Holiday Filler: Medicalization saves your marriage

[differenceblog]

Daniel Amen on the View (7:54). The author of multiple self-help books on ADD and relationships (two separate topics, not a book about managing ADD in relationships) talks to the View about differences in the way men's and women's brains are wired. Daniel Amen's Change Your Brain, Change Your Life clinics use SPECT imaging as a method of

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[rarkrarkrark]

First, having spent more than a decade advocating for the rights of people with mental illness and neurological differences, I find the way many queer activists want to advocate the belief that sexual orientation and/or gender identity are inherently inborn, under the theory that then people would have to accept differences in sexual orientation and/or gender identity in the same way that people "have" to accepted difference in race and sex to be problematic. Usually when I say this I get bombarded by links to studies showing correlations between various physical differences and sexual orientation or gender identity, but that's missing the point. Yes, we have some evidence that sexual orientation and gender identity are affected by genetics and prenatal environment, but it's a red herring. The problem is that the tactic doesn't work. In the case of people with mental illness, physical causation is an excuse for forced medication and removal of civil rights. In the case of people with developmental disabilities, physical causation is