Upon further reflection and deliberation
Filed by: Bil Browning
December 11, 2009 8:50 PM

http://www.bilerico.com/2009/12/upon_further_reflection_and_deliberation.php

The Bilerico Project editorial team has unanimously decided to remove Ronald Gold's contributor status and have taken down his previous post from the site. We regret that his words have caused so much hurt to so many in our community.

We appreciate all of the heartfelt responses and shared concerns about the post. This is only the third time a post has been removed from the site since the Bilerico blog started over five years ago; it is not something we take lightly.

We are very proud of our record of trans inclusion and participation and would never intentionally seek to harm anyone. We let you down this time and it won't happen again.

I am glad to see they took responsibly.



Blessed Be
Janet

That not responsibility, its more like an abrogation of it.  If there is no debate it starts to look more like a religion based on faith and little else.

I am glad it is gone because it was simply not medically correct, and was therefore untrue. GID is a medical condition, therefore this  should never have been published in the way that it was.  Opinion is one thing, bad science is something else.

GID is a medical condition

Sez who?  Not the APA, or the insurance companies that use the APA or AMA guides as a way to determine payoffs.  It perhaps should be considered that way, but at the current time, only France does I believe. GID in the USA remains a psychiatric classification with a medical treatment model.

Actually, I beleive the AMA did go on record as saying GID was a medical issue:
      In June, 2008 the American Medical Association stated that "medical research demonstrates the effectiveness and medical necessity of mental health care, hormone therapy, and sex reassignment surgery as forms of therapeutic treatment..." for emotional pain caused by distress with one's assigned sex and sex characteristics. AMA Resolution 122 called for health insurance coverage of these treatments for what it termed "a serious medical condition."

I found this at: http://professionals.gidreform.org/issues.html

That actually agrees with what I said, that: a psychiatric classification with a medical treatment model.

Quote from: tekla on December 11, 2009, 10:22:32 PM
That not responsibility, its more like an abrogation of it.  If there is no debate it starts to look more like a religion based on faith and little else.

Yes, you are right.  But despite the 300+ comments made in response to Gold's article, no discussion was taking place.  Even the author himself refused to defend his ideas.

Well just because one side is brain dead does not require the other side to be - however...

Gold's opinions are not well recieved and for obvious reasons. However...(there is alway a 'however')
Ron Golds article while maybe crass and uncooth did not cross the line of hate speach. He just strait to the point said his piece. I do not care how much an idea is repugnant to me I will not be clossed minded to the point of shutting out my opponents from voiceing thier personal brand of stupidity. Because to do so is to comit the crime of tyrany which is by far a more serious offence to the human psyche.

Gold should be reinstated his post restored and locked without coment. Save a secondary disclaimer disavowing conection with his ideas. Let this drival speak for itself.

Gold should be reinstated his post restored and locked without coment. Save a secondary disclaimer disavowing conection with his ideas. Let this drival speak for itself.

Well, that's the way a rational adult society would behave.  But, that's not what we're dealing with is it?  No,  we have a 'freedom for me, but not for thee' state of mind.  You're always free to agree with us, but never to disagree.  Hey, its half a freedom ain't it?

I don't see why they revoked his contributor status. It was THEIR fricking decision to post his little rant, and THEY should take responsibility for doing so. THEY clearly wanted his opinions up there. Instead, they seem to be blaming him. Yeah, I know, Bil posted a sort-of apology and took responsibility for allowing the post in the first place. That hardly ameliorates their insult to him.

If they want to tell him that all of his subsequent posts need to be backed up by evidence and research and the usual editorial standards, that's fine. If they decide that he isn't qualified to write about trans topics, that's fine; let him talk about gay stuff only. But to cut him off completely? Now, that's definitely in the spirit of free exchange of ideas.

And I think they should have left the post unless they were going to wipe the whole thing, comments and all (which I would not prefer). I disagreed with Gold, but I feel about him the same way I feel about neo-Nazis in this country. If you deny their freedom of speech, you violate an amendment that I hold dear. If you suppress them, they can accurately claim that they are second-class citizens. If you force them underground, YOU CANNOT KEEP TRACK OF THEM.

Then they can become invisible and scary and powerful. I think we should keep our enemies where we can see them. Let our enemies rant and foam at the mouth, but try very hard not to respond in kind. Let others see how rabid and hateful and ignorant and illogical they are. Eventually the worm will turn. But how can we negotiate the threat if we can't see it?

I agree that Gold's post should have been left up, if for no reason other than to make sense of the comments.  As it stands now, its left to our imagination as to what he wrote, and what I would imagine is worse than what he actually said.

As for revoking his contributor status.... I dunno.   We aren't privy to the communications between Gold and the Bilerico editorial team.  I am disappointed that Gold was unwilling to respond to the criticisms expressed in the comments.  Perhaps he was also unwilling to write another article taking those criticism into account (doing so, I think, would have been about as good.)  Bilerico seems to want contributors who "play nice" e.g. denying contributor status to Monica Helms.  My sense of Gold, from his one reply in the comments section, is that he feels entitled to offend others and not be accountable for it.

