How Therapists Are Failing Our Children: Pamela Garfield-Jaeger

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “I felt like I was a Rip Van Winkle therapist. I left my profession due to a health condition in 2017 … In 2021, I came back, and it was radically different,” says licensed clinical social worker Pamela Garfield-Jaeger. “All the teens that I had worked with before had never talked about being trans, and then the new program I was working at, half the girls were identifying as trans.”

Known as “The Truthful Therapist,” she is the author of “A Practical Response to Gender Distress” and is featured in the Epoch Times documentary “Gender Transformation.”

How has the mental health profession changed in recent years? What’s behind the spike in teens identifying as transgender? Why has “affirmation” become the norm? What alternatives exist? What impact is the widespread prescription of antidepressants and other drugs having on teenagers?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Pamela Garfield, it’s such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Pamela Garfield-Jaeger:

Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek:

You spent over 20 years working with young people in a clinical social work setting. Then you had to take a bit of time off, and you came back, and you say things profoundly had changed. What happened?

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

I felt like I was a Rip Van Winkle therapist. I left my profession due to a health condition in 2017. Things were starting to change, but I hadn’t noticed. Then in 2021, I came back, and it was radically different. All the teens that I had worked with before had never talked about being trans. And then at the new program I was working at, half the girls were identifying as trans. 

But what was most shocking was what the professionals were doing or what they weren’t doing, which was exploring underlying issues and helping them recognize what was going on, helping them recognize that they were avoiding things that are natural for anyone who’s struggling, but especially for teenagers. And they just weren’t helping them address their issues. And really, they were using it as a power move. 

Because the kids were saying, I’m transgender, and if you don’t go along with this, then you’re a transphobe, you’re a bigot. Then it felt like the adults were held hostage by these kids. Instead of the adults saying, No, we’re here to help you figure things out, this isn’t what’s going on, let’s at least explore what this could be, they just really essentially got really nervous and went along with it and then criticized other adults that had questions, like the parents.

Mr. Jekielek:

How did these kids suddenly have this strange power over their therapists that they didn’t have before?

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

I wish I fully understood that, but I think it’s about all the messages that our culture is getting. It really came through during the lockdown period. People were separated. People weren’t able to have conversations. The adults that did have different opinions were heavily silenced. They were canceled. They were not allowed to keep their jobs. 

There are some prominent people even within WPATH [World Professional Association for Tramsgender Health], known to be the experts on the transgender protocols, who just had simple questions and wanted to have some guardrails for youth, and they were pushed out.  A transgender man who identifies as transgender named Erica Anderson was pushed out. There’s a man named Kenneth Zucker, a Canadian, who was part of putting together the new DSM diagnosis in the Statistical Manual for Psychology Disorders. In 2014, he was well-established within this gender industry. 

Because he believed in watchful waiting, he was canceled. He wasn’t allowed to continue in his clinic anymore. He’s won a lawsuit since then. So even people who had more moderate views on transgender but still believed in the belief system that some people might be born in the wrong body or that these interventions might be helpful, even then they were pushed out. 

There was this tyrannical process that happened. In my profession, the people are agreeable for the most part. They want to get along. I think that their empathy is weaponized. They want to believe that they are accepting and open, and they want to do the right thing. 

They’re also told this lie that kids will kill themselves if we don’t give them these medications or at least affirm their pronouns and their identities. So they believe it because they believe what experts and authorities say. It’s hard when that’s the only message that they get, because the dissenting voices have been taken out.

Mr. Jekielek:

You mentioned watchful waiting. There are a few different approaches to kids when they have this gender distress. Please explain what those approaches are.

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

The common, mainstream thing is to automatically affirm, to not question a child, because they know who they are, which fundamentally comes from a different cultural perspective that kids know themselves and we need to hear what they have to say, that perhaps they have some kind of gendered soul within them and they’re expressing that. It even gets to the point where they can express that when they’re babies, even when they’re pre-verbal. 

There’s a psychologist, Diane Ehrensaft, who said that boys who open up their onesies and dance around are expressing that they really want to be girls, because that’s like a dress. Or if a girl pulls the barrettes out of her hair, she doesn’t want to be a girl. Someone with common sense would say, these are fussy babies that just don’t want to wear barrettes or don’t want their onesie on. That’s natural. 

