There's an important piece to this that isn't getting the coverage it deserves in all the commentary happening. Olsen-Kennedy isn't just refusing to publish the results, the NYT completely busted her and called her out for lying about and misrepresenting the mental health of the children who were the subjects of this study in a way that tried to make the null results look better. She told the NYT that the reason their mental health didn't improve was because their mental health was all so good to start with. The NYT pulled up an earlier interview with her where she told them 1/4 of these kids were seriously depressed and suicidal.
Jesse Singal has already uncovered how earlier research on this topic has been completely misrepresented and claims made that are the opposite of the results found by researchers and hospitals (one hospital continued to allow the research to be misrepresented and emails show they made a conscious decision to do this). I think it's time we start looking at how their research isn't just low quality, but that this field of research may be rife with outright fraudulence in the name of "human rights"
In this woman’s case, she’s married to a woman who identifies as male. How much are these people just trying to normalize their own weird relationships. Misery loves company…
Oh my goodness. I forgot about that. I won't comment on the nature of their relationship since I can't know that, but that has got to be stern as another red flag for bias when you consider that she is 1) withholding the report, 2) got caught not telling the truth about the mental health of the kids in the study as a way to dismiss her bad results, and 3) is saying things to suggest she's trying to keep working the stats on the days to get it to say something better.
" When I asked a representative for the APA why they hadn't engaged, he told me they saw youth gender medicine not as a scientific issue, but one of human rights."
Complete dereliction of duty. The APA is a professional psychological association, not a professional human rights organization. Or used to be. They should change their name them, e.g. to the American Association of Activist Psychologists. If I want to hear from activists, I know where to look.
Gender "medicine" is a medical intervention and should follow the rules of medicine--weighing benefit, harm, alternatives, including doing "nothing."
I would argue it's a human rights violation to perform unregulated and unmonitored experimental medical procedures on minors - surgeries and hormones that have resulted in not just irreversible effects but serious complications like stroke, locked in syndrome, life threatening blood clots, liver cancer, sepsis, and even death.
Your serious complications list is missing the most obvious…surgically removing the sex organs without medical necessity. At this point it’s genital mutilation. These kids will never have a sex life.
Yep. I think it goes something like this : "Follow the science, ignorant bigots!" .. "But the science shows..." "It's not a scientific issue, hateful bigots"
What shocks me the most about studies like Olson's is how shamelessly horrible the methods are.
I used to have to write these Likert-scale satisfaction surveys, and the first thing you hear about them in any social science/psych program is that they basically tell you nothing whenever there is ANY motivation at ALL for self-report to skew positive or negative. Satisfaction surveys are notoriously unreliable measures of *actual good*, even for adults, and even for measures of satisfaction on things that *aren't* one of the most polarizing and close-to-the-skin issues of our time.
Here, we're talking about self-reported satisfaction data from median *16-year-olds* about what is likely the most polarized political issue they are aware of, and one that folds their very bodies into the discourse of good/evil in just about every conversation with popular political visibility ("Queers for Palestine"). And this, from a group of people developmentally situated in the peak years of their need to conform to people who they perceive as similar to them.
The researcher reports being "surprised" by so many "7 out of 7" satisfaction reports from her young subjects. I thought that was a cute attempt to preempt anybody else bringing it up.
In good faith, she knows that satisfaction data so extreme on this issue -- for medical procedures that we have clinical evidence to prove result in complicated side effects and half-successful/non-functional aesthetic interventions, especially for females -- indicate the SELF-REPORTS ARE COOKED.
In a political climate where saying you're unsatisfied is received as a political statement, self-report satisfaction surveys should never have passed as a method in the first place. This mess shouldn't even pass a dissertation proposal defense. So, why are they not only one method among several, but seemingly the only method anyone is using to indicate satisfaction?
Enough with the self-report data. Tell us about clinical outcomes for phalloplasties. Tell us what happens to bodies when organs are gone or transformed or relocated. Tell us about how the male experience of taking on female secondary sex characteristics is categorically different from the female taking on male ones. Because if these "researchers" were actually looking and listening to girls the way teachers and parents are, they'd put down their presenter remote and move to a deserted island where they could repent privately for ignoring how sex-based distinctions in motivations, goals, and outcomes tell the picture about patriarchy's hand in all this that self-report data hides.
