Thinking the unthinkable

The adults who bear responsibility for harming children and the need for a shift of emphasis

The ethical resistance to a puberty blockers trial is a welcome development, marking a serious challenge to the relentless promotion of the autonomous ‘trans’ child. It will shift attention, rightly, from a belief in the individual child’s desire to change sex, to the deficits within the medical profession and beyond. Such resistance will surely shine a light on the social context of ‘gender identity ideology’ (GII), and most particularly, as noted by Carolyn Brown in our last blog, its hidden ‘product placement’ in schools and institutions, where its message has affected a huge number of people. Many of these people are susceptible to suggestion, and ready to buy-in to false claims, unaware, it seems, of the harms that lie in wait. As the slogan goes - ‘Buyer beware’!

Carolyn Brown's pleas are for cognitive development to be a major consideration, alongside effects of adverse life experiences, in a child’s psychological presentation within education, health, or social work settings. She has consistently made the point that children cannot possibly have the mental or experiential capacity to know what is involved in 'affirmative care', and that they are always vulnerable to being deceived by adults.

Why surgical interventions are a lie

Our additional concern, however, is how to find a way to think about the mental state of persuasive adults and the blind spot that leads them to push distressed children, with unseemly haste, towards lifelong medication and physical interventions. These adults are stubborn in their belief that the roots of the stated desire for sex change lie innately and uniquely within the individual child, in itself a curious position that reveals both a retrograde view of the individual in society, and a 19th century belief in one-person psychology.

As a result of the incoherence of their position, we feel bound to ask these questions:

• Why do some professionals consistently present pre-pubescent children as having the capacity to understand matters related to sex, its essential physiological processes, and its perversions, and what makes them ignore the boundary of generational difference, as though children are autonomous in their decision making and that their belief in sex change is valid and natural?

  
  

• Why do other professionals seek to medicalise individual children and search for a ‘diagnosis’ that takes the focus away from the active participation of adults in the fabrication of a fantasy that humans can change sex?

One way of answering these questions is to take Carolyn Brown’s insight about ‘product placement’ in schools, and try to understand the collusion that occurs when adults unconsciously participate in the hubristic fantasy that humans can have everything they want - a familiar technique that operates successfully in the advertising industry.

The origins of advertising and public relations theory

and the covert manipulation of the masses

Not many people are aware that the acknowledged ‘father of public relations’ and someone who theorised the ways in which advertising unconsciously influences choices, was Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays took his uncle’s concepts of sex, the unconscious, and repressed wishes, and applied them to the social world through his recognition that consumer goods are more easily sold when they are associated with hidden sexual or status-related desires. In the early days of advertising that link between sex and the manipulation of desire through propaganda was not as overt or recognisable as it is now.

Like Freud, Bernays believed that humans are driven more by the unconscious than by rational thought, and he applied this insight to the understanding of the practice of mass persuasion through propaganda. So, instead of appealing to logic or "educating" the public with facts (the old "press agentry" model), he saw that advertising was effective if it appealed to hidden desires, fears, and instincts - a concept that has long been embedded and recognised within the advertising industry and public relations.

One aspect of this hidden persuasion is that because it is not conscious, people completely deny that they have been influenced by a lie, so much so that they can find it easy to dismiss, for example, the dangers inherent in the pursuit of a damaging 'magical' product.

Historically, this blind spot can be readily recognised in relation to cigarette smoking, which was subject in its day to extensive idealised marketing, even to the point of reaching doctors addicted to the habit.

This insight into human susceptibility to suggestion and to the denial of the truth of harm, is equally relevant to our consideration of GII. It helps explain why the myriad of attempts to rationalise, argue, and present logical, scientific facts to those who believe that changing sex is possible and desirable, have so far had little impact on them. As Bernays would point out, this is because hidden persuasion relies ultimately on the emotional nature of unconscious idealised desires, and not on intellectual rationale.

It is not a huge leap, therefore, from Freud and Bernays to Carolyn Brown’s observation that the ‘product placement’ of GII within schools is based on the manipulation of unknown forces in the human psyche, in the same way that advertising works. The difference of course is that, in one case, hidden sexual desires are utilised to sell products, whilst in the other, a new iteration is in place, with overt sexualised material being covertly used to promote dissociation from reality, in the form of the myth that humans can change sex.

When children are the targets of such propaganda by adults, we all have an obligation to retrieve our moral compass. We must face up to the tragedy of this current moment, and think the unthinkable - that many adults, some knowingly, but the majority unknowingly, are harming children who have even less capacity to resist the power of the GII narrative than they do. A shift of emphasis for professionals must mean focussing on making conscious the mind-set of adults who are unknowingly and gullibly drawn in to colluding with the ‘big-sell’.

June Campbell

Retired NHS Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist