12:06 PM
As a social psychologist (PH), a consultant counselling psychologist (PL) a social psychologist (MB) and a chartered counselling psychologist (LM), we are challenged and heartened by Joan Roughgarden's call for psychologists to condemn transphobic and otherwise bigoted research. Like Roughgarden we were troubled upon reading Bailey's book for its explicit transphobic assumptions that trans adults are a negative outcome of development and for the heteros*xism, s*xism and racism which Roughgarden describes so well.
Trans men, gay and bis*xual women are notable by their invisibility in the text. The use of the authors friends' opinion of bis*xuality as "gay, straight or lying" in the book itself, and now it seems in advertisements is not perceived as amusing or trivial in our opinion in view of the slow progress there has been in developing a bis*xual psychology, and the real effects of biphobia in blighting people's lives.
There is very little recognition in mainstream psychology generally which is further perpetuated by this book, that someone could be attracted to both s*xes or have relationships with both, with many theorists favouring the general binary construction of s*xuality which does not allow for an 'in between' position; people are either gay or straight (Ochs, 1996). Generally, many bis*xuals are seen as straight if in a relationship with someone of the opposite s*x, and gay if in a relationship with someone of the same s*x and that experience of having an imposed social identity which conflicts with a personal identity, and the confusion it engenders can have commonalities with trans experience. In respect to the "Gaydar" and discussion of s*xual orientation and related behaviour described in the book, a whole literature of gay and lesbian psychology which has been painstakingly developed and promoted within mainstream psychology, appears to have been excluded.
