gdp's Comments

MercatorNet : MercatorNet: Yes, marriage will change—and here’s how

Fri, 21 Jun 2013 09:19:40 +0000

In an age where 60% of African-American children are born out of wedlock, and over 50% of marriages end in divorce... where 2nd, 3rd or 4th marriages are all not just common and accepted, but usual - I'd say that particular horse bolted a long, long time ago. I know more monogamous long-term couples who haven't married than have. Marriage is seen as a prequel to inevitable splitting. Marriages like ours are exceptional now. How forbidding some monogamous couples from marrying is going to help this undesirable situation - and I agree that it *is* undesirable - is beyond me. How forbidding some people - those who are Intersex - from marrying anyone at all - likewise. If Mr Regnerus is correct - we'd see a detectable dip in the number of couples getting married, and a detectable rise in the number of divorces, in jurisdictions that allow marriage equality. That may take a few years to become apparent, but the "half life" of marriages is only about a decade, so in ten years we couldn't miss this effect, and it should be detectable at 5. It's been 12 years in the Netherlands, 10 in Belgium, 8 in Canada... nada. The Regnerus hypothesis has no evidence for, and a lot against. A superficially plausible conjecture that experiments have shown isn't the case. Ideally, Sociologists and Scientist for marriage equality should be searching for downsides. Those against, searching for upsides - to avoid bias. Instead it seems it's "verdict first, then we try to cherrypick data to confirm predetermined conclusions". That's not just confined to Regenerus of course, nor to the confirmed anti-marriage-equality camp.

The New Civil Rights Movement : Fox's Ablow: Obama Conducting 'Black Ops' 'Psychological Warfare' On Conservatives

Tue, 4 Jun 2013 14:33:52 +0000

Acute paranoia.

MercatorNet : MercatorNet: Mutable or immutable?

Tue, 28 May 2013 06:49:12 +0000

Re Immutability - if I apprehend you rightly, women are a suspect class because sex is immutable. Except some people change sex. See: Gender change in 46,XY persons with 5alpha-reductase-2 deficiency and 17beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase-3 deficiency. Cohen-Kettenis PT. Arch Sex Behav. 2005 Aug;34(4):399-410. A minority, to be sure - but rather more than have changed sexual orientation.

MercatorNet : MercatorNet: Fraud threatens the integrity of social psychology

Sun, 5 May 2013 01:58:22 +0000

"What I find to be generally the case, dirtywithclass, is that conservatives use truth as a the basis of what they should think and how they should act. Progressives use truth as a tool if it suits their purpose in supporting something they have already decided. " That used to be the case. Not so much these days, the Religious Right started going PoMo decades ago, and now are nothing but. Example: "6. Scientific Method We affirm that the scientific method is useful in carrying out the creation mandate of Genesis 1:28 to subdue and have dominion over creation when the investigators have Biblical presuppositions and when the Bible does not directly give us the answers we seek; that the use of the scientific method is entirely controlled by the presuppositions of the investigators and therefore the results are a pronouncement of faith rather than of scientific fact; and that the faith nature of the results of scientific investigation is evidenced by the investigators’ proselytizing intent, that is, their attempt to transform man into their idea of what man should be. We deny that the scientific method can ever be applied in psychology without its being thoroughly determined by the presuppositions of the investigators" -- From The Christian World View of Counselling, Mr. George C. Scipione, Th.M., M.A., Chairman Dr. Lawrence Crabb, Ph.D., Co-Chairman Dr. Ed Payne, M.D., Co-Chairman Dr. Jay Grimstead, D.Min., General Editor Mr. E. Calvin Beisner, M.A., Assistant to the General Editor With contributions by members of the Psychology and Counseling Committee of The Coalition on Revival

MercatorNet : MercatorNet: Fraud threatens the integrity of social psychology

Sun, 5 May 2013 01:52:12 +0000

The scandal was that it was ever pathologised in the first place, when there was no experimental evidence that it was a pathology, only an "everyone knows" assumption. The APA's actions here are a good example of checking common wisdom against facts. The problem though is that it had to be voted on - as if a matter of observation also had to be popular as well as true. That's deeply troubling, and does show politicisation.

The New Civil Rights Movement : Religious Right Delivers Official Notice: Waver On Traditional Marriage And We Form Third Party

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:41:14 +0000

This poses a great threat to the Democrats. If the GOP jettisons all the crazies, the Flat Earthers and SoCons, letting them go off and form their own Theocratic Party... then they will attract a LOT of voters who currently vote DNC because there's no Republican Party any more to vote for, only a bunch of lunatics. In the short-term, the GOP will have a net loss of votes. In the long term, it's the only way the USA is ever going to have a functional 2 party system. 2 sane parties anyway.

