Change of CEO at mermaids…

[backaftera2yearbreak]

mermaidsuk.org.uk/news/susie-green-leaves-mermaids/

Childhood sex-typed behaviour and sexual orientation

www.researchgate.net/publication/232563268_Childhood_Sex-Typed_Behavior_and_Sexual_Orientation_A_Conceptual_Analysis_and_Quantitative_Review

Hmm, having read the paper and a bit about the 2 authors I'm not sure about that being such great evidence 😂

Hmm, having read the paper and a bit about the 2 authors I'm not sure about that being such great evidence

This is an odd thing to say. How do you think evidence works? What did you read about the authors? Do they falsify their data or something? Do you think it’s appropriate to make snide insinuations about their integrity without any supporting evidence? Why?

Would you mind clarifying exactly what it is you disagree with in the paper and also why you think the authors have no credibility?

Thanks

The paper is a review of existing research, most of which appears to find the opposite of what the authors claim to be true so at best it would appear there is much conflicting evidence - (that's why I said it's not great evidence).

That was very uninformed of you. Literature reviews are a higher tier of evidence than individual studies. Do you have some kind of critique of the methodology?

And if you are going to make claims about people (or indeed about research) you should substantiate them.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree as I think:

The paper is a review of existing research, most of which appears to find the opposite of what the authors claim to be true so at best it would appear there is much conflicting evidence - (that's why I said it's not great evidence).

and you clearly don't agree with that sentiment.

That's fine we don't have to agree :)

Also if you want to see the claims I mentioned about (one of) the authors look at their Wikipedia pages.

You do realise that anyone can edit a Wikipedia page, don't you? Dismissing a peer reviewed paper as biased and citing Wikipedia as evidence... What can I say?

I'm not sure which of the two authors you are dismissing as biased and controversial. Both have been smeared by the trans lobby.

Kenneth J. Zucker used to work at a gender clinic in Canada, but left after being accused of conversion therapy because he advocated a 'watchful waiting' approach in treating children who identify as transgender.

J. Michael Bailey was attacked for writing a book about transsexualism entitled 'The Man who would be Queen'. Alice Dreger has written about this here.

I suggest reading sources other than Wikipedia if you want to know about the authors.

Zucker and Bailey have both been interviewed as part of the gender pioneers series on Gender a Wider Lens podcast.
Very interesting for background and context:

Zucker was regarded as a leading world expert in the field of childhood gender dysphoria. The trans lobby went after him because he didn't automatically affirm every child (although he would affirm if the evidence pointed to lasting dysphoria).

He received an unconditional apology and a huge pay out.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/camh-settlement-former-head-gender-identity-clinic-1.4854015

Nice user name though @BloodyHellKen do love Uncanny

Jesus, every time I try and reply I have my message deleted and I'm not saying anything controversial or impolite!!!

Is this better MN? I used to work in urology theatre and know that this is the proper medical term so please don't delete me this time.*

@OldCrone I didn't say either authors were biased or that their paper was biased. I said there appeared to be many people disagreeing with their stance which (in my mind) indicates conflicting (ie weak) evidence and I stand by that assumption. If all the researchers including the authors had agreed on the same thing then that would have strengthened the argument that Childhood sex-typed behaviour is connected to sexual orientation.

I stand by my previous comment that Childhood sex-typed behaviour is not connected to sexual orientation in any meaningful way - an argument that many of the researchers mentioned in the paper also agreed with (especially re: girls and women where it appears little research has been done on this matter).

For some reason one of my earlier comments has been deleted but as I said in that one what on earth does all this have to do with the ex CEO of mermaids Susie Green who decided to give her primary school age son puberty blockers and then take him to Thailand to have a bilateral orchidectomy and penectomy be c*** on his 16th birthday?

I though most of us were in agreement that assigning people sexual characteristics based on what they feel like/what toys they played with is nonsense?

I think if you used the C word, it's an auto-delete.

But not cunt, that is a permitted C word!

Saying someone is not male or straight because they don't play with "heterosexual male typical" toys is nonsense. An behavioural outlier is just an outlier.

That's a totally different thing from a statement about a correlation, which could be simply true or false, and not inherently nonsensical.

The concept of GNC children being statistically likely to grow up to be gay (especially boys) is usually referred to as ‘pregay’ or ‘protohomosexual’ in research papers. There is a lot of it about besides Bailey and Zucker.

Of course, much of the discipline of ‘sexology’ is, in hindsight, really fucking circumspect so simply linking to papers online is a bit like playing academic Russian roulette, we’re quite likely to find a paedo apologist/queer theorist lurking in the chamber.
Add in the fact that statistically confirming parents homophobic fears about their GNC child growing up to be same sex attracted is (was?) unlikely to contribute to better outcomes for those children and it’s a bit of a quagmire.
I like to think that nowadays it would be more ‘Don’t worry about any unusual GNC behaviour, your child is statistically likely to grow up homosexual!’ and that being a relief and a comfort to parents, rather than the ‘Oh shit, your child will be a homosexual if you don’t pray hard/beat them/take their toys away’ it might’ve been historically (but I realise that outside of my Atheist, feminist, artsy social circle it can still be very hard for GNC maybe-gay-one-day kids, especially those growing up in orthodox/conservative religions).

GNC children who grow up to be gay do not necessarily retain their gender nonconformity in adulthood btw.
Lots of very macho gay men were once swishy, sparkly little boys!

