You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Listen as Ollie bravely shares intimate details of his story that breaks and warms the heart all at once. This is one of the most touching conversations I’ve had on the podcast to date, and I am honored to be able to share it with you.

Show Notes

Ollie had no history of childhood gender dysphoria. But he was lonely, nihilistic, troubled by a legacy of intergenerational trauma he hadn’t yet unpacked, and reckless with his health. In his 20’s, toxic social influences exploited this vulnerability, in combination with Ollie’s guilt over being a man in the #metoo era, naturally fluid gender expression, and increasingly radical political worldview. Several of Ollie's peers offered their opinion that he was trans. One day, an acquaintance asked an unsolicited question: "you're trans, right?" and he thought, "that makes sense.”  Thus began several years of living an exhausting and regrettable lie that eventually fell apart, taking many aspects of his belief system with it.

Now 34, his heart is healing and his worldview has matured. Ollie wants to have a family with the love of his life, but cross-sex hormones have permanently ruined his fertility. Yet the clinicians - psychiatrist, endocrinologist and general practioner - who enabled this expressed no remorse when confronted.

Listen as Ollie bravely shares intimate details of his story that breaks and warms the heart all at once. This is one of the most touching conversations I’ve had on the podcast to date, and I am honored to be able to share it with you.

Oliver Davies is an Australian man born in regional Victoria and now living Melbourne. He lives with his partner and two high-maintenance dogs. Oliver is passionate about history, computing, childhood development, and spirituality. He identified as a trans woman from January 2015 to early 2021.

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Show notes & transcript provided with the help of SwellAI.

Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude and permission.

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Creators and Guests

Host
Stephanie Winn
LMFT, writer, host of @some_therapist. 🦎advocacy, healing & justice. See 📌

What is You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist?

You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist intimately explores the human experience while critiquing the state of the counseling profession as it yields to cultural madness. Your host, Stephanie Winn, distills years of wisdom gained from her practice as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist as she pivots away from treating patients, and toward the question of how to apply psychology to the novel dilemmas of the 21st century. What does ethical mental health care look like in a normless age, as our moral compasses spin in search of true north? How can therapists treat patients under pressure to affirm everything from the notion of gender identity to assisted suicide? Stephanie invites heretical, free-thinking guests from many walks of life, including current and former therapists, medical professionals, writers, researchers, and people with unique lived experience, such as detransitioners. Curious about many things, Stephanie’s interdisciplinary psychological lens investigates challenging social issues and inspires transformation in the self, relationships, and society. Pick up a torch to illuminate the dark night and join us on this journey through the inner wilderness.

*ISSUES LISTENING ON SPOTIFY* - If you notice some episodes missing from Spotify, you can find them on any other platform. New episodes are released every Monday, and all are present in numerical order, so you should always see an episode that has been released within the past week, followed by episodes in descending numerical order without any missing numbers. Spotify has a backwards and archaic system for flagging copyrighted content for removal. This podcast has a license to use its theme song, Half Awake by Joey Pecoraro, but Spotify's system keeps removing it anyway, and demands that podcast creators manually appeal the removal for every episode. This is obviously ridiculous. Spotify needs to get it together.