@Geranium your effortposting is the backbone of this thread
I'm sorry to answer your diligent work with such horrifying content. Tony is clearly working with top-notch people, good to keep track of his meteoric rise.
I'm flattered, really, but I am honestly just happy that you and the rest of our friends in this thread post enough funny stuff to allow me to slip in my terminal
Someone-Is-Wrong-On-The-Internet-itis posts.
Took a couple of weeks, but I've finally gotten around to Tony's thread on the Reuters story. Here's the first tweet in the thread: (
twitter.com,
archive.ph)
Tony doesn't want to fuel Reuters' fascist genocide machine, so he doesn't link to the story, but it's here: (
reuters.com,
archive.ph)
The Reuters story is about how referrals to child gender clinics have gone from a relatively small amount of mostly boys to, in recent years, a much larger number of mostly girls.
If you are a mud-smeared, blood-soaked combatant in the Terf Wars, none of this will be new to you. You may well be familiar with Lisa Littman's paper, of 2018, which noted that clinicians were reporting a rise in the number of girls claiming gender dysphoria, and focussed on parental reports that their daughters' claims of trans identity were sudden (hence rapid-onset gender dysphoria, ROGD). (
journals.plos.org,
archive.ph)
If you are an especially grizzled veteran of the Terf Wars, repeatedly muttering to yourself "you weren't there, man", you may have seen this Swedish documentary, Trans Train, which focused on this phenomenon in Sweden and Norway:
The "international" clips shown in the snippet above are from RTÉ in Ireland and the BBC in Britain (the latter featuring trans propagandist Ben Hunte), where clinics had reported the same increase in adolescent natal females seeking treatment for gender dysphoria.
(I recommend
the first part of Trans Train - I've recently discovered that
there are several more parts which I have not watched.)
This won't surprise attentive Britbongs, where referrals to the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (or GIDS), which deals with children, have soared since 2010, and really taken off after 2014.
(
transgendertrend.com,
archive.ph)
(
segm.org,
archive.ph)
Phew, 400 words and not even into Tony's thread. Sorry! But that's basically the background. The Reuters story is that plus context plus quotes, rounding out to 6,000 words. As with the (shorter!) New York Times story, in this post I'm not intending to assess the Reuters story, only in so far as it matters to Tony's thread. So let's go!
Tony starts with some "You can't trust Reuters because they published another story I disagree with", and then guilt-by-association for one of the Reuters journalist's Twitter following list. It does not seem to have occurred to Tony that otherwise-uninvolved reporters might follow people relevant to a story they're reporting for a relatively brief period of time.
Finally, in tweet 7:
Tony said:
Lets start with the title, a very good place to start. The entire premise of the article is "more AFAB minors are seeking gender affirming care than AMAB people."
The idea behind this premise is to push that these people are not trans, they're just girls who "hate their body."
Tony is, for once, correct! The article is focused on the fact (and it is one) that currently more girls than boys are seeking treatment for gender dysphoria. His second sentence, about the "idea behind this premise", is entirely his speculation and is not something that is aired in the Reuters article.
Tony said:
What does the peer reviewed research of this say?
There actually hasn't been a lot! But the most recent article was from Jack Turban, who found that actually, there is NOT a sex discrepency in people seeking gender affirming care
Tony quotes one of his own tweets referring to a 2022 paper by Turban et al, "
Sex Assigned at Birth Ratio Among Transgender and Gender Diverse Adolescents in the United States". The Turban et al paper was quite long and I am commensurately drunk, but thankfully the hard work on this paper has been done for me by
Michael Biggs,
Leor Sapir and
Jesse Singal. The short of it? Turban et al claim there is not an imbalance in the sex ratio of trans-identifying youth by citing the claims of a survey from which we cannot tell which respondents are male or female. You cannot tell what Turban claims from the dataset he uses.
Tony says: “Interestingly the authors follow Jack Turban, but he appears nowhere in the article.” Perhaps the Reuters journalists realised that Turban is a quack?
Then, Tony says: “What is the authors evidence that such a sex discrepency [sic] exists? Non-peer reviewed single clinic anecdotes.” He includes a screenshot of the Reuters article where it cites the change in population at the Amsterdam University Medical Centre's gender clinic. But as noted above, this is not "single clinic anecdotes" - we have figures from GIDS in the UK, Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare, and Oslo University Hospital in Norway.
