IN the old days, when I was a medical student, if a man wanted to have his penis amputated, my psychology professors said that he suffered from schizophrenia, locked him up in an asylum and threw away the key. Now that I am a professor. my colleagues in psychiatry say that he is a “transsexual,” my colleagues in urology refashion his penis into a perineal cavity they call a vagina, and Time magazine puts him on its cover and calls him “her.” Anyone who doubts that this is progress is considered to be ignorant of the discoveries of modern psychiatric sexology, and a political reactionary, a sexual bigot, or something equally unflattering.
Because “transsexualism” involves, is indeed virtually synonymous with, extensive surgical alterations of the “normal” human body, we might ask what would happen, say, to a man who went to an orthopedic surgeon, told him that he felt like a right‐handed person trapped in an ambidextrous body and asked the doctor to cut off his perfectly healthy left arm? What would happen to a man who went to a urologist, told him that he felt like a Christian trapped in a Jewish body, and asked him to re‐cover the glans of his penis with foreskin? (Such an operation may be alluded to in I Corinthians, 7:17‐18.)
“But,” the medically informed reader might object, “isn't transsexualism a disease? Isn't it — in the grandly deceptive phrase of the American psychiatric establishment used to characterize all ‘mental diseases’ — ‘just like any other illness'?” No, it is not. The transsexual male is indistinguishable from other males, save by his desire to be a woman. ("He is a woman trapped in a man's body” is the standard rhetorical form of this claim.) If such a desire qualifies as a disease, transforming the desiring agent into a “transsexual,” then the old person who wants to be young is a “transchronological,” the poor person who wants to be rich is a “transeconomical,” and so on.
Such hypothetical claims and the requests for “therapy” based on them (together with our cognitive and medical responses to them) frame, in my opinion, the proper background against which our contemporary beliefs and practices concerning “transsexualism” and transsexual “therapy” ought to be viewed.
Clearly, not all desires are authenticated in our society as diseases. Why the desire for a change in sex roles is so authenticated is analyzed with great sensitivity and skill by Janice Raymond in “The Transsexual Empire.” Arguing that “medicine and psychology ... function as secular religions in the area of transsexualism,” she demonstrates that this “condition” is now accepted as a disease because advances in the technology of sex‐conversion surgery have made certain alterations in the human genitals possible and because such operations reiterate and reinforce traditional patriarchal sex‐role expectations and stereotypes. Ostensibly, the “transsexers” (from psychologists to urologists) are curing a disease; actually, they engage in the religious and political shaping and controling of “masculine” and “feminine” behavior. Miss Raymond's development and documentation of this thesis is flawless. Her book Is an important achievement.
The claim that males can be transformed, by means of hormones and surgery, into females, and vice versa, is, of course, a lie. ("She‐males” are fabricated in much greater numbers than “he‐females.") Chromosomal sex is fixed. And so are one's historical experiences of growing up and living as boy or girl, man or woman.
What, then, can be achieved by means of “transsexual therapy"? The language in which the reply is framed is crucial — and can never be neutral. The transsexual propagandists claim to transform “women trapped in men's bodies” into “real” women and want then to be accepted socially as females (say, in professional tennis). Critics of transsexualism contend that such a person is a “male‐to‐constructed‐female” (Miss Raymond's term), or a fake female, or a castrated male transvestite who wears not only feminine clothing but also feminine‐looking body parts. Miss Raymond quotes a Casablanca surgeon, who has operated on more than 700 American men, characterizing the transsexual transformation as follows: “I don't change men into women. I transform male genitals into genitals that have a female aspect. All the rest is in the patient's mind".
too bad this is from 1979: https://archive.is/gQFec
The science has changed. Pray it doesn't change any further.
Prayer is definitely needed. Lord, save us!
Oi m8, you got a loicense for that prayer?
No? Into the lion's den with you then!
It's literally just conversion therapy except irreversible, less likely to work, costly (but profitable for doctors and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies), and widely accepted. Muh science.
Two out of three of the most extreme levels of conversion therapy are now commonplace in the West, and even the most extreme has seen limited use. Chemical castration, as was done to Alan Turing, is now rebranded as "puberty blockers." Physical castration, as is done in Iran, is rebranded as "gender-affirming surgery." And execution is rebranded as "psychiatric euthanasia."
"MAID", good sir. It's called MAID services.
Autism provides the fertile ground in which this mental disease takes root.
Wow that last line is a real gut punch. The whole time I'm reading like, this is insanely based for the NYT. This has to be from like 2012 or something. 1979. Holy shit.
