Statistician reviews the GIRES report “Trans Mental Health Study 2012"

[TigerDrankAllTheWaterInTheTap]

medium.com/@paulhewson_11172/responses-stating-they-had-experienced-childhood-abuse-49-541e2f50cd5a

This is a Medium article by a Dr Paul Hewson, an experienced statistician, who was asked to do it by Professor Kathleen Stock, reviewing the GIRES report entitled Trans Mental Health Study 2012 by McNeil et al.

I'm not a statistician or in any other way equipped to follow this in detail but it seems to confirm problems I've seen mentioned many times before in relying on the findings of this survey. The impression I'm left with is that the study was not well designed and the analysis is poor. Accordingly, no great reliance should be placed on its conclusions and recommendations. Is that fair?

This looks really interesting and I will have a better read of it later.

Suspect @R0wantrees will find lots of interest here

Sorry/notsorry for the @, R0!

Oh thank you. I love stat evaluations!

Dude knows his stuff.

Really sad article.

the study was not well designed and the analysis is poor. Accordingly, no great reliance should be placed on its conclusions and recommendations.Is that fair?

Yeah, I think he's politely saying its useless and shouldn't be used, ever. Blooming heck though, this guy is excellent

I thought that, Kat. Don't know if I can express this very well, but I'll have a go. Human psychology is so complex and so much can go wrong. We understand very little about it. So many things we do and feel are only problematic because of the way we've set our society up. But instead of changing society, we let doctors decree that the person experiencing psychological distress is ill and needs drugs and sometimes even surgery to put things right. On this particular issue, the thinking is so muddled it's hard to get my head round it.

Most of us can see that if someone is deeply unhappy because of a life event such as bereavement antidepressants might be useful to get through a really bad patch but in the longer term if the depression doesn't lift what's really needed is therapy or counselling to try to get to the root of the problem and help the person find a different way of thinking or coping.

If a young girl becomes seriously underweight and it's clearly because she's restricting her eating and exercising obsessively, we all understand she needs therapy to try to come to terms with her body.

If a man becomes convinced he's hearing voices and experiencing hallucinations we know it's a sign of serious mental illness and the best way we have at the moment of helping him is to try to get him to take antipsychotics.

But gender dysphoria is increasingly not being treated as an illness. I just don't understand how we've got to the point where a person in deep distress about their sexed body is treated as being totally rational and offered drugs and surgery to change the body irreversibly, especially when it's becoming increasingly clear that so many of these people have pre-existing mental health issues.

Just so I don’t sound like an idiot when I talk about this out loud: how do you pronounce GIRES?

Is it with a hard G as in God or a soft G as in giroscope?

I was wondering that! But then I pronounce GIF like Jif and my family laugh at me, so I'm not best placed to guess.

Soft G for gender would make sense.

TigerDrankAllTheWaterInTheTap - your fine summary puts me in mind of Thomas Szasz 1979: Male and Female He Created Them (h/t to whoever mentioned this a while ago)

IN the old days, when I was a medical student, if a man wanted to have his penis amputated, my psychology professors said that he suffered from schizophrenia, locked him up in an asylum and threw away the key. Now that I am a professor. my colleagues in psychiatry say that he is a “transsexual,” my colleagues in urology refashion his penis into a perineal cavity they call a vagina, and Time magazine puts him on its cover and calls him “her.” Anyone who doubts that this is progress is considered to be ignorant of the discoveries of modern psychiatric sexology, and a political reactionary, a sexual bigot, or something equally unflattering.
Like much of the medical-psychiatric mendacity characteristic of our day, the official definition “transsexualism” as a disease comes down to the strategic abuse of language — epitomized by confusing and equating biological phenomena with social roles (in the present case, chromosomal sexual identity with acting as a man or a woman). Although there are connections between these concepts and facts, neither one “causes'.’ or “determines” the other.

www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/archives/male-and-female-created-he-them-transexual.html

Thanks, arranfan, I'll read that article with interest.

From the linked article:

The more precisely the target group for a survey are designed, the less global variation you have in the answers and hence the more insightful the findings.

Like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The more precisely you identify on variable (eg the position of a particle) the more imprecisely you can determine the other (eg velocity).