Telegraph: Oxford puberty blocker study issues

[WarriorN]

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/01/taxpayer-funded-oxford-study-puberty-blockers-hardline-trans/

Does anyone know what this is about? How has this been co-opted.

Also, the telegraph is suddenly churning out a lot on all this!

It seems like the Telegraph, Times and Mail (and their Sundays) are covering this a lot. I think The Sun also covered Braverman's intervention in the "we mustn't upset a convicted child sex offender" business this week, too.

Yes it feels things are ramping up.

Does anyone know what the article says? I'm not a subscriber

A few screenshots but I don't know how to do shares of the article.

Sometimes a Twitter search gets you a link

twitter.com/zeno001/status/1576356844930445312?s=46&t=pWeKENKOPetnKzVlHyTtBQ

That was an interesting read. Michael Biggs has been excellent in exposing the dire nature of so called "research" into trans issues and the way that vested interests are allowed to dictate the outcomes.

Re the Telegraph. It occurs to me that parents are increasingly aware of the scale of the problem with child gaslighting. Many schools are now evidencing levels of capture by trans extremist organisations. Social contagion amongst some peer groups is off the scale with children parroting delusional beliefs about biology, facts and science. This is now in people's homes and the awareness of the dangers posed to children by the demands for unrestricted drugs, surgery and social affirmation is understandably terrifying for parents.

digitaleditions.telegraph.co.uk/data/1107/reader/reader.html?social#!preferred/0/package/1107/pub/1107/page/29/article/NaN hope this works.

Thanks for links.

Bloody hell.

Also linking to Prof Biggs latest study into the history of pbs

www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0092623X.2022.2121238?needAccess=true

archive copy of article archive.ph/j8j8u

This book was published on the back of the research. It’s quite the eye opener. If I get a minute I’ll post some extracts

link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-09864-2

Bloodyhell.

Reminds me of some similar books published via academics on trans inclusion in education

Every UK family now knows someone affected by this trend and must be baffled by the silence on mainstream TV and the wholly captured US-style line on it peddled by the Guardian and Indy and to some degree all the political parties. For the Guardian, Indy, mainstream TV, many politicians they have held on to the rising balloon too long - they had many chances to let go - and reputationally are likely be shattered when the fallout from this madness becomes clearer. The Times, Mail and Telegraph will be able to emerge from this dark period with clean hands saying, well, we reported on this issue honestly, we did what journalists are supposed to do, cover the story, ask questions, dig deep - and what did you do, Guardian, BBC? Publish actively activist pieces, failed to cover anything that didn't fit in your wilfully blinkered world view, sat on stories, and sacked or silenced the prominent female journalists who resisted. This is made worse by the fact that as non-paywalled services the Guardian and Indy and BBC website are the most likely to be read by a younger readership who are also the target for trans activism and surgery. The Guardian could and should have been their free online resource for balanced facts ("facts are sacred", it used to say) - instead it read like another lobby group mouthpiece. And now look where we are.

First chapter:
Introduction: Parenting Trans and Gender-Diverse Children—Background and the Current (Hysterical) Historical Moment

'Hysterical'?

I can't see an obvious connection between this book and the research project that the Telegraph article is about (different authors), but I can't see the whole book.

TheTelegraph article says the research is published on the Healthtalk website, so I'm assuming this is it:

healthtalk.org/Experiences-of-trans-and-gender-diverse-young-people/overview

One parent, who was interviewed alongside 19 others for the study, told The Telegraph: “Trans rights activists have hijacked this study, they’ve used it as a figleaf for hardline trans activism and have recruited from a very narrow selection of channels.

“I only got involved by accident, after seeing an advert on the Mermaids Twitter feed, and they were shocked at how off-script I was. I am under the name Elijah and the only parent without an introduction, without a biography, heavily redacted.

“The whole purpose of the study was to push for barrierless medication for children as quickly as possible, that was the starting point

University no longer knows the difference between 'study' and 'taxpayer funded marketing opportunity to get wanted policy forced through without scrutiny or discussion'.

I can't see an obvious connection between this book and the research project that the Telegraph article is about (different authors), but I can't see the whole book.

OldCrone I don’t have time to post much today, but the book is absolutely an extension of the research project. Magdalena Mikulak Is now at Manchester Metropolitan University but at the time, she was at Oxford.

She says: “Whilst I wrote this book almost entirely in my spare time, working full time on another research project, I am grateful for the possibility to con- tinue to work with the interview dataset beyond my initial contract with the University of Oxford; a possibility that was enabled by the honorary research fellowship that I received for one year since leaving Oxford in May 2021.”

It is the same dataset with the same parents/children extensively quoted .

Thanks for clarifying that rogdmum.

I've just had another look at the Healthtalk site, and it seems there were two projects. Mikulak was involved with the one about the experiences of parents of trans-identified children, not the one about the experiences of the children themselves that I linked to earlier.

healthtalk.org/Experiences-of-parents-and-carers-of-young-trans-and-gender-diverse-people/credits

More information on this research project:
lilymaynard.com/costing-the-kool-aid-oxford-university/

@crsacre . This is a great find and share. Hope it gets picked up more widely. Imagine there will be lots more like this aiming to counteract Cass perhaps.
Thanks for linking.

The last chapter title says it all
”The Function of love is to Affirm”
AKA - “if my parents really loved me they’d buy me puberty blockers, binders and a double mastectomy NOW”

Is the Oxford ethics committee not interested in the representativeness of the sample at all? Or the recruitment practices, which will influence this?

it doesn’t matter if they are the experiences of people, if the study sought out a very particular group (pretty hardcore TRAs) and is then presenting the findings as more generally applicable to young people who may feel uncomfortable in any way with gender.

certainly the response from the university doesn’t seem to mention this.

I think there may be a lot more scrutiny of qualitative research practice coming in the near future.

They really are giving it a lot of coverage at the moment, and doing some good investigations, such as the Mermaids one.

I think it's a combination of things. First of all, they've realised that there's a big juicy story to uncover, providing an opportunity for some strong investigative journalism. Second, readers are interested in it - see the numerous comments you get on these articles in both the Tel and the Times. Third, from the point of view of the Telegraph and the Mail, both Tory papers, this issue provides a real opportunity to attack Labour. The Tory party is a mess, Truss is completely f*ing up, the Tories are way behind in the polls - but the one thing they have over Labour is that they're not in thrall to gender woo.

It also strikes me that university ethical review processes don’t seem to have any particular influence after a project is approved. A project gets approval based on the proposed methods - but then quite how the data is analysed and how the results are presented and published is a bit like heading out into the Wild West in some fields.

This matters because, unlike in quantitative fields where the actual methods of analysis are generally outlined in detail, qualitative researchers are incredibly vague - at all points of the process - about what analysis actually entails. People are carrying out loosely structured interviews, and then doing who knows what under the heading of ‘analysis’.The result can often be… well… less than objective.

Given how far ‘activism’ has encroached within academia, it seems pretty ridiculous really that there’s no formal process for checking that, you know, the findings of the study are in any way a reasonable representation of the phenomenon they claim to represent. We just trust the activists academics are not producing propaganda.

Even worse when these things go to echo chambers specialist journals where they’re reviewed by their cronies peers within tiny little research interest puddles where the aim seems to be maintaining the current consensus (and ensuring they’ve cited the reviewers sufficiently) rather than actually checking the quality of the research in any meaningful way.

it’s a fundamentally broken system.

So an Oxford study was untrustworthy.

'using the study to advertise their consultancy'.

God, it's all so bloody tacky.

This matters because, unlike in quantitative fields where the actual methods of analysis are generally outlined in detail, qualitative researchers are incredibly vague - at all points of the process - about what analysis actually entails. People are carrying out loosely structured interviews, and then doing who knows what under the heading of ‘analysis’

Qualitative research is different to quantitative research, but it is rigorous if done correctly.

Sampling should he representative of the universe being explored.

Due weight should be given to all the data set.

There are a range of qualitative analysis techniques, which are well known within the discipline, at least one of which should have been applied.

It will be relatively easy to check if this has all been done. Sampling criteria, recruitment notes, transcripts of interviews and analysis approaches used should all be supplied, which could then be verified by an outside expert.

This would all come up in peer review.

However this project sounds horrifically sloppy, I struggle to see how Oxford can stand over this work.

Yes. I know it can be rigorous.

I have qualitative PhD and taught methods for years. Most of the qualitative analysis techniques are vague enough that almost anything could be done if you call it ‘coding’.

and it often is.

None of it, in my experience (and that of anyone I know) does any of this come up in peer review.