[content note: rape apologism]
In 2013, Ray Blanchard– head of the paraphilia working group for the DSM-5 and originator of the controversial ‘two-type’ theory of transness— gave an interview about his work as part of the paraphilia working group, which included the following passage:
[Interviewer:] Do you think autoandrophilia, where a woman is aroused by the thought of herself as a man, is a real paraphilia?
[Blanchard:] No, I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism, because there are all these women who want to say, “women can rape too, women can be pedophiles too, women can be exhibitionists too.” It’s a perverse expression of feminism, and so, I thought, let me jump the gun on this. I don’t think the phenomenon even exists.
Quite frankly, I am flabbergasted.
Ray Blanchard openly admitted, in a publicly available interview, to attempting to include a condition that he does not think exists in the DSM. Why? Because feminists might get angry at him if he didn’t.
In the published version of the DSM-5, Transvestic Disorder does not include a “with autoandrophilia” specification; it existed only in the draft version. One hopes that someone read this interview, talked to Blanchard, and explained to him that the DSM should include conditions that exist and should not include conditions that don’t exist. One would hope that that was a fact a psychologist would be aware of once he has his PhD, or gets tenure, or is involved in writing the DSM, or is literally the head of a DSM-related working group. But I suppose we all miss minor details now and again.
Perhaps there should be some sort of training or orientation for people joining a DSM working group. I imagine, ten years from now:
“It is important,” the trainer might say, “that the DSM reflect reality as best it can. Psychologists and psychiatrists will use it to guide their treatment; insurance companies will allow or deny coverage based on it; drug companies will develop medications for the diagnoses we create; journalists and self-help writers will take inclusion in the DSM as a sign that a disorder wasn’t made up by crackpots. Human psychology is messy and it’s hard to create categories that aren’t at least a little bit arbitrary; we’re not expecting perfection, just do your best. A good-faith effort is fine.”
A member of the sleep disorders working group raises her hand. “So, if we’re just supposed to make a good-faith effort, what does this actually rule out?”
“Well, for example,” the trainer says, “if you would describe a phenomenon with the words ‘I don’t think it even exists,’ you should not put it in the DSM.”
“Who would do that?” the head of the depression working group says. “This is absurd. This is worse than the ‘instead of being a Nazi, consider not being a Nazi’ trainings we have to do every time we do research.”
“Yes, well,” the trainer says, “you’d think, but unfortunately Ray Blanchard fucked it all up for everyone. Please turn to page twenty of your booklets for the quiz entitled ‘In What Circumstances Is It Okay To Put A Disorder In The DSM Even Though You Don’t Think It Accurately Describes Reality At All’.”
The room is silent except for the scribbling of pens. A hand is raised.
The trainer sights. “Yes, Ray?”
“I’m stuck on number 12, ‘is it okay to put a disorder in the DSM, even though you don’t think it exists, if a feminist might get mad at you and write a mean article saying you’re wrong?'”
“That’s a no, Ray,” the trainer says.
“But what if it’s a really, really mean article? Like what if they call me a transphobe or something? Surely it’s okay if they might call me a transphobe.”
“We’ll cover that in Unit Four,” the trainer says, “where you learn about the exciting career opportunities available in pitching articles to Quillette.”
Sadly, this vision of the future would not come to be.
In fact, other than having “with autoandrophilia” removed as a specification, Ray Blanchard has faced zero negative consequences for his behavior whatsoever. There was no investigation; he was not censured; he was not removed as the head of the paraphilia working group; his previous research was not reviewed to see whether he has at other times engaged in academic dishonesty in the name of political correctness. This interview appears to have been entirely forgotten.
Indeed, Ray Blanchard has somehow gotten a reputation as a defender of science against political correctness. Presumably this is because his beliefs about transgender people are extraordinarily unpopular among trans advocates and he has faced various negative consequences, such as harsh criticism and Twitter suspension. It is easy to assume that a person facing a lot of criticism for their beliefs is a disinterested scientist following the data where it goes without regard for politics. As a recent example, Helen Joyce, an editor at the Economist, objected to Blanchard’s recent Twitter suspension by calling him “a world expert in the field… setting out his findings from a lifetime of research” and highlighting his work as head of the paraphilia working group.
