Totally. I accepted gender ideology for years, not because I thought it made sense, but because I felt I *had* to accept it to be a good person. I can remember moments when my brain would murmur unhappily at hearing some assertion or other, and telling myself to stay in my lane, I don't have to have an opinion, blah blah. Took until 2020 for me to finally stop shushing my doubts and start heeding them, and I have sympathy for others who haven't yet gotten to that stage.
I'll assume for the moment that Guyatt knows whereof he speaks, and that doctors are routinely prescribing poorly evidenced treatments. What he doesn't seem to consider is that these other treatments are prescribed for conditions that can actually be diagnosed. What kind of diagnosis is trans? We're told that gender dysphoria is not a prerequisite for being trans, so what is? From where I stand, it looks like doctors are prescribing treatments that might not work for a diagnosis they don't even know how to make. Is this medicine or magic?
"Guyatt: No, irrespective of anything else, we are discredited by the... I don't know how much, by some, some people in the ... our audience is the trans community!"
Ahhh, there it is. You give the audience what it wants, right?
That was crazy. The idea that patient autonomy ought to trump evidence (from the guy who helped popularize EBM as a concept!) is bad enough. But there he’s essentially saying that concerns about patient autonomy ought to determine what evidence gets published in the first place!
This was a telling moment for me. My understanding was that SRs generally aren't aimed at laypeople. They're very 'in the weeds', moreso than the average person is willing to wade through.
Yes--I'd never heard of them before going down this rabbit hole of gender medicine. Here's a person who has helped build the credibility of such reviews and is now trying to claim they don't matter?
Interesting that Guyatt keeps trying to claim that the "trauma" his junior colleagues have suffered is from attacks from both sides. As if the death threats are coming from both sides.
Well, SEGM might not have made death threats to the researchers. But you have to admit they did provide funding for autonomous research. That's just as bad, if you really think about it.
Well, it sounds like he didn’t want others — people he rubs shoulders with — to be hurt or upset. So not personally vulnerable specifically in terms of his job security. He essentially stated that he believes these interventions should be available and supports the “trans community.” It’s Canada, after all, so no surprise. And as he said, he’s a company man. He doesn’t want to do something that will hurt McMaster’s or his colleagues’ reputation, but doesn’t seem to care that the threat is coming from extremists or that the result is censorship of valuable research (or protecting the health of vulnerable youth and adults). He seems to care more about appearing “anti-trans” and about evidence being used by anyone except the patient (wise 14-year olds) and their parents and the very non-ideological gender docs. He doesn’t want it used for policy. That’s completely beyond the scope of the work but that doesn’t matter to him. And in no case is his JOB at stake or his reputation as a qualified researcher.
This is just SOP for this realm. He can’t see how bad this is.
“Evidence based medicine unless the evidence favors the position of people I don’t like” is just sophistry with extra steps. Institutionalized confirmation bias that *he openly admits to engaging in*.
I mean I understand the point that you're trying to make but no it doesn't look anything like that. If this were the cultural revolution they'd both have been shot after confessing that they were bribed by the CIA.
I was more so thinking of struggle sessions. So far as I know, most struggle sessions didn't end in people being shot. However, I'm no expert on the Cultural Revolution, so I could totally be wrong. Either way, I certainly wouldn't say this is literally the Cultural Revolution, or even anywhere near as severe. The use of social opprobrium and fear to get professors to recant their views and abandon their work just reminds me of elements of it.
The cultural revolution was one of the great atrocities of human history and I don't think it should be trivialized. If you think it would be tasteless to compare something to slavery or the holocaust you should think twice before comparing it to the cultural revolution, especially if your knowledge of that history doesn't go beyond a few sentence summary.
I agree that it was an atrocity rarely equaled. I place it at or near the same level of horror as the Holocaust. I've read several non-fiction novels that took place during it, but none that covered the entirety of the calamity itself. Do you have a better comparison in mind? Other than our own Red Scare, I struggle to think of comparisons beyond the two I initially listed.
