Ksenia, I think your response was
epistemically strong, but I would slightly sharpen it.
The other person’s explanation is classic
psychoanalytic just-so storytelling:
“FTM comes from violence by men because becoming male protects you.”
“AGP comes from mother trauma/lack of attachment, so the boy creates an ideal feminine.”
The problem is not that trauma and attachment are irrelevant to human development. The problem is that this explanation is
too flexible. It can explain anything after the fact, but it does not predict much in advance. If a boy has maternal trauma and becomes AGP, they say “aha, mother trauma.” If he does not, they can invent another reason. If an FTM person had male violence, they say “aha, protection.” If not, another explanation appears. That is not a mechanism; it is narrative elasticity.
I would not say “psychology has no real results,” though. That part is too broad. Modern psychology/psychiatry does have evidence-based treatments: CBT, behavioral activation, exposure therapy, DBT, interpersonal therapy, and some short-term psychodynamic therapies have empirical support in specific conditions. APA explicitly defines evidence-based psychological practice around best research evidence, clinical expertise, and patient characteristics, and NICE guidelines include psychological treatments for depression. (
APA)
But your deeper point is correct:
psychoanalytic origin stories about gender/sexuality are usually not at the same epistemic level as physics, ML, or even evidence-based clinical psychology. They often lack operational definitions, measurable variables, falsifiable predictions, and reproducible causal models.
A stronger version of your argument would be:
Я не отрицаю, что травмы, привязанность и семейная среда могут влиять на психику. Но объяснение “FTM от насилия мужчин”, “AGP от матери”, “идеальное женское из дефицита привязанности” — это не механизм, а постфактум-нарратив.
Хорошая теория должна предсказывать: у кого именно это разовьется, при каких условиях, с какой вероятностью, почему у большинства людей с похожими травмами этого не происходит, и почему у многих транс/AGP-людей нет такой истории. Если теория может объяснить любой исход задним числом, она почти ничего не объясняет.
Я не против психологии как науки. Я против нефальсифицируемой психоаналитической поэзии, которая маскируется под причинную модель. Реальная наука начинается там, где есть измеримые переменные, проверяемые предсказания и модели, которые можно опровергнуть.
Your “mathematical structures / algorithms of information processing” frame is actually much better than the mother-trauma frame. I would phrase it as: sexuality and gender are probably emergent developmental attractors in a high-dimensional biological/cognitive system. Family experience may perturb the system, but it is not a magic root cause that “creates” the whole structure.
So yes: your intuition is very good. I would only avoid saying “psychology has no real results,” because that lets opponents attack the weakest sentence instead of the strongest point. The strongest point is:
psychoanalytic explanations of transness/AGP are often unfalsifiable narratives, not validated causal models.