Kids don’t want to wear their shoes. They throw off their shoes. Does that mean they don’t want feet anymore? But that is the philosophy. And a lot of people start to believe it because people with these fancy letters that come from these fancy institutions repeat that over and over again. So that has become the mainstream narrative. 

However, there are people like me, more than I even know because they have been silenced, that believe that kids don’t really know themselves, that they need adults to guide them, and that they need to be grounded in reality. They need empathy and compassion, especially if they’re struggling with being in their bodies, but to help them figure out their reality. Generally speaking, when they have distress over their gender, then we need to wait and see what happens. Usually, they do grow out of it.

Mr. Jekielek:

You argue that there’s a social contagion at play, and that’s a major cause of the increase. But this social contagion is not just among the young people who start thinking they’re in the wrong body, but it is also among the adults, among the therapists. What are your thoughts?

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

Yes, academia has played a major role in this. All of these therapists and doctors and teachers are being trained to believe that there are these special people that need to be affirmed, and if they don’t, they will die, they will kill themselves, and they will be in more distress if we don’t use the proper pronouns and we don’t affirm them. We ignore all the other issues because this becomes the priority, so it has become this top-down phenomenon. 

So yes, between the adults and the kids, this is a different type of social contagion. There have been other social contagions. In the 90s, there were eating disorders. Some of that you could argue came from entertainment and influences in the magazines. But the professionals, the institutions were not reinforcing like this one. It’s at a whole different level. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Do you think the mental health professionals were taught all along that this is the correct understanding? It takes some years to become a licensed social worker in a clinical setting. I’m really curious how this suddenly exploded onto the scene like this. 

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

Honestly, as someone who’s been in the field for so long since the late 90s, this wasn’t a thing. We didn’t learn about it and it was very niche. There were the gender clinics that were the gender specialists, and those were the ones that were really mostly ignored because it was so rare. It wasn’t something that the everyday therapist encountered. 

Now, you talk to any therapist, they have encountered it within their practice, no matter which field, especially if they’re working with young people. It’s way more prevalent among young people. I worked with young people for so many years and never encountered a trans kid in the past, so I didn’t have a lot of training. My training was just common sense.

Back then, I just hadn’t thought about it that much, to be honest. I never had a class on it. There are a lot of disorders you don’t encounter. And if it’s something that you end up specializing in, maybe you learn more about it. But this is not something that most regular people specialize in. But now they’ve made it such a mainstream thing, because of all this top-down influence that we’re all encountering. But no, this was not mainstream. There was this, let’s be nice, but let’s figure out what’s happening.

Now I’ve learned more about it and know how harmful the hormones and the surgeries really are. I didn’t know that stuff before because it looks all glossy and pretty and you don’t really think about it if you don’t meet anybody that’s been through it. You just don’t hear about those accounts firsthand. Once you learn the truth, then all of a sudden your eyes open and you say, wow, I can’t believe that we ever thought this was okay to do.

Mr. Jekielek:

In a situation where a child is experiencing gender distress, what’s the right way to deal with it?

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

The right way to deal with it is by listening. A lot of adults want to start lecturing. We’re talking about a child especially. They want to start lecturing the person and saying, no, there are only two genders, stop this. But that will generally push them further away. And they want to feel heard. A lot of what this is about is wanting to be seen, wanting to be heard, which is natural within a young person’s development, especially one who might be struggling with something. 

So a lot of it’s about just sitting and listening to them. But you don’t affirm the new identity. You don’t use the new name or pronouns. But in the early stages, you also would not be confronting it. Because if you do, then you’re not going to be able to establish that trust. So a lot of, I mean, very basic therapy 101, initially, when you’re trying to work with somebody, especially a child or a teenager, is to establish trust with them so that they can work with you. 

So you don’t want to be combative, which I think is how a lot of people get in the way. They say, oh, they need the truth. They need to know that God was, you know, they’re made in God’s image. And that might be true. However, if they’re not in that, you know, headspace, that’s going to push them away. So you have to really be patient. 

But what you’re really doing is you’re looking into what’s really going on. You’re trying to just look under the surface, which ironically is what therapists used to do to a fault, right? Therapists used to analyze everything to a T. Oh, you’re cranky, you have this disorder, you have that disorder. No, maybe I’m just hungry right now. Just give me a candy bar, right? 

