Malcolm Clark Profile picture
Apr 17, 2021 24 tweets 8 min read Read on X
1./ A thread about conversion therapy, gender identity and the elephant in the room : mental health. It's remarkable how in the debate on 'gender identity' there's such a stubborn refusal to consider the power and fragility of the human mind. Here's why that's dangerous.
2./ If you haven't read 'Sleeping Beauties' I can reccomend this extraordinary new book that explores how stress and cultural influence can trigger medical conditions which, on the surface, seem baffling; like 169 girls in Sweden falling into 'comas'.👇theguardian.com/books/2021/apr…
3./ Except coma isn't the right word. The girls were all from refugee families, and almost all from the ex-USSR or Iraq. Many were Yazidi. Some of the families had been through hell. For 2 decades girls fell asleep and didn't wake for months or years.👇bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-…
4./ Critics accused families of faking it which is why local doctors were keen for the author, Suzanne O'Sullivan, a neurologist, to study them. The evidence quickly suggested a 'functional neurological disorder' (FND) or something we used to call psychosomatic.
5./ Psychosomosis gets a bad rap; as if doctors are saying it isn't real. But psychosomatic symptoms ARE real. The girls were also an example of an MPI, a 'mass psychogenic illness' where groups of similar people suffer similar symptoms with no obvious physical basis.
6./ But don't run away with the idea conditions like these only happen to girls. In 2016 adult male diplomats in the US embassy in Havana began to fall ill from what they believed were mysterious attacks with a powerful sonic weapon.👇vanityfair.com/news/2019/01/t…
7./ It started when a guy heard a buzzing so strong he had to close the windows and doors and turn up the TV. Over the next few months dozens of others experienced the same, suffering chronic headaches, vomiting and stupor. So what was the truth? 👇theguardian.com/world/2019/nov…
8./ US diplomats were withdrawn, putting Cuban relations into the cold-freeze all because guys had become convinced they were being targetted. They weren't. The power of the mind had "spread" a condition through a peer group who became equally convinced they were suffering.
9./ Why does this matter? If we are to believe the proponents of gender identity the 4000+ % increase in girls being diagnosed with gender dysphoria has NOTHING to do with this sort of culturally influenced psychogenetic illness. Maybe they are right.👇 telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/…
10./ While it can't explain all of the rise, if you really cared about kids wouldn't you at least consider it could be an amplifying factor? Wouldn't you want research? Instead these activists are doubling down. Affirmation is the only answer, they say. 👇theguardian.com/us-news/2021/m…
11./ The confused campaign for a ban on so-called Conversion Therapy claims failure to affirm a child's 'gender identity' is somehow an attempt at conversion. This insightful interview by @darrengrimes_ of @JamesEsses explains why that's nonsense. audioboom.com/posts/7845908-…
12./ As James says no therapist nowadays would set out to change someone's sexual orientation or 'gender identity'. That's why affirmation shouldn't be compulsory or the only option. Therapists need to be able to explore the reasons why a child believes what he or she does.
13./ A factor in some outbreaks of 'mass psychogenetic illness' is severe stress that can lead individuals in a peer group subconsciously to view their condition as an escape or coping response. We know lots of school-age girls are under huge stress.👇 bbc.co.uk/news/uk-565664…
14./ Swedish refugee kids who were uncertain about their future and feared going back to appalling conditions in Iraq closed down their bodies. Couldn't some girls in highly sexualised school cultures respond by denying their female-ness? Who knows? Isn't it worth research?
15./ We're told a child's anxiety disappears when they are affirmed. But again this simplistic approach fails to take into consideration the power of the mind. What do you think happened when a very common form of knee surgery was tested against placebo? nytimes.com/2014/10/07/ups…
16./ The results for those who had placebo surgery (only an incision was made) were identical to those who got the popular surgery. It turns out we can sometimes will ourselves well if we're convinced a procedure (like puberty blockers?) or even surgery WILL transform our lives.
17./ The experiment on knee surgery was more recently extended to one of the most common surgical procedures in the Western world: keyhole surgery on 'impinged' shoulders. 21 000 are carried out every year in the UK. Turns out placebo surgery is as good.👇sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/…
18./ The human mind is complex and often baffling and the connection between the mind and the body still full of mysteries. The idea the state should march into the therapy room with simplistic rules about what therapists must say or do is not just philistine, it's dangerous.
19./ Once therapists are told they must affirm where will that end? It was my experience working on a BBC Horizon 20 years ago that convinced me we must be careful about the pressure to affirm identities. The show was about people who believed they were meant to be amputees.👇
20./ It was Britain's leading expert on transsexuality Russell Reid who argued it was ethical to remove healthy limbs from these people and a Scottish surgeon did just that, amputating a leg. Reid said the procedure would make him "happy". Like that shoulder surgery did?🤷‍♂️👇
21./ Waiting in the wings are other 'identities' that argue therapy should do nothing but affirm them. There are growing numbers of people who argue they are Plurals or multiple personalities, many with different genders. Must all their gender identities be affirmed?👇
22./ Once we start telling therapists how they must treat their patients, and threatening them with criminal sanctions if they don't affirm, what then? We might open them up to complaints (or even claims) from clients like this that felt they hadn't been affirmed enough.👇
23./ Of course this will be dismissed as exaggerated. But then if you'd told the average person 10 or even 5 years ago that in some school classes a third of girls would identify as trans or non-binary they would have dismissed that too. So what should we do?
24./ The human mind is extraordinary. Our policy towards therapy should reflect that. We should empower therapists to freely explore clients' experiences with respect and curiosity not enforce some mechanistic one size fits all approach backed by the power of the criminal law.

