Off-Topic "Scientific" Studies regarding Transpeople

[TruffleSpark]

If you've got 40 minutes to spare you should watch this video. Quentin Van Meter is one of the few doctors out there publicly talking sense about trans insanity.

 

[Wallace]

Here's a thorough literature review of the effects of estrogen on men. (archive link)

The short version is: It's bad for them. Of particular note is the effects on the brain:

1. Reduces hippocampal volume, leading to affective symptoms and cognitive dysfunction, which are core symptoms in patients with depression;
2. Reduces serum BDNF levels, which is also associated with an increased risk of developing MDD (Major Depressive Disorder);
3. Increases the concentration of glutamate in the brain, reduces gray matter, and reduces cortical white matter integrity, all of which brings about cognitive decline and is an indicator of several neuropathologies, most prominently Alzheimer’s;
4. Reduces the volume of astrocytes, malfunctioning of which contributes to the degradation of memory, mental illnesses like schizophrenia, mood disorders such as depression and anxiety, drug dependence, mental retardation, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s;
5. Decreases the brain cortical volume, which is associated with a lowering level of intelligence as well as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; and
6. Enlarges the ventricles across the brain, compressing the brain from within and eventually damaging and destroying brain tissue.

 

[AMHOLIO]

@Not Dr. Evil Get the fuck in here. And @Geranium too.

 

[Geranium]

@Not Dr. Evil Get the fuck in here. And @Geranium too.

Hello! I've written up a few papers for the Tony Reed (erininthemorn) thread. When I get a chance I'll turn them into posts that can stand alone here. Here's a (very slightly outdated) list I posted in @AirdropShitposts 's thread in PG:

various posts on scientific papers and journalist reports that troons have hailed/condemned

Didn't see that one, sorry. I was only searching for 'studies', 'scientific studies' etc. If the thread is too similar, it's fine by me if this one gets merged into the other or something. I directly put it here on this board since I felt that the topic was closest to transpeople in general and not another specific lolcow (sub-)community.

But the focus I intended with the PG thread was more stuff like troons claiming they have real "working" vaginas, get periods, are getting more emotional, etc. This isn't stuff anyone is ever going to actually do a scientific study on because it's so absurd in the first place.

I think this is a reasonable distinction, and honestly I felt a bit off posting the study stuff in the other thread, it detracts from the "crazy things trannies say about x" focus.

The meta-study mentioned in this article has the title 'Regret after Gender-affirmation Surgery: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Prevalence' (https://archive.ph/Tx5T4), was published in 2021 and, according to research gate, was cited 59 times.

Bustos et al, drink!

Citation to help future searchers:

Spoiler: Citation

Bustos VP, Bustos SS, Mascaro A, Del Corral G, Forte AJ, Ciudad P, Kim EA, Langstein HN, Manrique OJ. Regret after Gender-affirmation Surgery: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Prevalence. Plast Reconstr Surg Glob Open. 2021 Mar 19;9(3):e3477. doi: 10.1097/GOX.0000000000003477. Erratum in: Plast Reconstr Surg Glob Open. 2022 Apr 28;10(4):e4340. PMID: 33968550; PMCID: PMC8099405.

JL Cederblom is essential reading on the Bustos regret paper: At what point does incompetence become fraud? (archive)

The paper is absolutely full of straight up errors. Not even questionable and flawed approaches, which is typically what you find in gender medicine research, but just plain errors, which the authors and the journal have refused to correct. They can't even summarise basic details about the included papers correctly.

The biggest problem is that they hallucinated much larger sample sizes — as @Comfyman points out, this gives them an overall low regret rate. The papers weighted most heavily are those that suffer the worst from Bustos et al's sample inflation.

But perhaps the funniest is that Bustos et al claim that in "1998, Kuiper et al followed 1100 transgender subjects that underwent GAS using social media and snowball sampling." As Jesse Singal puts it: "SOCIAL MEDIA! IN 1998!"

Singal mentioned Bustos in an article for Unherd: The media is spreading bad trans science - UnHerd (archive)

But what about the study which, she claims, “found that fewer than 1% of those who have received gender-affirming surgery say they regret their decision to do so”? Here’s where things get downright weird.

