Thread by @scattermoon

OK Twitter, I need to talk to you about the harmful version of conversion therapy I went through a teen - something called 'desistence therapy', which was basically gaslighting of a young teen into not only not transitioning but believing that not transitioning was their idea.

What's worse is that this was done to me not by a shady illicit private business but by a NHS Gender Clinic. They forced me to undergo the wrong puberty, with me begging them to prevent it, and tried to convince me that it was what I really wanted all along, and it broke me.

I've been wanting to make this thread for a while but every time I went to write it, I froze up, because it still has such a lasting impact on me even two decades later. I've been scared to talk about it, the effect it had on me, what it did to me. It's genuinely traumatic.

But I've learned that nobody seems to know it even happened here in the UK. I've met nobody who went through the same thing - at least this side of the Atlantic - and I feel that there needs to be some record of it, a testimony from someone who went through it in the UK in 2000s.

Not just as a personal record - finally putting this out there to get it out of my head - but also so that there's awareness that it happened, what it does to young people, and why it must NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN anywhere. Why 'desistence' is so incredibly harmful and outright abusive

I've always met trans people my age - mid-30s now - who tell me they wish they'd known they were trans earlier in their lives, before puberty did its damage, and I have to stop myself snapping at them in response, because I did, and it only led me into denial and gaslighting.

I realised I was trans very early for someone my age. I won't give you the full backstory but I was a nerdy kid who did her research and I was able to piece things together from various Internet resources and medical records around 2001. I was in my early teens still then.

Eventually I plucked up the courage to speak to my GP. Who didn't know what to do with me and had to look it up. Mostly it involved in him examining my teenage genitals - I know - and referring me on to a GIC. Given my age it should have been the Tavistock in London. It wasn't.

Instead I was referred to my local GIC, which I won't name here. Waiting lists back then were nowhere near where they were now, but they were still in the terms of many months, with something like half a year between appointments. This will become very important.

At that point, I was still very lucky. I'd barely had any effects of puberty yet, and I felt there was a good chance I could avoid it altogether, get the right puberty for me with the changes I wanted, rather than the male ones I dreaded and deeply feared.

I knew puberty blockers were a thing - despite what media now may claim, they're not new, and even back then they were in use for trans teens in the Netherlands. I thought maybe I could convince the doctors to save me. That maybe I'd saved myself.

I was very wrong.

When I finally saw the GIC, what I got wasn't that help, but persistent stonewalling, through a facade of concern. They interrogated me about my school life, my family, my sexuality, my mental health, the sexual assault I'd suffered as a kid, and they used all of it against me.

Everything they could find to justify making me wait a little longer - it was always 'the next appointment' when they'd discuss puberty blockers or hormones. And remember this was with 5-8 months between appointments, so each delay was costly, esp with puberty on the horizon.

But they always told me that I simply wasn't ready. Not even due to their call - they insisted that it was me. That what I was telling them suggested I wasn't really trans, that I wasn't sure, that I needed to give it more time before they could decide anything.

One time I remember very clearly was as I was approaching my 17th birthday. They told me that people who go to university experience a great deal of life changes and that I needed to wait until university before making any kind of call. Uni was still over a year away then.

All the while, I was encouraged to try other approaches than transition. Perhaps I should just spend more time with 'other boys'. I could try getting a girlfriend, having sex. Or maybe I was just gay. I should simply try not being trans. After all 'that's what I was telling them'

I was 16. I trusted them because I had to trust them, they were my doctors, I had nowhere else to turn, especially with no support from my Catholic school, my parents, or any local trans people. I was dependent on them and they let me down badly and abused that trust.

In hindsight, it was very clear they were never going to actually treat me in any sense. It was all a stalling exercise and their excuses were made up - using anything they could get - just to keep me in that endless holding pattern. Even when I cried begging them to help.

Except the holding pattern was designed to be indefinite. Even when I did go to university, as in the example above, they still spun new reasons at me. At age 19, I was no closer to any treatment at all than I was at age 14. And I'd hit puberty by then.

