"What I find to be generally the case, dirtywithclass, is that conservatives use truth as a the basis of what they should think and how they should act. Progressives use truth as a tool if it suits their purpose in supporting something they have already decided. "

That used to be the case. Not so much these days, the Religious Right started going PoMo decades ago, and now are nothing but.

Example:
"6. Scientific Method
We affirm that the scientific method is useful in carrying out the creation mandate of Genesis 1:28 to subdue and have dominion over creation when the investigators have Biblical presuppositions and when the Bible does not directly give us the answers we seek; that the use of the scientific method is entirely controlled by the presuppositions of the investigators and therefore the results are a pronouncement of faith rather than of scientific fact; and that the faith nature of the results of scientific investigation is evidenced by the investigators’ proselytizing intent, that is, their attempt to transform man into their idea of what man should be.
We deny that the scientific method can ever be applied in psychology without its being thoroughly determined by the presuppositions of the investigators"

-- From The Christian World View of Counselling,
Mr. George C. Scipione, Th.M., M.A., Chairman
Dr. Lawrence Crabb, Ph.D., Co-Chairman
Dr. Ed Payne, M.D., Co-Chairman
Dr. Jay Grimstead, D.Min., General Editor
Mr. E. Calvin Beisner, M.A., Assistant to the General Editor
With contributions by members of the Psychology and Counseling Committee of The Coalition on Revival

The scandal was that it was ever pathologised in the first place, when there was no experimental evidence that it was a pathology, only an "everyone knows" assumption.

The APA's actions here are a good example of checking common wisdom against facts.

The problem though is that it had to be voted on - as if a matter of observation also had to be popular as well as true. That's deeply troubling, and does show politicisation.

This poses a great threat to the Democrats.

If the GOP jettisons all the crazies, the Flat Earthers and SoCons, letting them go off and form their own Theocratic Party... then they will attract a LOT of voters who currently vote DNC because there's no Republican Party any more to vote for, only a bunch of lunatics.

In the short-term, the GOP will have a net loss of votes. In the long term, it's the only way the USA is ever going to have a functional 2 party system. 2 sane parties anyway.

I agree with everything you say (with one important exception), and if anything, you understate the problem.
The only quibble I have is over the phrase " tinker with their Corporate Equality Index". This was a real improvement, with many knock-on effects outside the Fortune 500.

However... the political arm of the HRC is as tone-deaf as ever, and it's gone beyond scandalous to bizarre that it's RWGs - Rich White Gays - only. There isn't even any tokenism, it's all-white, all-the-time, and they're unashamed of it.

Please keep on publicising this. If I can notice, all the way in Australia, others can too a bit closer to home.

Rather than calling someone who's ill-informed "ignorant", it's better to put the evidence before them. To educate, not engage in argument.

This stuff *isn't* taught well - if at all - in schools. Yes, it's all on the Internet, the facts, the medical journals and so on, but life's too short to investigate *everything*.

Put the evidence, the facts, before them. Reasonable people can differ on the interpretation and meaning of those, but at least we have a well-informed basis for discussion. Calling someone "ignorant" just because they don't know anything about an obscure subject, and don't even realise they know nothing about it, isn't helpful.

Citations please? You know.. evidence? Facts?

I know "Mass Resistance" claimed four such occurrences in one county, but both county sheriffs and police records showed they were making things up. Same with their tales of Transsexuals raiding churches and performing surgeries on kidnapped members of the congregation (as described in their 127 page report on the subject). That's why they're on the list of "hate groups",in between the Muslim Brotherhood and the KKK, they deliberately lie.

"You aren't born with both male and female DNA"

Actually I was, but mostly my body is 46,XY.

As is this woman''s - and her daughter's
"A 46,XY mother who developed as a normal woman underwent spontaneous puberty, reached menarche, menstruated regularly, experienced two unassisted pregnancies, and gave birth to a 46,XY daughter with complete gonadal dysgenesis. " -- The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism January 1, 2008 vol. 93 no. 1 182-189

1 in 300 men aren't 46,XY. Some women are. It's more complicated than the simplified child's version you were taught in grade school.

""Could someone who identifies as a dog be turned into a dog"

This is usually known as the "Giraffe Argument"., Giraffe, porpoise, or in this case, dog.

Well...

If an MRI scan of your brain showed it to be the same as a dog...
If there were a number of medical conditions where dogs turned into people, or people into dogs...
If you go around chasing cars, urinating on lampposts etc...
If your vocabulary is limited to "Woof" and "Arf"....
If you have a dog's sense of hearing, and a dog's sense of smell... so you can hear ultrasonics...

