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Bath Spa university bars research into transgender surgery regrets

Genital Reconstructive Surgeon Receives Dozens of Requests for Transgender Reversal Operations

A genital reconstructive surgeon who specializes in transgender reversal operations has received dozens of requests for operations, according to a report.
The Telegraph interviewed Professor Miroslav Djordjevic in an article titled, “Sex change regret: Gender reversal surgery is on the rise, so why aren’t we talking about it?” on Sunday, where the surgeon revealed that an alarming number of patients seek a reversal of previous transgender operations.

According to the Telegraph, “Around five years ago, Professor Miroslav Djordjevic, the world-leading genital reconstructive surgeon, received a visit at his Belgrade clinic: a transgender person who had undergone surgery at a different clinic to remove male genitalia – and since changed their mind.”

“That was the first time Prof Djordjevic had ever been contacted to perform a so-called gender reassignment ‘reversal’ surgery,” the Telegraph explained, adding that, “Over the next six months, another six people also approached him, similarly wanting to reverse their procedures.”

“At present, Prof Djordjevic has a further six prospective people in discussions with his clinic about reversals and two currently undergoing the process itself,” they continued.

cont. here
Report: Genital Reconstructive Surgeon Receives Dozens of Requests for Transgender Reversal Operations - Breitbart

Seems we may be seeing a growing trend why shouldn't we study it?
 
vanceen said:
I think you're wrong about instinctive learning being fundamentally different from scientific learning, and I don't think a study of world cultures makes it at all clear that they are different.

Unfortunately, the 5,000 character limit prevents discussions like this from going where they should. Let me just say this: science, I think you'll agree, emerged from a specific time and place. There were some Greek philosophers who might have a claim to be scientists, but science as it is practiced now emerged from 17th century Europe with Galileo, Gassendi, Descartes, Arnauld, and then moving into the 18th with Locke, Boyle, Leibniz, and Newton (and quite a few others). Its methods didn't start to really be formalized until the 19th century, again in Europe (and to be clear, what the guys mentioned above were doing was not science in any recognizably contemporary sense). A nod should be given to Muslim thinkers of the middle ages (especially Al-Jabir)--but then, they were mostly just preserving and extending what the Greeks had done (Al-Jabir, again, excepted).

More forcefully, science emerged from a distinct sub-culture of early modern European society, and it took quite a long time for it to garner any notice, much less respect, from most Europeans.

Nothing comparable emerged anywhere in any of the civilizations of the world, great or small. Not in India. Not in China. Not in Europe of the Middle Ages. Not in Africa, or Russia, or the Americas. If science is so closely related to instinctive learning, it seems some explanation needs to be forthcoming for this fact. Presumably everyone has the faculties of instinctive learning in question, so it's rather odd that science would not emerge basically everywhere. Of course, an explanation may be possible, but it had better be a good explanation.

vanceen said:
From infancy we form our belief sets from trials and interpretations (although not exclusively from those).

Interpretations are formed, and informed, by acculturation.

vanceen said:
I also think you're wrong about repeatibility and consistency being good markers of true conclusions.

I didn't say they aren't. I said it's an assumption that they are. And, it's an assumption with a pretty hefty metaphysical cost: carried to its conclusion, it implies that the universe is logically consistent. So long as this assumption is a kind of watchdog for judging whether an hypothesis has failed or succeeded, it retains a logical priority over observation.

Now of course, the universe could indeed be entirely consistent. The assumption is not automatically false. My point is to show that science always contains assumptions that are beyond testing, and that depend on a certain prior understanding of the world--an understanding that depends on culture.

vanceen said:
Again, it appears to me that you have a take on epistemology that is rather special, but you're not saying what it is.

I'm not sure what you mean. I have no systematic epistemology, if that's what you're asking. I do tend to follow Linda Zagzebski, Catherine Z. Elgin, Wayne Riggs, and Jonathan Kvanvig in thinking that a great many non-propositional epistemic goods must exist prior to any instance of propositional knowledge.

vanceen said:
Personally, I'm positivist.

I am not, mainly because positivism is obviously false. It died a flaming death in the late 50's, for very good reasons. Turns out there's no way to talk about, well, anything, without metaphysics.

vanceen said:
The scientific method has allowed us to hugely expand the scope of interactions with predictable outcomes. Within this scope, we know what's going to happen when A occurs and B occurs, and we know precisely how variations in A and B will change the outcome. If that's not truth, then we need some special definition of the word.

I don't think we know anything like that, but maybe I don't have in mind the sort of thing you have in mind. Can you provide an example?

vanceen said:
As far as I can tell, you regard truth as direct knowledge of the pure essence of things. If I accept that (which I don't), I would have to conclude that no truth can ever be known.

No, I have no definition of truth. I don't think it can be defined. I'm tempted by correspondence theories of truth, such that some proposition P is true by virtue of its correspondence to reality, since I think that captures what we usually mean by "truth." But such definitions are problematic.

vanceen said:
But I would still have to do my job, fix my car, cook my food, etc. exactly as if I did know some truths about how to do those things.

Oh, sure. I do the same thing. However, I'm struck by how often what I think I know, even in practical reasoning, turns out to be false, forcing me to adopt some other principle or method.
 
Stinger said:
Seems we may be seeing a growing trend why shouldn't we study it?

No one, as far as I can tell, is saying we shouldn't. That said, the studies I cited earlier in this thread show that around 1-3% of transgendered persons have regrets. Given that there are thousands of transgendered persons, there being "dozens" that seek reversal isn't surprising.
 
I am simply unable to parse the phrase "Bath Spa University" and reconcile the word "research."
 
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