Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
UPDATED: It is the position of the American Psychological Association that homosexuality is not a choice or a mental illness, but rather a normal variant of sexual orientation for a certain percentage of society. They came to this stand based upon scientific research that showed no connection between homosexuality and psychopathology. In addition to considering homosexuality a normally occurring human behavior, the APA does not support therapies to change sexual orientation and points out that there is no reliable science to suggest such therapies are effective. The APA also issued a resolution opposing discriminatory legislation and initiatives aimed at LGBT people.
In addition, geneticists have also found a link between genes and sexual orientation. While the ongoing studies have not been definitive is establishing genetics as the sole determining factor in human sexual orientation, they do indicate that both genes and environmental factors do play a role in determining sexual orientation. This comports with the research upon which the APA used to set their policies.
The stance of the country’s most recognized psychological professional association and the psychological, sociological and genetic research goes right to the heart of what’s going on in Anoka, Minnesota. Suicide, like sexual orientation, has environmental components influencing the behavior. Research has shown that ambient temperature and duration of sunlight are the dominant environmental influences on suicide, but that social cohesion, socioeconomic status, and social support are also important influences. The situation in Anoka involves students, teachers, school policies, religiously based politics and the suicides and attempted suicides of teenagers. It is not a pretty story.
Over a little less than the last two years, the Anoka-Hennepin school district has had seven student suicides, four of which involved students that were either gay or perceived to be gay and two of those cases involved direct anti-homosexual bullying. Since January of this year, seven Anoka Middle School students have been hospitalized for attempting or threatening suicide. Considering that studies since the 1990’s indicate that homosexual teens have a suicide rate at least twice that of heterosexual teens, this becomes a greater concern when the Anoka-Hennepin school district has been identified by Minnesota public health officials as a “suicide contagion” area due to their abnormally high numbers of suicides and attempted suicides.
Without question, Minnesota is a region with a higher risk for suicides given that it is in a high enough latitude to experience lower average ambient temperatures as well as shorter days on average than regions closer to the equator. But what about the other factors that influence suicide; social cohesion, socioeconomic status, and social support? Anoka is a fairly well to do suburb of Minneapolis, so socioeconomic influences aren’t likely contributors to the abnormally high suicide rate. Social cohesion and support are another matter all together.
Over the last two years, students in the Anoka-Hennepin school district have faced a concerted campaign degrading homosexuals that is driven by local religious and political leaders, but the issue dates back to the mid-90’s when the district instituted a policy known as “no pro homo”. Under this policy, teachers were forbidden to discuss homosexuality, even in the health terms of HIV/AIDS education, and told they could not teach that homosexuality was a “normal, valid lifestyle.” Later the policy was amended to order teachers to remain neutral on the issue of homosexuality. A policy change that only created confusion in the staff by contributing to their uncertainty on how to address bullying and reasonable questions students might have had. Both of these policies were driven by religious conservative activist groups like the Minnesota Family Council (MFC), and its local affiliate, the Parents Action League (PAL). These groups went so far as lobbying to put discredited “reparative therapy” materials in schools. The MFC is also behind a seven year battle to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to ban gay marriage. The amendment comes up for vote next year.
If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, these are the kinds of “therapy” discredited and disapproved of by the APA, but are reportedly practiced by Marcus Bachmann (husband of politician Michelle Bachmann) at his Bachmann & Associates mental health clinics. That is not the only connection the Bachmann’s have to the MFC. Before entering politics, Michelle Bachmann served as a consultant to the MFC. She continues in this role today. Last May, she headlined an MFC Annual Dinner along with Newt Gingrich. As far back as 2004, Bachmann was a proponent of creating an intentionally hostile environment for teen homosexuals in Minnesota schools. As a state representative, Bachmann joined demonstrators seeking the amendment to ban gay marriage, telling the crowd in her now infamous “irrational leaps in logic” style that “In our public schools, whether they want to or not, they’ll be forced to start teaching that same-sex marriage is equal, that it is normal and that children should try it.” Michelle Bachmann, like a lot of people, obviously doesn’t understand what a false equivalence is. Teaching that homosexuality is a normal variant in human sexuality is just good science, teaching that homosexual pairs deserve the same respect as heterosexual pairs is just good civics if you believe that all people are created equal, and nobody is saying that schools should endorse any kind of relationships – heterosexual or homosexual. Endorsement and education about are not the same things. Education is about providing information (and logical skills) so that people can make informed decisions. Endorsement is about pushing a specific agenda; whether it be “buy this product”, “choose this God” or “hate people for no other reason than they are different”. Endorsement of any kind has no place in education. If you think it does, you are free to send your children to religious or other indoctrination based private schools. The drive to oppress homosexuals is not scientifically or legally valid in its basis. The drive to oppress homosexuals is a religious doctrine, specifically a right-wing Christian conservative doctrine. The answer is simple: If you don’t like homosexuality, don’t be one, but you cannot force your religious beliefs on others via state run institutions like public schools without running afoul of the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment.
