Sun New Network’s Michael Coren investigates the case of a 6 year old boy who is being raised as a girl. First broadcast on 1st March 2013. Play [..]
This play is a must for anyone who is in a relationship or who wants to understand more about gender balance and what can happen when things go [..]
Dermot O’Callaghan, MA (Cantab) Studied Mechanical Sciences at Cambridge University and, after five years in industry, spent his working career as a management consultant in a variety of [..]
Recently my attention was drawn to the following website: www.gires.org.uk. This site refers to a training resource produced by GIRES (Gender Identity Research and Education Society). Background [..]
Information from a Danish Study published in March 2011. The objective of the study was to estimate mortality, morbidity and criminal rate after surgical sex reassignment of transsexual [..]
A Hong Kong transsexual has won the right to marry her boyfriend, following an appeal to Hong Kong’s top court.
Read here: www.bbc.co.uk/news/
Schools in California (sometimes referred to as: the ‘cereal packet’ State) will be compelled to accommodate transgendered students allowing them to use bathrooms and participate in school activities of their choice as a result of a Bill passed in that State Assembly.
Will ’gender’ no longer exist?!!
An Anglican church in the U.K. has become what is believed to be the first church service to affirm the transition of a 60 yo male to a female.
see: www.christian.org.uk/news/first-ever-c-of-e-service-to-affirm-transsexual/
The study summarized below was published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases; it reveals that:
almost a fifth of transgender women (born male but now identify as female) worldwide are infected with HIV. The meta-analysis reviewed 39 studies involving over 11,000 transgender women in 15 countries.
High profile U.K. journalist, Julie Burchill has been found not guilty by the Press Complaints Council of offending transsexuals in an article that she wrote.
Burchill has for sometime been critical of particularly male to female transsexuals and their desire to be treated as legitimate females by the public.
Read more from Digital Spy: Julie Burchill transsexual column: No breach of PCC code
Sun New Network’s Michael Coren investigates the case of a 6 year old boy who is being raised as a girl. First broadcast on 1st March 2013.
Play Audio (13 mins)
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He goes on to interview Robert John about who identifies gender?
This play is a must for anyone who is in a relationship or who wants to understand more about gender balance and what can happen when things go wrong. Recommended especially for anyone close to someone who is going through, or considering going through a sex change.
Ah Men is a touching love story, but in the context of the musical play, it portrays a painful irony. A career woman gets exactly what she wishes for ‘A Good Wife’ when her husband announces that he wants a sex change.
Ah Men reveals her worst nightmares as the husband, transitions to the female gender. In the background, echoes of the song Mon Paris fall, like a ray of light that has nowhere to settle’.
Dermot O’Callaghan, MA (Cantab) Studied Mechanical Sciences at Cambridge University and, after five years in industry, spent his working career as a management consultant in a variety of sectors, including mental health. In his retirement he has taken an interest in the way that science in recent decades has sought to understand the causes and consequences of same-sex attraction. He has followed with interest the ways in which science has been used (and sometimes misused) in society’s debates and in the shaping of social policy, including the increasingly robust actions of mental health professional bodies to prevent even a married man from being helped to reduce his unwanted same-sex attractions in order to save his marriage. Dermot is married, with one son and two grandchildren. He is a member of the General Synod of the Church of Ireland.
Purchase at Amazon.co.uk: Beyond Critique: The Misuse of Science by UK Professional Mental Health Bodies [Paperback / Kindle]
Recently my attention was drawn to the following website: www.gires.org.uk.
This site refers to a training resource produced by GIRES (Gender Identity Research and Education Society).
Background
Firstly, if you haven’t previously come across GIRES, let me explain who they are. GIRES consists, principally, of a husband and wife couple, Bernard & Terry Reed. Both are well educated, although not in the sciences. If they were perhaps they would be a little more cautious about their statements on transgender.
G
The word ‘gender’ has been used until recently to mean the psychological & physical characteristics that distinguish male and female. And, often, still is. In recent years it has become common to replace the word ‘sex’ with the word ‘gender’. (Women’s rights groups began to popularise the use of the word ‘gender’ in this way.)
It is therefore difficult at times to know precisely in which context GIRES uses the term. Perhaps aware of this difficulty they are now increasingly using the term ‘gender variant’ which implies being different from the norm. In the way the term is used by GIRES it remains an oxymoron. The pre-supposition that gender is biologically determined is false.
I
The presentation of information by GIRES is highly selective, presumably for ideological reasons, and therefore can be frequently misleading, as the following comment by Dr Neil Whitehead aptly demonstrates.
R
A research organisation it is not. An organisation that exists to present deliberately misleading information for ideological reasons, perhaps!
E S.
The value of its role as an educational society must be seriously questioned.
