"Tell them you love me"

How a documentary film about facilitated communication provides insight into the mindset of gender-affirmative therapists

Many of us who are deeply engaged in trying to understand the trans phenomenon often spend a lot of time analysing the motivations of gender-affirmative therapists. The good news is that the HBO film Tell Them You Love Me gives significant insight into their perspectives. The bad news is that the conclusion is pretty devastating, although also very helpful if you want to understand what drives gender-affirmative therapists to intrude so destructively upon the lives of others.

Of course, from the off, the phrase “gender-affirmative therapists” isn’t really appropriate. Val Thomas, co-founder of Critical Therapy Antidote, describes them more accurately as “identity practitioners”. These anti-therapeutic professionals often go way beyond affirming; they confirm, anoint, and promote unattainable identities upon their vulnerable clients. Therefore, "identity practitioners" or even "identity influencers" is a more accurate description than "gender-affirmative therapists."

First of all, spoiler alert - this article tells the whole story so you might want to watch it first (it’s easily available at the moment). Secondly, Tell Them You Love Me isn’t about gender. It’s about facilitated communication, but the similarities are striking.

Anna Stubblefield appeared to be a well-meaning and successful 41-year-old woman until she was found guilty in 2015 of aggravated sexual assault against Derrick Johnson, a 30-year-old, nonverbal, cerebral palsy sufferer with severe mental disabilities. Having earned her PhD in 2000, Stubblefield became a scholar in the field of Africana philosophy and in 2011, when the investigation first began, Stubblefield was professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and chair of the philosophy department.

To give some background, Stubblefield had been raised in a home that fervently believed in helping the oppressed and the voiceless. When she was a child, her mother taught her how to write braille, she had a blind pen pal and she also learned sign language. She truly seemed to be motivated by a zeal to help the needy. Perhaps this initial desire to 'help' evolved into a pathological urge to enhance Johnson’s life. Maybe she came from a hyper-critical background, driven by an overwhelming need to prove herself as 'good.' Alternatively, she might have been discontent in her own life, seeking an absorbing drama where she could play the hero. As Carl Jung tell us, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Derrick Johnson is an African-American man deemed to have an IQ of an infant child. He cannot speak and is unable to stand independently or accurately direct movements of his body. Johnson’s mother and brother, his legal guardians, were initially pleased when Stubblefield first entered their lives as a facilitated communicator with an electronic device and the training to assist Johnson. “She was going to move mountains, and I accepted her at her word,” said Johnson’s mother, Daisy.

Facilitated communication is a method used to aid individuals with communication disabilities by physically supporting them to type or point to letters and symbols. Johnson’s family were surprised but also understandably delighted when Stubblefield proposed that Johnson actually had normal intelligence - all he had ever needed was a person as special as Stubblefield who could somehow unlock his thoughts.

Buoyed up by her apparent success - not unlike the pioneers of the Dutch Protocol who enthusiastically promoted the concept of puberty blockers across the world - Stubblefield subsequently brought Johnson to conferences to demonstrate their Hollywood-style success story of facilitated communication. We all love a transformative tale where someone who was previously '“broken” is suddenly “all fixed” and most people bought into the idea that facilitated communication was able to bring about this extraordinary transformation.

Things began to fall apart however, in 2011, when Stubblefield revealed to Johnson’s mother and brother that she was in love with Johnson and they had had sexual relations. Stubblefield believed that Johnson loved her - she facilitated his communication to tell her this. With echoes of the challenges pertaining to informed consent, Stubblefield believed they had a mutually consenting sexual relationship established through facilitated communication. The family didn’t believe this was possible and denied Stubblefield further access to Johnson.

Stubbblefield believed she was in love with Johnson (maybe she was in love with the idea of being his saviour?). She defied the family’s wishes and continued to attempt to maintain contact with Johnson. She then went on to attempt challenge control of Johnson’s legal guardians over him, and so finally, in August 2011, the family contacted the police and she was charged with sexual assault.

Through testing, it was discovered that no one else was able to facilitate Johnson’s communication - only Anna Stubblefield had this apparent power. Daniel Engber covered the Stubblefield case for The New York Times (who got it right in this instance). According to Engber:

"From my position in the gallery, reporting on the trial, it always seemed to me that Anna was entrapped by the grandiosity of her good intentions. As an academic, she devoted much of her career to social-justice activism and the philosophy of race and disability, warning in her published work that men like D.J. (who is black) were like 'the canary’s canary' in the coal mine — 'the most vulnerable of the vulnerable' — and subject to both white supremacist and ableist oppression. In teaching D.J. how to type, using a widely disavowed method known as 'facilitated communication,' she believed she was restoring his right of self-determination: empowering him to take college classes, present papers at conferences and eventually express his longing for the older, married, white woman who had been his savior."

The startling difference between facilitated communication and gender-affirmative therapy is, of course, the widespread acceptance of gender-affirmative therapy as an appropriate approach. It is notable that facilitated communication testimony from Johnson was not allowed as it was ruled unreliable under New Jersey law.

Initially in 2015, the jury found Stubblefield guilty of two counts of first-degree aggravated sexual assault (the equivalent of rape in New Jersey) and she was sentenced to 12 years in prison and required to register as a sex offender. A year late, the family was awarded $4 million in a civil lawsuit against Stubblefield.

Nick Schager in The Daily Beast wrote that “though [Stubblefield] comes across as sincere, that’s not the same thing as innocent; considering everything, she seems to have deluded herself into believing a fiction because it let her feel good about liberating Derrick from his shortcomings.” But the story doesn’t finish there; facilitated communication has some serious advocates and they fought to have this technique recognised in the New Jersey courts. As Schager points out:

“Following two years behind bars, Anna won an appeal due to the fact that the trial judge hadn’t allowed her to bring up anything related to facilitated communication. Nonetheless, as expert Howard Shane persuasively contends, that treatment remains questionable at best, and deceptive at worst ... it’s a method in which the caregiver’s subconscious projections lead to misinterpretations and manipulations. That’s perhaps the nicest way of saying that Tell Them You Love Me thinks facilitated communication reveals more about the facilitator than the patient.”

In 2017, Stubblefield’s conviction was overturned on appeal and in the 2018 retrial, she pleaded guilty to “third-degree aggravated criminal sexual contact” and was sentenced to time served.

Stubblefield is now free and has met a new partner. She has left academia and has since worked for streaming services, writing audio description tracks for viewers with visual impairments. Although it is harrowing, I recommend watching Tell Them You Love Me as it deepens understanding of what is going on these days among mental health practitioners and other professionals who are married to the gender-affirmative approach. Yet again I was reminded of the words of Hannah Arendt:

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.