The head of Juvenile Psychiatry at Gregorio Marañón: "We are experiencing a boom of young people who say they are trans for fashion and in reality they are not"

"This is crazy, it's going to hurt a lot of people, many young people who have disorders think they're going to fix them by becoming trans when they're not. The Trans Law can't get ahead like this."

It is not said by any activist of any kind, by any opponent of Minister

, or by any political rival of the Government that is trying to carry out the norm that will regulate transsexuality in these months.

Says

(

, 1968), one of the greatest authorities on Spanish psychiatry, head of the pediatric and juvenile department of

, professor at the

and

universities , and former president of the

.

Arango is very alarmed by the possible approval in the

of a Trans Law that excludes the supervision of mental health professionals over adolescents, he says, that in reality "they are not trans, but rather have other disorders and believe that being trans they will overcome them. As the

has depathologized transsexuality, they have not asked us for an opinion. But what they want to do is outrageous, and the vulnerable, the usual ones, could suffer a lot. "

That is why he sponsors today, at the Madrid College of Physicians, the presentation of the

, which brings together some 300 parents from all over Spain who claim to suffer from the situation he denounces.

What vision do you have of the Trans Law as it is proposed in the Government project? Professionally, I attend with concern to the gestation of this Law, because it is far from reality.

From day to day at Hospital Gregorio Marañón we are witnessing an explosion, a boom, an exponential increase in adolescents who say they are trans, many for fashion, and they are not.

In our hospitalization unit, if we usually had one or two adolescents who said they were trans a year, now 15%, or 20% of those admitted.

Obviously it is not a normal figure, it does not respond to reality. What explanation do you have for that? When something like this appears and it is not viral or contagious, you ask yourself: what does this respond to?

I am very concerned, knowing the psychopathology of adolescents, that immediate search for an answer,

gratification, variability, change... One of the things we first learn in child psychiatry is to wait before acting.

When a child arrives and says that his life is worth nothing, before starting pharmacological treatment, what you do is make an appointment with him a week later.

And maybe the problem has disappeared. Just wait. Yes.

These changes in the pediatric population, in minors, are very frequent.

What used to be called gender dysphoria, which is now called incongruence, of course exists, and I completely agree that it be depathological and 'depsychiatric', in cases where it is real.

But what worries me is that most of the adolescents I am seeing, when I study them longitudinally, say they are trans and they are not.

And the problem is that if this leads to a wait and see situation, or to start psychotherapy, well.

But if we talk about someone who claims to be trans for three weeks going to a private center and they give him hormones... Well, it's outrageous.

We do something that is difficult to reverse, when it is not irreversible.

And we as health professionals have been taught that our first obligation is to take care of the health of our patients.

In two visits you do not meet a patient, imagine those who claim to be trans. Even if they express it with total emphatic. Logically, no.

You have to follow the protocols: wait, listen, make differential diagnoses... The fact that I say that trans people are not because of a mental disorder, that is, that it is not a disease,

It does not necessarily mean that many people with mental disorders will not say that they are trans when they are not.

The two things are compatible, and they are happening.

I'm going to give you an extreme example: if I have a schizophrenic person who the voices tell him is trans, what do I do: do I hormone him? You refute gender self-determination.

And mixing gender with sex, and giving the image that one can choose the sex one has... No, it's crazy.

One is either XX or XY.

Live as you want, but the sex is what it is, and we doctors have to know what the sex of a person is, because the treatments are sometimes different depending on one or the other. What would be the cause of this avalanche or boom of the talking?

For you, who see adolescents at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital. Well, look, there is a pattern of, let's say, false cases:

excluded child, with autism, perhaps bullying, adjustment problems, Asperger's, social relationship problems, who suddenly finds a group of people who welcome and support him.

And that by the fact of saying that he is from the soccer team X or the political party Y, they welcome him and he finds himself... Accepted. Exactly, accepted.

Well, he is already.

That was the problem, that I was trans.

Everything will be fixed now.

When you ask these guys: but what is it to be trans, what is it to be a woman, to be a man, you dismantle them very easily.

The ones that really are can be seen from the age of four or five.

At that age they already tell you that their dick disgusts them, that if they could they would take it off, that they will never wear underpants in their lives.

And in two years they are still the same.

And in five, the same.

And they dismantle everything you argue with them.

We have seen these seconds all our lives,

they suffer from that dysphoria that we were talking about, and the treatments for them are completely justified.

But they are the proportion that I told you at the beginning: in our hospital, maybe three cases a year.

The problem is the former.

Now there is an explosion of the former. The reader will wonder: but how can such a Law reach Parliament and no one from the scientific community raise their hand? Legislators must listen to those of us who serve these people.

Be careful, you can do a lot of damage with this.

And I am the first in favor of the World Health Organization when it says that gender dysphoria is not a mental disorder, although it is also true, mind you, that people with gender dysphoria do have many mental disorders derived from it.

If hormone therapy and surgery are good for these people, then fantastic,

This is what science is for.

But I am obliged to tell those in the Hemicycle to come and see what is happening in our unit.

I invite you to come. But why don't psychiatric professionals come out and say this? It's because they haven't asked us.

Since it is depathologized, they think they don't have to ask us.

It is also true that this phenomenon, the boom, is very recent, something of the last three years.

The Spanish Society of Psychiatry has just created a group on this.

It is the easy solution: flee forward.

'This is what happens to me.

I am in a body that is not mine and being trans is going to cure all my ills.

It's an adolescent classic, the magical solution, here and now, frontal lobe disinhibition, do before you think.

Then, this has two more aspects.

It is the ideology that has blinded the promoters of this law, but nature is what it is, there is no ideology that is imposed.

No ideology, I clarify, that of any party, neither one nor the other.

On the other hand, the way in which this is proposed attracts the risk that private medicine gets involved in doing certain things, and benefiting from it.

Be careful with that. But then, as far as you know, what scientific criteria has been used to compose this Law as it is drafted? Well, I don't know.

They have not contacted scientific societies.

I imagine that the criterion has been ideological.

If I think that trans people don't have any mental health problems, why should I talk to doctors?

I don't need them.

It is like applying the ideology to euthanasia.

You can't euthanize someone with major depression,

because you medicate him and suddenly he feels great.

If you allow euthanasia that would be called suicide.

A differential diagnosis must be made.

To someone who has come to euthanasia after thoughtful, weighed reasoning, etc., it can be applied.

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