Do phalloplasties actually work?

Seriously, that this paper has drawn conclusions is remarkable.

"Therefore, we surmise that they did not consider transgender females in female bathrooms a serious concern for their constituents (unlike 50% of the men opponents)."

From this methodology:

"The author searched the Australian version of Google News (sourced between April 29 and May 16, 2015) for news and blog articles for phrases such as transgender bathroom and manually inspected a large number of web news articles and opinion pieces for comments made in relation to safety and/or privacy in female bathrooms."

Being an Australian and living in the country at that time, I can tell anyone who asks just how little this very topic was discussed or even known about there. It was not widely known at all. I would say it was unheard of in discussions between friends and socially in 2015, even among activist friends it hadn't even registered.

I would also say looking at the information I have found about this person, that they have a mathematics background, but this paper is not part of their discipline stream at all. And perhaps they have a distinctly biased motivation for generating this paper.

sites.google.com/site/rebeccajstones/

I keep coming back to this.

"In this section, we describe how we collect comments from online news articles pertaining to the safety and privacy of patrons in female bathrooms, dividing them according to
(a) the gender of the user who made the comment,
(b) whether or not the comment is a negative comment,
and (c) in the case of a negative comment, whether the comment describes a causal or incidental link between transgender females and safety and privacy in female bathrooms (or neither)."

Just to pull this out again.

"in the case of a negative comment, whether the comment describes a causal or incidental link between transgender females and safety and privacy in female bathrooms (or neither)."

As I said up thread, who the fuck, analyses public comments to new articles with the view to establish how many women and girls have been harmed by male inclusion based on whether the victims of harm mention it in their public comments? Of course women and girls are not going to be making public their instances of harm in public comments.

It is a rarity to do this even now. Yet, this paper drew this conclusion based on that criteria.

And even a)! Has this person assumed the sex of commenters? Based on what?

I mean, fuck! This paper has so many holes in it, yet apparently some organisations use papers like this to shape their response to issues such as considering toilet concerns as a 'red herring'.

Good friend, mother to a girl. DD … develops thru childhood ….anxiety, few friends, ASD?

At yr 7/8, DD announced Bi, then within 24 mos (Covid) she announced trans and wanted to do all the buzz words - affirmating care, testosterone, top & bottom. No questions at all … this is the path to masculine enlightenment.
Wearing boy uniform at school etc. At weekends dresses like elderly country gent .. tweed jacket, tweed plus-fours, woolly high socks, old man brown walking shoes, flat cap & walking stick. She is 15.

Mum IS going thru menopause and saying to DD … do you know the long term health impacts of hormone blockers? Testosterone? Imploring DD …. Do not go thru menopause @ age 14, 15 …. Saying this to the “country gent”. Mum is supportive but firm no medical changes til 18 but knowing how easy to get meds online.

Do you think menopause + testosterone is what men feel like?

It was the willingness to go thru menopause at 14/15 & the denial of permanent health impacts most alarming. Very much seems brainwashed and unwilling to consider anything but what she’s been told on her tiny phone screen by Big Transfluencers.

DD at Uni now … she can do what she likes now.

Oh well might as well pack it up vipers. 'We' (who?) have unilaterally decided that toilets are a red herring. There's nothing to see here. Go back to chatting about weaning or something.

Dude, you're so far out of your depth it'd be funny, if this wasn't just a transparent attempt to stop people raising awareness of the mutilation of vulnerable, mostly ND, mostly gay, often abused, young people.

We can see you.

How on earth can a person who is female but has a stick on penis who then has a relationship with a female so thinks he is a gay man!

I presume you meant ‘has a relationship with a man’. BBC 3 is busily gaslighting men with this on their show ‘I kissed a boy’ which features a young woman claiming to be a gay man.

How on earth can a person who is female but has a stick on penis who then has a relationship with a female so thinks he is a gay man!

Same with a man who thinks he is female and has a relationship with a female then thinks he is a lesbian. He really isn't.

If I darken my face with makeup does that make me become black. Of course it doesn't. Neither does sticking on bits or cutting off bits and changing my name make me the opposite sex. It's all quite silly when you think about it. Also very sad since you can never be what you say you want to be.

A lot of these women are heterosexual so would identify as gay men.

God, just why would anyone do that. I mean just use a strap on surely it's the same difference and much less fuss.
Are partners of women identifying as men generally lesbians or straight women, I wonder what they think of the appendage?

Depends what you mean by 'work' ! If someone very lucky had no complications at all they still have to manually pump up the 'erection' and obviously don't orgasm in a similar way to men, and arm skin isn't as sensitive/erogenous as penile skin.....

Fell down a google rabbit hole as decided to see if there are stats - apparently only 1% of breast ops (per the FDA.gov) have post operative complications (everything from slow healing, implant capsule issues, cysts etc). Can’t imagine the stats would be v different in Europe/UK. Am actually surprised at how low that figure is, but it makes the stats re phalloplasty failures/complications even more stark.

