The Neverending Convention, Part II

I’m still (maybe just beginning) to debrief the Texas State Republican Convention. Part I is here.

On Monday, July 13^th, temporary committees began meeting, in person, in downtown Houston. I was serving as an editor for the Platform Committee, and my duty that day was to type up the material in the Health and Human Services Subcommittee. One of the committee members kept minutes, so I wasn’t doing that.

Serious work got underway shortly after noon. It took us until around 9:30 PM to finish up and get out of there. Then I went home and cleaned up the file and began formatting that one and the work of one or two other subcommittees. I got to bed about 4:30 AM (a schedule I repeated again the next two nights).

The HHS Subcommittee of the Platform Committee, plus me,
doing battle, with words, to protect our freedom.

While I didn’t get to have input into what went into the state party platform, I did get to hear discussion and testimony. There were a couple of people testifying that day that I’d like to share with you today. Both of these were on controversial topics—but not actually controversial in that room. We already had wording that I think satisfied them. Still, I found the testimonies enlightening.

Reintegrative Therapy

My very unofficial record shows the HHS subcommittee heard testimony from 16 people. The first was David Pickup, a licensed marriage and family therapist from here in Houston. He was speaking in favor of planks related to counseling and therapy, homosexuality, and parental consent. He shared with us the versions coming out of Collin County, around McKinney and Plano. While we didn’t end up with the same wording, I think the platform covers all the ideas he brought.

Different planks accomplish different things. But the ideas emphasize the purpose of giving freedom—to therapists, and to those seeking therapy. And beyond that, there is wording to prevent giving special legal status to people based on their LGBT identity.

Dr. Pickup talked a bit about the type of therapy he does, called Reintegrative Therapy. I wrote about this in September 2018. I learned about it from hearing Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, Jr. He discussed it only in reference to people with unwanted same-sex attraction. It isn’t designed as “change therapy,” although it can have that outcome. The concept is that there is a high likelihood that same-sex attraction is a reaction to a childhood trauma, causing—in my lay terms and probably not fully accurate—a sort of dissociative disorder, a separation from a reality that seems unacceptable in the child’s mind.

As I wrote in 2018,

The term reintegrative refers to the idea that, when the young person is developing thought patterns, he (or she) separates out parts of the self, can’t see their own gender in a healthy way, and in a way dissociates from their wholeness. The therapy helps them reintegrate, or bring back together those hidden or buried parts of themselves, making it safe for them to be wholly who they are.

The therapy deals with healing for the childhood trauma. After that, the results can range from an easing of multiple mental health symptoms, on up to and including the lessening of same-sex attraction, or even the alleviation of those symptoms. You resolve the trauma, and the issues caused by the trauma are resolved. The goal is mental health, not necessarily ridding a person of unwanted same-sex attraction, which is why this therapy hasn’t undergone as much attack as other “change” therapies.

To repeat Dr. Nicolosi,

In the work that we do, in Reintegrative Therapy, the client is in the driver’s seat. The licensed psychotherapist uses evidence-based mainstream treatment approaches, the same treatment approaches used in other clinics throughout the world to treat trauma and sexual addiction. And as those underlying dynamics are resolved, the sexuality changes as a byproduct. Our clients notice significant and lasting decreases in their same-sex attractions and increases in their heterosexual attractions.

At the time I wrote about it, I thought the description of how the therapy worked made it very likely to be helpful to people with gender dysphoria. Dr. Pickup is the first validation I’ve heard that that is true. He talked about his experience dealing with both people with same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria. He said it was his experience, without exception, that every person with same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria has an underlying trauma to deal with. When they heal from the trauma, their brain heals, and the issues are resolved.

This is not something that can be forced on someone who does not want it. Always, this is intended as an option for someone seeking the treatment. As public policy, we just have to keep government from interfering with that voluntary therapist/patient relationship.

The difficulty in the world today is not just an attack on our beliefs, but an attack on our ability to act on our beliefs, even when the facts back us up. As I said before,

In a sensible society, the obvious answer would always have been, “Let’s help you heal, and then we’ll see what you want to do,” rather than, “Let’s indulge your delusion and change the world and its reactions to you.”