While I'm writing all this out of my own rage: go ahead and send every researcher to r/detrans and r/butchlesbians before they publish, so they can see how UNIVERSALLY the loss of sex-based analysis has impacted girls for the worse, and how girls transition because they don't think they're pretty enough to be women, and how no one wants to be a butch lesbian because a butch lesbian is just a trans man waiting to happen -- according to the only queer-stamped """lesbian""" culture they're able to access these days, like Feel Good and The L Word, both of which deny the reality of female masculinity. Go look at how the kids on r/butchlesbians think they have to take testosterone and remove their breasts to be a legible form of human being, and how that comes from external discourse, not from their souls.
(and while I'm here, I just want to say that I'm *really* enjoying your conversations with Aaron Kimberly [The Bearded Lesbian]! SBD has been one of the most edifying and enlightening resources in my own understanding of all things gender, and I'm SO glad you and your voice are back online!)
I love your analysis here re methods / satisfaction surveys.
Because I want to get an overview of what those "trans" are freaking abt this week, I read Erin R substack but HIS analysis of legislation and current research always makes me say "wait a min, that don't seem right" He twists and skews everything to make all trans victims and only what they want matters. I never write in his comments bc I don't have the analytic skills.
Does anyone else read Erin in the Morning and wonder what's going on really? He is "engaged" to some trans/man legislator.
Speaking as a retired doctor, who used to teach medical ethics to medical students, I am disturbed by these gender doctors’ lack of scientific rigour. I am disturbed by their lack of capacity for self reflection. I am disturbed by their inability to acknowledge or perhaps even understand the harms they cause to vulnerable young people by foreclosing their future life choices. I am disturbed by the effect these ethical failures have had and are continuing to have on public trust in the medical profession.
However, I also believe that a significant part of the problem lies with the way medical research is currently conducted. “Publish or perish” means that advancing an academic career depends on quantity not quality of publications. This has led to an explosion in the number of publications in any given research field, making it very difficult for researchers to keep up with the literature, let alone engage deeply with any given publication. Importantly, peer review, which is supposed to safeguard the quality of published research, is not compensated. Rather it is provided by busy academics in their “spare time”, in between conducting their own research, teaching, writing grant applications, and keeping up with the tsunami of literature in their field. Thus, the peer review process is not always be as rigorous as we might hope or expect. Furthermore, there is a huge bias towards publishing positive results of experiments or trials. I believe that it should be a condition of the ethical review process (which must occur prior to starting a study) that all results should be published, whether positive, negative, or inconclusive.
They are also suppressing the names of these young adults who died from the iatrogenic harm as well as the post-surgery suicides in this field, where the "Trans Journalists Association Style Guide" demands these individuals are left forever in the fog, along with trans widows and trans orphans, because domestic abuse stories are hidden in that fog. Names of the dead and those we know of only by their deaths during a study: GRIFFIN SIVRET, natal female, originally Makayla, 24 SEPSIS, d. 7/2024, YARDEN SEVEIRA, natal male, 24, post-"vaginoplasty" colon blockage SEPSIS/suicide, d.2021, LIAM JOHNS, natal female, 35, liver failure from testosterone poisoning, d. 3/2024, NAME UNKNOWN, natal male, 62, liver & gall bladder cancer, listed in Mayo Clinic research study on TQ in hospice, the researcher complained he wasn't getting make-up after he went unresponsive, NAME UNKNOWN, natal male, 18, sepsis post "vaginoplasty" in Dutch Study by DeVries & Cohen-Kettenis, 2014, date of death assumed 2012
Genderists can’t stop politicizing genderology because it is an entirely political movement. Because it is not anchored by reality, its roots are not in healthcare they are not clinicians.
They switch around, sometimes it's "human rights movt" then they're going on abt their "gender soul" as some metaphysical, pseudo relig cult would proclaim.
Thank you, Lisa, as always. That ad is hard to watch. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the language overlap with abortion rights. This is at the heart of some of the trickier conversations I've had in the run up to the election. Megan Daum has a good conversation with Jennifer Block on her Unspeakable podcast. I'd welcome others' thoughts.
"Almost all of liberal America believes questioning or objecting to the gender-affirming model is wrong and bad. " This is not true at all. My liberal husband and I, and my closest friend, are all against gender-affirming and identity politics in general. Many of my liberal patients are against it as well and are visibly relieved to hear my opinions about it. People are afraid of being harassed or cancelled
It was so frustrating, listening toRo Khanna, a representative from California, on Megyn Kelly’s podcast last week complain that this issue has been so politicized and it needs to stop. And here you point out how someone running for a position in government is posting on social media, images of her shooting up with an experimental hormone. Definitely not politicizing it there. Thank you, Lisa.
