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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

The Lukewarm Perjury of Jack Turban

10 replies

NecessaryScene · 29/09/2021 09:27

This is a bit dry, but I think it's worth highlighting. (I fully admit I haven't read through that much of it myself).

Jack Turban is one of the most prominent pro-childhood-transitioning voices in the US. He's currently involved in at least one of the court battles about banning medical transition for minors.

This piece goes through the evidence he's presenting. As Turban is digging up every potential pro-transition scientific evidence, it's a good review of the current state of the literature - both what we actually know, and how Turban is (mis)representing it.

Abridged version
Full version

Got this via Jesse Singal - his commentary:

The extent to which Jack Turban, one of the leading voices in the youth GD debate, creeps right up to the line of lying even in a document he is filing in court under penalty of perjury suggests something has gone profoundly and dangerously wrong.

I have not vetted every single claim in this Medium post. But the claims I'm most familiar with are accurate, and are very much in line with what I've seen in my own deep dives into Turban's work: a chronic inability to accurately describe both individual studies and broader trends in the research literature. There's often a lack of awareness of basic methodological issues that pop up in the first semester of Stats 101.

He should stop injecting large quantities of misinformation and misunderstanding into a fraught and important subject.

(It's worth noting that Singal himself is not in favour of these bills, believing that the courts should not be intervening in medical treatment. But he's fully aware how bad/non-existent the arguments for the "treatment" are.)

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Thelnebriati · 29/09/2021 09:48

He should stop injecting large quantities of misinformation and misunderstanding into a fraught and important subject.

This is the pertinent point and the only people who disagree don't have good intentions (and shouldnt be involved in politics or informing politicians.)
I'd like to see a straight facts website, that we could direct anyone to.

Helleofabore · 29/09/2021 10:31

NS, this is hugely interesting. I will come back to look through it later!

Thanks for posting this. Turban has been very vocal on twitter lately.

MonsignorMirth · 29/09/2021 11:54

I've started reading the abridged version. Does anyone know if the author JLCederblom means biological males or females when they write "transgender males"? (And vice versa)

MonsignorMirth · 29/09/2021 11:58

"Similarly, a 2019 study for that fertility was similar between transgender men who had been on testosterone treatment and cisgender women."

This is incredibly disingenuous by Jack. These were not random “cisgender women” off the street, these were patients at a fertility clinic as Leung et al., 2019,²⁰ makes very clear: “Another limitation of our data is the selection of patients with infertility as our comparison group.”

Seriously, for me, this is such blatant wilful misrepresentation I would not believe anything else this Jack character had to say. About anything.

NecessaryScene · 29/09/2021 12:11

Does anyone know if the author JLCederblom means biological males or females when they write "transgender males"?

I don't see the author using such terms. Quotes from Turban say "transgender men" or "transgender female", and you would need to reverse stated sex to get to actual sex there.

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MonsignorMirth · 29/09/2021 12:16

Sorry, I was conflating two things. One of the study quotes says
The fifth was a longitudinal cohort study of 50 adolescents who received pubertal suppression, gender-affirming hormones, or both, and that found a statistically significant decrease in depression for transgender females following pubertal suppression.
and I wasn't sure which sex this meant.

Secondly this
For this he offers Pang et al., 2020,¹⁷ a single case report of a fifteen year old male, where we can read the following: “This calculator is based on data from older adults who have gone through puberty; hence, how long density affects EF’s actual risk of fractures is unknown.” The authors note that “EF’s bone density has already fallen to the lowest 2.5 percentile. It can be expected to continue falling.”

NecessaryScene · 29/09/2021 12:24

I checked the reference for the first one (a Turban quote) and that said the effect was most significant in male-to-female.

And checking the paper for the second one, that was male as stated - that's not a Turban quote.

All the references to papers have links in the footnotes of the full version - should be possible to double-check in each case.

I would expect all non-Turban quotes to be true sex, the opposite of the Turban quotes.

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MonsignorMirth · 29/09/2021 12:46

Thank you! I'm poking about on my phone which I find annoying to open lots of links but will have a better look on a pc.

Helleofabore · 29/09/2021 14:41

The size of this analysis is massively long. It it hugely interesting though.

NecessaryScene · 29/09/2021 14:45

I've certainly never seen "75min read" at the top of a Medium article before. Grin

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