American Psychological Association links ‘masculinity ideology’ to homophobia, misogyny

January 10, 2019 — Suzan

From NBC News:  https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/american-psychological-association-links-masculinity-ideology-homophobia-misogyny-n956416

For the first time in its 127-year history, the APA has issued guidelines to help psychologists specifically address the issues of men and boys.

By Tim Fitzsimons
Jan. 8, 2019

For the first time in its 127-year history, the American Psychological Association has issued guidelines to help psychologists specifically address the issues of men and boys — and the 36-page document features a warning.

“Traditional masculinity ideology has been shown to limit males’ psychological development, constrain their behavior, result in gender role strain and gender role conflict and negatively influence mental health and physical health,” the report warns.

The new “Guidelines for the Psychological Practice with Boys and Men” defines “masculinity ideology” as “a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.” The report also links this ideology to homophobia, bullying and sexual harassment.

The new guidelines, highlighted in this month’s issue of Monitor on Psychology, which is published by the APA, linked this ideology to a series of stark statistics: Men commit approximately 90 percent of all homicides in the U.S., they are far more likely than women to be arrested and charged with intimate partner violence in the U.S., and they are four times more likely than women to die of suicide worldwide.

Jared Skillings, a psychologist and the APA’s chief of professional practice, told NBC News these new guidelines are intended to educate mental health professionals about the unique issues facing this patient population. The APA published a similar report about girls and women in 2007 and is expected to publish an updated version this year.

“Masculinity ideology,” Skillings said, was important to highlight because it “represents a set of characteristics that are unhealthy for men — men who are sexist or violent or don’t take care of themselves.”

The report addresses the “power” and “privilege” that males have when compared to their female counterparts, but it notes that this privilege can be a psychological double-edged sword.

“Men who benefit from their social power are also confined by system-level policies and practices as well as individual-level psychological resources necessary to maintain male privilege,” the guidelines state. “Thus, male privilege often comes with a cost in the form of adherence to sexist ideologies designed to maintain male power that also restrict men’s ability to function adaptively.”

Continue reading at:  https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/american-psychological-association-links-masculinity-ideology-homophobia-misogyny-n956416

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Coming Out as Trans Isn’t a Teenage Fad

January 10, 2019 — Suzan

From The New York Times:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/opinion/trans-teen-transition.html

Conservatives are inventing a “syndrome” to undermine young people’s transitions.

By Jennifer Finney Boylan
Jan. 8, 2019

At the end of the long weekend when my daughter came out as transgender, she headed back to her car with her girlfriend. I watched them from my apartment window as they packed up. My child looked up, and waved.

Then she drove off.

I closed the window. Tears rushed to my eyes. She’s saying goodbye, I thought. I’ll never see her again.

This, of course, turned out to be malarkey.

In the months to come I’d see her lots of times, and each time she seemed happier, and more herself.

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You’d think that as a transgender person myself, I’d have rolled right along with my daughter’s unveiling. You’d think that I’d have been able to show her even half the grace that my 80-year-old, Republican, evangelical mother had shown me, almost 20 years before.

In spite of everything I know about being trans, I still had lots of my own dreams tangled up in my daughter’s — formerly son’s — life. I loved that child exactly as they had been. The idea that this person was now going to be different made me think, at first, that something precious to me was being taken away.

If it was a struggle for me, I can only imagine how hard it is for other parents.

Unfortunately, what many other parents are receiving right now is not encouragement to find wisdom and understanding. What they are getting instead is a bogus new diagnosis — Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. The inventors of this spurious term claim that R.O.G.D. is not a real trans identity but the product of social pressure.

Abigail Shrier, writing in The Wall Street Journal, describes it as “social contagion.” She says that young people — many of them college-aged, and most of them born female-bodied — are embarking upon transition, with its surgeries and hormones and other accompanying challenges, in the same way a person might take up the ukulele.

Even the headline on that essay is an insult: “When Your Daughter Defies Biology.” An abundance of scientific research makes clear that gender variance is a fundamental truth of human biology, not some wacky dance craze.

Transgender people have not come up with the entirety of our existence solely to hurt Tucker Carlson’s feelings. We do not embark upon transition because it’s groovy. We are here because our hearts demand it.

Continue reading at:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/opinion/trans-teen-transition.html

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