The DSM does cite academic sources IIRC, but they're listed as a while for the book, rather than being referenced by specific sections or criteria, which is a common critique of the DSM in general. Additionally, Ray Blanchard, an academic who believes transgenderism is caused by "autogynephilia"/"autoandrophilia" (i.e. a sexual fetish caused by attraction to oneself as the desired gender), was a member of the committee who decided the DSM-V definition.
So no, OP, academics who didn't support trans politics weren't scared off by the community.. Ray Blanchard played a big role. As for the "minimum of real science," there's a lot of sociological and psychological work that goes into the DSM. Some of the pressure was certainly political/social, like the removal of homosexuality was decades ago, but there are sources listed in the back of the book, even if it takes some digging.
Disclaimer: am trans, am really done with justifying my existence but I felt I should share what I know.
Not saying you're wrong, but there's nothing in your comment that supports this claim, so can you elaborate?
His role and behavior is independent of whether there was harassment of academics from people. He may have had that role and either one of these three options could possibly have happened: 1) no harassment of academics from people 2) some harassment 3) a lot of harassment.
To claim that Blanchard’s involvement is evidence that there was no harassment, you’d have to demonstrate that somehow that involvement is incompatible with 2) or 3).
If that abomination of a researcher wasn't scared off, it's pretty strong evidence that there wasn't any significant harassment that had a chilling effect on discussion. (You can apply all the "autogynephilia" testing and logic to most cis women and they'll come out with a strong diagnosis. Whatever you think about the nature of transgenderism, applying that particular theory leads to nothing but pain and abuse.)
Just because one person wasn't scared off doesn't mean they didn't get a lot of harassment. I don't know whether they did or didn't, but the fact that they weren't scared off is not evidence they didn't get lots of harassment.
And that doesn't mean other people weren't scared off. Different people have different tolerances for harassment, and differing degrees to which they want to be involved in a particular matter.
> You can apply all the "autogynephilia" testing and logic to most cis women and they'll come out with a strong diagnosis. Whatever you think about the nature of transgenderism, applying that particular theory leads to nothing but pain and abuse.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the content of any of my comments.
> This has absolutely nothing to do with the content of any of my comments.
I'm explaining why he's one of the most extreme members of that group, which is needed to support my main point.
That he might be the worst has zero bearing on this.
That is not true. Trans women score much higher on tests of autogynephilia.[1] This is even found to be true in amateur surveys.[2] Trans females score the highest, then cis males, then cis females. Trans males have the lowest scores for autogynephilia.
1. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1007/s10508-007-9306-9 From the abstract:
> The results showed that, overall, transsexuals tended to place more importance on partner’s physical attractiveness and reported higher scores on Blanchard’s Core Autogynephilia Scale than biological females.
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/et039t/independen...
And I wouldn't be surprised if the huge difference on "Attraction to Transgender Fiction" or "Interest in Uncommitted Sex" are begging the question. If you filter biological women on the same criteria you'd probably have similar answer patterns there.
Also the "autogynephilic transsexual" group is the one closer to the "biological female" group on a bunch of these metrics.
Pretty much all studies are complex enough that one can poke a couple holes in them this way. If that's enough to dismiss a study, then it's hard for us to believe anything in soft sciences.
And yes, the first study only looked at trans and cis women. But did you look at the amateur survey? It also surveyed trans and cis men. It reproduced the results of the academic study despite the creator of the amateur survey having no knowledge of it. That's some pretty convincing evidence in my book.
Also, do you have any studies that show that the majority of cis women would be considered autogynephilic? Because the only study I've found that asserts this is Autogynephilia in Women[1], which counted women as autogynephilic if they answered anything other than "never" to 9 questions about potentially arousing experiences. If someone answered "on occasion" to any question in that list, they were considered autogynephilic. When one of the questions is, "I have been erotically aroused by imagining that others find me particularly sexy, attractive, or irresistible.", it's easy to see what the authors of the study were trying to do. Nobody who is testing for autogynephilia uses such a low threshold.
I'll keep this study in mind, but without more context it doesn't seem to show a difference like that on 90% of the parameters. With more numbers maybe it would... but I don't have them.
I picked those questions because they showed some of the strongest statistical results. But they also have a very obvious alternate explanation that needs to be tested.
Especially because:
"Transsexual participants were categorized as autogynephilic or non-autogynephilic based on their scores on the Core Autogynephilia, Autogynephilic Interpersonal Fantasy, Attraction to Feminine Males, and Attraction to Transgender Fiction scales."
This desperately needs a comparison where they apply the same technique to the biological female data.
(Though that the last one is really tricky, because maybe a better analogy is "waking up as a woman, as usual, hooray" fiction and that's far too bland and common to be a genre.)
> It reproduced the results of the academic study despite the creator of the amateur survey having no knowledge of it. That's some pretty convincing evidence in my book.
Convincing of some overall trends. But the theory is much more than that.
> Also, do you have any studies that show that the majority of cis women would be considered autogynephilic?
No, I haven't spent that much time on this subject before to the point of digging up studies.
What? But you said this earlier:
> You can apply all the "autogynephilia" testing and logic to most cis women and they'll come out with a strong diagnosis.
