Transhausen by proxy: a few thoughts

On why this theory doesn’t tell us enough

Munchausen by proxy is one of the things I have frequently seen suggested as being behind the phenomenon of the rise of the young “trans child”. I’ve even seen it rather pithily called “transhausen by proxy” by the daring people of Twitter.

As it is so often mothers who support these transitions, and as we have seen them being shockingly pro-interventionist about their offspring, in “trans child” support groups (through leaked screenshots) it intuitively feels like this might be a real answer to the question of why this is happening. At least in a notable number of cases.

When people have suggested it, in the past, I have given credence to the idea, too, but in this short essay I intend to try and present the case that this is a blunt analysis that relies on the easy assumption that it is the mothers of these children that are liable to be pathological rather than leading us to focus on a broader social context.

While there will always be cases where a maladaptive parent induces illness in a child, I believe the societal discussions around gender issues, themselves, demonstrate a kind of collective madness. This means that we can’t always, or perhaps often, straightforwardly lay the blame at the door of any or both parents.

At least, not in any diagnosable way. 

There are many biases such as sexism or homophobia that might influence a parent into transitioning their child. There is also a potential increase in social standing, if they are in certain political spheres. Transitioning a child on the left, much in the same vein as middle class liberals identifying into new and increasingly niche marginalised groups, offers the adult a kind of social cachet. Or in the case of a child’s identity; cachet by proxy. 

To be vulnerable makes you important if your vulnerability (or pseudo-vulnerability) is one of the right kinds. 

Contrarily, to be Jewish, female, a black or gay person who doesn’t buy into identity politics or even to be physically disabled makes you ineligible for such importance. So does being working class. Despite the genuine hardships that affect people in these groups. 

Whether the promise of peer recognition actually translates to many adults transitioning their child, in the real world, though, remains to be seen.

A less cynical view might be that adults on the left who have been indoctrinated into gender-identity ideology, which is a circular, nonsensical and regressive ideology, will raise children with those same beliefs and those children are then more liable to be confused about their sex. 

Responding to that confusion with affirmation is also something adults have been taught to do by the ideology. They may have all kinds of private feelings, fears and concerns about their child’s declaration of gender identity and their motivation may be nothing more than doing the “right thing” by their child. There is additional social pressure on them to react in a certain way. 

Given that they have been taught by mainstream media, irresponsible clinicians and the social environment that anyone who expresses doubts is against them and their child, and may in fact have genocidal impulses towards trans people at large, they are then bound to perform absolute certainty about the transition. As well as to act with hostility and anger towards anyone who questions if it is the proper course.

Tell a parent their child may die if they do not respond quickly, and “correctly”, and love alone will surely derail their reason.

The sunk cost fallacy, whereby someone is reluctant to abandon a course of action because they've heavily invested in it, even when it would be better to do so, might also explain why families get stuck on this pathway. (I believe other women have also previously theorised this fallacy may be at play).

There is, indisputably, a form of gender ideology on the right, too. One that has been of such long standing that many people consider it invisible. It desires that everyone adheres to traditional roles and, not dissimilarly to gender-identity, sees those roles as innate. It also dislikes and/or punishes deviations from such roles.

In some cases right wing gender ideology also generates fears, in its adherents, that a gender nonconforming child may grow up to be gay. Given these biases, some parents on the right are also susceptible to the notion a child has been “born in the wrong body” if they behave in ways more historically associated with the opposite sex.

A religious conception of the soul as distinct from the body may also be a factor.

Coming back to Munchausen by proxy as a theory which is usually only invoked to explain certain liberal parents caught up in this….

While two thirds of adults with Munchausen are male, according to the British Medical Journal, it is true that the majority of adults who inflict munchausen by proxy onto their children are women. 

According to the Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior less than ten percent of cases are perpetrated by men. The reasons for this are often speculated on but not proven.

One theory is, simply, that women tend to be the primary caregivers of children, elderly or disabled relatives and even pets, giving them the ability to perpetrate this kind of abuse. 

Despite this theory about access, it is also worth noting that women who do this are much more likely to be married than to be single mothers. 

In one study, 75% of victims of Munchausen by proxy were under six years old.

Frighteningly, research suggests the death rate for victims is up to 10%.

