Non TS/TV males who post as women on WP, testimonials wanted, enquire within Options

[the fieryangel]

In the project that I'm currently working on with Peter, Greg, and Eric, I'm writing the chapter on Users. In the section discussing the systemic bias, I'm going to try to go into detail as to the gender gap and possible reasons why this exists.

It's obvious why TS/TV individuals post as women, so that's pretty self-explanatory (dare I say "normal"?) However, it would seem that a great many non-TS/TV males contribute to WP as females, either via sock puppets (à la Kristen Erikson) and also as their main personae. I'm looking for people who would be willing to discuss how posting as females changes the experience on WP. I would also be interested in women who post as males and why they do that. (I know of at least one experience of this happening and I'm sure that there are more....)

Just send me a private message here and we'll discuss it.

[Somey]

Ottava, you're reading what you want the articles to say, not what they actually say. It's the classic modern-conservative problem.

As for what's clear and what isn't, the first article says, in paragraph 2, "The prevailing theory at the time was that while sex was genetically determined at birth, the concept of gender was culturally shaped and malleable and that being female or male were interchangeable." It seems more likely to me that by "madness," he's referring to the fact that this was the prevailing theory, and not necessarily a specific reference to the mental states of SRS patients.

I haven't really met a lot of people who were considering gender-reassignment (in fact, I'd say the total is exactly 1). But you don't hear a lot of stories about such people running around frothing at the mouth and shooting up high schools, do you? No, because the vast majority of them are perfectly sane, even if in many cases they're depressed or anxiety-ridden over their self-perception issues. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that a decent psychiatrist might have said they were "collaborating with depression" or (more likely) "confusion" if he was talking about the patients... but certainly not "madness."

[lonza leggiera]

Ottava, you're reading what you want the articles to say, not what they actually say. It's the classic modern-conservative problem.

As for what's clear and what isn't, the first article says, in paragraph 2, "The prevailing theory at the time was that while sex was genetically determined at birth, the concept of gender was culturally shaped and malleable and that being female or male were interchangeable." It seems more likely to me that by "madness," he's referring to the fact that this was the prevailing theory, and not necessarily a specific reference to the mental states of SRS patients.
.....

Your interpretation of what McHugh might have meant seems to be based on a reading only of the NARTH news item which Ottava linked to. If you read the complete article—which Ottava seems to have been curiously reluctant to provide a direct link to—you will find that your interpretation isn't possible. The original article isn't a "Johns Hopkins report" as Ottava apparently wants to classify it, but an article[preceding struck through comment was apparently a misunderstanding on my part—see below] was one McHugh wrote for the conservative religious magazine First Things, whose publisher's stated purpose is "to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society." The relevant quotations, with sufficient context to show the incorrectness of your proposed interpretation, are:

We saw the results as demonstrating that just as these men enjoyed cross-dressing as women before the operation so they enjoyed cross-living after it. But they were no better in their psychological integration or any easier to live with. With these facts in hand I concluded that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness.
....
As for the adults who came to us claiming to have discovered their “true” sexual identity and to have heard about sex-change operations, we psychiatrists have been distracted from studying the causes and natures of their mental misdirections by preparing them for surgery and for a life in the other sex. We have wasted scientific and technical resources and damaged our professional credibility by collaborating with madness rather than trying to study, cure, and ultimately prevent it.

You're apparently right, however, that Ottava has misread something into these articles which neither of them say. In neither of them can I find any justification for Ottava's assertion that "Johns Hopkins stopped sex changes because they determined that it was a mental disease" (I presume the "it" here is referring to gender dysphoria, the condition which sex reassignment surgery was supposed to be treating). Presumably McHugh realised—as Ottava apparently does not—that most of his colleagues would regard surgery as a perfectly legitimate treatment for certain types of mental illness—provided only that it was effective. The reason McHugh gives for the termination of sex reassignment surgery at Johns Hopkins is not that the condition being treated was a mental illness, but that the treatment was supposedly shown to have been ineffective.

Judgmentally: Jeff, please spare us the Catholic "social engineering".

It has nothing to do with religion and all to do with psychology.

There are couple of interesting items available on-line which indicate that McHugh's religious convictions might have had more influence on some of his supposedly scientific conclusions than Ottava is willing to admit[apologies to Ottava for the preceding gratuitous speculation] the above-quoted assertion would suggest. The first is an interview recorded on the occasion of his participation as a plenary speaker in the 2010 Mere Anglican conference, where he acknowledges that "biblically based" societal expectations were "part and parcel of [his] commitment to really what amounts to loving relationships", and deprecates homosexuality as "erroneous desire".

The second is an article McHugh wrote for the March 28, 2005 issue of the weekly Standard, in which he serves up several of the easily refuted blatant falsehoods circulated by religiously conservative antievolutionists as supposedly showing up the deficiencies of evolutionary theory (which, like them, McHugh keeps referring to as "Darwinism").

This post has been edited by lonza leggiera: Fri 11th November 2011, 1:14pm