Why did you state that as fact when you had no clue what the academic consensus was? If you’re going to make such assertions, you need to base them on evidence.
Let's just use the main study you linked to. It shows biological females scoring 5.07 out of 9 on "core autogynephilia", with a standard deviation of 3.5.
hsyqiwgx wrote "The trans community lobbied and bothered academics ... until the academics threw up their hands and decided their funding wasn't good enough to justify having a spine".
sterlind replied "So no, OP, academics who didn't support trans politics weren't scared off by the community."
The claim that both of these people were talking about, concerned academics being harassed and as a result being scared off.
And just because that one person was involved, doesn't mean that other people weren't scared off.
What I did was not simply asking a person to back up a claim they made. If that was the case you could call me out for inconsistency.
I was responding to a person who had claimed to have provided some evidence that they had not actually given.
I responded to a sentence that was presenting a claim, and also implying that the evidence for their claim was given earlier in their comment, which I did not believe was the case.
That sentence was: "So no, OP, academics who didn't support trans politics weren't scared off by the community".
That 'So no' implies that the evidence for the claim has been given earlier in their comment. I did not see any evidence in their comment, so I asked if they could provide some.
Having seen the subsequent replies, I can now see how other people have taken it as a form of evidence.
While I can now see why other people might consider it evidence for the claim, I do not consider it to be such myself (in the sense of 'evidence' being something that supports a claim).
For example, there's the existence of Jesus Christ: Modern historians agree that there was a man named Joshua-son-of-Joseph who was a heretical rabbi in the First Century Middle East who got crucified by the local authorities. Why? Is it because the evidence for him is just that good, or is it because most scholars in Christian countries were Christian and, therefore, unapt to question their surrounding culture?
With Jesus, it's because of the evidence, as it happens, but the question is there, and hooting it down does a disservice to larger questions all fields have to confront as they mature.
It's amazing how many people will agree with that statement (because... duh) and then freak out when someone points out it's impossible to talk about the DSM without talking about dominant beliefs regarding "what society should be like". I.e., without talking about politics and labor economics.
There are many topics covered by the DSM that are maladaptations to this society but a) would not have been maladaptations in previous soecieties, and b) might not be maladaptations in future societies.
Is it even possible to talk about something like whether some particular aspect of human sexuality is a disorder using only "real science", and on a related note, what does "real science" mean here? E.g., there have certainly existed human societies with no strong taboo around human nakedness, and in those societies Exhibitionistic Disorder wouldn't even make any sense to talk about.
Similarly, it'd hard to imagine ADD being anything other than a perfectly normal non-maladaptive variation in personality prior to industrialization.
As a practicing scientist, I'm honestly not sure how "real science" is supposed to given an answer a question like 'is being transexual maladaptive?" It's just not a scientific question. There are lots of related scientific questions about human biology. But ultimately, it's a question about how those biological facts interact with social constructions.
Can you tell me, concretely, what you mean by "real science" here?
The field of study is not supposed to be “do we like this sort of people and get along well with them” or “are they well adapted behaviorally to be productive members of society” but rather an actual set of illnesses which can be diagnosed, treated, and conceivably cured. We do in fact prescribe powerful pharmacological agents based on these criteria, after all.
And yet, as the Director of the NIMH rightly laments, "DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure."
It is in essence a type of culture war hiding behind a so-called diagnostic manual. In that sense it is more aptly described as a dictionary, whose lexicon is revised more based on their perceived common usage more than hard scientific study.
Right, OP was complaining that DSM changed because of politics, and my point was... "yeah, no shit, politics is inseparable from what the DSM is trying to do".
OP can't point to "real science" justifying either the original definition or the changed definition, because both are inherently outside the domain of science.
This isn't an empirical science. We shouldn't keep shitty and harmful labels on people who are deeply struggling with their identity.
The DSM has always been political, though lately it's gotten worse. For the DSM-5, task force members were required to sign NDAs[1] Trans activists also tried (unsuccessfully) to get Dr. Kenneth Zucker & Dr. Ray Blanchard kicked off the task force.[2]
Due to the NDAs, we'll probably never know the full extent to which political pressure shaped the DSM-5.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/health/18psych.html?pagew...
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20081024203348/http://www.gaycit...
But the same argument could equally be applied to a group with a dysphoria that everybody loves to mock: furries. How would you make your statement work for a specific dysphoria and not every other dysphorias?
(Maybe it should work for every dysphoria? I'd be okay with that since it's a logically consistent viewpoint at least.)
Researchers have tried this on transgender brains and come up with mostly noise. When they do find differences, it appears that the brains of trans-women are unlike cis-women. Ditto for trans-men.[2]
I am very confident that there is a ton of publication bias in any transgender research. If you publish a politically incorrect result, you risk your career.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30430711
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337026445_Predictiv...
You seem to be implying that making the statement not work for other dysphorias would be desirable; what caused you to reach that conclusion?
On one hand, viewed through the lens of cold logic, it's no different from reassignment surgery and therefore their desire to modify their bodies is valid. On the other, it's difficult to honestly say that they would not be severely harming themselves by doing so.