Long chains of cause and effect do indeed exist; who woulda thunk it?
The slippery slope fallacy is overridden by Newton’s first law of motion. Organizations aimed at revolutionary social change will not spontaneously cease to exist the moment they accomplish their stated goals.
It's worth noting that it is only an informal fallacy in that just going "A leads to Z because it's a slippery slope" does nothing to show causation. You still need to show that it actually does. My comment is mocking the typical redditor NPC who just parrots "slippery slope is a fallacy REEE" as if the very notion that long chains of cause and effect existing is in itself a fallacy, which of course is a moronic idea to anyone with an IQ above their shoe size.
The part that makes it even more frustrating is the current LGBTWTFBBQ clown world we find ourselves in isn't even that many steps away from just legalizing gay marriage. It was never that convoluted of a chain of cause and effect, yet it doesn't stop people from screeching that slippery slope is a fallacy because they are either retarded or acting in bad faith. Often both.
I call it the "under new management" theory. Any movement that agitates for change, when that change is achieved, will be taken over and bent to be feminist-adjacent.
The unstated goal of modern movements is to never reach that state of "mission accomplished", the goal posts must always be moving, so that the movement is always struggling. Lenin and Troksty called this "Permanent Revolution."
They've been steadily adding links to that chain for generations while conservatives have done nothing to oppose them. That's how it went from being a joke to being a society-wide mental illness.
Conservatives have been the ONLY people trying to oppose them, but no democratic minority can prevent a majority from self-destructing, it can only slow them down.
You had me until the very end!
I’m honestly surprised that the Times would print this. Oh. It’s from 79
I'm not, it's typical female supremacist bullshit about "prejudice against women".
They'll print something like it either this year or next.
Conservatives from 2023 are liberals from 1979.
Which is a large part of why I want Conservatism to be burned to ashes and scattered to the four winds. It's not fit for purpose.
We have nothing left worth conserving. It is why revanchism is the only path forward.
I would rather preserve the freedoms my great grandfather had in 1909 than the freedoms my father had in 1979, or the freedoms I had in 1999.
Szasz was a Libertarian.
I was waiting for the catch lol
Patient 0 for this shit was subjected to a living hell until both he and his brother killed themselves.
John Money was openly committing childhood sexual abuse on his patients & he is the clear father of this entire movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money
Money is the one who came up with the term "gender." At any opportunity I tell people about him and his hobby of putting toddlers in sexual positions and taking photographs.
Same. Every time someone talks to me about 'gender' I tell them who came up with the term, and what he did to little boys.
That's a redpill everyone should know.
This isn't the first iteration of the tranny stuff. Weimar Germany did it before.
You neglect to mention all of his books were co-written by female authors, and the most popular version was wholly written by a female author.
They were testing the waters as far back as the 70s with this shit. There were occasional movies and TV shows like "Bosom Buddies", "Tootsie", Rocky Horror, etc.
Radical feminists started pushing it in fucking '68. Even before that, women believed castration was the solution to the male problem.
Punchline at the end, rofl.
Thomas Szasz was based before the term was invented.
He was a staunch Libertarian whose critique of the psychology establishment and drug prohibition should be required reading for everyone.
Can you imagine the Times running this editorial today?
Neither can I.
Well, being a real woman would involve murdering an infant, so we should be glad they only want to be a caricature of you demonic freaks.
The woman cries out in pain as she castrates you.
There will be no fucking truce. We will win the gender war and put those evil fucks in a new Nuremberg.
How many women qualify as a 'real woman' under that standard?
Sorry for your loss.
You and who exactly?
It's almost like I'm making arguments based on negative traits of the female population in response to a cheap shot that men somehow crave being women, despite the fact that women are failures who needed to rig the entire world to cover up how incredibly useless they are at everything. I suppose they're good at subterfuge, as they made it this far.
Stupid comment is stupid.
Everyone who isn't taken in by women's lies about being victims of their own movement.
I know you will ignore any question that is inconvenient to you, but can you answer the question how many women would qualify as 'real women' by that standard?
I'm not going to give an answer to a clearly hyperbolic statement based on the fact women are the majority of those who kill infants.
Great, then true men are rapists, genocidal monsters like Pol Pot and Stalin.
I notice you dropped Hitler from the list after I showed that he would be a nobody without the support of women for his early movement.
Who supported communism again? Ah...right.
Back to the drawing board, I'm sure you'll find one genocidal leader women didn't like.
You are literally retarded. No surprise coming from the gender that commits 97% of rapes and 100% of genocides.