Saw this thread on Twitter and am so upset:
twitter.com/JoPhoenix1/status/1430843096925970436?s=19
The precis is that:
- The Lancet published this paper on the relationship between head injury and violent crime in women in the Scottish prison service
www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(21)00082-1/fulltext
- According to the paper's methods section, 5 of the 109 female prisoners who took part in the study identified as trans women (about 5%)
Of the 355 women incarcerated in the four prisons we recruited from, 109 (31%) expressed an interest in being part of the study and were seen by researchers, and all were deemed eligible to take part. Five of these individuals identified as transgender women.
- Jo Phoenix and some other researchers tried to submit a letter pointing out the methodological flaw that sex-based male and female offending patterns are very different, so having 5% of participants from the other sex class might affect the results
- The Lancet editorial team initially agreed to publish the letter, then retracted, saying that the "consensus view" of the editorial team was that "the numbers involved were not thought likely to have influenced the outcome of the study as a whole".
What fresh hell is this??
So 5% of participants in a study on female prisoners were trans women (biologically male). Is that representative of the female prison estate as a whole? It's certainly interesting that whilst less than 1% of the UK population identify as trans, they make up 5% of a population of female prisoners with a conviction for a violent offence.
But I just feel so speechless that such a highly regarded medical research journal has just utterly silenced discussion about the meaning of these statistics. This stuff matters. If we can't name biological reality in actual scientific research, none of the research has meaning. The single sentence from the article quoted above is the only mention in the whole article that some of the women in the study were trans. It's not mentioned in the discussion, the limitations, anywhere. How can we do science if everything we write is skewed by this ideology?
This has completely shattered me this morning. I'm actually crying. This is cargo cult science. It looks superficially cotrect, but the meaning is gone.