And specifically WHAT is false about the analogy? What Ms Heriot was stating is that we all have private beliefs, which may or may not have validity. While there is a popular notion that gender dysphoria has external validity in terms of measurements of brains, hormones, whatever, there are in point of fact NO SUCH VALID DETERMINANTS. Heriot is correct. She said "If I believe that I am a Russian princess, that doesn’t make me a Russian princess, even if my friends and acquaintances are willing to indulge my fantasy. " This is specifically correct. Gender dysphoria is a psychosis, which happens to be coddled by a majority of credulous persons at this time. During the 50s, lobotomy was considered a solution to psychosis. Today it is consider malpractice.
I didn’t catch it. She said it was offensive and that she probably had never met a transgendered child, etc. Both true. Neither of which address why the equivalency is false. She could have made Heriot look stupid, which would be a hell of a lot more effective than just calling her stupid. I respect that she went out on a limb to speak from her heart but she didn’t advance her case.
And I’d really like for someone to do that, you know.
Arguments claiming the existence of god often rely on a “god of the gaps” approach; science can’t explain it, therefore it is evidence of god.
Yours appears to be a “bigotry of the gaps” argument.
You have it entirely backwards. You believe in fairies, and seek to convince me that fairies exist. You say “I feel certain that the fairies exist; all my friends agree”. I say “Show me a single shred of evidence of fairies”. You cannot do that. It is YOUR side which has the requirement of proof.
As I am a person who has been on various faculties of psychiatry, and who has published in the area of the assessment of psychiatric symptomatology, I cannot see why the notion that “I am Napoleon” or “I am uniquely gifted in poetry” or “my brain can use radio waves to read your brain” are psychotic, while “I was given the wrong genitalia at birth, and am really a man although I have a vagina” is sensible. All these beliefs are based on private states, and many private states are disordered and psychotic. When you have a private state that leads you to wish to cut your dick off, this is psychotic. It is malpractice to indulge this psychotic idea.
The gender surgery was pioneered at Johns Hopkins. They no longer do the surgery because 1) it doesn’t work 2) many persons who are temporarily under the delusion of transgender later lose this psychosis; 3) many who do have surgery later regret it.
Did you hear that Bruce is gonna lose the boobs? He’s not Caitlin any more - he’s back to Bruce. Wow, I guess he really is a girl. Luckily for him, I also understand he is intact in terms of male organs.
That’s the big deal. Once you cut your dick off, there’s no going back, even if you do sober up.
Your bigotry shows in your highly asymmetric demands for evidence.
After railing (I use that term because you use all-caps) about “NO SUCH VALID DETERMINANTS” “in terms of measurements of brains, hormones, whatever” that transgender has a physical basis, you bluntly state that “Gender dysphoria is a psychosis”. That is a “gaps” argument, to a tee.
Per my usual practice, I engage with you only briefly, then move on. This ends the engagement on my side.
Not a problem. You may wish to indulge in a brief sojourn into the foreign territory of science, where you will discover many wonders and new phenomena. It’s certain to be a new place for you. Evidence is not just a river in Egypt. I see that you tossed of the “bigot” statement; for liberals, that is always the end-point for an argument, although “racist” or “xenophobe” are sometimes used. There is never an attempt to use actual evidence of course.
Lofgren is well known as a looney liberal, so her opinions are easily ignored.
You sir, are just flat out wrong. Here’s some evidence:
This wasn’t engagement either. Some things don’t merit engagement.
When I read the scientifically and statistically dodgy stuff that passes for evidence in this area, I find numerous extremely questionable items. In the case of “Hypothalamic response to the chemo-signal
androstadienone in gender dysphoric children and adolescents” (Burke, Cohen-Kettenis, Veltman, Klink, and Bakker, 2014, doi: 10.3389/fendo.2014.00060) referred to in the Scientific American piece, they do some creative statistical analysis which looks highly questionable. I am going to see if I can get the data. Basically, they do 4 ANOVAs when they should do one, and then do the contrasts of interest as a subpart. Using the separate ANOVAs may be done to get out significance by implicitely manipulating the error term. It is also interesting that they singled out this single chemical. How many did they test?
The famous brain study from Spain looks similarly dodgy, in that they report 4 differences, but do not report the number they tested. This is called “capitalizing on chance” or “cherry-picking”.
If I do find something, I’ll publish it. Should be fun, and I thank you for pointing me to this.
BTW: You should be able to access and examine the Burke et al article, since it is open-content.
Added comment: Just sent a request to Burke for the data. We’ll see.
Yup!
The “witness” is a law professor. The question of a person’s sexual identity is a medical/psychological issue. Who cares what her opinion is on the validity of a transgender person’s self-identification?
Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego, was appointed to the U.S. Commission on Human Rights 2007 after she was recommended by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). She was recommended by McConnell for another term in 2013 and was confirmed to serve on the Commission until 2019. (emphasis added)
The fuck?
I didn’t see anyone commenting on anyone’s appearance. Lofgren talked only about Heriot’s ugliness. It was what Heriot said that revealed her ugliness, not what she looked like.
Lofgren is an immigration attorney. She is one of the most strident and hysteria-ridden proponents of the H-1B, and other scum-sucking job-stealing non-immigration visas. Her promotion of the H-1B has deprived millions of US STEM workers of their jobs, most recently at Disney, SC Edison, Toys-R-India, and other companies. Now THAT is ugly.
Very interesting. Especially this bit, from the SciAm:
“It is simplistic to say that a female-to-male transgender person is a female trapped in a male body. It’s not because they have a male brain but a transsexual brain.”
One of the pitfalls in my thinking on this is that I’ve been sort of excluding “transgender” as a gender identity. I’ve figured that trans folk would rather be considered as men, rather than trans-men, & women rather than trans-women. The fact that people will go through surgery and hormone treatment to bring them closer to some biological ideal has made me leery about putting them in another box…an “other” box, rather.
I guess that scientifically, and politically, that might be naïve. It seems that most trans folk don’t mind identifying as trans. It also seems that modern people are very eager to put themselves in a box, gender politics being only a tiny slice of that phenomenon. Someday probably people will value their uniqueness more than their affiliations, and respect same in others.
Thoughtful post. I mean I think at the end of the day, it’s just important to note that there’s a biological basis for transgender, unlike some in this thread who’ve essentially argued it’s a mental disorder. Once you have that recognition, it’s essentially up to each individual how they’d wish to be characterized. I’m sure large swaths don’t want to be identified as “trans-” but merely as men or women, dependent on their identity. I’m sure others still would want to be characterized as transmen or transwomen, and still others really wouldn’t want to be characterized at all. It’s just about empathy and listening to your fellow human.
I actually had the transcript page taped to my office door in my old firm, but that was a long time ago and I don’t know what became of it.
Why does the statement, “I am a woman because I ‘feel’ like a woman” sound rational to you?
Welch made this famous theatrical flourish after a moment in the hearing when, upon being challenged in a churlish manner by Welch to identify any communists which may have been lurking in the room with them so that the authorities could deal with them, McCarthy pointed out that Welch’s own law clerk handling his files at the hearing was a member of the Communist Party USA-affiliated NLG. This was, of course, a fact, but apparently an ‘indecent’ fact, or something.