So Ro Khanna hasn't been just as responsible as anyone for politicizing the issue all along? (Just a couple examples of lying by omission and artful euphemisms : "health care disparities" https://khanna.house.gov/issues/equality-and-social-justice and misrepresenting the motives of those concerned about huge numbers of kids identifying as trans https://khanna.house.gov/media/in-the-news/rep-ro-khanna-you-dont-have-see-someone-suffer-become-warrior-lgbtq-rights ) It seems he's been right up front spewing out the false narratives and emotion-laden propaganda on trans issues (of the kind that sows fear among those with important questions and makes any honest scientific inquiry nearly impossible) for years!! It's interesting how many who've been using sophistry as a weapon routinely suddenly want to call a moratorium on "politicizing" things just when their own sophistry becomes LESS effective.
New York State voters: Unsure about how to vote on Prop1?
Answer these questions: Do you want boys to play on girls' sports teams? To be in girls' locker rooms? If no, then vote no.
Do you want men housed in women's prisons? If no, then vote no.
The amendment makes discrimination against "gender identity" illegal. But gender identity is self-ID. It doesn't have to be on any document. There are no objective measures. And these days, gender identity encompasses raccoongender and genderfluid—what does it mean to prioritize those above the objective reality of sex?
Many of us liberals like the idea of an equal rights amendment. We don't want people discriminated against because of their sexual orientation, or their sex or race. And we want abortion to remain legal in NYS. I want all those things, too. But this amendment is so full of overreach, and doesn't even use the word abortion.
I believe it will pass, that so little awareness has been raised that people don't know what you're voting for. But you are voting for the abolition of sex, written into the state constitution. It's okay to say no.
There's an important piece to this that isn't getting the coverage it deserves in all the commentary happening. Olsen-Kennedy isn't just refusing to publish the results, the NYT completely busted her and called her out for lying about and misrepresenting the mental health of the children who were the subjects of this study in a way that tried to make the null results look better. She told the NYT that the reason their mental health didn't improve was because their mental health was all so good to start with. The NYT pulled up an earlier interview with her where she told them 1/4 of these kids were seriously depressed and suicidal.
Jesse Singal has already uncovered how earlier research on this topic has been completely misrepresented and claims made that are the opposite of the results found by researchers and hospitals (one hospital continued to allow the research to be misrepresented and emails show they made a conscious decision to do this). I think it's time we start looking at how their research isn't just low quality, but that this field of research may be rife with outright fraudulence in the name of "human rights"
In this woman’s case, she’s married to a woman who identifies as male. How much are these people just trying to normalize their own weird relationships. Misery loves company…
Oh my goodness. I forgot about that. I won't comment on the nature of their relationship since I can't know that, but that has got to be stern as another red flag for bias when you consider that she is 1) withholding the report, 2) got caught not telling the truth about the mental health of the kids in the study as a way to dismiss her bad results, and 3) is saying things to suggest she's trying to keep working the stats on the days to get it to say something better.
" When I asked a representative for the APA why they hadn't engaged, he told me they saw youth gender medicine not as a scientific issue, but one of human rights."
Complete dereliction of duty. The APA is a professional psychological association, not a professional human rights organization. Or used to be. They should change their name them, e.g. to the American Association of Activist Psychologists. If I want to hear from activists, I know where to look.
Gender "medicine" is a medical intervention and should follow the rules of medicine--weighing benefit, harm, alternatives, including doing "nothing."
I would argue it's a human rights violation to perform unregulated and unmonitored experimental medical procedures on minors - surgeries and hormones that have resulted in not just irreversible effects but serious complications like stroke, locked in syndrome, life threatening blood clots, liver cancer, sepsis, and even death.
Your serious complications list is missing the most obvious…surgically removing the sex organs without medical necessity. At this point it’s genital mutilation. These kids will never have a sex life.
‘Not as a scientific issue’ wow!!! I suppose at least he said it out loud….
Yep. I think it goes something like this : "Follow the science, ignorant bigots!" .. "But the science shows..." "It's not a scientific issue, hateful bigots"
Retweet, GenderRealistMom
Rachel, I am not on tweeter, but feel free to retweet if you like .:)
What shocks me the most about studies like Olson's is how shamelessly horrible the methods are.
I used to have to write these Likert-scale satisfaction surveys, and the first thing you hear about them in any social science/psych program is that they basically tell you nothing whenever there is ANY motivation at ALL for self-report to skew positive or negative. Satisfaction surveys are notoriously unreliable measures of *actual good*, even for adults, and even for measures of satisfaction on things that *aren't* one of the most polarizing and close-to-the-skin issues of our time.
