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How 'Gender Identity' in children becomes a False Self Donald Winnicott described the False Self as a defensive personality structure that develops when a child senses that their authentic feelings, impulses, or bodily experience are not welcomed. To preserve the attachment, the child presents a compliant, “as-if” version of themselves that wins approval. Over time this compliant persona can feel like the “real me,” while the True Self goes underground. For the transchild, the same mechanism operates: - The child shows distress or cross-sex behaviour (often driven by trauma, autism, homophobia, bullying, puberty fears, or simple imaginative play). - The adult’s excitement, special attention, new name/pronouns, and social media celebration act as powerful, seductive mirroring. - The child complies. To keep the love, praise, and sense of being “finally seen,” the child adopts the trans persona. This feels authentic because it is rewarded and because the original pain (True Self distress) is soothed by the new role. - The False Self is medicalised. Puberty blockers, hormones, surgery physically lock the compliant persona into the body. - The True Self, now associated with unbearable pain and rejection, has nowhere to return. (Many detransitioners describe the moment they stop hormones as “finally feeling like myself again.” That is Winnicott’s True Self trying to reassert itself after years of suppression.) In short: when adults treat a child’s transient distress or play as proof of an opposite-sex essence and then reward the performance of that essence, they cultivate a classic False Self organisation. Medical transition then makes it irreversible. This is not liberation of an authentic identity; it is the entrenchment of a defensive, compliant self that was created to survive an unsafe emotional environment.

(LONG POST) I was maybe 8 years old, when my grandma told me that “my tongue would cost me”. I was an abused child, my parents were violent and I was a scapegoat in a very dysfunctional family. But I always talked back. I talked about what was happening, even though I was forbidden to. When I didn’t talk, I read, I glared at the world, and I wrote. I wrote in my diary, I wrote poems on an old typewriter, and at one point, I wrote existential horror stories that were wrapped up in absurdist circumstances, but at their core, they explored themes that were very real to me. Then suddenly, it was war and we fled. I was devastated for many reasons, but when the shock wore off, the hardest part was not being able to emotionally express myself in English. Everyone wanted to know about the war, so I wrote about it in my broken English. When I got into medical school, I had to learn another language, again. This was so intense, that for the duration of my studies I neither read nor wrote anything not curriculum related. My choice of profession was psychiatry. I remember driving a consultant psychiatrist I was shadowing, when he confronted me about this at a traffic light. He wanted to know why I was making it so hard for myself? Why won’t I choose another specialty, since psychiatry was all about language, and operating on a high level in a foreign language, in addition to learning medicine, was needlessly complicated? My answer was that psychiatry married perfectly my love of writing and my love of medicine. So I was prepared to work hard for it. He wasn’t convinced. I became a good psychiatrist eventually (we call ourselves that even if we are still in training, as I was). And when I became very ill and had to stop working, the very first thing I did was write semi-autobiographical short stories in my mother tongue, to help me process the trauma of leaving Belgrade on the last plane that was allowed to leave the country. I wrote about us, teenagers, in the wake of events that would leave scars none of us - or our country - would ever fully heal from. I wrote happy and sad stories, evoking what we lost. This was when I got my first fans, haters and stalkers. I moved on to write something longer. That second blog really took off, and I became a small celebrity in our blogger community. There were entire forum threads where people gathered to discuss my latest posts, and speculated what would happen next. I started to receive emails from women from all over the world, telling me how my writing helped them through a difficult time. It was then that I realised I had a Voice. Despite everyone and everything that tried to strangle it, my voice was there. It was unique and coveted. Recognisable. I was finally a writer! I always knew this on one level, but after this, I my confidence grew. Despite the book deals I was offered in my old country (or what was left of it), I decided that my life was now in the UK, and I wanted to write in English. I was pretty good with non-fiction (med school and all the war talk helped with that) but my heart was in those bizarre, weird, wild, strange stories, that served to explore our humanity. However, I soon realised that writing fiction in English was a skill I didn’t quite have. So I set out to teach myself. Reluctantly, around 2012. I put my novel aside and started to write non-fiction again. I recognised a medical scandal of gender medicine and it was my duty as a physician to do something about it. From the start, I expected pushback from transactivists. I had been a woman online for years by then, and I was under no illusion about how aggressively men were working to silence feminists - be it liberal feminists or radical feminists, the attacks on us were constant (Gamergate, MeToo, women being banned from platforms, our websites shut down, our comments deleted). To go through all