First, law school requires a lot of effort, and so does building a family, so there were a few years when I legitimately didn’t have time to go around reading much on the internet. What turned up on Pharyngula constituted a large percentage of that. But more importantly, I spent years addressing this stuff back when the world was less connected and there were fewer noted cis supremacists who bothered writing about trans* people. Seriously, as far as critiques of written work or audio/video appearances went, I spent a decade speaking mostly about Janice Raymond, Mary Daly, and Germaine Greer. I’ve read so. fucking. much.
Now you have people like Peterson and Burchill and Singal, and when I’ve bothered to read them at all, what’s struck me is that despite citing different specific pieces of evidence, the actual arguments are all still the same. It’s maddening. While, yes, there have been great advancements for trans* communities over the last 3 decades, I find it entirely disheartening to come up against people who argue, in effect, “While, yes, people were wrong when they argued that trans* adults should be discharged from the military under the assumption that they’re mentally ill, we should assume trans* teenagers are mentally ill and deny them treatment, at least until they’re 18 and prove that they aren’t mentally ill.” What the Freud?
Really, if a presumption that gender-nonconforming behavior was evidence of ignorance, confusion, or mental illness turned out to be insufficient to justify barring people from holding a job (in or out of the military), then maybe starting from the presumption of ignorance, confusion or mental illness is the problem and shouldn’t be used to justify *anything*. It wasn’t the case that oh, it turned out the presumption was valid, but that mentally ill people are more job capable than generally thought (though we probably are). The presumption was invalid. So why are people using it in new arguments?
And yet, they’ll cite some fucking study and just to do due diligence, I feel compelled to go read the damn study to make sure there’s not some robust, empirically well-justified conclusion in there supporting the cissexist jerk’s point. And there never is. Either the methodology is crap or the studies data and conclusions are simply not nearly enough to support the writer’s conclusions. Their entire collection of arguments is a herd of spherical cows.
People still don’t get that there’s no such thing as a random sample of trans* people. I had to face that reality 20 years ago when attempting to study how domestic violence affects trans* folks. I came up with data, but it was all self-reported and I realized that my ambitions of providing any real, quantitative figures were misguided. The best part of that study was the qualitative bits, but they’re never validly generalizable.
So people like Singal come along and act as if there’s such a thing as a study of trans* folks from which we can generalize to an entire national or international trans* population and what can I say? You haven’t caught up to where I was twenty fucking years ago? I mean, it’s much worse than that. At that point I hadn’t been to grad school and I was teaching myself statistics while waiting for enough responses to the survey to trickle in and had to come to my own conclusion that none of the methods for generalizing from a sample to a population were going to work. People like Singal and Peterson have been to grad school. They’ve been trained in when to generalize from a sample and when not to do so. And so I have to wonder: are they fundamentally and consciously dishonest? I was highly motivated to use my data to come to conclusions and although I was trying to work with academics (and got advice from them), I had no one above me with authority to tell me to end my attempts at unjustified generalization.
And yet, I stopped. I stopped before publication. I stopped because I had a modicum of honesty, even when I thought that the numeric results I was getting had good reason to be considered reflective of trans* communities as a whole. I stopped even though the relationship between my numbers and the numbers for other populations were similar enough, with deviations predicted by my hypothesis and explainable through known mechanisms, that anyone familiar with the work on domestic violence at the time would have been entirely unsurprised had I reported my findings in a journal.
I stopped generalizing because it was the right thing to do.
But now, you have awareness of trans* folks vastly increased and people like Burchill and Singal and Peterson keep on generalizing. To fight it with the same integrity I fought earlier incarnations, I would have to do a huge amount of new reading, but I have every confidence that it would all come down to the same thing: No one has the data to generalize conclusions on a national level. Not the Singals and not the people I would support.
Why is this true? Because such a large percentage of trans* folks exist closeted, and there is no scientific mechanism to compare a known group to an unknown group. We can’t gather up trans* folks who aren’t out and compare their demographics and characteristics to out trans* folks so as to try to do the math that would appropriately correct for variations between the two. We can’t do it because they aren’t out.
This doesn’t mean we should do research on what’s working or not at an individual clinic or with a localized sub-population. The things that keep someone from coming out might be different in Lisbon than they are in Toronto than they are in Quito than they are at the Subic Bay Naval Base. What brings an 8 year old to the attention of researchers might be dramatically different than what brings a 15 year old to the attention of researchers. We can pay attention to these things – and should – but they don’t tell us anything about the 8 year old who doesn’t come to the attention of researchers.