The study in question, published in 2021 in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Global Open, has dozens of errors that its nine authors and editors have refused to correct. Indeed, it appears to have been executed and published to such an unprofessional standard that one might ask why it hasn’t been retracted entirely.

Before we get into all that, though, it’s worth pointing out that even if it had been competently conducted, the review could not have provided us with a reliable estimate of the regret rate following gender-affirming surgery: the studies it meta-analyses are just too weak. Many of those included did not actually contact people who had undergone surgery to ask them if they regretted it; rather, the authors searched medical records for mentions of regret and/or for other evidence of surgical reversals. Yet this method is inevitably going to underestimate the number of regretters, because plenty of people regret a procedure without going through the trouble of either reversing it or informing the doctor who performed it. In one study of detransitioners — albeit one focusing on a fairly small and non-random online sample — three quarters of them said they did not inform their clinicians that they had detransitioned.

The studies included in this review also failed to follow up with a very large number of patients. The meta-analysis had a total sample size of about 5,600; the largest study, with a sample size of 2,627 — so a little under half the entire sample — had a loss-to-follow-up rate of 36%. If you’re losing track of a third of your patients, you obviously don’t really know how they’re doing and can’t make any strong claims about their regret rates. And yet, the authors don’t mention the loss-to-follow-up issue anywhere in their paper. No version of this meta-analysis, then, was likely to provide a reliable estimate of the regret rate for gender-affirming surgery.

Even so, the version that was published was particularly disastrous. Independent researcher J.L. Cederblom summed it up: “What are these numbers? These are all wrong… And these weren’t even simple one-off errors — instead different tables disagreed with each other. The metaphor that comes to mind is drunk driving.”

To take one example, the authors initially reported that the aforementioned largest paper in their meta-analysis had a sample size of 4,863. But they misread it — the true figure was actually only 2,627. They also misstated other aspects of that report, such as how regret was investigated (they said it was via questionnaire but it was via medical records search) and the age of the sample (they said it included some juveniles, but it did not).

Not all the errors were significant, but they were remarkably numerous. And because of the abundance of issues, the paper attracted the attention of other researchers. “In light of these numerous issues affecting study quality and data analysis, [the authors’] conclusion that ‘our study has shown a very low percentage of regret in TGNB population after GAS’ is, in our opinion, unsupported and potentially inaccurate,” wrote two critics, Pablo Expósito-Campos and Roberto D’Angelo, in a letter to the editor that the journal subsequently published. In her own letter, the researcher Susan Bewley highlighted what appears to be an absence of vital information about the authors’ method of putting together the meta-analysis.

The authors and the editors decided to simply not correct any of this. They did publish an erratum, in which they republished seven tables that still contained errors, while maintaining that all those errors had no impact on the paper’s takeaway findings. But the paper itself remains published, in its original form, complete with those 2,200 ghost-patients inflating the sample size.

Here's a thread JL Cederblom wrote about Bustos in reply to some people promoting it on Twitter:

@JLCederblom, tweet 1576798499357630464 (archive)

J. Reads and Writes (@JLCederblom) · Oct 3, 2022 · 4:38 AM UTC
Interesting, the part you highlighted says "A total of 27 studies, pooling 7928 transgender patients". Let's look more carefully at that.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8099405/table/T2/?report=objectonly

J. Reads and Writes (@JLCederblom) · Oct 3, 2022 · 4:40 AM UTC
Kuiper et al., 1100 sample size reported. That's interesting. Let's look at Kuiper et al.

Oh, the sample size isn't 1100 at all. It's 10. They just mention that they believe 1100 was the total population, nationally.

J. Reads and Writes (@JLCederblom) · Oct 3, 2022 · 4:43 AM UTC
Interesting mistake to make. But it's probably isolated, right? They wouldn't make a ton of mistakes, surely. Wait, what's this - Wiepjes et al., 2018, sample size of 4863? Hang on a minute... The sample size is 1742 + 885, which is 2627 rather than 4863.

