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by dgellow·9y ago·view on hn ↗
From the response to "What do you hope to achieve coming out of this?":

> There’s even an anti-psychology program at OISE [Ontario Institute for Studies in Education]. It started when they got rid of [Ken] Zucker, and you don’t stop with one person. Zucker was a more than credible psychologist. He ran a very good program for people who had gender dysphoria, and he was conservative. Zucker’s attitude was that if you’ve got a kid who is complaining about their gender, you follow them up, and you see what happens, and you derive your conclusions from the research. Eighty percent of them declare themselves as homosexual, ninety percent settle into their biological identity as adults. His logical conclusion is to keep the goddamned surgical knife sheathed, and don’t bring out the hormones too soon. Well that’s all gone – it’s illegal now for doctors to question the decision of a three-year old child that he is a she. And if the parents want to start biological transformation, it is illegal for the doctor to reject that.

1 comments
Zucker was a hack who's popular with people like this because he believed that not trying to actively force kids not to be trans was morally equivalent to turning them trans, ran his clinic accordingly and gave it a veneer of scientific respectability when the scientific community wouldn't touch it. Just following up and seeing what happens is the mainstream approach he rejected. I had a look at some of his research and every time, there was a huge unbridgable gap between the conclusions he drew - which, naturally, supported his own existing beliefs about trans people - and the actual evidence he had.

This idea that dubious work driven by the researchers' existing anti-trans beliefs is the real science and that anyone who disagrees with it is therefore attacking science is, sadly, fairly common: http://freethoughtblogs.com/atg/2016/08/07/academic-transpho...

> I had a look at some of his research

can you elaborate? which papers?

This was probably a year or so back and I'm not sure I kept notes, sorry. Think I concluded that Julia Serano had already done a pretty decent job of dismantling his arguments and it wasn't worth doing more.