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https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1782653360207761431

https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1780803110589403329

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Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Apr 26

It’s part of the journalist’s job to fact check errors stated by public figures about matters of importance. That is what I have done with regard to the falsehoods spread about the Cass Review by Erin Reed and Alejandra Caraballo in particular. There’s nothing “weird” about this.

Fact checking errors stated by public figures about matters of importance is not “complaining.”

These types of defamatory claims are nonsense.

Read 20 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Apr 26

The British trans charity Mermaids was exposed as having put undue pressure on the GIDS pediatric gender clinic. Now @Mermaids_Gender responds to Cass Review: Instead of calling out the misinformation about activists attacking the report, Mermaids complains of misinformation going in the other direction.
mermaidsuk.org.uk/news/mermaids-…

Mermaids accuses the 388-page Cass Review of not being written in accessible language or of being clear enough: "We are deeply frustrated with the lack of clarity throughout the report, which has enabled wilful misinterpretation and the spread of harmful misinformation. Clear and accessible language is vital, especially when services are operating in a context where there is significant hostility to and misconceptions about trans people, particularly in the media." mermaidsuk.org.uk/news/mermaids-…

Mermaids says of the Cass Review: "As well as this lack of clarity, young people have told us that they are frustrated by the report’s desire to pinpoint a “cause” for trans young people to be open about who they are and are worried that it may be interpreted to limit social transition, particularly in schools."

Read 6 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Apr 26

Dr. Hilary Cass issues her likely last essay on the Cass Review website, in which she chastises "assertions being made on social media, and occasionally on mainstream broadcast media, which misrepresent the report and its findings, whether willfully or otherwise. Whilst some commentators have tried to debunk these misrepresentations, we live in a world where misinformation, when left unchallenged, becomes part of an accepted narrative regardless of its validity."
cass.independent-review.uk/entry-10-post-…

I have myself worked hard to debunk the many false assertions made by activists such as Alejandra Caraballo @Esqueer_, Erin Reed @ErinInTheMorn and Mallory Moore @Chican3ry.

Thanks to those of you who have helped in setting the record straight that, no, neither the systematic literature reviews nor the Cass Review simply "disregarded," "discarded" or "threw out" most of the available research about pediatric gender-transition treatment.

Read 21 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Apr 26

Whereas Michael Hobbes and @JesseSingal are arguing whether 7 clinic visits is fast or slow before referring a gender-distressed child to an endocrinologist for puberty blockers, transfeminine jurist Florence Ashley thinks children should proceed to the endo with no assessment.

https://x.com/segm_ebm/status/1768459520349737043

@jessesingal According to a recent review paper by UCL neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale, the neuropsychiatric impacts of puberty blockers when used to delay puberty past its natural point among gender distressed children remain unknown. The Cass Review seconded this.

https://x.com/segm_ebm/status/1768459520349737043

"Critical questions remain unanswered regarding the nature, extent and permanence of any arrested development of cognitive function associated with puberty blockers. The impact of puberal suppression on measures of neuropsychological function is an urgent research priority."
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38334046/

Read 4 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Apr 26

In a curious turn of events, controversial disinformation expert Ben Collins @oneunderscore__ has left @NBCNews and now...owns @TheOnion.

https://x.com/oneunderscore__/status/1783632037640835426

According to the new top boss at @TheOnion, Ben Collins @oneunderscore__, the official party line at the satirical media org is a free for all.

https://x.com/oneunderscore__/status/1783632037640835426

nytimes.com/2024/04/25/bus…

Read 4 tweets

Benjamin Ryan

@benryanwriter

Apr 25

Michael Hobbes Is Spectacularly Wrong About Youth Gender Medicine
That’s because he doesn’t care what the truth is, writes @JesseSingal

Jesse Singal takes Michael Hobbes @RottenInDenmark @IfBooksPod to task for being Wrong About youth gender medicine:

Michael Hobbes insists, on Twitter, that the Cass Review (which I wrote about here) vindicates his own view that youth gender medicine is in solid shape, and that the various experts and clinicians to whom we entrust gender-questioning children’s and teenager’s well-being are doing a good and responsible job.

This has long been Hobbes’ stance. He simply cannot believe that some journalists have spent so much time covering this issue in a critical manner, given the overwhelming evidence that the system works. And plus, even if there were issues, so few young people are transitioning that who cares? Hobbes views this as a moral panic, full-stop — and this is a popular view on the left, often founded on distortions and misconceptions.

For those who are unfamiliar, Hobbes is a pundit whose voice on these issues matters: he has built a career as an exceptionally successful DIY podcaster, probably one of the few self-made podcast millionaires. He originally became famous as the co-host of the blockbuster You’re Wrong About, which mostly revisited past controversies and explained how, well, we were wrong about them. These days he co-hosts Maintenance Phase, which involves a lot of debunking of obesity and weight-loss research, and If Books Could Kill, which involves a lot of debunking of airport bestsellers. Debunking really is his thing: he is trusted by a huge audience that views him as the last word on all manner of scientific and societal disputes.