J. Reads and Writes (@JLCederblom) · Oct 3, 2022 · 4:49 AM UTC
Interesting. What about some smaller examples. Let's look at Jiang, et al. They say 80 people were investigated for regrets, with a 1.25% rate found (i.e. one person). If we read the actual paper, we find they asked 16 people, and got 14 answers, and the rate was 6.25%.

J. Reads and Writes (@JLCederblom) · Oct 3, 2022 · 4:50 AM UTC
However, that doesn't really matter because the paper isn't about regret with surgery, it's about regretting choosing one procedure over another. It shouldn't even be in the review you linked.

J. Reads and Writes (@JLCederblom) · Oct 3, 2022 · 4:52 AM UTC
Those "mistakes" (there are so many that you could be forgiven for thinking they were either malicious or simply extremely negligent) are all on the authors. But you said a number of false things as well, for example about the recency of the data.

J. Reads and Writes (@JLCederblom) · Oct 3, 2022 · 4:53 AM UTC
In reality, almost all of it predates the demographic shift (see the male/female ratios, and the explosive trends, i.e. 4400%). All of it is abject garbage data, with the exceptions being Landén et al., 1998, (who the paper calls "Laden") and arguably Blanchard et al., 1989.

J. Reads and Writes (@JLCederblom) · Oct 3, 2022 · 4:56 AM UTC
So, when you thought you were going to score some easy debate points, "shut up, I have science!", you actually ended up portraying yourself as a peddler of pseudoscience, and the topic of discussion should now be whether you knew this and intentionally tried to mislead people...

J. Reads and Writes (@JLCederblom) · Oct 3, 2022 · 4:57 AM UTC
...or if you're just really ignorant and incapable of seeing through the most incompetently put together pseudoscientific article.

Singal also wrote a fun exasperated Twitter thread on Bustos:

@jessesingal, tweet 1692877908413407249 (archive)

Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) · Aug 19, 2023 · 12:35 PM UTC
1/ More fun w/Bustos et al, the endlessly flogged "meta-analysis" showing low regret rates for trans surgery: "We wish to make the following corrections, but plan on still reporting one study as n = 1,100 rather than n = 10, a mistake we super promise won't affect our results."

Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) · Aug 19, 2023 · 12:40 PM UTC
2/ The people callling you a bigot for distrusting this paper insist you defer to researchers who wrote: "In 1998, Kuiper et al followed 1100 transgender subjects that underwent GAS using social media and snowball sampling." SOCIAL MEDIA! IN 1998!

Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) · Aug 19, 2023 · 12:40 PM UTC
3/ The study in question did not examine 1,1000 transgender subjects and (obviously) did not have anything to do with social media. Other than that, great summary. This is the second instance of this team/paper misttating the sample size of a study by four figures (me in UnHerd).

Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) · Aug 19, 2023 · 12:51 PM UTC
4/ Oh, here's another instance of them inaccurately reporting a paper's sample size. This is also in the "corrected" table. All of these errors point in the same direction: a (fake) larger sample size, which will have the effect of deflating regret

Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) · Aug 19, 2023 · 12:52 PM UTC
5/ This paper, which, to repeat myself, demonstrates beyond a doubt that the researchers in question are incapable of consistently doing what a smart 12-year-old can do, is endlessly cited in both major outlets and legislation. How does this help trans people?

Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) · Aug 19, 2023 · 1:57 PM UTC
6/ Should add that if I'm being meaner than I usually am it's b/c journal + authors have dragged their feet and refused to correct stuff in a manner that's quite unprofessional.

More here: https://unherd.com/2023/04/the-media-is-spreading-bad-trans-science/

and https://nitter.net/JLCederblom is the OG on this

https://genspect.org/at-what-point-does-incompetence-become-fraud/

Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) · Aug 19, 2023 · 1:58 PM UTC
7/ Genuinely caring about trans people is completely incompatible with excusing and propagating research like this.

 

[Comfyman]

Thank you everyone for your input so far. I'm glad that the thread is well received.

I could see the dutch clinic having a lot fewer detransitioners and generally people reporting regret if their data predates the gender-trendiness of the mid-2010s tbh.

