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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   16411 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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A teenager with gender dysphoria has a high chance of interpreting innocent comments as teasing, and doubly so if they are depressed, but the study sought to determine whether teasing mediated the experience of depression among dysphorics.

The authors actually found, for self-esteem and anxiety:

Although partial mediation was indicated, the relationship [between gender typicality and low self-esteem] was still strong. Thus, regardless of gender-based teasing, boys who were low in typicality had lower self-esteem. Girls’ typicality was unrelated to their self-esteem.

Thus, regard- less of gender-based teasing, boys who were low in typicality were more anxious. Girls’ typicality was unrelated to their anxiety.

So, the study says that self-reported teasing did not mediate anxiety and self-esteem for boys, and that the negative mental health effects of being gender atypical came from being gender atypical, not from teasing.

The paper is kind of badly organized and an info dump, and I don't care enough to dig into the actual statistical methodology of it, which I assume is what's typical for a psych paper (i.e. bad). But it seems, if anything, less biased and ideological than a typical paper from the field.

(It's also worth pointing out that this isn't looking at dysphoria or wearing skirts, but atypicality in the sense of e.g. being short or bad at sports is gender atypical for boys.)

The current study predicted that gender-based teasing would mediate this link between typicality and mental health, and this prediction was partially supported. Gender-based teasing fully mediated boys’ association between low typicality and greater depressive symptoms and more negative body image. Boys who were low in gender typicality were teased more on the basis of gender, and in turn expressed more depressive symptoms and felt worse about their bodies (as in Smith & Leaper, 2005). Regardless of gender-based teasing, however, boys who were low in typicality had greater anxiety and lower self-esteem (teasing accounted for some of the low self- esteem, but not much). It is unclear why gender-based teasing fully mediated associations with depressive symptoms and body image, but only partially mediated associations with self-esteem and did not mediate associations with anxiety.

The typicality metric was informed by both peer-evaluated and self-reported questionnaires and would include wearing skirts and being dysphoric.

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