So how familiar are you then with the literature on both sides of the aisle? Also inviting other kiwis to join, I would love to hear from some fellow medical kiwis too to hear their anon insights!
I found Debra Soh's new book The End of Gender an interesting read, although it plays to my bias as basically aggregates all the papers I found and read, mostly by Zucker, Blanchard, Bailey and Cantor. However I find her outlook rather liberal and she makes a great deal of effort on emphasizing both sides of the argument, which gives me reason to believe that she is sincere and her argumentation seems sound.
I am inclined to agree with her that sex is binary and so is gender identity. The latter however moves between the two endpoints of complete masculinity or femininity as a spectrum in how we act/present and which preferences/tendencies, feminine or masculine, we may have and is determined during gestation: we all have traits of both some more than others. Our social environment postnatal determines what is viewed as masculine/feminine, and therefore plastic, and to what we degree we can act on our desires or are forced to suppress them. Kids do little more than figuring out how the world around them works, suss out the patterns and start consolidating their gender identity around early puberty. I see no fault with that theory and it seems completely plausible to me.
I have not been able to read the opposition such as Julia Serrano's Whipping Girl, although I have read some of her blogposts and she does bring up some fair points that make me doubt Blanchards AGP Theory:
1) Cantor, Bailey, Blanchard, Zucker and Soh are all linked academically and as such are a loose group of researchers that are proponents of this theory. So they may be biased towards each other.
2)As he also states I cannot find many papers on AGP, its exclusively published by this group and Anne Lawrence who is an outlier. This creates doubt in my mind as 1) Either its such a bunk theory that other researchers have not pursued it or 2) It is as Soh states in her book that there is a large taboo on the subject within academic circles, but the latter almost sounds on the border of conspiracy theory to me.
3) He cites counter evidence by psychologist
Jamie Veale that claims that there are plenty of TG's that claim to be bisexual or asexual (albeit the latter is very small so you could see it as the exception to the rule) therefore breaking the homosexual transsexual and AGP categorization, while Blanchard has pretty much stated that he thinks that these people are not entirely honest in their answer and that they are homosexual or heterosexual. Both sides offer fair points, but it makes Blanchard look worse as he needs to "prop up" this theory with ad hoc reasoning: you may need to question the validity of the theory if you need to keep doing that, particularly if you have nothing to back up these assertions.
The caveat is that Julia, Jamie and another high up critical academic
Dana Janett Bevan from Princeton are all what we would call AGPs, which also casts doubt on my mind as that seems like a strong potential bias.
I also disagree strongly with Serano's depiction on the firing of Zucker as the account of Jesse Singal really gives reasonably doubt that this was a politically motivated firing. Serano also called the questioning approach that Zucker at al employed "conversion therapy", which I find disingenuous as he conflates it with homosexual conversion therapy and from what I can tell this was not the case: psychologists and us MD's are not a patients buddy buddy we should be allowed to question and probe a patient to come to the right conclusion and foremost first do no harm. This is particularly the case when dealing with psychiatric issues where we cannot simply do certain tests as you would with a somatic substrate. People deceive for various reasons, that should be no surprise.
The affirmative approach sounds to me like being a (legally liable) obedient pushover that just goes along and I disagree vehemently with this approach. "Zachte heelmeesters maken stinkende wonden": gentle healers cause festering wounds, as we tend to say in the Lowlands.
I believe that MD's like Olsen-Kennedy and her trans husband as a social worker are operating in good faith, but I find it chilling how little they do to challenge their own assertions by doing the necessary studies to assure themselves that 1) puberty blockers has no long-term serious consequences when given prolonged starting a young age, 2) whether kids spontaneously remit in their GD, 3) whether kids fare better with their affirmative approach vs psychotherapy/watchful waiting.
Tl;DR: Both the proponents as the opponents of the AGP theory have fair arguments yet background details surrounding them that gives me reason to doubt them.
P.S: I must say though that I find the Title of Seranos book rather distasteful/trashy as googling it brings up other thrashy novels as you would expect to go along with such a header and seems a rather male kind of thing to do speaking as a man.
Others recommended Contrapoints AGP video, but so far I could not bring myself to watch it, I find his voice and presentation extremely grating. Anybody who watched it and does he bring up fair points?
