There is another fundamental problem with all these studies, now that gender mutilating surgery has become so political and the issue been forced down everyone's throat.
Anyone who undergoes this surgery has immense internal pressure on their psychological well-being to believe that they did the right thing and that they are now happier…
There is another fundamental problem with all these studies, now that gender mutilating surgery has become so political and the issue been forced down everyone's throat.
Anyone who undergoes this surgery has immense internal pressure on their psychological well-being to believe that they did the right thing and that they are now happier and less psychologically distressed. In addition, there is immense external pressure from the outside world and from their doctors to shun any thoughts of regret and to validate the medical intervention.
How do you think that will affect how the patient fills out their psychological survey? It's not just the researchers with the confirmation bias. Even worse Many patients will also has have a strong confirmation bias. This is the reason why, for clinical studies of medicines where subjective outcomes are measured, it is critical for the study to be double blinded. Unfortunately, there is no way to make gender mutilating surgery blind to either patient or physicians.
It's not just the analysis and conclusions that are corrupted, but reliability of the basic data on which those conclusions are also suspect. We saw a glimpse of that when Sapir noted how in one study a huge number of participants outright lied and said they were given puberty blockers at the age of 18, AFTER they had passed through puberty.
To get publicity for Sapir and others trying to shine a light into the despicably dishonest world of activist medicine, we need Republicans to hold hearings where Sapir and others can testify. Then their research and explanation will be in the congressional record and recorded on C-SPAN and Youtube. Conservatives can cite this testimony to fight back when the Left uses their "experts say" argument.
When people are tested with symptom surveys it is usually pretty easy to deny, minimize, or alternatively, amplify and exaggerate psych symptoms. Psychologists call this "faking good or bad," and it is a common testee strategy. People applying for jobs usually try to minimize symptoms and people who are trying to get disability payments may try to look sicker. Some symptom surveys (particularly the MMPI series) are more difficult to fake, but even so, aren't impervious.
I don't really know what the incentives currently are for adolescents to present at a gender clinic as more or less depressed, anxious, self-harming, etc. In the earlier years of gender treatment patients were selected for surgery only if they were evaluated as stable and free of other mental health issues along with trans-identification. In that case, I would expect the patients to deny symptoms both before and after surgeries. Now it appears that a high percentage of patients present themselves as distressed and as high suicide risks during psych evaluations, and the gender clinics are saying that, "People have a right to seek care regardless of what other problems they might have."
I found much of the research about gender clinic patients to be appallingly biased. Some of the articles I read explicitly instructed the reader to "frame" evidence that trans-identified adolescent patients have other diagnosable mental disorders as evidence for "minority stress" (as the one and only likely cause). These statements show extreme bias and disregard for scientific norms in research. The investigators writing up their study are not supposed to presume what caused patients' symptoms, or anything else. They are supposed to look into the problem they are studying without ruling out any variables that might be related to it. If the investigators can show that a patient's anxiety is diagnosable as situational they can move on to identify as many environmental stressors as they can think of as possible causes. It is not at all easy to meet the first requirement, showing that the patients' anxiety symptoms are like those that are caused by environmental stress, as opposed to OCD or something else. To really argue for causation the researchers have to design a longitudinal study, which takes years to complete and involves so many other logistical difficulties that doing this kind of research is almost unfeasible.
For the investigators to order the reader to "frame" an unwanted result as having been caused by "minority stress," without at least conducting an open search for all variables that potentially influence and sustain trans patients' anxiety is not research at all. It is unethical and scientific malpractice to conduct and then publish research for the preconceived purpose of selling a type of treatment that the researchers like to do.
I agree with you, it would be great if those of us who question the gender treatment industry could present in Congress the counterarguments against gender affirmative care. I find that most healthcare providers in general practices are uninformed about the controversies regarding gender clinic referrals, and this includes physicians who treat adolescents. That demographic is still typically nerdy and science-minded, especially if they graduated from medical school before the woke takeover. They could potentially be influenced if there were debates in Congress about the dissenting arguments with respect to "safe and effective treatment" of disorders focused on self-rejection of one's bio sex.