Yet we don't know the actual number of detransitioners as well as the total number of people who even reported regret since the definition of regret by the authors merges these two factors together, making it the most narrow and most convenient definition possible. Think of it like a flow chart. Generally speaking, the people start with hormone therapy and then advance to the surgery, revision surgeries etc. If someone starts HT, which already has long-term effects on the body as shown by @Wallace , and then either expresses regret and stops or silently stops without telling anyone, it isn't seen as regret (since everyone in Table 4 had a surgery done). If someone does the surgery and then regrets their choice but has to live with it, commits suicide, just detransitions without expressing their regret or expresses their regret without detransitioning, neither of those are seen as regret. And they still got some cases who were still willing to keep contact with the clinic and who were desperate enough to try to 'reverse' their decision of transitioning. And that was, as you said, before the beginning of the gender-trendiness. Just imagine what the real situation is today. And then include those people who suffer from their decision but lie to themself about being a real man/woman without facing the reality that their decision has caused.

 

[Jacques1194]

Does anyone know of any articles where someone tried to explain the psychology behind non binary or gender fluid?.TIPs always argue that neuroscience backs them up, but whenever i ask them where are the scientific studies that confirms the existence of a non binary or gender fluid brain, they have nothing.Do they know that arguing for a non binary brain while claiming male brain in female body and vice versa would contradict themselves?They cant say some brains are male or female but also some brains dont have a sex(which is what NBs argue).Also the idea of a brain that's half male and female to argue the existence of gender fluid brains would sound insane as well because how would the brain work like that?

 

[batteredpancakes]

I posted this Lancet article way back early last year on the general transgender thread so I'll post it here too.
Original KF post
Journal link
Archive
Basically, this is a paper from a bunch of Trannies complaining to researchers about how they're being transphobic by making them look bad and they should only post research when it's positive and affirming.

Spoiler: Text

As transgender people working in HIV research and public health, we express concern over the exploitation of transgender communities in academic research. Articles published in The Lancet have compelled our response, but in the spirit of calling our colleagues in rather than out, we are responding to the broader practice of studying transgender communities as so-called subjects of academic intrigue rather than real people with urgent health needs.
For example, we have observed a trend in public health literature concluding that transgender women partner with cisgender heterosexual men. Perhaps this finding is astonishing to the dominant research establishment, but it is not new information to transgender communities. Methods used to reach this conclusion include HIV-molecular and phylodynamic analyses—methods that are reported to have alarming limitations, questionable ethics, and potentially harmful consequences.

Use of potentially dangerous methods to reproduce knowledge that already exists in transgender communities exemplifies a systemic problem in public health research that prioritises so-called scholarship over the wellbeing of study populations who experience discrimination. Transgender people need not be subjected to these methods; knowledge of our partnerships is readily available in our lived experience. Furthermore, presenting this finding as unexpected perpetuates the transphobic notion that transgender women are not real women, and that heterosexual men's partnerships with transgender women should inspire bewilderment. We remind our colleagues of the serious danger of undermining transgender people's identities.

Researchers have a great responsibility: the creation and production of knowledge. Trans-gender people (including transgender academics) have to live with the knowledge that is created about us. We ask researchers who study transgender communities to consider the following questions. Who is the research for: the researchers or the study population? Does the project offer any meaningful benefit to transgender communities? Could the research question be reformulated to address more pressing needs among transgender people than what is being investigated? How does the project prioritise the needs of transgender people who are Black, Indigenous, and people of colour, whose health needs are most urgent due to enduring multiple forms of structural oppression? Do the methods include inherent limitations, ethical considerations, or potentially harmful consequences? How might the study portray transgender communities in stigmatising ways?

Over the years, transgender and allied responses to research in transgender populations have been reactive and proactive.We urge researchers studying transgender people to thoughtfully use these resources. Transgender people urgently need research that results in meaning-ful progress for our communities. We declare that research on transgender people must benefit transgender people.

We declare no competing interests.

Every single author here is a tranny. Four TiMs and two TiFs.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

And a 2011 journal titled "Autogynephilia: an underappreciated paraphilia". I'll have to find an accessible link since it's been so long since I skimmed the whole paper.

