Links

[conuly]

How LGBTQ+ Activists Got “Homosexuality” out of the DSM

Remembering the London Refuge for South Asian Nannies Far From Home

As masks fall out of fashion, Etsy sellers ask themselves, 'now what?' (What I'm getting out of this is that I should probably order more of my preferred mask style now.)

Food scraps recycled into materials stronger than concrete, yet edible

The Strange Story of Dagobert, the “DuckTales” Bandit

Ancient human faeces reveal gut microbes of the past

Should SUVs Get a Pedestrian Warning Label?

Would you wash with snail slime soap?

It’s Not Delivery, It’s…

What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed

100 years after Tulsa Race Massacre, the damage remains

When No Landlord Will Rent to You, Where Do You Go?

Comments

[steorra]

Your links to the "damage remains" and "No Landlord Will Rent" articles appear to be reversed.

[james]

I did exactly that - ordered three final face masks of my fav style in summer prints. I noticed a lot of etsy sellers have them on sale, but I suspect they're gonna end up with a lot of stock on hand.

[lauradi7dw]

Beau Ties in Vermont has a one day sale (25% off) today, so I bought enough to stock us up through next flu season. They'll be fine - their primary business was always bow ties and such, but their masks fit my husband better than any I had found. I had just received a fairly cheap etsy one today that made me wonder if the maker was making any sensible profit on it anyway.

[fayanora]

I for one intend to keep wearing masks indefinitely.

[conuly]

At least in crowds and trains.

[siderea]

How LGBTQ+ Activists Got “Homosexuality” out of the DSM

Hrm. This account is non-obviously problematic. As you know, Bob, this is my academic turf. One of the conservative talking points about the deletion of homosexuality from the DSM is that it was something non-medical activists did to (perpetrated against) the American Psychiatric Association. Despite being ostensibly laudatory of the role of activists, this article, presumably unwittingly, hews pretty closely to the homophobic account, leaving out, as it does, any discussion of how activists changed minds in the APA, and badly misleads the reader as to how it played out.

One would be excused for coming away from this article with the impression that protesters pressured the APA into changing the definition of mental illness by shouting slogans or writing think pieces in secret gay newsletters.

What actually happened was that highly organized protesters had a specific demand of the APA, and insisted it would keep disrupting their meetings until it was met. And that demand was to have a meeting with the DSM committee. That this was all they wanted, a meeting, came as a surprise to the APA members who received it, but they were like, "Is that all? Okay." So the meeting happened. And at the meeting, the gay activists – more specifically speaking, Charles Silverstein, a psychology grad student – provided the DSM committee with a great pile of scientific evidence, in the form of a literature review paper, that psychiatrists didn't know about, because it had been conducted in other fields than psychiatry, such as psychology, anthropology, and even animal ethology, and published in journals psychiatrists didn't read.

The activists didn't just say, "well, I'm a highly functioning adult so why are you calling homosexuality a disorder?" they cited scientific research to that account. (Particularly, the now-famous Hooker (1957) "The adjustment of the male overt homosexual") They disproved a bunch of things psychiatrists at the time believed of same-sex sexual behavior, such as disproving it was "unnatural" by providing scientific papers that documented same-sex sexual behavior in the animal kingdom and anthropology papers documenting it in many societies around the world.

The activists made a scientific case. And that is a very substantial part of how and why they won over the APA.

Homophobic conservatives, of course, leave that little detail out, and complain that the APA was "pressured" into removing homosexuality from the DSM, and that the APA "caved to pressure from activists".

BTW, the activist who was instrumental in securing that meeting between the DSM committee and the Gay Liberation Front representative? Was Ron Gold. That's what he is famous for. That is why he is a historical figure. That the article talks about him but never mentions this is what he achieved is... hrm.

There's a lot of things like that in this article. Like it treats the Dr. H Anonymous talk as a landmark to progress, but says nothing about why it was important or what it achieved, either. To the contrary, all it says is "The testimony did not convince voting members of the APA to remove the classification that year, but would signal a major turning point in the declassification effort." Also, this is my being very, very angry that the article describes the speaker as "a gay practitioner, John Fryer". That's either Dr. John Fryer or John Fryer, MD, or even "gay psychiatrist, John Fryer, MD".

Anyways, I'm going to stop ranting now, but I wanted to point out how this article sucks and is Bad.

As always, the best intro to this history, is This American Life's "81 Words" (podcast, ~1hr), and I recommend it to anyone who wants to know more.