To A T

 

Thus, came news over the weekend. At a Forum I frequent one poster attempted to place the item in a couple of places: against the rules, no cross-posting. But I can understand the impulse. No one enjoys having her life reduced to whether or not scientific proof can be found that basically makes her a part of the human genome rather than an object of psychological exploration by the likes of the CAMH/Northwestern sexological axis. Much better regarded is the research emanating from Melbourne and UCLA. 

Taken together with studies performed over the past ten years by researchers (biological/medical ones, not the psychological gim-crackery of the CAMH/Northwestern groups who mainly do “thought-experiments”) at The Free University of Amsterdam and at Goettingen University on the BSTc and the proof for brain-sex, there’s growing and compelling evidence that transsexuals, and possibly other gender-divergent people, are exactly who we have always said we were.

The latest release of research from The Prince Henry’s Institute in Melbourne adds, as Zoe Brain says, another piece, a small one, but an important one, in the puzzle of transsexuality. There’s a fashion in which sex is absolutely not the well-defined and currently accepted binary with no exceptions that we have lived with for millenia. As one finds and places those puzzle pieces into the frame one sees, without doubt anymore, that to be “male” is not always a matter of having “male-genitalia” and even “male chromosomes.” Nor is being female relegated a priori  to women born with 46xx chromosomes and a vagina and ovaries. Brain-sex, much maligned in some areas around Chicago, Illinois, USA, and Toronto, Ontario, Canada, has become over the past few years a fact that now requires proof that it isn’t true, rather than simply a pronunciamento by psychologists and psychiatrists that trans-folk have mental disorders.

Yep, I’ve halluncinated or imagined my entire life. How utterly psychotic is that?   

No longer can “the experts” simply declare, as have Kenneth Zucker, J. Michael Bailey and their ilk, that something is true if he says it’s true regardless the provenance of that particular brand of truth. Unless, of course, someone comes along with “scientific refutation” of a way-of-thinking he’s comfortable with.

O, by the way, Zucker and crew get to decide whether or not the proof is acceptable, because they “don’t believe in brain-sex.” Silly notion that, no? As if Luna had a vote about whether she was planet or moon? Or a neutrino deciding that it wasn’t an atomic particle? Or me deciding that you are not truly human because you don’t meet my prejudices and ways-of-belief about what humans are, how they should look and act?  

However, incidentally to self-interest no doubt, Dr. Zucker has filled his clinical coffers with pharmaceutical monies and brought parents to his offices with their reparable children for him to re-program. Now, given his economic interests, what sort of incentive does Dr. Zucker have in allowing any rendition of “Money” other than his own of taking the floor?

He shall rake in money and “prestige.”  Then it’s up to the critics to provide “proof” that his ideas are wrong. Critics who are not privy to whatever the machinations of his “chairmanship” of the “disorders of gender and sexuality” committee of the DSM-V and his mentor Ray Blanchard are cooking up with the “assistance” and expertise of Dr. Lawrence and Dr. Bailey who serve in “advisory” capacities to the committee. The committee’s work is closed except to members (Zucker, Blanchard and a few other psychiatrists who mainly work with other specialities) and their advisory selections.

One wonders now what pet theories of Zucker and Blanchard that have no empirical proof will be retained in the DSM-V and how much of a surprise it will be if they maintain their own interests at the expense of live human beings, otherwise known as “patients?”  

The re-programming agenda of Ken Zucker, the “proofs” of Ray Blanchard, occur in spite of the evidence that untreated gender-role non-conforming pre-adolescents have gender incongruity at very tiny rates in adulthood. You can ask my friend Zoe to find what the scientific protocol is for “burden-of-proof,” but I believe that the Zucker/Blanchard/Freund theory of transsexuality should have been accompanied by some “proof” prior to its encasement within the DSM-III. Now that it’s there doesn’t mean that it’s the “accepted way” of looking at transsexuality, especially in light of the growing body of scientific evidence that flies in the face of the thought-experiments of Blanchard and Zucker. Yet, the crusaders of the Zucker, Blanchard, Bailey group make the attempt to say their ideas have to be disproved, in spite of them never having been proven in the first place. Say what? 

