TERFs suddenly get all "hey now attack the ball not the man" when you point out the guy who's research they're citing also argues that gay people can and should be persuaded to become straight.

Sorry, drop-kicking your man into next week, the ball can fucking wait.

The thing is, you can't evaluate research findings of a shite artist without the context that they're a shite artist. That context matters - the fact that they are known to be heavily invested in cherry picking facts, are working for a partisan think tank with no ethics, matters.

"We found no evidence that gender dysphoria can't be cured by other means than transition" is an interesting thing for someone who is a legitimate expert to say, and a completely meaningless thing for someone invested in conversion therapy and not reading evidence countering it.

There's around 70 years history of psychotherapeutic and other approaches to "remediation" of Trans gender dysphoria issues.

The conclusion most psychotherapists came to in 1950s was that it doesn't work.

The conclusion most psychotherapists came to in the 1970s was it doesn't work.

The conclusion a very small handful came to in the 1980s was they thought they might be able to get it to work but couldn't really prove it, but the consensus was it didn't work.

The consensus in the 2000s was still that noone has really solved "how to cure transsexuals of being transsexual".

The widely held consensus in trans healthcare now is that actually trying to cure trans people is bad, caused decades of harm and probably exacerbates psych illness

So when you know someone is a shite artist and they pop up claiming they've cracked this apparently hard problem in psych care, and that in fact we need to push the stop button on medicalised transition, so they can do a expensive, years long therapy solution, they need evidence.

And saying they're a shite artist is absolutely enough to dismiss their work for the average lay person. Maybe you're an experimental psychologist and you want to test their claims with a longitudinal study of outcomes for some of their patients and see how they're claims work.

But most of us are not experimental psychologists with a need to advance our careers by studying people probably in the process of being medically mismanaged by some crank with an ax to grind.

At this point it's a lot like fucking alchemists arguing that maybe we haven't drunk enough Mercury to readjust the humours.

There's *a lot* of harmful backlog which itself is evidence that further research in that vein is a risk to trans people.

(with more nuance, I suspect you can probably help people cope better with dysphoria through therapy but you probably can't stop them being trans which is really what the conversion therapists are focused on. I think therapy to help dysphoric people feel comfortable seems good)

Dysphoria being among other things the distress and coping difficulties that result from trying to suppress betting trans - it's reasonable to just say "fuck it be what makes you comfortable, let's find a way for you to be happy with your life"

What does it even mean to be "cured" of the pain of having your hand held to a fire instead of taking your hand out anyway?

That feeling that you need to transition, every trans person is different but it's definitely a *part* of who I am and what made me the way I am instead of being someone else. I don't need curing of it, I need liberation from the cisgender expectations that make that need painful

I think many trans people have felt that way and it's why do much psychotherapeutic discourse on us has them complaining that we don't even want to be cured, and instead have a "tyrannical" need for them to just accept us as we are and help us get on with life.