The study raised questions
Colleen Flaherty at IHE on the campaign to delegitimize Lisa Littman’s study in PLOS ONE.
Brown University and PLOS ONE have distanced themselves from a controversial, peer-reviewed published study on “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” or gender identity issues that present not early and over a lifetime but quickly, in teenagers and young adults. The study, which has been criticized by transgender activists and allies as promoting the idea that being trans is a fad, and as relying on an unsound methodology, was based on anonymous survey responses from about 250 parents of (primarily female) teens and young adults who’d abruptly expressed gender dysphoria.
It’s almost funny that there’s outrage at the idea that being trans is a fad. Really? At the very same time as you’re engaged in trying to enforce the fad by shouting down anyone who asks questions? How, in this climate, could being trans not be a fad? It could certainly be other things too; it could be both a fad and a real experience or syndrome or whatever you want to call it; but at this point it can hardly escape being a fad too. It’s hyped like mad, it’s treated as sacred, it’s taboo, it’s sanctified, it’s retroactively diagnosed (Elizabeth Tudor? didn’t know that, didja!), it’s celebrated and defended and promoted all over social media. An adolescent would have to be superhuman not to be at least curious.
[T]he study also raised questions about whether social factors, rather than biological ones, influenced the young adults’ trans identities. It found that many young adults had requested and been offered medical interventions at the time of coming out, with possible lasting implications for their fertility and health, and that most doctors who evaluated these young adults didn’t ask questions about mental health, trauma or other possible reasons for sudden gender dysphoria.
The doctors are subject to social contagion too, though not as powerfully as adolescents. But the dogma is that if X says “I am trans” then that’s the end of the matter – it’s “transphobic” to wait and see.
A Brown news release about the study posted last week quoted its author, Lisa Littman, an assistant professor of the practice of behavioral and social sciences at the university, as saying, “This kind of descriptive study is important because it defines a group and raises questions for more research. One of the main conclusions is that more research needs to be done.” But Brown removed the story from its website this week, replacing it with an open letter from Bess H. Marcus, dean of public health, saying, “In light of questions raised about research design and data collection related to the study on ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria,’ the university determined that removing the article from news distribution is the most responsible course of action.”
Questions raised by whom?
By @SadistHailey.
thank you for bringing this to our attention. We take any concerns raised to us seriously and are already in the process of investigating these.
— PLOS ONE (@PLOSONE) August 24, 2018
Really. The person (or persons) managing the PLOS ONE Twitter account responded in all seriousness to that tweet from that “activist,” and then PLOS ONE removed the article. [My mistake.]
Marcus of course is the one who wrote that “The School of Public Health has heard from Brown community members expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community,” as I pointed out a couple of days ago. You know, Gwyneth Paltrow has perspectives too – shouldn’t Brown’s School of Public Health be protecting her perspectives also, by letting her write an article promoting jade eggs up the vagina? If it’s one set of perspectives it should be all of them, no? How about anti-vax perspectives? How about homeopathic asthma treatment perspectives? Won’t somebody please think of the perspectives?
While the “spirit of free inquiry and scholarly debate is central to academic excellence, Marcus said, “we believe firmly that it is also incumbent on public health researchers to listen to multiple perspectives and to recognize and articulate the limitations of their work. This process includes acknowledging and considering the perspectives of those who criticize our research methods and conclusions and working to improve future research to address these limitations and better serve public health.”
So then I guess that is what she means – all perspectives welcome, including on public health research. Never mind evidence and statistics, just collect all the perspectives, put them in a box, shake it hard, and then use the soup that results.
An additional university statement on the page cites PLOS ONE’s social media statement about the study. The journal has said it’s “aware of the reader concerns raised on the study’s content and methodology. We take all concerns raised about publications in the journal very seriously, and are following up on these per our policy” and other international publication ethics guidelines.
They’re aware of the concerns because random people on Twitter @ed them. Much science, very seriously.
Littman, the study’s author, declined comment on Brown’s or PLOS ONE’s actions. But she said she stood by her methodology. “My study is a descriptive study,” she said via email. “And like all descriptive studies there are limitations which are acknowledged. And although descriptive studies may be one of the less robust study designs they play an important role in the scientific literature primarily because they are a first description of a new condition or population and they make it possible to conduct additional, more rigorous research.”
She added, “When analyzing the methodology of my paper, it should be done in the context of other descriptive studies, not compared to studies employing other research designs. The methodology in my study is consistent with methodologies that have been used in other descriptive research and it has similar strengths and weaknesses, which I acknowledge in the paper.”
Well yes, but some activists made a stink on Twitter, so that settles it.
In a world where students doing an exercise on how science is done conclude their work by stating that they will now publish it on Facebook or on social media, what more can we expect? I think it is a new world out there, one where it only counts if it is on social media and has been RTed or liked enough times to indicate it is acceptable to the right people and can now be called scientific.
