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Sexuality
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Monday, November 02, 2009
Ray Blanchard at Toronto’s notorious Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) has accused me of spreading “misinformation” about him, so let’s get all his biographical details out on the table in order to make my point more clearly.
Blanchard is widely reviled by transsexual people. He once declared that a trans woman who has transitioned is merely “a man without a penis,” and said of trans men, “They get a kind of lump that in the best, most expensive, $100,000 cases, kind of, maybe, look like a penis from across a room.” His comments on trans people’s genitalia echo his fixation on “phallometrics,” the measurement of penile length, width, and tumescence when subjects are exposed to erotic stimuli. The field of “phallometrics” was developed by Blanchard’s mentor at CAMH to determine if army recruits were gay or not. Blanchard, who has not disclosed his own sexual orientation publicly, is considered an expert in determining the size and tumescence of male genitalia.
Blanchard took umbrage at my publication of his 2008 taxpayer-funded salary and my comment that he and Zucker both left America for Canada during the Vietnam War. Why is Blanchard so touchy about military matters, and what personally motivates his life’s work? What drives this key figure in the oppression of sex and gender minorities? Since he feels entitled to ascribe labels and motivations to others, let’s turn the tables. Why is Ray so reticent about revealing his own sexual interests and behavior, when his career involves “catching” people not being open and honest about their sexual interests and behavior?
This article examines Ray’s childhood, family life, sexuality, Catholic upbringing, and interest in penile tumescence. It also examines how CAMH became the world’s largest publicly-funded forced feminization sex dungeon and transgender reparative therapy clinic. Finally, it examines what Blanchard’s most important legacy will be: the broad expansion of “paraphilia” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) to further oppress sex and gender minorities as mentally disordered.
In this section:
* Ray Blanchard motivations for oppressing sex and gender minorities
http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/ray-blanchard-motivations.html
* Toronto: epicenter of pathologization of sex and gender minorities
http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/ray-blanchard-hypotheses.html
* Ray Blanchard’s problematic place in history
http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/ray-blanchard-history.html
* Notes, updates, further reading
http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/ray-blanchard-notes.html
This is talk, not advice. See Terms of Use for details.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
From my newest tsroadmap.com article:
Transgender taxpayers in Canada help foot the bill for their own pathologization, helping to pay nearly $328,000* in 2008 to two conservative Toronto psychologists working to turn back the clock on the rights of sex and gender minorities worldwide.
Public disclosure documents show that Ray Blanchard was paid over $172,000 in 2008, and Kenneth Zucker was paid over $155,500. Both men work at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto. This former “lunatic asylum” is home to the most notorious and regressive facility in the world dedicated to preventing and “curing” gender non-conforming behavior in children and adults.
Both Blanchard and Zucker are also heavily involved in the political push within psychology to continue labeling sex and gender minorities as disordered and diseased. Homosexuality was depathologized in 1973, but these men have an obvious and substantial financial interest in not just maintaining the status quo, but in expanding the definitions of sexual “disorders” that can be applied to all people. Their CAMH clinics are major recipients of taxpayer funds via the provincial and federal healthcare systems in Canada, so more “disordered” people mean more money for their clinics and themselves.
The full article discusses their reactionary opinions about sex and gender minorities, why both men headed to Canada during the Vietnam War, and why their “support” for transpeople is tied to their job security.
*Figures are in Canadian dollars. That totals over US$300,000 based on current exchange rates.
Full article:
http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/zucker-blanchard-salary.html
This is talk, not advice. See Terms of Use for details.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Suzan Cooke at ‘Woman Born Transsexual’ has a great piece on the perennial problem of trans people self-diagnosing as intersex, usually because they think it is more socially acceptable. She notes:
In the early days of Sex Reassignment Surgery they decided if one were intersex or transsexual based on one of the cruder tests, a buccal smear and slide stained to look for Barr Bodies, the inactivated x chromosome found in females but not males. For obvious reasons the majority of these tests came back negative. Nonetheless many doctors including Dr. Benjamin as well as the Doctors at Stanford where I had my SRS looked at some of us and said, “There is definitely something going on here that our tests are not finding. You were too feminine before starting hormones for there not to be. Matters like pelvic structure etc.
But as early as 1970 Doctors had become wary because they had been burned badly in a case circa 1960 at UCLA by someone known in the literature as Agnes. Her case is documented in Harold Garfinkel’s book Studies in Ethnomethodology. For those not familiar with the story of Agnes, Agnes was a transsexual to female person who got SRS at UCLA Medical Center in the late 1950s or early 1960s. She presented herself as an intersex person with male genitals and “spontaneously appearing” female secondary sexual features. She claimed these secondary sexual characteristics just developed and swore she did not take any legally or illegally obtained female hormones.
Full article:
Alien Abductions and Claims of Improbable Intersex Conditions in Online discussion Groups
http://womenborntranssexual.com/2009/10/14/alien-abductions-and-claims-of-improbable/
This is talk, not advice. See Terms of Use for details.
Ray “man without a penis” Blanchard has set his sites on further pathologizing crossdressers as well as other sorts of trans people in the 2012 American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
The DSM Diagnostic Criteria for Transvestic Fetishism
Abstract This paper contains the author’s report on transvestism, submitted on July 31, 2008, to the work group charged with revising the diagnoses concerning sexual and gender identity disorders for the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In the first part of this report, the author reviews differences among previous editions of the DSM as a convenient way to illustrate problems with the nomenclature and uncertainties in the descriptive pathology of transvestism. He concludes this part by proposing a revised set of diagnostic criteria, including a new set of specifiers. In the second part, he presents a secondary analysis of a pre-existing dataset in order to investigate the utility of the proposed specifiers.
This is talk, not advice. See Terms of Use for details.
Posted by Andrea James on 10/20 at 03:31 PM
Sexuality •
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Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Misuse of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) is the latest phrenology-like pseudoscience used by “experts” to prove their pet theories about sex and gender minorities. Recently, a scientist scanned the brain of a dead salmon with fMRI while presenting it with stimulus, and guess what? The fMRI said the salmon could perceive humans!
The result is completely nuts — but that’s actually exactly the point. Bennett, who is now a post-doc at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his adviser, George Wolford, wrote up the work as a warning about the dangers of false positives in fMRI data. They wanted to call attention to ways the field could improve its statistical methods.
Researchers get up to 130,000 voxels from each set of scans they do of a brain. They have to comb all that data for signals that indicate something is happening in a particular region of the brain. The fMRI data has a lot of natural noise, though, and with the amounts of data generated in the work, chance can play some tricks. Bennett compared the fMRI data problems to a particularly strange kind of darts game.
“In fMRI, you have 160,000 darts, and so just by random chance, by the noise that’s inherent in the fMRI data, you’re going to have some of those darts hit a bull’s-eye by accident,” he said.
Like a sophisticated version of Photoshopping the contrast on a photograph, neuroscientists can filter the fMRI data to highlight the signal within the noise, but in so doing, rigorous statistical checks have to be maintained.
“We could set our threshold so high that we have no false positives, but we have no legitimate results,” Bennett said. “We could also set it so low that we end up getting voxels in the fish’s brain. It’s the fine line that we walk.”
Watch for this device to be misused by crappy psychologists against LGBT people in the coming decade.
Scanning Dead Salmon in fMRI Machine Highlights Risk of Red Herrings
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
This is talk, not advice. See Terms of Use for details.
Posted by Andrea James on 09/22 at 01:37 PM
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