” Referring to Bieber’s methodology of relying on the reports of psychoanalysts, Kaye said, “He knew what he wanted to find before he did his study.”

That’s something I have to be careful of too. We all do.
It’s a trap for those with highly developed senses of morality: we see what we think should be, rather than what’s actually there.
I think the best we can do is try to guard against it, and to be prepared to change our minds when exposed to new evidence. There has to be some hysteresis, some resistance, but not very much.
I’ve taken a very firm stand on the biological basis of gender identity. Far firmer than most (a danger sign). I’ve tried my hardest to post what articles and evidence I can find refuting or limiting my position, and indeed have changed my opinions on the boundaries of what we know, always on the side of less clearly defined categories. Yet the mountain of evidence suggesting my analysis is accurate grows higher at an accelerating rate. I may still be out in Left Field, but at least now I’m well within the accepted ballpark.
Sexual orientation is another matter; my opinions there are nowhere near as well-formed. I’m not even sure what “sexual orientation” means – what characteristics define androphilia from gynephilia. Are we dealing with sex characteristics or gender characteristics, or both? How much is a matter of biology – instinctive recognition of someone else’s sex based on appearance, texture, smell, taste, (behaviour?) and how much is socially conditioned?
So much I don’t know. So many over-simplifications that can impede understanding. So much I “know” that’s quite probably wrong.
I can easily imagine Dr Zucker (who I think is deeply mistaken) having similar thoughts. But Nicolosi? Not so much.

There is reason to question that allowing psychoanalysts to fulfill their own prophecies was ever state of the art.

Warren, in the Dark Age of Psychiatry, it was the norm. Drapetomania. Hysteria.
Psychonanalysis was never evidence-based. We knew it did some good, in a minority of situations, sometimes. Well, we thought so, no-one ever actually checked, this belief was based on singleton case-studies, not double-blind experiments with controls.
Here’s McHugh on the subject of Transsexuality:

But lay these strong moral objections aside and consider only that this surgical practice has distracted effort from genuine investigations attempting to find out just what has gone wrong for these people–what has, by their testimony, given them years of torment and psychological distress and prompted them to accept these grim and disfiguring surgical procedures.
We need to know how to prevent such sadness, indeed horror.
We have to learn how to manage this condition as a mental disorder when we fail to prevent it. If it depends on child rearing, then let’s hear about its inner dynamics so that parents can be taught to guide their children properly. If it is an aspect of confusion tied to homosexuality, we need to understand its nature and exactly how to manage it as a manifestation of serious mental disorder among homosexual individuals. But instead of attempting to learn enough to accomplish these worthy goals, psychiatrists collaborated in a exercise of folly with distressed people during a time when “do your own thing” had something akin to the force of a command.
As physicians, psychiatrists, when they give in to this, abandon the role of protecting patients from their symptoms and become little more than technicians working on behalf of a cultural force.

It’s difficult to see how anyone could be unaware of a history 50 years long to find an environmental, rather than biological, cause. And the death-toll from failed “talking cures” along the way is staggering.
Ideology drives a belief, and facts that contradict that belief have to be ignored in order to maintain ideological purity. I find McHugh’s words to be a classic case of projection. One thing though – in the 60’s, there really was a “:follow your own bliss” Zeitgeist. He had evidence for his original beliefs. But that article was written in 1992. 19 years later, he’s still of his original belief, he’s learnt nothing since then.
I hope I never let my ideas become ossified like that.

Zoe, it must be frustrating for yourself, personally, in your humanity; as well, as frustrating to you as a scientist (rocket science, is it??) to watch many of us stumble about with notions that seem to be ‘flat earth’ notions.