Munchausen, itself, is named after the dissembling Baron Munchausen from the 18th century, who was known to tell fantastic lies about his experiences and life. It is the “most severe type of factitious disorder”. People with munchausen not only lie about their own health but tend to lie more generally. This makes sense when you understand the motive of munchausen seems to be attention and sympathy rather than something more material like money 

According to the Psychiatric Times, 30 to 70 percent of those who falsify illness in children also falsify illness in themselves, which is to say that adults with Munchausen by proxy may often also have Munchausen, too.

An article in the British Medical Journal specifically looked at 15 families in which the father fulfilled the criteria of Munchausen by proxy and most fulfilled it for Munchausen also. In these rarer cases the perpetrator was, similarly to women, often married or living with their partner. There was no suggestion the partner or spouse had colluded in the abuse. 

Eleven children died in these families, and six survived repeated abuse.

It is only the presence of factitious illness, rather than the specific kinds of abuse that are commonly also present (such as smothering and poisoning) that lead to the diagnosis of munchausen by proxy. This, in itself, may explain the disparities in the sex of the perpetrator. I.e that these particular forms of abuse are not more commonly perpetrated by women but that additional claims of factitious illness accompanying them is just less commonly seen in men. 

What leaps out on reading this paper is that “it was common to find that bouts of personal false illness behaviour had gone into abeyance at the time that they were inventing or causing false illness for their child, and then re-emerged when the child was healthy or dead.”

It seems then that there is a near seamless chronology of claims of false illness to be found in cases where both conditions are present.  To assume that a parent who says their child has dysphoria and is trans has one or both of these conditions, with no history of factitious illness, or of other fantastical claims, is an assumption not justified by any information I could find.

Neither does the advent of a newer term “Munchausen by internet”, which applies to people feigning medical conditions online, and in online support groups, offer enough explanatory power for the trans child phenomenon. 

Although it is clear that internet induced pathologies are a reality we have not reckoned with as a society despite having seen various social contagions (such as with gender dysphoria, Tourettes, dissociative identity disorder and anorexia).

Recently, both Munchausen and Munchausen by proxy have both been renamed. The former as the very catchy “Factitious Disorder Imposed on Self” and the latter as “FDIA”; Factitious disorder imposed on another. Risk factors for the conditions include histrionic and borderline traits and personality disorders. 

If you look at the potential signs of Munchausen by proxy (FDIA) it feels reasonable to say that this doesn’t look the same as what we are seeing in most cases of “trans children”.

Instead, we are seeing the medical profession itself, and society at large, rush to pathologise these children and to foster and propagate the narratives of innate gender identity and biological sex denial. 

Certain parents, including parents with certain traits or conditions, might be more susceptible to transing their child but it seems backwards to be attributing this to individual parents instead of to society as a whole. 

This is a medical scandal, first and foremost, with many clinicians choosing to give poorly evidenced treatments and dangerous drugs to children in the name of a modern ideology.

That ideology will catch many types of people in its net, some bad, some good, some healthy, some unhealthy.

However, it is the very profession all of them will turn to for answers and help which is enacting and enabling this latest form of child abuse.

Aided and abetted by other ostensibly trustworthy institutions, such as social work and the law, who are similarly captured by the glimmer of this mad idea.

Where Munchausen and Munchausen by proxy is a patient driven malady, that always relied on clinicians to unwittingly facilitate it, the transitioning of children is socially and medically driven. In this new phenomenon it is parents who are the ones being relied on to facilitate it, instead. I suggest, as lay people, they are frequently now the unwitting ones. It is all too easy for them to be ignorant of the harm involved, because of their lack of medical knowledge and their own submersion in these ideas.

A poisonous, and arguably symbiotic, relationship between medicine and ideology is the main cause of what is happening and this makes it a full scale tragedy of our times. Rather than disparate events caused by individuals who have no real power whatsoever it is a massive failure in institutions, who do have power, that has lead us here.

This is precisely why it falls to those of us who see through it to challenge it as best we can.

Sources:

https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/factitious-disorder-imposed-on-another-munchausen-syndrome-by-proxy-apotentially-lethal-form-of-child-abuse-2375-4494-1000e106.php?aid=58655#13

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on_another 

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/munchausen-syndrome 

https://adc.bmj.com/content/78/3/210

https://www.medicinenet.com/munchausen_syndrome/article.htm

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990557/

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/munchausen-by-proxy

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9834-factitious-disorder-imposed-on-another-fdia