He talked at length of John Money, psychologist and sexologist at John Hopkins University Medical centre, and his model of gender being socially conditioned and malleable. He mentions Money as part of a troika including Alfred Kingsley and Harry Benjamin. He saw Money as instrumental in popularising the concept of transexuality and also in promoting the concept of "gender" as a social construct, lifting the word from its then lingual context and applying it to a sexological context. In his discussion of Money Meter rolls out the occasional non sequitur, such as mentioning Money seeming to have horns growing out of his head in reference to a photo of him. This struck me as an unnecessary attack.
Eventually John Hopkins University Medical Centre where Money ran his sexual reassignment, undertook gender reassignment surgery but Meter neglected to mention that Christine Jorgensen in Denmark in 1952 was actually the first example of this surgery. Is this the usual Ameri-centrism of Americans or just sloppy on Meter's part?
Another example of not Meter not providing the full context is in reference to the famously tragic case of David Reimer. David was a twin with his brother Brian born in 22 August 1965 and because of a botched circumcision lost his penis. Money advised the parents to have gender reassignment done and to have him brought up as a girl. Money had a strong belief in societal gender constructs. Eventually biology made itself felt in David and his parents confessed the story. David wanted to be a boy. David was reassigned as a male but in 2004 committed suicide. Left out of the story was that Brian was a schizophrenic, and depressed, and who had committed suicide by overdosing on antidepressants in 2002. No doubt the original gender reassignment was the central tragedy in David's life and ultimately precipitated in his and his brother's suicides, but there may well have been a general predisposition for depression in his family. Meter does not mention his brother's suicide. This omission does him no credit.
In talking about Money's ideas on gender Meter did not mention Money's concepts of sex-adjunctive differences and sex arbitrary differences, that is biological and societal, and to this Money added gender role. This is an unfair and incomplete treatment of his ideas by Meter.
I came across a new concept in discussion of Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. That is the concept of steel manning. Straw manning is erecting and incomplete, simplistic and inaccurate picture of an opponent's views and easily attacking the straw man so constructed. By contrast steel manning is the process of accurately representing your opponent, even going as far as eliciting feedback from your opponent to do so, and then attacking these views. Counter intuitively it is a far better method of debate than straw manning because you are then arguing against the strengths of your opponents and positions which he agrees he holds and can not object to being misrepresented. Meter does not do steel manning and his method is visibly sloppy as a result.
Meter does nonetheless present some good arguments against trans identity and gender reassignment. He mentions the work of Kenneth Zacker and mentions the suicide statistics of post gender reassignment patients. These are 20 times as high as the normal population but I was disappointed that Meter did not state any statistics for trans people who did not transition. This would have been a control comparison and its omission is disappointing. Zacker's work also showed that most teens who state they are trans (between 80% and 98%) latter identify with their biological sex.
Meter next talks about professional associations and their related politics, in particular the American Academy of Paediatrics, the mainstream and largest group representing paediatric professional and the smaller more conservative American College of Paediatricians and how some professional bodies are captured by small special interest groups. Into this comes the non sequitur of Obama Care. How? I suggest Meter load one issue into his wheel barrow at a time.
Meter does credit however for making clear the difference between transgender/transsexual and transvestite, something which is smudged in normal discussions about trans issues. Identity politics has a way of blurring nuance into simple black and white dichotomies. He makes clear that not all children cross dressing identify as the other sex.
Meter is also quite religious. Strangely he closes his talk by turning around the quote by a colleauge "The more we know about science, the more we know there is no god" by stating that the more he has done science, the more it seems that a god must exist. This is irrelevant as it is illogical and unexplained. He leaves it hanging.
One of the replies I had to my post on the sub-Reddit r/transgenderau was that Meter opposed abortion. Although his professional organisation, the American College of Paediatricians is conservative and opposes abortion among other things I have not been able to google any quotes by Meter relating to abortion, only third party reports that he opposes abortion. I do not know his position on abortion. I am pro choice. The abortion issue was irrelevant in connection with his deplatforming at the UWA and to which my post to r/transgenderau related or my blog post on being banned in that sub-Reddit.
I will close with a meme that the sub-Reddit would do well to internalise.