A better comparison would be a bullying campaign in a high school cafeteria. The victims of the cultural revolution faced being tortured to death if they did not submit. Gordon Guyatt faces people screaming at him online. He doesn't even risk his job. To compare him to the victims of brutal state repression dignifies his cowardice in a way he doesn't deserve.
I want you to understand something. When my daughter got swept up in the trans craze at age 13, I had to make decisions about life-altering medical procedures with little or no good information on which to base them. 10 years ago, I didn’t even have access to the understanding that evidence of these treatments’ outcomes was limited even for the original patient population on which they’d been used (of which, as an “ROGD” female, my kid was not even a part). Doctors blithely told me that “blockers are a pause button” and confidently diagnosed my kid as genuinely trans, despite a host of other psychiatric problems (“He’s a guy!” crowed one gender specialist after a single visit). Thank god I listened to my gut and not their “expertise” or my child’s “patient autonomy”: today she is a happy cis-het young adult who is enjoying her intact body and has thanked me for not allowing her to destroy it. But making these decisions and holding the line on them was hell, largely because there was so little good information to counter the propaganda we were fed by doctors who proffered the treatments and activists who, for some mysterious reason, really want to see kids transition the instant they express a desire to do so. That hellishness would have been greatly alleviated had I had access to a clear, unbiased and scientifically sound assessment of the effectiveness and evidence base of the treatments being pushed on us. Thus I’ve watched the efforts of SEGM to provide that evidence base for years, in hope that other parents and kids in this situation will have access to that information. So it’s crushing to see you abandon this work.
This is a great interview. And... not too shocking.
I'm a large organization leader, so what I'm going to say may be screamingly obvious to folks, or not so much, depending on your experience...
*Of course* Guyatt is bowing to political pressure. He may make noises like he's "untouchable" but the reality is that his funding, his students, etc. are very much touchable. And he's not going to publicly call attention to this by spelling it out. IYKYK. So he's going to rationalize a decision that he's forced to make due to the hostages.
It's very hard to be an iconoclast when people, who you presumably like and care about, are hostages to your good behavior. Most leaders can't or won't do this. The people who will... generally don't end up in charge of large teams, departments, etc. If he took a strong independent stance here, his students would have a much harder time getting funding, postdocs, etc. Some of their careers would end, or not start.
The people who can do this kind of thing are usually solo acts, well insulated financially and reputationally, with family and friends well out of the line of fire (or nonexistent).
I celebrate the ideal of the scientist who pursues the truth at all costs, damn the consequences. It's a great myth, and like all myths is tells us a story about who we are and who we should want to be. But... not a lot of people can live up to a myth. The best we get in the real world are people who live up to some elements, some of the time.
I agree. But we celebrate bravery because it's rare, and it's neither shocking nor unusual when people do what their incentives push them to do. That's all I'm saying here - what is happening is basically 100% aligned with the role and incentives.
“If he took a strong independent stance here, his students would have a much harder time getting funding, postdocs, etc. Some of their careers would end, or not start.”
But isn’t *he* the one preemptively pulling his name off papers that his students have staked the start of their careers on? That’s more like throwing them under the bus to save his own neck.
The shape of his team or who exactly did what at the student level isn't in the article (or I'm failing to read it). It's clear he and other folks asked the (student?) authors to add a disclaimer, and some did or and some did not. And then he and others made a broader statement, made the appropriate ritual donation to appease the deities, and plans to stay far from this topic going forward. Chalk up a win for team activist.
I can't say if he was smearing a small part of his team to save the rest, abandoning them all, or what. Without building an org chart and researching the work and activities of everyone in it I can't say. It's just a guess that he probably thought he was preserving more than he sacrificed, or has convinced himself of that.
Personally I think the evidence of the past years has shown that caving to the screamers usually ends in more vilification and demands. But I also think way more people than seems possible have remain unaware of this dynamic until they get a personal intro.
I guess I was understanding that a couple of systemic reviews have been stalled out, in part because he’s no longer participating as an author. I’m sure you right that he’s convinced he’s saving more than he is losing, but he is also trying to save his *own* ass, and I was objecting to the sense in your original that this is a noble leadership move on his part because it was just to save his “friends”.
