Does the Transgender community have a problem with well evidenced science? Does the community only ever accept favourable reports, AKA confirmation bias, or is it something deeper?

[HydraDominatus]

Every piece of science or news thats not entirely supportive is buried under accusations of transphobia or bias

Why is this a political debate rather than a mental and physical health issue?

Cancer care isn't bias and politicised, trans health care shouldn't be either. Surely it's all about properly designed and researched programmes, with the outcome not predetermined, that we should be entirely standing behind?

Would the community ever stand behind rigorous, transparent, and ethically conducted research into transgender health care that did not align with its previous, deeply held views? If not, isn't that a problem?

tl;dr Is the Transgender community bias to it's own detriment?

(inspired by recent UK changes which do seem to be well researched, evidenced and guided by true support for people with genuine issues, it just does not line up with existing trans community narrative)

There are 3490 articles on pubmed - knock yourself out.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=gender+identity

Could you say what the serious issues are, please?

@DadJoke 7th fail a in a row, you really are a coward.. Own your opinions.

Come on? yes or no?

"would you accept rigorous research that showed a finding that does not align with transgender or transgender ally beliefs?"

No you can’t say that about me without being very specific and saying how I’m doing it.

wide range of experts, that’s great and what the Cass review got - But that doesn’t mean half of one opinion and half from another - it means serious professionals who believe in science and evidence not ideology.

be clear. Tell me the details and what the issues are. I’ll wait…

Can anyone find any peer-reviewed articles which suggest that gender identity is a belief or isn't innate?

I thought that view all ended with the very sad Reimer case which undermined the view that gender identity and sexuality was entirely environmental. It also estblished that non-transgender people have a gender identity.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/david-reimer.html

So what do you think this experiment tells us?

@DadJoke 8th fail a in a row, you’re a literal coward.

Come on? yes or no?

"would you accept rigorous research that showed a finding that does not align with transgender or transgender ally beliefs?"

Just skimmed the links provided. Opened a range at random & read the abstracts. Not a scientist, but found it interesting that of the four I chose, each one had a subtly different interpretation of gender identity, & several highlighted it as hard to define/categorise.

The inclusion of the "gender identity" field in the Brazilian violence surveillance system, although representing a step forward, still has limitations that may compromise epidemiological data validity. Existing response options for victims' identities do not adequately cover the diversity of this analysis category, resulting in classification biases.

However, it remains unclear what aspect of gender the children participating in past studies essentialized. Such studies used labels such as "girl" or "boy" without clarifying how children (or researchers) interpreted them. Are they indicators of the target's biological categorization at birth (sex), the target's sense of their own gender (gender identity), or some third possible interpretation?

Hospices are the last place of medical care for most patients before their death. Female patients who have taken part in palliative therapy have reported feeling that their femininity was 'taken away' from them by their illness, which in turn negatively impacted their mood.

gender, identified as a social source of variance

I don't consider people who vaguely gesticulate in the direction of a particular search term pulling up a few thousand wildly diverse articles with, as ppl have pointed out, very different definitions of the search term, to be seriously engaging on this topic.

I don't consider conflating knowing what sex you are with a man thinking what he feels must be "woman" feelings, begging a million questions, to be a good faith argument.

The most recent edition of Scientific American contains a feature article in the 'Psychology' section entitled "Families Under Attack'. It is written by a 'freelance science writer', Maria Broadfoot, who 'has a PhD in genetics and molecular biology'. My rough calculation makes it around 4,000 words in length. The only analysis that is in any sense 'scientific' is an infographic headed 'The Growing Map of Anti-LGBTQ Discrimination'. (It means, of course, 'Discrimination against LGBTQ people'). This shows which states were considering 510 'anti-LGBTQ bills' in 2023, and which passed 84 of them during that legislative session.

It includes some other statistics: 'about 25 percent of high school students are not heterosexual, according to a 2021 survey' (the survey is not identified); "Nearly half of LGBTQ kids seriously considered suicide... according to a survey ... conducted by a nonprofit group that offers crisis services.'