I have been banging my head on the wall all morning.
If you’ll indulge me for a moment—me, a middle-aged white guy who isn’t directly affected by this topic and the outcomes of all these disputes—this new world of ours scares the hell out of me.
To be clear, Brown removed news of the article from their news, but PLOS ONE has not removed the article. The DOI still works. Readers are commenting at the end of the article, though, and I see Prof. Littman responding there:
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202330
Meredith Wadman at Science also reported on this, and her DOI was activated today. I like her reporting in general, and I think she did a good job in this case, too:
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aav2613
Dave, that second article is interesting. I had not read the actual article, and had no idea that the phenomenon was being seen so heavily weighted toward adolescent females. This is the same age I would have been when I started becoming acutely aware of how much my gender was getting in the way of my future opportunities. If trans had been a thing when I was that age, if I had seen a lot of people doing it, would I have seen this as a possible way out of my terrible situation of being expected to marry young, have boatloads of babies? Of having to take Home Ec when I’d rather take Chemistry? Of having to do “girl things” and wear “girl clothes” and play “girl games”? Of being given fewer choices educationally (college) than my brothers, even though my brothers never finished anything, and never accomplished anything, and I was a hard-working dynamo determined to get an education and move into a satisfying career?
I probably wouldn’t, simply because my family is so fundamentalist it would have led to even greater problems. But it probably would have been tempting to see my despair at my situation being resolved by declaring myself male. And now that we are so gender conscious that we have separate pens, play-doh, and Legos for girls and boys, that we must have gender-announcing parties before our children are even born, and that we have come to believe there are separate brains for females and males, I might have come to believe that I had a boys brain, and was therefore actually a boy.
Imagine being so muddled that you believe these two things simultaneously:
– The concept of transgenderism, which means a person can have a mismatch between their physical sex and their internal/innate gender identity;
– the mere act of noticing that a person has a sex is antagonistic to the above.
How the fuck is it even possible to oppose the existence of sex while believing that a person has a sex and a gender???
Oh, thanks, Dave, I thought I had read that PLOS ONE had taken it down and I didn’t check.
They sent it back for “further review”, which they say they do whenever they receive–well, I don’t remember how they put it, but basically with any subject this controversial they want to be sure and cover their asses.
Saw this piece by the former Dean of Harvard Medical School that is critical of Brown for not defending Lisa Littman.
https://quillette.com/2018/08/31/as-a-former-dean-of-harvard-medical-school-i-question-browns-failure-to-defend-lisa-littman/
Many trans people think it can be a fad and refer to people in that category as “transtrender”:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/transtrender
Although they’re generally referring to people who don’t experience gender dysphoria rather than having “rapid-onset gender dysphoria“. I suspect that may effectively be the same thing in some cases.
.
Yes, they really should spend more time in medical school training doctors to recognize lady penises.
The enraged, testosterone-driven, ‘trans-women’ attack a paper that addresses a flood of gender dysphoria in adolescent girls?
Lady Mondegreen posted the link to this petition on an earlier thread, and I’ll post the link here too. The petition is well-written, and many of the comments are thoughtful:
https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/brown-university-and-plos-one-defend-academic
My favorite comment said that when science identified two types of breast cancer, everybody was happy right away, because everybody could see the discovery would make for better diagnoses and treatments.
The ROGD paper suggests that more than one thing is happening with young people saying they are trans. Everyone should be happy if this turns out to be true, because it would make for better understanding and care.
You’d think, wouldn’t you. It all seems to stem from the issue of validation. The ideology has moved over time to become the belligerently-enforced belief that trans people ARE (in every possible sense and don’t you dare come here with your pretentious distinctions between the ontological and the political) the sex they Identify As. Once you put that at the core all the rest of it follows – the need to bully and shun and lie and bully some more.
From that angle of course it’s not good news that some people who call themselves trans could be just responding to a cultural trend. All people who call themselves trans HAVE to be genuinely trans meaning genuinely the sex that doesn’t match their bodies – they have to be, for maximum validation.
Also, just signed it. Forgot to before.
Ophelia, thank you for explaining it that way. I worked that into my letter that I mailed to the Dean yesterday with a cc: to Prof. Littman and her department chair. I wrote these premises in bullets:
I wrote that the Twitter trans activists hold the premises inviolable, and if Brown agrees they are inviolable, then Brown can’t investigate scientifically. For one thing, the premises don’t allow for false positives or negatives on the premises.
I also told the Dean she needs to Dean up. She has two options: 1) Stop research in this area, and say why, or 2) Continue research and accept some people will get mad. I’m sorry if that’s a dilemma for her, but that’s her situation.
Ah well done Dave. Let us know if she responds.