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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4619 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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I read a bit in that study, and I am not exactly overwhelmed.

The abstract talks about X2 statistics. Now I am not a statistics nerd, but I have encountered the letter χ (chi) in passing and happen to know that it does not identify as X or x.

Also, what one sentence claims, the next takes away:

Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up [...]

Only to note that [my addition, emphasis mine]:

After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment [which was a contraindication to gender reassignment], all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity

In the study itself, the key variable of interest was simply boolean:

Need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment before the index contact (yes/no) and thereafter (yes/no) was recorded.

The impact of the quality of life on visiting a psychiatrist is hard to quantify. Both a patient who is undergoing exposure therapy to better deal with their fear of spiders before moving to the countryside, and a patient locked up in forensic psychiatry after killing someone during a psychotic episode would simply fall in the "specialist-level psychiatric treatment" bin.

The statistics section briefly discusses confounders:

In the next step, controlling for possible confounders: Birth year and index year and finally adding the need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment before the index contact.

There is no discussion of any of the less obvious confounders. After all, some patients got interventions and some did not -- based on their case histories, not on some RNG, so they must systematically differ. Trivially, having gotten a medical gender reassignment might make a patient more trusting to seek out sensitive medical help (e.g. psychiatric care) in the future. Or perhaps the eye color of the doctor deciding on the intervention is both correlated with their decision -- green-eyed doctors approve more, but getting treated by a green-eyed doctor will also drive 10% of patients mad. (Unlikely, the point here is to illustrate the required paranoia when separating confounders from the effect of the intervention.)

As a data point for the benefits and risks of gender-related interventions, this study does not tell us a lot either way.

Need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment before the index contact (yes/no) and thereafter (yes/no) was recorded.

The impact of the quality of life on visiting a psychiatrist is hard to quantify. Both a patient who is undergoing exposure therapy to better deal with their fear of spiders before moving to the countryside, and a patient locked up in forensic psychiatry after killing someone during a psychotic episode would simply fall in the "specialist-level psychiatric treatment" bin.

The statistics section briefly discusses confounders

They don't:

Ben Ryan: Is it fair to say that just by virtue of having contact with GIS [gender identity services—ie: the gender clinic] and undergoing GR [gender reassignment], the youth in the study cohort would be more likely to be referred to a specialist psychiatrist than someone in the general population, even if they had similar psychiatric comorbidity?

Riittakerttu Kaltiala: No. Specialist level psychiatric treatment is provided in case of severe mental disorders, and the need is assessed with national equity criteria that exist to maintain equal access across the country. Referrals to specialist level psychiatric services by different referring agents (such as primary care, GIS, occupational health, student health, private practitioners) are assessed similarly regardless of where they come from.

The abstract talks about X2 statistics. Now I am not a statistics nerd, but I have encountered the letter χ (chi) in passing and happen to know that it does not identify as X or x.

😹 I hereby award you🥈in the One Joke championships! (The 🥇 goes to 'vegetables thing that identifies as a beef burger'.)

There is no discussion of any of the less obvious confounders.

Or the more obvious confounder that the tribe that is more likely to transition is also more likely to seek psychiatric help?

Some people use statistics as a drunk man uses lamp-posts—for support rather than for illumination.

Woke people often complain that conservatives only know how to tell one joke, but even if that were true, I will remind them that 1 > 0.

The abstract talks about X2 statistics. Now I am not a statistics nerd, but I have encountered the letter χ (chi) in passing and happen to know that it does not identify as X or x.

One time in physics class I said “doubleyou” instead of “omega” and everyone laughed at me.

... because everyone knows that the "w" sound is represented by digamma in Greek.

So a trans person that got a follow up psychiatrist appointment to treat ADHD or a crippling fear of heights would be counted? That’s not very useful statistic.

I suppose it would be possible, if the ADHD was severe, and and phobia was truly crippling. He was actually quoting an excerpt showing that the more mundane cases were excluded (see here).

How is it not a useful statistic? Again, the study didn't just compare trans people to controls. They compared to how the mental health of trans people developed over the years as they transition / or don't, to how it develops in the control group. The group of trans people that took blockers or hormones, or had surgeries, had a higher rate of severe mental disorders than the trans people that didn't.

Even if the modal case is a crippling fear of heights, a result showing that these crippling phobias develop after their medical intervention, but not in people who don't go through with the transition, is interesting, no?

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