lesbian and become increasingly uncomfortable with the way she is perceived; then, some months later, she might abruptly identify as a heterosexual boy. In such a case, a therapist might fear charges of practising “conversion therapy” if they were to explore homophobia in that child’s environment and its relation to her internalised homophobia. The therapist will feel conflicted about how to proceed and may ultimately feel unable to carry on effective therapy. It might seem easier simply to avoid working with this cohort.

The fear that one accusation could ruin their reputation has already had a chilling effect on therapists, with many now refusing to work with LGBTQ+ clients altogether. “The stakes are too high,” as one colleague recently put it; as a result, there’s a terrible shortage of mental health professionals willing to undertake this much-needed work. At the same time, the rising number of young people with gender dysphoria means that waiting lists are growing exponentially longer while qualified therapists stay away.

As practised for decades, conventional psychotherapy includes probing, thoughtful questions that seek to bring about a deeper awareness of the self. One regular feature is a technique called “Socratic questioning,” a disciplined and thoughtful dialogue between therapist and client that gradually reveals and unravels the deeply held values and beliefs of the individual. This can be a powerful intervention that helps the person understand themselves more deeply, uncover unrecognised motivations, and discover new possibilities for self-expression. Successful psychotherapy helps clients to make fully informed decisions for themselves, which might mean continuing on to medical/surgical interventions, desisting from trans-identification, or finding their way to a unique form of self-expression.

Genspect believes that governments should reject these new expansive conversion therapy bans that make the practice of conventional therapy a crime or leave so much doubt that therapists will avoid working with an underserved population for fear of putting themselves and their professional license at risk.

[1] Utah Occupational and Professional Licensing Code, R 156-60-102.

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