Well, aren’t you quite the expert on American society? Nice little display of xenophobia thrown in there to boot. Care to substantiate your claims?
Someone who believes every August that Liverpool are going to win the EPL next season shouldn’t accuse others of delusion.
1 Like
Travellers and Unemployed people shouldn’t even be allowed to vote, you should be only allowed vote if you contribute to society and pay your way
3 Likes
I firmly believe homosexuals and these transgender types are suffering from a severe form of depression, mental illness, they need help and care
1 Like
He is a (former) Professor of Psychiatry, not Psychology. the distinction is important, as Psychiatry is based on science (empirical evidence) whereas Psychology is based on a mixture of science and made up bullshit. He is certainly a controversial figure today, and perhaps is wrong on the transgender issue, but it is a very complex and sadly not well understood condition. I would be hesitant to say he has been discredited based on the article you posted, and the article itself is highly discriminatory, basically labeling him as old (ageism) and a Catholic (religious bigotry).
It’s important to make the distinction between recognizing a medical condition and advocating discrimination based on a medical condition. There should be no stigma attached to any medical condition, every human suffers from at least one of them. Nobody should be discriminated against based on a physical or mental condition, unless they pose a threat to others. This misconception is where the PC brigade lose all credibility. Gender Dysphoria is either a medical condition or it is not, if it is not then there is no reason to treat it and certainly no reason for society to pay for its treatment. I believe it is a medical condition and should be treated, but we are not at the stage of understanding it yet to even know what might work. In time surgical intervention might be looked back on the way we look back on lobotomies or electric shock treatment today.
Leaving aside the predictable bigots on the thread, I don’t see how anyone can find @ironmoth’s post offensive, unless based on a total miscomprehension of the issues involved.
2 Likes
It’s a mistake to lump them together. Homosexuality refers to sexual orientation or “preference”, whereas transgender refers to gender identification. There has been much more research on homosexuality, which is now pretty much accepted as being genetic, whereas transgender hasn’t been widely studied, but is most likely genetic as well. For clarification, when I say genetic I mean a combination of genetics and epigenetics (the genes you are born with and the genes that get expressed during development). At the end of the day its all biology.
There is not much either group can do (or should do) about who they are, they are either born that way or develop that way due to their environment.
1 Like
We’re still going to win it this season once all the other teams are thrown out for doping.
2 Likes
That is a very good point. There is very little tolerance of alternative views. The Children’s Referendum from a few years ago was a fine example, where most if not all the political parties gave a completely one-sided “vote yes for children” type message. There was little or no debate, and practically nobody asking questions about what the cons of the constitutional change might be.
Well, at the very least the video kept a few of us keyboard warriors out of trouble today. Maybe if I had a deep understanding of Psychiatry, like some of our fellow posters, I’d be horrified at the suggestion that a gender dysphoric person is mentally ill. Alas, I do not, and I am not.
1 Like
Please address your point to your pal @ironmoth who was the first to call him a Professor of Psychology.
I did - edited now. I also first referred to him as a Professor of Psychiatry, but then the stress and edginess resulted in me making this faux pas.
Another good example is the mud slinging thrown at Professor McHugh for “defending” clerical child molesters. This is based on his skepticism and opposition to “recovered memory therapy”. The reality is RMT is the kind of pseudoscientific junk science all too common in Psychology, and is now totally discredited. How many people though were falsely accused, often by family members, and locked up due to this practice? Much of the “evidence” came from regression therapy under hypnosis, who the fuck knows where those memories came from, they could be dreams, hallucinations, delusions, or real.
1 Like
Just doing a bit more reading about this Paul McHugh chap. He may be very learned and all that but so was Antonin Scalia. Being learned doesn’t stop a person from having ridiculous views and there’s a litany of stuff out there that indicates a pretty extreme conservative bias on his part that clearly clouds his thinking on the issue.
He may be a Professor of Psychiatry, but the American Psychiatry Association disagrees with his classification of gender dysphoria as a mental illness and that’s as good an indicator as any that he’s an outlier amongst that profession.
McHugh refers to transgender women as “caricatures of women”, which is deliberately offensive language in the same vein as John Waters’ comments about same sex marriage being a “satire on marriage”. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/11/surgical-sex
His views on homosexuality are also a good indicator of his biases against sexual minorities in general. He believes homosexuality is essentially a choice. http://www.transadvocate.com/clinging-to-a-dangerous-past-dr-paul-mchughs-selective-reading-of-transgender-medical-literature_n_13842.htm
The following quote from him demonstrates an irrational, homophobic bias:
http://www.virtueonline.org/charleston-sc-dr-paul-mchugh-there-no-gay-gene
“It really is amazing … I mean, 50 years ago [homosexual behavior] was a crime, and now we’re talking about [same-sex marriage]. Anyone who wants to stick with the tradition is accused of being a biblical literalist or a homophobic racist, because, in part, of the more fundamental change in our society towards permissiveness, that is, easy divorce, cohabitation and concubinage, abortion, pornography … and euthanasia. The issue of the homosexual is not separate … it’s all part and parcel of the pandemonium that the permissive movement has brought. We have just licensed all kinds of behavior.”
