Thread by @TwisterFilm

1./ Another week, another misleading science report from LGBTQ+ lobbyists. Not content with picking a fight with the equalities watchdog, the @EHRC, this increasingly aggressive lobby is misusing a report on sexual violence to defend a wayward type of conversion therapy ban.👇

2./ Last week @GalopUK published a study it claimed proved the pressing need for a ban on "transgender conversion". "We must not delay the implementation of this life-saving law." By an amazing coincidence their report landed just a week before the consultation end.

3./ A cynic might conclude the report was rushed out in time to allow its headlines to stick but not enough to allow a proper investigation of the research. This is has become a trademark of the LGBTQ+ lobby, not least because their proposals are so often at odds with the public.

4./ Galop's claims were part of a collective shriek from the LGBTQ+ lobby after @EHRC calmly dismantled the case for rushing into a ban on "transgender conversion therapy". Here's Pink News labelling the EHRC a "so-called" watchdog. Does so-called now mean the same as statutory?

5./ A throng online soon claimed the @GalopUK research proved @EHRC wrong. Far from there being little evidence on trans conversion therapy Galop had proved, they implied, a terror stalked the nation. And "It was indisputable". So is @EHRC right or the LGBTQ+ lobby?

6./ Up to now, the only evidence any proponent of the govt's mess of a Conversion Therapy Bill could cite was a study it commissioned from @DrAdamJowett that was so absurdly biased and unconvincing no one could possibly take it seriously.👇
gov.uk/government/pub…

7./ Yet here's Trans activist @UglaStefania this week saying the report "clearly shows trans people are subjected to conversion therapy". It doesn't. It interviewed just 3 trans peeps who said they'd had conversion therapy for gender identity. So is the new report any better?

8./ The key headline is "24% of LGBT+ respondents" have been "subjected to sexual violence to convert or punish them". This suggests some sort of epidemic of sexual violence to try to convert people. It's a suggestion @GalopUk go on to amplify mercilessly in press releases.👇

9./ Galop also say their report proves conversion therapy "is a significant and ongoing issue...happening to LGBT people of all cultural, religious and ethnic backgrounds". And trans folk are, they say, at greater risk of conversion. But are any of these claims really true?👇

10./ To judge a survey you need to know who carried it out. Why was the firm's name not appended to this? In the questionnaire were multiple choice questions randomised? Did they avoid the biases that can creep in from the order questions are asked? Who knows.🤷

11./ How can we judge any potential bias if we're not told how many questions were asked nor a single other question; never mind the order? Such information particularly matters in this case because the survey was carried out two years ago for a quite different purpose.

12./ Y'see, this wasn't a survey of the LGBT people in general. It was exclusively a poll of LGBT+ folks who responded to a survey online about sexual violence. That's why in the small print it says "this was not designed to indicate prevalence in the UK LGBT+ population." 👇

13./ Why does that matter? To point out the obvious, a survey of people about sexual violence will tend to attract people who have experiences of sexual violence. 889 people out of the 935 people who responded said they HAD experienced sexual violence.

14./ So despite the report's own warning it shouldn't be used to make claims about the general LGBT+ population, wasn't that exactly what Galop was encouraging people to do? Another limitation of the report is the sampling it employed, called "convenience sampling".👇

15./ Galop used online ads and "email networks" (ie folk they already knew) to find respondents. This convenience sampling is cheap and easy but it's about as robust as a Facebook Poll. It's also subject to huge bias and is notorious for preventing you from generalising.👇

16./ A further hindrance is that while 24% of the respondents said they believed the sexual violence they endured was an attempt to convert or punish their orientation or identity we're given no evidence to judge why they came to this conclusion. Was this domestic violence?🤷

17./ What % reported the violence to police? You'd think a charity that claims to focus on domestic violence might have an interest in these answers. What's even stranger is this issue of sexual violence is almost entirely irrelevant to the debate about conversion 'THERAPY'.

18./ For those at the back...all forms of non-consensual SEXUAL VIOLENCE are already illegal in the UK. And a conversion therapy ban of any sort couldn't possibly make a blind bit of difference to that; nor could any sort of ban have any imaginable additional deterrent effect.

19./ So why did so many people think this report had any relevance to the conversion therapy debate? It exploits a psychological weakness called selective attention. People find it extremely hard to focus on two different things at once.

20./ So in a sentence which mentions both conversion therapy & sexual violence our selective attention makes us focus on one or the other. When guided by Galop who tell us the findings prove something important about 'conversion therapy' we're likely to focus only on that.

21./ To show how easy it is to make people only focus on the subject you ask them to and ignore something else important, play this classic attention experiment where you're asked to count the number of times players in white pass a basket ball.👇

22. Did you see the gorilla? Most people who play this for the first time don't notice him. People reading headlines about this report were encouraged to ignore the fact it was a survey that only applied to an unrepresentative group of people who'd experienced sexual violence.

23./ It's almost as if Galop has decided to misuse its survey to help it jump on the lucrative conversion therapy ban-dwagon. An impression underlined by the fact 2 months ago they opened a hotline for "victims of Conversion Therapy". They're raising £10K to pay for it. 👇

24./ IF conversion therapy really was as widely practised and as pressing an issue as Galop and the LGBTQ+ bandwagon claim don't you think they would have raised more than just £2.8K in 2 months? A cynic might suggest all this ballyhoo is in fact a branding exercise.

25./ Conclusion: This poorly evidenced report which is subject to serious bias makes totally unsupportable generalised claims. What's worse these are being used to promote the biggest conversion therapy scandal of all: the medicalising of troubled gender non conforming teens.