Certainly, feminists and trans advocates have sometimes made arguments that contradict the best scientific evidence; certainly, it is important to pursue truth even when it goes against what you find politically palatable. But to the best of my knowledge no trans advocate or feminist has ever put a diagnosis into the DSM-5, which they sincerely believed did not exist, for the sake of political gain. Certainly, none of them have done so not because they think it would help people– which would be understandable, although morally wrong and academically dishonest– but because experiencing criticism from feminists is scary and they don’t want to.
That is literally all Ray Blanchard.
Have you considered that if you don’t like being criticized maybe you should be involved in writing the DSM?
Late in the interview, Blanchard says:
But I don’t think we should promulgate untruths for the sake of political agendas, even if they are worthwhile political agendas.
I believe this is excellent advice. Ray Blanchard should consider following it.
—
Two final notes:
In the interests of being more intellectually honest than Blanchard, I’d like to highlight that Blanchard appears to have changed his mind to some degree about autoandrophilia. He has recently argued that “autohomoeroticism”– a paraphilia in which female people are aroused by the concept of being gay men– may exist, although rarely. However, it is unclear to me whether Blanchard sincerely believes in autohomoeroticism, or merely has figured out that lying in order to keep feminists from yelling at you works better if you don’t openly admit to lying. It seems wise to me to view all his research with distrust.
Second, I have avoided discussing anything other than the object-level issue in this post. Although I am a trans advocate, I hope people of all political persuasions may find Blanchard’s behavior here objectionable; certainly, people who are against trans advocacy have made it very clear that they consider science to be more important than political correctness. I don’t want the conversation to be derailed by other, more controversial topics. Therefore, I have written my other thoughts in a separate post, which will be up on Wednesday.
Why do Americans even need DSM when the rest of the world uses ICD just fine?
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If you subscribe to cross cultural psychology theories, every country should have their own DSM. Psychiatric disorders present differently within different cultures, so actual practitioners should use a guide tailor made for the culture of their patients
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It seems to me that:
1. There’s a large difference between making up an entirely new condition, and merely leaving out saying that there’s a large sex difference in some condition. In this case, Blanchard clearly did the latter.
2. The root of the problem is sexism-accusations, not Blanchard’s reaction. Thus, the appropriate group to call out seem to be feminists.
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Full disclaimer: I believe autoandrophilia is real. I don’t know whether it’d change my assessment of this situation if I didn’t believe it was real.
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If you can’t handle the possibility that people might criticize you, you should not be working on the DSM. The DSM is criticized in many ways, some correct and some incorrect; this is an extremely predictable outcome. Being able to do the job to the best of your ability in the face of criticism is a basic job requirement. If Blanchard felt he was unable to do this, he should have resigned and given the position to someone else.
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I doubt Blanchard proposed it because he couldn’t handle criticism, though I may be wrong; are there other cases where Blanchard showed that he can’t handle criticism well?
I think a more-likely explanation is that his autoandrophilia beliefs aren’t documented by formal studies or anything like that, so he doesn’t have much he can use to argue when it comes to sexism accusations. But I don’t know the specifics and before we really discuss this, we should get some more information about the degree to which he pushed for AAP to be included in the DSM.
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I’ve gotta say, I’m literally in awe at the charity you’re extending to this guy.
He explicitly said that he acted the way he did in order to avoid being accused of sexism; you can waffle about whether he was telling an unforgivable big lie or a forgivable little lie, but the fact remains that he admitted to academic dishonesty in the service of dodging criticism. His credibility as an truth-teller who doesn’t sway to political correctness — one of his selling points! — is suspect.
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I do believe that the sexism played a role (anything else would be dumb), but a decision is rarely influence by only one factor.
And when it comes to the question of being a truth-teller who doesn’t sway to political correctness, few do so to a full extent. I don’t think this sort of thing is a major issue (unless someone uncovers evidence that he pushed hard for the inclusion of autoandrophilia or something, which nobody has done yet).
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“2. The root of the problem is sexism-accusations, not Blanchard’s reaction. Thus, the appropriate group to call out seem to be feminists.”
If people are accusing someone of not including something because of a form of bias – i.e. sexism – then, surely, those people believe that the thing does exist (and therefore should be included).
No scientist should expect freedom from being criticised by people who think that they’re wrong.
