Some of you have reported that comments posted do not show up in my blog.
I can see that this is the case, as I get emails from Blogger (the Google blog publishing service) with the content of your comments, even if they are not published online.
If I see this happen again, I will take the liberty of posting the text in one of my own comments, under the relevant post.
Don't hesistate to email me at jack.molay@gmail.com if this happens again.
Jack
Thank you for this article. I would like to make a few comments on some of the issues raised by you in the sequence in which they appear in your piece.
ReplyDeleteBlanchard reduction of the entire transgender issue to sexual urges, and therefore the denial of their reality and the classification as deviants is of course the easy way out if he cannot otherwise describe the phenomenon of human beings crossing the social dividing line between genders and having a need to reconstruct the physical determination existing at birth. As discussed in another place Blanchard is good at building typologies, that is the reduction of what he perceives into a system that for him describes and thereby explains his perceptions. The difficulty is that it is still a reduction. The richness of the phenomenon is reduced to less in the process and the end result becomes poor. It also leaves the niggling feeling in the reader that "it is not quite right", something is missing.
In your description of the Weinrich work a thought emerges for me that may help clarify an approach to conceptualizing the transgendered phenomenon. The research indicates that we are essentially developing gender-neutral in the first phases of gestation. That neutrality is then shifted if you will by hormones which are an environmental factor in the strictest sense of the word in that they come through the environment of the developing foetus. If this research is correct, the instinctual capacity of human foetuses includes both mount receiving and mounting impulses. The hormonal environment during gestation "organizes" the predisposition for either gender once it begins it's work.
In my view this is a very important aspect of this whole debate. It completely debunks our notion that there are two god given genders and everything else is a perversion, as Blanchard in not so many words theorizes. What it really shows is, that if you study the phenomena of gender expression then gender is a continuum not a dichotomy.
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