Do trans activists need to fight the ROGD idea? Couldn't you just say "some people are trans, but some people are misdiagnosed as trans when they have other issues. It's important to differentiate these groups."
I'm sure everyone in here believe in, for the lack of a better term, "people with cancer rights." But wouldn't it be reasonable to check if someone actually has cancer before giving chemo?
I think you missed something though. When Turban says this:
"Of note, a substantial percentage of TGD adolescents in the current study sample also identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual with regard to their sexual orientation, which further argues against the notion that adopting a TGD identity is an attempt to avoid sexual minority stigma."
Many trans-identified people who are opposite-sex attracted describe themselves as either "gay" or "lesbian" on the basis that they are "trans men" attracted to men, or "trans women" attracted to women. Similarly the trans people who describe themselves as "straight" may actually mean attracted to people of the same sex. So unless this was asked in such a way as to ascertain what they meant, this also doesn't tell you very much, and certainly doesn't rule out the idea that a large set of the ones self-identified as "straight trans" were actually gay or lesbian prior to transition.
I’m a psychiatry resident and rotate on an adolescent ward and it runs around 25% gender divergent, mostly female and identifying as non-binary. Basically all post pubescent and with friends or internet influence. I asked one kid and they said “Well I was talking to my friend and he said I was trans like him and then everyone in the group chat typed one of us,
one of us!” which struck me as comically consistent with ROGD.
We are all prone to cognitive biases, researchers no less than anyone else. But Jack Turban has gone way beyond such biases. He is an ideologue, an operator, an activist, and not a researcher. He knows in advance exactly what he wants his studies to demonstrate and he utilizes the garden of forking paths to get where he wants to go.
He fully avails himself of researcher degrees of freedom to produce studies that amazingly are exactly congruent to his ideological agenda. The fact that putative top journals publish his tripe is indicative of how ideology has hijacked science.
Show some backbone, journal editors, don't go for the faddish, for the pc, for plaudits on Twitter. Go with the evidence, go with researcher integrity, lean against researcher degrees of freedom, go against ideology.
Turban is an activist who tricks out his ideology with scientific terminology. It is all a charade. I would say exactly the same thing of a researcher with the precise opposite ideology of Turban because ... the truth shall set you free.
The one thing that resonates most when I read these tireless deconstructions that are, for now, being noticed almost entirely by the already convinced is that they will assume enormous value once enough people understand the surreal level of bad-faith claims being made in the area of "gender science" even in peer-reviewed journals.
I'm expecting the tide to turn with such alacrity (the NYT is already shifting the narrative) that even though I despise the viciousness of the attacks against Jesse and others, and have repeatedly derided the participation of transwomen in female sports myself, I genuinely fear undue backlash against trans people in general, including the many quiet ones struggling to resolve their feelings and place in the world, and whose interests have been largely co-opted by a horde of screaming white shitlibs who conspicuously couldn't care less about either the facts or how this turns out for the various identity groups they've been relentlessly pimping for clicks and approval.
When, pray tell, is Turban going to respond to *any* of these critiques, let alone yours? How long can one influential researcher get away with this “quality” of research?
This is a fantastic critique. Thank you for putting it in language an ordinary intelligent, and maybe not so intelligent, reader can understand.
Can a researcher like Turban turn out such shoddy work again and again and still be respected? And what of UC San Fran.....Doesn't that institution care? And isn't that the same university where a professor ignorantly went after the "Normal Distribution" in an article from Scientific American?
What of the "Pediatrics" magazine....will it have the courage to point out flaws or is it terrified that doing so will bring the "transphobic" charge on it?
"Though with the GWAS revolution, you never know — watch this space for breaking news about the newly discovered genetic underpinnings of going goth."
That was my initial reaction (which now appears to be correct). Going goth may be partially genetic. Let me use an extreme analogy. Cutting showed evidence of being a social phenomena. However, even at the peak, most teens were not cutters. Why some teens and not others? It could have been partially genetic.
This is a fantastic analysis, Jesse! I especially appreciate that you have taken apart the logical leaps that this paper makes; it is not testing the claims of Littman about ROGD, but rather some sloppy version of them that seems to deliberately misunderstand their actual nature.
Great post, as usual. I want to add with respect to the alleged decline in trans-ID that was found between 2017 and 2019 that when you use proper statistical procedures that can handle the complex survey design (such as SAS procedure surveyfreq, which by the way is required when you use this dataset) you shrink the contribution of Maryland from almost 40% to under 6%, and at the same time, you find that trans-ID rates in the included states stayed about the same (statistically no different) between 2017 and 2019.
Insanity these days it's like "NBC and the American Academy of Pediatric Endocrinologists published an article with 100 errors, and now I'm going to write a terse rebuttal on my Substack.!"
And yet. The piece passesd peer review at Pediatrics, a respectable journal (well, it has been, and for a long time). And respectable news outlets continue to push it.
Which is evidence for the politicization of science and news -- a rational reason for those on the Right to turn away from those elites. The pity is that so many then find homes in Donald Trump's neighborhood.
if someone ID's as trans who does not have dysphoria, as Turban states, that would imply trans ID is a choice. IOW trans id is not immutable and shouldnt supersede the rights of protected groups that are, such as women, gays and children.
Certainly, Turban is a first rate propaganda minister gleefully creating news headlines via his imagined ideology that allows him to leap like superman over all the inconvenient gaps
Another thing that's weird about this.
Do trans activists need to fight the ROGD idea? Couldn't you just say "some people are trans, but some people are misdiagnosed as trans when they have other issues. It's important to differentiate these groups."
