Beware: New App Puts Your Daughter in Danger, And It's All Under the Guise of 'Mental Health'
Parents need to be aware of another way the radical transgender and gay agenda is being pumped into the minds of our children — this time with a smartphone app that bills itself as a “mental health” tool for kids.
The Kooth app might seem harmless at first glance because it is billed as a tool to help kids improve and maintain positive mental health. But this app is also filled with “affirming” information about radical transgenderism and is an aid to further the social contagion of the radical LGBT agenda among our youth.
On its main website, Kooth explains that it is intended as a well-being counseling service for kids to turn to for help delivered by psychologists and mental health counselors.
“Kooth is here to provide safe and confidential online support and counseling. The whole team is made up of friendly and experienced individuals who want to help you,” the site said.
It all sounds perfectly wonderful, of course. Having a place where frightened kids can go to ask questions about their mental health that they may be unwilling to ask of people in school, home or church might seem to be a good idea. But parents in the U.K. have found a major problem with this service: It is being surreptitiously used to push the radical transgender agenda on kids.
Instead of helping further mental health, Kooth is pushing radical, left-wing gender ideology and politics, according to Mary Harrington of UnHerd.
“‘Kooth’ bills itself as ‘your online mental well-being community,’ offering ‘free, safe and anonymous support,'” Harrington wrote. “Yet it is riddled with highly politicized trans-activist assumptions and leaves a user base predominantly composed of unhappy adolescent girls largely free to ‘support’ one another in affirming and intensifying their shared gender confusion.”
Harrington added that the “affirmation-only” approach that Kooth takes to push radical transgenderism runs contrary to the recent Cass report on the U.K.’s National Health Service’s gender identity services, which found that the “affirmative approach” is a disservice to people seeking gender altering and mental health care.
In fact, the Cass report in Britain is not the only report to determine that it is a bad idea to rush to “affirm” every person who thinks they “might” be transgender. Much of Europe is beginning to push away from the widespread and automatic acceptance of transgenderism and is finding that for most people — especially children — feelings of transgenderism or gender dysphoria are temporary phases. So, rushing to hormone therapy or surgical solutions is a disastrously wrong approach.
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Forbes, for instance, recently noted that, “Increasingly, European nations are adopting a more cautious approach to gender-affirming care among minors,” and went on to describe how countries such as Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the U.K. are beginning to pull back from a headlong rush toward medical intervention for trans people.
The magazine added that after a decade of pushing hormone therapies and surgical procedures, many European countries are finding little evidence that transgender affirmation actually ends up leading to positive mental health solutions, especially in the long run.
“But caution with respect to gender-affirming care for minors may be warranted, as European experience indicates,” Forbes reported. “A series of Europe-based systematic reviews of evidence for the benefits and risks of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones have shown a low certainty of benefits. Specifically, longitudinal data collected and analyzed by public health authorities in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and England have concluded that the risk-benefit ratio of youth gender transition ranges from unknown to unfavorable.”
In other words, kids and young adults who have “transitioned” end up no happier or mentally healthy.
“As a result, across Europe there has been a gradual shift from care which prioritizes access to pharmaceutical and surgical interventions, to a less medicalized and more conservative approach that addresses possible psychiatric comorbidities and explores the developmental etiology of trans identity,” Forbes noted.
This, though, is not what Kooth is fostering. The app is being used in a heavy effort to push radical transgender “affirming-only” information, Harrington points out.
“Kooth operates according to a pyramid model, offering users first a library of ‘therapeutic’ articles (riddled with gender ideology), then ‘peer support’ (online forums where girls reinforce each other’s preoccupations with gender). This is followed by limited in-person assistance for the most acute distress, delivered remotely in a chat window by ‘Online Emotional Wellbeing Practitioners’: individuals who don’t even need a counseling qualification … and moderate the message boards and provide chat-window ’emotional support,'” Harrington wrote.
Harrington added that this “nightmarish” scenario makes a mockery of real counseling, which often takes into account 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 colonized by the disembodied and dissociative one-size-fits-all ideology of gender,” Harrington warned in her conclusion.
“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,” she said.
In Harrington’s estimation, the Kooth app starts with the assumption that any child who expresses any hint of gender confusion must automatically be a “trans person,” and that radical ideology is then funneled at the child full bore with no regard for that child’s actual mental state.
Parents need to be aware that this dangerous ideology is being pushed on kids in many forms. It is coming from their medical establishment, their schools, their entertainment, and even the apps they use on their phones.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