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What may also be relevant is how he went about it. I don’t know of any documents describing any details, so if you have some please post them or something, but what I imagine happened was that he gave some justification of autogynephilia being relevant in AMABs, and then proposed adding “with autogynephilia” and “with autoandrophilia” specifiers. This doesn’t seem super objectionable to me.
On the other hand, if he made up reasons to include autoandrophilia specifically, and made up fake information about autoandrophilia to include in the DSM, then that’s a far bigger problem.
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The purpose of the DSM is to be an agreed set of diagnostic criteria. The idea is that it has a clear, objective definition of, say, “depression”, so that any two psychiatrists talking about depression will know what the other means – even if one of them doesn’t believe depression exists or doesn’t believe it’s a mental disorder.
If anything I’d say it’s even more important to have a clear definition of a condition if people are arguing over whether it exists. It would be very unfortunate if there was an argument among psychiatrists about whether condition x existed just because different people were using different definitions of condition x. For someone who doesn’t believe condition x exists to say “here is how I define condition x; here are the precise symptoms for which I would give a patient a diagnosis of condition x; also I do not believe any patient will ever actually present with these symptoms” is very much a positive contribution to medicine.
As far as I can see it’s entirely appropriate for a contributor to the DSM to work on a clear definition for a disorder that they believe does not exist, but that other psychiatrists may want to talk about.
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The DSM-5 is aware that this is a useful thing, which is why there is a chapter for Conditions For Further Study, where there will be clear definitions for research but psychiatrists will not diagnose people with the condition under the mistaken belief that it is commonly accepted by experts within the field. If Blanchard had attempted to place autoandrophilia in the ‘Conditions For Further Study’ chapter, I would be commending his open-mindedness.
It occurs to me that the existence of this chapter is not widely known; I will edit the post to include it.
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Do we know that he didn’t suggest placing it under Conditions For Further Study?
Again, if you have documents with the specifics of what he proposed, then it would be good if you could post them here so we can discuss it in a more-informed way.
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I wasn’t aware of that, so I looked a bit more. I couldn’t find the explicit criteria, only a popular summary, but it sounds like the decision between including a condition in the main section and in “conditions for further study” is explicitly subject to political considerations (an example given was that premenstrual dysphoric disorder was relegated to further study due to protests). If that’s the APA policy then it seems entirely possible he was faithfully fulfilling his duties.
Proposing a disorder you don’t believe exists is certainly unusual, but it seems like a big leap to claim this person must have lied.
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Are you drawing on more information about this situation that you haven’t shared? Because this seems like an awful lot to conclude from three sentences in a Vice interview. For example, is it clear that “proposed” means he made a serious effort to get it included in the DSM? And given that he has said contrary things about autoandrophilia (or “autohomoeroticism”) at other times, is it possible he may have just been in a bitchy mood during the interview and said something he didn’t mean, or oversimplified what he actually believes?
If he made a serious effort to get a condition he doesn’t believe in added to the DSM, that’s pretty bad, but unless there’s more documentation I think you’re running way ahead of the evidence.
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Blanchard has consistently insisted that autohomoeroticism and autoandrophilia are not the same thing and autoandrophilia doesn’t exist; his belief in autohomoeroticism also seems to be relatively recent.
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His “heterosexual gender dysphoria” here seems to hint at AHE: http://individual.utoronto.ca/ray_blanchard/GID_Women.pdf
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> Have you considered that if you don’t like being criticized maybe you should be involved in writing the DSM?
The sentence is missing a ‘not’ in the second clause.
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You’re flabbergasted?
That’s laughable.
Oh yes, poor widdle Ray, scared of those mean feminists. Maybe he can write for Quilette.
I wonder how Tim Hunt’s second career as an internet columnist is going. It took me a few tries to figure out how to even get the the google to tell me what his name was. I doubt the people who took him down could remember his name either. They’ve moved on to the next target.
I bet Justine Sacco is enjoying a thriving career at Quilette too.
I hope Allison Stanger has recovered from her concussion. If not I’m sure those sweet Quilette dollars are enough of a consolation.
Ray Blanchard acted as a coward. He should have said what he thought was true, not what he thought would keep him out of trouble. He should not have told lies. He certainly should not have put lies into the DSM.
If the Ray Blanchard’s of the world did not participate in lies then we would not recognize our country either.
But I find it infuriating the way you minimize and condescend to what he was afraid of. Everyone is afraid.
