Determining the research results at the outset
Eliza Mondegreen at Unherd on the hiding of the research:
In today’s New York Times, reporter Azeen Ghorayshi investigated a leading gender clinician’s decision not to publish the results of a study into the effects of puberty suppression on the mental health of patients with gender dysphoria.
At the outset of the National Institutes of Health study, principal investigator Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the most vocal advocates of “gender-affirming care” in the United States, expected that young patients put on puberty blockers would experience “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality” and “increased body esteem and quality of life over time”. But that’s apparently not what the evidence showed. Rather than revise her hypotheses and share her findings with the scientific community, Olson-Kennedy and her team decided to sit on the results. Olson-Kennedy told Ghorayshi that she worried the study’s disappointing findings would be “weaponised” by critics.
That is, critics would point out that the evidence fails to show that blockers relieve suffering and that the reason for using them was to relieve suffering so maybe just maybe doctors should stop prescribing them. That kind of “weaponising.”
Blocking puberty is a very drastic thing to do. The reason for doing it has always been about helping young teenagers cope with getting older and dealing with changes to their bodies. If it turns out that the evidence shows it doesn’t really help with that, what is the point of continuing to do it?
Researchers and clinicians have decided — in advance — that “gender-affirming care” is safe and effective, no matter what the evidence shows. At the European Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Killarney, Ireland, in April 2023, researchers presented an array of discouraging findings, bracketed by statements like “as you all know, there are improved mental health outcomes following puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones” — even when the research being presented suggested the opposite.
…
Sometimes, research findings get a glossy makeover before being presented to the public, like a 2022 study that reporter Jesse Singal summarised thus: “Researchers found puberty blockers and hormones didn’t improve trans’ kids mental health at their clinic. Then they published a study claiming the opposite.”
Like Macbeth, they’re in so far they can’t go back.
So not as useful or effective as leeches and maggots:
https://mountainview-hospital.com/about/newsroom/the-healing-power-of-leeches-and-maggots-in-hospitals
Yes, it’s a cheap shot, but the insistence that blockers “work” is a cheap shot to start with.
Scientists design and carry out their experiments in such a way as to get the results they prefer, for whatever reason, to get. At least, that’s what I was told by a drunk who sat down next to me on a bus I was riding on the other night.
For me, that was a revelation; kind of like the one Newton had after he saw that apple or pear or pumpkin or whatever it was fall. And…. He gave me a few swigs form his whisky bottle as well.
The drunk I mean; not old Izzy Newton. He died some time ago, I believe.
Omar, sure you can do that, and I think that’s become more common both from intentional acts and poor experiment design. I don’t think it’s all, or even most scientists. That it’s become as common as it appears to be is certainly cause for concern though. Not least because it leads to the public and political decision makers no longer trusting expertise. The biggest issue is that it takes real expertise and/or careful research to figure out who is talking shit and why. Often really good science is quite counter-intuitive, so commonsense or obviousness is a very poor yardstick for non-experts to use. I don’t have any easy answer for this.
Or you could do repeated studies until one of them demonstrates the results you desire, bury all the negative studies, and publish the positive one. Was that Olson-Kennedy’s plan?
Does Olson-Kennedy worry that her critics will weaponize the non-release of the results ?
Rob, that’s true, although it often isn’t all that hard to spot bad research. I could do it when I was in my first semester of my masters. Not all, of course, but some of it is so obvious. Why it isn’t caught on peer review, I’ll never know, unless the reviewers have a dog in the fight, as well.
iknklast #6
Indeed. As a non-biologist, it is easy to be intimidated by technobabble about chromosomes, embryology, neurology, hormone levels, “intersex” conditions etc. Luckily, you don’t have to be a biologist to recognize basic errors like logical contradictions, equivocations, circular definitions, untestable claims, disproportional degrees of certainty, activist language (e.g. a supposedly “scientific” article describing itself as a “call to arms”), intellectual double standards, blatant misrepresentations of opposing views etc. when you see them. If an argument contains such fatal flaws at the most basic level, then no amount of work on the higher levels is ever going to fix it.
If you want to get really circular and meta, she’s weaponized her refusal to report the findings of her study.