So now we’ve gone to the opposite extreme where let’s just affirm every feeling, every belief system, and that’s not healthy either, right? So we need to figure out what’s really going on, and it varies. The gender thing is really more of a symptom of something else. And you want to figure out what that is. And it could be multiple things. 

So usually there might be some struggles within the family, maybe some communication issues with the parents. A lot of times it’s like cultural clashes, like a new family, a first-generation immigration family, where the parents are much more traditional and the child is struggling, dealing with the culture clashes. So that might be something that you’d be addressing as a therapist. 

There are also some very common comorbidities that happen. So one is sexual trauma. You want to usually rule that out or figure out if there’s been some kind of sexual trauma. And you want to figure out are they dissociating from their body? Are they running away from something, from their sexuality, because they’re scared or they were hurt? Kids with autism tend to gravitate towards this, and there are several reasons for that. 

A lot of it has to do with their sensory issues. They don’t like dressing a certain way. They also struggle socially, so they want to feel like they fit in, and they have more rigid thinking. And of course, you want to assess how much internet they’re consuming, because most kids are getting these ideas from the internet. Those are a few things to consider when you’re working with a child with a transgender identity.

Mr. Jekielek:

You mention dissociation in the body. We have been covering the overprescription of psychiatric drugs on the show recently. Across the board, it’s very common as a first-line treatment to give people SSRIs, including kids. This has grown as an approach in the last decade. One of the common side effects is a type of dissociation. Could there be a connection there?

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

I believe there’s a strong connection. And that’s the other thing that’s really changed. When you asked me earlier, what’s changed so much? I talked about the trans, but there are so many elements to the mental health profession that have shifted. And the prescription of psychotropic drugs has really heavily increased. When I was coming up the ranks, it was very rare for a primary care doctor to prescribe any kind of psychiatric medication. If they did, it was very temporary and then they passed them on to a psychiatrist who was monitoring them and also really understood more of how they can interact with other drugs and also for a long time, you couldn’t even prescribe a psychiatric drug without counseling alongside it. 

There are several reasons for that. One is just the monitoring, because when you start a new drug, you’re usually going to have mood and behavioral issues, and that needs to be monitored closely. And then also, there are studies out there that show that drugs without any kind of counseling are way less effective. But nowadays, they’re just passed out like candy. So I think there’s a huge drugs-to-trans pipeline that is happening right now.

Mr. Jekielek:

Is someone researching this? It would seem to be an obvious place to look.  Secretary Kennedy has mentioned that he will be looking at antidepressants, SSRIs.

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

There’s a lot of controversy about SSRIs and how effective they are, how they work. I think no one actually really knows how they work. It needs to be investigated. All the uproar was that he’s just going to take away everyone’s drugs and make them all suicidal instead of what he wants to do is do more research. So I hope there is more research because I don’t think that there is good research on this.

Mr. Jekielek:

Would you suggest that specific studies should be done? 

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

Yes, I would like that if they’re going to be prescribing all these drugs to children. It’s kind of confusing because I personally believe that fewer kids should be on drugs. So I don’t like a study where we’re kind of implementing putting more children on drugs to study them. However, if there are going to be youth on drugs, we could study the outcomes of them and track them, and track them more long-term, and try to tease out some of these variables that get in the way of knowing what is, whether or not they’re helping, and then also looking at their, you know, their function in the future, their relationships and how they’re able to work and how they report their mood and also looking at behaviors. 

So I feel like we need to look at the effectiveness of these drugs because I think that we’re making assumptions. It’s like this marketing name, antidepressants, so that means they resolve depression. Well, do they? Maybe, sometimes. It’s unclear. And then, of course, it’s used a lot for anxiety. So they prescribe SSRIs for anxiety, even if it’s someone who’s not depressed. And they affect people very differently. They were prescribed very cautiously for young people because there’s a black box warning, especially for teenagers, to be on an SSRI, that they become more suicidal.

Mr. Jekielek:

Across the board? 

