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 don’t know about the Pope because as far as I know he is expressing a valid opinion not facts, but I do agree with Lord Robert Winston , emeritus professor at Imperial, member of the HOL, respected world wide for his life time of work on fertility - and he is adamant that there are two human sexes, female and male. And that they can’t change.

Team LRW all the way.

I have absolutely no obligation to answer your or anyone’s questions and neither does any other poster. I have been AFK.

Yes, of course.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, however. For example if an apparently rigorous study suggested climate change wasn’t real, or gender identity was not innate, there would be a seismic shift in our understanding of science, and I would expect it to be challenged and reproduced by other scientists.

However, other claims related to transgender issues would not require that standard of proof.

I think trans is real and trans people exist. I think they are a product of lack of understanding of the rich tapestry of the way it's ok for people to present themselves and a confusion of that with stereotypes. I also think that they don't literally change sex and thus have no business entering spaces or positions reserved for a particular biological sex. How they choose to dress or present and who they choose to have sex with is irrelevant.

He was a sick fuck who believed that his unethical experiment would demonstrate that gender identity was cultural, He was wrong.

The article said “trans is made up.” If they mean it is made up in the sense that all words are made up, it’s trivially true and devoid of useful meaning. If they mean it in any other sense, it’s nonsense.

I thought “phlogiston” several posts ago too!

Who knew the Pope was so on the money eh? 🤷🏻‍♀️

It is the “loud Trans campaigners” who have dictated societal response to people who identify as transgender. It is they who have managed to persuade so many people that it is “transphobic” to use third person pronouns the way they have been used for most of my lifetime (and I am not young!), because some people think they have a right to dictate how everyone else sees them and relates to them. Unfortunately, most trans people now demand that everyone treats them as they wish to be treated; this is unrealistic, and often it descends into coercive behaviour, with threats of “going no contact” if family members do not toe the line unilaterally imposed by the transgender people themselves or their “allies”. In my experience, the allies are the most dogmatic and coercive.

Instead of accepting the reality of gender identity,

No one has yet defined or explained "gender identity" in a way that I understand. Until I get an explanation and definition that makes sense, I will continue to file it under "mythical concepts".

I feel noticeable body dysmorphia related to my female secondary sexual characteristics as a consequence of female puberty, which is traumatic for autistic girls and even more so when it comes whilst still at primary school. This isn't gender identity, it's a failure to adapt to uncontrolled change. This "inner sense of being a man" or a woman isn't something I've experienced. I can see how an autistic girl could mistake that pubertal trauma for "being a man really", and this makes me terrified for autistic girls.

Oh no, I definitely agree with you, the whole concept of a "Gendered soul" is bizarre to me -

"But there are people who want to be the opposite sex or mistakenly believe they are in some way the opposite sex. Those people obviously exist, and if 'being trans' means 'thinks they are the opposite sex or wants to be the opposite sex', then 'trans people' exist." <--- This part of what you said is what I was meaning with my ultimately very simplistic comment - Apologies if that didn't come across, I should've taken time to be clear, I'm just so insanely sick of the argument "You're erasing my existence" that I let my frustration get the better of me I think!

I believe it may well "feel" like someone is trapped in the wrong body, but just because something feels a certain way doesn't make it objectively true.

I often times "feel" like the world is against me with how much seems to go wrong or backfire in my life, but ultimately I know that my simply "feeling" this way doesn't make it so!
That would make me genuinely insane, quite self absorbed, and very "main character syndrome-esque"!

@GenericMNwoman yes rinse and repeat innit

@SabrinaThwaite ffs stop making us all google 😂

This is the meat of it to me. Scientific research is a mess particularly the social sciences where there is a major replication crisis. In the research world it’s publish or perish so a lot if bad research is churned out.

Academic publishing makes ridiculous amounts of money and there are plenty of journals that will publish anything or where authors pay to be published. Peer review is often completely slapdash or, even if done well and the reviewer has a lot of reservations, it’s published anyway.