I'm sure everyone in here believe in, for the lack of a better term, "people with cancer rights." But wouldn't it be reasonable to check if someone actually has cancer before giving chemo?
Just a bizarre paper.
I think you missed something though. When Turban says this:
"Of note, a substantial percentage of TGD adolescents in the current study sample also identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual with regard to their sexual orientation, which further argues against the notion that adopting a TGD identity is an attempt to avoid sexual minority stigma."
Many trans-identified people who are opposite-sex attracted describe themselves as either "gay" or "lesbian" on the basis that they are "trans men" attracted to men, or "trans women" attracted to women. Similarly the trans people who describe themselves as "straight" may actually mean attracted to people of the same sex. So unless this was asked in such a way as to ascertain what they meant, this also doesn't tell you very much, and certainly doesn't rule out the idea that a large set of the ones self-identified as "straight trans" were actually gay or lesbian prior to transition.
I’m a psychiatry resident and rotate on an adolescent ward and it runs around 25% gender divergent, mostly female and identifying as non-binary. Basically all post pubescent and with friends or internet influence. I asked one kid and they said “Well I was talking to my friend and he said I was trans like him and then everyone in the group chat typed one of us,
one of us!” which struck me as comically consistent with ROGD.
Jesse is the Hercules of journalists and all these spurious Lysenkoist Trans "studies" are his Augean stables. Bravo!
We are all prone to cognitive biases, researchers no less than anyone else. But Jack Turban has gone way beyond such biases. He is an ideologue, an operator, an activist, and not a researcher. He knows in advance exactly what he wants his studies to demonstrate and he utilizes the garden of forking paths to get where he wants to go.
He fully avails himself of researcher degrees of freedom to produce studies that amazingly are exactly congruent to his ideological agenda. The fact that putative top journals publish his tripe is indicative of how ideology has hijacked science.
Show some backbone, journal editors, don't go for the faddish, for the pc, for plaudits on Twitter. Go with the evidence, go with researcher integrity, lean against researcher degrees of freedom, go against ideology.
Turban is an activist who tricks out his ideology with scientific terminology. It is all a charade. I would say exactly the same thing of a researcher with the precise opposite ideology of Turban because ... the truth shall set you free.
The one thing that resonates most when I read these tireless deconstructions that are, for now, being noticed almost entirely by the already convinced is that they will assume enormous value once enough people understand the surreal level of bad-faith claims being made in the area of "gender science" even in peer-reviewed journals.
I'm expecting the tide to turn with such alacrity (the NYT is already shifting the narrative) that even though I despise the viciousness of the attacks against Jesse and others, and have repeatedly derided the participation of transwomen in female sports myself, I genuinely fear undue backlash against trans people in general, including the many quiet ones struggling to resolve their feelings and place in the world, and whose interests have been largely co-opted by a horde of screaming white shitlibs who conspicuously couldn't care less about either the facts or how this turns out for the various identity groups they've been relentlessly pimping for clicks and approval.
When, pray tell, is Turban going to respond to *any* of these critiques, let alone yours? How long can one influential researcher get away with this “quality” of research?
I remember Jesse debunking studies with the resigned lament "I didn't have time for this but I guess I'll have to as no-one else is".
It's brilliant to see Jesse able to reference so many others reporting or emailing him with stringent quality control.
This is a fantastic critique. Thank you for putting it in language an ordinary intelligent, and maybe not so intelligent, reader can understand.
Can a researcher like Turban turn out such shoddy work again and again and still be respected? And what of UC San Fran.....Doesn't that institution care? And isn't that the same university where a professor ignorantly went after the "Normal Distribution" in an article from Scientific American?
What of the "Pediatrics" magazine....will it have the courage to point out flaws or is it terrified that doing so will bring the "transphobic" charge on it?
"Though with the GWAS revolution, you never know — watch this space for breaking news about the newly discovered genetic underpinnings of going goth."
That was my initial reaction (which now appears to be correct). Going goth may be partially genetic. Let me use an extreme analogy. Cutting showed evidence of being a social phenomena. However, even at the peak, most teens were not cutters. Why some teens and not others? It could have been partially genetic.
This is a fantastic analysis, Jesse! I especially appreciate that you have taken apart the logical leaps that this paper makes; it is not testing the claims of Littman about ROGD, but rather some sloppy version of them that seems to deliberately misunderstand their actual nature.
Great post, as usual. I want to add with respect to the alleged decline in trans-ID that was found between 2017 and 2019 that when you use proper statistical procedures that can handle the complex survey design (such as SAS procedure surveyfreq, which by the way is required when you use this dataset) you shrink the contribution of Maryland from almost 40% to under 6%, and at the same time, you find that trans-ID rates in the included states stayed about the same (statistically no different) between 2017 and 2019.
Insanity these days it's like "NBC and the American Academy of Pediatric Endocrinologists published an article with 100 errors, and now I'm going to write a terse rebuttal on my Substack.!"
And yet. The piece passesd peer review at Pediatrics, a respectable journal (well, it has been, and for a long time). And respectable news outlets continue to push it.
Which is evidence for the politicization of science and news -- a rational reason for those on the Right to turn away from those elites. The pity is that so many then find homes in Donald Trump's neighborhood.
if someone ID's as trans who does not have dysphoria, as Turban states, that would imply trans ID is a choice. IOW trans id is not immutable and shouldnt supersede the rights of protected groups that are, such as women, gays and children.
Certainly, Turban is a first rate propaganda minister gleefully creating news headlines via his imagined ideology that allows him to leap like superman over all the inconvenient gaps
of his arguments.
If they think that exposure to trans identification has no effect why do they promote ‘trans day of visibility’?