This controversy has been white hot for quite a few years now. It is hard to imagine those on the team did not understand what they were wading into. (Although I would be interested to hear arguments against this...)
I don't know. I the activist forces have been so wildly successful (until recently) at suppressing dissent that until you stick your foot into the meat grinder it's entirely possible to to miss. I know in my personal circles most people had no idea this was even a thing until the past year or so.
What is the point of having a career in the field if the field has been rendered worthless by politicization? When you cave like this ostensibly to salvage other people’s careers, you’re salvaging their careers as apparatchiks, not as scholars.
Well. That's a completely different question: how does he find value in a career where he has to accommodate the politics of the day? You’d have to ask him.
I suspect his answer is that he finds value in the myriad of places where evidence based science can be applied without the piranha attacks. And that he is simply not interested in taking on hotly contested political subjects where doing good work will be made difficult or impossible.
“My whole body of work is worthless if I ever compromise in anything” is not a reasonable standard of value for most people.
I think considering the truth to be your North Star is not a “nice to have” for scientists, it’s absolutely critical. Also, once any of your work has been compromised by Lysenkoist horseshit, no one can ever trust that anything else you produce hasn’t been compromised. You’ve shown yourself to be someone who can be bullied and manipulated, someone who can be motivated by political expediency rather than truth. If you sacrifice your integrity, if you in fact go on the record stating that your goal is not to establish what’s true but to placate whichever nutcase group of activists and/or cowardly administrators is mad at you, you’re ceded your career as a scientist, full stop. It doesn’t matter if you never actually engage in this kind of thing again, or you only work on anodyne subjects; nobody can ever be certain of the integrity of your work because you traded away your integrity to appease people who are openly hostile to the truth.
What a weasel. “Well, people say SEGM is bad, so even if that’s not true, it’s important we act like it’s true to save our reputation”. “I’m invulnerable, but I’m going to pull my name off this paper that I was completely behind until I found out that trans activists were mad about where some of the funding came from, because I just *care so much about how scared my young colleagues are* (never mind that pulling my name and reputation off their work just further discredits them and makes them more vulnerable)”
That’s the thing, the groveling isn’t going to buy them anything but a dirty conscience, because to the activists they will remain “transphobes” forever. Hell, they’ve admitted that they are, as far as the activists are concerned. An apology or clarification is treated as a confession.
Probably would be better for SEGM and/or Guyatt to go the route of that “anti-Muslim” author and hit at SPLC legally.
> So I’m on the PhD committee. I don’t ask questions about whether — didn’t occur to me that the university was taking money for these reviews.
> Guyatt maintained in his reply that he had no knowledge of the funding until recently
For what it's worth, not knowing who's funding what seems pretty normal to me. I've collaborated on many projects and been coauthor on several journal articles where I didn't know where most of the funding was coming from. This happened a lot when I was a grad student or when I was contributing to a project run by some other lab. Also, I would guess that not everyone on my PhD committee knew where all the funding for my research was coming from.
Which you’d think would be all the more reason not to cave to the bullshit smear campaign! After all, how can your research be tainted by funding you didn’t even know about?
I bet there are graduate students who don't know where all their funding is coming from. Sometimes a professor needs to "make payroll" and makes allocations accordingly.
Such an Upton Sinclair moment! "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
Not his salary. His reputation as a good person on the academic Left, which is 80% of academia
Totally. I accepted gender ideology for years, not because I thought it made sense, but because I felt I *had* to accept it to be a good person. I can remember moments when my brain would murmur unhappily at hearing some assertion or other, and telling myself to stay in my lane, I don't have to have an opinion, blah blah. Took until 2020 for me to finally stop shushing my doubts and start heeding them, and I have sympathy for others who haven't yet gotten to that stage.
I'll assume for the moment that Guyatt knows whereof he speaks, and that doctors are routinely prescribing poorly evidenced treatments. What he doesn't seem to consider is that these other treatments are prescribed for conditions that can actually be diagnosed. What kind of diagnosis is trans? We're told that gender dysphoria is not a prerequisite for being trans, so what is? From where I stand, it looks like doctors are prescribing treatments that might not work for a diagnosis they don't even know how to make. Is this medicine or magic?