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ugh this was supposed to be a quote block:
“And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me.”
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Ray Blanchard has tenure. The entire purpose of tenure is to isolate you from real-world consequences for your beliefs. If there is any person whose fear of being accused of being sexist is laughable it’s Blanchard’s.
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@ozy
Social Justice advocates have found a way to get around this, which works if the administration is sufficiently progressive, by claiming that stating certain beliefs is abuse (‘violence’) and/or harassment. Tenure doesn’t protect professors from being fired for those reasons.
In general, tenure provides merely some protection. Ultimately, it can’t force academics to work with a professor or students to attend lectures. The professor can (and probably will) be fired if she can’t do her job. This enables an indirect approach, where the people who associate with the professor are harassed, causing her to no longer be able to do her job, which is ’cause’ that allows her to be fired. Here again, we see that Social Justice advocates have found a justification for this, by coming up with new terminology for guilt-by-association.
Finally, as we’ve seen with Bret Weinstein & Evergreen State College, if the president of the university is a SJW, he can just tell the campus police to stand down as SJW vigilantes go after professors.
PS. Note that people are increasingly mobile and globalist, so tenure may be less effective at protecting people as in the past, when it was more common for people to stick to one job for their entire career.
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Brett Weinstein and Heather Heyer had tenure too.
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Technically, Evergreen doesn’t have tenure, but contracts for life. Studies of these contracts suggest that job security actually is higher than tenure, although that may be due to a confounder (because characteristics of contract-based colleges are different) or because they are less likely to get rid of poor performing teachers. It’s possible for there to be a Simpson’s paradox, where the (presumably comparatively large) subset of professors who suck at their job, plagiarize, sleep with students, etc have more job security, while people like Bret Weinstein have less. I’d want to see a study or analysis specifically of the job security of the very heterodox (relative to the administration) before I could judge.
If anyone is interested in this enough to buy and read a book on the subject, which is a set of people that doesn’t include me, Tenure on Trial: Case Studies of Change in Faculty Appointment Policies seems like a rather good overview, judging by the Google Books preview. I’d be interested in your free labor in the form of a book review 😉
In the interest of fairness, I’ll do a little free labor myself by noting that the book suggests that contract systems may reduce the quality of faculty, in particular by not having a high-threshold decision point, but that faculty tend to get these long term contracts much more casually.
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You wonder how Tim Hunt is doing. Well, the Wikipedia article will tell you:
“By 2017, Hunt was lecturing again. In June, he traveled to Germany with the Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative.[35][36] In October, he presented at the second Molecular Frontiers Symposium at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.[37][38] In December, he held the inaugural lecture for the Year of Research at the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station in Naples.[39][40] In 2018, he returned to Lindau.[41] In March of 2019, he participated in the fourth Nobel Prize Dialogue in Tokyo on the theme of aging.[42]”
So your interest in the matter does not seem to be entirely serious.
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Oh man I read the salient quote years ago on Wikipedia (forget what article) and it stuck with me because of its silliness. Was just thinking of it the other day; had no idea this was the same as the two-type transness guy!
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It’s not clear from the quote that he told any lies or deceived anyone, is it? Is there any additional information that suggests that?
Because I mean, for all I can tell from this post, Blanchard argued against its inclusion in the DSM, while also being the one who proposed it. For example, consider this:
“What do you think of including autoandrophilia? I’m not sure there really is any such phenomenon, but the existence of autogynephila could suggest that we at least consider that autoandrophilia exists.”
Not that I am saying that this actually happened, because I don’t know that, either. But that’s one example of a statement that is both consistent with the quote you posted and would not imo show any intellectual dishonesty or poor practice on Blanchard’s part.
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Did it exist in a draft version? How do you know? I agree with Notpeerreviewed’s comment that you seem to be extrapolating a lot from the word “proposed.”
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Clarification: I left the parent comment because I thought that the Julia Serano essay linked in the sentence (link text starting with “does not include”) failed to support to claim that the autoandrophilia (AAP) specifier appeared in a draft DSM-5, because there were no hits when I used my browser’s Ctrl-F search functionality to search for the substring “autoa”, but it turns out that the text actually does say, “many of us were surprised to find that Blanchard also added ‘autoandrophilia’ […] as a new specifier to this proposed diagnosis” (page numbered 160). The Ctrl-F behavior of my browser (Firefox 68) on the linked page seems to depend on which page element is active (last clicked), which is really weird and unexpected to me!