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

Across the board, yes. They were prescribed very cautiously. When I was coming up the ranks, when I knew a kid that was getting these drugs, they were in a residential program. So they were being monitored 24 hours to make sure that they were safe. Now they’re being given outpatient care all the time, and they’re not being monitored at all. So we’re talking about this mental health epidemic. I’m wondering if some of this is just the drugs that are creating these suicidal thoughts. 

 say, oh, if you don’t affirm, they’ll kill themselves. But we don’t talk about, well, if you give them these drugs, they also might kill themselves. It’s really very messy, to be honest. And that’s the thing about the mental health profession. There are no clear answers. And people are individuals and react to things so differently. So I would love to see more long-term studies on these. And I think there are fewer young people because it’s still relatively new that they’re giving so many kids these drugs. They were designed for adults.

Mr. Jekielek:

Do the people prescribing them understand that there’s this black box warning which is serious? 

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

I don’t know. I doubt it, but I actually don’t know. I’m not sure what information they are given, especially regarding teenagers. 

Mr. Jekielek:

One of the chapters in your book is about therapists manipulating parents. Please tell us about that. 

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

I was out of the profession for so many years and when I came back I was like, what the heck is going on? I attended a few trainings. I went to a big therapy conference in California in 2023. It’s maybe the biggest organization in the country, California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists [CAMFT]. They had several training sessions on gender. I went to just learn what was going on. Then I actually wrote some articles, and they’ve been published with the Epoch Times, actually. For those listening, they can look those up. 

One of them is titled, emotional manipulation. That’s a chapter in my book as well. It was about how they manipulate parents to believe that the right thing to do is to affirm their child. I knew that this was happening, but I was still shocked when I heard the training and how nothing made sense. They took old traditional mental health ideas like the Kubler-Ross stages of grief and applied it to this transgender philosophy. 

They were telling the parents that you are now grieving your cis child, cis meaning like normal. That’s another word that turns everything upside down. They say that your child is cis if they’re just normal. But then they say, your child is no longer cis or normal, your child is trans. You’re grieving the loss of a normal kid. Because now you have to acknowledge that your kid is this special soul child that’s trans and needs to take all of these hormones and surgeries that will sterilize them and lead to all these health issues. They don’t acknowledge that part. 

They just say, well, I’m sorry you’re grieving your cis child. So they act very compassionate. I actually think that they mean it. They’re sincere because I think they believe it. They’re true believers. It’s like you’re going to their church and they’re trying to get you to believe, right? They feel like they have to in a way, like they’re getting these children saved. And if you don’t do it, the child won’t be saved. They’re going to end up in this burning hell. That’s what they believe with good intentions. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Because they believe the child might commit suicide, so they’re trying to help. 

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

Yes. And obviously, suicide is the most scary outcome. Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?

Mr. Jekielek:

What is the reality around that? How often does that actually happen?

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

We know it’s a lie. There’s no data that backs that up, if you look at any of their studies. First of all, if you’re a parent or you’re somebody that’s been told that line, just ask that person and say, show me that study. I want to see it. See if they even show you one. They will probably show you one from the Trevor Project that will show a correlation. 

They’ll say that  all kids with LGBTQ identities have higher rates of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts. It doesn’t even say suicide, the actual act. Then also they lump all those letters together, which are all very different. A gay man is very different from a transgender girl who thinks she’s nonbinary. So lumping that all together already kind of muddles the study. But it’s a correlation, it’s not a cause. 

The truth is people within these populations tend to have more mental health issues. They tend to be on more medications. They tend to have more suicidal thoughts. And then also they’re being told you’re going to kill yourself if you don’t get these hormones and drugs, right? They’re told that. There are slogans all over the internet. Their own therapist has even said it. 

They say that in front of the child to the parent. How is that not influential?  They say, I need to tell you, and have the child sitting there, that your child will kill themselves. Of course, that’s going to have an impression on a child, and they might internalize that and believe that. Without these control factors, we don’t have a good study. Also, a lot of them have very small sample sizes.

Mr. Jekielek:

You mentioned that a lot of these kids have these comorbidities and various mental health issues so in addition to the gender distress or combined with it somehow so it just it makes no sense in that case, right, to say that this is a causal reason because just the whole population is people that tend to have these types of issues it’s also irresponsible. 

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

The reason I think it works so well on parents, really smart but very scared parents is because their child probably did have a suicide attempt and they see that their child is really struggling emotionally. And so because of that, that becomes weaponized, right? They’re weaponizing something that is very real for this family and they’re scared and they’ve come for help, and then of course they’re going to believe the professional. So it’s also very irresponsible. 

