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?
Think of it like a spinoff of the #MeToo movement - "Believe All Transitions".
If they won't admit male prisoners might fake being trans to get transferred to the womens' prison, they certainly won't admit some kids might be following a social contagion.
No, because that’s “gatekeeping” and requires accepting that declared gender identity is not the sole arbiter of gender. Or that a certain level of transition is required to be a “real” trans person.
To be clear I actually think your idea is a reasonable one and probably the closest to reality. But it’s not the horse trans activists have hitched their wagon to
The other serious issue that activists will discover down the road (apparently) is that the more ROGD kids get put on the Full Medical Regimen then realize they’re just on a gender journey, the more the average public will turn against transition for all youth, full stop. Particularly so if long-term consequences are found.
I've been making this argument for months. Some people honestly think they have cancer and don't (hypochondriacs). Some people knowingly lie about having cancer for one reason or another (Munchausen's, insurance scams, whatever).
No one thinks that acknowledging the existence of these two groups implies that cancer is not a real condition.
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 completely meant to make that point but simply forgot to. Yes, since we don't know the biological sex of the kids in the sample, there could absolutely be cases where the kids report they are 'straight' with reference to the gender identity, but where they're technically homosexual with reference to biological sex. Which means their trajectory would be perfectly compatible with ROGD, but Turban et al would interpret it as evidence *against* the theory. I did mean to include that, so thank you for bringing it up.
I've been analyzing the YRBSS for a related purpose for the past several months, and it is obvious that at least some respondents are using creative interpretations of all of these words. There is another question about sex of sexual partners, and if you try to line it up with what kids report about their own sex and sexual orientation, you find that anywhere from 2% to 5%, depending on the category, are reporting things that are mutually exclusive with respect to the standard meanings of the terms.
And also: the "standard meanings" have been dislodged by the big gay-rights orgs! What a betrayal of their original, same-sex attracted constituents, supporters, and advocates. Now, if you're not same-gender attracted, you might just be a "transphobic."
But the kids don't know the history, and so the way they understand these terms will truly be all over the map.
Figured. It’s also just hard to know where to start, I mean, even if this was accurate it doesn’t say anything very useful; stigma could be a factor for some kids but not others, nobody is suggesting the population is homogenous.
Aww, I don't want to put you on the spot! I'm an academic and I'm always about giving credit where it's due. I'm also in the subset of academics that think humility is a virtue. (Those who don't tend to become Twitter personalities, much to their own detriment. I will say no more about certain holders of named chairs at Yale. 😸)
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?
he will get away with it as long as his results serve the official approved narrative...once the herd of independent minds we call the media senses that the ground is shifting and they need to cover their tracks (that is, try to achieve some sort of plausible deniability about their role in producing and directing transmania) he will no longer be useful and then they will turn on him or at least memory-hole him and his work.
How long? I mean, read the NBC "article". It reeks of confirmation bias. They bring up Littman only to try to further discredit her. Then they simply bandwagon with Turban with not a single critical point raised.
So, yeah. As long as the MSM is a narrative driven shit show, Turban and his ilk are safe.
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.
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
Excellent writeup. I agree the issue of how respondents interpreted the sex question is significant and likely to have muddled the results, but I don't know whether I find Biggs' height analysis that compelling. In a group of biological males I wouldn't be surprised if the transgender identified group reported slightly shorter heights, because shorter males might be more likely to identify as trans, for a variety of reasons. The transgender group could also be slightly more likely to under report / less likely to over report their height (see here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-011-0003-8).
It's a clever idea for spot checking with the data available but doesn't seem like strong proof to me, especially since there wasn't a similar difference in the female group.
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?
Think of it like a spinoff of the #MeToo movement - "Believe All Transitions".
If they won't admit male prisoners might fake being trans to get transferred to the womens' prison, they certainly won't admit some kids might be following a social contagion.
I know it’s not your exact point, but there have been plenty of cases of cancer grifters who in fact did not have cancer, so it’s a point well taken.
No, because that’s “gatekeeping” and requires accepting that declared gender identity is not the sole arbiter of gender. Or that a certain level of transition is required to be a “real” trans person.
To be clear I actually think your idea is a reasonable one and probably the closest to reality. But it’s not the horse trans activists have hitched their wagon to
The other serious issue that activists will discover down the road (apparently) is that the more ROGD kids get put on the Full Medical Regimen then realize they’re just on a gender journey, the more the average public will turn against transition for all youth, full stop. Particularly so if long-term consequences are found.
I've been making this argument for months. Some people honestly think they have cancer and don't (hypochondriacs). Some people knowingly lie about having cancer for one reason or another (Munchausen's, insurance scams, whatever).
No one thinks that acknowledging the existence of these two groups implies that cancer is not a real condition.
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 completely meant to make that point but simply forgot to. Yes, since we don't know the biological sex of the kids in the sample, there could absolutely be cases where the kids report they are 'straight' with reference to the gender identity, but where they're technically homosexual with reference to biological sex. Which means their trajectory would be perfectly compatible with ROGD, but Turban et al would interpret it as evidence *against* the theory. I did mean to include that, so thank you for bringing it up.
I've been analyzing the YRBSS for a related purpose for the past several months, and it is obvious that at least some respondents are using creative interpretations of all of these words. There is another question about sex of sexual partners, and if you try to line it up with what kids report about their own sex and sexual orientation, you find that anywhere from 2% to 5%, depending on the category, are reporting things that are mutually exclusive with respect to the standard meanings of the terms.
And also: the "standard meanings" have been dislodged by the big gay-rights orgs! What a betrayal of their original, same-sex attracted constituents, supporters, and advocates. Now, if you're not same-gender attracted, you might just be a "transphobic."
But the kids don't know the history, and so the way they understand these terms will truly be all over the map.
Figured. It’s also just hard to know where to start, I mean, even if this was accurate it doesn’t say anything very useful; stigma could be a factor for some kids but not others, nobody is suggesting the population is homogenous.
It might be worth editing the online version of this post to include this insight, with a credit to "X." in the comment section.
X.: You impress me again and again with your analytical prowess. Thank you!
"Fractally wrong" is the perfect description!
Aww, I don't want to put you on the spot! I'm an academic and I'm always about giving credit where it's due. I'm also in the subset of academics that think humility is a virtue. (Those who don't tend to become Twitter personalities, much to their own detriment. I will say no more about certain holders of named chairs at Yale. 😸)
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.
I only wish the kids knew the movie that line came from originally...
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?
he will get away with it as long as his results serve the official approved narrative...once the herd of independent minds we call the media senses that the ground is shifting and they need to cover their tracks (that is, try to achieve some sort of plausible deniability about their role in producing and directing transmania) he will no longer be useful and then they will turn on him or at least memory-hole him and his work.
How long? I mean, read the NBC "article". It reeks of confirmation bias. They bring up Littman only to try to further discredit her. Then they simply bandwagon with Turban with not a single critical point raised.
So, yeah. As long as the MSM is a narrative driven shit show, Turban and his ilk are safe.
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.
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’?
Excellent writeup. I agree the issue of how respondents interpreted the sex question is significant and likely to have muddled the results, but I don't know whether I find Biggs' height analysis that compelling. In a group of biological males I wouldn't be surprised if the transgender identified group reported slightly shorter heights, because shorter males might be more likely to identify as trans, for a variety of reasons. The transgender group could also be slightly more likely to under report / less likely to over report their height (see here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-011-0003-8).
It's a clever idea for spot checking with the data available but doesn't seem like strong proof to me, especially since there wasn't a similar difference in the female group.