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John Robert's avatar

What a great interview! But horribly alarming. Ben Appel's observation connecting the current enthusiasm among health care professionals to rush putting gender non-conforming kids and teens on the conveyer belt to drug and surgical intervention to the old attempt to "cure" homosexuality with hormones is right on the money. They are both discredited conversion therapy. One attempted a cure by changing the object of the patient 's sexual attraction. ( It just made patients more active!) Now the morons are attempting a cure by changing the patient 's anatomy and endocrine system to make them more conventionally "appropriate". It reminds me of an article I stumbled upon titled, "Trans[ition] in Iran" . It's apparently no longer available but what I found was credited "Downloaded from wpj.sagepub.com at COLUMBIA UNIV on December 19, 2014" and the masthead read "WORLD POLICY JOURNAL" . As I understood the report, gays in Iran do have an alternative to being thrown off the roof of a tall building: undergoing reassignment surgery and a lifetime of hormone maintenance. In fact, the government offers financial support for both. It's a strange example of reasoning from religious dogma. Sex between two men, say, is a grave offense against Allah 's law, but sex between a man and a eunuch with surgically constructed imitation female genitalia brings the two back into conformity with Allah's design.

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John Robert's avatar

I've found a way for public to access the article on Iran's policy. Go to Google Scholar link found in Google "Lisa Terman ". In list of her publications follow link to "Transition in Iran" which gives an abstract. The complete article is found at the link at top of the abstract page "(PDF) at Columbia.edu".

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Dr. K's avatar

Lisa, Those of us that do not listen to/watch stuff on the Internet (or elsewhere -- there are just not enough hours in the day) are hoping that you will get an inexpensive/free voice transcriber and publish this interview in written form. Most of the Substackers (and others) now do this for those of us who are visual learners. The transcriptions are not perfect, but they are generally good enough. Here's hoping...

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Lisa Selin Davis's avatar

This is a very reasonable request. I started to do it for the last interview and it was so full of "um" and "ah," and misspellings that I wanted to fix it, and that was taking hours and I gave up. But if you're cool with a robot's version, I'll do it!

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Dr. K's avatar

Lisa, We understand the um's and ah's. But the gist of the conversation generally comes through loud and clear. And if you've ever gotten a text from anyone, you are used to reading through misspellings/wrong words. It just will provide your content to far more people and that is a good thing. Many thanks.

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