Also retweeted someone who had taken an arbtrary subsample (well, top 5 men and women from France with no explanation of why sampling was taken in this way) of some data to try to discredit the male advantage in chess:
Tony posted a follow-up tweet which I actually agree with: there are fewer women in chess because of creepy men!
Erin Reed • @ErinInTheMorn • 2024-02-05 04:58:32 UTC
I’ve never seen a more easy way to explain why there are so few women in chess and at high levels of chess.
Elon Musk retweets a claim that men have a biological advantage at chess.
Then some chess enthusiast reply guy goes ultra creep mode on women players.
Thats why.
So obviously we should let said creepy men play in the women's tournaments!
I read Pamela Paul's New York Times article on detransitioners this morning, along with Tony's "debunking" of it, which was published on his Substack blog and reprinted verbatim by The Advocate.
Pamela Paul's article:
Opinion | As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do. - The New York Times (
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Tony's blog:
Debunked: Misleading NYT Anti-Trans Article By Pamela Paul Relies On Pseudoscience (
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Reprinted at The Advocate:
Latest NYT anti-trans article relies on pseudoscience (
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When I read Paul's article I kept thinking "how is Tony meant to 'debunk' this?", because really all Paul does is set out that there is a dispute over treatment approaches. Tony's "debunking" is really nothing of the sort. He paraphrases bits of Paul's article where she cites arguments he disagrees with, and responds to those.
But Paul is very even handed. At most, you could say that she argues that there are at least some people for whom the affirmative approach doesn't work (whom she interviews).
Ultimately I think this is an attempt, through hysterical whinging, to return to the past situation where it was forbidden to discuss alternatives to affirmation. The most consequential part of Tony's "debunking" is the first paragraph:
Tony said:
In an article published in the opinion section of The New York Times, opinion columnist Pamela Paul wrote a 4,500-word article filled with factual errors and unfounded assumptions about transgender care and the lived experiences of transgender people. Although the article is presented as a piece on detransitioners, the interviews serve as vehicles through which Paul packages inaccuracies and disinformation with faulty citations and claims that are not supported by the evidence she presents. The article is the latest in a series published by The New York Times to do so, and a simple fact check of the claims presented easily debunks the article's central premises as highly misleading.
We've had several cases in the past where a fairly anodyne article is published and the troons freak out, leading to the outlet to apologise or whatever. This is Tony's call to arms, to get trannies bleating: "It's full of factual errors! It's inaccurate! It's disinformation!" in the hope that it will chasten New York Times editors and make them wary of touching the subject again.
I've gone through Tony's specific points below. I've mostly just addressed his "claim/fact" bits; the paragraphs that follow them are just typical Tony verbiage, repeating things that we've gone over ad nauseam by now.
Tony said:
Claim: Rapid onset gender dysphoria and transgender social contagion is making people trans.
Fact: Rapid onset gender dysphoria and transgender social contagion is not a validated theory, has been widely debunked as pseudoscience by major medical organizations.
Paul addresses this controversy in the article. Rather than acknowledge there is a disagreement here, Tony just takes one side.
Pamela Paul said:
While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.
Tony continues to lie about what happened to the Littman paper. He repeats this lie in a short update he added at the end:
Tony said:
Post publication edit: Originally, the article read that Paul relied on a study by Lisa Littman that was retracted. This is corrected to read that Paul cited a separate study, which was itself retracted. Littman’s study was removed and republished with a correction noting that her research "does not validate the phenomenon" of social contagion with an apology from the journal.
More on Littman's original ROGD paper:

Tony, man, you've got to know that Littman's paper was not retracted. Surely.
He also lies (by omission) about Ken Zucker. Zucker’s clinic was closed, then Zucker sued, winning an apology and more than $500,000. More on Zucker:
Then Tony goes on to attack Kenneth Zucker with a report that CAMH apologized for and gave Zucker over half a million dollars in damages for publishing (troons never mention this part, but Jesse Singal does which is stochastic terrorism)
Tony weirdly describes Bailey as "Littman’s treasurer", when he is obviously
a renowned researcher in his own right. Tony also lies by omission about the Diaz-Bailey paper; it was retracted by Springer Nature on a standard that Springer Nature has never applied to any other paper.
This the recent Diaz & Bailey paper on ROGD.
In general, Paul describes that there is a dispute, and Tony fails to realise that he is one of the parties to the dispute that Paul described; the side that refuses to take its opponents’ arguments seriously.
Tony said:
Claim: Stephanie Winn, a "licensed marriage and family therapist," spoke out in favor of "approach gender dysphoria in a more considered way" but then was "investigated" for conversion therapy.
Fact: Stephanie Winn suggested the treatment of transgender youth with acupuncture to "see if they like having needles put in them" and stating it could "help spark desistance." She also pushed the idea that transgender men should be estrogen to make them feel more feminine.
Tony’s "fact" is not a response to the claim. Tony attacks Winn for practising "cruel, coercive, and painful conversion therapy techniques", with his evidence being a blog post in which Winn contemplates several things including acupuncture to "spark the creative mind in ways that might, for someone, somewhere, illuminate something that could be helpful".
("should be estrogen" appears verbatim in the Advocate article; so clearly it’s just been republished without any changes.)
Tony said:
Claim: Transgender people may actually just be gay, and transitioning is a form of "conversion therapy."
Fact: Gender and sexuality are different, many transgender people identify as gay or bisexual after transition, and gay acceptance is higher than trans acceptance.
This doesn’t address the claim. The following paragraphs are about how people dislike troons more than gays, and the refrain of "couldn’t you have just been gay?" But Paul isn’t suggesting that all trans-identified people are gay.
Tony said:
Claim: 80% of transgender individuals desist from being transgender if they go through puberty without intervention, and another study suggests that 30% of individuals stop taking hormone therapy medication.
Fact: Detransition rates are estimated to be between 1-4%. The study citing an 80% detransition rate is based on faulty outdated data, using criteria no longer in use. Furthermore, the study indicating a 30% discontinuation rate is based on military families not refilling their prescriptions through Tricare, rather than actual discontinuation of hormone therapy.
We have no idea what detransition rates are. Paul covers this in the article; effectively no detransitioners tell their gender docs, and we know from Jamie Reed and the Tavistock that not all clinics keep such records.
The Detransition Rate Is Unknown | Archives of Sexual Behavior (
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I actually agree with Tony that we can’t rely on older studies, even those conducted 10–20 years ago, because the current cohort is so different (ROGD!). Conversely, it’s difficult to study desistence among trans-identified people who are "affirmed", as this may help to cement a transgender identity (as Paul mentions and as Hilary Cass discusses in her interim report).