A further comment
I have met with Bernard & Terry Reed on two occasions. At the first meeting they produced a power point presentation which outlined a series of scientific references which they claimed demonstrated conclusively that gender is biologically determined. I and a colleague who attended that meeting were instructed at the outset that questions were not permitted. Some years earlier I and the same colleague were involved in the producing of two separate publications that, based on sound scientific research, contradicted virtually all their power point assertions. Clearly GIRES research had not uncovered either publically available publication. Or, they deliberately chose to ignore them.
At the second meeting months later I strongly challenged the very premise on which they (GIRES) took their stand.
The meeting concluded on good terms, I believe. However, it has since become apparent that their position on transgender has not changed one iota.
Throughout the last 15 or 20 years it has not been unusual for me to be publically and privately vilified by members of the transgender community claiming that I am bigoted and unwilling to listen to reason. This is in spite of the fact that I have constantly used my best endeavours to understand truth and what science is saying about transgendered behaviours.
I can therefore only conclude that it is the transgender community and their misguided supporters, such as GIRES and others with their own vested interests who qualify to be called bigots.
Professional comments on GIRES e-learning resource
Neil Whitehead, Ph. D*
The training resource says that neither your sex characteristics nor your upbringing determine your gender identity. On the contrary, while they do not absolutely create gender identity, they do create it to a high degree.
The truth is that transgender is still a rare condition, and that sex characteristics and upbringing produce divalent gender identity to an extraordinarily high degree, and this characterises “determine” as the word is normally used. There is considerable evidence for this, hundreds of scientific papers dealing directly with the observed developmental psychology processes which lead to gender identity.
In contrast the most the (GIRES) authors can say is that there is considerable scientific evidence that gender identity is influenced before birth. The word “influenced” is quite weak and papers dealing with this hypothesis (not observations) are a handful, negligible compared with those examining post-natal factors. This is certainly not “considerable”.
The clear statement is made that we are born with gender identity. This is absolutely wrong. Researchers define gender identity as a consciously held idea. This idea simply does not exist in new borns. They do not even have a sense of a separate identity from their mother for months. The stages by which they acquire a sense of gender identity have been much investigated, and much of this like all children’s learning is from copying others of the same sex.
An alternative less clear interpretation of being “born with gender identity” is that we are inescapably destined to a particular gender identity, as this trait develops.
No academic of my acquaintance will say that gender identity is completely fixed prenatally and unchangeable thereafter. Rather they will say that all human traits are multifactorial, having very many influences from prenatal, family, society, developing physiological states through childhood and random experiential sources. Further there is considerable malleability and strong post natal influence can have a considerable effect. A girl subjected to bad sexual abuse may retreat from a gender identity of femininity to that of androgyny.
Saying we cannot change who we are inside, is contrary to human experience. The authors are laudably attempting to create precisely this change to dispel prejudice in the minds of their listeners, and such prejudicial beliefs can indeed change. But (as shown by twin studies) there is much stronger scientific evidence for innateness of prejudice in several fields than of innateness of gender identity!
The authors are pointing to the experiences of many who have not found it possible to change their gender identity, or to those who experienced conflict very early, as implicit evidence that change does not happen. But there is evidence available from those who have changed and contrary interview material could have been produced, as the authors are aware. In view of that, it is scientifically indefensible to assert that gender identity cannot change. The authors may not know that nearly 100 years ago the standard medical opinion was that alcoholism was incurable. The fact that so very many now routinely change shows how totally misleading it is to mistake great difficulty for impossibility.
It is a scientific impossibility to prove that change cannot happen, because there could always be somewhere some very skilled therapist who would have some successes, or new treatments might emerge. It is another example of the philosophical principle that it is impossible to prove a universal negative.
The DSM (Diagnostic & Statistics Manual) manuals classify GID (Gender Identity Disorder) as a mental illness. If the authors want to argue otherwise, their forum is certainly not a training course, but a scientific article in the Journal of Sexual Medicine or a related publication.
There may be many reasons for treating trans people with respect, but for the authors to invoke science in this way, implying that there is such a clear a consensus around their position that public policy inevitably follows, is totally incorrect and reprehensible.
(My bolding, italics and brackets.)
*Dr Whitehead has a multi-disciplinary, Ph.D. For forty years he has worked as a researcher for the New Zealand government and the United Nations. And, for two Japanese universities. He has some 30 published papers on this and related subjects.
Dr Whitehead’s website: www.mygenes.co.nz
Information from a Danish Study published in March 2011.
The objective of the study was to estimate mortality, morbidity and criminal rate after surgical sex reassignment of transsexual persons.
Mortality, morbidity and criminal rate amongst post-operative transsexuals (PDF file).
