A well-known heterosexualist and a believer is heterosexual supremacy, he once quoted Richard Green and mentioned:
The rights of parents to oversee the development of children is a long-established principle. Who is to dictate that parents may not try to raise their children in a manner that maximizes the possibility of a heterosexual outcome? If that preogative is denied, should parents also be denied the right to raise their children as atheists? Or as priests?
Not content of being known as an authority with no authority of transgenders, one by fame and not by merit, he now decided to shut everyone who disagrees with him up by making threats. And one of those threats, directed at Professor Lynn Conway, sounds so bogusly false and ridiculously baseless that it deserves to be awarded the second "Transphobication Of The Day"!
This was released worldwide today at Professor Lynn Conway's site :-
Lynn Conway's Trans News Updates: The webpage Zucker attempted to suppress
Copyright © Lynn Conway 2009.
All rights reserved
First posted 2-03-09 [V2-03-09]
Contents:
Zucker attempts to disrupt and suppress Lynn Conway's trans news-feed
Note the deviousness of the falsifications in the Jacobsen letter
Consider the timing and context of the attack
What could have motivated Zucker's attack on Lynn's freedom of speech?
Defending Lynn's freedom of speech
Zucker attempts to disrupt and suppress Lynn Conway's trans news-feed:
As part of her University of Michigan website [1] Lynn Conway maintains a news-feed [2] that provides ongoing access to news items of interest to the transgender community. Each day Lynn receives and posts links to the latest news, often including brief quotes from the articles to alert readers to their contents.
On January 30, 2009 Lynn received an e-letter [3] from Peter M. Jacobsen, an attorney representing Dr. Ken Zucker of the “Centre for Addiction and Mental Health” (CAMH, aka The Clarke Institute) at University of Toronto. The letter was also apparently sent to the University of Michigan's Information Technology User Advocate, in an attempt to disrupt Lynn's postings on the internet and defame Lynn amongst her colleagues and senior University officials as they heard about it.
The Jacobsen letter is posted at this link (more, more). It threatens Lynn with a lawsuit for libel by claiming that:
“Your website contains very serious false and defamatory allegations of criminal conduct and sexual abuse by Dr. Zucker. These allegations clearly exceed the limits of free speech and public discourse . . . Please be advised that we have also notified the IT User Advocate at the University of Michigan of this defamatory posting. . . Please confirm receipt of this libel notice immediately and advise us immediately of what steps you have taken to have this defamatory material removed from your website” – Peter M. Jacobsen, representing CAMH and Zucker
Jacobsen inserted the following entry from Lynn's news-feed into his letter as 'evidence' to support Zucker's accusations of libel:
01-17-09: Organisation Internationale des Intersexués (OII): "The self-proclaimed experts on intersex: Zucker and Lawrence", by Curtis Hinkle
"I am sure that many intersex people were aware that the APA had brought out a booklet on intersex. However, I am not sure that many understand how problematic it is to many intersex people to see some of the following names associated with this booklet: Margaret Schneider, Walter O. Bockting, Randall D. Ehrbar, Anne A. Lawrence, Katherine Louise Rachlin and Kenneth J. Zucker. At first glance, the booklet seems apparently harmless. However, that is what's so clever about it. It's a way for the Clarke/Northwestern clique to get their nose under the (intersex) tent and then later "come on in"."
As you can see, there are no "allegations of criminal conduct and sexual abuse by Dr. Zucker" in that news-feed entry, nor will you find any such allegations anywhere in Lynn's website.
On reading Jacobsen's letter most people cannot imagine that it could contain such a bold falsification, even though it is right there in front of their eyes. Therefore, the first and lingering impression is that Lynn must have made those allegations – even though she did not.
We are posting this report to alert our readers and seek their support in maintaining Lynn's freedom of speech against this blatant attempt to suppress and infringe upon it.
Note the deviousness of the falsifications in the Jacobsen letter:
After boldly claiming that the allegations against Zucker are located within Lynn's news-feed (which they are not), Jacobsen does a quick shuffle of the deck. He now says that the presumed allegations are actually contained in another website that Lynn simply links to – i.e. a page in the website of Organisation Intersex International (OII) [4].
In doing so, Jacobsen claims that cross-website linkage is legally equated with website-inclusion, but Canadian case law says otherwise: Crookes v Wikimedia [5].
However, even that point is moot, because not even that secondarily-linked webpage in OII's website makes the allegations against Zucker that Jacobsen alleges. Instead it simply reports the fact that such allegations had been previously received by OII personnel from a third party and had been turned over to Canadian authorities.
As readers struggle to follow Jacobsen's tangled legal 'logic' – and as they click on links from site to site trying to figure out what it all means – they can easily loose focus and simply assume that Jacobsen must know what he's talking about. This is a well-known effect of "the big lie":
The bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed.
What could have motivated Zucker's attack on Lynn's freedom of speech?