(Although it’s still unclear to me what Serano’s additional source was; footnote 22 goes to the same Vice interview.)
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A lot of the commentary here has focused on precisely how to understand Blanchard’s remarks on autoandrophilia. It’s worth noting that the rest of the comment is equally absurd.
To pick a concrete example: Blanchard implies (in the year of our lord 2k13) that the claim “women can be exhibitionists too” exists only as a “perverse expression of feminism”.
On the other hand, “My Secret Garden”, a compendium of female-reported sexual fantasies from 1973, includes, e.g., a subject who, upon becoming aroused by having her genitals observed by a neighbor, began to have intercourse with her husband solely in the context of an erotic fantasy where her genitals were placed on display in Madison Square Garden to an audience of hundreds of thousands.
Now, perhaps this doesn’t meet the DSM criteria for paraphilia, since it doesn’t disrupt the respondent’s life. But Blanchard’s assumption women can’t be exhibitionists is not remotely supported by evidence.
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The belief that women can’t be paraphilic is more because Blanchard & co think that paraphilia-like sexuality in women is more akin to a temporary learned sexual obsession than a persistent sexual orientation.
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Is this in part about the framing, anyway? Couldn’t the same examples have been used to illustrate the existence of ‘thing where you fantasise about physically being the ‘opposite’ sex’? It feels like then the default assumption would be that it existed in men and women, but you could then add notes about how you think it must be rare in women cause you haven’t seen any cases or whatever…
I feel like I’m not being good at expressing this. What I mean is that nobody had to go out and prove the existence of the two separate disorders ‘depression when women have it’ and ‘depression when men have it’.
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I’m pretty sure the standards for “academic dishonesty” aren’t just “will include things they’re not sure exist but which might exist”
A lot of things are fine in academia as long as you’re open about them.
If I’m working on a paper and think a certain type of mutation in a gene will be 100% deadly such that we would never see people with it… but some of my co-authors or colleagues think it might turn up one day next to the similar ones we’ve found, it’s not academic dishonesty to include it as a proposed category even if I personally doubt it exists in the wild.
Particularly if I talk openly about it and state for the record my beliefs.
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Someone on r/TheMotte made a reply to this that I thought was insightful and deserves to be cross-posted here. (Not my own post but hopefully they’ll forgive me for copying their work):
To make a comparison: I spent a while on the volunteer board of a church.
Every year, one of our congregation members would offer us a very generous deal on snow removal. His prices were about 40% below market rates, and he was extremely prompt.
But snow removal is expensive. So, every year before we signed his contract, I’d do some due diligence. This meant spending a few hours calling other companies for their bids. Every year, their bids would be worse than Phil’s bid.
On a personal level, this felt like an obnoxious waste of time. I was burning a few hours of my time on a task I knew to be pointless. Get me on a bad day, and I’d say it was “so I couldn’t be accused of just giving money to my friend.”
But, from a random congregation members perspective, that accusation would be reasonable. They don’t know what snowplowing costs. They just see me writing a check to Phil for $$$
So, I’d bring the bids to the board meeting and move to consider each of them. As part of that motion, the president would direct the secretary to save a copy of the bid in our files. And then we’d vote, with the board unanimously rejecting each of my proposals in turn, until we finally got to Phil’s bid.
The steps, along with “bid considered, rejected on price,” would go in the meeting minutes.
Ozy’s critique would apply to me. I “proposed” a contract that I knew to be a bad deal, and I knew would disrupt the good service the congregation enjoyed, and I knew would take business away from someone everyone liked.
And, obviously, I really hate Phil because the minutes show that I only presented his bid after literally every other option was rejected.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/bytvw2/comment/er5r1yy
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One mark of intellectual honesty is remaining open to the possibility that one’s belief system may be wrong, which is how I interpret Blanchard’s proposal of autoandrophilia as a possible condition despite not personally believing in it. There is no indication in the interview that he tried to get it included in DSM-5. I think you’re reading too much into his off-the-cuff remark.
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What if he had restated his answer more diplomatically as “I personally don’t believe autoandrophilia exists, but I proposed it to encourage other researchers to look for it and perhaps prove me wrong”? Would you find that more acceptable (though it amounts to the same thing)?
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