Does the Transgender community have a problem with well evidenced science? Does the community only ever accept favourable reports, AKA confirmation bias, or is it something deeper?

I agree that I don’t know the majority of trans people. I know two personally, and at least three trans allies, and many more people just going along with what they have been taught is correct polite behaviour. What I have observed is that societal expectations have been very successfully set by the vocal people, and trans people, the sort who just want to get on with their lives, are usually subject to the same societal expectations. They have had their expectations set, and if I (or anyone else) do not meet those expectations, by using their chosen name and preferred pronouns, and accepting their appropriation of opposite sex spaces, then I (or anyone else) hate them and am transphobic.

This is an unhealthy viewpoint and harms trans people, the sort who just want to get on with their lives. It means that they can very easily see themselves as victims of people who in reality do not hate them, but do disagree with them. This is a particularly visible example of a wider trend in society, to equate disagreement with hate. Hate is a strong word and should be reserved for vicious attacks, not polite disagreement.

So I can have a healthy disagreement with a Muslim. Or I can say very nasty things about one or more Muslims. In between is a whole grey area, so it is sensible to try to avoid the reasonable perception of hatred or dislike. But I draw the line at accepting coercion. If a group of vocal Muslims was demanding that I pay lip service to their beliefs, I would resist that.

But we may not actually be disagreeing, and I don’t want to derail this thread further. Thank you for helping me to think about this.

@ZippyGoose I think you are mistaken. @DadJoke is not claiming to be trans.

He is just trying to bash women who recognise that women should have rights and that children should be protected from harm with what he says is scientific evidence, and is refusing to answer questions on why it is not adequate evidence.

No one is talking about treating individuals badly but a LOT of harm has been done to women and children by some extreme trans activists. What we are doing is speaking out against that and the ideology that has allowed it to happen.

I don’t think we can draw any conclusions from Moneys research other than he was a sick fuck that should never have been allowed around children

🙋‍♀️I've concluded that even though research ethics boards can be a pain in the ass, there's a very good reason for them...

All of this.

But yelling at them online obviously doesn’t help does it.

Even calling them ‘them’ is problematic (aware I’ve done it myself). Surely we know from history that when we take a cohort of people and ‘other’ them, and decide they all think the same way about certain issues and behave in the same socially unpaletable ways, we’re into dodgy territory.

When we yell online we polarise the discourse. You’re doing it now, with this thread, ‘why don’t THEY agree, what’s wrong with THEM’.

If you believe, as I do, that the term or presentation of trans likely covers a massive spectrum of conditions, the diversity of the underlying community is really apparent.

Amongst trans people i’m 100% certain there are…

some nasty people
some nice people
some people who always shout
some who never do
some who genuinely truly believe they were born in the wrong body
some who believe that changing their identity will solve some other problem in their life
some who are pursuing a fetish
some who have no fetish at all but are mentally unstable
some who really want to use their identity to harm women
some who love women and really do wish they were one

and of course the women who want to be a man too.

All totally different issues and different problems which would need to be dealt with separately.

I totally agree the way to respond as a society isn’t just to say ‘ok that’s fine’. Your comparison of anorexia is a great one. We don’t say ‘well you have a right to be really really thin and we’ll support that’. We help them.

But we also don’t yell at them and send them links about how being anorexic is really really a bad idea do we 🤨

@iverpickle - thank you - well expressed... esp.:

We need to find a more positive way for people to express this feeling, without resorting to surgery and attempting to distort reality for the whole of society.

I am completely GC and post on here fairly robustly against the current ideologies which would try and fool people into believing something that just doesn't happen or make sense - but that doesn't mean that there aren't those who do genuinely have body dysphoria and feel out of place in their body...