Here, we're talking about self-reported satisfaction data from median *16-year-olds* about what is likely the most polarized political issue they are aware of, and one that folds their very bodies into the discourse of good/evil in just about every conversation with popular political visibility ("Queers for Palestine"). And this, from a group of people developmentally situated in the peak years of their need to conform to people who they perceive as similar to them.
The researcher reports being "surprised" by so many "7 out of 7" satisfaction reports from her young subjects. I thought that was a cute attempt to preempt anybody else bringing it up.
In good faith, she knows that satisfaction data so extreme on this issue -- for medical procedures that we have clinical evidence to prove result in complicated side effects and half-successful/non-functional aesthetic interventions, especially for females -- indicate the SELF-REPORTS ARE COOKED.
In a political climate where saying you're unsatisfied is received as a political statement, self-report satisfaction surveys should never have passed as a method in the first place. This mess shouldn't even pass a dissertation proposal defense. So, why are they not only one method among several, but seemingly the only method anyone is using to indicate satisfaction?
Enough with the self-report data. Tell us about clinical outcomes for phalloplasties. Tell us what happens to bodies when organs are gone or transformed or relocated. Tell us about how the male experience of taking on female secondary sex characteristics is categorically different from the female taking on male ones. Because if these "researchers" were actually looking and listening to girls the way teachers and parents are, they'd put down their presenter remote and move to a deserted island where they could repent privately for ignoring how sex-based distinctions in motivations, goals, and outcomes tell the picture about patriarchy's hand in all this that self-report data hides.
While I'm writing all this out of my own rage: go ahead and send every researcher to r/detrans and r/butchlesbians before they publish, so they can see how UNIVERSALLY the loss of sex-based analysis has impacted girls for the worse, and how girls transition because they don't think they're pretty enough to be women, and how no one wants to be a butch lesbian because a butch lesbian is just a trans man waiting to happen -- according to the only queer-stamped """lesbian""" culture they're able to access these days, like Feel Good and The L Word, both of which deny the reality of female masculinity. Go look at how the kids on r/butchlesbians think they have to take testosterone and remove their breasts to be a legible form of human being, and how that comes from external discourse, not from their souls.
Enough with self-report.
PREACH, SISTER ✊!
(and while I'm here, I just want to say that I'm *really* enjoying your conversations with Aaron Kimberly [The Bearded Lesbian]! SBD has been one of the most edifying and enlightening resources in my own understanding of all things gender, and I'm SO glad you and your voice are back online!)
I love your analysis here re methods / satisfaction surveys.
Because I want to get an overview of what those "trans" are freaking abt this week, I read Erin R substack but HIS analysis of legislation and current research always makes me say "wait a min, that don't seem right" He twists and skews everything to make all trans victims and only what they want matters. I never write in his comments bc I don't have the analytic skills.
Does anyone else read Erin in the Morning and wonder what's going on really? He is "engaged" to some trans/man legislator.
Speaking as a retired doctor, who used to teach medical ethics to medical students, I am disturbed by these gender doctors’ lack of scientific rigour. I am disturbed by their lack of capacity for self reflection. I am disturbed by their inability to acknowledge or perhaps even understand the harms they cause to vulnerable young people by foreclosing their future life choices. I am disturbed by the effect these ethical failures have had and are continuing to have on public trust in the medical profession.
However, I also believe that a significant part of the problem lies with the way medical research is currently conducted. “Publish or perish” means that advancing an academic career depends on quantity not quality of publications. This has led to an explosion in the number of publications in any given research field, making it very difficult for researchers to keep up with the literature, let alone engage deeply with any given publication. Importantly, peer review, which is supposed to safeguard the quality of published research, is not compensated. Rather it is provided by busy academics in their “spare time”, in between conducting their own research, teaching, writing grant applications, and keeping up with the tsunami of literature in their field. Thus, the peer review process is not always be as rigorous as we might hope or expect. Furthermore, there is a huge bias towards publishing positive results of experiments or trials. I believe that it should be a condition of the ethical review process (which must occur prior to starting a study) that all results should be published, whether positive, negative, or inconclusive.
