3.
Faced with our revelation that there are dozens of possible taxonomies of transsexuals, Blanchard is going to take us to one side and explain the following.
“Dude, I get what you’re saying… ok, there’s an infinite number of taxonomies… but mine is different. The ones you’re citing are just man-made, observations of unimportant differences. My taxonomy… – homosexual and nonhomosexual – is made by nature. This is some a priori shit… kapish?”
And this my friends, is where it gets interesting…
The schoolboy error the Blanchardites have made is to see transsexualism as some kind of physical entity of which there are variants. However, the word ‘transsexual’ denotes no such thing… it is a psychiatric term for a person who has, according to ICD-10…
“a desire to live and be accepted as a member of the opposite sex, usually accompanied by a sense of discomfort with, or inappropriateness of, one’s anatomic sex, and a wish to have surgery and hormonal treatment to make one’s body as congruent as possible with one’s preferred sex.”
A transsexual is not a species or a personality type … it is a person with the condition described above. For there to be two types of transsexual there would have to be two types of transsexualism… with varied symptoms and a clear experiential difference.
As far as I know, transsexuals – be they gay or straight – all experience their condition in the same way – as defined by ICD10.
“a desire to live and be accepted as a member of the opposite sex, usually accompanied by a sense of discomfort with… etc.”
Therefore, it is irrelevant whether they are early onset or late onset, tall or small, intelligent or low IQ, Latin or Asian. What unites them all is that they are all experiencing exactly the same symptoms described above. This clearly demonstrates there is only one type of transsexual.
To understand this better, we only have to look at a taxonomy of depressives. Depressives fall into a number of categories – manic, bi-polar, vascular etc. Each category is not dictated by some inherent quality of the person who suffers it – sexuality, height, social class etc… BUT BY THE DIFFERENT SYMPTOMS THEY DISPLAY.
The symptoms and the treatment are all the same in the case of gay and heterosexual transsexuals, so it makes absolutely no sense to divide them up on the basis of sexuality. In fact, it seems, outright weird and creepy. And I think we should reflect on that a moment.
Why are these people so obsessed with a taxonomy that makes no sense clinically, especially a taxonomy based on sexuality… particulalry one that is either homosexual or nonhomosexual? Well, let’s look at the two leading figures in promoting this theory: James Cantor and Raymond Blanchard.
Firstly…
-
- guess what field they come from…
Sexology.
Secondly…
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- guess what their sexual orientation is…
Homosexual.
Thirdly…
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- guess what type of theory they came up with to categorise transsexual people…
One based on their field – sexology – and their sexuality… not even classifying people as hetero or homo… but homosexual or nonhomosexual.
Now, I don’t want to insinuate that these men are seeing the world through their own narrow vision… I want to flatout say it. These men are seeing the world through their own narrow vision!!!. Jesus Christ, guys, science is about objectivity. Here we have intense subjectivity with a lot of discipline blindness.
It’s my opinion that sexologists should stick to their field. Gender, as everyone else knows in the twenty-first century, has nothing to do with sexual orientation.
Point 3: A transsexual is a person with transsexualism. There can only be different types of transsexual if they experience different types of transsexualism. Whereas with depression there are commonly agreed types of depressive because there are different types of depression – there is only one type of transsexualism, and therefore only one type of transsexual.
Part 4. The existential value of the autogynephilia theory for transsexuals
[…] Part 3. The schoolboy error at the heart of Blanchard’s taxonomy of transsexuals. […]
Are you really suggesting that there is no difference in Blanchard’s two types?
Hello… if you are following the argument you will see that – yes , of course they are different but that this difference is of no clinical, social or scientific interest. They are differences that follow on logically from differences between homo and heterosexuals and are not relevant.