Yaaay, SmartNews and National Review strike again – the NR’s article “Transgender Teen Study Results Unchanged After Activists Force Review” – and, as usual, it’s a festival of lies and disinformation.
The study in question is, mirable dictu, the very one that started the Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria bullshit. Done by Dr. Lisa Littman from Brown University, it was a poster abstract done in 2017:
Poster abstracts are often published when not only is the material too weak to be a journal article, but of insufficient quality to even be accepted for oral presentation at a conference. As such, the academic bar for a poster abstract getting accepted is very low. It was, however, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Partially what made it so weak was the fact that it relied entirely on active response to the questions – not drawing from a pool of randomly selected non-biased candidates, you know, like science does – but also was from only responses of parents reading anti-trans sites and didn’t involve the kids in question at all.
Plus, it pretends that any new increase in the number of trans kids “appearing” MUST be due to some nebulous “contagion”, instead of mayyybeee kids coming out as trans due to a more accepting climate in most of our culture towards LGBTQ issues.
As The Advocate put it:
“Rapid Onset Gender Dyshphoria” was first proposed as a diagnosis on anti-transgender websites in 2016, and this study appears to be a naked attempt to legitimize anti-transgender animus with a veneer of academic respectability. In the process, however, Littman’s work shreds all standards of academic integrity.
Viewed in this light, any “review” of this study has to be just as biased and dangerous as the original study itself. You can’t draw on flawed, biased data, draw a plot from the points, and then go back to the same flawed data to confirm the correctness of your plot no matter how many times you try it. The National Review is just attempting to flog trans hatred once again with this article, and I’m beginning to see a pattern here. Call it ROTB – Rapid Onset Transphobic Bullshit.
Pere Ubu's Debraining Machine 