Since the revelation of the higher than normal rate of suicides within the school district, Michelle Bachmann has been curiously silent on the matter. She is, however, on record as opposing anti-bullying legislation. Addressing the state legislature, she said “I think for all us our experience in public schools is there have always been bullies, always have been, always will be. I just don’t know how we’re ever going to get to point of zero tolerance and what does it mean?…What will be our definition of bullying? Will it get to the point where we are completely stifling free speech and expression? Will it mean that what form of behavior will there be—will we be expecting boys to be girls?” Her indifference if not outright hostility to a problem that is related to the unusual number of suicides in her home school district is enough to make one question Bachmann’s willingness to serve all the people of her district and not just the heterosexual conservative Christians she has associated herself with both past and present.
Do we need another state politician that doesn’t represent all of their constituents? Do we need a possible Presidential candidate that has telegraphed that she has no interest in representing the needs of constituents that don’t meet her personal religious standards? When politicians contribute to an environment of intolerance and hatred and this intolerance has a measurable effect on our youth, no matter its basis, should they be held accountable for their misdeeds at the ballot box? Are stronger measures such as Sen. Al Franken’s (D – MN) push for legislation that protects LGBT students necessary? Are the facts of science ever enough to discourage the bad behavior of zealots? What can and should be done to help the youth of Anoka, Minnesota? Bullied and bullies alike?
What do you think?
UPDATE: Civil rights groups the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights plan to sue the Anoka-Hennepin School District in Federal court over their neutrality policy and the Department of Justice and the Department of Education investigating the bullying incidents. CNN will air a special report this Sunday, August 7, at 8PM EST. The following is a CNN story leading up to that special report.
If you or someone you know is in crisis and is considering suicide call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or the Trevor Project Lifeline for LGBT youth at 1-866-488-7386.
The hotlines are free, confidential, and run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Source(s): CNN, Mother Jones, The Guardian, The American Psychological Association, Science Daily, The Anoka-Hennepin School District
Kudos: Liberty and justice for some and Elaine M.
~Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
@JT, there appears to be a repeating pattern of laser-like convergence of every single thread to the topic of Gene vs. Buddah by a single mind at the expense of civil debate.
There exist civil remedies.
@Brian Harris,
That statement is not consistent with the heated rhetoric in Gene ‘Buddha” Howington post.
Gene,
Regarding the CNN report, Saturday is the 6th…, not Sunday…
@ Gene “Buddha” Howington
You are right, I should have raised that fine argument against the original post as well.
Great article….Until I walk in the shoes of the person I am condemning…I am playing God….
If somebody else said the above they get credit…Right now I think I wrote it…
RE: kderosa, August 3, 2011 at 2:08 pm
I do not know about Gene Howington’s source.
The following is sufficient for me, regarding the “official” American Psychological Association viewpoint:
http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/sexual-orientation.aspx
To preclude any appearance of misinformation, I am a member of the Association for Psychological Science and I AM NOT a member of the American Psychological Association.
“It is my observation, since I was chronologically a baby, that bullying bullies reinforces bullies proclivity to bully others, for doing that profoundly validates the process of bullying.”(J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.)
Disagree wholeheartedly but then I also consider “turning the other cheek” to be pure bunk. I repeat, I am not the least bit interested in helping bullies discover their inner good self … I leave that to those who figure they have one.
