The LGBTQXYZ Social Services Groups, assimilationism, the lack of Gay organization and the enabling of gender ideology.
Has the Trevor Project considered that they are driving suicide contagion. Why do they publish in a journal which some have concerns about being a predatory journal?
PART 1 - About those claims about suicide.
I want to first discuss Trevor and their agenda before discussing the impact of these so-called LGBTQXYZ social welfare groups and their impact.
I also want to point out that it isn’t just the trans doctors putting youth at risk. With the Trevor Project have they considered that they are driving suicide contagion?
Some links: https://www.facebook.com/TheTrevorProject
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/
With some of the social welfare agencies we find that when they are caught out or investigated suddenly webpages disappear.
This is the Internet Archive archive of their website.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://www.thetrevorproject.org/
The Trevor Project has been recently claiming, “that 45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.”
.
Facebook Posts
On their website
This article has the survey result which the claim that LGBTQ youth are thinking of suicide.
Internet Archive of the page. Sometimes it takes a minute to load.
Suicide seems to be everywhere.
One of the strategies to push parents to accept surgery on their children is the question, “Do you want a live girl or a dead boy.” Suicide is used by those wanting to do trans surgeries and puberty blockers.
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/blog/multiracial-lgbtq-youth-face-heightened-suicide-risk/
Credibility of the claim.
This claim lacks credibility with me. I was 18 years old in 1970 and I didn’t consider suicide. Also, when I came out and was meeting other young Gay guys, we hadn’t considered suicide and were happy that we were finally out and connected to the Gay community.
Of course, we don’t know what percentage of Gays are considering suicide in this statistic, we are all lumped into this amorphous mass of identities. (I will provide a link about initialism at the end of this post.)
We weren’t so self-absorbed then either, and there wasn’t social media platforms to competitively show our afflictions.
One of the long-standing arguments against Gays by anti-Gay individuals and organizations is that Gays are really unhappy and sad and this constant propaganda supports basic anti-Gay ideology.
With the Trevor project suicide is an endless problem with LGBTQ youth who for one reason or another are just ready to go off and consider suicide.
Supposedly in this post, “Student mental health reached crisis levels last year.”
Of course, what I think is hysteria, in my opinion, is used to push the trans agenda.
Suicide Ideation. Does the Trevor Project put LGBTQ lives at risk?
There doesn’t seem to be any idea that their claims of wide spread thoughts of suicide with LGBTQ might be normalizing and resulting in thoughts of suicide in LGBTQ youth and they might be creating a suicide problem with LGBTQ youth.
There is the whole issue of Suicide Contagion and efforts of schools to prevent it.
https://time.com/5572394/suicide-contagion-study/
https://base.education/understanding-suicide-contagion-prevent/
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00031539.htm
The Trevor Project does have this booklet on preventing suicide and talks about suicide contagion on pages 23, 24.
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Model_School_Policy_Booklet.pdf
This paper discusses “copycat suicides.”
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Reporting-Suicide.pdf
However, I think that the constant emphasis that LGBTQ are highly susceptible to suicide might be a risk factor in itself. So maybe the issue with the Trevor Project isn’t “suicide contagion,” but more on being a source of ideation for suicide. I think, in my opinion, this issue of inadvertently causing suicide ideation needs to be researched by credible professionals.
I think that the representation of the LGBTQ as mentally fragile, plagued by thoughts of suicide, frequently needing help and not resilient is not good for Gay people, and I think it is likely not good for other sexual minorities.
We have been resilient and resilience and the expectation of being resilient is likely the Gay communities best strategy for the unknown future.
And what about this “peer reviewed” published study?
The above screen capture is from this article.
They claim that the study was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, that was peer-reviewed. It is a journal of the MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) and after looking at their webpages I decided to see how the publisher was perceived. I can have suspicions, but I don’t believe I have the expertise to judge and so all I can report to you is what others say.
The following links are to articles on what they call “predatory publishing.” The key thing is that you pay to get your academic article published. These are articles so you can read about “predatory publishing” and they aren’t about MDPI. I provide them for background information. You can skip them.
https://www.ashclinicalnews.org/features/predatory-publishing-dark-side-open-access-movement/
Resume reading here.
However, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is mentioned in this article titled, “Beware! Academics are getting reeled in by scam journals.”
Again, it is their opinion of the journal.
Who is the University Affairs/ Affaires Universitaires? They have been around evidently more than 60 years.
https://www.universityaffairs.ca/us/
From their about page.
University Affairs is Canada’s most authoritative source of information about and for Canada’s university community. Founded in 1959, University Affairs provides breaking news, provocative commentary, and in-depth articles about university trends, as well as practical advice and tools to help your career, whether you’re a university administrator, faculty member or graduate student.
There is this article at Oxford University Press, “Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The Case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI),” in the publication Research Evaluation, Vol. 30, Issue 3, July 2021, pages 405-419. Below is a link to an article on the Oxford Univ. Press website. You can read all of it.
https://academic.oup.com/rev/article/30/3/405/6348133?login=false
The above article is an excellent article on the world of predatory journals and the issues around deciding whether a publisher or journal is predatory or not. The article also points out that the reputation of MDPI has been up and down.
It may therefore be appreciated that the reputation of MDPI Publisher has undergone ups and downs over the past few years and has both its critics and supporters, which makes it an interesting case study. The aim of this investigation is to provide objective data, in order to verify whether MDPI-journals indexed in JCR fit the definitions of a predatory journal that Grudniewicz et al. (2019) and COPE (2019) have established.
So, what did the author conclude about MDPI?
The results presented above showed that the 53 MDPI-journals under analysis possess, to a greater or lesser degree, some of the criteria for the identification of predatory journals and deviate from best editorial and publication practices when e.g. mimicking names and claiming rapid publication. The COPE/DOAJ/OASPA/WAME Principles for Transparency and Best Practices in Scholarly Publishing stipulate that journal names should not be easily confused with another journal and that journal websites should not guarantee very short peer-review times (as a member of COPE and DOAJ, MDPI could hardly argue that it ignores those Principles). Additionally, the constant and quite exceptional increase in the number of articles published in MDPI-journals between 2018 and 2019, reinforced by an exponential increase in the number of special issues, which easily outweigh the number of regular publications (above all in view of the previsions for 2020), together with an opportune increase in APC fees all raises serious concerns over the legitimacy of MDPI as a publisher, at the very least because its ‘APC-based business model alters the economic and scientific incentives in academic publishing’ (Siler 2020).
The article talks about “serious concerns,” but doesn’t make a definitive statement.
There was this scandal about one of MDPI’s magazine, Vaccines publishing an article that covid-19 vaccines kill.
This generated considerable controversy and the article’s severe issues was reported by Science magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Several respected virologists and vaccinologists have resigned as editors of the journal Vaccines to protest its 24 June publication of a peer-reviewed article that misuses data to conclude that "for three deaths prevented by [COVID-19] vaccination, we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination."
Since Friday, at least six scientists have resigned positions as associate or section editors with Vaccines, including Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Katie Ewer, an immunologist at the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford who was on the team that developed the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Their resignations were first reported by Retraction Watch.
Of course, many respectable journals have to retract papers and so this one paper’s publication is concerning, but it doesn’t necessarily mean all of MDPI’s journals are flawed or have problems. This merely means we might want to consider the issues of quality control at these journals as we should with all journals.
I am not a specialist in deciding what a predatory journal is and I can’t do a classification of the MDPI journals or say whether any of the journals or MDPI are predatory. I just want people to know about the current academic discussion is about “predatory journals” and the publisher MDPI.
I think it is concerning that the Trevor Project report on suicide was published in an MDPI journal. I think that if their data and methodology is good they should submit the article to a journal that doesn’t have questions about it and get it published there. Also, I am somewhat surprised that the Trevor Project chose the journal that they did, if they were concerned that their research be considered credible.
I think the LGBTQXYZ press should do a better job on reporting when a claim is made by a social welfare group as to the study and where it is published.