I’ve worked in a high school where there are unfortunately several suicides that happened, and everybody knew at that time that you don’t go around and say you’re going kill yourself. You don’t do that to a group of people who’ve all been exposed to a horrible loss and something everyone’s really scared of. And there were kids that were vulnerable. You would never do that to a child that’s vulnerable and say, well, if you don’t get this thing, you’ll kill yourself. 

In fact, that’s something that someone with a personality disorder would do. I feel like they’re actually teaching these young people to behave as though they have personality disorders. So it’s like a threat to like a more traditional thing before all of this trans stuff is if you break up with me, I will kill myself, right? 

So that’s how a lot of abusive relationships happen. Someone’s afraid to break up with that person because they’ll feel responsible if something happens to their partner if they break up, right? Well, that’s obviously very emotionally unhealthy and it doesn’t work out in the long run because you’re still making this threat and you’re kind of buying love, right? 

You’re buying love with threats as opposed to someone who will really stay with them because it’s the right thing, you know, it’s the right relationship. So they’re teaching kids to have this empty sense of connection because everyone will rally for me if I say I kill myself. This is how people will notice me. What’s the most unhealthy message to give to kids?

Mr. Jekielek:

Presumably, someone studied whether using the gender-affirming care approach actually stops suicide.

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

There has never been a real one where a control group of trans people who didn’t get the affirmation and a group of trans people who did were compared. There was one study that was hidden. Dr. Joanna Olson-Kennedy had a big study that was backed by the NIH, and it was millions of dollars. It was a lot of government funding that was supposed to show that puberty blockers helped improve the mental health of children. 

Well, her study didn’t show that. It just didn’t show there was any improvement. So she hid the study, and the New York Times just exposed that several months ago. So that was shown. All of the media know that the clock is ticking on the truth and they can’t keep pretending. So they’re now telling the truth. You know, it drips out, right? 

But no, there’s no study that shows that. What’s the truth here? The truth is none of it helps our mental health. What it does is it might give a short-term placebo effect of what they call euphoria or you know feeling a high because you’re getting what you want initially. It’s like giving a kid candy and they’ve you know it’s like fun and tasty and the sugar high and then you crash. That’s what this is. 

A lot of the studies too will show like a short-term follow-up like I think there’s one for two years after there’s one that there’s a study on the double mastectomy, and I think they followed up for two years. And that’s not enough time because it takes longer than that for the person to realize that they maybe have made a mistake, or maybe they feel other side effects. It usually takes seven to eight years, and there are very few of those studies. This cohort of young people hasn’t been around yet for seven years in order for them to be studied. It’s a new phenomenon, this level of getting these drugs to these kids. So we really have no studies on that.

Mr. Jekielek:

We do know that there are certain side effects with these drugs: the stopping of puberty with the puberty blockers and the potential impacts on sexual function later. There is also the permanent surgery. All of this is highly consequential and impacts people’s lives. Some people ask, is all this really good? 

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

I don’t even call them side effects. I call them effects. That’s just what happens, right? Those aren’t side effects. We are sterilizing them, right? These are the drugs that they use to chemically castrate criminals like Lupron, so that’s not a side effect. These are the things that do happen. We’re making a choice.  Oftentimes, when you’re doing a medical intervention, you make a choice between one difficult thing and another, if there’s some kind of really severe medical issue. 

However, we’re taking physically healthy children and then giving them these effects. That’s the difference. And then calling it medicine instead of helping them with whatever psychological distress they’re having. Or they might not even be having that much psychological distress. They might have just spent a little too much time on the internet. There are so many different levels to this. 

We’re told over and over again that these drugs are reversible. I don’t even understand that. That was the other weird thing when I came back. How can something that suppresses puberty be called reversible? Do we even need a study to see the lack of common sense in that? It’s not reversible. You’re stopping puberty. Boys end up with these micro penises. Girls don’t develop their bone density. It just doesn’t develop. 

All of these horrible things happen and you can’t reverse time. You can’t reverse the clock. And there are things that a child goes through to grow up. Those are very important developmental years, both physically and emotionally. That’s not reversible, and you can ever get your childhood back. 

Mr. Jekielek:

How does one go about finding a therapist for their child? 