In his next tweet, Tony says: “This next section focuses on trans youth and regret. It is important to note that regret rates for transgender surgeries and procedures are exceptionally low. Lower than knee surgery, lower than even most lifesaving surgies. Recent regret rate studies show that it is around 2%”
As we have previously discussed, those who detransition are either simply not considered, don't inform their gender clinic, are "lost to follow up", or are simply ignored in studies because they no longer identify as transgender. So it is quite reckless to claim that "regret rates for transgender … procedures are … lower than even most lifesaving surgeries", even ignoring the silliness of that statement on its face. The study he links is a review (AND I AM AMAZED) but it does not discuss loss to follow-up; there is a fairly prominent table of the studies included, but it lists a sample size without any further details.
If these studies started with 5x the number of participants, but 4x were so horrendously disfigured by their amholes or rotdogs they ran away to live in the woods like Sasquatch, what can these figures say about the 1x of whom 98% had no regrets? (This is all hypothetical; the point is you can't tell from the linked study.)
Then we get into everyone's favourite topic, when Tony says that "ROGD does NOT exist", citing as proof
a WPATH position statement. I highly encourage you to read that WPATH statement (it's one page) because it doesn't prove Tony's claim that "ROGD does NOT exist". WPATH simply complains that "it is both premature and inappropriate to employ official-sounding labels" for something that hasn't had an official stamp of approval.
For those unfamiliar, what "ROGD" is, classically, is the phenomenon of (mostly) girls with no history of gender dysphoria suddenly adopting a trans identity. Lisa Littman's original paper is a descriptive account of this phenomenon through parent reports. Is it real? That is a good question deserving of serious study! It is not a settled issue. But, for the purposes of this post, we have in front of us a lot of tranny screeching, the Littman paper, the WPATH statement which says next to nothing, and statistics from several gender clinics. The trannies say "It can't possibly be real!" but the Littman paper and the referral stats seem to tally, which suggests there might be something worthy of further investigation. Certainly it has not been "debunked".
Tony says that, since the WPATH statement, "there has [sic] been a lot of studies on [ROGD]. It doesn't exist." He cites one, Bauer et al 2021 (
jpeds.com,
archive.ph) "in the esteemed Journal of Pediatrics" (lol). But the definition of ROGD used by Bauer et al was so different from the original, and so the conclusions so unrelated, that Littman felt compelled to write in to complain (
jpeds.com,
archive.ph).
Skipping along, Tony describes Lisa Littman as using a "discredited process" by relying on parent reports. Tony does not say how this is discredited; it seems like a logical approach to studying children with wildly fluctuating views. It's important also to note here that Littman has not overrepresented her research's findings, unlike some of Tony's favourite docs, and instead has consistently said that this is an area for further consideration and scrutiny.
Tony also says that Littman's research has been "smacked down" by WPATH in its latest self-identifying "Standards of Care", specifically in this passage:
WPATH said:
One researcher attempted to study and describe a specific form of later-presenting gender diversity experience (Littman, 2018). However, the findings of the study must be considered within the context of significant methodological challenges, including
1) the study surveyed parents and not youth perspectives; and 2) recruitment included parents from community settings in which treatments for gender dysphoria are viewed with scepticism and are criticized. However, these findings have not been replicated.
This … is not a smack-down? There are some shortcomings with Littman's research as judged against some abstract ideal, but Littman has been clear about them and research having shortcomings is not the same as research being fatally flawed.
Then we move onto the minimisation. Tony says that there are a "MINISCULE [sic] number" of teenage girls having both breasts removed because of gender dysphoria. He quotes Kate Strangio, who includes screenshot of a chart in the Reuters story suggesting 230–290 teenage girls are having breast amputations for gender reasons a year in the United States. I'll let you, m'learned friends, decide whether 300 American girls a year having their tits cut off because they think they're boys is a "MINISCULE number".
Finally, we end on Tony quote-tweeting Giles Branstetter of the ACLU, who wrote a whinging email to the journalists with fairly boring, unimportant points that I really can't be bothered to address.
No matter what gender you are, "twitch thot doing anime sexy faces" is some embarrassing ass shit.
to 
At least his mom will get him.