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More from @TwisterFilm

Apr 22
1./ 🧵Why was media coverage of the Supreme Court's ruling on sex so biased? My latest article tells the emblematic story of one channel's capture by the trans lobby. Channel 4's subversion is partly down to the social circle its staff move in. Guess who's this guy's best mate.👇Image
2./ Last week Krishnan Guru-Murthy gave two idiot trans activists the chance to malign the Court's ruling with all the critical challenge we might expect from some blowhard champion of the trans agenda like the SNP's John Nicolson. Funny you should mention that poltroon. 👉 Image
3./ Guru-Murthy and Nicolson regularly describe each other as their closest friends. Nicolson says GM is "one of the people in the world who likes me most." A low bar. They met when Guru-Murthy was a 15 year old schoolboy during filming for a TV show Nicolson was presenting. Image
Read 15 tweets
Apr 19
1./ Apologies. It’s welcome that
Mark Smith has said, “men like me need to say sorry”. Everyone makes mistakes. A democratic culture only works if we accept people’s views evolve. There are tho some lessons to be learned from Mark’s original stance. 👉
heraldscotland.com/politics/viewp…
2./ In his column in early 2020 after the launch of @AllianceLGB, Mark opined on our “horrible website”. He complained images of women had been deliberately chosen to look as feminine as possible to emphasise trans male exclusion. Uh? 👀 They really weren’t. Worse was to come. 👉 Image
3./ Smith went on to compare @AllianceLGB’s concern over child safeguarding to Section 28. “Dangerous to children is a phrase that appears on the LGB Alliance website along with multiple uses of the word ‘threat’. We have been here before.” Indeed we have. Heard of PIE anyone? Image
Read 7 tweets
Apr 17
1./ 🧵On a female hero. It’s typical of @HotchkissRhona to hand out well-deserved plaudits to women who helped prepare the ground for the Supreme Court triumph. But no one who went to early public meetings of @ForWomenScot can be in any doubt Rhona herself deserves thanks. 👉
2./ I first met this pocket rocket at a @ForWomenScot meeting in early 2020. In those days all gender critical events were by word of mouth or carefully vetted such was the level of fear. I’d come to talk about @AllianceLGB and was amazed to find a secret, feisty army of women.
3./The first speaker was @HotchkissRhona who talked, as an ex prison governor, about how trans identified men often acted out in sickening ways in women’s jails. Her jaw dropping speech was spiced with Rhona’s biting wit. She then introduced a young woman sitting beside me.
Read 9 tweets
Apr 13
1./ How deep does homophobia run in the trans psychosis? There's a clue in the story of Sofia Taloni, one of the Arab world's most famous trans activists who's now detransitioning back to the bloke he always was. If Sofia looks a bit of a lunatic there's a reason for that. 👉 Image
2./ Taloni was born in Morocco where homosexuality is illegal. Though as many a tourist can attest it's not exactly unknown dans la casbah. Shame and the threat of a jail sentence has led many gay Moroccans to embrace trans, which is not illegal. So here's Taloni not being gay.👇Image
3./ Taloni's internalised self-hate erupted in 2020 when he told his 700K Insta followers to download Grindr, create fake profiles and expose closet gay men. Taloni urged his followers to post the men's images online and then publicly berated them.
attitude.co.uk/news/world/as-…
Read 8 tweets
Apr 2
1./ 🧵Why is the debate about Trans so overdue? It's great to see the landmark book by @HJoyceGender discussed at a Festival at long last and by the legend that is @bindelj. There was though a tragic irony about the location that reminds us why this debate is urgently necessaryImage
2./ In the early hours of the 25th July 2021 a slightly-built 30 year old Spanish engineer Jorge Martin Carreno was separated from his friends and sat down, tipsy, beside the architectural wonder that is the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford where today's debate was held. Image
3./ What Jorge did not know was a 23 year old trans identified male, who called himself Scarlet Blake, was at that very moment scouring the streets of Oxford looking for someone to kill. He was wearing a hooded jacket that hid his face. And then he spied...Jorge. Image
Read 15 tweets
Apr 2
1./ 🧵Adolescence
If someone says a TV drama should shape policy remind them of Butterfly about a boy who wants puberty blockers. Its advisor Susie Green had castrated her own son. 6 years ago the show was applauded by many now applauding Adolescence.
2./ We now know puberty blockers do not alleviate gender dysphoria, yet Butterfly claimed they did. The Tavistock only released that information after relentless pressure. In the show the clinic is portrayed as a centre of excellence. It's now been closed.Image
3./ The boy at the centre of Butterfly was 11. We now know from the Cass Review that the depiction of boys like him was a shockingly biased and often blatantly untruthful account. Yet Lucy Mangan described it as "an important, truthful drama".
theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2…
Read 10 tweets

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