One of the main problems in combating the woke cult generally is that half the population still thinks the anti-woke effort is about "far right conspiracy theories." Getting evidence in front of the public requires doing some kind of end run around the repression of dissent in the MSM. Congress does seem to be the place people turn now when they want to get the word out about something that the MSM won't cover.
This is a long term solution but it may turn out to be the only solution. We have to discredit the MSM so much that they lose their audience. Otherwise they will have no incentive to even contemplate changing and conservative reason and evidence will lose to government directed MSM propaganda. And you have to do what the Left does so effectively to discredit the right. Frame their opponents as not just wrong but actually evil, because in this case it actually is. And it may be most effective for conservatives to do this by co-opting the language of the left. So William Thomas stealing women's swimming wins and parading her junk around the women's locker room (as well as Adidas having men model women's bathing suits and Target making women's bathings suits for men) has to be considered an evil example of "Toxic Transgender Masculinity". "Gender Affirmation" needs to be called "The Mullah's Conversion Therapy", because that's what they force upon homosexuals in Iran to punish them. And because the data says that, if you leave most of those with real gender dysphoria alone (not the huge increase in girls affected by social contagion) almost 90% of them will settle down as homosexuals, you need to call all those medical experts, activists, journalists, neighbors attacking you as a transphobe what they really are: homophobes trying to do what the mullahs are doing - committing homogenocide by sterilization. The conflagration is too big to fight fire with water, i.e. by trying to cool things down. It is time to fight fire with fire. The Left wants to exterminate the views and lives of common sense people by using the fascist collusion of powerful government and corporate coercion. We have to fight back like our lives and the lives of our children depend on it.
I emphatically agree with your position! At this point I take for granted that our country is under attack via psychological warfare. With respect to the activists, I believe we need to identify them as "the enemy," as our troops normally due during wars, and treat them accordingly. A lot of their weapons work against them, especially critical theory, which always assumes that an opponent's arguments are just covert power strategies designed to oppress somebody.
I was reading articles on Persuasion and Reason for a while but had to take a break from them because of the persistent push by their authors to treat all interactions with the woke like dialogues in which people are seeking mutual understanding. The stance being promoted by F.I.R.E. is also tilted towards protecting woke rights. Liberals have so much difficulty with accurately perceiving an enemy as such and behaving accordingly.
There is another fundamental problem with all these studies, now that gender mutilating surgery has become so political and the issue been forced down everyone's throat.
Anyone who undergoes this surgery has immense internal pressure on their psychological well-being to believe that they did the right thing and that they are now happier and less psychologically distressed. In addition, there is immense external pressure from the outside world and from their doctors to shun any thoughts of regret and to validate the medical intervention.
How do you think that will affect how the patient fills out their psychological survey? It's not just the researchers with the confirmation bias. Even worse Many patients will also has have a strong confirmation bias. This is the reason why, for clinical studies of medicines where subjective outcomes are measured, it is critical for the study to be double blinded. Unfortunately, there is no way to make gender mutilating surgery blind to either patient or physicians.
It's not just the analysis and conclusions that are corrupted, but reliability of the basic data on which those conclusions are also suspect. We saw a glimpse of that when Sapir noted how in one study a huge number of participants outright lied and said they were given puberty blockers at the age of 18, AFTER they had passed through puberty.
To get publicity for Sapir and others trying to shine a light into the despicably dishonest world of activist medicine, we need Republicans to hold hearings where Sapir and others can testify. Then their research and explanation will be in the congressional record and recorded on C-SPAN and Youtube. Conservatives can cite this testimony to fight back when the Left uses their "experts say" argument.
When people are tested with symptom surveys it is usually pretty easy to deny, minimize, or alternatively, amplify and exaggerate psych symptoms. Psychologists call this "faking good or bad," and it is a common testee strategy. People applying for jobs usually try to minimize symptoms and people who are trying to get disability payments may try to look sicker. Some symptom surveys (particularly the MMPI series) are more difficult to fake, but even so, aren't impervious.
I don't really know what the incentives currently are for adolescents to present at a gender clinic as more or less depressed, anxious, self-harming, etc. In the earlier years of gender treatment patients were selected for surgery only if they were evaluated as stable and free of other mental health issues along with trans-identification. In that case, I would expect the patients to deny symptoms both before and after surgeries. Now it appears that a high percentage of patients present themselves as distressed and as high suicide risks during psych evaluations, and the gender clinics are saying that, "People have a right to seek care regardless of what other problems they might have."