Unless you're trans yourself, you probably can't fully appreciate what going through the wrong puberty is like - especially with full awareness of its wrongness, that it was fully preventable, and that those who could do that were simply not (and were saying it was your fault)

It's pure pure body horror. Everything goes the wrong way, in ways that make you feel sick, that just don't feel like *you*, in ways that are permanent or at least very costly to undo. It's like feeling yourself slip away with you powerless to do anything about it. It's HELL.

Your own body betrays you. It no longer feels yours. Even your voice is stolen from you. And it feels wrong on such a basic primal level you can't even articulate to anyone who doesn't know that world-shattering pain. And you're still a child then.

For me at that age, after having been told by other (much older) trans people on the net that I was so lucky to be doing things so young - it felt like game over. That that was it, I'd never be able to be myself anymore, that I'd lost my sole chance at a happy life.

When I reached my second year of university, much of puberty over, and I was *still* being told the same things - that I didn't seem actually trans, that I needed to give it more time, that I should enjoy being a man more, that perhaps I just needed a girlfriend - I broke.

I gave up. Stopped attending any more appointments because it was clear it wasn't going to achieve anything, and I felt like there was nothing to achieve anymore anyway, as I said, it felt like game over. I just wanted to die. Wanted any excuse to die. There was no point.

The only reason I didn't die is that I was too concerned with upsetting those around me, so I carried on with uni, but I was a shell. I didn't look after myself in any way, I stopped being as outgoing and active, my lively online presence dwindled away to nothing. I was empty.

That thing where you wish something would kill you so you could have oblivion without the guilt it would cause those around you if you took your own life. I deliberately don't look crossing the road. I never expected to live long. What was the point? I was gone. I was denied.

You can still see it in my old livejournal posts - going from a bubbly and poetic girl flirting, discussing anime, writing stories, being emotional and naive in all those teenage ways - to just doing my uni assignments, disappearing into video games, no longer writing anything.

I was fortunate to have a year abroad as part of my degree, and living by myself in a German forest with new friends, I slowly began to start to rebuild myself as much as I could, using the money I made teaching out there to fund private hormones and transition upon return to UK

And that's how I eventually got to where I am today. But it'd be a lie to say everything just fixed itself. I'd not be writing this otherwise. I still recall all the trauma of being forced through the wrong puberty, being constantly delayed, told it was what was best for me.

I've since learned what was happening. I can't be entirely sure as I don't have any notes from that time, any records. I was a teen after all, and it was still the early 2000s before things were all done electronically.

Further, my parents were absolutely not supportive, they told me it was God's will that I was born a boy and that I shouldn't change that, I had to go behind their backs the whole time, and the few times they found any GIC letters they threw them away. I have no records.

And I feel like I can't trust my own memories because that's what gaslighting does. I have my old private diary entries, which are deeply painful to read, but I just remember being made to feel like I was saying the wrong things, that I wasn't trying enough options, etc.

But what I recall very much matches the methodology of a Canadian psych called Kenneth Zucker and his 'desistence therapy', a technique designed to make trans children 'desist' from being trans, through the idea that they'll grow out of it - that you can make them grow out of it.

Rather than the standard NHS practice of waiting until trans kids turned 18 before beginning treatment - something the Tavistock was doing at the time, and which a similar aged friend of mine who saw the Tavistock at the same time ended up doing - they tried to desist me.

I don't know why. I assume they didn't know what to do with a trans child when their other patients were adults so followed Zucker's methodology, which was medically uncontroversial at the time.

All the smiley, 'supportive' meetings I'd had with psychs at the GIC were attempts to get me to stop with this whole trans thing. That they could convince me that I didn't really want that, through trying to get me to be a boy, through saying it was the fault of my assault, etc.

