For those missing context, "Gender Identity Disorder" in the DSM-IV, which described transgender identity itself as a mental illness, was replaced with "Gender Dysphoria" in the DSM-V, which was scoped specifically to the depression/pain of feeling socially in the wrong gender role, as well as the feeling of one's body being wrong.
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.
> 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.
[EDIT: do the people downvoting this care to explain why they disagree with it? Just because one person was involved is not evidence other people weren't scared off because of harassment. Nor is it evidence that there was no harassment. If you disagree, why?]
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).
> not evidence other people weren't scared off because of harassment
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.)
> 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.
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.
"academics [...] weren't scared off" isn't a claim that not a single person was scared off, but that as a group they were not scared off. If one of the worst members wasn't scared off, that's a good piece of evidence.
> 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.
"If one of the worst members wasn't scared off, that's a good piece of evidence." Yes, I think that him being one of the worst has zero bearing. You made the claim - why do you think it's good evidence?
> You can apply all the "autogynephilia" testing and logic to most cis women and they'll come out with a strong diagnosis.
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.
> 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.
This study isn't super helpful because it doesn't give a number for cis men to compare to. But being able to statistically distinguish between 41 and 35, standard deviation 10, or between 3.08 and 2.93, standard deviation 1.4, doesn't exactly give a ton of evidence to the idea that your test groups have fundamentally different underlying reasons for feeling female.
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.
It really seems like you're asking, "Must I believe this?" instead of "What is true?" You picked a couple of questions on the survey to try to dismiss the study. Someone believing the opposite of you could have picked "attraction to male physique" (where trans women score lower) combined with "attraction to feminine males" (where they score higher) to bolster the autogynephilia theory. There's also the complication that trans women seem to be closer to men in other psychological measures (less masochism, less jealousy, preference for younger partners).
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.
Let me put it this way: Being able to distinguish groups is not enough. The core of the theory is that these people have a fundamentally different underlying reason for feeling female.
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.
> 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.
God forbid I use wikipedia once in my life. Is that the only part you want to reply to, not the substantive parts?
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.
> The claim wasn't that there was or wasn't harassment, but that harassment was the cause of the change in policy.
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.
I'll just note you're only asking one side of this argument for any validation of their claims. And that side has provided more validation than the other.
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.
Then they did, and you've called that evidence unconvincing. But it is still evidence. More than the zero you've gotten (or requested) from the original claim.
No, I did not see any evidence there at all, and I wrote my comment on the basis of that.
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).
Ah, so you’d also agree homosexuality is a mental illness that “political groups” lobbied to change? Because, from the perspective of someone who isn’t a conspiracy theorist or bigot, it looks like the DSM updated their definition as more research and academic interest rendered the old definition outdated.
There's an actual, interesting question here, away from the Culture War fighting, which we can have if we want it: How much of any academic field is due to the culture that field is immersed in, and how much is due to empirical evidence and people attempting to be unbiased?
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.
As society changes, what it means to be maladapted to that society also changes.
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?
Not the OP, but I think you’ve actually made exactly the point quite well yourself.
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.
> It is in essence a type of culture war hiding behind a so-called diagnostic manual
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.
Framing the DSM-5's redefinition of gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria as academics "not having a spine" and not "real science" is a disgustingly transphobic opinion, whether you intend it to be or not.
This isn't an empirical science. We shouldn't keep shitty and harmful labels on people who are deeply struggling with their identity.
I think it would be more productive to show how the author is incorrect instead of declaring his statement "a disgustingly transphobic opinion".
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.
> "We shouldn't keep shitty and harmful labels on people who are deeply struggling with their identity."
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.)
But doesn’t there exist a plausible biological pathway for transsexuals to develop a brain structure similar to the opposite sex whereas no similar plausible biological basis can be proposed for having developed the brain of a fictional anthropomorphic animal?
I'm not sure how that's relevant. Setting aside that being plausible doesn't mean it's true, would you be less supportive of gender dysphoria if there were no plausible biological explanation for it? Alternatively, if there were a plausible biological pathway for people having species dysphoria, would you be more supportive of furries?
Isn't "brain structure [characteristic of a] sex" basically pseudoscience? We're rocking different hormone mixtures and maybe slightly different average skull sizes, but I'm under the impression that the later at least doesn't manifest in any measurable innate cognitive differences between males and females. That stuff went out the window with phrenology I think.
If you look at MRIs of human brains, you can determine the sex with pretty high accuracy. Researchers have even trained machine learning algorithms to differentiate with >90% accuracy.[1]
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.
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.
