The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a medical professional organization of 60,000 pediatricians, has joined a chorus of criticism against an antigay Christian Right political group, after the latter sent a letter to U.S. public schools pretending to represent mainstream professional pediatric expertise.
The statement reads:
In 2008, a diverse coalition of 13 national organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) joined in a renewed effort to protect the safety and emotional well-being of students, including those who are at higher risk because of their sexual orientation. This group of education, health, mental health and religious organizations developed and endorsed Just the Facts about Sexual Orientation and Youth: A Primer for Principals, Educators, and School Personnel and sent the resource to public school superintendents across the US.
On or around March 31, 2010, school superintendents may have received another letter from the American College of Pediatricians, which is in no way affiliated with the American Academy of Pediatrics. The letter promotes another campaign titled “Facts About Youth,” which professes to offer guidance to educators on “approaches to students experiencing sexual orientation and gender identity confusion.” Their campaign does not acknowledge the scientific and medical evidence regarding sexual orientation, sexual identity, sexual health, or effective health education.
The AAP encourages school administrators and officials, teachers, parents, and youth to become familiar with and utilize the AAP developed and endorsed resources on this issue for reliable, sound, scientific, medical advice:
Just the Facts about Sexual Orientation and Youth: A Primer for Principals, Educators, and School Personnel – A guide for employees who confront sensitive issues involving gay, lesbian and bisexual students. It is intended to help school administrators foster safe and healthy school environments, in which all students can achieve to the best of their ability. “Just the Facts” includes the most recent information from professional health organizations, as well as up-to-date information on the legal responsibility of school officials to protect students from anti-gay harassment.
Sexual Orientation and Adolescents – A clinical report from the AAP Committee on Adolescence.
Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Teens: Information for Teens and Parents – Questions and answers from the AAP for teens and parents about sexual orientation.
Gay and Lesbian Teens – Information on sexual orientation from the AAP’s Caring for Your Teenager.
Gender Identity and Gender Confusion in Children – Information on gender identity, sexual stereotypes, gender confusion, and sexual orientation from the AAP’s Caring for Your School Aged Child: Ages 5-12.
With this statement, AAP joins University of Minnesota researcher Dr. Gary Remafedi, M.D., M.P.H. and conservative Christian professor Warren Throckmorton of Grove City College in Pennsylvania in criticizing the Christian front group’s falsifications and distortions of legitimate research.
Last week, Remafedi said:
Knowingly misrepresenting research findings for material or personal gain is a flagrant violation of this code of conduct. Implicating me in this chicanery is doubly damaging to my professional reputation and career by holding me accountable for misstatements and by associating me with a cause that most ethical Pediatricians will recognize as misguided and hurtful to an entire class of children and families.
After citing specific acts of research fraud by the ACP, Remafedi asked the ACP to retract its misuse of the research with a written statement on the front of its web site, and to return any donations made to the ACP on the basis of its fraudulent claims.
Throckmorton cited additional examples of fraud and misrepresentation.
“The ACP’ new anti-gay website essentially replaces facts with quacks,” said Truth Wins Out executive director Wayne Besen. The ACP consists largely of members of the discredited reparative therapy organization, the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). Former NARTH officer Arthur Abba Goldberg — a convicted Wall Street con artist and disbarred lawyer, not a doctor — sits on the ACP’ so-called “Pediatric Psychosocial Development Committee.”
Given the repeated acts of research fraud and misrepresentation that have been committed by NARTH, Focus on the Family, Exodus International, and PFOX, a joint effort among medical and mental-health professionals is needed, not just to slap down such political propaganda disguised as science, but to slap it down the moment it is made public.
The ACP has not corrected its website, and Focus on the Family and PFOX both continue to market the ACP’s fraudulent web site as if it were a factual resource for schools.
I like the letter although I would have LOVED for them to show more fire in denouncing the ACP
[...] again, Truth Wins Out has done what TWO does so well: getting professionals to refute the nonsense claimed by anti-gay [...]
Thank you for sharing this information, it is so important for people to understand what is going on!
When will the truth be told about homosexual activists who had the American Psychiatric Association change homosexual behavior from a ‘mental disorder’ without any single evidence of science behind it? This happened in the early ’70s.
Yes, those all powerful gay activists who managed to bewith, bother, and bewilder a major professional organization into changing a position without the slightest bit of evidence.