(do you have any idea how much it hurts to be told that something traumatic you had done to you, like the assault I had when I was 11, is the reason why you're having further trauma inflicted on you? Like it was my own fault and I was paying the price)

Told it was a sexual thing that I could solve through fucking somebody. That it was a mental health thing and I just needed to be happier. That it was an idle fancy I'd drop in the real world of uni. And that this was what I really wanted. Of course that I wasn't genuinely trans"

I struggle to say all this because - while I know I am trans and have for a long time - I still feel like it was actually my fault that I never got treatment then. That I'd said the wrong things, presented the wrong way, that I should have made more an effort, that I should etc.

Rationally, I know there was nothing I could have done, that what I said or did was irrelevant, because that's how desistence therapy works, the whole idea is to get the child to stop being trans after all. But still, it's hard not to blame myself. I do, in my darker moments.

Part of what made me realise this was desistence therapy was speaking to a friend (who I won't name publicly here, she can come forward if she wants) who went through the same thing at Zucker's clinic in Toronto. Our experiences tallied almost exactly despite the different places

Zucker's medically discredited now, though the anti-trans campaigners still love him (even though he's also extremely creepy towards the kids who see him). However when he was struck off, the very psychs I'd seen at the UK gender clinic signed a letter defending him. A red flag.

Desistence therapy assumes that you can stop trans children from being trans by forcing them to grow out of it - one way or another. In practice, this means leaving them broken, depressed, and suicidal, believing that they did this to themselves. It's immensely cruel.

'Desisting' is of course a term used to describe criminal acts and that very much reflects how it views transness in young people as something going very wrong with them and that they can get away from it and live a 'clean life' if only they're held back like it's a life of crime

I used the term 'conversion therapy' at the beginning of this thread because that's what it is. Doing trans healthcare is never the goal, the entire aim is to stop a trans kid being trans, you just do it by keeping them waiting endlessly rather than directly forcing them.

These are children and you're gaslighting them that not only are they not what they say they are, but that they know they're not and that this is the outcome they themselves desired. This is immensely abusive and deeply shattering to the psyche. Trust me, I know.

I have had a lot of traumas in my past - many which I've never gone into publicly and which I have no intention of doing so - my life, especially my early life, is a mess - but this is one I've struggled to talk about the most because it's still so upsetting. I live with it.

The fact that I am who I am today wouldn't have been possible without a lot of self-reflection (obviously going through male puberty wasn't actually 'game over' for me) and therapy but I still have the signs of PTSD from the whole experience across the latter half of my teens.

In some ways I feel I have survivors' guilt. That I made it through this, so the responsibility in dealing with it rests solely on my shoulders. Heck, this is why I'm making this extremely long thread today. But I don't know of anyone else who went through this in the UK.

Whether anyone else did, I don't know. As I said, I was meant to be referred to the Tavistock. The GIC I ended up at clearly didn't know what to do with me and looked to Zucker's (deeply abusive) methodology. But there might have been others who were likewise broken. Or killed.

It was *very hard* to be actively trans as a young teen c.2002. Thanks to Section 28 there were very few resources, so you had to be good at research to even know it was a thing beyond the sensationalist occasional lurid glossy mag stories. So maybe it was just me. I don't know.

Part of why I decided to keep living and try life after all was a desire to ensure this never happened again to anyone in the UK. But I was never in a position to help ensure that. I wasn't able to raise the alarm as a teen - Mermaids wouldn't help me then - I was powerless.

While trans youth healthcare in the UK since then has still been pretty awful and not remotely sufficient, I've at least not heard of active desistence therapy techniques being used (though I know horrifyingly trans kids are still effectively forced through wrong puberties).

However recently with the upswing in anti-trans activism and the increasing moral panic about trans kids, I've seen the ideas of desistence therapy coming back into the public eye. It's what the anti-trans orgs campaign for, I've read their documentation.

And whenever I see anyone advocating for 'desistence', I cannot think straight, because what happened to me comes flooding back, and all I can think is that it must not happen to any other child. I don't want anyone to ever have to suffer like that ever again. You can't imagine.

Those who don't believe trans is *really* a thing, or that it's some kind of adulthood perversion, or a social contagion akin to the dancing plague, they all believe that trans kids cannot be, and that you can somehow stop them if you just hold them back, tell them you're helping

that desistence therapy is a 'kindness' because it 'allows' the child to stop being trans through making them think it's their own idea, that you can keep them away from it long enough it will stop, that it's not as brutal as straight-up conversion therapy.

