Disclaimer: only partway through the article, will post a summary once I finish. Edit: added summary below.

Shared from Twitter.

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Jack Turban is a researcher and TQ+ activist on Twitter. He advocates for the medical transition of children and claims that there is no evidence for the social contagion hypothesis-- the idea that "adolescents adopt a transgender identity in response to social cues and pressures" (quote from this article).

This article describes how Turban engages in several misleading and or even outright dishonest research practices in his recent (peer reviewed!) research article.

• Ignoring trans-questioning adolescents-- which minimizes and obscures the number of girls who may identify as trans.

First, the supplemental questionnaire asks respondents whether they self-identify as transgender. It gives them four options: yes, no, I don’t know, and I don’t understand the question. Turban includes only those who said yes (2.4 percent in 2017, 1.6 percent in 2019). He leaves out those who answered, “I don’t know,” a far more numerous category (4 percent). This is a problem, because that category might include adolescents who identify as something other than girl or boy—for instance, the increasingly common “nonbinary”—or who may still be in the process of figuring out whether they identify as trans. Not only is it conceivable that members of this group are more likely to be female, but kids who aren’t sure about their “gender identity” also seem more likely to be affected by social contagion than those whose trans self-identification is tenacious and has been ongoing.

• Citing studies to support a claim-- when those studies do not actually support the claim at all.

Second, the supplemental questionnaire also asks respondents what their “sex” is. Turban assumes that respondents understand this second question to mean “sex assigned at birth” rather than “gender identity,” and cites three studies to confirm that that is how teenagers “are likely to understand” the word “sex.” Yet the first two citations say nothing of the sort, and the third only weakly hints in that direction. No less damning, the researcher who developed the questionnaire for the CDC has herself emphasized the “uncertainty as to whether transgender students responded to the sex question with their sex or gender identity.”

• Using a non-representative sample to make claims about a much broader population.

Third, Turban’s claim about the sex ratio is inconsistent with existing data, which clearly show a strong predominance of girls over boys. These trends have been documented in peer-reviewed research, are internationally observed, and have remained fairly steady over the past decade or so. By contrast, Turban’s data are solely from the U.S., sample only one-third of states (Turban mentions 16 states, but it appears that the actual number of states collecting data is even lower), and focus only on two specific years.

• Assuming that correlation equals causation: that being transgender causes children to experience more bullying. (Ignoring alternatives; e.g. (homophobic, or anti-ASD, or sexist) bullying being a factor that drives children to want to identify as transgender to avoid it.)

...Indeed, trans identification is sometimes thought to be a strategy of coping with social maladjustment, especially in autistic and neurodivergent youth (a group that represents one-third of female referrals, according to the Cass Review of the U.K.’s now-closed Tavistock Clinic). In other words, the bullying may be a response to social maladjustment, independent of any gender issues.