Cont: Trans women are not women (IX)

[JoeMorgue]

‘Social contagion’ isn’t causing more youths to be transgender, study finds

“Social contagion” is not driving an increasing number of adolescents to come out as transgender, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Pediatrics.

The study also found that the proportion of adolescents who were assigned female at birth and have come out as transgender also has not increased, which contradicts claims that adolescents whose birth sex is female are more susceptible to this so-called external influence.

https://www.today.com/parents/parents/social-contagion-isnt-causing-youths-transgender-study-finds-rcna41457?utm_source=digg

 

[Ziggurat]

Nope, this is a blind and a distraction. Homosexuals do not impact, and never have impacted, on the rights of others.

That's not completely true. That whole wedding cake mess is a counter-example. But in general, your point is quite valid: homosexuals for the most part aren't asking for and don't need other people to make accommodations for them. Certainly the early gay rights push for decriminalization needed nothing of the sort. So it's a very bad parallel for transgender activists to call upon.

 

[Rolfe]

“Social contagion” is not driving an increasing number of adolescents to come out as transgender, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Pediatrics.

The study also found that the proportion of adolescents who were assigned female at birth and have come out as transgender also has not increased, which contradicts claims that adolescents whose birth sex is female are more susceptible to this so-called external influence.

That's a bit like saying, "water found not to be wet", according to a new study.

I suppose we'll see how that ages.

 

[Rolfe]

Oh look, that was quick.

https://twitter.com/nathankw/status/1555176667932418048

 

[Ziggurat]

‘Social contagion’ isn’t causing more youths to be transgender, study finds

Well, no, that isn't what the study finds. Here's their actual conclusion:

The sex assigned at birth ratio of TGD [transgender and gender diverse] adolescents in the United States does not appear to favor AFAB [assigned female at birth] adolescents and should not be used to argue against the provision of gender-affirming medical care for TGD adolescents.​

This conclusion is being used to argue against one of the cited pieces of evidence used in the social contagion theory (an uptick in the number of females becoming transgender). But it doesn't by itself disprove social contagion.

Moreover, their only real finding is that (according to the survey) there are still more male transgender adolescents than female transgender adolescents, but that doesn't discount the possibility of an uptick in female transgender adolescents.

They've only got data for 2 years, with considerable variability between years: 2.35% (they rounded to 2.4%) of respondents self-identify as TGD in 2017, 1.6% in 2019. Random sampling should give you a statistical error on the order of root(N), so in 2017 with 2161 TDG respondents (out of 91,937), random statistical sampling error should be around +/- 46, which would mean the percentage would be 2.35% +/- 0.05%. The 2019 data has similar sized errors. So the variation between years (1.6% vs. 2.4%) is far in excess of the random sampling errors. Is the difference due to genuine change over time? Don't know, we only have two years. Is it due to some non-random sampling error? Don't know, it's self-reported data so quite possibly. But with a change between years much larger than the statistical error should be and only two data points, there's not much to work with and little reason to put much confidence in the numbers.

I don't think you can really conclude much of anything from such a limited data set.

 

[Steersman]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1:

This should go without saying. Of course trans women are not women. They are males who choose to self-identify as females. Even if they have had transition surgery and are taking hormones, they still have male bone structure, male neural pathways, and if you do a gender-ID blood test, the test will show them as male. Even when criminals leave a blood smear, their gender can be determined by analyzing the blood for form a and form c neutrophils. ....]

I agree with all of your post. Personally, I'm still stuck at "This should go without saying. Of course trans women are not women. They are males who choose to self-identify as females." and still scratch my head as to why there continues to be disagreement on that most fundamental fact.

Amen to that - more or less. Though somewhat moot on exactly what ARE the facts of the matter.

It's a clear and quite "brute" fact that some 33% of humans are able to produce ova on a regular basis - habitually, so to speak - and that some 33% of humans are similarly able to produce sperm on a regular basis - habitually, so to speak. The balance in the third group not being able to produce either on any basis at all. But the first two groups are, at least in humans, mutually exclusive.