And at New MRI Studies Support the Blanchard Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism - PMC (archive), there's a 2011 study that's said to find that males who identify as "transgender" are either autogynophiles or are homosexuals who want to seduce straight guys.

Also at Q&A: Therapists on Gender Identity Issues in Kids : NPR (archive), it's said that back in 2008, 88% of kids with "gender dysphoria" outgrew it when they got older.

No wonder The Cult of Progress wants to inject the "ideology" of "transgender" into elementary school curriculums.

 

[Wallace]

We declare that research on transgender people must benefit transgender people.

If it leads to a better outcome than all of the shit we have documented above, isn't that a benefit?

We declare no competing interests.

 

[Procrastinhater]

This is a study I found on mental health issues in eunuchs, crossposting from Dongs thread.
Eunuchs suffer all kinds of physical and psychological problems including but not limited to kyphosis, pot bellies, baldness and a whole host of mental issues, many stemming from them being unlikebale, scheming, perverted bastards who find themselves shunned by society.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347627327_JPMA-2019-07-887_The_mental_health_issues_of_eunuchs_in_the_context_of_social_exclusion

 

[Procrastinhater]

Fantastic OP by the way, and great idea for a thread.
We needed somewhere for actually legit studies to be posted to counter the pseudo science of the Cult, where people can go to find actual studies without having to hunt them down.

 

[Comfyman]

Fantastic OP by the way, and great idea for a thread.
We needed somewhere for actually studies to be posted to counter the pseudo science of the Cult, where people can go to find actual studies without having to hunt them down.

I have tried to extend the introductory sentence of the OP to include 'real' studies since it makes sense to include flawed gender-ideology studies, solid studies as well as articles that analyse such all in one thread, in my opinion.

 

[Geranium]

Quick summary of the Chen et al paper that was all the rage at the start of the year.

---

Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth after 2 Years of Hormones​

Diane Chen, Ph.D., Johnny Berona, Ph.D., Yee-Ming Chan, M.D., Ph.D., Diane Ehrensaft, Ph.D., Robert Garofalo, M.D., M.P.H., Marco A. Hidalgo, Ph.D., Stephen M. Rosenthal, M.D., Amy C. Tishelman, Ph.D., and Johanna Olson-Kennedy, M.D.

January 19, 2023. N Engl J Med 2023; 388:240-250 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2206297

Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth after 2 Years of Hormones | NEJM (archive)

Conclusion:

In this 2-year study involving transgender and nonbinary youth, GAH [gender-affirming hormones] improved appearance congruence and psychosocial functioning.

This paper is still being promoted by Jack Turban. @jack_turban, tweet 1698055042371346678 (archive)

At the time, pro-trans outlets reported its findings uncritically. Trans Teens Benefit From Gender-Affirming Care - The Washington Post (archive)

Here's a summary of the paper's approach from Jesse Singal:

The research team has spent years following a cohort of kids who have been administered puberty blockers or hormones at four participating clinics. In this study, they reported on how the kids who went on hormones did over the two-year span following the start of that process. The participants filled out surveys every six months on issues pertaining to their mental health, gender dysphoria, and so on. According to the authors, the kids showed key improvements two years later. “Our results provide a strong scientific basis that gender-affirming care is crucial for the psychological well-being of our patients,” said Robert Garofalo, one of the principal investigators for the study, as well as co-director of the youth gender clinic at Lurie Children’s Hospital in a Chicago, in a press release accompanying the study. A number of media outlets echoed this narrative.

Analysis​

Jesse Singal published a two-part assessment of the paper, which I highly recommend:
On Scientific Transparency, Researcher Degrees Of Freedom, And That NEJM Study On Youth Gender Medicine (Updated) (archive)
The New, Highly Touted Study On Hormones For Transgender Teens Doesn’t Really Tell Us Much Of Anything (archive)

But in short, here are the problems with the authors' approach:

• The authors preregistered their hypotheses — where they say what they'll report on in the final paper; a method to keep researchers honest by making it clear when they change their arguments to fit the results. ie, they can't just make things up as they go along to make their paper more compelling.
• In their preregistration they hypothesised that several measures would improve as a result of cross-sex hormone treatment.
• In their final paper they just ignored most of the measures they said they'd report on; because they showed no improvement. Instead of grappling with this fact, they just swept it under the rug.
• One of the main measures they did report on (appearance congruence — my appearance fits what I would like to look like) was not mentioned at all in the preregistration, and is of questionable significance.
• The researchers had participants complete several measures, but just stopped using some of them part-way through the study.