Why would Jacobsen make these false accusations? Could Zucker be angered that Lynn's site contains investigative reports [6] and links to media articles that are unflattering to Zucker and CAMH – reports such as those on U. S. National Public Radio [7] and in the Torontoist [8] that have widely exposed Dr. Zucker as operating a trans-reparative clinic for ‘curing’ gender variant children?
If so, they should note that Lynn's news-feed links to many articles by or about Dr. Zucker and his colleagues that are extremely unflattering to transgender people. It also links to articles published by groups such as NARTH [8] and Focus on the Family [9] that are supportive of Dr. Zucker’s teachings. By doing so, Lynn's news-feed links to both sides of the story and helps generate healthy debate.
Then too, OII Founder Mr. Curtis Hinkle reports that OII has not received similar threats of lawsuits, even though the OII page in question (an open letter to the President of WPATH) [4] has been posted on the internet for eight months and is widely known about in Zucker’s professional circles.
These facts suggest that Zucker is more interested in suppressing Lynn's website than in addressing the underlying complaint asserted in Jacobsen’s letter. But there is more:
Consider the timing and context of the attack
The timing of Zucker’s action is also suspect – coming on the eve of an important workshop at the IFGE conference [11]. Zucker is aware that the presentations at that workshop will be posted on my website and will question his selection to lead revisions of the gender identity section [12] of the psychiatric code-book of mental illness (the 'DSM') [13].
Zucker's selection for that role is the elephant in the room. That psychiatric code-book currently pathologizes all transgender people as being mentally-ill for life, just as it did to gay and lesbian people in the past – and Zucker appears determined to retain that stance in spite of growing evidence to the contrary (more) and social pressure to depathologize gender variance [14].
For more on the psychiatric and social context that led to the current diagnostic nomenclature in the DSM, see Gender Madness in American Psychiatry, Essays from the Struggle for Dignity, by Kelley Winters, Ph.D. [15]. Dr. Winter's book provides deep insights into the many issues and
challenges faced by the trans-community on the eve of publication of the DSM-V, and exposes the reasons for and nature of the community's confrontation with Zucker.
Zucker’s colleague and close confidant Alice Dreger went to great lengths to suppress a similar panel at the National Women’s Studies Association conference last June, but failed in that attempt - after graduate student Joelle Ruby Ryan stood up to Dreger's attack on Joelle's academic career. My report on those events [16] has since gained wide notice, much to Dreger’s and Zucker’s consternation.
And as many news-feed readers may recall, as editor in chief of the Archives of Sexual Behavior (ASB) Zucker previously stooped so low as to exploit his power-position to subvert that journal into a propaganda tool [17] to support his ASB colleagues against widespread complaints and internet blogging by the transgender community. In the process Zucker was exposed as conducting his own personal vendetta against Andrea James and Lynn Conway, two women who've been effective in exposing his reparatist treatment of gender variant children (more).
Zucker’s series of actions suggest that he is now motivated to suppress Lynn's right of free speech (and especially Lynn's ability to publish on the internet) by any means possible, in order to minimize his exposure as a trans-reparatist and suppress the escalating questioning of his selection to lead the DSM revisions.
Defending Lynn's freedom of speech:
In the face of this threat, Lynn's seeks your assistance in protecting her Constitutional rights and ensuring her full and open access to the internet – so that her website and others like it remain freely available in service of our community.
You do not need to write letters or make demands. You should instead exercise your own right of free speech to widely propagate this news report and the Jacobsen letter, as evidence of Zucker's attack.
By informing people of Zucker's attempt to suppress Lynn's freedom of speech, you can expose him for what he is – and let history be his judge.
You only get to keep your Constitutional rights if you fully exercise them.
[1] Lynn Conway’s homepage,
Lynn Conway, lynnconway.com.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html
[2] “Trans News Updates”,
Lynn Conway, lynnconway.com.
[7] “Two Families Grapple with Sons' Gender Preferences - Psychologists Take Radically Different Approaches in Therapy”, Alix Spiegel, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, May 7. 2008.
[9] “How Should Clinicians Deal With GID In Children? Psychologist Kenneth J. Zucker explains the current research on children and adolescents who develop a Gender Identity Disorder”,
Frank York, National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), September 23, 2004.
[11] “Disordered” No More: Challenging Transphobia in Psychology, Academia and Society”, by Joelle Ruby Ryan (chair), Julia Serano, Ph.D. and Kelley Winters, Ph.D., IFGE Worshop, The
23rd Annual Conference of the International Foundation for Gender Education, Alexandria, VA, February 4-8, 2009.
http://www.ifge.org/register/db_wrkshp_one.php?the_id=77
[14] “Psychiatrists Revise the Book of Human Troubles”, Benedict Carey, New York Times, Dec. 17, 2008
war" against the social emergence of transgender women", A report by Lynn Conway, lynnconway.com, August 21, 2007.
LynnConway.com > TS Information > Trans News Updates > Lynn Conway's Trans News Updates: The page Zucker attempted to suppress.
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