A major correction
The Public Discourse September 2020:
The American Journal of Psychiatry has issued a major correction to a recent study. The Bränström study reanalysis demonstrated that neither “gender-affirming hormone treatment” nor “gender-affirming surgery” reduced the need of transgender-identifying people for mental health services. Fad medicine is bad medicine, and gender-anxious people deserve better.
And that’s all the more true when the “medicine” isn’t medicine at all. The only purpose of “gender-affirming hormone treatment” and “gender-affirming surgery” is, well, to affirm gender, and affirming gender is a mental/emotional/psychological thing, not a medical thing. Gender-affirming hormones and surgeries don’t treat an illness or heal an injury, they attempt to make people feel less unhappy in their bodies. If people don’t even feel less unhappy in their bodies after the hormones or surgeries maybe stop doing them? Seeing as how the side effects are pretty major?
A major correction has been issued by the American Journal of Psychiatry. The authors and editors of an October 2019 study, titled “Reduction in mental health treatment utilization among transgender individuals after gender-affirming surgeries: a total population study,” have retracted its primary conclusion. Letters to the editor by twelve authors, including ourselves, led to a reanalysis of the data and a corrected conclusion stating that in fact the data showed no improvement after surgical treatment.
So…surgical or pharmacological mutilation with no improvement. Fabulous.
Our co-author Dr. Paul McHugh ended sex reassignment surgeries at John Hopkins Medical School when a study from his department revealed that the mental and social health of patients undergoing sex reassignment surgery did not improve. He adds here that this paper, and even the correction, misdirects clinical thought in many ways. Most crucially it presumes an unproblematic future for these subjects, despite evidence that the psychological state of many will, after surgery, worsen with time. Our experience at Hopkins, when we first recognized that the psychological well-being of patients undergoing surgery did not improve, rested on relatively short-term assessments. The long-term Swedish study of Dhejne demonstrated that the serious fallouts including suicide emerged only after ten years. None of this clinical experience is reflected in this paper or its correction.
Or the news media coverage of the subject or the sloganeering of the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, National Organization for Women, Stonewall…
Thanks to guest for the link.
Is it not just a bit frustrating that you wouldn’t need a corrected study to tell you any of this? Aristotle could’ve figured it out no problem…
It’s a great lesson in understanding how science works. We’re not supposed to “trust the science.” We should instead interrogate the science. Always. Challenge it. Scientific results are not sancrosanct. Good science survives challenges, poor science falls apart.
I have bookmarked that article.
I literally just realised, though it’s right there in the heading, that this article is nearly three years old. And yet this stuff is still happening. I guess I just couldn’t imagine no one, or very few, advocating these interventions would actually stop doing them because they don’t work.