A further similarly "brutish" fact is that most of those competing in what are called "women's sports" have at least a substantially large degree of "family resemblance" to the first group while Lia Thomas has a substantially large degree of "family resemblance" to the second group while having almost diddly-squat in way of any resemblance at all to the first - homeopathic concoctions probably have a greater resemblance to the starters of entirely different compounds.

What is rather moot is what we shall CALL those groups. But the calling is something of red herring. The fundamental question seems to be whether women's sports are to be for the exclusive "enjoyment" of the first group or whether some of the second group can encroach upon the territory of the first group.

Too many people don't seem to realize that words are abstractions, that they're labels that denote properties and categories, that they're often just "maps" to territories - not much in the way of territories themselves. Whole lotta reification goin' on ...

 

[d4m10n]

‘Social contagion’ isn’t causing more youths to be transgender, study finds

Did you happen to click through to the article itself?

The ROGD hypothesis asserts that young people begin to identify as TGD for the first time as adolescents rather than as prepubertal children and that this identification and subsequent gender dysphoria are the result of social contagion.

This decrease in the overall percentage of adolescents identifying as TGD is incongruent with an ROGD hypothesis that posits social contagion.

The authors must be taking a bizarrely naive view of contagion to rule it out just because the numbers happen to be trending down in the short term. Imagine if someone had argued the influenza is not contagious because fewer people caught it in 2020 than in 2018, or that the hula hoop craze wasn't the result of social contagion because it had petered out by the time disco became hip.

 

[Rolfe]

Here's another.

https://twitter.com/TwisterFilm/status/1555308001631895553

 

[Elaedith]

Did you happen to click through to the article itself?





The authors must be taking a bizarrely naive view of contagion to rule it out just because the numbers happen to be trending down in the short term. Imagine if someone had argued the influenza is not contagious because fewer people caught it in 2020 than in 2018, or that the hula hoop craze wasn't the result of social contagion because it had petered out by the time disco became hip.

They are supporting an ideological position that states that the rapid increase in young people identifying as transgender must be solely explained by feeling it is safer to 'come out'. Yet a decrease between two time points which they interpret as meaningful, but for which they offer no explanation, proves that any increases cannot be due to contagion. Apparently if the contagion hypothesis is correct, rates can only ever increase and never decrease, but the social acceptance hypothesis is compatible with rates changing in either direction.

It is beyond bizarre, but in line with what one expects from Turban based on his body of work.

 

[Brainster]

That paper would get an "F" in any statistics class. Seriously, using two data points to make a trendline?

 

[Ziggurat]

They are supporting an ideological position that states that the rapid increase in young people identifying as transgender must be solely explained by feeling it is safer to 'come out'. Yet a decrease between two time points which they interpret as meaningful, but for which they offer no explanation, proves that any increases cannot be due to contagion. Apparently if the contagion hypothesis is correct, rates can only ever increase and never decrease, but the social acceptance hypothesis is compatible with rates changing in either direction.

It is beyond bizarre, but in line with what one expects from Turban based on his body of work.

In fairness, I don't think that's their argument. The author seems to be arguing that the social contagion model suggests that females should be dominating the transgender rates, but it's still more males than females. And their data does indicate that it's more males than females (with the provisio, again, that the data isn't very good). But I don't think the idea of social contagion really requires that it be more females than males overall, even if social contagion is more prevalent among females (which has been suggested by advocates of social contagion model).

 

[Rolfe]

Here's another more detailed take-down. I particularly liked this part.

Turban and colleagues used publicly available survey data (self-reported from anonymous high school students in 16 states) which was gathered as part of a CDC biennial survey on risk behavior among high schoolers.

So, Turban didn’t conduct his own “research” or “design a study” per se. He took some publicly available data, which asked a few questions that were of interest to him. He told readers what the answers to those questions were, and then… he made some huge leaps.

The author of the study didn't ask any questions of anyone. He simply tapped into an anonymous survey. He then cherry-picked the data shamelessly, in particular by choosing to compare two sets of data only two years apart and extrapolate short-term trends in that time as if they were certain to reflect long-term trends.

