My discussion on an alternative view of gender and sex continues. In this post I will focus on the model that shaped the autogynephilia theory.
There was one big problem with the biological sex model. It was created within a society that valued a scientific discourse within a democratic culture. As long as the social mores fit with the theory, science could be used to suppress women, blacks and homosexuals. But as soon as the democratic process liberated one group after the other, it became abundantly clear that working class people were not stupid, that women could become excellent scientists, that Irishmen and black people could (in the end) become presidents and that homosexuals could marry and establish loving families.
And scientists who were convinced that this were so, used their power and their influence to demask the racists and the sexists. But in some cases the scientist were forced to stop labelling groups as sick perverts, not because they stopped believing this was so, but because it became politically impossible.
In 1973 homosexuality was removed from the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The old belief system had crashed into the revolution of 1968 and it had to go into hiding in order to survive. It did so by redefining the unit of analysis.
Note that in the biological sex model, what is found between your legs define your natural behavior and your place in the world. Women, that is human beings with vaginas and uteruses are weak, passive etc.etc. And they are also exclusively attracted to males, because males are the only ones who can give them babies. And women are programmed by nature to love babies.
The natural existence of same-sex relationships could no longer be denied, however. There were too many of them. The two Kinsey Reports on human sexual behavior, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male from 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female from 1953, by Dr. Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy and others, had shown that even white Anglo-Saxon Americans did not do what they preached. Women were horny and men had sex with men. Lots of it. Kinsey also found that there were no clear cut boundaries between heterosexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality.
There was one big problem with the biological sex model. It was created within a society that valued a scientific discourse within a democratic culture. As long as the social mores fit with the theory, science could be used to suppress women, blacks and homosexuals. But as soon as the democratic process liberated one group after the other, it became abundantly clear that working class people were not stupid, that women could become excellent scientists, that Irishmen and black people could (in the end) become presidents and that homosexuals could marry and establish loving families.
And scientists who were convinced that this were so, used their power and their influence to demask the racists and the sexists. But in some cases the scientist were forced to stop labelling groups as sick perverts, not because they stopped believing this was so, but because it became politically impossible.
In 1973 homosexuality was removed from the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The old belief system had crashed into the revolution of 1968 and it had to go into hiding in order to survive. It did so by redefining the unit of analysis.
Note that in the biological sex model, what is found between your legs define your natural behavior and your place in the world. Women, that is human beings with vaginas and uteruses are weak, passive etc.etc. And they are also exclusively attracted to males, because males are the only ones who can give them babies. And women are programmed by nature to love babies.
The natural existence of same-sex relationships could no longer be denied, however. There were too many of them. The two Kinsey Reports on human sexual behavior, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male from 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female from 1953, by Dr. Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy and others, had shown that even white Anglo-Saxon Americans did not do what they preached. Women were horny and men had sex with men. Lots of it. Kinsey also found that there were no clear cut boundaries between heterosexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality.
