5% of participants in women's prison research were trans - Lancet journal refuses to publish letter questioning statistics

[InvisibleDragon]

Saw this thread on Twitter and am so upset:
twitter.com/JoPhoenix1/status/1430843096925970436?s=19

The precis is that:

• The Lancet published this paper on the relationship between head injury and violent crime in women in the Scottish prison service

www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(21)00082-1/fulltext

• According to the paper's methods section, 5 of the 109 female prisoners who took part in the study identified as trans women (about 5%)

Of the 355 women incarcerated in the four prisons we recruited from, 109 (31%) expressed an interest in being part of the study and were seen by researchers, and all were deemed eligible to take part. Five of these individuals identified as transgender women.

• Jo Phoenix and some other researchers tried to submit a letter pointing out the methodological flaw that sex-based male and female offending patterns are very different, so having 5% of participants from the other sex class might affect the results
• The Lancet editorial team initially agreed to publish the letter, then retracted, saying that the "consensus view" of the editorial team was that "the numbers involved were not thought likely to have influenced the outcome of the study as a whole".

What fresh hell is this??

So 5% of participants in a study on female prisoners were trans women (biologically male). Is that representative of the female prison estate as a whole? It's certainly interesting that whilst less than 1% of the UK population identify as trans, they make up 5% of a population of female prisoners with a conviction for a violent offence.

But I just feel so speechless that such a highly regarded medical research journal has just utterly silenced discussion about the meaning of these statistics. This stuff matters. If we can't name biological reality in actual scientific research, none of the research has meaning. The single sentence from the article quoted above is the only mention in the whole article that some of the women in the study were trans. It's not mentioned in the discussion, the limitations, anywhere. How can we do science if everything we write is skewed by this ideology?

This has completely shattered me this morning. I'm actually crying. This is cargo cult science. It looks superficially cotrect, but the meaning is gone.

Meant to say that there is a link to the petition at the end of the thread.

The thing about this is that it would be quite possible to categorise by sex and also by gender identity. Then look at the results clearly against each category.

Somehow, when it comes to things that harm biological males (e.g. covid) this is magically possible.

When it comes to things that will harm terribly vulnerable women, well then those in a position of power look the other way. Cowardly, weak and pathetic and frankly this sort of thing is evil. Women HAVE been sexually assaulted in prison by males who say they're women. They're harming women by looking the other way and for people with such power and a responsibility for scientific truth it's despicable.

It gets even worse. Looking at the data, they recruited 109 participants. They split that 109 people into a group who had experienced a head injury and a group who had not. They then compared various things between the two groups - like history of violent crime, trauma history, history of abuse etc.

But the groups weren't equal sized. Of the 109, 85 had suffered a head injury and 24 had not.

I don't know whether the trans women were evenly distributed across the two groups (because the researchers don't report this). But given that many of the head injuries were incurred from historic domestic violence, which disproportionately affects natal women, it's plausible that the trans women were more likely to be in the no head injury group.

In the (statistically unlikely) case that all the trans women are in the no head injury group, that would be 5 out of 24 participants, which would be more than 20% of the group. Which would really screw up all the analysis.

I read an article earlier this summer about The Lancet (might have been in The Spectator, really wish I'd kept it) about The Lancet being anything but reputable and honest They have form for bending the truth apparently. Which I find very scary indeed.

Yes The Speccie in June this year, an article by Stuart Ritchie:

"And it is also one of many journals run by publishers (in this case, Elsevier) who appear to care less about getting the science right than they do about prestige, attention and citations; who pressure editors to accept exciting and flashy research papers that will hit headlines and garner interest among other scientists rather than ones that are more boring, but more reliable.

The purpose of the Lancet, back in 1823, was to slice away the immorality and complacency of the medical establishment. Although there are many similarities between Wakley and Horton — both using catty editorials to attack their opponents, though only the latter with access to Twitter — Wakley would have been stunned to see that his journal now exemplifies that establishment. It embodies an unaccountable or only partially accountable elite that does often make progress, but fails abjectly to face up to its many faults."

The Wakley referred to is the founder and Horton is, I think, the current editor.

Gosh, OP. That is unbelievable.

Their reputation should take a hit because of this, I really hope it does get the publicity it should.

That is a brilliant talk by Feynman, thank you for sharing that.

It's clear the Lancet has been completely ideologically captured and is part of the shocking decline of Western institutions, along with the university system and the mainstream press.

It's horrifying but I am starting to wonder if we have to let these institutions destroy themselves. It doesn't seem like they can be saved.

Meanwhile, some of society's most vulnerable women are being abused in plain sight.

So, 5 of the participants were transwomen.

The Lancet study reports that, of the participants without significant head injuries (SHI), 5 were severely disabled and another 5 had no disability. Also, 5 had worked in skilled occupations.

Of those who did have significant head injuries (the much larger group), 5 were non-white.

I’ve no reason to think that these or any of the other categories included all 5 transwomen. But we have no way of knowing that, or anything else relevant to the male-born prisoners. Because the authors choose not to tell us. And, even worse, The Lancet chooses to support this poor methodology.

All we asked for was sub-group analysis and for a comment from the researchers as to whether the % of 'male women' included in the sample was representative of the total population in the female prison estate.

One would have thought these were easy Qs to answer. And if the answers were:

1. made no real difference, and here's the data to prove it
2. yes

then that could have been included in an answer to our letter.

KeepPrisonsSingleSex

Well yes. Those are so clearly such important questions to ask once you realise that trans women have been included in the sample.

Thank you for asking them and for publishing the response from the editor.