TransGriot : Why The Trans Community Loathes HRC

Mon, 8 Apr 2013 05:18:16 +0000

I agree with everything you say (with one important exception), and if anything, you understate the problem. The only quibble I have is over the phrase " tinker with their Corporate Equality Index". This was a real improvement, with many knock-on effects outside the Fortune 500. However... the political arm of the HRC is as tone-deaf as ever, and it's gone beyond scandalous to bizarre that it's RWGs - Rich White Gays - only. There isn't even any tokenism, it's all-white, all-the-time, and they're unashamed of it. Please keep on publicising this. If I can notice, all the way in Australia, others can too a bit closer to home.

Frontpage Magazine : Crazy Man Named Calliope Wong Applies to Liberal All-Girls College, PC Comedy Follows

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 23:47:41 +0000

Rather than calling someone who's ill-informed "ignorant", it's better to put the evidence before them. To educate, not engage in argument. This stuff *isn't* taught well - if at all - in schools. Yes, it's all on the Internet, the facts, the medical journals and so on, but life's too short to investigate *everything*. Put the evidence, the facts, before them. Reasonable people can differ on the interpretation and meaning of those, but at least we have a well-informed basis for discussion. Calling someone "ignorant" just because they don't know anything about an obscure subject, and don't even realise they know nothing about it, isn't helpful.

Frontpage Magazine : Crazy Man Named Calliope Wong Applies to Liberal All-Girls College, PC Comedy Follows

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 23:39:58 +0000

Citations please? You know.. evidence? Facts? I know "Mass Resistance" claimed four such occurrences in one county, but both county sheriffs and police records showed they were making things up. Same with their tales of Transsexuals raiding churches and performing surgeries on kidnapped members of the congregation (as described in their 127 page report on the subject). That's why they're on the list of "hate groups",in between the Muslim Brotherhood and the KKK, they deliberately lie.

Frontpage Magazine : Crazy Man Named Calliope Wong Applies to Liberal All-Girls College, PC Comedy Follows

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 23:18:02 +0000

"You aren't born with both male and female DNA" Actually I was, but mostly my body is 46,XY. As is this woman''s - and her daughter's "A 46,XY mother who developed as a normal woman underwent spontaneous puberty, reached menarche, menstruated regularly, experienced two unassisted pregnancies, and gave birth to a 46,XY daughter with complete gonadal dysgenesis. " -- The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism January 1, 2008 vol. 93 no. 1 182-189 1 in 300 men aren't 46,XY. Some women are. It's more complicated than the simplified child's version you were taught in grade school.

Frontpage Magazine : Crazy Man Named Calliope Wong Applies to Liberal All-Girls College, PC Comedy Follows

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 23:12:37 +0000

""Could someone who identifies as a dog be turned into a dog" This is usually known as the "Giraffe Argument"., Giraffe, porpoise, or in this case, dog. Well... If an MRI scan of your brain showed it to be the same as a dog... If there were a number of medical conditions where dogs turned into people, or people into dogs... If you go around chasing cars, urinating on lampposts etc... If your vocabulary is limited to "Woof" and "Arf".... If you have a dog's sense of hearing, and a dog's sense of smell... so you can hear ultrasonics... Then yes, I'd say you were really a dog. But unless all of the above are true, the two situations aren't remotely comparable. This isn't a psychological issue, but an anatomical one. I don't know how to express it more simply than that. Sense of smell: Male-to-female transsexuals show sex-atypical hypothalamus activation when smelling odorous steroids. by Berglund et al Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(8):1900-1908; Sense of hearing: Dichotic Listening, Handedness, Brain Organization and Transsexuality Govier et al International Journal of Transgenderism, 12:144–154, 2010 Spatial Cognition: Neuroimaging Differences in Spatial Cognition between Men and Male-to-Female Transsexuals Before and During Hormone Therapy by Scoening et al J Sex Med. 2009 Sep 14. Anatomy: Male–to–female transsexuals have female neuron numbers in a limbic nucleus. Kruiver et al J Clin Endocrinol Metab (2000) 85:2034–2041 Regarding "psychiatric therapy" - you think it hasn't been tried over the last 60 years? We know that doesn't work. Patients die. Long-term studies show a 0.000% success rate. "Treatment aimed at trying to change a person’s gender identity and expression to become more congruent with sex assigned at birth has been attempted in the past without success (Gelder & Marks, 1969; Greenson, 1964), particularly in the long term (Cohen-Kettenis & Kuiper, 1984; Pauly, 1965). Such treatment is no longer considered ethical. " We had enough evidence that it didn't work, and a mountain of corpses from failed treatments over 30 years, 30 years ago The treatment we use now - transition - has a measured 98% success rate.