And here are the concerns raised by their reported results:

• 2 of the 315 participants committed suicide (an extremely high rate).
• Anxiety and depression improved for trans-identified females, but not for trans-identified males (probably due to the antidepressant effect of testosterone, which is not seen with estrogen, and for which the researchers don't account).
• The improvement in anxiety & depression was small. At the end of the study 42.5% of the participants were still depressed (down from 51.5%). The percentage of kids with severe depression went from 15.6% at the start to 13.7% at the end.
• The reported improvements can't be attributed to hormones because the researchers don't account for any therapy or other medications the participants may have received.

 

[JULAY]

View attachment 5317173
If you've got 40 minutes to spare you should watch this video. Quentin Van Meter is one of the few doctors out there publicly talking sense about trans insanity.

Jesus Christ, I thought I knew the whole story of what a fucking monster John Money was, but fuck, he is a strong candidate for the most evil person who ever lived. If I could go back in time and kill just one person, it would be John Money.

 

[TruffleSpark]

Another John Money fact, when he was a lecturer at the University of Otago in the 1940s he had a student called Janet Frame who he had forcefully institutionalized. She was then wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia and she spent most of the next 8 years in various psychiatric institutions where she was forcefully subjected to electroshock therapy and insulin shock therapy. In 1953 they let her go because she had managed to get a short story collection published that won a bunch of awards, thus proving she was sane in the eyes of the system. She was scheduled for a transorbital lobotomy at the time, and had she remained in the system for even a few weeks longer she would have had her brain permanently destroyed.

 

[Procrastinhater]

Jesus Christ, I thought I knew the whole story of what a fucking monster John Money was, but fuck, he is a strong candidate for the most evil person who ever lived. If I could go back in time and kill just one person, it would be John Money.

Money was a fucking monster. Without doubt one of the most evil men ever.
If he lived in Germany in the 30's he would have been at Dachau doing human experiments on prisoners and would be remembered today alongside people like Mengele and Shiro Ishii from Unit 731.
It shows the depth of evil of the modern gender cult that a fucking monster like Money is hailed as a visionary and founder of the Cult.
If there is a Hell, Money is screaming in it, hopefully having all the shit he subjected those children to done to him by Cenobites.
It's just a shame poor David Reimer didn't knock on Money's door one night and take the fucker with him when he decided he could no longer live with what Money did to him.

 

[Geranium]

If he lived in Germany in the 30's he would have been at Dachau doing human experiments on prisoners and would be remembered today alongside people like Mengele and Shiro Ishii from Unit 731.

Erwin Gohrbandt, who performed the first vaginoplasty procedures at Magnus Hirschfeld's institute, oversaw the hypothermia human experiments at Dachau. Prisoners were forced into ice water, or left naked outside in sub-zero temperatures, for hours. Nazi Science — The Dachau Hypothermia Experiments | NEJM (archive)

Something about transgenderism really attracts grade-A scumbags. Troons today celebrate Hirschfeld and his institute.

More here:

So, Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Sexualwissenschaft variously translated into English by different sources as Sexual Research, Sexual Science, or Sexology). The history of sexuality is not one of my interests, even (as here) as a footnote in the history of fascism and Nazism specifically. Thankfully I've seen various informative points made about Hirschfeld and his institute and so I thought I'd collect them here as a response to Tony's video.

 

[bile demon]

>1 % regret rate
>99 % safe and effective
>6 million
The science is settled.

 

[Wallace]

If anyone would like to hear the story of David Reimer and John Money, the sicko who started the whole idea of transgenderism, there's a podcast episode that just came out on Quillette.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Money was a fucking monster.

An interesting question: was he acting on his own, or did anyone else order that sick stuff to be done?

(also that sick crap John Money pulled is one reason I avoid unironically using that word "gender" now)