Guyatt’s reputation deserves to take a hit, not because of the reviews but because of his intellectual cowardice.
"Well, you can put me in as many difficult positions as you want, as long as you don’t get me in trouble with other people."
Come now. Would a coward say that?
"Guyatt: No, irrespective of anything else, we are discredited by the... I don't know how much, by some, some people in the ... our audience is the trans community!"
Ahhh, there it is. You give the audience what it wants, right?
That was crazy. The idea that patient autonomy ought to trump evidence (from the guy who helped popularize EBM as a concept!) is bad enough. But there he’s essentially saying that concerns about patient autonomy ought to determine what evidence gets published in the first place!
This was a telling moment for me. My understanding was that SRs generally aren't aimed at laypeople. They're very 'in the weeds', moreso than the average person is willing to wade through.
Yes--I'd never heard of them before going down this rabbit hole of gender medicine. Here's a person who has helped build the credibility of such reviews and is now trying to claim they don't matter?
Literally just describing audience capture.
Interesting that Guyatt keeps trying to claim that the "trauma" his junior colleagues have suffered is from attacks from both sides. As if the death threats are coming from both sides.
Well, SEGM might not have made death threats to the researchers. But you have to admit they did provide funding for autonomous research. That's just as bad, if you really think about it.
He feels invulnerable.
Right.
That completely explains his behavior. Definitely the actions of a man who is not feeling vulnerable in any way.
Well, it sounds like he didn’t want others — people he rubs shoulders with — to be hurt or upset. So not personally vulnerable specifically in terms of his job security. He essentially stated that he believes these interventions should be available and supports the “trans community.” It’s Canada, after all, so no surprise. And as he said, he’s a company man. He doesn’t want to do something that will hurt McMaster’s or his colleagues’ reputation, but doesn’t seem to care that the threat is coming from extremists or that the result is censorship of valuable research (or protecting the health of vulnerable youth and adults). He seems to care more about appearing “anti-trans” and about evidence being used by anyone except the patient (wise 14-year olds) and their parents and the very non-ideological gender docs. He doesn’t want it used for policy. That’s completely beyond the scope of the work but that doesn’t matter to him. And in no case is his JOB at stake or his reputation as a qualified researcher.
This is just SOP for this realm. He can’t see how bad this is.
I wonder if this dude is bipolar. Everything else he said made "I feel invulnerable" seem like complete horse shit.
You are my hero Julia
"I now see that I have an additional responsibility about how my work gets used"
Hmmmm... don't like that. Seems antithetical to EBM.
“Evidence based medicine unless the evidence favors the position of people I don’t like” is just sophistry with extra steps. Institutionalized confirmation bias that *he openly admits to engaging in*.
This reads like something you would've seen out of the Soviet Union during the reign of Lysenkoism or China during the Cultural Revolution.
I mean I understand the point that you're trying to make but no it doesn't look anything like that. If this were the cultural revolution they'd both have been shot after confessing that they were bribed by the CIA.
I was more so thinking of struggle sessions. So far as I know, most struggle sessions didn't end in people being shot. However, I'm no expert on the Cultural Revolution, so I could totally be wrong. Either way, I certainly wouldn't say this is literally the Cultural Revolution, or even anywhere near as severe. The use of social opprobrium and fear to get professors to recant their views and abandon their work just reminds me of elements of it.
The cultural revolution was one of the great atrocities of human history and I don't think it should be trivialized. If you think it would be tasteless to compare something to slavery or the holocaust you should think twice before comparing it to the cultural revolution, especially if your knowledge of that history doesn't go beyond a few sentence summary.
I agree that it was an atrocity rarely equaled. I place it at or near the same level of horror as the Holocaust. I've read several non-fiction novels that took place during it, but none that covered the entirety of the calamity itself. Do you have a better comparison in mind? Other than our own Red Scare, I struggle to think of comparisons beyond the two I initially listed.
A better comparison would be a bullying campaign in a high school cafeteria. The victims of the cultural revolution faced being tortured to death if they did not submit. Gordon Guyatt faces people screaming at him online. He doesn't even risk his job. To compare him to the victims of brutal state repression dignifies his cowardice in a way he doesn't deserve.