But most of the article is mainly personal accounts of what individuals have experienced as they seek 'the gender-affirming care they need'. The writer's research involved '20 parents and their kids'. A 'six-year-old transgender girl' is mentioned.

It will take too long to go through the entire article; but what comes across is a mind-set from the writer, and presumably the magazine and its publishers, that the right way forward is to help 'kids embrace their authentic selves'. There is nothing about biological reality or the damage of puberty blockers.

So, to return to @HydraDominatus' original question: yes. But it seems that even so-called 'scientific Americans' have no interest in science in this area.

I cannot link to the article. However, I shall try to post, separately, a photo of the first page of the article. (I tried that earlierand lost the post.)

Scientific American cover and part of article. For @HydraDominatus- and anyone else interested.

""trans is not real""

Literally no one on these boards has argued that trans is not real?
I'm genuinely so sick of seeing this brought up again and again as if anyone is arguing this.
NO ONE is saying trans people don't exist.

Just one more. This is fascinating. I'd say the dominant impression these articles give is that gender identity is far from settled in the scientific community. When we consider that, in addition to the scientific literature being undecided, the term is being used by laypeople in relation to an infinity of different demographics, contexts & scenarios, often with political underpinnings... well, my impression is, that Dadjoke's link to articles using the term rather supports the perspective that this is a fluid, complex sociological phenomenon with innate elements we don't fully understand and are positively struggling to conceptualise, let alone to label in a meaningful way.

People who express a sense of discomfort with their anatomical sex and related roles have been reported in the medical literature since the middle of the 19th century. However, homosexual, fetishism, gender identity disorder, and associated conditions were mixed together and regarded as types of sexual perversion that were considered ethically objectionable until the 1950s. The first performance of sex-reassignment surgery in 1952 attracted considerable attention, and the sexologist Harry Benjamin reported a case of 'a woman kept in the body of a man', which was called transsexualism. John William Money studied the sexual consciousness about disorders of sex development and advocated the concept of gender in 1957. Thereafter the disparity between anatomical sex and gender identity was referred to as the psychopathological condition of gender identity disorder, and this was used for its diagnostic name when it was introduced into DSM-III in 1980. However, gender identity disorder encompasses a spectrum of conditions, and DSM-III -R categorized it into three types: transsexualism, nontranssexualism, and not otherwise specified. The first two types were subsequently combined and standardized into the official diagnostic name of 'gender identity disorder' in DSM-IV. In contrast, gender identity disorder was categorized into four groups (including transsexualism and dual-role transvestism) in ICD-10. A draft proposal of DSM-5 has been submitted, in which the diagnostic name of gender identity disorder has been changed to gender dysphoria. Also, it refers to 'assigned gender' rather than to 'sex', and includes disorders of sexual development. Moreover, the subclassifications regarding sexual orientation have been deleted. The proposed DSM-5 reflects an attempt to include only a medical designation of people who have suffered due to the gender disparity, thereby respecting the concept of transgender in accepting the diversity of the role of gender. This indicates that transgender issues are now at a turning point.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22844818/

I'm a Procrastinator Extraordinaire today.

Which of those are demonstrating the 'basic science' that proves that everyone has a gender identity? That's your claim.. And that's not what you've provided evidence for here.

This is number 8 on that list.

https://philarchive.org/archive/BYRTOO-7

He mentions Stoller and Greenson's original (1964) definition of gender identity, which is the one described by Katie Alcock in the article I posted a link to earlier in the thread:

Gender identity is the sense of knowing to which sex one belongs, that is, the awareness ‘I am a male’ or ‘I am a female’

He goes on to discuss how that meaning has now been lost, and replaced with the near-circular WPATH definition: “a person’s deeply felt, internal, intrinsic
sense of their own gender”, where “gender may reference gender identity, gender expression, and/or social gender role, including understandings and expectations culturally tied to people who were assigned male or female at birth”, which completes the circularity.

He concludes: “Gender identity” has gone from being well-defined to
being ill-defined.