Mike S.,
I started my campaign against bullies at a young age and have never understood from whence the recognition stemmed or why I never feared those who attempted to wield fear.
Nature or nurture?
“[I]t is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
~Macbeth Quote (Act V, Scene V)
@ Gene “Buddha” Howington
This article is so wrong I don’t know where to start. And the wrong part has nothing to do with the “therapy” doled out at the Bachmann & Associates mental health clinics, which for all I know might be accurate.
No, the problem is again with your understanding of science and how it works.
First you state: “It is the position of the American Psychological Association that homosexuality is not a choice or a mental illness, but rather a normal variant of sexual identity for a certain percentage of society.”
I can’t find any source for the ABA has embraced the “normal variant” position. They appear to be silent on the issue, having un-endorsed the opposite view some years ago. What’s your sourcing?
Then there’s this statement: “In addition to considering homosexuality a normally occurring human behavior, the APA does not support therapies to change sexual orientation and points out that there is no reliable science to suggest such therapies are effective”
This staement appears to be accurate. The science is scant. So, the source you copied that statement from was reasonable and fair.
But, then we get to your characterization: “If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, these are the kinds of ‘therapy’ discredited and disapproved of by the APA, but are reportedly practiced by Marcus Bachmann (husband of politician Michelle Bachmann) at his Bachmann & Associates mental health clinics” which is typical Buddha overreach and spin.
As far as the APA disfavoring such therapy, they appear to have taken that position as a matter of policy. They also appear to take a somewhat contarry position when discussing the science:
(Summarized nicely by Wikipedia) The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has stated “some people believe that sexual orientation is innate and fixed; however, sexual orientation develops across a person’s lifetime”. In a joint statement with other major American medical organizations, the APA says that “different people realize at different points in their lives that they are heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or bisexual”. A report from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health states: “For some people, sexual orientation is continuous and fixed throughout their lives. For others, sexual orientation may be fluid and change over time”. One study has suggested “considerable fluidity in bisexual, unlabeled, and lesbian women’s attractions, behaviors, and identities”.
That suggests behavior is in issue and behavior can be changes. Though the APA does seem to difavor such behavioral changes as a matter of policy, not necessarily based on scientific grounds.
Alos, the APA didn’t discredit anything. The APA merely pointed out that the “therapy” lacked scientific validation. No knowledge is not the same as scientific discreditation, whatever that is.
And that was the “strong” part of the article. The suicide part was much weaker part, but there’s no need to ever reaach it based on your other faulty premise, described above.
If you want to criticize Bachmann, just do it directly. Don’t try to hide behind a patina of scientific credibility. When you get the science part wrong, it exposes you as the sham you are. Just put the Buddha mask back on and do your hit pieces the right way — filled with vitriol.
Once one hits the Support Group Circuit, boy do the scales fall from eyes! This happened to me in the early 1990s in East Lansing, MI. In these settings you end up meeting people from all over the map. Because they are not clinical, the support group settings naturally lead to making friends, and so you begin to hang out socially. I filmed a transgender Halloween Ball at one point. You did not know what belonged to who and you did not care! It was a huge celebration after millennia of something other than that.
Our country’s grappling with LGBT issues is courageous, and it’s only the beginning. Two things were perfectly clear to me after these experiences: both gender and sexual orientation are spectra, and for some, quite malleable in terms of self identification in time. This pre-sages what is coming for society as genetic engineering grants more control over our material constituency. More spectra are coming.
You have to allow folks to breath if you want to hear what they have to say. To what extent are these spectra obscured due to, say, calling for the death penalty for those who claim it for themselves?
Oh yes, of the two biggest bullies on the planet, e.g. yaweh v allah, I’d say the former has peaked, and the latter will when the oil runs out.
I see the IRS has revoked the tax-exempt status of an anti-gay hate organization. Here is the lede: “The IRS has revoked the tax-exempt status of Americans for the Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), a group whose leader once said that gay rights is, ‘Satan’s point of attack on the United States of America.’ ”
Whole story at the link:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/08/irs_revokes_tax-exempt_status_for_anti-gay_group.php
RE: Blouise, August 3, 2011 at 12:34 pm
anon nurse,
I actively bully bullies and apologize to no one for it. Haven’t met one yet that I like and I let others worry about “helping” them.
