A scant 30 years ago, therapists with (mostly) the best of intentions managed to ruin many people’s lives. Using recovered memory therapy, clinicians unwittingly participated in creating false memories of horrific abuse that in some cases permanently sundered relationships between parents and adult children and sent innocent people to jail for decades. Most importantly, this treatment also harmed the patients it was meant to help.
In the late 1990s there were numerous lawsuits in which therapists or psychiatrists were successfully sued or settled on charges of having propagated false memories of childhood sexual abuse, incest, and satanic ritual abuse. Fran and Dan Keller served 21 years in prison after young children who attended their daycare began making wild allegations after having been coaxed by a therapist. According to one child witness, the Kellers “had everyone take off their clothes and had a parrot that pecked them in the pee-pee,” and “came to her house with a chainsaw and cut her dog Buffy in the vagina until it bled.” The therapist construed these childish imaginings as literally true, and concluded her small patient was a victim of ritual abuse. The Kellers were finally freed in November of 2014 after the only witness who provided any physical evidence of abuse—a doctor—recanted.
The false memory and ritual abuse scares of the ‘80s and ‘90s now seem bizarre almost beyond imagining. Therapists, psychiatrists, government agencies, congressional committees, and the media bought into the belief that worldwide satanic cults had infiltrated society and were ritually abusing children on a significant scale.
Tragically, history is in the process of repeating itself. Something strikingly similar is now happening. The current trend to diagnose children as transgender bears an eerie similarity to this previous social panic. This matters because, as with the previous panic of the ‘80s and ‘90s, the current trend is harming those it is supposed to help, and forcing them to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives.
Below, I outline the similarities—and differences..
Transgender children fall prey to the bizarre belief that they are the opposite sex or neither sex. Taken away from the clamor and din of politics, the assertion that one is biologically one sex but of a different “gender” in some mysterious way makes no sense and is every bit as strange as asserting that daycare workers sacrificed babies and fed them to children.
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