The term Munchausen syndrome is named after Baron Munchausen, a fictional character known for telling tall tales. Clinically known as Factitious Disorder Imposed on Self (FDIS), Munchausen syndrome is a rare mental disorder in which a person deliberately and repeatedly fakes physical or psychological symptoms, sometimes even inflicting injuries on his body, with the primary motivation of assuming the sick role and receiving medical attention and care.
People with Munchausen syndrome often go to great lengths to deceive medical professionals, fabricating elaborate stories about their symptoms, medical history, and even undergoing unnecessary medical procedures or surgeries. They may move from one healthcare provider to another, seeking treatment for their fictitious ailments, which can result in significant medical expenses, emotional distress, and potential physical harm from unnecessary interventions.
Treatment for Munchausen syndrome typically involves psychotherapy, however, since individuals with Munchausen syndrome often resist acknowledging their behavior, treatment is challenging. It is crucial, then, that physicians provide the first line of defense in identifying the disorder and referring the individual to competent mental health professionals.
Munchausen syndrome is distinct from other similar presenting mental health conditions in that, with Munchausen, the afflicted subject intentionally feigns illness or injury for personal gain, such as attention or sympathy, rather than experiencing genuine physical or psychological symptoms. This difference means that the target of Munchausen syndrome may be another person. In other words, the person suffering from this disorder project her desire for attention by feigning illness onto other people, seeing them as suffering from a medical condition and obtaining attention by being a dutiful and compassionate caregiver.
This projection is known as Munchausen by proxy (MBP), or as factitious disorder imposed on another (FDIA), a mental disorder in which a caretaker, frequently a parent or guardian, deliberately amplifies or manufactures physical or psychological symptoms in the individual under her guardianship. The individual may be a child, an elderly family member, or another vulnerable individual. MBP, which disorders the protective instinct, can have terrible consequences for vulnerable individuals.
The typical case is the mother projecting onto her child a fictitious conditions. For example, a mother may come to believe that her daughter is a boy born in the wrong body and take the girl to a physician or a psychologist in hope of obtaining gender affirming care. Gender identity disorder, now known a gender dysphoria, is an easy illness to fake since there is no detectable physiological basis for the disorder. A diagnosis of gender dysphoria is dependent on what a person saying they have this condition, often corroborated by a parent or teachers.
The daughter, as most children are (but especially girls, who are on average more social compared to boys), is attentive and empathetic to her mother’s concern and, wanting to please her and relieve her mother of her stress, and perhaps coming to believe herself her mother’s delusion about her because of the certainty with which the mother expresses her beliefs, throws herself into the role by wearing her brother’s clothes, playing with her brother’s toys, etc. She may relent to puberty blockers, testosterone, and double mastectomy to help the mother continue the delusion. They may even appear to demand treatment.
Once the process is started, those around the mother and daughter become invested in the child’s fictitious condition and any express skepticism are dismissed as ignorant or prejudiced. It becomes very difficult to unwind the process once treatment for this fictitious condition begins. The drugs and surgeries are irreversible, and they set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, when physicians believe the mother and child and participate with them in the unnecessary treatment of the child (and there is a financial incentive to do so, as well as peer pressure), the potential for harm to the child increases exponentially.
As with FDIS, the primary motive driving the mother’s behavior in FDIA is attention and sympathy for herself but through a proxy—her daughter. The mother is often ideologically influenced and signals her political identity and tribal membership by transitioning the child. The child may be caught up in the same politics. The mother and daughter are often the victims of social contagion (Why Aren’t We Talking More About Social Contagion?). It doesn’t have to be a mother. Fathers and other individuals can suffer from MBP. However, while males appear to be overrepresented among those with Munchausen proper, in MBP the perpetrator is nearly always female and is typically the child’s mother.
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Wesley Lang puts the matter precisely when he writes, “You can’t be more explicit that you are not doing medicine—a diagnostic practice—at all, but are instead a member of a priesthood enacting body modification rituals in pursuit of transfiguration while operating under the guise of medicine. They are proudly boasting of this.”
What Dr. McNamara, a pediatrics professor at Yale, is saying is a crackpot. If your kid’s doctor speaks this way find another doctor. Kids have a gender and it’s not a subjective thing. Gender is an objective feature of a child’s biology. If a child perceives his gender is something other than what it is your job is to validate his feelings and help him work that out not affirm him in his delusion.
But doctors are not only failing to protect the children that come to their offices. They are putting them on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgically mutilating their bodies. Pediatricians abandon their child protective duties and sacrifice the health and well-being of children on the altar of a perverse religious ideology.
Crazy and unscrupulous people can and do obtain medical and other advanced degrees. Look at the history of people like John Money and Robert Stoller. Money, the man who coined the term “gender role” (which he plagiarized from the standard term “sex role” in the field of sociology) had doctors turn a boy’s penis into a fake vagina, told the boy he was a girl, and then made the child watch porn with his twin brother—while Money watched. Stoller, the man who coined the term “gender identity” also believed in dream telepathy, the pseudoscientific idea that supposes a man can share dreams with other men unassisted by technology.
Crazy people invented gender ideology. Crazy people came up with the crazy idea that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. And millions of people participate in the crazy.
Have the gullible ever considered the possibility that psychologically disordered individuals obtain medical and other advanced degrees and work their way into positions where they can profit financially while carrying out their fetishes on children? Of course not. They’re gullible. These are the people who fell for everything the doctors told them during the COVID-19 pandemic. These are the people who marched their children to the clinic for mRNA gene therapy shots and took pictures of it signal their virtue on social media platforms.