#######################
It is my observation, since I was chronologically a baby, that bullying bullies reinforces bullies proclivity to bully others, for doing that profoundly validates the process of bullying.
I prefer to model the behavior I prefer to experience in and from other people. That way, I demonstrate an achievable, realistically attainable alternative to the behaviors I find abusive and therefore objectionable.
If I do that to which I object, I cannot truthfully object to it.
Reciprocal retaliation in the pursuit of justice, as I find the late Dr. Martin Cooperman profoundly observed from within framework of the dyadic psychoanalytic process of psychotherapy, is a purely defeating process.
I have worked at developing effective ways to genuinely respect people whose conduct is that of bullying. I can be difficult, painful, excruciating and as though without plausible reward.
Why would I ever want, or be willing, to be rewarded for doing what I believe to be decent, kind, and affirming of other people?
I have encountered many people whose treatment (mistreatment?) of me was of bullying. Without exception, when I have become able to know and understand such people, I have found myself connecting with a person who had been met with severe earlier bullying and who was punished to the extent of being unable to resolve the experiences through verbalizing them, and, having been so punished, was left without recourse to acting out that which was impossible to not express, impossible to express in words, and, finally, neurologically impossible to not express through overt, destructive conduct.
Beware of dispositional attributions. They are inextricably false. A person’s disposition is purely situational.
I recall a song by the Threshold Choir that goes, in part, something like, “Hatred will not cease by hatred. By love alone will it end.”
Elaine,
Thanks for the update. I’ve added the video to the article and contact information for two suicide hotlines just in case any of our readers are grappling with this issue personally.
If any reader is contemplating suicide, please call either of these numbers. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. If you need someone to talk to who won’t pass judgment on you to help you find the path out of the place you are it, please call. It gets better. There are people ready, willing and able to help you find out how and they are just a phone call away.
It is hard to imagine that the psychiatrist community once considered LGBT as a mental disorder or disease.
Raff,
To give you an idea of the vituperation of this in the psychological community, this change was being hotly debated during my first year at a Psychotherapy Training Institute. By year’s end the Institute had literally split in two, with the students having to choose which side they went with.
Blouise,
That was a heartwarming story about your relative having been lucky to sustain a 32 year relationship. Last week, a dear cousin by marriage, wedded her partner of 16 years, as a celebration of NY’s new law. Hearing the news will be joyous as will attending their religious ceremony later in the year.
Throughout my working years, many of my co-workers and friends were Gay and lesbian. I enjoyed my relationships with them and saw them for the human beings they are. I too will not stand for prejudice spoken in my presence and am not able to be amicable with prejudiced people.
anon nurse,
I actively bully bullies and apologize to no one for it. Haven’t met one yet that I like and I let others worry about “helping” them.
Civil Rights Groups Plan To Sue Minn. School District Over Curriculum Policy On Sexual Orientation (CNN)
mahtso, an excellent question.
My suspicion is that it is the “different other” that is feared and reviled. We see the same phenomenon appear whenever someone is perceived as “different from me.”
As far as sexual matters go, in talking with homophobic straight people, they simply cannot imagine being attracted to a member of their own sex. They cannot wrap their heads around the idea of engaging in erotic play with a same gender person. Remember Jerry Falwell and his obsession with strap on dildos when talking about Rachel Maddow. I suspect there is also an unconscious erotic reaction with which the homophobe is struggling. A bit of cognitive dissonance going on in cases like that.
As far as “different others,” we see it in racism, sexism, tribalism, and xenophobia,. We see it in how the mentally ill and the handicapped are either treated as invisible people or are actively discriminated against.
Blouise,
Thanks for sharing the story… and its happy ending, as well as what should be everyone’s “zero tolerance” policy.
Is the new PC term “genderqueer” as a simplification for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Transsexual, Two-spirit, Queer, and Questioning?
Transgendered, in the DSM-IV-TR seems to have two categories, Male to Female (MtF) and Female to Male (FtM). That list is incomplete. For the DSM-IV, another transgendered category is under consideration, Male to Eunuch (MtE). Of course a woman who gets a hysterectomy as a surgical correction of a transgendered condition would be an Female to Eunuch (FtE) if a castrated woman is also a form of Eunuch.