Pubmed does include a lot of prestigious journals, but it also includes PubMed Central which is open access and the articles are not necessarily peer reviewed.

People cite bad research or make misleading claims about other research and then the cycle continues and we have people believing that puberty blockers are completely harmless.

I do wonder if gender identity is the 21st century incarnation of phlogiston theory.

This needs reposting. Spot on.

I wasn't aware that Dadjoke was into pesky ethics TBF.

Bingo.

The fact that Dadjoke cited this as evidence is the real joke.

Yeah, this ludicrous "you are denying trans folks existence". Gets pretty tiresome. Smacks of a teen complaining that the object of their desires "doesn't even know I exist" 😭😭😭
Perhaps TRAs should try using some more grown up language if they would like respectful debate.

Of course people who call themselves trans exist. We wouldn't be having this conversation if they didn't.

The sticking point is that people with a grip on reality KNOW no one can change sex. Not sure where the trans part features. Transing to what?
Because it categorically cannot be the other sex. You can decide to present differently to the stereotypes of your biological sex - yes! Please do! I love it when people don't subscribe to the artificial stereotypes of what it means to "look like" a woman or man. I'm all for it ❤️ be your true self.

But it stops there. Because reality kicks in. You stay in the sex defined spaces of your sex.

Life may seem unfair, but sometimes it just is.

I think this research showed us that children who are sexually abused may then have issues with their body image and mental health.

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.

Cancer care isn't bias and politicised, trans health care shouldn't be either. Surely it's all about properly designed and researched programmes, with the outcome not predetermined, that we should be entirely standing behind?

Just want to make a quick point about this; at times cancer care (or more specifically, drugs) absolutely are politicised and mainstream media reports are biased (‘NHS denies patients new wonder drug’). The big pharmaceutical companies are always keen to promote new drugs for cancer as much as for anything else and send materials and funding to patient groups to help get their point of view across in the media, preferably with a few heartbreaking tales attached. They also try the usual tricks of small trials, short followup, no control or trialed against a placebo instead of the established best drug, carefully selected patient groups etc.

Also his twin killed himself. There was more to that family than anyone knows about

The Reimer case doesn't really tell us that, though.

All it tells us is that a kid believed his parents when they told him he was a girl, was sexually tortured by Money as part of a sex "role play", then when he found he was really male he chose to live as a man until his suicide.

There is nothing in this experiment that evidences gender identity.

Moobjuice Gate.

NHS Trust says Moobjuice is perfectly safe and nutritional based on a study of one person.

MN says this is total bullshit and totally unscientific.

WPATH (!) say yeah, this is slightly disturbing ethically.

Various other sources including other NHS one go 'wtf this is not good science'

Dadjoke says Yey it's safe cracking study cos transgender woooooo. I know better than all of you.

WPATH say publicly woot puberty blockers are safe based on science.

WPATH privately say yeah we've no fucking idea what we are doing, there's massive scientific flaws in this but hell we will do it anyway.

MN goes fucking hell are you for real.

The NHS eventually wakes up looks at actual research and go... Hmmm nope.

Dadjoke goes yay puberty blockers.

Also Dadjoke, Gender Criticals have a problem with science. I know better than all of you.

Cos that's the way these conversations always go, with us all being mansplained to like we are five by someone who wouldn't know science if it hit him in the face repeatedly.

Yeah ok. As you were.

You may disagree, but I don't believe that people all have a gendered soul which can be born in the wrong-sex body. So I don't believe that anyone 'is trans' in this sense.

But there are people who want to be the opposite sex or mistakenly believe they are in some way the opposite sex. Those people obviously exist, and if 'being trans' means 'thinks they are the opposite sex or wants to be the opposite sex', then 'trans people' exist.

The experiment tells us you know if you’re a boy or a girl.

I was under the impression what was not yet established is ‘how’ (if it has been established forgive me, this is not my area of expertise nor anything more than a minor interest) - if memory serves there were various theories about parts of the brain that might be giving us that signal?

And that brain part could, in theory, malfunction in a minority of people and tell those people that they are the other gender?