'we collect comments from online news articles '

Oh, my days.

Absolutely, LesserCelandine. In exactly the same way asking a thirteen or fourteen year old if they want to pursue fertility preservation before sterilising themselves is next to meaningless.

Coming back to the young girls having dangerous phalloplasties. I think there is a large element of not understanding what it is not to have good health. You just need to look at TV ads to see how much of an issue continence is for older women. Older women know how debilitating even mild stress incontinence or urgency or frequency is. It is just too abstract a concept for young girls for whom continence is taken for granted. Same with urinary infections - and chronic urinary infections are a huge issue for phalloplasty as it creates pockets where chronic bacterial populations can become established.

(The lack of encouragement for older women to seek medical support for continence is also an issue, possibly made worse by women being reluctant to discuss pelvic floor issues with male health care professionals)

Absolutely. The ability of transactists to influence and manipulate laws to intimidate and silence women is chilling. As this thread demonstrates, the desperation to silence women from speaking and understanding issues that relate to us is very strong.

An alternative conclusion from that research would be that the laws introduced in those areas were as effective at silencing women

Very true.

An alternative conclusion from that research would be that the laws introduced in those areas were as effective at silencing women as they were at removing their privacy, safety and dignity.

Yes. I agree.

I have used media aggregation such as this to look at things like usage, and at what may be issues needing attention, particularly immediate attention and investigation.

To shape policy and prioritisation of issues? Fucking hell! To use papers such as the ones presented to categorise toilets as being a 'red herring', is negligent.

If I worked for an organisation that did this, I would be hugely concerned.

Research presented by TRAs is almost uniformly poor, biased, misinterpreted, falsely generalised to unrelated populations, or simply misrepresented. They never seem to expect people to actually read the studies they quote even when they don’t try to hide it behind references to opinion pieces rather than the research itself.

It's entirely dependent on what you want to find out.

So if you want to understand emerging themes in a category - it is useful. For example, if you want to find out what people are using vitamin supplements for (recent example that I worked on).

But you wouldn't use it in isolation and you wouldn't definitely wouldn't use it to gauge representative opinion on anything, much less a complex topic like this.

It's a joke! An absolute joke! And I feel embarrassed for that poster that they used it. One state, and the fact that women don't report these things - because we know fucking damn well what the response would be, don't we - means it 'dIdN't hApPeN'. We went straight from MeToo, to mass silencing women and girls and then using that silence as complicity and to gaslight.

I'd be embarrassed to put my name to that if I was MyOliveHelper. I'm actually cringing with second hand embarrassment for them. Imagine that constitutes 'research' on ANY LEVEL. Fuck me a 9 year old would be too embarrassed to pass that in as homework.

I must admit that I was disappointed to see the 'valid' defence.

But then the other day I had someone lecture me that something that had a very weak conclusion and even admitted its limitations was regarded as 'good' quality research to support the conclusion. I realised that I am obviously from a different field that uses data to using it in academia and I felt rather sad that so much poor quality research is being regarded as being 'strong', rather than only an indication of where further research was needed.

And imagine if brands only ever took what was posted about them online as what the population thought about them and whether users liked their products. Fuck. If someone put this kind of report infront of me and said, 'look this is what our target market really think of us', I would be sending them away to do their work.

Aggregating online comments can only be valid for the very limited purpose of gauging what people who post on line comments are saying in the particular media being analysed.

It may be useful for generating further research. But if an organisation is drawing strong conclusions from them, it could be likely that they end up with false conclusions.

It also relies on people then posting about their traumatic experiences on line. I know of very few women and girls who would even think of such a thing.

It also ignores the many activist poster such as yourself, who will post online with little strong evidence to support claims.

That you call this 'valid' research and defended it shows the organisation/s you work for in a very poor light.

It's valid and useful for certain things. I use this technique myself from time to time, for certain research questions, though admittedly never as a standalone.

But it's definitely not valid as a accurate capturing of representative opinion and it would never be used in that way by professionals.

I’ve only looked at the abstract, but I see it’s a limited study from 2018 in one US state. It finds that the passage of inclusive “bathroom” laws is not related to the number or frequency of criminal incidents in these spaces. It says reports of privacy and safety concerns in such situations are “exceedingly rare”, and that it provides evidence (fair enough, but not proof) that “fears of increased safety and privacy violations as a result of nondiscrimination laws are not empirically grounded.”

This is the extensive research that you feel supports your assertations?

No I don't think that. Which is why I didn't say that. Read my post. Properly.

Yes and also if it interfered with continence and included removing all reproductive organs leading to a rather premature menopause with a future of broken bones.

Why do they remove everything internally too it's horrific.