In the wake of the NY Times article on October 21st, to which WPATH responded with a press release which was distributed to all our members and posted on the home page of WPATH's website, wpath.org, the recent news has been FULL of articles related to Transgender Health. In our first section below, WPATH in The News, we have two positive story examples, plus one horrible article that is both historically and scientifically inaccurate. Dr. Quentin Van Meter is a propagandist par excellence, and we thought you might want to know what he's saying. I won't debunk his opinions one-by-one here, but suffice to say (as an example of his ridiculousness), WPATH was NOT founded by John Money and Alfred Kinsey. Unfortunately, while the Education News piece we've offered here has a distribution of a mere 13,000 readers, the original source of this article was Breitbart, which has a reach of 6 million readers. That's a lot of potential influence. We follow this with an article originally published in the New York Times, in which our member, Dr. Joshua D. Safer, elucidates the emerging science of gender identity.
In our second section, Transgender Health, we offer stories from Uruguay, Zimbabwe (by way of Malaysia), Los Angeles (featuring our member Dr. Joanna Olson-Kennedy), and Bangladesh (the story from The Asian Age, which, in spite of the photo of Mr. Trump, presents a balanced, though superficial, position on the trans rights debate.) And, finally, to keep us all informed, an article from the National Review about the 'redemption' of Dr. Kenneth Zucker, also one of our more controversial members, which brings back the increasingly volatile controversy over academic freedom and censorship.
As our leadership and MANY of our members are soon on their way to WPATH's 25th Scientific symposium in Buenos Aires, where there will be scores of stimulating presentations and discussions and just the right amount of enjoyable and relaxing social events, we are sorry to have to share the sad news about the passing in Rio de Janeiro of Joao W. Nery, age 68, from lung cancer which had metastacized to his brain. Mr. Nery was the first trans man to receive surgery in Brazil (in 1977). He was a writer, a psychologist, and an activist who fought mightily for the legal and social recognition of trans people. He was an icon to the transgender movement in Brazil and to all who knew him. The only articles we could find about him are in Portuguese, but interested readers are invited to run the text through Google Translate or a similar program, but we offer this article for its photographs of one of our pioneers. RIP, Joao. We will keep fighting. See: http://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/geral/noticia/2018-10/morre-joao-w-nery-primeiro-homem-transexual-ser-operado-no-brasil
--Jamison Green, PhD
Communications Director, WPATH |