Does this mean that any idea must be accepted as truth until complete scientific “proof” that the idea is false has been provided? In spite of the fact that the idea itself had never presented any scientific “proof” to support it? If this is the “science” of the “not real girls and boys crews” at CAMH and Northwestern then I am truly amazed that they seek to reverse whatever credibility psychology has accrued to itself in the West in the past hundred years. Isn’t the idea rather one like the “witch is made of wood” theory expressed in Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

Thus, we come back to “real girls.”

I’m forever struck by the way we somehow irrationally manage to cop to the flimsiest appeals to our unreason: “That Obama-guy is gonna let the black-folk take over the government.” That doesn’t appear to be logical; yet, this election-season we have heard those views expressed quite openly by various people interviewed about their support for John McCain or their opposition to Barack Obama.

I would imagine that the idea is perfectly ludicrous for a number of reasons. But, I will also, as an aside to my point, ask this question: after 200+ years of having an overwhelmingly “white” list of political leaders, advisors, consultants, judges and cabinet members what would there be that was intrinsically wrong if Mr. Obama did only include persons of color, black people at that, in his administration? I don’t recall the hue and cry when white presidents made their entire entourage white. So what would be the ineffable evil in having all black members of Congress, or in an Executive Branch administration? (That’s an idea to simply think about and maybe consider for a later blog here.)

Aside from the constant drumbeat from some bloggers who apparently have a huge investment in being “real” while trying to “unrealize” others; aside from some rad-fems who fear their ideas will become useless if transsexuals are recognized as simply woman and men in the reverse-way the rad-fems think of us as being men and women at this point;  and aside from many neo-Freudian psychologists who have certain monetary, theological, and professional interests in maintaining the efficacy of thought experiments over biological researches; what is the problem if “real girls” and “real boys” have body configurations not in the norm for their groups? What exactly is lost? Or, as Helen Boyd has stated at en|Gender “transitioners, as I expected, are turning out to be the last tool in the feminist toolbox.”  

That would certainly tend to put paid to the fears of Mary Daly, Janice Raymond and Miss Andrea at Feminazi that the acceptance of transsexuality as a fact would somehow undermine all of feminist theory. (My! Who knew the existence of lil ole me could cause such a stir?) I would argue that it will only undermine certain deep prejudices by those authors and actually serve to revivify many feminist deconstructions of gender roles and stereotypes as being perfectly valid deconstructions. 

That Jillian Weiss and many others of us have discovered exactly the truth of what’s been described very much before as untrue or archaic can only reinforce the critiques of gender-discrimination in this country. There are actions performed here in USA that are so deeply embedded in folks that they are first nature. 

The question? Are transsexual women “real women?” Surely you’ve not read this far without knowing I am going to say, “yes, we are,” have you? 

I suppose you can best label my arguments as being “human-centered,” “connection-seeking” and “humane.” For in all of the various discussions about morality and truth, who is real, and who is delusional, I maintain that people are not delusional, not at base and not about what they know of their bodies and minds. As a therapist, how could I simply discount the thoughts, emotions and behavior of my clients as being “unreal?”

I suspect along with the British psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, there are many human behaviors in our technological, categorically-structured modern world that elicit “delusional behaviors” as being perfectly rational ways of coping with anomie and alienation. Laing also stated this: The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds. 

I find the words to be most constructive and also find them true. We fail to notice so very much research, ways-of-being-and-acting, and how true-to-life those are. We, the human community, not just members of the APA (psychiatric,) often fail to notice that we failed to notice events, people and processes that are beyond the ken of our religious, philosophical or scientific prejudices.

People are consistently, perhaps only, moved by their experiences in the world. When Laing’s “stone-age baby” meets the “modern-day mother” there is a lot that gets lost. Yet, as he also said, most of the time the interaction works well for both parties. We manage to live through our infancy and our early childhood.

