From January 2022, a piece on the garbage fire that “conversion therapy” bans have made of child therapy:

My son has a great therapist. That sets us apart from, I think, the great majority of parents. Mental health care for children is difficult to get, and it’s even more difficult to get mental health care that doesn’t just check the box or blunder about, but actually helps a child. My son’s therapist, who he’s been seeing regularly for years, to help him work through a long list of problems including anxiety, depression, and being autistic, is a great therapist. But I can’t tell you his name.

Because the son also had gender dysphoria, and now doesn’t, and he didn’t “transition” – and we can’t have that, now can we. If someone has gender dysphoria and then gets over it, a crime has been committed.

In time, as my son’s mental crisis subsided, the belief that he was really a woman subsided with it. That belief wasn’t a solution, it was an escape, and it was a false escape at that. How could discomfort with his body, his growing, pubertal, hairy man’s body, be made better by the sort of eternal fixation on one’s body that medical transition entails?

Not to mention the eternal fixation on one’s idenniny, and importance, and needs, and rights that trump everyone else’s rights, and hatred of feminist women? Recipe for a good life is it?

Starting with New Jersey, in 2013 (nine years after gay marriage became legal there), it became illegal to give therapy to a child who believes they should be the other sex, unless that therapy confirms that belief.

And then in 23 more states, or maybe more by now, a year and a half after this piece was written.

The practice of therapy for kids with gender issues became a legal minefield at that point, as a therapist who followed what had been the standard of “watchful waiting” could be accused of “sexual orientation change efforts” if the child went into therapy believing he was a girl and came out no longer believing that… as most do, even without therapy.

In all of these states, it is hazardous to the therapist to accept a child with gender issues. I live in one of these states. My son is still a child, yet all these laws were passed in his lifetime, and they compromised his ability, and the ability of other children, to get adequate mental health care.

…

In states with such laws, kids with gender issues may be shut out from one therapist after another until they end up at a “gender therapist.” There is no real qualification for a “gender therapist:” it’s just a therapist who is enthusiastic about trans ideology and transitioning children.

This means there’s a population of children who need help and can’t get it, or can only get one type of help – a type that causes harm.

Most boys who believe they are girls will grow out of that belief after puberty. This has been demonstrated in study after study. Most of these boys will also, after puberty, come to recognize that they are homosexual or bisexual. Boys can learn to cope with gender dysphoria as they can with other sources of discomfort. But if these boys are passed down the line like hot potatoes until they get to the gender clinic, they might not just never learn to cope, they may never be able to express their sexuality. The first line of medical treatment for these boys at the gender clinic is the same medication used to castrate Alan Turing for the then crime of homosexuality.

What a nightmare.

H/t Papito