Scottish GRA consultation - misinterpreting of the scientific data?

[BlindYeo]

I'm just reading through the Scottish GRA consultation paper and I got to a bit about the science. It says:

"A study of US boys and girls (age 4-11) found 1.0% of boys and 3.5% of girls wished to be the opposite sex (Zucker et al 1997).
A study of 5010 first year college students from the National Taiwan
University found 7.3% of female and 1.9% of male students reported that they (very) often wished to be of the opposite sex (Lai et al 2010).
Using the same question with 760 Dutch 11-18 year olds, 5% of boys and 8.4% of girls indicated that they wanted to be of the opposite sex (5.2% & 8.2% respectively, “a bit or sometimes” and 0.0 and 0.2% respectively “clearly or often”) (Tick, van der Ende and Verhulst 2008)."

Is the consultation citing this research as if all these respondents are trans? As a child if I were asked that question, I would simply mean that yes it might be nice to be a boy in terms of the freedoms and privileges they get! Not that I think I AM a boy trapped in a girl's body and I want to actually turn my body into a surgical facsimile of a boy or go around presenting like I am one when I'm not.

Even if the researchers thought they were asking a question about transgenderism (and I'm afraid I don't know if they were or not as I haven't read the original papers), there is surely a good chance that a child answers this sort of question having interpreted it the way I describe above?

It seems that in a spread of countries, girls think that being a girl is a bit shit. Well, there's a surprise.

Yes exactly. But surely it's wrong for that to interpreted as trans inclinations.

If i were analysing that for critique my question would be about the age ranges.
Also how old the papers are.

Asking that question to a 4 or an 11 year old vs a 18/19/20 year, well it is different. The age ranges are too vast for any kind of meaningful representation imo.

A 4 year old girl will most likely see that boys have certain toys encouraged to play with and vice versa.
The more interesting question would be the follow up of "why".

I've not read the paper myself but I would that that it is background research given how old the references are and should indicate more research needs done.

*I've not done research/critiquing properly in years so that could be a load of tosh

I thought that the survey was biased. It didn't consider impacts on other demographics and some of the questions were quite biased in their composition.

I would read the original papers, if possible, that's what they're cited for. I agree it's not at all clear cut from what you've quoted.