Carol Tavris is an American social psychologist and anti-transgender activist.
Tavris considers the safer and mpre accepting climate for gender diverse youth to be a “social contagion” that needs a correction.
Tavris’ attacks on the trans rights movement center on several gender critical tactics:
- promoting the ex-transgender movement
- supporting disease models of gender identity and expression
- supporting gatekeeping models of healthcare for our minors
- criticizing expert medical and scientific consensus on healthcare for our minors
Tavris claims sexual orientation change efforts like “conversion therapy” are terrible, but gender identity change efforts are completely different.
Background
Carol Anne Tavris was born September 17, 1944 and grew up in Los Angeles. Tavris’s parent Dorothy was a lawyer, and parent Sam died when Tavris was 11.
Tavris earned a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and sociology from Brandeis University. Tavris then earned a PhD in sociology from the University of Michigan.
Tavris was married to actor Ronan David O’Casey (1922-2012).
Tavris has written several widely-used psychology textbooks.
Anti-transgender activism
Tavris and other anti-transgender extremists like Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Sommers have been logrolling for each other for years.
2022 Skeptic piece
In 2022, Tavris published a piece in Skeptic repeating transphobic talking points packaged as “skepticism.”
Today, once again, the public is hearing only one side of an emotionally compelling issue: the transgender story. Once again, distinctions are ignored, this time between people for whom identification with the other sex began in early childhood and those whose rapid onset gender dysphoria started during adolescence.
[…]
Saying you suffer from “gender dysphoria” is cool and common, just as saying you were sexually abused in your youth once was.
Tarvis is especially scornful of an On the Media episode, claiming it did not give time to the ex-transgender movement:
In its most glaring omission, “On the Media” said not a word about the “desisters,” a term often used for those who make a social transition (changing their names and pronouns) but do not persist in having surgery and hormones or changing their gender identity, and often change back; or about the many (possibly thousands of) “detransitioners” who now regret that they had medical procedures. Many of them are bitter and angry that they have had irreversible voice and hair growth changes, underwent surgical procedures that cannot be corrected, and have become infertile.
[…]
Many gender professionals have marginalized, bullied, and tormented their colleagues who disagree. Politically organized “transactivists” protest that any research on, say, factors contributing to the rise of cases of gender transition, the potentially negative consequences of transitioning, or the importance of counseling and treatment before transitioning are indications of the unacceptable idea that gender transition is a pathological problem or disorder.
[…]
But we may, at last, be entering a new phase. As usual, we can thank the first wave of writers who have refused to be cowed or bullied — Abigail Shrier in Irreversible Damage, Kathleen Stock in Material Girls, Helen Joyce in Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.
[…]
In November, 2021, Laura Edwards-Leeper and Erica Anderson, two psychologists whose practice has been devoted to offering transgender patients ethical, evidence-based treatment, wrote an editorial in the Washington Post. Their trans-supporting credentials are flawless.
Tavris also cites “The Gender Affirmative Treatment Model for Youth with Gender Dysphoria: A Medical Advance or Dangerous Medicine?” by Alison Clayton.
“My thanks to Leonore Tiefer, PhD, for her resources, advice, and expertise.”
Selected publications
- Estrogen Matters: Why taking hormones in menopause can improve women’s well-being and lengthen their lives–without raising the risk of breast cancer (with Avrum Bluming). Little, Brown Spark 2018 ISBN 978-0-316-48120-5
- Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (with Elliot Aronson) Mariner Books, 2020, ISBN 978-0-358-32961-9
- Psychology (with Carole Wade, Samuel Sommers, and Lisa Shin) 2020, Pearson, ISBN 978-0-13-521262-2)
- Invitation to Psychology (with Carole Wade) (6th edition, 2014, Pearson, ISBN 978-0-205-03519-9)
- Psychobabble and Biobunk: Using Psychology to Think Critically About Issues in the News (Pearson, 2011, ISBN 978-0-205-01591-7)
- The Scientist and the Humanist: A festschrift in honor of Elliot Aronson (with Marti Hope Gonzales and Joshua Aronson) (New York: Psychology Press, 2010 ISBN 978-1848728677)
- Psychology in Perspective (with Carole Wade, Samuel Sommers, and Lisa Shin) (Three editions, latest 2001, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-028326-6)
- The Mismeasure of Woman: Why Women Are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex, or the Opposite Sex (Simon & Schuster, 1992) (ISBN 0-671-66274-0)
- Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion (1983, Revised edition 1989, Touchstone, ISBN 0-671-67523-0)
- EveryWoman’s Emotional Well-Being: Heart & Mind, Body & Soul (Doubleday, 1986, ISBN 978-0385185615)
- The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective (with Carole Wade) (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, revised 1984, ISBN 978-0155511866)
- The Redbook Report on Female Sexuality: 100,000 married women disclose the good news about sex (Delacorte, 1977, ISBN 978-0385288675)
References
Tavris, Carol (2022) Trans Reality: “I Didn’t Know There Was Another Side” Skeptic 27.1 (March 2022) https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/transgender-reality-i-didnt-know-there-was-another-side/
Resources
Dr. Carol Tavris (tavris.socialpsychology.org)
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)