Mick Hartley

Shelley Charlesworth at Transgender Trend on a mental health app that's helping to push troubled young girls down the trans route:

Visit Kooth’s website and you’ll read that they are the market leader in online mental health support and advice and the largest mental health platform for 10-25-year-olds in the UK. But what they don’t say is that this also makes them one of the largest sites teaching gender identity theory to children and young people, whose counsellors direct children to other harmful sites such as those promoting breast binding.

Initially, there are no signs of affiliation with the gender cause on the website; no pink and blue flags or allyship statements. But when signing up to use Kooth there’s a compulsory tick box choice of four ‘genders’: male, female, agender, and genderfluid. Whatever reason a child has for joining the platform, from the outset they are being schooled in the neo language of gender.

A major driver of Kooth’s approach to gender identity is their association with the BACP:

“We continue to be a BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) accredited service and indeed are the only nationwide digital mental health service to hold this accolade”.

Some might question whether BACP endorsement is any sort of accolade. BACP’s position of gender identity hardly differs from LGBT activist groups such as Stonewall or Mermaids. BACP was a key player in the contentious addition of gender identity to the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy in 2017. This development of the MOU, based on no evidence whatsoever of a problem with ‘anti-trans’ therapy in the UK, has had a chilling effect on therapists wanting to work with gender distressed children. BACP’s evidence to the government’s conversion therapy consultation is written from an ideological, political approach to gender, particularly in relation to children….

According to Kooth the most used form of therapy on the site is peer to peer-to-peer or self-help. We know social contagion is a major driver spreading gender ideology. What appears to be happening here is that an online platform, which is supposed to offer qualified, evidenced mental health support, has handed over the job to the teenagers….

But it’s clear that the girls have come to the Kooth platform already informed by the neo language of trans activism, ready to label themselves as trans, transmasc, gender fluid, agender, non-binary, asexual, aromantic. They are not describing symptoms but rather picking a self-diagnosis from LGBTQIA+ glossaries. These are then reinforced by the online community they share. They believe the world is hostile to them; Kooth has already told them they’re vulnerable to discrimination and hatred. The contrast with the forum threads on eating disorders could not be more stark. There the teenagers are encouraged to accept their bodies, to reject harmful thoughts and behaviours. 

Kooth, as Mary Harrington notes, is supported by the NHS. In these cash-strapped times, with an explosion in youth mental health issues, it's easy to see why off-loading troubled teenage girls onto apps such as Kooth might be appealing. It's a disaster in waiting, though:

There’s something nightmarish about this scenario. Epidemic levels of (predominantly female) youth psychic distress are being funnelled through a kind of online sausage machine of the soul, in the name of “access”. In that sausage machine, any personalised response is only grudgingly granted, while the very format — disembodied and remote — forecloses any of the non-verbal communication widely understood to play a critical role in an experience of encounter and empathy. 

Starved of in-person presence and empathy, nothing prevents the loneliness and misery of young girls being colonised by the disembodied and dissociative one-size-fits-all ideology of gender. Promising a simple physical fix for often complicated emotional difficulties, it’s perhaps the ultimate bargain-basement solution for price-sensitive healthcare, in an age that’s both overtly concerned with “mental health” and profoundly indifferent to what such health would actually imply.