But, as is increasingly clear, we do not live in a sensible society.

I have believed all along, the kinder and more accepting approach to people with same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria is to recognize that they are functioning with damage. Some are doing well enough, regardless of their issues, that they see no need for treatment. But many want relief. Allowing freedom in that search is better than insisting there is no relief to be had.

While I had known about Dr. Nicolosi, I hadn't known where one would go to find another such therapist. I'm not sure how one would find the nearest such therapist, but I was pleased to know that there is one in Houston, so I assume Reintegrative Therapy is available in a growing number of places. 

Vaccination Choice

The other testimony I wanted to mention today was from a woman named Jackie. She was speaking in favor of a plank calling for informed consent concerning vaccines. Informed parental consent is a big issue in several areas; healthcare issues such as vaccines is only one part. So we were on the same page. Not anti-vaccine; rather, pro-freedom of choice following plenty of accurate information.

Vaccine reactions are rare. But Jackie’s daughter is one of those rare vaccine injured. She has been living a severely disabled life since that vaccine reaction, and her family, including parents and siblings, must dedicate their lives to caring for her. It is a labor of love, but it is not the choice Jackie would have chosen for her daughter had she known the outcome of simply getting the standard list of vaccines.

One of Jackie’s concerns—and this was also the concern of several others who testified in that subcommittee—was that, once there is a vaccine for this coronavirus, that the entire public would be forced to get it.

I’ve been thinking through the math. I don’t have all the numbers I need to verify this, but I think the rare vaccine reaction, such as Jackie’s daughter suffered, is less rare than, or on par with, children dying of the coronavirus.

graphic from here

A Canadian report this month showed that Canada has had only one death in a coronavirus patient under age 20, and there wasn’t data to show whether the patient actually died of coronavirus or some other reason. Numbers in the US, China, and Italy are similar. Children rarely contract the disease. I don’t have an accurate number for that. But if you accumulate 10,000 of these rare children who get it, 1 is likely to die—but that child will have an underlying condition such as asthma, cardiovascular disease, or immunosuppression such as in cancer patients undergoing treatment. And with that one casualty, it will be uncertain whether COVID-19 was the cause of death or simply an additional or possibly contributing factor. 

A piece I found concerning vaccine injury, from 2017, noted that in the previous year 48,000 Americans reported adverse reactions and side effects to vaccinations. Most were mild. These include things like soreness at the injection site and fever.

A vaccine injury, as opposed to a reaction, is more rare and more serious. I don’t remember which type Jackie’s daughter had, but my guess would be Transverse Myelitis. Other serious injuries might be Guillain-Barré Syndrome, Encephalitis, Anaphylaxis, Chronic Arthritis, shoulder injury ranging from temporary ache to complete loss of use. Most sources simply refer to the risk of these injuries as “rare.” But I did find one estimate as “on the order of one per thousands to one per millions of doses.”

A parent is to be faced with balancing two risks:

1.     a child contracting COVID-19, which is relatively rare compared to adults contracting it, and then getting a severe case, which is much more rare, and then dying of the disease—a disease for which we’re getting better treatments—let’s call this a likelihood of 1/10,000 (which is probably higher than actual).

2.     a child reacting to a vaccine to prevent an illness that is both rare for the child and even much less likely to cause severe illness or death. 

image from here

Add to this the lack of data concerning the vaccine’s efficacy at preventing the disease, and lack of data on how frequent vaccine injuries might occur from it. That will be the situation when a new vaccine for this coronavirus comes out. Its effectiveness is likely to be in the range of the annual flu vaccine, which is not exactly a guarantee of protection.

You can argue for the vaccine or against it. But if you’re that parent, do you want the decision about what risk to take on behalf of your child to be in your hands or in the hands of your government?

If you’re a free Texan, you want to be the one making that decision.

One thing we’ve learned during this pandemic is that government officials aren’t all that good at gathering data and wisely interpreting it in order to make the best healthcare decisions for all of us.

There may be a theme related to this Republican platform discussion: Decisions about our lives ought to be in our hands, not the government’s. I think I can share a part III with more planks on that.