Serafina wrote:Really?
Yes, really.
The quoted part was not my main argument.
The idea that transsexualism is an essential and biological feminisation of the brain was a major component of your argument for quite some time. You can't really claim that something is a strawman when it was one of the cornerstones of your argument for a couple of weeks.
No, this is not an ad hominem attack. It is merely a debunking of Kors/Oraghans appeal to his authority. Their claim, not mine.
If you can explain - logically - how claiming Zucker published only 49 papers is anything but an inaccurate
argumentum ad hominem Zucker, I will be amazed. At the moment, I consider such a feat impossible.
Wait, i thought your had no rules of evidence here?
There are no official rules of evidence - as in you will not get banned for making bald assertions without backing them up. However, it's a very unconvincing tactic.
I already referred to David Reimer and similar cases.
Which would be slightly more relevant if you were still saying that transsexualism
is as simple as having a brain of the wrong type in the wrong body - a precisely female brain in a precisely male body.
If you'd as much as mentioned Reimer and Zucker in the same post before, that might
also have been slightly more convincing.
Conditioning doesn't change gender identity, even if it is much stronger than what Zucker does.
Cart before the horse again. Zucker is asserting it can, and has evidence that he think proves it - evidence that goes well beyond the scope of accidental case studies in relevance and rigor.
As it so happens, the other literature suggests that all that it's just part of an array of longitudinal studies displaying that GID in childhood has only a little to do with being transsexual in adulthood.
All they did was pulling a name out of a hat
You will notice that they do not quote any studies or link to them. That's not an argument, that's an appeal to authority.
See, you're making unsourced claims there again. I've reviewed your posts. You have yet to cite papers which contradict Zucker or imply that his method is a failure. This isn't to say that they don't exist (I linked to an overview article that discussed the rates at which childhood GID appears to persist into adulthood); you simply didn't cite them, refer to them, or in any fashion allude to their existence. Your "proof" amounted to re-stating your own model of transsexuality.
Wrong. They have to cite independent papers. No matter how famous a scientist is, his work has to be independently verified. Again, it is not my job to back up their claim.
Do you not understand what you've actually said?
I don't have a problem with you demanding evidence. I do have a problem with you making bold claims without providing evidence for them. You
claimed that there were numerous other experts out there contradicting Zucker. You didn't supply them. That makes
you look like you don't know what you're talking about, and offers, via the fallacy
ad logicam, illogical - but real - inducement towards the other side.
How helpful do you think Point45 is to the
Saxtonite cause on SpaceBattles? His only "helpful" function is to help the mods look less biased when he manages to get banned.
Yet i can not find long-term observation in Zuckers studies. If there is any, show it.
You can't? You think he doesn't consider
long term effects? Perhaps, in reading the roughly hundred articles he had written, you failed to notice the times where he
complained about how previous researchers have failed to follow up over a long enough period?
He has done some
short term studies and you probably skimmed one of them, but the claim of 80% "cure" rates was published in his 1995 book with Bradley, "Gender identity disorder and psychosexual problems in children and adolescents." The length of the average follow-up interval therein is 8.4 years. That's not exactly
short term.
Less blind luck than compressed knowledge. More-or-less official german literature on transsexuality mentions that
(1).
Of course, that not a scientific source and not quotable or linkable.
It is cited in the literature. Did I link to that article before? I think I did.
And where do you think the book gets that from? The "assorted longitudinal studies" that pre-date it. Including, in all probability, Zucker's work.
Just the main theory about transsexuality which states that it is pretty independent on nurture?
What "main theory" again?
Right, what you're
trying to convince your opponents of. You're putting the horse before the cart. Or perhaps I should find a German equivalent: "Das Pferd von hinten aufzäumen."
Again, you keep criticizing me because i demand evidence.
No, it's not that.
My opponents used NO EVIDENCE AT ALL, they just appeal to Zuckers authority.
And it's effective, isn't it?
Kor, introducing Zucker wrote:In fact Kenneth Zucker has had a huge amount of success with his treatment of children who show signs of transgendered behaviour. In one group of 50 all but 10% were essentially cured and now live happy lives within their natural physical and biological gender, older individuals are less willing and as such do not respond well to treatment.
His overall sucess rate is roughly 80-90%.
Zucker has published almost 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. These articles have been cited over 2000 times, with an h-index of 20. In 2007 Zucker was chosen to be a member of the American Psychological Association Task Force on Gender Identity, Gender Variance, and Intersex Conditions, and in 2008 was named chair of the Americ[an Psychiatric Association workgroup on "Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders" for the 2012 edition of the DSM-5. He previously served on workgroups for the DSM-IV and the DSM-IV-TR.
(Actually, you were the first to mention Zucker in this debate - you cited one of his papers, in one of the posts in which you felt like actually providing evidence.)
So here's the problem. You're in an argument, lay person to lay person. Neither one of you is actually a qualified expert. Bringing up an expert that agrees with you doesn't mean you are
necessarily correct, but it's a pretty convincing tactic.
You responded by attacking his expert and claiming he's not much of an authority. This was the wrong technique to use on Blanchard and the wrong technique to use on Zucker. Both of them are big shots in the psychiatric world, with numerous feathers in their caps proving that a lot of people think they're experts.
i can not find a single studies agreeing with him where he is not involved.
You can't even get through his own studies, it would seem. That you can't find an article is only going to convince your opponent that those articles don't
exist only if your opponent thinks you're very good at finding papers and trusts you to tell the truth. Neither one is the case. As far as I can tell, Kor doesn't trust you to tell the truth
and thinks you can't understand scientific articles.
Just because something is published in a peer-reviewd journal it doesn't have to be right.
No, but it's one of the best indications. When your opponent is able to cite peer-reviewed articles in his or her favor, you had better be able to pull out the big evidentiary guns. Instead, you took out a pair of starter pistols and fired off a bunch of blanks.
Again, it is Kors/Oraghans job to give actual evidence for their anti-trans claims.
And it's your job to back up your own claims.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Cosmetic appearance is largely the first phase.
And unless we're working in a hospital, it's usually the
last phase, too. We examine what the body looks like on the outside. If it doesn't fit neatly in the box, we engage in a little surgery to make it fit in the box.
Generally, for not really important matters, contrary to ethical or philosophical issues, we tend to limit ourselves to what's simple enough, to what is superficial and practical and yet what doesn't shock our views on the world, and the observation of the codes. Of course, as pointed out, you have more chances of being considered a woman in your daily life, with a passing interest, if you match enough critera, both about physiognomy, behaviour and dressing. But the topic never limited itself to that. You can have a Japanese male dressing up as a girl, wearing fake breasts and women clothes, enough make up and behaving like a woman, to pass as one. But this remain nothing more than superficial. Science doesn't stop there.
But science doesn't tell us how to decide to treat each other, either.
That they are aware or not is irrelevant. You can have a disease and not know it, or have a cancer. Your ignorance isn't powerful enough to trump reality though.
But what's the reality here?
Is it biological essence? Or social function? We're
not actually that concerned with reproductive capabilities in deciding whether someone should wear a dress or be addressed as "sir" or "madam."
People naturally looking half way between both genders, without being particularly handsome, indeed tend to be hard to identify. This happens, for example, when you see someone on TV and you ask yourself "wait, is that person a woman?"
But then, again, this happens very rarely.
Say... about 1 in 10 cases in the casual contexts?
And obviously the members of the society, as a whole, don't seem to be bothered about trying to trump the opposite gender about their own true gender. Namely, the vast majority of women won't suddenly develop an odd interest in trying to pass off as men, and quite logically so: because there's no point doing so.
Sometimes there is. Men may have more rights. They may be able to go into male-only zones. You need to combine motive and ability, and weigh the probability of passing against the consequences of being unmasked. Motive might not be that rare. Ability might not be that rare. However, the two are pretty independent, so the combination is going to be rarer than either.
And vice et versa. So you can safely consider that what looks like the majority of feminine codes will be followed by the immense majority, if not near totality of females.
The odd cases, again, are just that. Odd. Rare. They don't break the norm.
If they don't break the norm, we may as well assign all of them piecewise.