J. Reads and Writes Profile picture
"Lege den finger auf jeden posten - frage: wie kommt er hierher?"
Apr 13 103 tweets 33 min read
More musings on the Cass review, second half. 🧵 Random thoughts from the first half here:

The next chapter is going to be the Clinical approach and clinical management one.
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Apr 10 81 tweets 27 min read
Thread of random thoughts from the Cass review. For a decade trans activists have claimed that the science is settled. Over the last five years or so, this has been pushed back against with "the evidence is limited & weak". The discourse is now getting much closer to the reality that trans activism is anti-scientific.

(p. 25) Image
Sep 30, 2023 23 tweets 7 min read
Supposedly there's Canadian public money in this, originally regarding Covid, but seemingly it's had a bit of feature creep. Let's look at their claims.

canada.ca/en/public-heal…

Image This one is fairly silly, and is arguably rainbow-washing ancient homophobia. Homosexuality is very real, as are DSDs, and people who are not particularly horny do not need an alphabet letter. Image
Apr 29, 2023 14 tweets 7 min read
In Googling around to try to keep up to speed on various US bills, you come across a lot of local news garbage. Sometimes you have to stop and appreciate just how bad it is. I just read indianacapitalchronicle.com/2023/03/21/hou… And it is both very average and impressively incompetently written. It's your usual mindless puff piece, but look at the numbers, and try to picture what the person who wrote the article (@WhitneyDownard) was thinking.
Dec 10, 2022 10 tweets 5 min read
The cult language of "sex assigned at birth" really rots the mind of some people, and the capture of these projects is quite interesting. The Free & Equal project puts out annual "progress reports" (at the bottom of unfe.org/about-2/), These start as very corporate/government looking dry documents about their media engagement numbers. Oh, and conflating sex and gender.
Nov 24, 2022 42 tweets 12 min read
Having a brief look at the presentation that resulted in the mental breakdown of one Dr. Hartland. A self-proclaimed alphabet mafia member who believes that biological sex is socially contrived.

Surely, no one could question that? Putting forth the entirely sane idea that "trans woman" is fine, but "transwoman" is hate-speech. Nothing to question here.

And of course, Hartland is already conflating sex and gender here, as well as conflating natal sex with the paperwork ("assigned") about it.
Nov 22, 2022 21 tweets 8 min read
After making a fool of herself in Florida, being caught lying multiple times and failing to answer obvious and simple questions, Dr. Meredithe McNamara has decided to call others "science denialists" in another spectacular display of her incompetence.

nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.105… The bizarre part is perhaps that NEJM has published it - while claiming to use a highly rigorous peer-review, numerous falsehoods are present. It suggests that the only thing in place is highly rigorous rubber stamping.
Oct 21, 2022 14 tweets 4 min read
There's a new paper from the Dutch, which has trans activists drooling, so let's see what they're saying.

thelancet.com/journals/lanch… Apparently it's a groundbreaking new study that shows that "98% of trans youth" that receive puberty suppression and start cross-sex hormones continue to take cross-sex hormones into adulthood. Clearly this will support that "trans kids know who they are". Image
Jul 11, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read
WPATH SoC8 was supposed to be out in 2021. Then it was spring 2022, now it's just 2022. Two systematic reviews were supposed to be done, only one is and it revealed terrible quality evidence. We've seen the draft of SoC8, and it was an absolute trainwreck.

What are they doing? WPATH does not have the competence and cabaility to put together proper guidelines. They certainly don't have it to put together proper-looking guidelines when the conclusion has to disagree with the scientific evidence.
Feb 7, 2022 12 tweets 3 min read
This paper is rather interesting. It was published a few days ago and made headlines right away, but I hadn't read it until now.

jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman… It takes its format from a previous paper (jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman…) but looks at specifically the "trans train" report, and its impact on referrals.
Sep 6, 2021 94 tweets 16 min read
I've not followed the employment tribunal case between Appleby and the Tavistock in great detail, but since they've concluded the process, it's time to have a read and see what they found. This is a case about whistleblowing from within GIDS, specifically by one of the members on the Tavistock and Portman trust's Safeguarding team. About a dozen current and former staff were heard. Several thousand pages of relevant documents were gathered.
Sep 4, 2021 8 tweets 2 min read
The part that bothers me the most about the study itself is actually that they use the terms "transgender women" and "transgender men" - this is the same population (plus three years) as the 2018 paper, which means they include people who explicitly denounce the label. How does one measure it? It's a religious term, and it's explicitly incorrect for the population being described. They are going out of their way to choose vague and misleading language in a scientific paper, and the statistical comparisons with the opposite sex are just silly.
Jul 11, 2021 8 tweets 3 min read
When people suggest that medical transition would be fine if only people followed the WPATH Standards of Care (which are not actually standards of care) they usually neglect to mention that no one actually follows them, not even WPATH members. The author of the usual example to show how young they're pushing surgical transition is a WPATH member, in fact on its board of directors. Even as vague as the "standards" are, it's clear to see she does not follow them.
Jun 27, 2021 27 tweets 5 min read
AusPATH likes to put out statements that look good on the surface but quickly deflate when you dig into them. Recently they put out this: auspath.org/gender-affirmi…. Let's take a look at a specific part of it which I am very familiar with. The authors make two claims: that adhering to carefully developed guidelines is associated with little regret and "de-transition", for which they offer three references; and that "de-transition" is often a consequence of external pressures, for which they offer one reference.
May 29, 2021 26 tweets 5 min read
If you've read one of these, you've read them all, but I'll do some quick thoughts on it regardless.

nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NE… "Gender identity - the deeply felt internal sense of oneself as male, female, or somewhere else on the gender spectrum - may or may not align with the sex one was assigned at birth."

Male and female is not a spectrum. Stop conflating sex and gender.
May 24, 2021 28 tweets 5 min read
This will be a thread thinking out loud about the 60 minutes segment. It was all over the place, and I need to go over it bit by bit to figure out what just happened. The opening sentence actually contains an error. The Arkansas law does not prohibit the facilitation of medical transition of youth for "transgender youth", but any youth. It will later cover a number of cases where people who considered themselves "transgender youth" weren't so.
May 13, 2021 30 tweets 5 min read
GnRHas does not operate on your paperwork, your registered sex is not relevant in the slightest. By using the term "assigned sex at birth", the author manages to introduce a falsehood in their text which did not need to be there at all. Maybe I should do a write-up of this whole article. Okay, so "stop transgender kids from experiencing the effects of puberty that may not align with their gender identities" is an odd choice of words, they stop any kid from experiencing the effects of puberty, full stop.
Feb 9, 2021 10 tweets 6 min read
@FlohrFritz @ortrudethevegan I'm sick of the term "gender" in general. I'm tired of having to work out which distinct school of thought and/or sect the person using it subscribes to before I can even extract any meaning from what they've written. @FlohrFritz @ortrudethevegan An apparent rite of passage in writing trans-related papers is to include some rough definition of what trans is in the introduction (example in image). I compiled a number of these, all on a single trans-related surgery, and it's a mess to read.
Feb 7, 2021 11 tweets 4 min read
The ICGP recently took down their trans guidelines and just the other day put a revised version back up. Let's see what changes have been made... The first significant change is reworking the evidence introduction. That makes sense since it had nothing to do with what was being presented in the document, however the new version makes no sense either as there is only a single place where it is brought up. ImageImage