I thought the name Alex Byrne sounded familiar. He wrote this article which I remember from a few years ago.
https://medium.com/arc-digital/what-is-gender-identity-10ce0da71999

He's also written a book.
http://www.alexbyrne.org/trouble-with-gender.html

I feel really uncomfortable around any questioning of the views of a ‘community’. I’m not sure all trans people think the same way about issues, any more than we’d assume all women have the same view on any topic.

Sure there are some loud Trans campaigners, and some of them are nutcases, but logic would dictate there are probably plenty of trans people who just quietly want to get on with their lives without everything being a political debate.

These kind of angry shout-outs to the ‘community’ are just so unnecessary. Imagine asking the Muslim ‘community’ to comment on Hamas or the White ‘community’ to comment on the actions of the US republican party. It makes no sense.

I'm conscious the focus of my post above is GID (gender identity disorder) but do think that the focus on the literature on this may also actually support the perspective that any claim that "gender identity" is a unanimously settled and innate default human experience may be driven more by sociological influences than supported by unambiguous consensus science and agreed definitions.

But am very much out of my depth now.

And tired.

Just interested, too! Clearly, there's a Thing. Of course trans people "exist", as the infuriatingly obvious saying goes. But I'm wary of reductive categories outside those founded in solid science - and especially wary when such categories are used rather aggressively to deny my own experience (and in the name of validating someone else's).

Hang on all this o called science is psychology/social studies which is not actual science.

The experiment tells us you know if you’re a boy or a girl.

I was under the impression what was not yet established is ‘how’ (if it has been established forgive me, this is not my area of expertise nor anything more than a minor interest) - if memory serves there were various theories about parts of the brain that might be giving us that signal?

And that brain part could, in theory, malfunction in a minority of people and tell those people that they are the other gender?

You may disagree, but I don't believe that people all have a gendered soul which can be born in the wrong-sex body. So I don't believe that anyone 'is trans' in this sense.

But there are people who want to be the opposite sex or mistakenly believe they are in some way the opposite sex. Those people obviously exist, and if 'being trans' means 'thinks they are the opposite sex or wants to be the opposite sex', then 'trans people' exist.

Moobjuice Gate.

NHS Trust says Moobjuice is perfectly safe and nutritional based on a study of one person.

MN says this is total bullshit and totally unscientific.

WPATH (!) say yeah, this is slightly disturbing ethically.

Various other sources including other NHS one go 'wtf this is not good science'

Dadjoke says Yey it's safe cracking study cos transgender woooooo. I know better than all of you.

WPATH say publicly woot puberty blockers are safe based on science.

WPATH privately say yeah we've no fucking idea what we are doing, there's massive scientific flaws in this but hell we will do it anyway.

MN goes fucking hell are you for real.

The NHS eventually wakes up looks at actual research and go... Hmmm nope.

Dadjoke goes yay puberty blockers.

Also Dadjoke, Gender Criticals have a problem with science. I know better than all of you.

Cos that's the way these conversations always go, with us all being mansplained to like we are five by someone who wouldn't know science if it hit him in the face repeatedly.

Yeah ok. As you were.

The Reimer case doesn't really tell us that, though.

All it tells us is that a kid believed his parents when they told him he was a girl, was sexually tortured by Money as part of a sex "role play", then when he found he was really male he chose to live as a man until his suicide.

There is nothing in this experiment that evidences gender identity.

Also his twin killed himself. There was more to that family than anyone knows about

Cancer care isn't bias and politicised, trans health care shouldn't be either. Surely it's all about properly designed and researched programmes, with the outcome not predetermined, that we should be entirely standing behind?

Just want to make a quick point about this; at times cancer care (or more specifically, drugs) absolutely are politicised and mainstream media reports are biased (‘NHS denies patients new wonder drug’). The big pharmaceutical companies are always keen to promote new drugs for cancer as much as for anything else and send materials and funding to patient groups to help get their point of view across in the media, preferably with a few heartbreaking tales attached. They also try the usual tricks of small trials, short followup, no control or trialed against a placebo instead of the established best drug, carefully selected patient groups etc.

I think this research showed us that children who are sexually abused may then have issues with their body image and mental health.

I don’t think we can draw any conclusions from Moneys research other than he was a sick fuck that should never have been allowed around children.