Then yes, I'd say you were really a dog.

But unless all of the above are true, the two situations aren't remotely comparable.

This isn't a psychological issue, but an anatomical one. I don't know how to express it more simply than that.

Sense of smell:
Male-to-female transsexuals show sex-atypical hypothalamus activation when smelling odorous steroids. by Berglund et al Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(8):1900-1908;

Sense of hearing:
Dichotic Listening, Handedness, Brain Organization and Transsexuality Govier et al International Journal of Transgenderism, 12:144–154, 2010

Spatial Cognition:
Neuroimaging Differences in Spatial Cognition between Men and Male-to-Female Transsexuals Before and During Hormone Therapy by Scoening et al J Sex Med. 2009 Sep 14.

Anatomy:
Male–to–female transsexuals have female neuron numbers in a limbic nucleus. Kruiver et al J Clin Endocrinol Metab (2000) 85:2034–2041

Regarding "psychiatric therapy" - you think it hasn't been tried over the last 60 years? We know that doesn't work. Patients die. Long-term studies show a 0.000% success rate.

"Treatment aimed at trying to change a person’s gender identity and expression to become more congruent with sex assigned at birth has been attempted in the past without success (Gelder & Marks, 1969; Greenson, 1964), particularly in the long term (Cohen-Kettenis & Kuiper, 1984; Pauly, 1965). Such treatment is no longer considered ethical. "

We had enough evidence that it didn't work, and a mountain of corpses from failed treatments over 30 years, 30 years ago

The treatment we use now - transition - has a measured 98% success rate.

Reality:

Sexual Hormones and the Brain: An Essential Alliance for Sexual Identity and Sexual Orientation Garcia-Falgueras A, Swaab DF Endocr Dev. 2010;17:22-35

The fetal brain develops during the intrauterine period in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed or organized into our brain structures when we are still in the womb. However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in extreme cases in trans-sexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain. There is no indication that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation.

----

Cat - what makes you a woman? Chromosomes? Nope, there's mothers who have XY chromosomes, and a chance you may do too. So what if you do?

Genitalia? What about women who have had radical hysterectomies and vulvectomies? They're still women.

Genitalia at birth? See http://www.usrf.org/news/010308-guevedoces.html
There's plenty of men who have fathered children who were born with female-looking genitalia. 5ARD and 17BHSD syndromes are the most common causes.

Or is it your brain, your mind, your self, your very essence, no matter what your body may look like externally?

I was born looking male by the way. That changed at puberty - something of a "get out of Hell free" card. It was... it was... it was as bad as you can imagine before then. So although I'm not technically transsexual, the 3BHSD form of CAH caused the change, not hormones and surgery - I know what Calliope went through. She's just a girl you see, like you. One born with a pretty awful congenital issue. Trying to carve out as normal a life as she can under the circumstances.

Maybe this will help - first, do you know the meaning of the word "Intersex"? It means someone born neither wholly male or wholly female, anatomically speaking.

It's more common than you think - 1 in 60 - but most people don't know they're Intersex. Does it really matter if a man doesn't have the 46,XY chromosomes most men do? 1 in 300 men don't, by the way.

OK, so what has this to do with Transsexual women? They're men, right? I mean, they look male at birth.

See a paper nearly 20 years old now:
A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality. by Zhou et al Nature (1995) 378:68–70.
Our study is the first to show a female brain structure in genetically male transsexuals and supports the hypothesis that gender identity develops as a result of an interaction between the developing brain and sex hormones

Calliope had partly female anatomy when she was born. Well OK, so do many men, what matters is *which* parts. In her case - a feminised brain. Not "spiritually" or "psychologically" by anatomically feminised. Something visible on MRI and PET scans.

We know that every human with a feminised brain, be the genitalia male, female, somewhere in between, or missing entirely - has female emotional response, instincts, even senses of smell and hearing. They are, by any rational definition, women.

Unless you think genitalia is more important than mind.

To change the brain would be like unscrambling an egg - we'd have to do surgery on individual brain cells, changing them from one type to another... curing cancer and conferring immortality is dead easy in comparison.

But as it turns out, it's ridiculously easy to change the body to (mostly) match the brain, and in the next twenty years or so, we'll be able to do it completely, rather than mostly.

Calliope's gone through as much of that process as is legal to do. Most of her documentation has been corrected. Biologically, she's more female than some of the women already attending - one in 500 women has CAH, which causes varying degrees of masculinisation.

This whole thing is caused my lack of education in biological sex, and an "Ick" factor when it comes to Trans and Intersex people.