Uninformed and unquestioning support
Psychologist Ellyn Kaschak on the trans dogma:
… there is a deafening silence on the part of most individual psychologists and an enthusiastic, unquestioning and unresearched explosion of support for transgender motives, actions and people by others. I too want to offer support for human rights, but uninformed and unquestioning support may actually involve harm, so instead, I am asking for psychology to step up and take on its responsibilities in this regard.
Not only the conferences, but the classroom and the laboratory are appropriate places to be asking important questions. Yet the inhabitants of these venues are being silenced in the name of human rights and a purported bias named “transphobia.” Academics have been censored and in some cases, lost their positions for just using language deemed unacceptable by the transgender movement, words such as “women.” Yes, “women” is considered hate speech and this purported transphobic hate speech is being aggressively monitored and eliminated in our very universities.
It’s not just a personal preference or psychology now, she notes, but a movement, enforced by threats and punishment.
You are bound to have a relative, a friend or a co-worker bring this issue from the abstract to the personal, as proclaimed gender defiers are inventing more and more genders rather than attempting to abolish this social construction, as did feminists before them. More perniciously, their wordplay includes substituting the term “gender” for the sex change that they are attempting. The reason for this substitution is simply that sex can not be changed. It is a biological reality rather than a socially constructed idea. Sex is currently immutable; gender is not. The conflation of these human characteristics can and does lead to confusion at best and irreversible physical damage at worst.
This formerly personal psychological issue, which affected only 0.1% of the population, has exploded into a social movement with all the characteristics of social contagion.
Along with righteous fury and sadistic love of punishment.
The diagnostic of “gender dysphoria” actually came into existence as “gender identity disorder” and replaced the pathologizing of homosexuality (eliminated in 1973) in the DSM, the psychiatric bible. These diagnoses are adopted by popular vote of the American Psychiatric Association members, democratic rather than scientific. They have the strongest investment in construing psychology in terms of health and pathology. The association members had been convinced by lobbying groups and research, to vote to “normalize” homosexuality. In doing so, they wanted to leave a diagnostic possibility for those who remained conflicted about their sexual orientation. Diagnosis permits treatment via the official approval of the insurance companies, who today control the professions to a frightening extent. Thus was born “gender identity,” seemingly a harmless and even generous compromise.
I don’t think I knew that. The compromise outgrew its cradle and has started devouring the world.
Proponents of the transgender movement actually hijacked this diagnosis, along with the 50 years of feminist theory, practice and discoveries about the social construction and contextual nature of gender and spun them into a human rights movement, but not one for women. In fact, this movement actually infringes on many of the hard-won rights of women, including not only the right to assemble as a sex-based group but the right to call ourselves women, mothers and daughters. It even attempts to destroy the very concept of sex by conflating sex and gender, but make no mistake, lifetimes of research support unequivocally the difference between sex and gender. They may influence each other, but they are not the same thing. And sex can not be changed. It is a biological reality.
Quick, bring out the guillotine.
Here are some more important questions. If psychologists and psychiatrists are going to pathologize and diagnose, a questionable practice at best, then shouldn’t they diagnose carefully, as lives depend upon it? Are they then considering and eliminating such diagnoses as narcissism or sociopathic disorders, sexual fetishes, dissociative disorders or even delusional disorders? Is transitioning more like self-cutting or eating disorders than like homosexuality?
And if so is it really all that brave and stunning?
Fear for your job, standing in society, reputation, lifelong friendships, marriage, and ability to put a roof over your families head and food on their table will do that to you.
‘Lobbying’ is always carried out in private in order to bring about a vote in a public forum desired by some faction or another. It is inherently antidemocratic. All such ‘lobbying’ should be out in the open, as in a court of law.
If I am party to a case being tried and I buttonhole the judge in a lobby or a carpark with intent to influence the judge’s decision in the case, I can be looking at a term of serious porridge. And rightly so.
Those scare quotes on “normalizing” homosexuality look as if Kaschak might still consider it a pathology, though she does mention research as one of the factors which convinced the association to change the DSM. I mention it because one of the most frustrating arguments against Gender Identity Doctrine is that it’s entailed by society accepting the perversions of homosexuality and feminism. No. And I don’t think that’s what Kaschak meant, either — though I wish she’d left off those ambiguous scare quotes.
Well, patients do diagnose themselves as cutters or anorexics — but they don’t walk in and tell their therapist why they do it and have their story accepted, at least not without a lot of exploration by the professional. Homosexuality is also self-diagnosed, but the reason why doesn’t really matter. If they’re not “born that way” — so what?
The hypothetical backstory to transgenderism is considered absolutely crucial to proponents, however: what you feel, why you feel it, and what needs to be done about it.. No other psychiatric diagnosis is supposed to be lead so completely by the patient. Psychologists are essentially supposed to function like plastic surgeons performing voluntary cosmetic procedures. Affirmation only. If they’re not conflicted about this, they should be.
I dunno. The scare quotes feel right to me. There’s a difference, after all, between removing a stigma both from ignorance and making something out to be an item of, for lack of a better word, pride. It quite often seems that when people say “normalize”, what they mean is the latter rather than the former. Normalize has unfortunately earned its ambiguity, in the same way that “progressive” has. Or “feminist”.
It seems to me that one of the most effective results of the claim that a person is “Assigned Female” or “Assigned Male” is to cement in our minds that gender is something that we are born with, as an internal entity that is tied to the hormones and genes present in the womb while our brains were being formed. The result is that any therapy not gender affirming is considered to be conversion therapy, and since that has been discredited for homosexuality it is then also discredited for transgender patients. This is one reason that therapists in many cases are reluctant to do anything but affirm.
Never mnd the health of the patient, keep the practice open. I’m fully sympathetic to therapists who fear for their professional lives, but somehow the patients’ long term mental health must be watched for and nurtured. Not by telling them what they want to hear, but by resolving the issues.
The Trevor Project lumps gender identity in with homosexualty:
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/get-involved/trevor-advocacy/50-bills-50-states/about-conversion-therapy/
(Emphasis mine: MH)
This is highly irresponsible and dangerous of the Trevor Project, a group we would expect to be sensitive to homophobia (but so would the Human RIghts Council.)
I am continually questioning my own understanding of this issue, and trying to figure out what the hell I am missing that so many people that I have respected can see? I mean biologists, skeptics, anthropologists, phycholoists, sociologists, “intersectional” feminists, teachers, guidance counselors, doctors, and on and on; all of these people I used to think we could trust, have gone down the route of accepting that there is such a thing as a transgender identity that we must respect without question. And it makes no sense to me. I mean, I am willing to ask “Am I the asshole?” And sometimes the answer is yes, yes that was a cruel tweet, or Facebook post, or comment (it’s part of my personality to respond to thickheadedness with antagonism.)
But I don’t hate anyone because they are gender non-conforming. I am not afraid of anyone for being different. I welcome those differences and I even think that color dye in hair is as cool as a pair of jeans covered with patches was in the late ’60s.
And this revelation on the DSM is a bit of a surprise that may explain at least in part why our psychology and our mental health sciences have taken such a drastic turn; but how does it make it acceptable to use this “gender identity” to threaten feminists and call them nasty names over social media? Why do “reasonable” people fault JK Rowling or Rosie Duffield, why do skeptics remove a post by Harriet Hall for not coming to the correct conclusion?
I still feel like i am missing something. How can I see the misogyny and sexism when friends who I would assume could see it manage to ignore it?
SMDH.
And all they had to do to achieve this is to stick “T” on the “LGB”. The work had already been done for them, all they have to do is sit back and enjoy the outrage their shenanigans generate.