Frontpage Magazine : Crazy Man Named Calliope Wong Applies to Liberal All-Girls College, PC Comedy Follows

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 13:54:11 +0000

Reality: Sexual Hormones and the Brain: An Essential Alliance for Sexual Identity and Sexual Orientation Garcia-Falgueras A, Swaab DF Endocr Dev. 2010;17:22-35 The fetal brain develops during the intrauterine period in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed or organized into our brain structures when we are still in the womb. However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in extreme cases in trans-sexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain. There is no indication that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation. ---- Cat - what makes you a woman? Chromosomes? Nope, there's mothers who have XY chromosomes, and a chance you may do too. So what if you do? Genitalia? What about women who have had radical hysterectomies and vulvectomies? They're still women. Genitalia at birth? See http://www.usrf.org/news/010308-guevedoces.html There's plenty of men who have fathered children who were born with female-looking genitalia. 5ARD and 17BHSD syndromes are the most common causes. Or is it your brain, your mind, your self, your very essence, no matter what your body may look like externally? I was born looking male by the way. That changed at puberty - something of a "get out of Hell free" card. It was... it was... it was as bad as you can imagine before then. So although I'm not technically transsexual, the 3BHSD form of CAH caused the change, not hormones and surgery - I know what Calliope went through. She's just a girl you see, like you. One born with a pretty awful congenital issue. Trying to carve out as normal a life as she can under the circumstances.

Frontpage Magazine : Crazy Man Named Calliope Wong Applies to Liberal All-Girls College, PC Comedy Follows

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 13:43:34 +0000

Maybe this will help - first, do you know the meaning of the word "Intersex"? It means someone born neither wholly male or wholly female, anatomically speaking. It's more common than you think - 1 in 60 - but most people don't know they're Intersex. Does it really matter if a man doesn't have the 46,XY chromosomes most men do? 1 in 300 men don't, by the way. OK, so what has this to do with Transsexual women? They're men, right? I mean, they look male at birth. See a paper nearly 20 years old now: A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality. by Zhou et al Nature (1995) 378:68–70. Our study is the first to show a female brain structure in genetically male transsexuals and supports the hypothesis that gender identity develops as a result of an interaction between the developing brain and sex hormones Calliope had partly female anatomy when she was born. Well OK, so do many men, what matters is *which* parts. In her case - a feminised brain. Not "spiritually" or "psychologically" by anatomically feminised. Something visible on MRI and PET scans. We know that every human with a feminised brain, be the genitalia male, female, somewhere in between, or missing entirely - has female emotional response, instincts, even senses of smell and hearing. They are, by any rational definition, women. Unless you think genitalia is more important than mind. To change the brain would be like unscrambling an egg - we'd have to do surgery on individual brain cells, changing them from one type to another... curing cancer and conferring immortality is dead easy in comparison. But as it turns out, it's ridiculously easy to change the body to (mostly) match the brain, and in the next twenty years or so, we'll be able to do it completely, rather than mostly. Calliope's gone through as much of that process as is legal to do. Most of her documentation has been corrected. Biologically, she's more female than some of the women already attending - one in 500 women has CAH, which causes varying degrees of masculinisation. This whole thing is caused my lack of education in biological sex, and an "Ick" factor when it comes to Trans and Intersex people.

BioEdge : BioEdge: Questions hover over “brain death”, says US bioethicist

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 12:03:46 +0000

"In one astonishing case, a “brain-dead” four-year-old boy lived on for 20 more years. He fought off serious infections and went through puberty before succumbing to pneumonia. An autopsy showed that his brain and brain stem had calcified; there were no neurons at all." What evidence do we have that this was a person in any meaningful sense?

Frontpage Magazine : Forget Transgender, Get Ready for Transpecies

Thu, 7 Mar 2013 02:46:56 +0000

...and one you just made up, right? Source?

Frontpage Magazine : Forget Transgender, Get Ready for Transpecies

Thu, 7 Mar 2013 02:45:14 +0000

"It's easier to fix brain damage" Just plain obviously wrong. Seriously, what on Earth makes you think that? Where did you get such a notion from? I know I'm stating the obvious here, but such a statement as your goes well beyond "medically ill-informed" into "crass stupidity".