As we grow older and live under the burden of our adult hopes, fears, accepted-wisdoms we often grow further alienated from anyone who might be “different.” We find that stone-age fear out-paces modern knowledge. We heighten our abilities to fail to see what we have failed to see and that we have failed to see either.  

In so doing we are often simply too ready to exile this or that group, this or that person, from what we presume to define as the sisterhood of humanity. — Yes, that’s contrived and meant for you to notice. — It’s not a ploy to prove my womanhood. Very simply, it was contrived to show you my point.

Many of you reacted interiorly to that phrase, sisterhood of humanity, didn’t you? There came a moment of cognitive dissonnace into your psyche, right? Even if it was a fleeting  moment, you noticed it now that I’ve mentioned it, right? So, we can actually notice what we fail to notice about ourselves if we can be honest and listen to another occasionally? I believe we have that capacity. 

We take our cues from the cues that have been structured within us. Dylan Thomas thought that within him there still lurked a Puritan-heart, placed there by his father, and that no matter his reaction, the Puritan-heart somehow nuanced his response either positively or negatively.

So with us all, I believe. We act and react based on deeply embedded conditioning. I hold fast in many ways to the fundamentalist perspective I was raised with. I reject that dogma, but find myself consistently having to compensate for the ways I have translated that fundamentalist-conditioning with the ways I argue and advocate for human equivalence: each one of us has the same importance in universe. I can be rather puritanical about that. I try to keep an eye on my own tendency to be my own sort of “true-believer.”

We claim, very rightly, to think. Yet, we hold fast to outdated and atavistically-engendered trajectories in our thoughts, in our ways of allowing or disallowing the world and other humans. We feel, as Caucasians in America, for instance, a profound discomfort when we are in predominately “minority” areas. We don’t enjoy the feeling of alienation, of being different, of standing out, and we may often feel, vaguely, that the sins of our forefathers will be revisited upon us when we are so caught-out.

Yet, statistically, there’s no need for the fear. Instead, most white-people should fear to be among “our kind” and most black people should fear to be among “their kind,” for that is where we see, again and again, that crime and violence enfolds us: when we are among “those we know or are like.”  

I have no doubt that in some Platonic World there are “real girls” and “real boys.” I also have no doubt that my life has no relationship, Plato notwithstanding, to that Platonic World of an ancient thinker’s thought-experiment. Instead my life takes place in what I shall call a Real World peopled with, and both affected and effected, by other real people, processes, events and objects.

Claiming to know Truth as presented in the Bible, the Koran, or in my experience and life has no more authority than would the claim of a quartz-crystal to know the entirety of existence, or the claim of a person who had attended six school grades or forms before leaving school forever to have a knowledge of education. Yet, I am always willing to assert that another’s life and thoughts are somehow delusional because they do not follow from attitudes and accepted belief that make me feel better about myself. 

Are transsexuals “real girls” and “real boys?” O yes. Just as we are all “real human beings.” Can we know truth? Most assuredly. Some truth comes to us through revelation, some through lived-experience and some through scientifically-accumulated research. I am willing to go way out on an unsteady limb and say that all of those areas contribute mightily to our various human knowledges. But the deepest knowledge available to any of us, to all of us, is simply that our different perspectives tend to be flawed by the things we fail to notice, and the failure to notice the things we fail to notice.

That’s the closest I can move toward defining in any particular way who is a “real woman” and who is a “real man,” who is a “real American” or who is a “real human being.” I can only make an unqualified and firm statement of fact about that last question.

Who is a “real human being?”

Why, every human being. C’est tres facile, n’est pas?

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This entry was posted on October 28, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Connection, DSM-V, Feminism, Gender, Humans, Inclusion, Intersectionality, Otherness, Psychology, Relational-Cultural Theory, Social Relations, Theory/Reality, Transgender, Transsexing, Transsexuals, Witches, Women. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Connection, Feminism, Intersectionality, New Research Results, Psychology, R.D. Laing, Reality, Transsexuals

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