tyr_13
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No more than it argues that sexual orientations are by choice.
Trans Women are not Women
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No more than it argues that sexual orientations are by choice.
Meadmaker
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I only watched the three minute segment you mentioned above, and I only skimmed the paper you posted in that earlier link, but I wouldn't call Blanchard's work discredited based on either.
The video in particular seems to be saying, "I think this is really stupid and I need a drink." It's not a compelling argument.
One thing about it that might be a bit more convincing is the narrator's discussion of the "pair bond". If that language came from Blanchard, I would have to agree it makes no sense. If, on the other hand, that is her explanation of what Blanchard said, but not in Blanchard's words, then it's a straw man. From the way she said it and lack of citation, I couldn't tell which was the case. In the little bit I've read about Blanchard's stuff, the idea of a "pair bond" didn't ring a bell.
JihadJane
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"Coming out" as transgender can make young people feel very special (temporarily) and explain away other mental/emotional or neurological problems. Being transgender is now often more acceptable than being gay or lesbian.
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Care to specify where those "some places" are, outside of your imagination?
Rolfe
Adult human female
Rolfe
Adult human female
I've never seen anything about a "pair bond" in Blanchard's stuff at all. I've tried to read Anne Lawrence on the subject (Anne is trans by the way, and I think AGP), and it sounds like the sort of thing s/he would say, but I honestly can't get through it. Something about AGP reinterpreted as romantic love. I don't think this is really mainstream, it's one interpretation and it could be in the category of "if it makes you feel better about yourself". Or maybe I'm being unkind.
I think the so-called debunking is essentially setting up a straw man and knocking it down.
A lot of it is "well I don't understand what he's saying so I'll claim he's saying this and that's just silly so there." And if I drank that much Bailleys I'd be giggling and saying sensible things were silly too. I do recall now seeing a video by someone entirely different, not a psychologist, who compared the AGP man's constructed female persona to his lady-love, to explain why AGP men go completely ape if someone who doesn't clock they're presenting as female calls them sir. It's the lady-love who has been insulted, so the man responds in violent fury. (This was Mr "It's MA'AM" of viral video fame.) It seemed to make some sense when he said it but this wasn't Blanchard or even a professional.
A good test of a theory is how well it explains observed reality. Well one big plus for Blanchard is that once you read what he's saying and you have a look at the trans characters you know and you encounter online, it makes everything fall into place. But very few transitioned autogynaephiles will admit to being AGP. I did talk to a couple of non-transitioned AGP men on twitter, which was interesting. One in particular said his wife was OK about it but he was worried he'd go out of control like the guy in the Gas Mark 6 blog. I thought that since he had that self-awareness, that was unlikely. Blanchard is advocating self-help and counselling groups for AGP men to help them live with the condition in a way their friends and loved ones can cope with, and hopefully not progress to transtioning.
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Rolfe
Adult human female
This is borne out by what many young people say. They're lonely and not "special" and then when they come out as trans they're "brave and stunning" and special and everybody makes a huge fuss of them.
I saw an article by the mother of one girl who said she was beginning to feel left out because so many of her classmates were either identifying as boys, or some weird "gender" that she was isolated. When she tried to talk about liking (real) boys, her classmates laughed at her. I struggle to believe that, but that's what her mother said.
Belz...
Fiend God
What are you on about? This has nothing to do with what you quoted. We're not talking about sexual orientation, but gender identity. Is gender identity based on one's own identification or not? If yes, then how could someone ever be mistaken in such an indentification?
tyr_13
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As I said, I'm under no delusion that I'm going to change minds here. You skimmed a paper, watched three minutes (and it appears didn't absorb much of that), so of course you aren't convinced. Did you even notice I recommended that portion of video because it relates to a specific line of argument some other posters were having? That part alone is not and was not supposed to discredit Blanchard alone.
Blanchard's work is discredited in that video, (go ahead and watch from the beginning, it's long but her form of argument lays things out nicely by sections, unless her humor isn't your kind of thing) in the paper, and in that part of the video. Moreover, it not being used by the actual professionals and professional organizations that deal with such issues despite a very vocal lobby pushing it for a long time is more support that it is discredited. In fact, for a meaningful definition of discredited, that is proof it is, at least for experts.
She specifically pointed out MANY ways it is really stupid.
Except the part where she reads verbatim from the writing Men Trapped in Men's Bodies by Blanchard's key example and disciple Anne A Lawerence? Don't get too hung up on the 'pair bond' thing because it is a paraphrasing as far as I can tell, but an accurate one. Blanchard argues that the reason that post-transition trans women don't continue to exhibit the behaviors and feelings he bases his finding that they are autogynophiles on is because they form a relationships with the women they think they have become, fulfilling their 'sexual orientation' of autogynophiles. This despite them still forming relationships with...other people. And some of them being sexually attracted to men. And a whole host of other problems that go away if we apply Occum's razor and think that most trans women are women who like most women sometimes want sex.
Let me repeat again, even the trans women that Blanchard found who were also autogynophiles by their own belief reported that their cross-sexual fantasy and arousal ceased after transition. But they still wanted to live as women, and their sexual responses were those of women. He argues that the autogynophilia is causal of being trans gender, remember?
Yea, that place is weird.
We had trans vs trans stuff going on last night complete with chanting drumming and fire alarm pulling. It even happened is the peaceful sedate rich people's neighbourhood that hasn't seen that sort of action since the Oak Bay tearoom ran out of Earl Grey.
https://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/protesters-disrupt-anti-sogi-speaker-in-oak-bay-1.23810604
tyr_13
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Blanchard argues that the gender identity is caused by a paraphilia that after transition behaves something like a sexual orientation.
