Quote from: Sky-Blue on January 31, 2013, 01:11:42 PM
I've been reading a few peer reviewed papers on Transsexualism and it seems like psychology as a whole has no clue what it's talking about. It talks of gender variance, but in black and white terms; how backwards is that! Plus most of the time the papers are just outright offensive and rely on generalizations.

I'm curious as to what other intellectuals think about Psychology.

Is it a Pseudoscience?

Isn't it extremely black and white?

Are there many hard facts backing up many of its claims? Or is the majority of it just ridiculous?

(Edit)

The only reason I asked for intellectuals is because I didn't want the thread to degenerate into, "All psychologists are idiots/jerks".

So, as far as what contributions to the understanding of GID has been made by the fields of Psychiatry and/or Psychology ...I am afraid the answer is: "NOTHING!!!"..the proverbial "jack s.."

Now, Neurobiology...that is a different story..neurobiologist have undercover a wealth of information on the  biological basis of GID, say for the last 15 years or so...

Dr. Peky

Quote from: peky on February 01, 2013, 12:01:30 PM


So, as far as what contributions to the understanding of GID has been made by the fields of Psychiatry and/or Psychology ...I am afraid the answer is: "NOTHING!!!"..the proverbial "jack s.."

Now, Neurobiology...that is a different story..neurobiologist have undercover a wealth of information on the  biological basis of GID, say for the last 15 years or so...

Dr. Peky

I was hoping you would get involved with this discussion.

There is one more thing to think about and that is science itself is self correcting. Disproven or falsifiable theories are thrown out especially incompetent science. Pseudoscience will continue on because it has a religious like following. The so called "new age" medicines despite out and out disproof still persist. People still want to believe that magnets or sounds or any number of things are a cure for disease, old age, cancer you name it.

The reason I think we as a group are misunderstood is that there is not enough research and by this I mean "real" research. When was the last time you heard of long term follow up studies of post-ops? No one is doing them. They know the process works and weeds out those who probably don't want a real change so why fix something that isn't broken? Our very lives are a living testament to the efficacy of the standards of care. That might be why we don't see much. Also why look for genes, brains etc when it may or may not prove anything because there is so much overlap between the sexes. That's just my thoughts.

the problem is that psychology isn't really a science at all, per se.  it's a social science, which is a different thing that abides by different standards and uses a different method of approaching problems than hard sciences do.  trying to uphold the standards of neuroscience when you're looking at psychology isn't fair to either of the disciplines, and probably won't net you much in the way of answers.

(which is to say nothing of the travesty that is pop psychology.)

I think there are a few reasons why it seems so black and white.

1. They kind of approach an understanding of something (like convergence in math) where you build up a series of this is true, this is not true little by little until you see the whole picture. Unfortunately because it's very theoretical and is largely based on sociology which is a huge huge huge thing to try to understand, the chances of ever seeing the whole picture are slim.

2. There's a language barrier. There are only so many ways to describe something without leading to confusion. You're talking about trying to describe feelings that one person has over feelings that another person has. By the time you get done explaining it all, nobody's going to remember what the original purpose was. So they come up with labels to group similar ideas together to make them easier to work with. If you start adding too many labels, nobody's going to be able to remember them all and psychology will start having lots of splits like the sciences do, where people can only specialize in very tiny sub-sections and never fully understand the whole subject. And I don't mean psychology as the whole subject. The whole subject may end up being transsexualism with 10 different sub-sections of specialization and the same goes for the other labels that fall under transgender (and any other area of psychology for that matter).