THIS. IS. BULLSHIT. Take it from me who actually lived it, not from some columnist who thinks transness was invited in 2010, or some parent who thinks they can un-trans their child, or some anti-trans activist who spins webs of concern trolling, or Kenneth fucking Zucker.

Desistence isn't "letting kids stop being trans", it's *forcing* them to not be, it's *disallowing* transness, it's even right there in the word itself. It doesn't work through changing the child's mind, it works through making the child eventually give up. Conversion therapy.

It's imperative that desistence therapy be seen and regarded as a variant of conversion therapy. Don't let its gaslighting nature or the fact it never *directly* pushes conversion fool you. It is abusive, it is damaging, it is inhumane, and it leaves children with lifelong damage

Desistence therapy is sold as a kinda humane 'cure' for transness. Not beating transness out of the kid but encouraging them to drop it, to 'move on', to 'learn to be a boy/girl instead'. This is all equivocation, it makes no difference in terms of harm done to the child. I know.

And on top of that, you leave the child blaming themselves, for the rest of their lives. Any parent who truly cares for their kid should rightfully view that as abhorrent, but current discourse is selling it as a panacea instead. I'm deeply deeply afraid for current trans kids.

Again, I'm the only one I'm aware of who underwent this particular kind of treatment as a child in the UK (I know plenty who had the just as harmful more traditional kind of conversion therapy, unfortunately). There may well be more.

But it means I know what it does, first-hand.

I don't want to spill my traumas quite so openly on this platform - I'm making myself very vulnerable here, opening myself up like this - but as I said, I feel a kind of responsibility to explain what happened to me, to leave a record, and to plead that it never be allowed again

I've long wondered what, if any, purpose my trauma had. There's no karmic reward for the suffering I went through. What doesn't kill you just leaves you wounded. But if I can somehow stop what happened to me happening to even one other person, I'd give my all to do that.

Hence this thread. Sorry it's been so raw. I could have made it longer but I worried about its length as it is. I just felt I needed to get it out there, especially with recent developments. I needed people to know what happened, what desistence therapy is, what it does.

I'd really appreciate it if you could spread the word, let people know, pass on my testimony, promote this thread, have this all mean something in at least some way. In some ways it feels like one of the most important things I've ever written. That people know what this is.

It's such a fucked-up thing to do a kid and I recall it every time I look in a mirror even now in my mid-30s. I'm both my current self, angry about what this does, what it did to me, and my teen self, scared, doubting every aspect of herself, feeling like her life was stolen.

Please help me stop this ever happening again.

This was deeply scary to write and share and I've been putting it off for a long time, but I felt that I had to say something, at long last.

Thank you so much for reading.

Elaine Scattermoon

PS: It seems desistence therapy is now being called 'gender exploratory therapy', but it's still the exact same thing under a different name. Don't let the phrasing fool you, it's not about exploration but rather trying to push acceptance of birth gender.

https://twitter.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1584169785998610432

You might also see desistence therapy called 'watchful waiting' esp in UK, though they won't tell the young patients themselves that. These euphemisms all imply a lack of harm but that's deliberately misleading: remember we're often *begging* for *urgent* help at these points.

'Doing nothing' is *not* the neutral option because it's actually 'forcing kids through wrong puberty' which is deeply traumatic body horror. Blockers on the other hand are neutral: they hold off that puberty and give the option of continuing with it later if so desired.

PS2: I went over my own diary entries from the time again and recalled that the clinicians kept trying to tell me how very masculine I was, how masculine my voice sounded, how manly I looked. None of that was true - I was actually bullied a lot for being so girly as a kid/teen.

"You're such a manly boy, look how handsome you are, hear how deep your voice is, you could easily get a girlfriend, you'll feel so much better, you've basically told us yourself"

meanwhile I'm getting thrown into the mud at school (& worse) on a regular for being a girly gay.