The Myth of “Reliable Research” in Paediatric Gender Medicine

[NotBadConsidering]

A critical evaluation of the Dutch Studies - and research that followed.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2022.2150346

Now open access. It’s excellent. A real go-to piece for people.

Bumping this, a summary of the article here:

https://segm.org/Dutch-studies-critically-flawed

The part about switching the questionnaires before and after is particularly shocking.

I was close to tears reading this. The Dutch protocol, the good standard depended upon by all those medicalising gender dysphoric youth is thoroughly dishonest and incompetent.

Everyone needs to read this.

The thought of all those mastectomies and puberty blocked children resulting from this junk science is devastating.

*gold standard

I don't fully understand what they mean with "reversal of questionaire" and I don't have time to read it in detail now. Do they mean that they gave the study participants different questionaires before and after transition, like the one for females before and the one for males after (or vice versa)?

Yes igneococcus. A bit of a quick read from me but the major problem with that identified in the segm article was that a girl who answered questions about how much they hated a specific aspect of their female body for being female, and scored that highly, would after transition be asked how much they hated an aspect of their male body for being male, and score that low, apparently eliminating dysphoria scores post transition. But by not asking questions about their actual body the process would hide persisting dissatisfaction, which the segm article suggests did actually show up in other parts of the questionnaire.

Thanks @PermanentTemporary That's shockingly bad experiment design or probably on purpose.

This is all covered by this episode in the podcast Gender:A Wider Lens where they interview the Dutch clinicians. Shocking stuff.

Yes. I’ve attached screenshots of the questionnaires. One is for males, one is for females.

Before the transition they asked all the males the questions in the male questionnaire and all the females the questions in the female questionnaire. But after the transition they asked all the males the questions in the female questionnaire and they asked all the females the questions in the male questionnaire.

You can see from the questions and the way the scoring is for those questions that a male asked the female would automatically score less, and hence demonstrate “improvement” in their distress regardless of any intervention, hormonal, psychotherapy or otherwise. And vice versa for the females.

In fact, if they had given the subjects the two opposing questionnaires just 5 minutes apart it would demonstrated the same improvement.

In short, it’s scandalously bad.

Thanks @NotBadConsidering and@Nutmegger

It's really interesting to see these questionaires next to each other.

I knew about the swapping, bit it's the first time I'd seen the actual questions. Very interesting to compare the 2 sets - I was expecting mirrored questions, but there is quite a different slant to the 2.

Even if you rewrote the female questions to say boy or vice versa, and gave the tests at the same time, they still wouldn't give the same answers

Wow, those questionnaires look dodgy AF anyway, especially the "girl" one - could it read any more as though it was dreamt up by a man?

Quite apart from all the questions about "living as" a girl/boy - what the heck does that mean? - they take hating having breasts/hating periods as signs that a girl should really be a "boy"! But surely hating developing breasts as a girl, and hating periods, are such normal feelings for so MANY girls to go through during puberty (and in many cases, ongoing - does ANYONE actually like having periods?) that they could at least as well be taken as proof of BEING a normal girl! And many grown women still don't like their breasts much either, especially if they're unusually big or small and/or get them harrassed by men, teased etc!

As for the ones about liking looking at yourself naked, and liking to "act sexually as a girl" or whatever it was - how many actual girls would say yes to those? Those don't read like signs of "being a girl" so much as signs of "being a male autogynephile" 🤦‍♀️

Note also that there's no even close equivalent to these two questions in the "boy" version... which also seems strange, plus it almost makes it seem like "if you have sexy feels (even as a boy), you're a girl, if you feel at all uncomfortable about sex/your body (even as a [potentially quite young] girl) you must be a boy ".

FGS it's nuts! And THIS is what they were using to tell girls they were "really a boy inside", and vice versa 😡🤬

And the questionnaire is just one of many huge flaws.

The full paper is essential reading. The situation before this research, the huge flaws in this research, the ignoring of other research, the poor follow up research, the spin, the lies about necessity, all the concerns that have been known about and discussed in fragments are now all in one place, superbly written.

The entire pathway is built on sand and no one can possibly ignore it.

The unilateral sexualising of the girls' one is very instructive.

God yes.

What is devastating is that ALL gender affirming medical treatment of young people worldwide is based on this original Dutch protocol. From the Tavistock to Mermaids to yeet the teet insane surgeons in the USA, all propped up by Wpath which relies on the Dutch originators.

And it's all based on lies and incompetence.

I think that all parents should have this explained to them, if they are considering the "treatments" for their child:

Many risks and uncertainties associated with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones have emerged in more recent research. Long-term follow-up data presented at the WPATH Symposium suggest that reproductive regret and significant problems with sexual function affected a significant proportion of those transitioned in the Dutch clinic as adolescents. The authors observe: “Patients and their families cannot make informed decisions about a treatment when the physical health risks are assumed to be minimal and not reported, and only the potential psychological benefits are considered.”

This is unbelievable.

FGS it's nuts!

Now, to some extent, used correctly, the precise form of the questions doesn't matter, because those things would have been intended to use as comparators. It's a standardised test and you would compare two individuals' responses on the same test.

If the test has a "well, everyone female would say yes to that" question, it doesn't really matter so much, if used as intended. It's the different responses that matter.

But to actually compare scores on the two different tests is indeed nuts.

It would already be nuts if you concluded "girls have more or less gender dysphoria than boys" based on comparing male and female population scores on two completely tests. The two tests are not comparable, and clearly were never intended to be.

To then top that misuse by comparing the results of one person on the correct-sex test with their results on the incorrect-sex test is double-triple super nuts.

IIRC, the Dutch researchers muttered something in the Wider Lens podcast about them using this tool because it's the standard tool and it's all they had.

But this is Jack Monroe opening-a-tin-with-a-knife-and-a-mallet level of incompetence.

Now, they should have known better, because these weren't just "dysphoria" measures in general, they were specifically to assess people for treatment. In this source, you can see them marked as "female-to-male version" and "male-to-female version". They're specifically assessing people for treatment for "transition" from their actual sex.

It appears they forgot somewhere along the way that they were "-to-female" and "-to-male" tests, and thought they could be used as a general "dysphoria" measure, so the "transman" ends up doing the "male-to-female" test.

(The article above references a replacement scale getting rid of the sex dependence on the test, to be "nonbinary-inclusive". That one probably would be comparable pre- and post- "transition", as it locks down the actual and desired sex).

I hope the media picks this up.

I doubt they will. Bit technical for most.

The heavy pushing of the suicide narrative is worrying in the boy one, too.

Az Hakim frequently talks about an effective gender dysphoria questionnaire he (and his team?) put together that he repeatedly offered to the Tavistock- for free- and that his offer was ignored.
Would love to see his questionnaire to compare with these

Ooh! We don't want that, it works properly!