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

It’s not easy, especially if you want one in person. And I don’t think Zoom therapy is the greatest, especially for kids. It’s become very widespread, and I don’t think it’s, oh, it’s cracked up to be. People use it for convenience, but I don’t know how effective it really is. And sometimes that can be dangerous depending on the severity of the situation. But there are some websites out there. There are some lists and some directories. 

There’s one directory called conservativecounselors.com, and they will not affirm your child. There’s also a group called Therapy First at therapyfirst.org, and they run some alternative training sessions. They don’t believe in affirming children instantly, although it depends on what each therapist believes. Some believe that eventually you should affirm. Some believe that you should never affirm. So it really depends on what you believe as a parent. 

When you’re looking for a therapist, you should always screen very carefully and don’t be afraid to ask questions and also stay very involved in the process. No therapist can ever fix your child; even the best therapists in the world cannot fix your child without you because they’re only in your child’s life temporarily, and their goal is to help you connect. They need to know what’s happening with you and with your family and your child’s history; they need to really be involved to be able to help your child. So that’s also a big shift in the profession: just pushing the parents away. 

So if you are a parent looking for a therapist for your child, make sure that you are very involved. If the therapist says, no, I need to have my special place with your child, that’s a red flag. They do need to have some connection with your child, of course. But they should be talking to you, and they should be communicating with you. They should be talking to you, at the very least, about what the treatment goals are, what they see as the concerns, how they are conceptualizing the case, what they think is wrong, what they think could help, and what they think you could do as a parent. 

They should be working with you. You should be working as a team with that therapist, and that’s a lot more work. With these overworked, overstressed therapists, even those that are very ethical, it’s still difficult to do all that, to work with kids and have all that involvement. But that’s really the best way. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Overworked and overstressed therapists and overworked and overstressed parents working together for the benefit of the child, which is the future.

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

Yes, and that’s often a trend with the kids too. It’s loving parents, but they’ve been working really hard or they’ve been consumed with something else, sometimes something out of their control, like a crisis within the family, right? Their job just puts some big demands on them, or maybe the parent is having their own health issues. This is what happens. 

Families go through things. And that’s oftentimes when this trans agenda swoops into the family because the child is left to their own devices, physically their devices, the phones and the iPads. And that’s when we need to step back and pay attention and notice what the kids are needing. 

Mr. Jekielek:

What do you make of these executive orders related to this topic? No men in women’s sports is one that comes to mind.

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

I’m happy with them. In some ways it’s kind of silly that we even need to have them. There’s an executive order that they’re only men and women. That’s an executive order. It’s not legislated, but it’s kind of weird that we have to put that into the government and proclaim that. That’s how kind of crazy our culture has become. But I think they’re great. 

I would like to see them really passed as legislation and not the executive order so that they would stay. But so many things are being done by executive order. I don’t like that process. I know that that process came long before Donald Trump, but I think it needs to be done. I think this is just about safety. This is about maintaining our union, our reality, the integrity of sports, and child safety. 

I think it’s great we’re doing this, and I hope that we can do more. But honestly, as much as they’re doing, I’m watching behind the scenes and seeing that the mental health profession is doubling down. The true believers are doubling down hard. Some of them are being a little less vocal, a little less prominent, because they’re feeling a little less confident to be able to say that they’ll sign letters in an hour to give someone a surgery to remove their healthy breasts. 

Mr. Jekielek:

That has happened in an hour? 

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

Yes. It’s so radical. If I heard myself talking even just five years ago, I would think I was crazy right now. But that is what has been happening. Someone has a website where you can go and get trained in one workshop. You can write a letter for someone within an hour to get surgery. Affirming letters, they call them, and those still exist. There have been no consequences, not yet. I hope that comes, and I think it will. But yes, this is the first step. It’s the first step in a lot of things. In the end, though, the culture needs to shift, and the institutions need to be changed.

Mr. Jekielek:

Many are baffled by the speed with which this approach was adopted by so many therapists. We need to understand how that happened.

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

Yes. I don’t fully understand it either because it happened while I was on disability. I’ve just been observing it and trying to understand. The people who don’t want to rock the boat and really think this is the compassionate thing to do believe in authority and institutions. They’re the same people that believed in a lot of the Covid measures. 

