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Today, Jesse Singal wrote an opinion for the New York Times where he argued that Trump defunding youth gender research was a bad thing, despite the terrible research coming out of that part of science. He thinks that reform is in order, not slash-and-burn practices. In my opinion, there is definitely enough research out there by now that you can confidently release something like a Cass Report without anything new. Certainly, funding bad actors makes no sense, but to me, reform is little gain, and even a good new study must follow around minors that have gone through the unethical transgender science grinder.
It reminds me of an (unpopular) opinion Trace shared the other day on Twitter regarding the axing of funds for museums and libraries. Even if anthropology is 99% leftist, well, the institutions belong to those who show up, so right wingers just need to get in there and fix it themselves. While I appreciated that stance as it related to conservative law organizations, and as it related to Twitter when left-wingers were leaving the site en masse, I find it pretty distasteful to give up anthropology to positive feedback loops, and let our history become a mockery when it is within one's power to just raze it.
Deus Ex took a look at this perspective. Spoilers for Deus Ex:General Carter, after the UNATCO plot is exposed, decides to stay within the organization, because institutions are only as good as the people that comprise them. Later in the game, you see him in the Vandenburg compound. He has given up on his idea of reform and joined the resistance.
I'm going to guess most of this forum disagrees with Trace and Jesse on this matter in pretty much the same way that I do. Can you name any areas in government or other organizations where you do agree with them?
It's not a wonder you don't care about reforming the science to have evidence based results on if trans healthcare for minors has positive or negative results for patients if you've already made up your mind that it's unethical off other grounds.
Science should not be
Step 1: Have a view established off something else Step 2: Only accept evidence, research, and experts that agrees with the pre-established view and not the ones that disagree. Step 3: Declare the issue done with and stop further research.
Running these experiments is itself a violation of the ethics of human experimentation because, as detransitioners would be able to tell you, it can't be opted out of.
The same argument applies for signing up for experimental heart surgery.
I feel like there's a 'gonna die if you don't, gonna die if it doesn't work, not gonna die if it does' unstated exception to that particular tenet of the Nuremberg code.
Honestly, this is one of the situations where I say "fuck it"; the amount of trans surgeries from doing the RCT, assuming it finds that they're bad, will be lower than the amount from not doing it (in contrast to the usual case), so I'm not seeing the "do no harm" issue.
The bigger issue is that trans activists will attempt to defy you and transition the control group anyway. I don't see a way to get around that that isn't either "deploy the counterterrorism apparatus in full to prevent such attempts" or "ban transition as a whole in order to saturate the trans movement's covert-ops resources and draw them away from the trial". These are both pretty drastic actions, with significant PR costs even if you personally aren't bothered by using that level of force.
Yeah, I haven't settled on an opinion, but I feel you. There is currently some brouhaha about an NHS puberty blocker trial, with the anti-trans side arguing that it shouldn't be done because we already have the evidence (they also have other criticisms, but that tends to be the opener). A part of me feels like the political capital would be better spent saying "Oh, you want a trial? Fine, we'll do a trial, but we're doing this one properly", but I've been wrong on political tactics before (I was against blanket bans, until Alabama and Tennessee did them, and ACLU in their infinite wisdom decided to sue them, which allowed WPATH's internal docs to go into discovery).
When I was reading the papers on chemical castration, I think one of them said you can detect non-compliance with a blood test (though it may have been about taking counter-measures, instead of unauthorized taking of chemical castration / puberty blockers).
Oh, it's easy enough to tell if somebody's been taking hormones against your instructions. That just doesn't solve the problem.
If you count defiant transitioners as part of your control group, it biases your study in favour of transition, because defiant transitioners amount to "transition with a bunch of extra annoyance" and as such are near-guaranteed to do worse than the transition group regardless of how good or bad transition is.
If you kick defiant transitioners out of the control group, it biases your study against transition, because desisters will stop trying to defy you at some point, and as such success stories will make up a larger chunk of your control group than they would have if you'd successfully prevented the defiant transitioners from transitioning.
If the trans activists manage to subvert enough of your control group (which is pretty likely without the extreme measures I mentioned), these two effects will destroy the study's value; it will give the "do transitions!" answer with one set of rules and the "don't do transitions!" answer with the other. Whoops, looks like the clear liquid you poured on that fire was petrol instead of water.
Oh, and this is assuming that you picked outcome measures that don't allow for easy lying; it's not like people can't go on Twitter and yell "hey everybody, put down that you're ecstatic if you were in the transition group and suicidal if in the control group; it's for the sake of all the other transfolk". As Scott said, "sometimes people might just be actively working to corrupt your data".
Your overall point is correct, but:
That's not necessarily true: suppose transition, even with transition-with-extra-annoyance, always leads to strictly better outcomes. The control group will then have better outcomes if the defiant transitioners are counted than if they aren't, possibly on par with transitioners within margins of error depending on how many there are and how much the extra annoyance impacts outcomes.
This point aside, I also think any study of this sort would need extremely careful design to separate the effects of social transition vs the actual puberty blockers. I think you'd need two control groups: one where the kids socially transition but don't take puberty blockers, and one where they don't transition either way. And while it's very easy to tell if somebody's been taking unsanctioned hormones, it's rather harder to tell if they switched pronouns among friends, so you really couldn't run a study like that with participants who don't play fair.
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