I am, and have long been, an openly transgendered person, albeit one who does not seek, want, or need Sex Reversal Surgery (SRS). I have been married for over 35 years and, to the extent it remains feasible, intend to stay married for as long as we both shall live.
Would it be reasonable and even intelligibly accurate to state that our children, when we had two children (a boy and a girl) had two mothers, one of whom had one X chromosome and one Y chromosome, and the other mother two X chromosomes?
What rightfully, actually determines a person’s gender except the person whose gender is being determined? How many genders truthfully exist in a biological sense, if the brain is an aspect of biology? Two? Three? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions?
I recall it was during December, 1952, the Jack Benny radio program, the opening joke about taking a trip to Europe; going to London, where a man is a man, to Paris, where a woman is a woman, and to Copenhagen, where a man is a woman. The late Christine Jorgensen…
My mom, dad, brother, and I were listening to the console radio in our living room, having finished Sunday supper. Shortly after that joke, I excused myself to go upstairs to” use the bathroom” in a timely manner and not because of the joke. Then I went to my bedroom, also upstairs, lay down on my bed and cried, and cried some more. I knew that I was not totally alone in ths world where the inextricable biological uniqueness of every individual person was not something that would necessarily forever be socially, despicably hateful.
Well before I learned to talk, my brain resolutely informed me that there was an interesting mismatch between what my brain told me my body was supposed to be (xx female) and what my body told me it was (xy male), and a sense of gender identity discrepancy was an intractable feature of my life for roughly the first two thirds of it so far.
In 1986, my understanding of biology and family cancer risk informed me that, unless I got some effective cancer-preventive medical care, I would likely soon be very, very dead. Culminating an effort of more than two years, I was able to persuade a vasectomy doctor to do a “radical vasectomy” (or bilateral orchiectomy) in the early summer of 1986, by agreeing to never, never ever, identify that doctor. The next week, my brother, graciously proving the validity of my cancer risk concern, was diagnosed as having the form of terminal cancer I sought to prevent.
About two months later, my colon was removed at Michael Reese Hospital. It is now about 25 years after those surgeries, and I have apparently not developed cancer, but have had many, many surgical procedures (at places including the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, and elsewhere.
An endocrinologist at the University of Chicago put me on female hormones as a way of validating my being transgendered, but, after a few years, it was decided to stop them because of the risk of female hormones also functioning as possible cancer promoters in my body.
I may be somewhat of an expert on being transgendered, having largely transitioned from male hormones to female hormones to eunuch hormones. Unlike testosterone, which I experienced from puberty until the “radical vasectomy” as though unpleasantly brain-toxic, female hormones did not “fog” my brain like testosterone did.
I may be somewhat of an expert on being transgendered, having studied the biology of gender about as much as I would conjecture anyone ever has.
I may be somewhat of an expert on being transgendered, having studied the social pathology of false dichotomies about as much as I would conjecture anyone ever has.
If only I were an exhibitionist (not me), Wisconsin law regarding gender and dress would allow me (as an XY) to publicly flaunt my upper endowment, in a way not allowed for an XX?
I am a unique person, just like everyone else. I am neither more nor less normal than is anyone else, because being unique is impossible to actually avoid.
I do know about bullying and abuse and the despair it can produce in a person who is shunned, denigrated, despised, and scorned. During the first three days of kindergarten, at Columbia School, in Seattle, perhaps a third of my classmates were so cruelly bullying that, on the way home, walking beside my mother, I chose to not dive under the back wheels of a Seattle public transportation bus which passed in front of us at the intersection of Ferdinand and Rainier.
For what may have been a millisecond or so, it came to me that the abusive children could never again hurt me if I dove under those wheels; but in the next millisecond or so, it came to me that my so diving would hurt my family a thousand times more than those bullying children could ever hurt me.
More than I recognized that suicide would make my life on earth vastly easier for me than avoiding suicide, I realized that my suicide would make life far harder for others. Hence, I am here.
Were I to list my understandings of severe abominations, I would regard the biologically ludicrous notion of binary gender dichotomy as belonging in the most severe category of extant child-abusive abominations.