There are a lot of parallels there, like doing what’s right for the greater good and having that mentality. I didn’t realize I was so different, that I was a therapist that didn’t follow the rules all the time. I didn’t realize I was such a rebel. But I think that generally, therapists are rule followers. They’re the good girls, honestly.

Mr. Jekielek:

But for some people this is like a religion. How does that happen overnight?

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

I think there are different levels. There is the inner circle of the real believers, and then the general population that hasn’t thought about it enough, and they haven’t heard the other side. 

Mr. Jekielek:

They’ve been told by the professionals that this is the right way, and if it’s not done this way, there would be very terrible consequences for these poor kids.

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

The professionals have been fear-mongered, just like the parents have been. Therapists really want to do it right. I think more than the general population, they really want to believe they care more. Therapists, for better or worse, think that they care.

Mr. Jekielek:

This real caring and desire to help has been weaponized, to the point where there are very serious issues. 

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

Another dynamic that happens, and it’s something that when I was coming up the ranks, I needed to learn this, where you want to help so bad that you get over-involved and you kind of project, I need to help this kid. They call that a rescue fantasy. I remember feeling this, and we all feel it. But I was trained and I learned to check that. You almost want to adopt all these kids that are in foster care. You want to take them home. You want to hug them all. You want to do all these things. 

But I was trained to have some boundaries. I hate even using that word because all this therapyspeak has been hijacked. But you have to have some limits and recognize you can’t rescue them. Now, our profession doesn’t have that type of training anymore and doesn’t have the kind of guardrails to recognize when people do that overly to the point where it’s unhealthy; they’re not stopped anymore. 

A lot of people who were really bullied when they were young, a lot of people who really felt like they were misfits, maybe still do feel like they’re misfits, feel like they need to help these poor children and they need to rescue them. So they’re projecting their needs onto these kids. Maybe the therapists had very challenging relationships with their parents, and they wish they had an adult to help them get away from their parents or set their parents straight for something. Now, they think they need to do this with all the other parents.

That’s why when you talk about parental rights, these trans activists don’t seem to care about parental rights because they’re imagining, in a lot of cases, their own parents or other parents that they know weren’t up to snuff or were difficult and caused more pain for these children. So they feel like they need to rescue the children from these bad parents. However, even the bad parents need therapy. They shouldn’t be pushed out. In the foster care system, one of the major interventions is to give the parenting classes and to give the parents support so that they could reunify in the future. Those philosophies that were longstanding have been thrown out the window.  

Mr. Jekielek:

Your book is a really valuable resource. Where can people find it? 

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

The book is, A Practical Response to Gender Distress. It’s available on Amazon. It started off as a 10-page document that was on my website. I have a website, thetruthfultherapist.org  which I call, A Parents’ Guide to Mental Health. It has a whole bunch of things just to understand what was appropriate mental health care before things really got more radical and taken over by ideology. And I had a little section on gender in there. And that was obviously the most popular one because it was such a hot topic. So I thought, oh, I’ll make a little booklet and print it out. 

Well, it expanded into a book, and what this book has is all these different chapters with very succinct but thorough facts on the different lies that the transgender movement has pushed without much pushback. So all the different things they say, for example, that intersex proves that that means we have multiple genders. Well, it doesn’t. That is, we still have two gametes. We’re still male and female. Even those who are intersex are still male and female. But they have a birth disorder, right, and you can’t always tell at birth whether they’re male or female. We don’t have some special third or mysterious types of gender. 

Then there are clownfish where the males lay the eggs, but it doesn’t matter because human beings aren’t fish. You get bamboozled real easy, because they say it with confidence. They have these scripts. When you have a teenage child that has been listening for hours and hours on all these different talking points, they think, I know what they’re saying is nonsense, but I don’t know what to say right now, or I don’t even know what to think. 

My book will help you with that. It debunks the suicide lie and explains in lots of different reasons why it’s a lie, both through the data and then also just clinically. It’s not clinically sound to be talking about suicide with teenagers, and the real what’s also special about this book is there are the detransitioners who allowed me to print their art inside, so I have their art. There’s pictures which make it an easy read.

Mr. Jekielek:

When you say detransitioners, what do you mean?