I think there are a number of things which we need to do as a society:

• de-gender society - there is no need to so rigorously promote differences in societal expectations - very often they are done for power reasons and even outside this discussion they can be harmful to children - esp. girls. It would be an interesting experiment to legalise against gender stereotyping - so e.g. don't allow any item to be targetted at boys / girls / men / women - unless specific to their biological sex - so it makes sense to sell bras to women, but no sense to only sell dinosaur tee-shirts to boys...
• promote positive views of both sexes - celebrate all the things people can do without reference to sex, but celebrating both sexes doing it - jobs / sports / hobbies / etc.
• work with children pre-puberty to build resilience and positive images of being a boy / girl so that when their body changes they have tools to deal with it
• work with children pre-puberty to understand becoming an adult and the positives - most children I know have at some point articulated that they are happy being a child and don't want to be an adult - but that is just a natural expression of uncertainty about the future - not an excuse to pump them full of hormones and chop bits of their body off!
• take mental health more seriously - as well as the above, look at mental health as a life long strategy...
• consider more seriously the effect of the internet on child -> adult development. Despite all the advantages of the internet I think we are only just waking up to the negatives and the impact it is having on our youth...

and no doubt, lots more - there is so much we need to do - recognising that for the vast majority of children and teenagers, body dysphoria is real - but it's solution is in mental health, not surgery or medication...

as for the trans activists who use this for power and other reasons - totally different approach...

Amazingly, these types of discussions have been happening on threads here for years and TRAs have had years to work on their arguments and come up with something good. And it hasn’t happened. None of them manage it.

I think @Catiette found a particularly interesting article actually, and one which I could find myself agreeing with.

If I understood it correctly the point made was that the modern Western idea of "trans" is particular to this present time and our culture. Other cultures and in other times have found different responses, ( much more positive for all of society) but this outburst of expression came as a response to an underlying feeling of the not fitting in with the 2 human sexes, male or female.

I believe that there are differences between males and females, and these differences stem from biological reality. However these differences don't limit themselves to the most obvious biological differences in our bodies, so reproduction, but also differences that occur to enable this vital process to have the best overall outcome.

Whilst it's not helpful to continually push this idea, it's equally unhelpful to pretend it doesn't exist at all. And while there will be a proportion of people where the differences are minimal, on the opposite ends of the male/female divide there will be noticeable differences, not only due to socialisation.
The sexual stereotypes are not completely made up, and even though they have been also greatly manipulated throughout history, and socialisation has played a significant part , it doesn't mean to say that they are without substance, particularly in certain points in life, puberty, childbirth, menopause etc.

It isn't a coincidence in my mind that Pre teen/ teenage Autistic girls make up a large proportion of people who feel "wrong" in their bodies. It goes without saying that a girl who for whatever reason feels more comfortable being nearer the middle ground rather than displaying her development into a "reproductive female" is just as much a woman as the girl who embraces this with positivity. However where once being a Tom boy was a socially acceptable response to this awkward feeling of change during puberty, nowadays it doesn't seem to be

This is why I can go along with the idea that people who feel "trans" are expressing, ( in a particularly unhealthy way in my opinion) the feelings of "inadequacy" of not "aligning" with the far end of the spectrum of stereotypes.

We need to find a more positive way for people to express this feeling, without resorting to surgery and attempting to distort reality for the whole of society.

I'd be interested to know if anyone else has read Cracked by James Davies?

It is a few years old and doesn't cover anything about trans (and I have no idea if the author has a bias / blind spot in this area or if he's sensible across the board) but I think it is relevant in describing the situation within psychiatry and culture in which trans ideology was born.

It details the absolute lack of scientific rigour at the heart of many psychological diagnoses; and the way it all so often points back to pharmaceutical companies making money. You can kind of join the dots to apply it to the trans health situation (and it's well worth reading in it's own right).

This is true.

I love reading the studies because often I wouldn’t have come across it before. There is also something to learn from them. Like that even in 2016 or 17 there was a study that looked at long term status of medically transitioned patients and discovered a 8-9% detransition rate. It never gets mentioned, it wasn’t a study into detransitioning. And the study was posted as a ‘gotcha’ to try to show the satisfaction of the patients or something.

Another posted the bone density study as proof that it apparently wasn’t a problem. But it showed that it was indeed a problem, for female patients. The male poster was gleefully posting the study and had not even bothered to consider the impact on female bodies. It wasn’t important to him at all.

Now we just see that bank of 51+ studies in the Cornell blog. The posters never bother to read them and they never realize they don’t show the current affirming only treatment plan improves the lives of the current cohort of children. But we have read them.

Quite.

The emotional manipulation of the idea that trans people deserve sympathy and kindness annoys me.

It suggests they aren't getting any.

I think theres a fair few of us who have/had every sympathy and tried to be kind but had it thrown back in our faces as not being good enough and not being kind enough.