Feels weird to generalise this because we’ve seen such massive shifts in terms of childhood conformity to sex stereotypes over the last 40 years (and children growing up with feminist mums have been somewhat sheltered from pressure to gender conform at home, whilst still being steeped in media/advertising pressure and peer pressure at school) still…

Girls generally have a wider spectrum of societally acceptable gendered behaviour available to them in childhood than boys do but girls tend to get those GNC behaviours squashed out of them hard and with little warning at puberty (one of many reasons why puberty can be particularly hard on ASD girls who don’t cope well the sudden ‘rule change‘) whereas GNC boys have a more consistent level of societal disapproval all the way from preschool to young adulthood (especially from hetero adult males, eg Dad, which is sometimes enforced by adult females eg Mum, even if the original disapproval didn’t come from mum and from male peers at school).

（following this post up with a few links but dare not click away to find them in case this gets accidentally deleted 🤣）

Thank you for taking my question, musing and discussing it.

We don’t know either way if GNC children may grow up to be gay, just as we don’t know if more stereotypically conforming children will do so. I don’t particularly see a good reason for the link or that it’s helpful. In fact it could be unhelpful as talking about a link between GNC and LGB makes a link in people’s minds.

I didn't say either authors were biased or that their paper was biased. I said there appeared to be many people disagreeing with their stance which (in my mind) indicates conflicting (ie weak) evidence and I stand by that assumption.

What you said was:
having read the paper and a bit about the 2 authors I'm not sure about that being such great evidence

The implication (as I read it) was that you were suggesting that the paper was flawed because of something you'd read about the authors. If that's not the case, what did you mean about reading 'a bit about the 2 authors' and why is it relevant?

But I notice that you managed to download the paper, read all 10 pages of text, analyse it, google the authors, and post your own comment in the space of less than 10 minutes. That's impressive. Or had you already read the paper and were already familiar with the authors? Because your earlier comment implied that you weren't aware of the controversies surrounding either of them.

I stand by my previous comment that Childhood sex-typed behaviour is not connected to sexual orientation in any meaningful way - an argument that many of the researchers mentioned in the paper also agreed with (especially re: girls and women where it appears little research has been done on this matter).

The paper does mention the lack of research about women, but I haven't read it in great enough detail to comment about whether their conclusions about male behaviour and sexuality are consistent with those of the papers in their review.

Is the (possible) correlation between childhood gender-nonconformity and adult homosexuality being stated the wrong way around?
ie.

NOT - "If a child is GNC then he/she is likely to grow up to be gay/lesbian"

BUT RATHER - "Gay men and lesbians are likely to have been GNC as children"

The equations are quite different.

The percentage of the population who grow up to be gay or lesbian is quite small.

If many girls can be described as "tom boys" then most of them will grow up straight - because so few girls grow up to be lesbians.

However, that is not inconsistent with (if true) many lesbians having been tomboys.

Is the (possible) correlation between childhood gender-nonconformity and adult homosexuality being stated the wrong way around?

I wondered about that too. Also whether there would be different stats for males and females. And finally, age distribution- I'd guess many older gender conforming gay people in the past would not have been out at all, so things might have appeared differently.

Ah, Bosky has already said some of this, but I had my own version typed out...

I note some of the previous debate may only be a debate due to differing interpretations of the term "strongly correlated".

Given that homosexuality is so rare, even with a strong correlation between GNC behaviour in childhood and being homosexual, the chance that a child who is GNC is homosexual is slim. Homosexuality is rare!

Whereas the chance that a homosexual child may be GNC will be MUCH higher.

Now, that correlation isn't immediately important, if no action is proposed based on the observation of GNC behaviour.

If there is a new diagnosis of "trans" for GNC that causes action, then given the correlation a small minority of straight children and a much larger proportion of gay children, possibly a majority of them, are liable to be caught up in it.

I think there is also a correlation with younger brothers being more likely to be gay than older male siblings?

I listened to this 2020 podcast interview with SG yesterday. In it she says that when Jackie was tiny she read a book on parenting boys that had a few paragraphs about GNC behaviours (inc toy choice!) indicating future homosexuality. I’m trying to find the book referred to…

open.spotify.com/episode/4b5OvrPpDPgDfkFmq3QHIa?si=besdUvuMQ5O2dQTS9sEPjw

Whilst getting the timeline figured out to look for likely boy-raising manuals (potentially looking for something that came out in the early/mid nineties) I came across this 2016 Mail article on Jackie & Susie Green and the controversial influence of Mermaids on UK politics and NHS policy.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3973036/amp/Jackie-Green-heart-controversy-children-young-nine-given-drugs-change-sex.html

It’s bonkers how long people have been trying to sound the alarm. Pretty much everything we’ve seen play out in the last 6 years is warned off (Stephanie DA is quoted).

I know this article has been posted before but it’s well worth revisiting re: how the greater prevalence of GNC behaviours observed in girls than is observed in boys has resulted in so many girls finding themselves under the enormously expanded ‘trans umbrella’ and may be the simplest explanation of both the sudden rise and the sex ratio flip in referrals to paediatric gender clinics:

www.realityslaststand.com/p/the-transgender-umbrella-casts-its

This 2010 Scientific American article is mostly talking about the Bailey/Zucker research but I did find this little snippet to be interesting in the context of little data being available re: girls.

blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/is-your-child-a-prehomosexual-forecasting-adult-sexual-orientation/

it’s only 25 GNC girls but it’s 25 GNC girls who were so GNC they stood out even in a sea of tomboys OR they were 25 GNC girls who had parents/teachers/HCPs who were sufficiently troubled by their GNC behaviour to trot them off to the gender identity clinic (dated 2008 so way before most parents would’ve been aware that paediatric gender clinics were a thing).

Maybe it’s unfair of me but I imagine at least some of those 25 girls had an influential adult in their lives with some homophobic issues to work through (perhaps some in a genuinely anxious/fear for the future way rather than a bigoted way)

Thanks for the links Daughter.
Very interesting to read the DM one again, as you say, in the current light.