on •

LEXIE CANNES STATE OF TRANS — A notorious center for anti-trans reparative therapy in Canada has been shut down, curtailing decades of harmful treatment. The closure of Dr. Kenneth Zucker’s Child, Youth, and Family Gender Identity Clinic at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) followed an independent review into it’s operations. They found, among other things, bias, backwards thinking, humiliation as a standard practice and cases of not placing the client’s needs ahead of family members.

Trans advocate Brynn Tannehill told ThinkProgress: “This [independent review] is damning, and long overdue. The transgender community has been saying the same things the report concluded for over a decade. Given the unethical, unscientific, and damaging nature of the work done at CAMH and revealed by this report, the research done there by Dr. Zucker and his cohorts there will be relegated to the dustbin of junk science, where it should have been all along.”

Tannehill also said Dr. Zucker’s decades of damage will not go away as fast as the clinic will.

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/12/16/3732840/ex-trans-reparative-therapy-clinic-closing/

—–

Scientific American in December, 2015 ran a wrap on trans research: “Is There Something Unique about the Transgender Brain?” Some kids immediately know they’re not the not the gender of their birth sex, and exploration of this indicates that there may be a genetic basis. Studies show trans people tend to have similarities to brains of their experienced gender than those of their natal gender (ie: a trans man’s brain is similar to a biological male’s brain), or a brain uniquely different from either the male or female brain. Although findings for a biological cause for gender dysphoria continue to grow, the case of a doctor being able to provide definitive answer to whether any given child is trans is still down the road.

(Researchers: Antonio Guillamon of the National Distance Education University in Madrid and Carme Junqué Plaja of the University of Barcelona; Sarah M. Burke of VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam and Julie Bakker of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience.)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-there-something-unique-about-the-transgender-brain/

—

The University of Arizona is developing a transgender studies degree program set to begin in 2016. Director Susan Stryker of the University of Arizona Institute for LGBT Studies says interest in the program remains high since the idea was first hatched by her in 2013 following UA’s desire to retain her employment at the university.

Stryker says the university saw the idea as a means to raise their international profile, enabling them to attract quality students and research funding. $150,000 of outside funding has already been raised and faculty positions are falling into place and an international conference is planned for September 2016.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/susan-stryker-transgender-studies-university-of-arizona_564e3023e4b031745cf07ae6?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000050&

——

Politically, trans people still transit stormy waters, but scientifically, the seas are smooth.

Watch the award-winning trans film LEXIE CANNES right now: http://www.amazon.com/Lexie-Cannes-CourtneyODonnell/dp/B00KEYH3LQ Or get the DVD: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0963781332

Read Lexie Cannes in The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/courtney-odonnell/

Share this: Twitter

Facebook

Reddit

LinkedIn

Tumblr

Print

Pocket

Email

Pinterest

Like this: Like Loading...

Categories: Transgender, Transsexual, Trans