And so if I were really to take these stupid fuckers on, I would have to make the argument that the fact that they’re right that uncertainty exists doesn’t mean that they’re right to advance the same presumptions and rationalizations to support new policies that clearly failed when supporting old policies. Just as we are justified in taking note of the fact that supernatural explanations have never been later found to be justified and use that set of observations to set “no supernatural activity caused this phenomenon” as our default or null hypothesis, we are justified in saying that despite how much we don’t know, “denying or at least delaying treatment should be the reasonable first option” has never yet been later determined to be empirically justified and thus providing active help upon first presentation should be our default stance, providing active help is better than not providing active help should be our null hypothesis.
I am bothered by how often trans* advocates (researchers and lay persons) generalize results beyond what is practically, empirically, and mathematically justified. But I don’t want to concede that shit to the SPBs of the world because their consistent misrepresentations of important truths, including the historical context in which research has never justified a deny/delay first approach as best for trans* persons, makes me quite certain that those fuckers will distort that concession to make it appear that they aren’t themselves guilty of the same, but many times over.
I am not comfortable with how some pro-trans* folks report or discuss individual papers, but the trans* advocates’ position that responses to trans* people need to be centered on what trans* individuals assert is best for themselves has been borne out any number of times, and as far as I know, deceptive, denying, delaying and non-collaborative responses used from the time of Alan Hart to today have never been empirically validated as good for trans* people.
When cissexists come up with a new thing to deny or delay, with a new treatment that should be decided by experts or providers and not collaboratively with trans patients or clients, I don’t want to read their arguments. We shouldn’t have to read their arguments. Even when they cite new data, an individual study, non-generalizable as it must be, simply has no power to challenge the massive body of research acquired over decades that justifies responding, “Whatever new study you might cite, the premises and structure of your argument have been proven to be unjustified. Unless you can break entirely with the past, unless you can develop new premises, or unless you accrue a large body of non-generalizable but highly repeatable research that shows we’ve finally reached the limits of the applicability of the patient-first model, just fuck off.”
I hate that it’s so complicated. I hate that honesty compels a truly complex and nuanced response. I hate that in order to make my argument I have to cite not one particular study, but the massive weight of decades of evidence, of hundreds of studies. Burchill, Peterson & Singal have the same advantage as Ken Ham: they can cite single studies or a specific few by name. Read superficially, these might even highlight uncertainty about trans*-related best practices (PBS) or evolutionary biology (Ham), and that uncertainty might seem to someone less than expert to raise a reasonable doubt.
It’s a trick that embraces ignorance. It’s a trick that sells short the capacities of children. It’s a trick that harms us all. And yet, leaping at the opportunity to smack down another PRATT with your 1,001st rebuttal reaches a point of diminishing returns. (After his history opposing the nonsense of Ham and similar, I’d be unsurprised if PZ happened to agree.)
No, I can’t be bothered to put up a rebuttal every time the next SBP writes a new piece attacking the autonomy, capacities, or treatment of trans* people. But it’s not because I don’t care.
If you feel, as a trans* person, that I should be writing more articles debunking this shit, I hope that this helps you understand why I don’t do as many responses to the newest cissexist pseudo-intellectual crap as I once did.
Can’t blame you one bit.
Did you see this article by Donna Minkowitz apologizing for botching a story she wrote 25 years ago about Brandon Teena because of her ignorance about trans issues? Here’s a quote:
Thanks, Mano. I hadn’t seen that yet. Maybe I’ll have some thoughts later.
I’m very curious. Exactly what is your rational justification for
because you give none.
Also, for this
The null hypothesis is always no statistical difference. The null hypothesis is help of any kind is no better then no help. I would imagine most if not all studies done on this topic has rejected the null hypothesis as a conclusion. I think what you are trying to say is that the default position we as compassionate and rational creatures should have is that every problem has if not a solution, then at minimum an improvement to the problem.
Finally the standard medical practice is always start with least invasive or risky treatment. If counseling and coping mechanisms is enough for the patient then there is no reason to progress to hormone treatment, if hormone treatment is adequate then there is no reason to progress to surgical intervention. The current medical recommendations are precisely this. There are very specific and strong medial reasons to not give hormone blockers to children before puberty, and why to not to perform surgery before the patient is fully grown, but the crux of current recommended medical treatment is affirming the preferred gender of the patient. Anyone who doesn’t agree with these recommendations and treatments has a large burden of evidence since these are based on best research available.