They are also suppressing the names of these young adults who died from the iatrogenic harm as well as the post-surgery suicides in this field, where the "Trans Journalists Association Style Guide" demands these individuals are left forever in the fog, along with trans widows and trans orphans, because domestic abuse stories are hidden in that fog. Names of the dead and those we know of only by their deaths during a study: GRIFFIN SIVRET, natal female, originally Makayla, 24 SEPSIS, d. 7/2024, YARDEN SEVEIRA, natal male, 24, post-"vaginoplasty" colon blockage SEPSIS/suicide, d.2021, LIAM JOHNS, natal female, 35, liver failure from testosterone poisoning, d. 3/2024, NAME UNKNOWN, natal male, 62, liver & gall bladder cancer, listed in Mayo Clinic research study on TQ in hospice, the researcher complained he wasn't getting make-up after he went unresponsive, NAME UNKNOWN, natal male, 18, sepsis post "vaginoplasty" in Dutch Study by DeVries & Cohen-Kettenis, 2014, date of death assumed 2012
Genderists can’t stop politicizing genderology because it is an entirely political movement. Because it is not anchored by reality, its roots are not in healthcare they are not clinicians.
They switch around, sometimes it's "human rights movt" then they're going on abt their "gender soul" as some metaphysical, pseudo relig cult would proclaim.
Thank you, Lisa, as always. That ad is hard to watch. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the language overlap with abortion rights. This is at the heart of some of the trickier conversations I've had in the run up to the election. Megan Daum has a good conversation with Jennifer Block on her Unspeakable podcast. I'd welcome others' thoughts.
YES! I have also been seeing some connections betw the Trans Agenda language (and tactics) and the anti-abortion rhetoric.
Looking forward to insights and discussions on that.
Lisa, I have seen this covered in various other media, but I always appreciate your balanced take on things. I have never trusted medicine less.
Good luck with your deadline. Thanks for your continual sanity, fairness and science-orientation on this issue.
Advocacy Science challenges Advocacy Journalism to see who can enrich the US Medical Industrial Complex quicker.
"Almost all of liberal America believes questioning or objecting to the gender-affirming model is wrong and bad. " This is not true at all. My liberal husband and I, and my closest friend, are all against gender-affirming and identity politics in general. Many of my liberal patients are against it as well and are visibly relieved to hear my opinions about it. People are afraid of being harassed or cancelled
It was so frustrating, listening toRo Khanna, a representative from California, on Megyn Kelly’s podcast last week complain that this issue has been so politicized and it needs to stop. And here you point out how someone running for a position in government is posting on social media, images of her shooting up with an experimental hormone. Definitely not politicizing it there. Thank you, Lisa.
So Ro Khanna hasn't been just as responsible as anyone for politicizing the issue all along? (Just a couple examples of lying by omission and artful euphemisms : "health care disparities" https://khanna.house.gov/issues/equality-and-social-justice and misrepresenting the motives of those concerned about huge numbers of kids identifying as trans https://khanna.house.gov/media/in-the-news/rep-ro-khanna-you-dont-have-see-someone-suffer-become-warrior-lgbtq-rights ) It seems he's been right up front spewing out the false narratives and emotion-laden propaganda on trans issues (of the kind that sows fear among those with important questions and makes any honest scientific inquiry nearly impossible) for years!! It's interesting how many who've been using sophistry as a weapon routinely suddenly want to call a moratorium on "politicizing" things just when their own sophistry becomes LESS effective.
Good luck with your deadline!
So disturbing watching her "shoot up" during the ad.
New Yorkers: Lisa hs put out a statement about Prop 1 that is absolutely perfect. Please, if you see this, pass it on to anyone you can: https://twitter.com/LisaSelinDavis/status/1850533467685007839
New York State voters: Unsure about how to vote on Prop1?
Answer these questions: Do you want boys to play on girls' sports teams? To be in girls' locker rooms? If no, then vote no.
Do you want men housed in women's prisons? If no, then vote no.
The amendment makes discrimination against "gender identity" illegal. But gender identity is self-ID. It doesn't have to be on any document. There are no objective measures. And these days, gender identity encompasses raccoongender and genderfluid—what does it mean to prioritize those above the objective reality of sex?
Many of us liberals like the idea of an equal rights amendment. We don't want people discriminated against because of their sexual orientation, or their sex or race. And we want abortion to remain legal in NYS. I want all those things, too. But this amendment is so full of overreach, and doesn't even use the word abortion.
I believe it will pass, that so little awareness has been raised that people don't know what you're voting for. But you are voting for the abolition of sex, written into the state constitution. It's okay to say no.
Brava, Lisa!
Y'all are talking too much common sense. Those professional geniuses will never listen to you.