The claim that has received the widest attention is that there are not more natal-born girls identifying as transgender than natal-born boys. This is self-evident nonsense, as can be shown multiple times by referring to the published data from gender clinics showing an increase in presentations from both sexes, but in particular an enormous increase in girls - as much as 400x in some countries.

So how did he do this? He simply took the anonymous respondents' word for it as to whether they were male or female, and assumed that they had answered with their biological sex.

Yes, really. He decided that girls who identify as boys wouldn't tick the "male" box on the survey form (or that boys who identify as girls wouldn't tick the "female" box). Some might, but you can bet your bottom dollar many wouldn't, and we have no way to know how the split went in the anonymous survey he was using.

Here's another takedown published today, with a particularly interesting observation.

Another indication comes from the distribution of height, given that natal females are shorter on average than natal males. Predicting height separately for each sex, OLS regression (adjusting for age and race) reveals that transgender respondents who identified as male were on average 2.5cm shorter than non-transgender male respondents (95% CI: 1.3...3.8cm, total n= 87,568). (There was no discernible height difference between transgender respondents who identified as female and non-transgender female respondents.)This height difference is evidence that some of the transgender respondents who identified themselves as male were natal females.

If the original author was correct in his assumption that the young people answering the anonymous survey always reported their biological sex, then this is a very remarkable population in which the average male height is an inch shorter than the average female height.

How do these things get past peer review in the first place?

 

[Ziggurat]

Here's another more detailed take-down.
...
Here's another takedown published today, with a particularly interesting observation.

Thanks for these. I did look at the original paper, but these are much more in-depth than my own examination, and I'm not surprised to see even more serious faults than I found.

How do these things get past peer review in the first place?

I think we already know that answer. Peer review isn't magic, and the entire field has been corrupted.

 

[theprestige]

In fairness, I don't think that's their argument. The author seems to be arguing that the social contagion model suggests that females should be dominating the transgender rates, but it's still more males than females. And their data does indicate that it's more males than females (with the provisio, again, that the data isn't very good). But I don't think the idea of social contagion really requires that it be more females than males overall, even if social contagion is more prevalent among females (which has been suggested by advocates of social contagion model).

Especially if we consider what I take to be the "Rolfe Hypothesis": That the ranks of trans-identifying folks got an early boost in their numbers from autogynaephiliacs using LGB rights activism and the Normalization of Queer as trojan horses to inject themselves into sex-segregated spaces as "women". So even if the social contagion hypothesis is correct, women may still be playing catch-up, numbers-wise.

I think a better approach to the social contagion model among women would be to look at the growth in FtM trans identification over time, without comparing it to the MtF numbers. If the hypothesis is correct, we'd expect to see an acceleration in the increase of FtM numbers as Queer becomes more normalized and trans-promoting viewpoints and authority figures become more mainstream.

We'd still need waaay better data than this paper goes with, though.

 

[theprestige]

He simply took the anonymous respondents' word for it as to whether they were male or female, and assumed that they had answered with their biological sex.

That's one thing that aggravates me. We've gone to great effort here to draw a clear distinction between sex and gender, and to reserve male and female as terms for sex. But it's clear that the wider culture isn't making this effort. It's clear that a lot of people in the wider culture aren't even aware of the issue, or how bad it is to ambiguate sex and gender like this. And it's clear that the trans-activist community wants it that way and is pushing it to be that way.

One obvious way it's bad is that you absolutely cannot trust a teenager raised under Queer-Is-Normal to use male and female to mean biological sex, or to even understand the pitfalls of not doing that. But that trust is exactly what this author relies on to reach his conclusions.

How do these things get past peer review in the first place?

My hypothesis is that it's a mixture of ideological capture, and cargo-cultism in the sense of people confusing going through the motions of good science is the same as doing good science. "Good scientists do peer review? Here's a peer reviewed journal you can publish in - yay, we're being good scientists together!"