I found much of the research about gender clinic patients to be appallingly biased. Some of the articles I read explicitly instructed the reader to "frame" evidence that trans-identified adolescent patients have other diagnosable mental disorders as evidence for "minority stress" (as the one and only likely cause). These statements show extreme bias and disregard for scientific norms in research. The investigators writing up their study are not supposed to presume what caused patients' symptoms, or anything else. They are supposed to look into the problem they are studying without ruling out any variables that might be related to it. If the investigators can show that a patient's anxiety is diagnosable as situational they can move on to identify as many environmental stressors as they can think of as possible causes. It is not at all easy to meet the first requirement, showing that the patients' anxiety symptoms are like those that are caused by environmental stress, as opposed to OCD or something else. To really argue for causation the researchers have to design a longitudinal study, which takes years to complete and involves so many other logistical difficulties that doing this kind of research is almost unfeasible.
For the investigators to order the reader to "frame" an unwanted result as having been caused by "minority stress," without at least conducting an open search for all variables that potentially influence and sustain trans patients' anxiety is not research at all. It is unethical and scientific malpractice to conduct and then publish research for the preconceived purpose of selling a type of treatment that the researchers like to do.
I agree with you, it would be great if those of us who question the gender treatment industry could present in Congress the counterarguments against gender affirmative care. I find that most healthcare providers in general practices are uninformed about the controversies regarding gender clinic referrals, and this includes physicians who treat adolescents. That demographic is still typically nerdy and science-minded, especially if they graduated from medical school before the woke takeover. They could potentially be influenced if there were debates in Congress about the dissenting arguments with respect to "safe and effective treatment" of disorders focused on self-rejection of one's bio sex.
One of the main problems in combating the woke cult generally is that half the population still thinks the anti-woke effort is about "far right conspiracy theories." Getting evidence in front of the public requires doing some kind of end run around the repression of dissent in the MSM. Congress does seem to be the place people turn now when they want to get the word out about something that the MSM won't cover.
This is a long term solution but it may turn out to be the only solution. We have to discredit the MSM so much that they lose their audience. Otherwise they will have no incentive to even contemplate changing and conservative reason and evidence will lose to government directed MSM propaganda. And you have to do what the Left does so effectively to discredit the right. Frame their opponents as not just wrong but actually evil, because in this case it actually is. And it may be most effective for conservatives to do this by co-opting the language of the left. So William Thomas stealing women's swimming wins and parading her junk around the women's locker room (as well as Adidas having men model women's bathing suits and Target making women's bathings suits for men) has to be considered an evil example of "Toxic Transgender Masculinity". "Gender Affirmation" needs to be called "The Mullah's Conversion Therapy", because that's what they force upon homosexuals in Iran to punish them. And because the data says that, if you leave most of those with real gender dysphoria alone (not the huge increase in girls affected by social contagion) almost 90% of them will settle down as homosexuals, you need to call all those medical experts, activists, journalists, neighbors attacking you as a transphobe what they really are: homophobes trying to do what the mullahs are doing - committing homogenocide by sterilization. The conflagration is too big to fight fire with water, i.e. by trying to cool things down. It is time to fight fire with fire. The Left wants to exterminate the views and lives of common sense people by using the fascist collusion of powerful government and corporate coercion. We have to fight back like our lives and the lives of our children depend on it.
I emphatically agree with your position! At this point I take for granted that our country is under attack via psychological warfare. With respect to the activists, I believe we need to identify them as "the enemy," as our troops normally due during wars, and treat them accordingly. A lot of their weapons work against them, especially critical theory, which always assumes that an opponent's arguments are just covert power strategies designed to oppress somebody.
I was reading articles on Persuasion and Reason for a while but had to take a break from them because of the persistent push by their authors to treat all interactions with the woke like dialogues in which people are seeking mutual understanding. The stance being promoted by F.I.R.E. is also tilted towards protecting woke rights. Liberals have so much difficulty with accurately perceiving an enemy as such and behaving accordingly.