@paxoll:
How would you go about getting a truly random sample of trans* persons?
How would you know if they were or weren’t representative of trans* persons as a whole?
There’s no such thing as a random sample. More to the point, there’s no such thing as a representative sample that we can know for sure is a representative sample.
Actually, we ascribe randomness to the method of sampling, not the resulting sample itself. We don’t know that the resulting sample is representative of the population, but that is an issue in all medical testing.
I should add that in this case, there may be a self-selection bias.
paxoll #4
uh huh
not trolling at all
You think?
I hear ya.
I’ve spent my life being told that I was doing me and my life wrong and I should just do and be what they thought I should be. (And when I had kids, they said the same nonsense about how I was raising my kids.) At some point, I came to see that they didn’t know jack s*** and I stopped bothering to argue with them, and my life improved enormously.
Life’s too short to spend arguing with or even listening to people who don’t know what they’re talking about and won’t listen.
My basic premise is: why are trans people the exception to the general rule that people should be allowed to live their lives as they choose as long as they’re not harming anyone? Why is being trans different from being a stamp collector or living in a commune? Or getting a nose job or a boob job? To me, that is the real “null hypothesis” in all this.
I don’t understand statistics, having dropped it twice. Is “[b]ecause such a large percentage of trans* folks exist closeted” a reason why one can’t get a random sample of trans people? It seems to me there’s a significant difference between the populations of out and closeted trans people so as to skew any conclusions from a study of trans people unless you can get sufficient randomly selected closeted trans people, and how do you do that?
When I started working with a trans person a few years back, it was a very salutary slap upside the head to me. I’d been roommates with gay people, I’d had a significant relationship with a bi woman who caught shit from some of the then G&L community for dating me (ca 1988; she was instrumental in the local shift to LGB as then was), I’d been friends with and worked with people of various ethnicities and backgrounds and ages … I figured I was pretty damn liberal. But using the singular “they” (on request) threw me for a loop. Fortunately I turned the loop into a somersault, and the experience really helped me.
So I am uncomfortable with generalizations about trans* people, even those made by members of the community (-ies). But FFS these SPBs (can that be a new collective noun?) don’t even know what they don’t even know. I think the key line in the OP is: “The presumption was invalid.” Or, they will adjust their social response but not the fundamental prejudice from which it derived. Not just assholes but stupid assholes, some of them with advanced degrees.
There is the Trans Youth Project. Not a random sample, but a plan to recruit as many families of transgender children as they can, and follow up on those kids for 20 years, comparing them to cisgender kids from the general population as well as to cisgender siblings of transgender kids. So far their conclusions are that transgender kids construct gender similarly to cisgender children, and that transgender children who are supported in social transition are similar in measures of mental health to cisgender children.
paxoll, see Informed Consent in the Medical Care of Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming Patients. Under the Informed Consent model, there is no necessity to first test if counseling and coping mechanisms are sufficient before starting hormone treatment. Under this model the patient and doctor discuss the patient’s entire situation, history, goals etc and decide which treatments are the most likely to be helpful to the individual patient. So for one patient it might be to try counseling first, but usually it is to start hormones, starting with a low dose and increasing to get to the norm for one’s age, with the option of counseling as additional treatment in parallel.
For gender affirming surgery there is still a requirement for letters from mental health professionals (one for top surgery, two for lower), though proponents of Informed Consent are hoping to change that too.
@petesh:
Exactly. Where were you when I needed to cut 1700 words from the OP?
Yeah, I was mixing up the order on purpose so as not to reinforce that I was prioritizing critique of one over critique of any of the others, and I think it would have to be standardized if its going to be recognized as a collective noun, but YES: whatever order we decide on, I think “SPBs” absolutely deserves to be a new collective noun.
There’s always some new person coming along asserting that the problem wasn’t the prejudice, it was just the particular implementation of that prejudice. They try so hard to position themselves as the new, reasonable thinkers on trans* lives and medical care because they reject what 80% of the population already rejected as based on prejudice or unjustified assumptions in their effort to justify some new thing based on prejudice or unjustified assumptions. And each and every one of them thinks that they are perfectly unique. :vomit:
@Crip,
I asked for your justification and your answer is to question me and say
. Wow, so statistics are wrong and useless. All those college classes on statistics a waste of time. I’ll have to remember this whenever someone tries to use published research to make a point.
