NEW: Azeen Ghorayshi reports in the @nytimes that prominent gender clinician Johanna Olson-Kennedy of @ChildrensLA has refused to publish data from a study on puberty blockers, fearing that the unimpressive results will be "weaponized" by critics of "gender-affirming care." 🧵
Olson-Kennedy told the Times that the kids didn't improve because their mental health was "in really good shape" at the start of the study.
As Ghorayshi notes, this seems to contradict what Olson-Kennedy et al. reported in 2022 about the study's cohort at baseline.
Olson-Kennedy fears the study's results could be cited by critics of pediatric sex "change" in court cases. She doesn't seem to think that, as a medical researcher and clinician, her primary responsibility is to her current and future patients.
Doctors as agents of lawfare.
Ghorayshi's report is helpful in holding members of the gender Rx industry accountable, but it also has at least three problems.
First, Ghorayshi mentions the reported findings of the Dutch puberty blocking study but not the highly important critique of those findings, nor that systematic reviews (e.g., NICE 2020) have found it to be unreliable due to risk of bias.
More here: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
Second, Ghorayshi mentions the reported findings of the NIH-funded cross-sex hormone study but doesn't mention that the boys showed no improvement while the girls' improvement was very small. Nor does she mention the authors' HARK-ing and goalpost shifting. Critical problems.
I discuss these issues re: the NIH study in our recent amicus brief: supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/2…
Jesse Singal has also written about the NIH study at length.
Part 1: jessesingal.substack.com/p/on-scientifi…
Part 2: jessesingal.substack.com/p/the-new-high…
Finally, it's disappointing to see the Times continue to refer to the kids given Rx as "transgender adolescents." This isn't a neutral term. Whether these kids "are transgender," or what it means to say such a thing, is half the debate in a nutshell.
Neutral terms for journalists who want to remain independent of the controversy and not (intentionally or unintentionally) put their thumb on the scale:
Adolescents with gender dysphoria.
Adolescents who identify as transgender.
The article in the New York Times: nytimes.com/2024/10/23/sci…
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