On your knees! Beware our mighty powerful might.
The reason the APA dropped homosexuality from its list of mental disorders was that there was absolutely no evidence that being gay is a mental disorder. Not then. not now. not ever. They had a definition of mental disorder, but to make it stick for gay people they had to ignore their own definiton, and say that “Of course. Gay people are mentally disordered BY definiton. Just not THIS definiton.” It could not hold up to any kind of scientific scrutiny. The really homophobic psychiatrists, like Bieber and Soccarides (father of a gay son!!!), the ones who earned their living “curing” gay people, tried to force a referendum on the APA, but it also failed. The whole procedure underlined that prejudice was really the defining issue, not homosexuality, as is often the case on this particular issue. (Not surprisingly, religious reactions to gay people are very similar). First, a whole category of people is defined as mentally ill (or particularly sinful) with no scientific or experiential (or biblical) reason to do so, only a cultural and religious prejudice. They they have a vote, and presto-change-o, a whole category of people are “cured” overnight. Then, the people who whose livelihood depend on the the “mental illness” issue try to make another vote to make all of those people “sick” again. Clearely, not a matter of good science or good medicine, just prejudice. You might call it the politics of diagnosis. There is a great book on the whole fiasco called “Homosexcuaility and American Psychiatry” by Ronald Bayer. It’s a great read.
you must know something that the rest of us don’t. i’m suprised we haven’t managed to turn you queer just by thinking about it.
preach on, Ben!
I’m wondering if he will come back.
I suspect he’s either wracked by guilt or bouncing around gay websites that actually feature hoo-hahs.
ps. Thanks
DJ said “When will the truth be told about homosexual activists who had the American Psychiatric Association change homosexual behavior from a “mental disorder’ without any single evidence of science behind it?”.
That is a lie. Starting with Evelyn Hooker in the 1950′s a series of studies were done which showed that gays were indistinguishable from straights on common measures of mental illness.
Priya– if Evelyn Hooker proved anything, it was that psychiatrists knew next to nothing about homosexuality, and that they had medicalized their own prejudices into a self-perpetuating theoretical structure that had no relevance to reality.
One of her tests, as I recall, was for the psychs to pick out who was gay based upon responses to rorschach tests. I think the results were even worse than if they had just flipped a coin and skipped the rorschachs altogether.
In other words, the theory was wrong, the applications were irrelevant, and the results were bogus. All rorschachs due is give an indication of hwere the unconscious mind might be wandering. A perceptive analyst could use them to point himself in the right direction. Not surprisingly, and unperceptive analyst…
What about her other tests Ben?
I really can’t remember much else. I think I wrote something on this a few years ago.
In the 50′s, Psychoanalysts were claiming that gay people, particularly gay men, had a series of traits INHERENT to them that would make them identifiable to a knowing analyst using current tools.
Holy St. Evelyn, blessed be she, decided to test the premise. she presented these “ducktors” with the results of those current tools for a group of gay men and a group of straight men who were otherwise matched except for the issue of orientation. They were supposed to quack straight or gay, based upon their analysis of the results of the tests.
ThoughI don’t remember the actual results, basically they labelled half of the gay men straight, and vice versa. They could easily have flipped a coin and come up with the same results.
Quack. Quack. quack.
Alternatively, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a psychoanalyst who confuses his own biases with objective truth,
As I understand it, Hooker decided to do her experiment because she was familiar in her personal life with gay men who seemed outwardly perfectly normal. She accepted the standard psychiatric dogma of the day that there was something wrong with them, and so she was curious as to how they could appear to be so otherwise normal. She did some research and was surprised to learn that no one had actually done any science on homosexuality. Every study done previously had been done on homosexuals who were already either in mental institutions or in jail.
So she devised a simple, straightforward experiment to get to the bottom of what the pathology of homosexuality actually was. Via her gay friends, she recruited a group of sexually active gay men, and eliminated from the group anyone who had ever been to a psychiatrist or diagnosed with a mental or emotional problem or in trouble with the law and so forth. Then she recruited a similar group of sexually active heterosexual men and did the same with them, removing anyone who had been diagnosed with a mental problem, in trouble with the law…
So she ended up with two groups of seemingly normal men, but she figured if they were compared clinically side-by-side the underlying pathology that made men homosexual would stand out.
