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[–]reluctant_commenter[S] 11 insightful - 1 fun11 insightful - 0 fun12 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I wanted to share this article because it is a pretty comprehensive and accurate summary of the child transitioning in the last 15 or so years.

It does give a fair amount of leeway to the pro-transitioning crowd at the very beginning. However, I think it also does a good job of being accessible to people who are left-leaning and haven't been following the transgender movement much apart from reading liberal media headlines.

Great summary quote:

Mainstream coverage of this issue is a buffet of sanctimonious overclaiming. It says authoritatively that kids in the US can’t go on blockers or hormones prior to lengthy, in-depth assessment (false). That no one under 18 is getting surgery (false). That the worldwide rise in referrals to youth GD clinics is almost entirely the result of reduced stigmatization (no one knows). That GD, or the perception that one has GD, can’t spread through adolescent social networks (almost certainly false on the basis of anecdotal evidence and any familiarity with developmental psychology). That it’s a ‘myth’ that significant number of kids who believe themselves to be trans will later feel differently (false, according to all the existing data). That only a tiny percentage of people detransition (we have no data at all on this in the context of youth gender care in the States).

And, an excerpt about Jack Turban's flawed research study that was reported by newspapers as supporting child-transing...

In this politicized hothouse, questionable claims that support the ‘right’ political conclusions flourish. For example, last year Pediatrics published a study in which a team led by Jack Turban — a fellow in psychiatry who racks up many media hits promoting the view that concerns over youth transition are overstated — purported to demonstrate a link between access to blockers and reduced risk of suicidal ideation. His paper is rife with crippling methodological problems.

The researchers took data from the 2015 United States Transgender Survey (USTS), a big sample recruited online, and zoomed in on the subset of respondents who reported ever having wanted puberty blockers. Then the researchers attempted to correlate this group’s access to blockers to various outcomes. In the controlled models, the only outcome that was statistically significant was lifetime suicidality: among respondents who reported ever having wanted blockers, those who reported receiving them reported lower lifetime suicidality than those who reported not having received them. Hence, the claim that blockers reduce suicidal ideation.

Except that, as the Oxford sociologist Michael Biggs and a number of other critics pointed out, causality could just as easily go the other way: maybe those in the higher-suicidality group were more suicidal as youngsters, and the clinicians they went to for blockers followed guidelines which state that the medication should not be administered if a child has serious mental-health problems. The design of the study offers us no reason to view this as a less likely explanation. While the authors briefly mention the causality issue in the study itself, Turban subsequently gave interviews and wrote a New York Times column that ignored it. (In the column, he actually misrepresented his own study as having measured young-adulthood suicidal ideation rather than lifetime suicidal ideation, which would support his preferred causal explanation.)

There’s an arguably bigger problem with the study, anyway, also highlighted by Biggs: 73 percent of the respondents to the USTS who said they’d been on blockers reported receiving them at age 18 or later. Since blockers aren’t usually given past age 16, this clearly indicates that the respondents didn’t know what blockers are — and that they, as the authors of the survey themselves suggest, have likely confused them with cross-sex hormones. To address this, Turban and his colleagues simply tossed out the results from this 73 percent, but given the extent of the confusion, why should anyone think it didn’t apply to the younger respondents too?

[–]Dromedary 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I do follow and read Jesse Singal, he is quite meticulous in his reporting and fearless in taking on thorny issues like child gender dysphoria and transition etc. And importantly, he does it with a lot of compassion- he's coming at it from a liberal and conscientious way. And because he's so meticulous, and marshals his facts so well, he drives trans activists up a wall, and he is a HUGE target for all sorts of smears and calumny. But he carries on, even when the attacks are personally upsetting. He says what some people just don't want to hear.

[–]reluctant_commenter[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah, I really appreciate how thoughtful and nuanced this article was. Made me rethink the way I approach discussions about gender dysphoria, to my surprise.