1/ The Cass Review explains, in detail, why we need to trust systematic reviews over both doctors' anecdotal evidence and low-quality standards published by professional associations. The CBC responds by publishing an article that cites professional associations and is dominated by doctors' anecdotal accounts.

Science journalism seems screwed at the moment.

cbc.ca/news/health/pu… 2/ This might be the worst bit:

"Surveys and interviews are considered low-quality evidence in medicine, said [Pediatrician Dr. Tehseen Ladha], but that might be misleading to the general public. 'Many people would see low-quality evidence and think well, that means this could harm our children. But that's not what it means.' "

That's... exactly what low-quality evidence for a major intervention means. It means we don't know if the intervention offers a net benefit, because the true effects might differ significantly from what the studies in question present.

1/ Sam Seder just found out about the Cass Report yesterday and he is VERY concerned 2/ Should address one substantive point here. The caller says the Cass Review threatens access to hormones/surgery for any trans person under 25. This is NOT true. It's a viral rumor that popped up right after the report came out. I think the source is Erin Reed.

wait what 2/ "Heyyyy I'm ridin' heah! I love da camoonity of my fellow ridahs! Fugheddaboutiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit"

Strange evening. The ACLU of Missouri subpoenaed Jamie Reed, demanding (among other stuff) all her communications w/me. I emailed them saying (politely) wtf, you're the ACLU. Got a call from a lawyer there saying it was a mistake -- "It's a big team." Okay.

2/ Here's the supoena, not current since they're removing the "Jessie Singal" bit. Also in on the effort was Lambda Legal. Weird this was a mistake given that it's the second thing listed and tons of eyes must have been on this before it was filed. 🤷‍♂️

drive.google.com/file/d/1TugDqb…

Who would have thought a program called Woke Kindergarten wouldn't have succeeded where a century's worth of other efforts to end educational inequality have failed? Truly surprising stuff. Maybe if they got more funding...?

2/ Lemme take a crack at this: "This exceptionally stupid idea that any questions about any DEI programming constitute an attack on 'anti-racism' itself has given cover to grifters and opportunists at the expense of poor kids." Not true but a familiar-sounding argument.

1/ Maybe I'll newsletter about it but maaaaan is this a frustrating article. There's nothing wrong with pointing out how crazy Kiwi Farms can get, but this is so factually challenged and tilts so heavily toward a certain whitewashed activist account...

washingtonpost.com/technology/202… 2/No one familiar with this stuff believes Kiwi Farms went after Liz Fong-Jones because she "donated to a transgender nonprofit"!!! This is ridiculous. The conflict has to do with LFJ's perceived closeness to the scammer(s) (I forget if it was one or both) who ran Trans Lifeline

Are any health/science reporters at major outlets that cover the youth gender medicine debate going to reach out to the authors of this viral meta-analysis to ask what's going on? Anyone? Overstating sample size by thousands isn't a big enough red flag for you?

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1692877908413407249

2/ When you support trans people so much you accidentally invent thousands of them to introduce into a meta-analysis, swelling your sample size by 42%.

(Original study sample size was 7,928. We now know that about 3,336 of those individuals do not exist. Very Serious Science.)

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!

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.

https://twitter.com/nkulw/status/1682365104619233281

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.

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.

drive.google.com/file/d/1nd3ifC… 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.

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.

1/ GLAAD has teamed up with a gaggle of celebrities to call on major social media platforms to *ban* the view that youth gender medicine is dangerous.

glaad.org/lgbtq-celebrit… 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[.]"

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.

https://twitter.com/GorinMoti/status/1635433194160807936

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.

Slay the Spire break from editing -- look what I got trading my starting relic for a boss one man this is going great

New from me:

Gender-Clinic Whistleblower Jamie Reed Has Provided A Detailed Account Of Her Most Controversial Claim, Including The Names Of Those Involved

jessesingal.substack.com/p/gender-clini… 2/ It could certainly be the case that Reed is not telling the truth, but she provided me with full blow-by-blow details of the incident that sparked the helicopter-child reference in her affidavit. And it lines up with what has happened elsewhere.

My writing was cited as evidence there's a controversy over youth gender medicine. There's a controversy over youth gender medicine. If legislators wanted to cite my opinion on the bans specifically, their only option would be this piece opposing them.

jessesingal.substack.com/p/why-the-hard… 2/ The bans are both a bad idea as policy and have had an absolutely devastating (and predictable) effect on this conversation. It's harder to discuss evidence when you feel your healthcare is under threat. But the bans receive absolute blanket coverage and aren't my focus.

Consistent feature of my arguments w/these guys is that b/c they haven't read my work, the only evidence they can provide is tweets they don't quite like that are marginal examples at best. There's just no comparison between the hyperheated rhetoric and the substantive complaint.

https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1633625235365740544

2/ So @HeerJeet doesn't know anything about this issue -- about the research, the key players, etc. But it's SUPER important for him to pop into my mentions to fact-check.... whether media staffers *really* think JK Rowling is Hitler. He's super fastidious when it comes to that!

1/ The same day the gender clinic whistleblower Jamie Reed's article went up on Free Press, Susan Halla, Board President of the activist group TransParent, sent this email out to her network asking its members to defend of the clinic, and to spread the word about this effort. 2/"Urgent Action Needed!" went the subject line. "If you have any contacts with the media, please let us know. *We need people to show up for this urgent fight.*" TransParent has every right to do this! But it might explain the ratio we saw in the first wave of followup coverage:

1/ Almost 800 retweets. The number of rigorous regret studies from American youth gender clinics appears to be ZERO.

These guys have memed themselves an alternate reality. And those of us who refuse to accept their evidence on account of it not existing are called reactionaries. 2/ I say "appears to be" because there's always a chance I'm missing a study, but almost no American youth gender clinics appear to be tracking outcomes at all, which is not good. The rigorous body of evidence Zimmer is pointing to does not exist, full stop.

At 6:50 in his latest episode of If Books Could Kill, which is titled "The New York Times's War On Trans Kids" -- WAR!!!! -- Michael Hobbes claims this surgeon "essentially doesn't do surgery on minors."

He's either a liar or he doesn't read the articles he critiques. Full-stop. "Essentially," I eat well and a have a healthy lifestyle