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

Yes, I should explain that term. Detransitioners are people who used to believe they were trans and they went through the medical interventions to look the opposite sex or look like a different gender. They have since realized that they made a mistake or that they’ve now gone back to their normal sex. And many of them have become public to a lot of harm, like a lot of risk to their lives even, because the trans movement is so harsh and doesn’t allow for anybody to start saying, actually, there’s some regret here. So that’s who they are. I have a drawing from Chloe Cole, who’s maybe the most prominent detransitioner. She’s 20-years-old now. 

The other thing that’s different about my book is because it’s written for me, a therapist, a mental health professional that has so much experience with teens and works with so many acting-out teens, teens that I actually had to sometimes even restrain because their behavioral issues were that extreme. I know how to talk to them. I know how to de-escalate them. I know how to talk to them in a way that’s not going to say, well, F you. Sometimes they do, but that’s OK. 

But I have a section in the back that has ideas on how to open up a conversation with a child who might be ready to talk about it. That’s not confrontational; they’re more open-ended questions. So that the adult who really cares about that child can talk to them and really do a lot more listening. But also ask leading questions so that they can maybe figure it out for themselves eventually, plant some seeds.

For example, you know, what does it mean to be trans? Because it’s ever-changing and it’s such a broad term. And then just asking more follow-up questions: what does it mean to be a boy or a girl? How do you know? Some of them are kind of obvious, and there are some prompting questions. But I also really emphasize in this book that there is no script; there is no exact formula for you because there are so many different situations within the family and a lot of it is about figuring out what is happening within your child and with your family. There’s a whole section with ideas of what could be the underlying issues here.

Then I do have a section on how to screen for a gender-critical therapist. We call that that. Someone who’s just not going to affirm your child and all kinds of questions, and ask them what they think about Internet use with kids. How do you work with families that have different belief systems than you? How often do you talk to the parents in this situation? What secrets do you share and don’t share? All those things. 

My book also has a really comprehensive list of all different resources. There are so many different organizations out there that are doing this work. And they do it all differently. Some of them have different backgrounds and philosophies. There’s the radical feminists and then there are the Christian conservatives who all have their different ways of approaching it. 

I’m not here to say which one is best for you and your family, but what I did was list them all so you can look through them and see what would be a fit for you, and you can, you know, read about it and use your discretion. Because my overall message, I’d say to families about mental health and maybe about everything, is to think for yourself, question experts, and use your gut. Don’t just go along just because you’re scared because they have some kind of authority.

Mr. Jekielek:

You have also written a children’s book called Froggy Girl that is coming out soon.

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

Froggy Girl is a little children’s book, and the art is done by a detransitioner. He’s a man who used to believe he was a woman trapped in a man’s body, so that makes it extra special. I saw so many books out there. Because I published that other book, I was ranked a lot in the teen LGBTQ section on Amazon. I saw so many children’s books and teen books that were pro-transition, that were teaching kids to hate their bodies, to hate themselves, and to not accept themselves. I decided I wanted to write something to teach them to accept themselves for who they are and that it’s okay.

This is a little story about a little girl who wishes she was a frog. She thought she could hop and wanted to be with the froggies and have fun with them. In the book, her parents affirm it, the teacher affirms it, and her friends affirm it. She thinks it’s cute at first, but then she actually gets really sad. Then she meets a wise turtle that teaches her to accept herself as a little girl. It’s just a cute little story, and it rhymes. I just wanted to put it out there. 

I’m just one person. I wanted to put one more thing in the ether, among all the other books that teach them. There’s one like In My Daddy’s Belly. There’s all these radical books out there that confuse kids and teach them that they could be whatever they want and confuse them on their identities. I wanted one to help them be grounded in reality.

Mr. Jekielek:

Pamela, any final thoughts as we finish up?

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

Two things. One, I encourage everybody to question authority, question institutions, and not be intimidated, especially by therapists, even when they act nice because they often are very nice and I think they usually mean well. But if something doesn’t sit right with you, ask more questions and don’t just go along with it. That’s my main message. 

Then second, to remember that I’m just one person. In fact, I was on disability for four years and thought I’d never have a voice, and here I am talking to you. So anybody could be out there. You could make a book or you could do anything. If you find this is an important topic for you or some other topic, you don’t have to sit back and wait for someone else to do it. You could do it too.

Mr. Jekielek:

What a fantastic message. Pamela Garfield, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Garfield-Jaeger:

Thank you.