Dear Gordon Guyatt,
I want you to understand something. When my daughter got swept up in the trans craze at age 13, I had to make decisions about life-altering medical procedures with little or no good information on which to base them. 10 years ago, I didn’t even have access to the understanding that evidence of these treatments’ outcomes was limited even for the original patient population on which they’d been used (of which, as an “ROGD” female, my kid was not even a part). Doctors blithely told me that “blockers are a pause button” and confidently diagnosed my kid as genuinely trans, despite a host of other psychiatric problems (“He’s a guy!” crowed one gender specialist after a single visit). Thank god I listened to my gut and not their “expertise” or my child’s “patient autonomy”: today she is a happy cis-het young adult who is enjoying her intact body and has thanked me for not allowing her to destroy it. But making these decisions and holding the line on them was hell, largely because there was so little good information to counter the propaganda we were fed by doctors who proffered the treatments and activists who, for some mysterious reason, really want to see kids transition the instant they express a desire to do so. That hellishness would have been greatly alleviated had I had access to a clear, unbiased and scientifically sound assessment of the effectiveness and evidence base of the treatments being pushed on us. Thus I’ve watched the efforts of SEGM to provide that evidence base for years, in hope that other parents and kids in this situation will have access to that information. So it’s crushing to see you abandon this work.
This is a great interview. And... not too shocking.
I'm a large organization leader, so what I'm going to say may be screamingly obvious to folks, or not so much, depending on your experience...
*Of course* Guyatt is bowing to political pressure. He may make noises like he's "untouchable" but the reality is that his funding, his students, etc. are very much touchable. And he's not going to publicly call attention to this by spelling it out. IYKYK. So he's going to rationalize a decision that he's forced to make due to the hostages.
It's very hard to be an iconoclast when people, who you presumably like and care about, are hostages to your good behavior. Most leaders can't or won't do this. The people who will... generally don't end up in charge of large teams, departments, etc. If he took a strong independent stance here, his students would have a much harder time getting funding, postdocs, etc. Some of their careers would end, or not start.
The people who can do this kind of thing are usually solo acts, well insulated financially and reputationally, with family and friends well out of the line of fire (or nonexistent).
I celebrate the ideal of the scientist who pursues the truth at all costs, damn the consequences. It's a great myth, and like all myths is tells us a story about who we are and who we should want to be. But... not a lot of people can live up to a myth. The best we get in the real world are people who live up to some elements, some of the time.
I get this--having felt the pressure myself--but maybe someone with his stature refusing to stand firm is what actually puts his students at risk?
In large part, you are describing a kind of professionalism--close ranks whatever the cost--that has brought us to this position.
I agree. But we celebrate bravery because it's rare, and it's neither shocking nor unusual when people do what their incentives push them to do. That's all I'm saying here - what is happening is basically 100% aligned with the role and incentives.
“If he took a strong independent stance here, his students would have a much harder time getting funding, postdocs, etc. Some of their careers would end, or not start.”
But isn’t *he* the one preemptively pulling his name off papers that his students have staked the start of their careers on? That’s more like throwing them under the bus to save his own neck.
The shape of his team or who exactly did what at the student level isn't in the article (or I'm failing to read it). It's clear he and other folks asked the (student?) authors to add a disclaimer, and some did or and some did not. And then he and others made a broader statement, made the appropriate ritual donation to appease the deities, and plans to stay far from this topic going forward. Chalk up a win for team activist.
I can't say if he was smearing a small part of his team to save the rest, abandoning them all, or what. Without building an org chart and researching the work and activities of everyone in it I can't say. It's just a guess that he probably thought he was preserving more than he sacrificed, or has convinced himself of that.
Personally I think the evidence of the past years has shown that caving to the screamers usually ends in more vilification and demands. But I also think way more people than seems possible have remain unaware of this dynamic until they get a personal intro.
I guess I was understanding that a couple of systemic reviews have been stalled out, in part because he’s no longer participating as an author. I’m sure you right that he’s convinced he’s saving more than he is losing, but he is also trying to save his *own* ass, and I was objecting to the sense in your original that this is a noble leadership move on his part because it was just to save his “friends”.