 

[Brainster]

How do these things get past peer review in the first place?

It does boggle the mind that this got published as a serious, scientific paper. I mean, I'm assuming that this isn't the Bentham Open Pediatrics Journal.

The cynic in me thinks that pediatrics being a fairly sleepy field nobody wants to turn away a sudden profit center from a demographic (adolescents and young adults) that seldom require medical care relative to their younger and older counterparts.

 

[Elaedith]

How do these things get past peer review in the first place?

Pediatrics is published by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The AAP has a policy of unqualified support for gender affirmation model of treatment for 'transgender and gender diverse' children and adolescents. We already discussed this before in the thread, as none of the citations offered in support of their policy actually do support it.

The AAP is also currently trying to suppress a motion for an evidence review of its policies in line with the UK Cass review. Pediatrics rejected for publication the comment by Dr Michael Biggs pointing to the height discrepancy issue you mentioned before, within an hour of it being submitted to the journal. I think we can safely say at this point that nothing the AAP says or publishes can be trusted.

More broadly, the state of academia at present is such that there is actually a serious movement proposing that deplatforming and traducing other academics for wrongthink is equivalent to conducting peer review.

 

[Elaedith]

In fairness, I don't think that's their argument. The author seems to be arguing that the social contagion model suggests that females should be dominating the transgender rates, but it's still more males than females. And their data does indicate that it's more males than females (with the provisio, again, that the data isn't very good). But I don't think the idea of social contagion really requires that it be more females than males overall, even if social contagion is more prevalent among females (which has been suggested by advocates of social contagion model).

Yes, their main argument is concerning the absolute number of males and females (but as you point out, this is not relevant - the contagion hypothesis is suggested by reversal in rates of female versus male adolescents reporting to gender clinics around the world).

My comment was related to this line in the discussion: "Additionally, the total percentage of TGD adolescents in our sample decreased from 2.4% in 2017 to 1.6% in 2019. This decrease in the overall percentage of adolescents identifying as TGD is incongruent with an ROGD hypothesis that posits social contagion."

 

[Rolfe]

And another.

The New Study On Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria Published In “Pediatrics” Is Genuinely Worthless

I was going to quote a bit but it's pretty long and it also references the critiques I linked to above. Then it goes on to reference more anomalies and criticisms. He does not miss and hit the wall.

He does have some interesting observations about the author of the study though.

If you follow this issue closely or read this newsletter regularly, you probably already know who one of the coauthors of the study is: the psychiatrist Jack Turban. Turban recently finished his fellowship and is about to start as a psychiatry professor at the University of California–San Francisco.

In recent years, there’s probably no public-facing researcher who has written or been quoted more about youth gender medicine. And it’s always in the same way: The evidence is fantastic. These treatments work. Everything’s great. Our field is helping so many kids. There’s no controversy here.

In a sworn declaration (PDF) he filed as part of a legal challenge to Arkansas’s attempt to ban youth gender medicine, Turban wrote that “all existing evidence indicates that gender-affirming medical interventions improve mental health outcomes for transgender adolescents and it would be dangerous and unethical to prohibit these medical services.” If you know anything about the present state of research on youth gender medicine, this is an absolutely astonishing thing for a supposed expert to claim — and under oath! There are plenty of studies that offer mixed at best findings about the impact this medicine has on youth mental health. Some of Turban’s own research has failed to establish a statistically meaningful link between access to youth gender medicine and improved outcomes on crucial variables like suicide attempts. (See here for more details.) This is why just about every nation or research body that looks closely into this question has found the same thing: The evidence base is alarmingly weak. Finland, Sweden, and now England have significantly tightened up how they approach youth gender medicine as a result. To my knowledge, Turban has never explained why his assessment of the research base for youth gender medicine is so different — so much sunnier — than almost everyone else’s.

Other stuff in the article suggests that the journal Paediatrics has been entirely captured by the trans agenda.

 

[jimbob]

This thread seems to have calmed down now, so I am going to try taking it off moderated status

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: jimbob