It was all a fever dream guys, don't know what you are all on about...<whistles and kicks floor>

[Shedmistress]

Stephen Whittle the Ex President of WPATH declares it never happened.

And if it did happen you made it up to make her and her ilk look bad.

This is really interesting. I remember this kind of explanation in my psychology textbook back in the early 90s.

I think it's worth remembering that regular people were not just pulling this idea out of thin air, it was popularly distributed. I used to know a transwoman who medically transitioned back around 1980, so quite early on. It seemed to have been completely treated as a clear medical condition by the doctors. Looking back I think that this person probably suffered from AGP, or possibly was autistic, but that wasn't the message from the medical people involved. And even more than now, people then tended to accept what doctors said, you weren't going on the internet to look up other theories when you were just a regular person.

There is a very interesting link to an article/study on the reification of conditions in the DSM. It suggests to me that this isn't purely an issue with gender medicine, it's a wider problem in how disorders are being defined and understood.

@TempestTost, I’m curious about how much of the reification of DSM conditions started from the American healthcare model, where in order to treat someone you have to have a medical code number to give their insurance company. I suspect it’s a tricky old knotty mess to untangle.

Oh yes I saw that - although she got shirty when someone assumed she was talking about young teens and claimed she meant the older ‘rangers’ - 17/18.

There seems to be an underlying thread of dishonesty coming from her. Not surprising really.

Interesting. So it was claimed to be a medical condition which should have some sort of science based medical diagnosis but that isn’t convenient for the trans activists who actually don’t want there to be a medical diagnosis as that’s ‘gatekeeping’.

Essentially confirming that they want anyone and everyone to be able to self identify into this ‘condition’.

Imagine how it would sound if a medical diagnostic technique was called ‘gatekeeping’ that condition? ‘Gatekeeping’ cancer for example, or ADHD.

ADHD is probably going that way, tbh.

It was actually mentioned in the linked article I mentioned as an example where people take what is meant to be, in the DSM, a kind of heuristic "diagnosis," and reify it to treat it as an objective thing in itself.

So perhaps we could hypothesise that categories like that are particularly prone to first being reified, but then becoming subjective self-declarations. Which is indeed an interesting trajectory.

Just plopping by to say that regardless of at what stage in their life a male (or female) human decides their personality is not aligned with their physical sex, and regardless of whether or not this feeling has a biological element, it is still not the same thing as actually being the opposite sex and still does not justify the TRA demand that female only language, protections and provisions be extended to male people on its basis.

So finding an undeniable biological cause for transgender idenities will still not mean some male people are actually female and vice versa, any more than knowing exactly how someone lost a leg means they actually have two legs.

The presence of structures, beliefs, feelings or preferences that society or science assumed to be exclusively female in the brains/minds of the physically male doesn't mean some male people are female, it means that society or science was wrong in assuming they were exclusively female.

Observing a black swan we logically conclude that some swans are black, not that some swans are crows.