You have to understand that gender affirming care is a massive fraud. Here is the same Dr. McNamara cannot cite a single systematic review of the evidence that indicates benefits from puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Congressman Dan Crenshaw puts in her face systematic studies—the work of meta-analysis that she agrees is the gold standard after saying that this or that study is not how science works—that do not find benefits and all she can cite is “the standards of care.”
Which standards are these? Those established by a group called WPATH, or the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The organization was founded in 1979 by social psychologist Paul Allen Walker as the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA).
Who is Harry Benjamin? Benjamin was a German endocrinologist and sexologist who was an early pioneer of gender ideology. In 1985, a year before his death, Benjamin admitted the following: “I do remember going, as a young person, to a lecture by Auguste Forel, whose book The Sexual Question was a sensation at the time and which impressed me greatly. I also met Magnus Hirschfeld very early on through a girlfriend, who knew the police official Kopp, who was in charge investigating of sexual offenses. He, in turn, was a friend of Hirschfeld’s, and so I met both men. That was around 1907. They repeatedly took me along on their rounds through the homosexual bars in Berlin. I especially remember the ‘Eldorado’ with its drag shows, where also many of the customers appeared in the clothing of the other sex. The word ‘transvestite’ had not yet been invented. Hirschfeld coined it only in 1910 in his well-known study.” After this experience Benjamin became obsessed with what sexual medicine. (I will soon be following on all this in a length essay.)
Who was Allen Walker? Walker conducted research with none other than the crackpot pedophile John Money in the Office of Psychohormonal Research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the clinical psychologist who mutilated that young boy to prove he could raise him as a girl—an experiment that failed utterly with the subject taking his own life.
Walker was also in charge of the Janus Information Facility which oversaw the early surgical “transitions” of people who believed they were the other gender. Readers know who Janus was, right? Janus is the Greek god with two faces. He’s the god of doors, gates, and transitions. When you say somebody is Janus-faced you mean that they tell you one thing while doing another. Sexual deviants tell parents what they are doing to their faces by pitching it as medicine and depending on parents believing them, which, thanks to a constellation of personality and socialization factors, they often do.
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The professor’s sociological point is nonsense. There were no large numbers of children saying they were in the wrong body before this fad emerged. The emotional blackmail tactic of threatening suicide typical of gender dysphoria—where was this historically? What explains drastic differences in cross-national and cross-cultural rates of suicide? If objectively existing, shouldn’t the proportions of boys born in girls’ bodies in any given population be roughly the same across time and space? Are there racial and ethnic variations? The professor wants you to believe that little boys were scared to tell their parents they were really girls before gender ideology colonized schools and internet chat rooms. He doesn’t really believe this because he knows it is a lie.
We are in the midst of a classic mass hysteria. Trans is social contagion. It would pass like other crazes if treated rationally. But this fad has been manufactured in contrast to other crazes that are organically emergent or indirectly caused. These doctors are working from a false narrative to rationalize a multibillion dollar industry. They want children because children are easily confused and yield the most money over the life course. (See Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex; Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds; Sanewashing—It’s More Widespread Than You Might Think; Feeding the Medical-Industrial Complex.)
How the industry shuts down opposition: it portrays those doctors who raise questions about the affirmation model as a danger to children. Teachers do this, as well, when hiding from parents the knowledge that their children believe they are in the wrong body, arguing that parents who do not subscribe to the affirmation model are a danger to their children. (See The Problem with parental Rights.)
Jillian Spencer describes her opposition to the affirmation model as a child protective matter. She is entirely correct to say that it’s the duty of governments and parents to protect children from cults and unscrupulous doctors. Why did woke progressives freak out about The Sound of Freedom? Because progressives want to weaken the child protective instinct and they understand that the more parents known about child sexualization and grooming the more they will see it in their everyday lives, because it goes on all around us. Gender ideology operates in the open. All we need to do is help people see what gender ideology is actually about.
Why are governments and so many parents failing to protect their children? Why is the government is failing to protect children is because (a) agencies have been captured by gender ideology and (b) the medical-industrial complex is making bank on drugging and mutilating children. Why parents are failing to protect their children is (a) faith in authority, (b) ignorance, and (c) an ideology that disorders their common sense and natural instincts and recruits them to play the key role in cult induction.
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A prominent California director of a gender clinic and a professor at a medical school, Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, has asserted that there is an extensive spectrum of gender identities, even including one whimsically termed a “gender Tootsie Roll pop.” Dr. Ehrensaft, who has been a leading figure advocating for progressive gender concepts within the fields of medicine and psychology for many years, holds the positions of director of mental health and chief psychologist at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) Benioff Children’s Hospital gender development center, in addition to being a professor at UCSF School of Medicine.
In a presentation on gender ideology, as reviewed by Fox News, Dr. Ehrensaft explored the concept of a “gender Tootsie Roll pop” identity as part of what she has referred to as “The New Gender Wars.” She has previously characterized this movement as a “Gender Revolution.” Ehrensaft advocates for early childhood social transitions, emphasizing that “gender encompasses a limitless range, and children should have the opportunity to live in their affirmed gender as soon as they recognize it,” as stated by Ehrensaft.
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To my American readers, the Democratic Party supports the madness. Remember that when you go to the polls. A lot of people lean into insanity so hard that they will think I just put in a plug for their party. Good. Keep leaning in. Stick out your chins. The boomerang is on its return trajectory.
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The Canadian shop teacher I dubbed “Busty Lemieux” because if his massive prosthetic breasts has shown up for work without his fetish gear and significant razor stubble—or, as the mass media reports it, “Kayla Lemieux is now dressing as a man.” I wondered aloud earlier today on social media whether the media would use he/him pronouns. Why they used she/her pronouns in the first place tell us how deeply gender ideology has burrowed into western culture. We will see.
freedom and reason 