And eventually shook ourselves down and went 'why am I putting up with this unacceptance lack of respect and at times out right abuse. I wouldn't tolerate it from anyone else, so why do I tolerate it from them?'

There was a spell on here where TRA did link studies. They never seemed to have read them though as they either had clear flaws, conclusions which didn’t match the data, or more often the paper showed the opposite of what they claimed it did.

They stopped posting about them so often when they realised we would immediately go and read the paper rather than take their word for it.

Thats precisely why we had this whole phase of 'educate yourself' because activists didn't understand what they were being told. They just go along with it and take it as gospel and think other people should too.

If you understood the studies or knew they were good quality you'd link to them and explain them.

You wouldn't go 'oh look at the quantity' if you understood the studies or knew they were of value to your point. We know that quantity isn't a marker for quality.

I’d tend to feel most trans people deserve sympathy and kindness rather than othering as treatment of some kind of homogenous ‘community’ online.

Everyone deserves sympathy and kindness, not just "trans people".

Later this morning in the HoP.

if “dadjoke” had or applied critical thinking skills he would be GC. Thats why TRA’s are so circumspect and evasive.

feel most trans people deserve sympathy and kindness

why?

As I'm sure you're aware, the term 'trans people' covers anyone who says they are trans, from the moment they declare this. Most of these people won't have any medical treatment. Only about 5% of males who identify as transgender have genital surgery.

While children are encouraged down the medical route, middle-aged males often do no more than put on a dress and a wig. Males like Jamie Wallis MP who 'came out' as trans shortly after crashing his car whilst wearing a mini skirt and high heels. Most of these men are what we would have called transvestites or cross-dressers only a few years ago. Now they are described as 'trans' and we're supposed to believe that they're having a difficult life.

I’d tend to feel most trans people deserve sympathy and kindness rather than othering as treatment of some kind of homogenous ‘community’ online.

I agree that they shouldn't be lumped together. Adolescents who are struggling with puberty or being encouraged to believe that they're 'trans' because they're same sex attracted are not the same as middle-aged heterosexual males (with wives and children) who like to dress up in women's clothes.

One group deserves far more sympathy and kindness than the other.

Yep.

I’m with you on this.

A kind social response would be to have available ‘third spaces’ for trans people, though I gather some loud voices within the trans community wouldn’t be in favour of this solution

Years ago I knew people who were into spiritualism who kept telling me to look at the "science". They were nice people, in professional jobs, and not stupid but they just didn't know what science looks like, how to tell good quality evidence from poor.

What's more worrying to me is how come people who should know better, like the Endocrine Society in the US, or the American Paediatric Association, or all the bits of the NHS that claim to be following WPATH standards of care, or the editors and reviewers of big journals like Science, have all come to accept the conclusions from such poor quality science. It wont last but it's instructive to consider how it happened in the first place.

ok so I don’t know any trans people personally, but my impression is it’s quite a hard way to live. Painful surgeries etc.

Whatever the reason for people feeling this way, I would tend to feel that it must be very real to them, even if we don’t understand why? Maybe one day we’ll know. I imagine the science will reveal a real medical reason for a certain %, with then another % being that fundamentally many young people have mental health and sexuality confusions that they wrongly believe can be a result of being the wrong gender as opposed to just how many young people feel. Who knows. After all we still haven’t identified the gene or scientific reason for homosexuality either (not conflating the two things, just giving another example of a thing we don’t understand).

Whether the correct response to any of this is to give trans people support and counselling or to provide NHS budget to help them with cutting bits of their anatomy off is a discussion for a whole other day.

I’d tend to feel most trans people deserve sympathy and kindness rather than othering as treatment of some kind of homogenous ‘community’ online.

I have conducted systematic reviews. For some topics we would end up with several hundred abstracts from the original searches. However when screening through them you would be able to quickly reduce that number, often to a few dozen, as large numbers of abstracts would be of narrative reviews, commentaries, opinion pieces, irrelevant topics, etc. Then when you got the full papers many would be poorly conducted studies, under powered studies, different condition, lack follow up etc.

Producing a list of thousands and saying ‘look lots of research’ suggests you either don’t know how to use a search engine and/or you don’t know what proper research looks like.

Exactly this. And @DadJoke you weren’t asked for a ‘list of scientists researching gender identity’.