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Notes -
I'd agree that the evidence in this post is lacking, and this is a perfect example of the exact sort of question the OP should have concluded with. The articles I heard of this from very clearly portrayed Johnson, Wassersug and Willette as enthusiastic participants in the castration fetish scene, along with evidence that seemed to back their assertions reasonably well, but I likewise did not check primary sources, and the source I found it from was fairly partisan. I did google the names and found the papers they'd written drawing on the fiction archive as a research resource, but that doesn't answer the question.
I'd readily agree that dispassionate researchers engaging in some niche anthropology is very different from extreme-fetish enjoyers smuggling their thing into academia, and then into actual policy. If the former is the case, I'm pretty sure I still have some pointed objections, but would agree that this instance isn't directly relevant to the larger issues. The same would go if it could be argued that these guys weren't actually relevant to the WPATH drafting, or that WPATH isn't actually influential to policy. That chain is the actual story the above is hinting at, and the fact that it's hinting rather than laying it out is my objection to the post as a whole.
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