Not noble at all. Just human.
I thought the same thing. Why isn’t he standing up for his students and younger colleagues ?
This controversy has been white hot for quite a few years now. It is hard to imagine those on the team did not understand what they were wading into. (Although I would be interested to hear arguments against this...)
I don't know. I the activist forces have been so wildly successful (until recently) at suppressing dissent that until you stick your foot into the meat grinder it's entirely possible to to miss. I know in my personal circles most people had no idea this was even a thing until the past year or so.
What is the point of having a career in the field if the field has been rendered worthless by politicization? When you cave like this ostensibly to salvage other people’s careers, you’re salvaging their careers as apparatchiks, not as scholars.
Well. That's a completely different question: how does he find value in a career where he has to accommodate the politics of the day? You’d have to ask him.
I suspect his answer is that he finds value in the myriad of places where evidence based science can be applied without the piranha attacks. And that he is simply not interested in taking on hotly contested political subjects where doing good work will be made difficult or impossible.
“My whole body of work is worthless if I ever compromise in anything” is not a reasonable standard of value for most people.
I think considering the truth to be your North Star is not a “nice to have” for scientists, it’s absolutely critical. Also, once any of your work has been compromised by Lysenkoist horseshit, no one can ever trust that anything else you produce hasn’t been compromised. You’ve shown yourself to be someone who can be bullied and manipulated, someone who can be motivated by political expediency rather than truth. If you sacrifice your integrity, if you in fact go on the record stating that your goal is not to establish what’s true but to placate whichever nutcase group of activists and/or cowardly administrators is mad at you, you’re ceded your career as a scientist, full stop. It doesn’t matter if you never actually engage in this kind of thing again, or you only work on anodyne subjects; nobody can ever be certain of the integrity of your work because you traded away your integrity to appease people who are openly hostile to the truth.
What a weasel. “Well, people say SEGM is bad, so even if that’s not true, it’s important we act like it’s true to save our reputation”. “I’m invulnerable, but I’m going to pull my name off this paper that I was completely behind until I found out that trans activists were mad about where some of the funding came from, because I just *care so much about how scared my young colleagues are* (never mind that pulling my name and reputation off their work just further discredits them and makes them more vulnerable)”
😂😥
Breakneck shifts from candour to slipperiness. A mad read.
WTF did I just read? What a strange melange of transparency and evasiveness.
I wonder if his cowardly about-face will get this removed: https://www.transgendermap.com/issues/academia/gender-critical/society-for-evidence-based-gender-medicine/gordon-guyatt/
One must learn to live with a page on that site to have integrity in the transgender research space. I find it a badge of honor.
That’s the thing, the groveling isn’t going to buy them anything but a dirty conscience, because to the activists they will remain “transphobes” forever. Hell, they’ve admitted that they are, as far as the activists are concerned. An apology or clarification is treated as a confession.
Probably would be better for SEGM and/or Guyatt to go the route of that “anti-Muslim” author and hit at SPLC legally.
> Guyatt: I have nothing to lose reputationally. I feel invulnerable, actually.
> Singal: You do?
> Guyatt: I feel completely invulnerable.
I translated this as, "Please don't tell them I'm afraid of them; that will make them extremely angry."
> So I’m on the PhD committee. I don’t ask questions about whether — didn’t occur to me that the university was taking money for these reviews.
> Guyatt maintained in his reply that he had no knowledge of the funding until recently
For what it's worth, not knowing who's funding what seems pretty normal to me. I've collaborated on many projects and been coauthor on several journal articles where I didn't know where most of the funding was coming from. This happened a lot when I was a grad student or when I was contributing to a project run by some other lab. Also, I would guess that not everyone on my PhD committee knew where all the funding for my research was coming from.
Which you’d think would be all the more reason not to cave to the bullshit smear campaign! After all, how can your research be tainted by funding you didn’t even know about?
I bet there are graduate students who don't know where all their funding is coming from. Sometimes a professor needs to "make payroll" and makes allocations accordingly.
I certainly didn't!