The problem is, he’s exceptionally bad at it. Find me an even mildly complex subject he has discussed, and I will find you countless errors, misunderstandings, and, in some cases, what can only be fairly described as lies. And it isn’t just that he errs and misunderstands and lies quite frequently; it’s that he does it with the maximum possible amount of sanctimony and a complete absence of good faith. He has built a huge listenership out of the idea that American intellectual life is full of vapid morons stoking moral panics and peddling false cures, and he, Michael Hobbes, can help guide the curious but less informed reader through this morass. Far be it from me to disagree with his overall diagnosis, but I don’t think Hobbes is on the side he thinks he’s on.

A lot of the things Hobbes gets wrong are relatively low stakes, but some aren’t. Maintenance Phase, for example, is a profound train wreck of misinformation, and unfortunately, people do take their health and wellness cues from Michael Hobbes–style demagogues. (Seriously, just click this link, peruse for 20 minutes, and tell me this is a man you would trust to accurately predict where the sun will rise tomorrow morning.)

I’d like to give Hobbes the longer treatment he deserves someday, but because he produces so much bullshit, and because the bullshit asymmetry principle tells us that debunking bullshit takes orders of magnitude more time than excreting it, that will have to wait. For now, I just want to tackle a few of the misconceptions about youth gender medicine he has been propagating for years, and with renewed vigor since the Cass Review was published.
jessesingal.substack.com/p/michael-hobb…

Personally, I cannot stress enough how Wrong About my tweet Michael Hobbes is. Thanks to @JesseSingal for pointing this out.

Here it might be interesting to compare three sources:

Michael Hobbes: Youth gender medicine “reduces both suicidal ideation and suicide attempts.”

WPATH Standards of Care: “Despite the slowly growing body of evidence supporting the effectiveness of early medical intervention, the number of studies is still low, and there are few outcome studies that follow youth into adulthood. Therefore, a systematic review regarding outcomes of treatment in adolescents is not possible.”

An independent systematic review of youth gender medicine commissioned by WPATH and published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, including studies with subjects of all ages: “We could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide,” write the others, because only one study on the subject even met their minimum quality criteria. That study showed that those who had transitioned had a higher rate of suicide than a matched control group. If I were a hack, like Michael Hobbes, I’d pretend that this is proof transition worsens the risk of suicide. But it doesn’t! It’s a study with a high risk of bias. So, as the authors write, “We cannot draw any conclusions on the basis of this single study about whether hormone therapy affects death by suicide among transgender people.”

Michael Hobbes does not strike me as the sort of person who loses much sleep over the possibility that he might be wrong. But if he was, wouldn’t it cause him some sleepless nights that his own view, that these treatments are extremely powerful, reduce rates of both suicidal ideation and suicide itself, and have piles — towering piles! The biggest piles you’ve ever seen! — of evidence behind them. . . all of this runs directly counter to what WPATH, the Cass Review, the Journal of the Endocrine Society, and health authorities in Finland, Norway, and Sweden have found? Is any of this penetrating?

Hobbes can only pull off his bizarre claims about a towering pile of research supporting youth gender medicine by pretending that if you can point to a few studies that appear to show X, that’s good evidence for X. As it turns out, that’s not the case — you need to carefully evaluate studies on the basis of their quality. We’re decades into the age of replication crises, so anyone who is surprised by this hasn’t been paying attention. This vital concept that weak studies, combined, do not constitute sound evidence is why Cass commissioned systematic reviews, why those systematic reviews came back with a damning assessment of the evidence for blockers and hormones, and why Cass chose to deploy language she must have known would send ripple effects across the world of youth gender medicine: this is “an area of remarkably weak evidence.”

For anyone who doesn’t understand why it is perfectly reasonable, if not morally necessary, to discount a weak study on an important medical question, see here and here and here and here and here, as long as you’re willing to muck around in the weeds a bit. We aren’t talking minor methodological quibbles, like Oooh, it would have been nice if you had 2,000 kids in your cohort instead of 1,500! We’re talking — I’m repeating myself because this is worth repeating — potentially crippling selection-bias issues, variables that suddenly go missing, researchers claiming treatments work when they simply don’t appear to, suicides of kids who went on hormones, and all sorts of really worrisome stuff.

Hobbes ignores all of this. Those posts took me many hours to write, because digging around in a study’s innards is time-consuming. Think about how much less time it took Hobbes to fire off his 10 millionth tweet about how there’s overwhelming evidence to support these treatments, because look at all these studies! Don’t worry, though — Hobbes has read all the abstracts.
jessesingal.substack.com/p/michael-hobb…

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