So she gave both groups the standard (of the day) clinical psychiatric tests…tests used and accepted by the government, the military, FBI, Secret Service and other agencies so on to weed out possible problem candidates. The people administering the tests were professionals who knew how to do that, and they were not told whether they were testing a gay or straight man. When Hooker got the results back she further anonymized them so no one looking at the results could tell who administered the test. Standard, double-blind procedure. And then…
…and then…she did something so beautifully simple and straightforward I am still in awe of her. She passed the results out to some of her peers in the profession and said basically, “Here are the results…can you identify the homosexuals?”
No one could.
What really needs to be emphasized about all this is that result absolutely surprised and shocked everyone, including Hooker. But this was science at its simple, beautiful best. And because her experiment was so simple and elegant, it was convincing. Psychiatrists, those open to the evidence at any rate, began to question what they thought they knew about homosexuality. And that started the walls coming down.
Hooker was the first to do actual science specifically regarding homosexuality. Kinsey’s study was broader, and never addressed the question of whether or not homosexual behavior was the result of some inner pathology. Hooker completely destroyed the idea that there was any pathology at all. The best science is the simple curious question leading to the simple experiment that changes everything.
thanks, Bruce. a more ocmplete version.
Michael, thanks for bringing this issue to our attention it was something that somehow managed to pass me by. It’s a very positive move to see the American Academy of Pediatrics react to the “American College of Pediatricians”.Like a.mcewen I would have preferred a more firey response but then they’re not necessarily looking to fight anyone else’s fight but effectively keep their name clean.
On a different subject, I want to say thank you to you Bruce for such an informative and indepth explanation of Hooker’s work it’s the clearest description of it that I’ve seen!
To add to Bruce
Not only did Hooker show that there were indeed sane and functioning men that also happened to be gay — yeah amazing, but that was a result completely at odds with what the profession assumed at that time — but the study also highlighted something about the profession itself.
One of the tests was the “story picture”. Basically, it’s a picture of a couple of people in some setting. Subjects are asked to make up a story about the people — what they might be saying to each other, what sort of person each individual is etc. (It’s actually a fairly good way of picking up subjects with bizarre or distorted ways of thinking.)
Several of Hooker’s subjects outed themselves simply by what they said. I cannot recall what pictures she used, but an example would be if two guys were in kitchen a gay subject might make up a story about a couple talking about their day while preparing dinner together.
For these cases the therapists were scathing in their assessment of the subject. He would be declared half-way to psychotic, unable to function at work or social settings, untrustworthy etc etc.
Yet, the exact same subjects got glowing assessments on the other tests. Declared to be decent, hard-working, sane “family guys” that were undoubtedly great fathers and loving husbands blah blah blah.
Hooker didn’t dwell much on it at the time but what this helped show was the revolting bias that these so-called dispassionate therapists bought into their assessments of gay men and women. Simply knowing the subject was gay caused therapists to utterly reverse their assessments.
I personally think this finding about therapists and about anti-gay bias was just as important as the one that ‘discovered’ the existence of sane gay men.
It and other studies nearly killed psychoanalysis and caused a wholesale period of self-reflection during the 1950′s/60′s. Infamous at that time for their insular, dogmatic and arrogant attitudes — and with a lock-hold on assessments of homosexuality — psychoanalysts were (rightly) humbled and began talking to other types of professionals. It was the basis on which assumptions about gay people were identified, tested and overturned — eventually leading up to the well-known changes to the DMV-II in 1974.
Hooker helped liberate both gay men and lesbians… and her fellow professionals.
/snort. DMV. Sorry, I am working ona report at the moment and have “DMV” stuck in my head. It was, of course, the DSM-II.
[...] of Pediatricians is not the same as the well-respected American Academy of Pediatrics. In fact, the nation’s pediatricians recently rebuked the fake medical group for attempting to deceive the public and for not acknowledging “the scientific and medical [...]
[...] of Pediatricians is not the same as the well-respected American Academy of Pediatrics. In fact, the nation’s pediatricians recently rebuked the fake medical group for attempting to deceive the public and for not acknowledging “the scientific and medical [...]
[...] the contrast between Rekers’ illegal behavior with a very young man, and Rekers’letter to school boards, urging them to harass LGBT youths, just two weeks before Rekers’ scandalous European [...]
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