APA: The Bernie Madoff of Science?

How did homosexuals get to be mentally ‘normal?’ Until the 1960s, they were considered ‘mentally disturbed,’ not just by ordinary folk but also by psychologists and psychiatrists. So what happened?

Even in the 1950s, there was political pressure by some psychiatrists and gay activists to remove the designation of homosexuals as ‘mentally disturbed.’ But professionals want something ‘scientific’ on which to hang their hat; they do not want to appear ‘political.’ The landmark study by Evelyn Hooker of UCLA was that scientific thing. In fact, her study got promoted as ‘definitive’ by the American Psychological Association (APA).

‘Hooker proved that gays are normal’ said the APA. And the professional organization convinced psychiatrists that the Hooker study did just that. No wonder Hooker’s work is considered by many to be the most influential social science study ever published!

But there is a problem.

The APA lied — and it was a BIG LIE. Hooker’s study proved no such thing. Indeed, it was shoddy — filled with holes and weirdness. For instance, Hooker started out studying 74 male homosexuals but ended up with 30. Hooker would not let colleagues look at her data — and later destroyed it. And, in what might be the biggest example, on the key issue — whether homosexuals could be reliably identified on projective tests — every homosexual almost certainly revealed himself on at least one of the three tests.

To this last bit, Hooker and the APA said ‘forget about that, the 30 homosexual males were not predictably flagged on the ink blot test, so we should just ignore the rest of the findings from the other two tests.’ And, amazingly, the psychiatrists and just about everybody else did forget! So court decisions, textbooks, scientific articles — all of them misreported Hooker’s study.

But FRI has now gotten the facts out — in a major scientific journal, Marriage and Family Review. The sparks are already flying. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) — a far-left group with tons of money — wants our heads, and the article somehow unpublished. Homosexual activists are screaming that FRI is unfair. BUT, no one is denying our facts! And they are devastating.

This may be the first fraud committed by a scientific organization rather than a sole investigator. As the Hooker study is so central to the ‘homosexuals are normal’ argument, its exposure reopens the question of whether homosexuals are mentally disturbed. After all, for the American Psychiatric Association, something ‘associated with… a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, [or] disability….’ is a mental disorder. Things like alcoholism or drug addiction, for instance.

But, given that homosexual practitioners are at significantly greater risk of suffering mental and physical diseases — and this apparently leads to their shortened average lifespan — homosexuality would also appear to qualify. What is the rationale for considering homosexuality ‘the exception to the rule?’ Now that the Hooker study has been debunked and just about every study since reports that homosexuals are more apt to smoke, get drunk, use illegal drugs, and test mentally disturbed, what indeed?

Our paper demonstrates that the APA is the Bernie Madoff of science — at least when it comes to homosexuality. Who knows what else? If an organization will lie about one thing, about what can it be trusted?

Why Must a Murderer be Mutilated at Taxpayer Expense?

A federal judge has ruled that a Massachusetts man who murdered his wife but who now wants to ‘be’ a female must get taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgery. Why? Because it is the only way to treat his “serious medical need” given his constitutional “right to adequate medical care.”

So a murderer who wants lots of attention — he has been at this since the 1990s — is getting it. He wants a new career and some psychiatrists have declared he “needs” this procedure. Psychiatry got fooled by the APA and Evelyn Hooker and it is being fooled now. If a murderer ‘feels’ he should ‘be’ Hitler, does medical necessity require he be given a uniform, mustache, and get saluted? If this convicted murderer feels he MUST BE a ‘woman’ or he will commit suicide — so what? Good riddance. What is so ‘special’ about being a transgender nut that you must be served by society?

Recently, the first long-term study (10 year follow-up) was published of a large group (n = 324) of the sexually mutilated matched against a sample of more than 3,000 non-mutilated individuals.¹ The long and the short of it was that “after sex reassignment, [the mutilated] have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.”

This study looked at people who had sex mutilations (‘sex changes’) from 1973-2003. Because Sweden is a heavily regulated country, those who were studied were not asked survey questions about criminality or psychiatric problems as is common in American or British studies. Instead, their official records — and in Sweden those records are incredibly extensive — were examined for: (1) all-cause mortality, (2) suicide, (3) death by cardiovascular disease, and (4) death by cancer. Morbidity included (5) any psychiatric disorder, (6) alcohol/drug misuse, (7) suicide attempts, (8) accidents, and (9) convictions.

Before mutilation, transsexuals “had been hospitalized for psychiatric morbidity other than gender identity disorder… four times more often than controls” (17% vs. 4%). After mutilation they had higher rates of everything bad. Thus, the mutilated were about three times more apt to die, 19 times more apt to commit suicide, and about twice as apt to die of cancer or a heart condition. So, sex mutilation was not a cure.

But, were they happier in their new condition? One way to index happiness is whether they were hospitalized for psychiatric reasons (other than for ‘gender disorder’). By this measure, the mutilated were about four times more apt to be hospitalized — that is, they were not just unhappy, but so unhappy/disturbed they got put away. The authors suggested that “even though sex reassignment alleviates gender dysphoria, there is a need to identify and treat co-occurring psychiatric morbidity in transsexual persons not only before but also after sex reassignment.”

What? Mutilation is apparently just a down payment — the drain on society’s resources never stops. The mutilated were three times more apt to engage in substance abuse, eight times more apt to attempt suicide, twice as apt to have an accident (serious enough to have authorities involved), twice as apt to be convicted of a crime, and three times more apt to commit a violent crime.

These results are not dissimilar to reports by homosexuals regarding criminality, seeing a psychiatrist, etc. Past studies have shown the same relative results when comparing homosexuals to heterosexuals — homosexuals report more bad outcomes (and, when asked, at least 5% have said they might like a ‘sex change’). A key difference here is that the Swedish study did not look at subjective distress unless it led to a consultation, or crime unless it led to a conviction, etc., so this study reports only the ‘hard, actually caught’ data, and undoubtedly failed to document even more pathologies.

Again the authors: “Even though surgery and hormonal therapy alleviates gender dysphoria, it is apparently not sufficient to remedy the high rates of morbidity and mortality found among transsexual persons.” Indeed, these are deeply disturbed people, and they continue to be disturbed. Medical treatments that do not work are abandoned. So why continue sex mutilation? Why should society consider only the sexually-disturbed in need of ‘civil rights,’ and give them what they want no matter what the cost? Why are homosexuals encouraged not to change, and transsexuals allowed to flip their gender, despite the obvious negative social outcomes?

This study — by far the best of the lot — brings the whole idea of ‘mutilation therapy’ into question. Why are we mutilating disturbed people who continue to be disturbed? Do ‘feelings for the sexually-distressed’ trump science? Psychiatrists were fooled by the APA and Hooker into ‘freeing homosexuals’ to do their thing. Will they ever acknowledge they made a mistake in regarding mutilation as a treatment?