Can you please cite the place it's "in there," Cathryn. As it stands your statement isn't supported as the term itself is not used that I have been able to find. That it may well be "lurking" is not the question. But, to date, " ->-bleeped-<-" has never been recognized as anything more than Ray Blanchard's adaptation and linguistic trope for what he and mentor Freund have believed, not proven or supplied any creditable scientific evidence for at all. Unless one surmises that Anne Lawrence's copping to something like that narrative rates as "scientific proof."
Which is, afterall, the level of "science" these "thinkers" have at their base. Wanting something to be true doesn't give me truth. Feeling something should be true isn't a scientific anything, it's a thought. Thoughts and opinions appear to be normal among all human beings, but their existence doesn't provide one with "authority" anymore than does my acquaintance with a host of gender-specialists give me some deep insight into the development of sex in the human body.
Given the bases you've used thus far, I could simply toss out a label for you and voila, you'd become in that instant a "Red Queen." That would hardly make you a "Red queen" or a character in Lewis Carroll's works of literature would it?
The entire labelling ploy is remarkably full of irrationality and a lack of human compassion, dignity and value. As I wrote for my blog, it's a way to deflect the uncareful reader from the true point here: humanity is various and we fail to notice that we fail to notice things such as that.
What seems to me to be truly "at stake" in our discussion is that recognition that humanity has many experiences and configurations inside a frame that makes every last one of us about 99% alike. Now that's the biological reality of the matter. Period.
That we have different ways and means of interpreting who is "me" and who is "like me" and who is "other" is simply a carry-over from days when we were spread thinly as snail-darters are now on the planet. "The stone-age child meets the modern mother." We continue to react to one another as dangerous strangers rather than as examples of similarity and sameness.
We wish to make defining characteristics of human-being out of our own fears and fever-dreams: old folk are different, young folk are different, "transvestic fetishists" are socially unacceptable. Hell, that's why we use the term fetish in a supposedly "scientific" compendium now isn't it?
Because the dirty "secret" of DSM is that it's not, at base, a scientific work, at base it's a work that makes for payment for treatment, niches for study and "work" and it's considered now and has been since its inception a means of defining whom we will treat as "human" and whom we will "exile" to some other area where societies can "deal" with them.
As a practioner and someone who uses DSM on a regular basis I can tell you that that is the truth.
So, for all practical purposes, the argument is simply about whom I will accept as like me and whom I will relegate to some niche where they "require treatment" so they will confine their expresssions of self and reality to those I am comfortable with and my society is comfortable with.
The difficulty with Western "psychology" is that it categorically rejects "soul" in spite of the origins of it's name and adheres rigorously to pathologizing what is uncomfortable for me to deal with.
Nichole