In my opinion, their policy, whether consciously or without self-awareness, is about the CA$H FLOW.
Without constant crises and alarming statistics and alarming problems their importance is diminished and the supply of donations diminishes also.
Again, I am not saying that they are consciously doing this or are self-aware of doing this, but I think it is easy to be biased to follow a path which enhances the importance of the organization and increases funding.
PART II
These LGBTQXYZ social welfare groups have multiple impacts on the Gay community which are repressive and harmful.
They are ongoing funded groups with connections to political and other organizations that fund them, they have staff, offices, and a continuing presence. As supported institutions they have credibility.
Initialisms
For starters the initialisms from LGB to LGBT to LGBTQ and now to LGBTQ+ because they have to 14 letters so far to be supported by social welfare groups. It is simply portfolio expansion requiring more staff for more clients and more training when you start having 14 letters and each group will require special training to service. Queer is similarly useful, being an elastic definition of most anyone who isn’t some standard straight person, and likely what a standard straight person will be progressively whittled down. Maybe their potential clients will involve the majority of society under the classification of genderqueer which we will find involves many, many wrought issues needing counseling services. Ca$h Flow.
They aren’t Gay focused since Gay issues are just a subset of a large group of interests of a large group of letters.
There won’t be Gay cultural events and institutions, but queer institutions which will involve a lot of material of no or little interest to Gays.
Coming Out
Now the LGBTQXYZ services are constantly complaining about some some supposed Gay people pushing people to come out. Discussing coming out where might mean up to a dozen paid sessions as every little qualm and anxiety is dissected. The old slogan, “Out of the Closets and into the Streets!” is likely seen as retrograde. So the politics of coming out have been subdued at least.
Sexual Liberation
These groups are composed of middle class persons with social worker mores and only a fraction of them are Gay men. Since all these agencies are wanting funding from governmental agencies and foundations, they want their clients to look as acceptable as possible to straight people.
They would be horrified by this being the image of Gays. You have to click on it.
So more and more the representation of Gay people is some middle class Gay couple that is monogamous living in a nice house and nicely dressed and preferably with adopted children they adore.
For the social worker class, being none-threatening and assimilated is critical to funding.
It is not accidental that Gay marriage was a priority over civil rights protections for employment, public accommodations, and housing, even though the percentage of Gays who have gotten married is very low and Gay marriage is often when a Gay person is older and concerned over inheritance and hospital visits.
So you find that more and more events are now “family friendly,” which involves policing Gay behavior, such as the ban on throwing condoms at Pride Day parades, regardless of the urgency of limiting AIDS. Or the ongoing debate about banning kink and leather from the Pride event. The Leslie-Lohman Museum is really toned down from what it was. [Link after the end of this article.]
STD Research
My local LGBTQXYZ is obsessed with proclaiming that monkeypox isn’t a Gay diseases. County records which I track show that consistently it has been 98.5+%
There really isn’t an agenda about aggressively asking for support for research on STDs since that is embarrassing to the social worker types who typically are not that active and it makes their clients look less appealing when they seek funding.
Your local Stonewall Democrat would rather die than make research on vaccines for syphilis and gonorrhea a major agenda item. They so much would want to focus on wedding cakes not being baked.
Muting Criticism of institutions, agencies and government.
These social welfare groups don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. So criticism will likely be orientated towards the failure to fund the needs of the LGBTQXYZ which these groups will be administering.
Will a new ordinance shutdown a bath house? They will be embarrassed even in discussing it and certainly not want to protest it and upset those that fund them.
Did the police engage in entrapment at a park and arrest Gays? The LGBTQXYZ would just be writhing in embarrassment. Do we want clubs to be stay open later? The LGBTQXYZ wants Gays to not stay out that late and be worthy citizens.
Did Bill Clinton implement, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a closet ideology for American soldiers, don’t bring it up with Hilary Clinton when she is running for office for the Democratic administration will be the source of large cash flows.
Did the darling of the Democrats, Stephen Colbert say that Donald Trump was the “cockholster” of Russian premier Putin? Let it pass, since again, the flow of cash is from the Democrats.
