To say that Conservapedia is...well...limited in its depth is an understatement. It appears that its contributors have conveniently failed to actually read relevant material.
Allow me to pick something apart here by doing a "compare-and-contrast" between the Conservapedia article on Gender Identity Disorder and the corresponding Wikipedia Article on the same subject.
To say that the opening description of GID in the Conservapedia article is "lightweight" is something of an understatement:
Gender identity disorder is a medical diagnosis for a mental disorder according to the DSM IV, which indicates a "strong and persistent cross-gender identification."
A couple of points of criticism here: First of all, there are references to the Diagnostic and Statisical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) without actually identifying the DSM correctly or providing appropriate cross-linkage to related material.
Second, a degree of caution should be used around the phrase "medical diagnosis". Although the DSM is a diagnostic tool, my own experience with it says that it is far more of a lexicon used by professionals to describe a client's condition rather than something that triggers a specific path of treatment.
In comparison, the Wikipedia entry starts with the following description:
Gender identity disorder, as identified by psychologists and physicians, is a condition in which a person has been birthed one gender, usually on the basis of their sex at birth (compare intersex disorders), but identifies as belonging to another gender, and feels significant discomfort or being unable to deal with this condition.
And now we come to the first outright factual error in Conservapedia's entry:
A set of International Standards of Care [3] guide most physicians, and therapists around the world in a widely accepted medical process that begins with Reparative Therapy intended to dissuade patients from the permanent and irreversible physical alterations that could seriously damage their mental health.
Although WPATH is an international organization that publishes a Standards of Care protocol document, it is a bit of a reach to suggest that this protocol is universally applied by practitioners working with transgender clients.
The great fallacy here is the idea that anything in the SOC is even vaguely related to the notion of "Reparative Therapy". In fact, a careful reading of the SOC and the protocol that it implies leaves the decision making very much in the hands of the client. While the therapist may to some extent guide, they certainly are not going to attempt to dissuade the client. (negative persuasion is more typical of so-called "gender programs" run by the Clarke Institute in the late 1970s.)
In comparison, the Wikipedia article provides the following abbreviated version of the DSM-IV pages on the subject which are much more complete:
DSM-IV
The current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has five criteria that must be met before a diagnosis of gender identity disorder (302.85) can be given:[2]
1. There must be evidence of a strong and persistent cross-gender identification.
2. This cross-gender identification must not merely be a desire for any perceived cultural advantages of being the other sex.
3. There must also be evidence of persistent discomfort about one's assigned sex or a sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex.
4. The individual must not have a concurrent physical intersex condition (e.g., androgen insensitivity syndrome or congenital adrenal hyperplasia).
5. There must be evidence of clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
On the subject of treatment, Wikipedia provides the following comment about dissuasive therapy:
... Today, mohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifst medical professionals who provide transgender transition services now reject conversion therapies as abusive and dangerous, believing instead what many transgender people have been convinced of: that when able to live out their daily lives with both a physical embodiment and a social expression that most closely matches their internal sense of self, transgender and transsexual individuals live successful, productive lives virtually indistinguishable from anyone else ...
As well as a link to a lengthy article on the WPATH SOC.
The next bit of supposition is just so astoundingly brain damaged that I don't know how to read it:
However, the Kinsey model fails to account for a significant amount of transsexuals, who appear to be attracted to the the gender that they identify as. As a resolution, modern and typically liberal transgender activists have tended to present a model that transsexuals are fundamentally a man or woman trapped in the body of the other, and that their sexual orientation is entirely independent of their gender identity.[4]
The first thing that goes through my mind is that the Kinsey model has exactly nothing to do with gender identity in the first place. Kinsey focused on sexual attraction, not gender identity. The second issue that this paragraph suffers from is that the writers assume that "transgender activists" are "liberal" (often, transgender people are, but political leaning has little to do with one's identity). The last sentence is important, as it contains a subtle inference that is simply not substantiated by the evidence. (Far too many transgender people clearly do find their gender and sexual identities are distinct aspects of their being to ignore).
Critics of this common model for transsexualism, like J. Michael Bailey point out that such a model fails to properly account for the empirically evidence that transsexuals typically lie in two separate and distinct categories: whereas some males are so naturally effeminate and homosexual that it makes more sense for them to be women, than to continue to struggle and/or fail as men.
Okay - around about the time that anybody quotes J. Michael Bailey as a legitimate counterpoint model for transsexuals, they've lost the rhetorical argument. Bailey has already admitted to making unfounded inferences in drawing his conclusions. In my view, that's right up there with the so-called "critics" of evolution - most such critiques are based on amazingly bad science to start with.
Quite frankly, factual and semantic errors aside, Conservapedia is so obviously ideologically biased that it hardly represents any kind of credible source for reference information. Ignoring reality doesn't exactly help either.
No comments:
Post a Comment