This has prompted a detailed response from Jesse Singal - "The stakes are too high for this".
Imagine a pillar of frowny faces ten thousand light-years high.
[...]
So:
1. The authors of a major study, in their preregistered protocol, say they’re going to measure suicidality in a sample of kids who go on hormones.
2. They mysteriously fail to report anything about that variable, other than to note, almost as an aside, that there were two completed suicides — meaning the sample had a high rate of suicide. Several other key variables are missing as well, with no explanation.
3. In short, the study provides no evidence that, in this sample of trans youth, access to hormones reduced suicidality.
4. Scientific American points to this study as evidence that hormones reduce suicidality in trans youth.
You can see how this is frustrating, right? You can see why I keep writing these articles?
He remains a total centrist softy though...
This has been frustrating me for years. Journalists and pundits are utterly failing to disseminate accurate information about very serious treatments, in some cases straightforwardly misleading their audiences — among them parents trying to make medical decisions for kids who are too young to consent on their own — about vital questions involving mental health and suicide. I believe that this will go down as a major journalistic blunder that will be looked back upon with embarrassment and regret.
[...]
Here's the article. I feel a little bad critiquing it because it was written by a SciAm intern. But it was published in one of the leading science outlets in the world, and it does have some major problems, so I don’t know what to say.
I blame the editors, for whom this is a pattern, far more than I blame the individual author. I’m not going to name her, because I’m not trying to cause long-lasting Google damage to a young journalist’s reputation, but obviously her name will not be hard to find. I promise you, notwithstanding any of the criticisms that follow, that when I was a young journalist I wrote far worse stuff than what she wrote here. She is in a difficult situation, attempting to write about an issue where there is so much spin and so much politicization that it is impossible not to step on landmines unless you are very, very careful. Her editors were not careful. Not at all.
He takes the opportunity to dig back into all the dodgy "suicide" research - a lot of which he's covered before, but this piece collates it all together.