1/ More fun w/Bustos et al, the endlessly flogged "meta-analysis" showing low regret rates for trans surgery: "We wish to make the following corrections, but plan on still reporting one study as n = 1,100 rather than n = 10, a mistake we super promise won't affect our results."
2/ The people callling you a bigot for distrusting this paper insist you defer to researchers who wrote: "In 1998, Kuiper et al followed 1100 transgender subjects that underwent GAS using social media and snowball sampling." SOCIAL MEDIA! IN 1998!
3/ The study in question did not examine 1,1000 transgender subjects and (obviously) did not have anything to do with social media. Other than that, great summary. This is the second instance of this team/paper misttating the sample size of a study by four figures (me in UnHerd).
4/ Oh, here's another instance of them inaccurately reporting a paper's sample size. This is also in the "corrected" table. All of these errors point in the same direction: a (fake) larger sample size, which will have the effect of deflating regret
5/ This paper, which, to repeat myself, demonstrates beyond a doubt that the researchers in question are incapable of consistently doing what a smart 12-year-old can do, is endlessly cited in both major outlets and legislation. How does this help trans people?
6/ Should add that if I'm being meaner than I usually am it's b/c journal + authors have dragged their feet and refused to correct stuff in a manner that's quite unprofessional.
@JLCederblom 7/ Genuinely caring about trans people is completely incompatible with excusing and propagating research like this.
8/ Almost every item in this row from the post-correction chart is wrong, too. If you pull up the study in question, sample size was 147, 71 mtf and 76 ftm. Meta-analysis authors also say the method of determining regret is not stated but it's clearly a search of medical records.
9/Could be there's an answer to the question "If the 9 coauthors on this paper were chronically unable to accurately extract basic study info like the numbers of patients, sex ratios, and methods of measuring regret, why should we trust their statistical claims?," but I'm stumped
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1/ It's sort of crazy to have another known figure in lefty media publicly call for me to kill myself, and there's absolutely no pushback, no "This is too far," nothing from his "side." It's really bad to say stuff like this because you have no idea what someone is going through.
2/ I'm fine and (obviously) not going to kill myself because Noah Kulwin told me too, but for the love of fucking Christ, just a tiny bit of decency among the irony bros.
3/ Washington Post staffer. Normal stuff, just casually joining in on calls for other journalists to kill themselves. Really healthy industry we got.
1/ Here's the full letter from grad students that Yoel Inbar believes prevented him from getting hired as a psych prof by UCLA. On the one hand it's pretty wild, but on the other it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect, in all the worst ways.
2/ Among other things, Inbar stands accused of being mildly skeptical of diversity statements on the grounds that we don't know whether they accomplish anything, and of thinking it isn't a good idea for professional psych societies to wade into issues like abortion.
3/ As is often true in these letters, there are real leaps in -- and struggles with -- basic argument. Oftentimes one sentence does not logically flow into the next one. The authors -- dozens of grad students -- seem confused about basic aspects of how language and science work:
Very frustrated The Cut published this. This is such an overstatement of the available evidence, and such a minimization of the potential risks. We don't know *how* risky these treatments are, but serious side effects in the U.K. and Sweden involved kids in their teens, not 50s!
2/ Anyway, it's increasingly pointless to even rebut this stuff. A dam has burst and almost every single major outlet is on board spreading medical misinformation that is potentially quite harmful. Will take awhile for things to get back on-kilter.
3/ "And yes, maybe when she is 50, she will have some bone-density problems."
2/ If this policy were enacted, it would mean that users could get suspended or banned for e.g. publishing the Swedish health authority's view that "the risks of [youth gender medicine] currently outweigh the possible benefits[.]"
3/ This proposal is the natural endpoint of GLAAD's yearslong campaign to slander and bully anyone with questions about an area of medicine that, it turns out, is in dire evidentiary straits. Suppressing evidence and discussion is an awful, awful thing to do to trans youth.
In recent weeks a lot of left-of-center commentators have discovered an interest in this, or gotten more interested in it -- @RottenInDenmark, @ryanlcooper, @SamSeder, etc. None of them *ever* addresses this. They intentionally omit it. They think their audiences are morons.
2/ Hobbes' only mention of Finland, for example. And it's a misleading tweet. He's comparing careful evidence reviews to much more lightweight policy statements, press releases, etc. -- many of which only actually support the Dutch approach and/or have misleading citations.
1/ Briefly, while this is at least *not* a deranged critique of my work and doesn't involve wild and false legal claims about my imminent imprisonment, I disagree with it pretty fervently and think it's a bit disingenuous.
2/ One way a whistleblower can prove they're credible is by passing information on to the media. Wong knows this because she authored a (much bigger, more involved) piece in which a Facebook employee came forward and provided Wong with internal documents.
3/ In a medical or mental-health context, it'll basically be impossible for a whistleblower to prove their trustworthiness without providing *some* degree of information about patients to a journalist (and later investigators). Journalists then have to make judgement calls.