But also, how are you not following? Like how some people think they might be gay and then find out they are not does not mean sexual orientation is a choice any more than some people thinking they are trans gender and then finding out they are not does not mean gender identity doesn't exist.
Unless I'm mistaken by what you are talking about with 'gender=identity'.
Rolfe
Adult human female
We get it. You don't really understand it, neither does the liqueur-drinking lady, so you'll say what you think it's saying and dismiss that because you don't understand that either. Sorry, done now.
Men can just barge in to women's locker rooms and sexually assault people with complete impunity only because they declare that they identify as a woman?
Nice! That's how it works in Sweden too.
tyr_13
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And neither does the APA, nor the WHO, nor the NHS... (Despite largely right-wing political pressure which it seems posters forget is a thing just as much as left-wing political pressure.)
I'm done for now too. Honestly just linking to ContraPoints on Youtube should accomplish my goal of looking out for the lurkers or off chance anyone in the thread still wants information. Like I said, I'm under no delusion you or anyone else is here likely to change. That's ok, because other people are looking at the actual evidence and society in general is coming to the opposite conclusions of the 'trans skeptics'. In the off chance science's best understand is shown to be wildly wrong because of new evidence, I'll change my view too. Until then, I'm fine with you and others thinking I 'don't get it' just as I'm fine with AGW deniers and flat earthers thinking I'm wrong. (I also am fully aware that's going to be seen as overstating the strength of the understand of trans gender overall, but it's actually a fully juvenile swipe at the weakness of Blanchard's hypothesis.)
DragonLady
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In my experience, the people suffering stigma and consequences are those who are NOT trans, and want to draw personal boundaries that exclude those that are.
I think all this would be a non-issue to most of us, if it wasn't for the very real consequences to those who do not want to be forced to accept an intact male as a "female" nurse, or find themselves being forced to share sleeping quarters with a man just because he's female in "all the ways that count" -whatever that means.
In other words, they (those identifying as trans) absolutely should enjoy the right to be whomever they wish. But that right should end at the noses of those who are not comfortable with their choices.
Archie Gemmill Goal
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And if people don't like sharing spaces with gay men or black people they shouldn't have to either, right?
DragonLady
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This isn't about "sharing spaces" is it? It's about sharing INTIMATE spaces. It's about being forced to share showers and locker rooms and sleeping quarters.
Should someone be forced to share sleeping quarters with ANYONE if they don't want to? Shouldn't the right to privacy and comfort extend to BOTH parties?
How about if the gay person is male, but a woman has requested a female nurse? Does being gay make him "less" male? Isn't that up to HER to decide?
Really clever, BTW, to bring the race card to a discussion about gender identity. It's just soooo related.
Meadmaker
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Very standard, though.
Somewhere along the way, someone heard that it is wrong to discriminate. All discrimination is bad. That's what drives the debate about transgender rights/privileges/whatever to such absurd lengths. Above all, there must not be discrimination.
The people who make that argument, and there are many of those people, obviously never looked up "discriminate" in the dictionary. Discrimination can be a good and indeed necessary thing, but we have a generation of people who don't know how to discriminate.
Meadmaker
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That's what it seems to me as well.
I had never heard of Blanchard or autogynephilia until you brought it up in another thread some time ago. I looked up some stuff about it, and it seemed rather a sensible theory. There were certain trans people who it described incredibly well, and for the most part those people were the ones making the headlines by demanding access to shower in the vicinity of teenage girls, or other equally horrible things.
He didn't say that every MtoF transperson was autogynephilic, but he said a lot of late transitioning, heterosexual, men who wanted to transition definitely were. He had numbers and experiments to back up his claims.
And then, reading his critics, I saw an awful lot of straw men and an awful lot of use of the word "discredited", but rarely evidence to back it. In some cases there was mockery. In other cases there was misrepresentation (straw men). Perhaps Blanchard exaggerates the extent of the presence of AGP in the population. I really don't know. What I mean is I don't even really know how prevalent Blanchard says AGP is among male to female transitioners, because the critics that I have read seem to really exaggerate what he said, to the point that I don't really trust anything I read.
That paper Tyr_13 posted seemed to at least have the correct form. I'll try to slog through it at some point. It's kind of hard. Academics love to use unnecessarily big and unfamiliar terms, and then you have the confusion that comes up trying to map familiar terms into a rather difficult situation. When a biological male identifies as a woman but is attracted to women, do the authors of the paper and/or Blanchard describe that person as homosexual? It gets hard to follow.
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Ziggurat
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Your link was about autogynophil, was it not? Perhaps you didn't notice, but until this post, I never even used the word. None of my posts rely on the concept.
No. I said that going forward, we can expect individuals to claim trans identity in order to abuse the opportunities that provides. Such people don't need to be autogynophilic. The creep who just wants access to a woman's locker room can qualify. I am not claiming the numbers at the moment are high.
But you don't even need to "come out" as trans to pull of this trick. You can claim it at a moment's notice, and then discard it when you're done using it. No one in your regular life need even know. That's sort of what that Canadian dude who used it to get better car insurance rates did.
I don't think you have actually even listened to what I'm saying, because your responses are really tangential.
That's not always true. People like the man in the video I linked to earlier didn't need acceptance of his trans identity, he needed counseling and therapy to process the sexual abuse he suffered.
Nor does your acceptance mantra answer the question of medical intervention. You can accept the gender identity of a child without mutilating them.
... and there's the panic. Suicide rates. It's like a magic talisman.
Acceptance by family and friends is indeed not the problem I'm talking about in regards to segregated spaces. Stuff like unconditional acceptance of self-professed gender identity, even in the face of obvious contradictory evidence, is what causes that problem.
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