It’s almost like he misses “the good old days” and some of the stuff he has said directly contributes to a culture of prejudice against gay and transgender people that leads to them having higher rates of mental illness.
His assertion that gender reassignment surgery shouldn’t be performed and instead dealt with by “understanding, treatment and prevention” is almost “pray the gay away” from South Park stuff.
It seems to me that he’s far more guided by his religious views than by anything else and has serious difficulty separating them from his professional life. That’s not a good starting point for a reasonable contribution to a discussion on such issues as transgenderism.
1 Like
Having different opinions is part of the human condition, just as sexual orientation and gender identity are. It’s not surprising that McHugh’s extreme conservative opinions are controversial to extreme liberals, and visa versa, which justifies a rational and reasoned moderate stance on such divisive ethical questions. Transgender, and the associated gender dysphoria that some transgender people suffer from, is a complex and marginally understood condition, so to make strong pronouncements on it simply isn’t based on solid evidence. It was as recent as 1980 that gender dysphoria was recognized at all by the APA, prior to that time there wasn’t even a treatment option for anxiety and depression suffering transgenders. So, in a few decades we have gone from it not being recognized as a medical condition at all by the medical industry, to now being recognized to the extent that genitals are being cut off or added, but the condition necessitating this extreme treatment cannot be called a disorder or in the spectrum of mental illness (even though gender dysphoria symptoms are anxiety and depression).
While I disagree with McHugh on most of his pronouncements on social issues, his views cannot be simply dismissed as ridiculous, and deserve a more rational analysis than the article you posted by the PhD student. She attacks him for calling homosexuality a “choice” and subtly links him to the murder of Dr Tilller. These charges don’t really stand up to rational analysis, and could only be made and supported by extreme liberals. It’s the classic tactic of extremists (on both sides) to throw as much mud as they can at their opponents.
On the homosexuality issue, McHugh argues that homosexuality, or indeed any sexual orientation, is not solely or even primarily defined at birth. That is not the same as saying homosexuality is a choice. What is being argued is that the environment a person grows up in (epigenetics) has more to do with sexual orientation than inherited genetics. There are a lot of studies that support this nurture versus nature argument, not just in the sexual area but effectively in all areas of human behavior. For example, we now know that most psychopaths were raised in highly dysfunctional and violent households, and that most sex offenders were themselves abused. What McHugh is referencing is the plasticity of sexual orientation, and quotes a study where 67% of women who identify as lesbians stated they had changed sexual orientation once, and 33% of them more than once. Again, this doesn’t imply choice, it implies sexual orientation is not so simple as the moronic mantra “born that way”.
His argument to the supreme court is here, see if you can find where he said homosexuality was a choice.
McHugh did testify as an expert witness against Dr. Tiller, the leading provider at the time of late term abortions in the US. Having looked at over 150 cases in Dr. Tiller’s files, McHugh concluded that in many cases the legal standard of “grave danger to the life of the mother” was not met, and although nothing justifies what happened to Dr. Tiller, this is where the abortion question becomes problematic ethically even for rational pro-choice proponents such as myself. In my opinion a woman presenting with anxiety or depression about being pregnant or giving birth or being a mother does not justify sticking a needle into the heart of a fetus that is capable of existing outside the womb (obviously there are medical emergency exceptions but the data released by the Kansas Dept of Health demonstrates that in the majority of cases threat to the life of the mother or fetal abnormality was not the issue). Making this into a religious argument isn’t so simple either as Tiller was a practicing Christian and was actually murdered during a church service.
2 Likes
These different opinions are even evident amongst medical profession associations / organisations.
On one hand, the American Psychiatric Association in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) refers to people whose gender at birth is contrary to the one they identify with. On the other, the American College of Pediatricians state that no one is born with a gender, but everyone is born with a biological sex. They say that “gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one”.
The ACPeds sees itself as a group with “Judeo-Christian traditional values”, others see them as a “hate group”. I am totally at odds with a lot of their ‘values’ (e.g. on abortion, on same sex parenting) but very much aligned with others (e.g. parental choice on vaccines, limiting a child’s exposure to electronic media).
The APA and its members have their own chequered past in my opinion, e.g. strong affiliations with big pharma and links to torture of ghost detainees being two such examples.
Is that not reason enough to stay open to both sides of the argument? Society changes. Ideas change. Practices change. Remaining rigid in a belief system leads to conflict (and rows on the internet).
1 Like
What on earth is an “extreme liberal”?
A person who holds extreme liberal views, typically defined by a stubborn insistence they are correct even if there is scant or no evidence to back up their claim. An example is the view that there are only extreme conservatives and no extreme liberals.
Transgender is a load of bollocks.Or not.
Cut that out.
Think that’s the problem.
2 Likes