@Anat
I was completely unaware that this WPATH organization existed or had a recommended SOC for transgender treatment. What I was speaking of was a best medical practice. The conclusion of the article you linked is very appropriate
The informed consent model is essentially what has taken place for all over the counter medication and plastic surgery. How this is proposed in this article is actually what is being taught to doctors right now and it mirrors treatment for depression exactly. Depression medication used to be prescribed at absurdly high dosing and the significant risks of the medication made most clinicians uncomfortable prescribing it and would say they needed to see a psychiatrist to get the medicine. Now that it is much lower risk virtually all clinicians are comfortable giving a prescription for antidepressants. What I was specifically saying is that the best practice in medicine for prescribing antidepressants is to start by sending the patient to therapy. Not to get permission to proceed to the next level of treatment, but because it is the least risky and invasive treatment and should always be prescribed. Any doctor that does not prescribe therapy for depression is being negligent. I don’t think any doctor would agree with an informed consent model of medicine that would allow the patient to simply dictate their treatment when that treatment has as significant risks as sex reassignment.
@paxoll:
There’s no such thing as a representative sample of trans* persons because there is no reliable demographic baseline we can use to guarantee a sample is representative. Which trans* people are out and why and to whom (since many of us are plenty out but not out to every single person) dramatically affects how a local trans* population is seen, but not in a way that ensures those who are seen are representative.
We can’t try to defeat self-selection bias through random sampling because how would you know that you’re sampling randomly among trans* people only?
The ability to perform generalizable research on trans* people is poisoned by the social conditions which make being trans so hard to talk about in the first place – like Peterson’s insistence that gender and sex are both binary. It’s further poisoned to the extent that threats to trans* safety & health exist.
In the end, there simply is no possible way you can support the statement that random and/or nationally or internationally representative samples of trans persons exist. In order for those to exist, you had to have a way of identifying trans* people that didn’t depend on self-report. You don’t have it. Combine dependence on self-report with an environment that makes self reporting difficult and/or dangerous, and you’re not going to have samples which can support national or international generalizations for decades (at least).
There is nothing in college statistics that runs in any way counter to this assessment of the current state of research on trans* populations.
As for
well, that statement just shows how uninformed you are. You might be a medical expert. You may very well know thousands of times more than I do about medical research. But I’m not trying to do medical research. I’m saying that on a particular topic where I am very familiar with the research pre-1990 and casually familiar with the research from 1990-2000, there has been a consistent trend with standards of care being proposed and implemented, then found wanting. (I’m even more familiar with sociological and psychological research from 1950 – 2008 or so.) The different treatment standards developed over the decades made reference to different studies, but continued to rely on specific underlying assumptions that should have been questioned as the old standards kept failing over and over again.
Worse, popular writers outside the medical/psychological community now make reference to specific studies, but without the historical context (demonstrating that their underlying assumptions are almost certainly flawed) their general audience is unable to understand the problems with their arguments. The arguments appear facially reasonable, but are not.
One of the problems with their argument is that there simply is no such thing as a random or representative sample in current demographic, sociological, anthropological, psychological, or medical research on trans* persons.
Just because sampling is difficult doesn’t mean it is not possible, and just because sampling is not a representative sample of all trans people doesn’t mean it is not a representation of a set of trans people. The most obvious comparison is the gay community. Research done on homosexuals from a easily sampled place like San Francisco in the 1970s has almost nothing to say about a homosexual in Mississippi at that time, or homosexuals in modern day San Francisco. The real question is, is there any reason at all to combine representative samples from both areas? Transgenderism is a self identity issue, making self-selection bias not a problem but an overarching goal in the research. The actual self selection bias that would cause problems with trans research is simply the same problem most poorly funded and poorly researched humanities issues have. The solution is to not do shitty research, not that it is “not possible” .
It does mean that there’s no such thing as a representative sample.
It does mean that you can’t use randomization to try to defeat self-selection bias.
You haven’t apologized for or even retracted your snark about how my statements of what is obviously true are somehow contrary to college statistics.
And, finally, now you’re implying I’ve said that you can’t do research.
OF COURSE you can do research. Let me quote from the OP:
and:
The problem is not bad research. The problem is not that people dare to research at all.
The problem is exactly what i said before: These dishonest fuckers will makes statements like, “X% of trans people” or “X% of trans kids” which is just plain fucking wrong.
