Friday, December 30, 2011

Thoughts on "GLBT"

"Pleasureman" (formerly "Udolpho") has some interesting thoughts on transgenderism and homosexuality as mental illnesses:

People who lack knowledge of how psychology and psychiatry work are usually unaware of how hit and miss the treatment of mental illness is, and so it is easy to sell them on the idea that treatment of homosexuals and transgenders--or attempting to "cure" them as the left derisively and misleadingly puts it--is farcical pseudo-science at best and demented religious superstition at worst. Needless to say, conservatives, being largely ignorant of how psychology and psychiatry work, are unprepared to tell them differently: that we simply haven't come that far in treatment of mental disorders, but that management of symptoms is within reach and that there is reason to hope that further work on these disorders will uncover new, more successful approaches. After all you didn't see liberals saying let's throw in the towel on an AIDS cure because someone's shark cartilage cure didn't work.

There is also the point made that organized psychiatry and psychology are rather politicized (i.e. that their attempts to redefine transgenderism and variant sexuality as "normal" rather than "disordered" are due more to politics than to actual objective science), which means that the use of the American Psychiatric Association's positions to refute traditional ideas about homosexual behavior suspect.

Of course, I will admit that a lot of the posters on the site seem to dabble in antisemitism and I would be wary of some of the things they say, but this seemed to me to be a good point that not enough people bring up.

That is all.