I’m afraid that the whole discussion is so polarized at the moment that it is hindering progress. On one hand, conservative people want to completely ban hormone therapy and puberty blockers. On the other hand, progressive people want to ban the pathologizarion of gender affirmation. There a huge lack of nuance in the discourse.
A while back, there was a study (IIRC) from the UK that recommended against gender transitioning for children. No surprise, it created quite an uproar before it was retracted.
At no point in any of the media coverage or comments on Lemmy, etc, did I see any discussion of the study itself. To this day, I have no idea if there was an issue with the methodology. It seems that no one, neither supporters nor opponents, bothered to read past the headline. Many of them were very fervent in their beliefs, but that wasn’t enough to get them to look at the details.
This is also very bad for science - there are countless headline-grabbing “studies” that fail basic requirements. I’m sure you’ve seen things like “Is coffee/chocolate/etc good for you? A new 10-day study of 23 people suggests that…”. Which of course should get picked apart.
If we aren’t following the science, then what are we even trying to do?
(As an aside, I suspect that study was flawed, but I can’t confirm. It goes against the conclusions widely agreed upon, and would require significant rigor and evidence to support the claim)
On priors, you’re talking about the Cass report, which was in fact massively flawed, and I saw a great deal of discussion on it. Among other issues, they tossed out a lot of studies, and wrote the report from the stance that the only studies worth looking at would have been double blind studies. I’m not sure if you’ve considered this specifically, but it’s pretty damn hard to blind starting to grow boobs or facial hair. Cass, the supposedly neutral party conducting the study, was handing out copies of “Irreversible Damage”, a scaremongering antitrans book about how the poor helpless young “women” were being seduced by big trans. It was garbage, and there’s plenty of writeups on it.
When human and social situations are interpreted in simplistic one-size-fits-all ways by people who have linked such interpretation to being a member of a “political side”, their takes are not really about what’s best for the people involved, even when they claim otherwise.
There really isn’t any “one size fits all” approach for most human subjects, specially something as socially significant as gender is in most societies.
I’m afraid that the whole discussion is so polarized at the moment that it is hindering progress. On one hand, conservative people want to completely ban hormone therapy and puberty blockers. On the other hand, progressive people want to ban the pathologizarion of gender affirmation. There a huge lack of nuance in the discourse.
I agree with you, and would go further.
A while back, there was a study (IIRC) from the UK that recommended against gender transitioning for children. No surprise, it created quite an uproar before it was retracted.
At no point in any of the media coverage or comments on Lemmy, etc, did I see any discussion of the study itself. To this day, I have no idea if there was an issue with the methodology. It seems that no one, neither supporters nor opponents, bothered to read past the headline. Many of them were very fervent in their beliefs, but that wasn’t enough to get them to look at the details.
This is also very bad for science - there are countless headline-grabbing “studies” that fail basic requirements. I’m sure you’ve seen things like “Is coffee/chocolate/etc good for you? A new 10-day study of 23 people suggests that…”. Which of course should get picked apart.
If we aren’t following the science, then what are we even trying to do?
(As an aside, I suspect that study was flawed, but I can’t confirm. It goes against the conclusions widely agreed upon, and would require significant rigor and evidence to support the claim)
On priors, you’re talking about the Cass report, which was in fact massively flawed, and I saw a great deal of discussion on it. Among other issues, they tossed out a lot of studies, and wrote the report from the stance that the only studies worth looking at would have been double blind studies. I’m not sure if you’ve considered this specifically, but it’s pretty damn hard to blind starting to grow boobs or facial hair. Cass, the supposedly neutral party conducting the study, was handing out copies of “Irreversible Damage”, a scaremongering antitrans book about how the poor helpless young “women” were being seduced by big trans. It was garbage, and there’s plenty of writeups on it.
https://kinesismagazine.com/2025/02/16/methodological-and-ethical-failures-of-the-cass-review-why-it-falls-short-as-a-guideline-for-trans-healthcare/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-u-k-s-cass-review-badly-fails-trans-children/
Thank you- this is exactly the sort of critique I had been expecting/hoping to find
When human and social situations are interpreted in simplistic one-size-fits-all ways by people who have linked such interpretation to being a member of a “political side”, their takes are not really about what’s best for the people involved, even when they claim otherwise.
There really isn’t any “one size fits all” approach for most human subjects, specially something as socially significant as gender is in most societies.