Frontpage Magazine : Forget Transgender, Get Ready for Transpecies

Thu, 7 Mar 2013 02:33:58 +0000

If you intervene during pregnancy, yes, that's what the animal experiments say. After the 5th month though - the course is set. We can't detect Transsexuality in the womb though, not yet. So we'd have to treat all fetuses, which would damage those not Transsexual. In the case of opposite-sex twins, we face a no-win situation. Masculinise both or feminise both. See: Prenatal exposure to testosterone and functional cerebral lateralization: a study in same-sex and opposite-sex twin girls. Cohen-Bendahan et al, Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2004 Aug;29(7):911-6. In animals it has been shown that exposure to sex hormones is influenced by intrauterine position. Thus fetuses located between two male fetuses are exposed to higher levels of testosterone (T) than fetuses situated between two female fetuses or one female and one male fetus. In a group of opposite-sex (OS) twin girls and same-sex (SS) twin girls a potential effect of prenatal exposure to testosterone (T) on functional cerebral lateralization was investigated. We hypothesized that prenatal exposure to T would result in a more masculine, i.e. a more lateralized pattern of cerebral lateralization in OS twin girls than in SS twin girls. An auditory-verbal dichotic listening task (DLT) was used as an indirect method to study hemispheric specialization. Firstly, we established a sex difference on the DLT. Compared with SS girls, OS twin boys showed a more lateralized pattern of processing verbal stimuli. Secondly, as predicted OS girls had a more masculine pattern of cerebral lateralization, than SS girls. These findings support the notion of an influence of prenatal T on early brain organization in girls.

Frontpage Magazine : Forget Transgender, Get Ready for Transpecies

Thu, 7 Mar 2013 02:29:54 +0000

Having a feminine brain doesn't mean you're brain damaged. As for the case you mention - we know that there's a 2% failure rate in treatment, mainly due to misdiagnosis. One swallow does not a summer make. In cases like this particular case - late transitioning, gynephillic - the success rate is only 80%. The case is borderline, and one time in 5, we get it wrong and give treatment we shouldn't. 2 times in 5 though, we don't give treatment when we should, and the patient dies as the result. Had this person been shorter than 6' 2", and had they not looked like " man in a dress" after transition (to use Michael Coren's own words) perhaps treatment might have been successful.

Frontpage Magazine : Forget Transgender, Get Ready for Transpecies

Thu, 7 Mar 2013 02:22:13 +0000

Nope. That doesn't change the brain structure set in the womb in these areas. It does in some, just not these ones. Once you've made an omelette, there's no amount of cooking that will turn it back into an egg. See these papers on the subject: Changing your sex changes your brain: influences of testosterone and estrogen on adult human brain structure by Pol et al, Europ Jnl Endocrinology, Vol 155, suppl_1, S107-S114 2006 --Results: Compared with controls, anti-androgen + estrogen treatment decreased brain volumes of male-to-female subjects towards female proportions, while androgen treatment in female-to-male subjects increased total brain and hypothalamus volumes towards male proportions. Size is changed - but not proportions of cell types. Neuroimaging Differences in Spatial Cognition between Men and Male-to-Female Transsexuals Before and During Hormone Therapy by Scoening et al J Sex Med. 2009 Sep 14. Conclusions. Our results confirmed previously reported deviances of brain activation patterns in transsexuals from men without GID and also corroborated these findings in a group of transsexual patients receiving cross-sex hormone therapy. The present study indicates that there are a priori differences between men and transsexual patients caused by different neurobiological processes or task-solving strategies and that these differences remain stable over the course of hormonal treatment. Sexual differentiation of human behavior: Effects of prenatal and pubertal organizational hormones Sheri A. Berenbaum, Adriene M. Beltz Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology 32 (2011) 183–200 A key question concerns the extent to which sexual differentiation of human behavior is influenced by sex hormones present during sensitive periods of development (organizational effects), as occurs in other mammalian species. The most important sensitive period has been considered to be prenatal, but there is increasing attention to puberty as another organizational period, with the possibility of decreasing sensitivity to sex hormones across the pubertal transition. In this paper, we review evidence that sex hormones present during the prenatal and pubertal periods produce permanent changes to behavior. There is good evidence that exposure to high levels of androgens during prenatal development results in masculinization of activity and occupational interests, sexual orientation, and some spatial abilities; prenatal androgens have a smaller effect on gender identity, and there is insufficient information about androgen effects on sex-linked behavior problems. There is little good evidence regarding long-lasting behavioral effects of pubertal hormones, but there is some suggestion that they influence gender identity and perhaps some sex-linked forms of psychopathology, and there are many opportunities to study this issue.

Frontpage Magazine : Forget Transgender, Get Ready for Transpecies

Thu, 7 Mar 2013 02:14:45 +0000

Women are not brain damaged just because they have female brains.