Blierico chose to allow the post. They saw it, they sanctioned it. I assume they either share his beliefs or just want the traffic. I'm not familiar with them, but have they ever hosted a similar posting about homosexuality being a delusion?

Oh, FFS, people, telling a crappy contributor to piss off is not censorship; it's an exercise of editorial judgment. Mr. Gold spoke from ignorance without any evidence of serious consideration, and ended up producing a steaming pile of drivel. It's not just that it was offensive -- which it surely was -- but that it lowered the level of debate. What he said was based on such a naive understanding of gender that it wasn't really worth talking about. Oh, yes, it was one tiny step above the straw-man model he set up regarding dolls, toy trucks, and "personalities," but it was still pretty damned ignorant.

Sorry, but some people are just more worthy of a pulpit than others. And when it comes to trans issues, he doesn't have anything to contribute that I can't get from Focus on the Family or Exodus Ministries. Mr. Gold can take his steaming pile over there, or put up his own damned blog. Bilerico isn't silencing anyone by telling them to move along. There's plenty good room on the Web for Mr. Gold to spew.

Or, as an alternative, we can all tell Bilerico that they need to provide a spot for a representative of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. We wouldn't want to silence alternate viewpoints, after all.

Because its bad writing, on a very touchy topic, with a very, very touchy audience which has a tendency to at least slightly (ahumm) over focus on the self, I think it was all too easy to miss (because being a bad writer, he really didn't do a good job of saying it, or making the first mistake of bad writing - assuming that everyone reading it knew WTF he was really talking about) that the real focus of his hostility was not the TS community, but the psychiatric community and how they have convinced the TS community that they, and only they (parroted endless in here as: Well, you really need to talk to a gender therapist as the first advice about every TG topic) have the solution/cure to the 'problem' of being TS, and how (Ding! Surprise!) works out that the psychiatric community is - strictly by accident I'm sure - the first in line with their hand out to collect fees, better seen in many cases as merely tolls. 

Now old Mister Gold actually accomplished something in his life, something that lies at the heart of a current debate in our community.  He was one of the people who got homosexuality out of the DSM.  I think in the wider sense he wants to take most sexual behavior out of the realm of mental illness and psychiatric problems, and seen as just part of the normal warp and weft of human variance.

I don't doubt that if I could create some sort of 'more perfect' society (which I'm not sure isn't happening with or without my efforts) where there was far less gender stereotyping, where a greater range of behavior - both in terms of diversity and in terms of deviance from the norm - is casually accepted, that fewer people would feel the need to seek out psychiatric or medical solutions to things that are no longer perceived as a problem.  Which is what I think he was trying to say. 

On the issue of medicalization of transgender identities and the inclusion of GID in the DSM -- as you suggested, there is plenty of open and vigorous debate on the subject. If Mr. Gold was trying to add a perspective to that debate, he failed utterly, despite perhaps having much to offer.

I think you and Mr. Gold both miss the important distinction between psychologists (who make up the bulk of gender therapists) and psychiatrists (who are involved with compiling the DSM). The kind of medicalization and gender-stereotype-reinforcing you and Mr. Gold talk about just isn't there in the psychological community. And before he talks about medical issues, he should probably ask what trans people actually think about them. There are plenty of parallels between the DMS issue for gay and trans people, but they aren't the same.

But the worst part is this:

Quote from: tekla on December 14, 2009, 01:01:58 AMWhich is what I think he was trying to say.

Well, he should have said it, then. But if that's what he meant, he failed.

I think you and Mr. Gold both miss the important distinction between psychologists (who make up the bulk of gender therapists) and psychiatrists (who are involved with compiling the DSM). The kind of medicalization and gender-stereotype-reinforcing you and Mr. Gold talk about just isn't there in the psychological community.

I think both of us know which is the tail, and which is the dog, and we know the tail does not wag the dog, the dog wags the tail.  As long, and so long, as medical billing is done by coding based on various forms of the DSM (there are such things for non-psychoanalytical medical fields too) then who defines those terms gets to create the rules to a large extent - having control over the insurance payments is a pretty big power. 

Yeah, psychologists can do all sorts of things and go in all sorts of directions that a psychiatrist can not (but not having access to the supreme tool of Western Medicine, a key to the medicine cabinet) they've been pretty much forced to go that way.  God knows, I spend a lot of time in Sonoma Country, home to some of the most whacked out psychology in the world.  But not all are getting insurance coverage for that either.

And before he talks about medical issues, he should probably ask what trans people actually think about them.
I doubt very seriously that the doctors are ever going to give up control over the issues, no matter who wants the debate.  No more than the Ph.Ds are going to give over control of the university to the grad students.

It was a poorly written article which seemed to void any kind of real research at all as he targeted transgender folks calling us deluded and calling our SRS mutilation. I can't see how anyone would support this article to be honest.

Just the fact he said Cross Dressers an Post Op Transexuals should't be discriminated against. What about me? I am pre op.

It was just a pile of hate thrown together.

You missed the distinction in what you wrote, that's all.

But, as I said, even if what you are talking about was at the heart of what he was driving at -- something worthy of discussion and about which lots of discussion goes on -- it sure didn't come across that way. It seemed more like an excuse to bash trans people. FAIL.