An entry from my personal journal
It’s funny, really, to find now, after coming to terms with some of the internal distinctions I’ve fought for so long, that there has been a debate raging for nearly as long as I’ve been questioning and exploring. To think if I had encountered Blanchard’s work — or J. Michael Bailey’s book, which I almost dread reading, given the preamble it’s so far received (plus, I’m always shy of consuming large works I expect myself to ultimately reject; that is, at least, without preparation) — before achieving any resolution of my entanglement: I might have been profoundly “pathologized” in my own head for many, many more years of silent unhappiness.
I would like to think that at least Bailey’s (apparently) trollish and polarizing interpretation would have met with a degree of fundamental resistance. However, while I would also hope that my first impressions, now, of Blanchard’s seminal paper1 would be similar to M. Wyndzen’s in the referenced foreword1, I can’t know that for certain. In a rational state, I would have noticed many of the underlying weaknesses, especially the confused interpretive strategy applied to autogynephilia test scores. I am not, however, reliably in a fully rational state when exploring a subject so intensely personal to me. I can’t understand how one can be, even in isolated contexts, so barren of compassion as to present such dismissive, damaging, and poorly supported arguments to a population already suffering from a dearth of acceptance or understanding.
I’m not going to talk about myself further, here; I’d rather write into a blank slate than place my heart on the same page as such a painful, external shock.
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