Aligning with Queer studies
They will need to have an intelligentsia that provides the justifications for services, training for services to create a class of trained persons delivering the services, and expanding services and addressing obstacles.
They need an intelligentsia that creates new sexual identities that will need social services. Queer studies people benefit by expanding their portfolio to ever long lists of letters. In this the Queer studies people and the LGBTQXYZ establishment are in perfect alignment.
Anti-Gay politics
The queer agenda and the social worker agenda and the LGBTQXYZ agenda doesn’t align well with what the Gay community wants.
One example is “Gay” transmen endlessly complaining that they are Gay and that Gays largely refuse to have sex with them or relations with them. They continue not to get married and they continue to do things like kink and be puppies.
They use hookup apps instead of getting married and staying home baking cookies for adoring adopted children.
Gays are also a potential threat. They are the great majority in terms of the economics and activity of what might be the LGBTQ. There are still quite a few Gay bars in existence still, as well as bathhouses and other venues, whereas there are very few Lesbian bars left, and of course no bathhouses.
If Gays and their bars decided not to show up at the Pride parade, there wouldn’t be much of a parade or event. If Gays decided to exit, LBTQ wouldn’t be much and if the Lesbians left also, there wouldn’t be much at all.
So it is important to the LGBTQXYZ that Gays are always denounced as a a class so they are guilty about themselves rather than asserting themselves.
Twitter and Facebook is filled with really vicious denunciations of “cis Gays,” “cis white Gays,” and “old cis Gays.”
An alternative strategy is to find other resources not dependent on Gays, such as gender reassignment surgeries, which the LGBTQXYZ has uniformly supported.
Conclusion regarding their interests.
What the interests of the LGBTQXYZ isn’t necessarily the interests of the Gay community in general and will be shaped by them as a social class and economic class and be bound by assimilationism and the need for funding which means being seen sympathetically by the straight community in general.
PART 3
Where is the voice of the Gays?
Other minority groups have social support organizations, but it likely isn’t a problem since other minorities have independent free standing groups to watch after their interests
For minorities it is groups like the NAACP and LULAC, and other groups for racial minorities. It isn’t one together mashed together organization for a dozen racial and ethnic groups.
For religious groups, they have their own individual religious groups to focus on their needs.
This means there are independent voices to challenge what their social welfare groups might have to say. They have voices to speak to their specific interests. The NAACP speaks to the interests of the African American community and focuses on it, rather than being the NAACLAIXYZP focused on dozens of ethnic and racial groups. The same with LULAC, they focus on the issues of Latinos.
They are groups that also are not appendages of political parties. There are African American political Democratic and Republican groups, but the NAACP, LULAC are nominally and supposed to be independent.
Contrast this with the Gay community.
The last independent Gay organizations closed in the 1990s, when the Gay Activist Alliance closed.
We have conglomeration groups of LGBTQIAP+ and more letters. We have Stonewall Democrats, but there aren’t any independent Gay groups.
Part of this is due to assimilationism where we are just supposed to be just like straight people except for what we do in bed.
So why would there be Gay book clubs, Gay art societies, or any type of Gay independent organizing? I have written about Gay housing needs are different than straights, but we won’t work on Gay housing needs if we imagine that we are basically variants from straights.
If you are assimilationist, you don’t want separate Gay groups since you don’t see a need.
So with the ideology of assimilationism and the lack of independent Gay groups it shouldn’t be any surprise at all that there is an attempt to define Gay as homogender instead of homosexual.
What is to be done
Even if somehow the trans extremism hegemony is overthrown, it will just be replaced by something else.
If we don’t define ourselves and imagine that we have a Gay identity and a Gay existence we will be defined by others, not organized, our needs unmet, and not supported and be defenseless against aggression and face ongoing denunciations of our community and its ways.
I am planning to write about organizing and I have been thinking about it, but until I could show the consequences of the failure of Gays being organized, there would be no point in discussing it. So I have written down the consequences in this essay here.
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LINKS TO ESSAYS MENTIONED.
I am running out of room for this post, so I am going to have to have this link below.