that in full health is hard enough, and I was doing it while ill and traumatised by male violence. Still, it was worth it. Colleagues started to reach out, one by one. They read what I wrote. They wanted to meet me. The shared my work with others. I was invited everywhere but could not even speak on the phone at length due to shortness of breath. So I wrote. Emails. essays, articles, letters, tweets. And whenever I could, I worked on my novel too. I’ve been penalised for speaking plain truth ever since I was a child, so I was used to it. So when women around me were bewildered about how bad things were, I took it in my stride and kept going. I mean, no angry misogynist online was a match for the raging bulls, dramatic health events, warring sides and anxious grandmothers, who tried to silence me over the years. In 2022, I announced I was about to publish a book on gender ideology, feminism and medicine. I decided to do it on my own (with help from friends) because what I needed to write was a book with sex accurate language and clear analysis of a medical and social scandal, not something that uses euphemisms and preferred pronouns, which work to cement the abuse directed at women, girls and vulnerable patients. Then, just as my book was about to come out, I was wrongly suspended and banned from social media. Twitter employees even tried to sabotage my book launch, where I was speaking through a friend’s phone. Enemies I didn’t even know I had (among the GC crowd) came out of the woodwork, to lie and malign me and my book, in my absence. Some vindictive one star reviews were left on Amazon and Goodreads. Entire sections of GC community, women I have supported for years, turned against me. My book was not just ignored, it was agitated against. Just a mention of it could cause certain people to have tantrums. I had become an unmentionable in many circles. I will never forget the kindness of those who were there for me, and there were many. But those who suddenly and inexplicably weren’t, broke my heart. And limited my reach. They took advantage of the fact I couldn’t go to meet ups, parties and various events. They used my anonymity on social media to discredit me, even though countless women, doctors, journalists and politicians knew exactly who I was. Cliques were formed, groupthink was enforced, and even people I thought were my friends, risked exclusion unless they went along with it. Most fell in line, throwing me a guilty email or a message once in a while, or letting me know about the thrashing. My book was written specifically to help people understand gender ideology and the medical and social scandal associated with it. I used all my skills as a doctor and a writer to communicate even the most complex issues in a way most people could understand. I also wrote it for my colleagues. Informing them. Reminding them of the ethics. Appealing to them to bloody do something. Because of the thrashing, sabotage and censure, the awareness of my book spread slowly, by word of mouth. There was no glowing review in mainstream media outlets, no fancy celeb quotes, no big endorsements. The momentum I had hoped for in November 2022 fizzled out before my eyes. Despite my dear friends, who have supported me all along, I was devastated. I felt alienated and unworthy, because I always believed in sisterhood, in lifting each other up and I also believed that nobody who really wanted to stop a medical scandal, would censor the only book about this topic written by a doctor and a feminist. Then, something remarkable happened. People who read the book, reviewed it incredibly generously. They bought it for others, shared quotes, said they understood the medical side of things so much more clearly. Colleagues started to get in touch. They were letting me know about chapters they found particularly meaningful. One senior colleague called it a “profound and seminal piece of scholarship”. I clung to that desperately. Doctors I know were starting to have the book recommended to them by colleagues I’ve never met before. The book was finally getting out there, giving me renewed confidence. But what did that really mean in a today’s world, where just a single tweet about men not being women can have a female writer’s career ruined? My T3RF credentials could be seen from the moon. In the current climate, what chances did I really have, even if my novel was good, of having it published by others? Being a writer is hard. It’s a lonely, back-breaking work, and it’s cognitively extremely tiring for a bilingual person. I have so many doubts, I’m very self-critical, and the mountain of obstacles in my way seems at times insurmountable. But what choice any of us writers really have, but to keep writing and hope for the best? A dear friend, and a remarkable wordsmith, confronted me recently about being so driven and motivated to write. She wondered if I needed a long rest instead. I told her that it’s not so much that I want to write (although I do!), it’s that I start to feel unwell if I can’t write. I feel pressure, anxiety, lack of concentration, I am preoccupied with my thoughts and all my heart craves is to go back to my story. My health issues mean that I am unwell a lot of the time, so when I’m well, I do as much as I can. I live for these windows of good health, when I can write so much that the pressure eases, I feel like I’ve released the blockage and my voice can flow freely. Many have tried to take that away from me, but they will never succeed. What they might succeed in is to limit my reach, to hurt me emotionally, to make me feel small, sad, doubt myself. They can make me feel like a loser and a difficult woman. But they will never make me stop writing and that will have to do.