What they can truthfully say is, “One particular study found that in their sample X% of trans people…”
But they don’t do that. They generalize inappropriately. I don’t know if Burchill is educated not to do this, but Peterson & Singal certainly are. They know they shouldn’t be generalizing to all trans people*1, and yet they do, over and over.
THERE SIMPLY ARE NO CURRENT STUDIES THAT VALIDATE THIS, AND NO STUDIES THAT CAN VALIDATE NATIONAL OR INTERNATIONAL GENERALIZATION ARE ON THE HORIZON EITHER.
Please don’t say that I’m anti-research. I have never said I’m anti-research, and in fact my entire argument rests on deep familiarity with research trends over decades. You’re twisting what I’m saying so badly I’m starting to wonder if there’s some fundamental hostility to my point on your part. Because what I’m saying is eminently reasonable: you don’t get to generalize from self-selected samples. You don’t get to say you know what’s best for trans* kids or adults, because no one really knows for sure and those statements should be highly qualified by anyone making them, pro-trans* or anti-. And, finally, if you base your interpretations and conclusions on a filter that has been used repeatedly in the past to negative effect, then even when you’re referencing valid data, and even when you’re not overgeneralizing, your interpretations and conclusions are highly suspect. Readers should know those things, but the PBSs don’t allow them to know that. They don’t put any of this into their articles and their articles invariably communicate far greater certainty than is deserved.
Finally,
Point to one fucking place here where I called for shitty research or called for doing research using a methodology which would guarantee shitty results.
If you can’t, maybe you should actually listen to the points that I’m actually making and not some fantasy of what I’m saying. Oh, and apologize for implying I called for shitty research. That might be nice.
*1: they usually don’t even limit themselves to all trans persons within a single nation, but hey, I’m reasonable and when they’re speaking to the NY Times they might think of themselves as speaking just about US trans people, with corresponding reservations for the Times of London or the Sydney Morning Herald, etc.
paxoll @16:
Then you are clearly not competent to discuss trans medical issues. It’s like claiming to know about USAan medical issues but never having heard of the AMA or the CDC. It shows the depth of your ignorance.
I give credit to Ms. Dyke for answering you. As I mentioned above, I wouldn’t. My (remaining) life’s too short to waste time debating people who can’t be bothered to educate themselves before weighing in on a topic, especially a topic that forms such a large part of my life and the lives of people I care about.
@Allison
Lol. bullshit. How much does the US or any country put stock in some small international organization? Each specialty especially in the US has their own governing body of experts that use the most up to date research to provide a SOC for problems associated with their specialty. GPs generally follow the specialists SOC as long as they are qualified to provide that care. The US medical system follows the APA recommendation for mental health issues and while the APA may mirror the SOC that WPATH has come up with, they do so with their own experts and their own conclusions. I might expect a psychiatrist to know WPATH, just like I might expect a urologist to know of ISUP or INUS, but I bet most don’t. So please take your self righteousness and stuff it.
@Crip
I asked you a really simple question, to justify your claim that
YOU are the one that “snarked” back at me with questions and doubling down on your baseless assertion, so expecting me to apologize after your antagonism is fucken rich.
How is self-selection bias corrected for for ANY population?
I don’t care what has been done, what you have done, or what dumbass people claim has been done. There are ways to collect information to correct for all types of bias and research is always qualified by its limitations. Your over generalized statement is wrong, and when it is correct it applies to “shitty research ” so
is a fucken strawman because I never said that.
I guarantee that most research papers will have in their conclusions solutions on how to correct for some of the “shittyness” of their research.
So when I make an actually false inference or imply something that is not true, I’ll happily apologize as soon as you do for your snark, strawman, quotemining bullshit.
Since I have a gravatar, I don’t get one of the blog-generated ones.
But I must say that I think paxoll’s is spot on.
@Paxoll:
You’re not even listening. You don’t even know what this conversation is about.
@Crip
I do know what your post was about, and I know what the conversation I started is about. Its about you having a perfectly accurate and reasonable opinion about trans research and people good and bad reporting on that research, and instead of sticking with that, you tip into hyperbole. You overstep the same way I see people in these forums do constantly. I’m trying to get people here to recognize that they have overreached logically, or emotionally and that overreach is always going to be a detriment to your purpose.
Good luck and goodbye.
weird
I meant to copy/paste this above my #25
RECENT RANTS BY PEOPLE WHO PROBABLY MORE ARTICULATE THAN THE AUTHOR OF THIS BLOG: