Mike Penner: A cautionary tale of 'Transgender Regret'

You are very welcome and thank you, ACP!:) Hopefully this story will shed additional light on this very complex orientation.

There is nothing like "transsexual" in this world. You are either male or female. The so-called "transgender" feelings are not abnormal. There is a bit of female in every man. And there is a bit of male in every woman. We need to believe and trust in who God has made us - our bodies provide a huge evidence of who we are (whether male or female). Society shouldn't dictate to us. Neither should our emotions - feelings are temporary.

(I posted this on one of the other stories about this same case.)

Yes. Clearly a case that points to an error in diagnosis and treatment.

As a veteran of primal therapy when I was young and a second round right smack dab in the my forties, I know that childhood pain surfaces over the years and that this man could have had something like this cause him to shrink from his masculinity, just as you can shrink from using your left hand  under pressure to use your right one.

Our basic nature is feminine. Our body starts off as a woman's. The man's, the boy's body is made from the female. The eggs pass down the inguinal canal and become testicles. The body is overladen with wider shoulders, more muscle mass, and changes in the  brain.

We end up with more speech impediments, more problem with reading and we also end up wanting to be women about three times as often as women want to be men, even though, logic would have it that women have it worse off than men and would want to change over more often.

But that is not the case.

What this man needed to do was get in touch with his pain. His anger would have surfaced, fending off depression and feelings of helplessness. His need  underneath for the affection of his father would have been felt as such and not sexualized. The unfulfilled need for affection and the love and direction of a father may translate into an identification with the feminine. He may have faced hostility from his father as a competitor as well.

That is what he needed to do, not become a woman.

I am not saying that there are not transsexuals. I have known several very well. They were happy as women. No problem.

This man, though, was a victim of a kind of political correctness that, in essence, demanded that he become the woman that he felt inside of himself as if that was what he was when it was actually a symptom of his pain as a boy. 

Somebody didn't want to discover the truth.

Roy, you are raising some interesting questions and some of that deduction may very well be.

I know the science behind the process that makes us male or female, however the psychology of each individual is rather diverse and complex.

The brain being the main organ that controls this is guided by chemical processes and those can be distorted for multiple reasons. 

All this starts the minute or even second of conception. 

The research on all this is not unanimous, many questions still remain and much more needs to be understood and learned before we can understand all the mechanism and causes. 

Thanks,  Paschen. There is the brain, and there is the psyche. We tend to favor one or the other in our approach. I try to use both.

In the last few decades, psychiatry has abandoned looking at the psyche and done what Freud did: jump to physiological explanations.

Nature and nurture create us. Unfortunately, we cannot do experiments on humans, and therefore there will always be some element of conjecture and downright guessing about our identities as human being.

What I am saying is that science will not resolve these issues. Cannot be done.

Roy. I  have never heard a better concise explanation of why transgender is another foolish science foul.  We cannot cut out and input into the body .  It denies the spirit and psyche's influence.  It has to be realized that everyone still lives with painful emotional and physical problems.  The people who do this then are really trapped for it is even more difficult to get the help they really need when this temporary fix does not fill the hole in their hearts.  They have mutilated their bodies . Janov has a good article this month ...here it tis: When will the madness stop? Above all, the madness in the name of science and medicine. In the N.Y. Times today (Nov. 26-09) is a story about places like Harvard, of all things, doing surgery for obsessive disorders, depression and other psychological maladies. Here is what they do: In cases of obsessive rituals and thoughts which have been intractable to psychotherapy, they have decided to cut out those pesky afflictions with brain surgery, cutting out pieces of the emotional brain to ease the problem.This surgery, they warn, is only for those obdurate psychological problems that do not respond to any sort of psychotherapy. It involves drilling four holes in the brain and inserting wires deep down. From there the procedures differ but in one key surgery, cingulotomy, they pinpoint the anterior cingulate for partial destruction. The rationale: they want to destroy some of the brain tissue that forwards emotional messages to the thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex from the feeling areas such as the cingulate. The claim is that this area is overly active in cases such as obsession in inputting emotional messages to the thinking, intellectual centers. There are variations to this theme but in nearly all cases the attempt is to suppress emotional pain from its apprehension higher up.The claim is that standard therapy cannot touch the problems such as deep depression . This is brain surgery, remember. The result, according to the surgeons, is about sixty percent satisfactory, although we do not know the long-term consequences of brain surgery. There is one follow-up study which indicated that these patients seem apathetic and lose some self-control for years afterward. It is no wonder since we have cut out the person’s passion.But what if we could do exactly what the surgery does? What if we could avoid a very serious surgery? I believe we can because primal is the only therapy to be able to go deep in the brain purely by psychological means. Because other conventional therapies do not have this possibility in their theories or in their therapy, they think that the only other solution is surgery. And of course deep depression sometimes is being helped by this surgery. Deep depression means just that; origins deep in the brain. So again, a therapy that probes the depths, the antipodes of conscious/awareness should work as well or better than to have one’s brain cut into.I have not kept our therapy a secret but it is up to those who do this surgery to investigate what is out there before burning out brain tissue. What is sad is that this kind of “way-out” procedure can have positive stories on it in the New York Times and many other respected journals, while a “far-out” psychotherapy such as ours, cannot get a line printed in any newspapers. It is not “safe.” But here is a surgery that is decidedly dangerous and obtains cache in our country. So someone who compulsively washes her hands needs brain surgery? This, it seems, is recommended because, I think, the pain imprinted down low was too much for the usual tranquilizers. So, ergo, we cut out the relay mechanism that sends terrible emotions to the understanding cortex. So, no relay, no pain and no symptoms. If anything about this procedure is enlightening is that we see how compulsions and obsessive develop out of pain surging up from lower brain centers, and how ordinarily, the gating system keeps symptoms from showing. The pain is still doing its damage, however; only we are no longer aware of it. Certainly, the surgeons did not cut out the origin, the emotional imprint, they cut out the circuit that forwards the message to our awareness. That imprint is all over the brain and body. So a piece is cut out and the imprint is still there doing its continual damage. It will certainly find other outlets. What we will do then? Cut out more? The imprint is the conductor; it won’t help to kill the violinist.In this highly respected scientific atmosphere the most outrageous modes of therapy are taking place.

Hopefully, it will calm some of the bigots left in our society.