Actually, here people are pretty good. No-one’s taught this stuff at school. I’ve been called in by professors of psychology and medicine to give remedial lectures to their students, not in first year, but to third-year and post-grad students, as they weren’t taught it in med school either.
I have an advantage there. They don’t realise that they’re being taught by one of those anomalous cases. So when I drop that piece of information as the tail of the lecture, the sheer shock of that is a “teachable moment”. Like the traditional old Buddhist technique of unexpectedly whacking the student with a stick “and thus they became enlightened”.
I’m sure Warren can tell you more about the mechanism at work there than I can, in a way it induces very mild psychic trauma to make sure the message that has been conveyed immediately before is laid down in permanent memory more strongly.
Anyway, if third year med and psych students at top Universities don’t know this stuff, how can lay people be expected to?

Reading your Comments, which as an aside are always a joy to read … on many levels, semantically, grammatically, content … you seem to be saying that the fields of biology, physiology, micro-biology are making serious strides in observing (maybe understanding) some ‘sexual’ developmental processes. Is that correct?

Exactly correct, yes (and keep those compliments coming!). Right now we’re at the stage of determining the limits of our simplifications and categories. Basically, a lot of things we assumed just “were” turn out not to be so clear-cut.
In the past, experiments were performed using subjects as stereotypically male as possible, or stereotypically female as possible. We wanted to highlight any differences that there may or may not have been between them neurologically, so we could determine whether differences existed or not. We didn’t know. So we had to exclude possible sources of noise and uncertainty, and of course that means we were experimenting using an atypical cohort.
Once we found differences – or, in many cases, determined that no differences existed, we could start using cohorts that better matched reality.
Now we’re extending the bounds even further, though there’s still a lot we don’t know. We get tantalising hints suggesting directions of future research, but it’s likely many of these are false trails because sample sizes are too small.
Here’s an example of one such, quite possibly false, trail:
One person we studied had untreated male gender dysphoria (S7), took no hormones and kept his transsexual feelings under wraps. He appeared to have a large INAH3 volume – in the male range – but a female INAH3 number of neurons (68) and a female BSTc somatostatin neuron number (95). Hence, this individual’s hypothalamic characteristics were mid-way between male and female values
That’s from Sexual differentiation of the human brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation D.Swaab & A.Garcia-Fulgaras Functional Neurology, Jan-Mar 2009:
Here’s another, showing that things are not so clear-cut as we’d thought they might be:
We analyzed MRI data of 24 male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals not yet treated with cross-sex hormones in order to determine whether gray matter volumes in MTF transsexuals more closely resemble people who share their biological sex (30 control men), or people who share their gender identity (30 control women). Results revealed that regional gray matter variation in MTF transsexuals is more similar to the pattern found in men than in women. However, MTF transsexuals show a significantly larger volume of regional gray matter in the right putamen compared to men. These findings provide new evidence that transsexualism is associated with distinct cerebral pattern, which supports the assumption that brain anatomy plays a role in gender identity.
From Regional gray matter variation in male-to-female transsexualism. by Luders et al Neuroimage. 2009 Jul 15;46(4):904-7.
Finally, another one showing that things aren’t as neat as we might expect, but that we’re now studying subtle, rather than gross differences:
This study investigated the functional brain organization of 68 male-to-female (MtF) transwomen and 26 female-to-male (FtM) transmen by comparing their performance with 36 typical male and 28 typical female controls on two indicators of cerebral lateralization: dichotic listening and handedness. A sex-differentiating dichotic test and a handedness questionnaire were administered. It was hypothesized that the MtF participants’ dichotic performance would be significantly different from the control males and resemble the control female pattern. This hypothesis was supported. It was also hypothesized that the FtM dichotic pattern would be significantly different from the control females and would resemble the control male pattern. This hypothesis was not supported. Finally, it was hypothesized that there would be significantly more nonexclusive right-handers in both trans-groups. This hypothesis was supported. Taken together, the dichotic and handedness data reported here indicate that the MtF and FtM conditions are not mirror images in terms of the verbal-auditory aspects of their brain organization and neurobiology plays an important role, particularly in the development of the male-to-female trans-condition.
From Dichotic Listening, Handedness, Brain Organization and Transsexuality Govier et al International Journal of Transgenderism, 12:144–154, 2010