Washington Post Buries Trans Response to Inaccurate Anti-Trans Op-Ed
Mira Lazine wrote that an offensive op-ed opposing trans medical care by a gay man made major errors in its interpretation of the history of the gay rights movement and the APA.
Republished with permission, by Mira Lazine
Earlier this month, a gay male writer wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post that completely misrepresented the history of the gay rights movement in order to make the false suggestion that gay men had waited meekly for the science to be settled before accepting the judgement of the APA that homosexuality was not a mental disorder. This ahistorical narrative was used to suggest support for transgender medical care should be revoked by the APA.
The Post refused to correct the historical errors in the piece, instead burying criticism on the letters page on May 10 under the headline, “What President Biden got wrong about immigration and Japan,” a reference to a different story. A subhead obliquely mentioned the historical errors in Ryan’s piece, saying “readers debate the history of psychiatry and sexual orientation.”
Two letters to the editor were published by WaPo. Both of them pointed out the errors in Ryan’s overly tidy narrative. One of them was from Assigned Media contributor Mira Lazine.
We believe Lazine’s letter, and the issues it raised with an opinion writers attempt to re-write LGBTQ+ history on the Washington Post opinion page, deserved better than to be buried under a headline referring to another piece. We’re therefore republishing it just as it appeared in WaPo:
Benjamin Ryan named the 1974 decision to remove homosexuality as a mental illness from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a key turning point in medical and social history. He further argued that this was due to the quality of the available science and contrasts it with contemporary research on the medical treatment available to transgender children and teenagers.
Unfortunately, 1974 was not the turning point Mr. Ryan made it out to be, either in psychiatry or society at large. It took nine more years for the APA to expel Paul Cameron, who published anti-gay pseudoscience alleging that gay people are more likely to be murderers and child predators, and it wasn’t until 1985 that the American Sociological Association condemned him for warping science in service of his campaign for the “abrogation of the civil rights of lesbians and gay men.”
Indeed, as Jack Drescher has written, psychology and psychiatry maintained pseudoscientific views about gay people for years after, with diagnoses like “Sexual Orientation Disturbance” given to those who found their sexual orientation distressing and wished to change their sexual orientation, followed by the later “Ego Dystonic Homosexuality.” It was only as late as 1987 that the American Psychological Association removed both concepts from its list of disorders.
But ending the description of homosexuality as a disorder was only part the process. It took until 1998 for the APA to issue a position statement formally opposing conversion therapy, affirming that there was no such need given that sexual orientation was not a fact about a person in need of treatment. Even then, the organization noted that “there are no scientifically rigorous outcome studies to determine either the actual efficacy or harm of ‘reparative’ treatments. There is sparse scientific data about selection criteria, risks versus benefits of the treatment, and long-term outcomes of ‘reparative’ therapies.’”
If we are to judge present debates about treatments for young transgender people by comparing them with past processes in fields like psychiatry, we must be clear about what those processes were actually like.
Mira Lazine is a freelance journalist covering transgender issues, politics, and science. She can be found on Twitter, Mastodon, and BlueSky, @MiraLazine